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Are sports the most valuable commodity in the world? On this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel is joined by Pablo Torre for an examination of the role that sports and rampant sports betting are playing in our politics, culture, and economy. Pablo Torre is a longtime journalist and the host of the show Pablo Torre Finds Out, where he reports on everything from football fans on death row and what it’s like to be a transgender athlete in high school to analyzing the coach Bill Belichick’s shirtless ring-cam footage. Torre is a student of the internet as well, and a keen observer of our attention economy. Sports, he argues, are the last monocultural product—the only sure way to draw eyeballs on an ever-fractured internet.
In this episode, Warzel and Torre dig into why billionaires and nation-states are buying teams and partnering with sports leagues. Torre discusses what he’s learned about journalism from bingeing YouTube videos and why having good taste is more important than ever now online. Then Warzel and Torre turn their attention to sports gambling. Are same-day parlays the new American dream? Are sports leagues at risk of losing their legitimacy? And why is nobody playing the long game?
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Pablo Torre: I don’t know if you’re like me. I’m like, I guess I’ll read Mr. Beast’s leaked manifesto now.
Charlie Warzel: Oh, 100 percent.
Torre: And I’m trying to …
Warzel: Yes, absolutely. I’m studying YouTube thumbnails and being like, how far can I take this and maintain my dignity, you know?
Torre: It’s—let me just tell you, dignity is the first to go. Whatever face you think you’d like to make is not the face you’ll be making in the thumbnail for this video.
Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and welcome to Galaxy Brain. Today we’re going to talk about sports, but we’re not going to talk about the actual sports themselves—not the things that happen on the field, or on the court, or whatever—but the culture around sports. Because, as my guest notes, sports are this unbelievable attentional hack, right? There are few things that can reliably attract an audience as much as live sports. We sit down together, and we watch the Super Bowl. We have the sports that are passed down in our families, this kind of cultural heritage that gets us to sit down for the World Series or the World Cup or the NBA finals, what have you, right? And because they can reliably draw eyeballs, and because we’re all competing with each other for attention in truly every facet of our lives, sports are extremely valuable.
You may have noticed that in the past 10, 15 years, nation-states and billionaires are buying up sports teams or presenting sports leagues, funding sports leagues. And this is all because sports is a really powerful product to rehabilitate someone’s image. They are a way to ingratiate themselves; they are a way to make a nation-state appear softer, or more Westernized, or what have you. They are these really valuable products. And as such, there’s a lot of stakes to it, right?
And so my guest this week is Pablo Torre. Pablo Torre is a longtime sports journalist. He was at ESPN for quite a while, and in 2023 he launched Pablo Torre Finds Out, which is his fantastic podcast and YouTube show. And what Pablo was so good at is investigating these deeper, thornier, honestly sometimes really complicated issues inside sports: everything from economic disputes to labor issues to going through Department of Justice filings. And he finds this way to make them extremely interesting, and that is because, as he tells us, he’s actually a student of the internet; he is someone who studies creators of all kinds and figures out the little hacks and interesting ways of presentation that they use and finds ways to put them into his journalism. He’s essentially creating a magazine for the YouTube generation, and his theories on attention and the internet are extremely interesting. And now my conversation with Pablo Torre.
Charlie Warzel: Pablo, welcome to Galaxy Brain. I’m thrilled to have you here on our podcast experiment.
Pablo Torre: I’m happy to be the subject of yet another experiment that I’ve, apparently, unwittingly entered into. But good to see you, Charlie.
Warzel: The little tagline that I’ve tried to come up with to just organize this show in some kind of way is, you know, I write a lot about the internet, about information—and so it’s “paying attention to where we pay attention.” And you gave a talk at UConn recently that, as I listened to you sort of unfurl your Grand Pablo Torre Finds Out theory of sports and coverage and your work and what you’re trying to do there. And the way that it revolves around attention. The way that sports revolves around attention.
It kind of broke my brain open: in the good way, not the normal internet-bad way. And I wanted to have you kind of try to lay that out a little more for all of us here. Why are sports important from this attentional perspective?
Torre: Yeah. It’s the lens I see the world through now. As I also, like, hunger for any amount of audience/attention/discoverability/funnel/all of the buzzwords we use to describe getting someone’s time, someone’s brain. And sports is up and to the right. I mean, that’s the crazy and scary and favorable part to people who work inside of sports.
Everything is fragmented. Everything is siloed inside of your own algorithm, which is entirely personal, as you know as well as anybody. And yet, in that deeply broken landscape, there is one kind of big tent remaining, broadly speaking, and it’s sports. And you could go to all sorts of reasons why. The live nature of events; the general hereditary sort of nature of how we care about things passed down to us from our parents, our ancestors. You could simply give it the credit of: It’s the one place left in mainstream culture, such that there is any mainstream left, in which you can walk inside of a building and sit next to somebody who otherwise shares nothing in common with you—and yet will yell directionally at the same thing for the same outcome.
And it’s just a rare thing, to have sports be this big green arrow as everyone else is managing their decline. And so, for me, sports started off, I mean, as my passion—because I just love sports. And I worked at ESPN full time for about 13 years, and the show Pablo Torre Finds Out that I host. I wish I had this level of sort of grand theorizing at the outset. But I really began to sort of reckon with its undeniability as I started to wonder: Why aren’t I more subject to the wanderlust of someone who has lots of different interests? Why do I feel like sports is satisfying? And it’s because A: Sports is where I’m getting attention. Sports is where attention is directed. And also, sports has always been, to me, this weird liberal-arts education that can allow you to be inside of that field of vision for people that otherwise have zero shits to give about the stuff that I’m otherwise trying to tell them.
Warzel: And I think, too, what that helped connect for me is this notion of why people freak out when politics and sports collide. Because you made this point that—it’s basically like you’re hijacking someone’s attention with something, right? This is an audience that maybe didn’t come here to hear your theory on X, Y, or Z, and yet it’s been Trojan-horsed in via this product that people are, you know, so culturally attuned to. And I think that that makes it so, so valuable.
I mean, that’s kind of now become, like, a guiding framework for the show? Basically. Like: I’m gonna, you know, put the cheese on the broccoli or whatever, and you’re gonna eat it.
Torre: Yeah. I mean, that’s—look, that’s the metaphor that I’ve been clinging to recently. I’m here to melt cheese on broccoli. Cheese being sports; broccoli being any number of the issues I’ve dealt with—whether it’s, you know, effectively carbon credits and Silicon Valley billionaires coming into sports and creating and orchestrating, allegedly, these schemes to get around the rules of fair play and integrity in the NBA. That’s the Steve Ballmer/Kawhi Leonard/Aspiration investigation. That has sort of consumed my life. Or it could be, you know, I’m here to talk about most recently—in the case of this weird thing I’m into now with Phil Mickelson, the golfer. I’m talking about, you know, “Are we gonna reopen this oil pipeline in Santa Barbara?” through the lens of Phil Mickelson tweeting, or rather texting, a group chat of investors in Sable Offshore, this weird company. Things about Donald Trump’s alleged 14-inch cock, that being a direct quote from texts that we obtained. Anyway, the point being: Inside of all of these things is this, yes, this larger, bigger, story, hiding inside of it. And, you know—I reckoned with it when I was at ESPN, because ESPN’s audience, of course, they came for the candy. They came for the dessert. And when I would inject—so to speak; that was the accusation, I was injecting politics into their sports—it was meant to be this, “How dare you invade our comfort zone?” And when I was at UConn giving this talk, you know: The night before, I was at a dinner with Tommie Smith and John Carlos. The most famous sort of podium visual in Olympic history, raising their fists in the air. Recalling what an impact that had. Now, gosh, that was Mexico City in the ’60s and ’68. We’re talking about that still. And the reason why is, because you hear the boos. People didn’t want that shit. And I’m not in any way saying that I am akin to Tommie Smith and John Carlos. But the premise is: People are there to watch sports, and something else happens, and now their brain effectively is broken, too. And what do you do with that? Why is that powerful? Why is that increasingly in this era of American politics and culture, such that it exists anymore?
Why is that the only place where you can kind of sneak into someone’s feed, so to speak? Because otherwise, we’re just getting the shit that we expressed that we wanted already.
Warzel: Well, and I feel too that it just—the way that all of that intersects with power—is again, like I said, it broke open my brain. Because, you know, I look at billionaire owners, and I look at, you know, obviously Steve Ballmer’s one of them, of Microsoft fame and fortune.
But, you know, there’s a lot of people coming out of Silicon Valley who are injecting their money into sports in this way. And I think it’s very easy for us all to look at it and say the thing—“Oh, these are fans, right?” Like they want to do something with this money. But looking at it from this attention-and-power way, not to say that it’s all always nefarious, that it’s always, you know, duplicitous, in this horrible motive. But it’s like: You’re making an investment in a team, in whatever. But it’s also this attentional product, right? Whether it’s what you’re putting on the jerseys—in terms of your sponsors—and, you know, the ads and things like that that you can generate. But also: just this idea of I can get people to care about things by putting it into this Trojan horse.
I thought that that was just sort of a different way to format this. For me, because I spend a lot of time thinking about tech billionaires and a lot of time trying to, you know, suss out what they’re doing. And in some ways it’s very, very obvious when Elon Musk buys Twitter, right? What he’s trying to do here. Like, it’s right in your face. But I think what your framework has helped me understand here is this notion that, like, this is actually happening everywhere, all the time. It’s sort of just a truism of, you know, living in the world right now.
Torre: Oh look, I think about the billionaire as a species in sports through this lens of “We’ve never had more of them.” And on some level, that’s entirely explained by the fact that sports values are going up; franchise values are going up. The NBA just tripled its rights deal as media is sinking, and they welcomed Amazon into the fold, and they get to all that stuff, right?
That’s an economic proposition, but it’s always been deeper than that. And it’s never been more clearly deeper than that. And this is where we can sort of, like, cross streams here a bit and just think about FTX. Like, to me, FTX—when I was seeing the story, I’m like, Of course, yes; this is a tech story.
But then I’m seeing what he spent his money on for marketing, and I’m like: Wait a minute. You got Tom Brady, you got Steph Curry, you got the Miami Heat naming-rights deal. He put FTX logos on the chest plates of the umpires in Major League Baseball.
Warzel: Wild.
Torre: He was bidding. I mean, and I read both books—the Zeke Faux and I read the Michael Lewis—and I talked to both of them for an episode of my show. And it was entirely just through the lens of sports.
Because that, to me, as much as we wanna talk—and we should talk, by the way, about Saudi Arabia and the Middle East and where money is being reapportioned because attention has been disrupted. We’re now looking toward the Middle East for, like, reliable revenue streams. As cable television has fallen apart domestically, is managing its own decline domestically.
As much as that is sportswashing in the more sort of traditional sense, Sam Bankman-Fried also was doing the same thing. He was buying this relatability; he was buying this recognition. And in sports there’s a history of it. I mean, sports gives you—as a billionaire—the currency not merely of, you know, whatever the money that you have access to. You also have this currency of cultural visibility, and also relatability. Like suddenly, “Steve.” Look, it was so—what’s so funny, dude, is for me to talk to people who covered Steve Ballmer when he was just the Microsoft CEO managing the monopoly, the alleged monopoly, and the trial they’re in of The United States v. Microsoft. And they’re like—
Warzel: And sweating profusely onstage.
Torre: And absolutely, some things have not changed. The sweat, you know, all of that stuff. Yeah. And to talk to people who covered it at the time, you know, his reputation is—so until, I would say, like, this reporting I’ve been doing into him vis-à-vis Aspiration and the Clippers and Kawhi Leonard, his reputation was that of a bully. Was that of someone who was this, sort of, just like, strong-arming executive who had, of course, Microsoft as the lens you saw him through. Meaning he was Goliath.
And weirdly, when he sets the record for the most expensive franchise ever purchased in the NBA, and he becomes the owner of the Clippers, and he rescues it from Donald Sterling, who was, of course, this recorded avowed racist. One of the easier decisions of like, “You can’t have this guy around.” In comes Steve Ballmer, and immediately he’s this white knight.
To the point of being courtside cheering, he becomes rebranded. His sweat gets rebranded as that of a superfan. He is just like you. And, in that way, I think two things are true, as you say. One is: The dude actually loves basketball. That is undeniable. He really loves and sweats over the games. Simultaneously, it’s been the greatest thing in terms of the laundering of his image. That he could possibly do such … that when I’m now trying to figure out, how do I sort of report around and report the case against what he’s been doing, that he doesn’t want people to know about in the NBA? One of the obstacles has been: But wait a minute; he’s one of the good guys. It’s shocking. And I’m like—but he’s also the dude who was going around, you know, according to the United States government, going around the rules around fair competition when he was running fucking Microsoft. And so why is this surprising? It’s because sports has this capacity to change how we see even the most consistent principles across someone’s life.
Warzel: Yeah. And when you’re doing it for a team—you’re doing it for a city, you’re doing it for a fan base. for generations of people, right?—there’s this “rescue,” paternalistic idea of it. It’s such an amazing way to contextualize what these guys are doing. But I want to talk a little bit about your show in another context, because outside of what you’re choosing to focus on and this, you know—his broader framework of the way that attention and power works, and that sports is this lens for it—you’ve also been, you know, doing something that I have found as a journalist, incredibly fascinating. Which is: playing with form. Trying to, you know, trying to get people’s attention on stories in a more logistical way, right?
Like, “How do I present these stories? How do I tell them?” And something that you wrote in a Substack post about how you were doing your Bill Belichick reporting—which people should go follow this, because it’s an amazing blend of this high/low, really important stuff about things that may not feel very important—but you talk about using a YouTube genre, of the unboxing video, as this way to try to think about the story.
Can you tell me a little bit more about how that clicked in your brain? And how you employ that sometimes to tell the stories of the reporting that you’ve gathered?
Torre: Yeah. So—so far in our conversation, I think, if you’re not familiar with me, you might be wondering, So where is this cheese you promised? You’re talking a lot about these, like, highfalutin issues. Where’s the cheese? And I think that was always the thing that I wanted to be very true to. It’s like, I have fun reporting. I mean, the thesis—very bluntly and very lamely—is: Journalism is fun. It’s fun for me to do. At its best, it’s fun to consume.
You share it on your group chats, all that stuff. We know this as journalists. At our best, like, that’s the promise of why we like working this insanely.
Warzel: It’s gossip, sometimes, right? Like it can be.
Torre: It can be, right? And like, it should be, actually—at its best, it should feel kind of rude. Like, Wait a minute, we’re not supposed to know this. But now we know it, and it’s changed how we think about this thing. Like someone—as many people have reminded me—like, the basic definition of journalism might just be: You’re reporting something that someone doesn’t want you to know. As opposed to public relations, which is, of course, the opposite.
Anyway, what I did when I was launching this show, and of course starting a podcast—as you can relate, starting a new thing is one of the more kind of fundamentally depressing exercises, because you’re like, All right, how do I get this funnel to be as big as possible? I have to learn how to use words like funnel and not even think about it anymore.
Warzel: True nightmare.
Like I’m trying to, genuinely. And so you’re led to study, you know. I don’t know if you’re like me. I’m like, I guess I’ll read Mr. Beast’s leaked manifesto now.
Warzel: Oh, 100 percent.
Torre: And I’m trying to …,
Warzel: Yes, absolutely. I’m studying YouTube thumbnails and being like, how far can I take this and maintain my dignity, you know?
Torre: It’s—let me just tell you, dignity is the first to go. Whatever face you think you’d like to make is not the face you’ll be making in the thumbnail for this video.
Warzel: Yeah. Can we both just do this for a second?
Torre: Exactly, exactly. Just take care of it. Look, the thing that happens is: You study the people who have figured this out, who are, like, native to this world, so to speak, and are successful at navigating its incentives. And the genre that I have always been mystified by—that I began to study closely—is the unboxing video. And an unboxing video; it just feels crazy that I get to introduce it to anybody on the internet. But in case you don’t know, it’s a genre of video that is most exemplified by someone named Ryan, of Ryan’s Toys. And Ryan, who, like me, is a sort of like vaguely Asian character, making like NBA max-contract money for years and years.
His parents apparently set up a camera, and at the table he would get to basically open up a series of presents, inside of which there were toys. Hence, Ryan’s Toys. Very straightforward. And I remember first getting a sense of like, Wow, Ryan is killing it on YouTube. He has zillions of—I mean, just truly a staggering, and, again, depressive amount of views. And also a lot of money that comes with it. But more deeply, I was like, Why is this specific genre so addicting? Or perhaps, more generously, Why is it so appealing to lots of human beings as just a format? And I started thinking about it. I was like, either this is the end of everything, in which case we’re just watching a child open gifts and play with toys. And this says everything about the era of, you know, vicarious capitalism that plagues all of us, that is sending us into the apocalypse. And that is still a viable argument. I think, yeah.
Warzel: I was gonna say—don’t count it out.
Torre: Still on the board. But the other way of thinking about it is: There is something to the vicarious surprise and enjoyment of watching someone else do something that you’re kind of wishing you were doing yourself.
And so, inside of that format you get this authenticity. Of, in Ryan, this surprise and delight, and frustration sometimes. You’re basically seeing someone else relive Christmas morning over and over again. And I think the key word there, as much as anything, is surprise. And I think about surprise a lot, because in our feeds—algorithmically by design, of course—we are getting fed things we’ve already expressed a desire for.
And for me—if I may now, like, connect dots that typically aren’t connected—the thing that Ryan’s Toys reminded me of is: I was like really banging my head against the wall. Like, what should I be doing with this show? How can I be trying out new things? It reminded me of opening a mailbox to get a magazine that I subscribed to. In the magazine, there is, in the back somewhere, potentially like 8,000 words. As I like to say these days, “Like, 8,000 words by John McPhee on oranges—who asked for that, right?” Like, nothing about my habits as a magazine subscriber was like, I need that guy writing about oranges. And yet, there it is. Somewhere in the front of the book, there was, of course, lighter fare. There were celebrity interviews; blah, blah, blah, blah. There’s a profile somewhere in the middle.
Like, the premise of a magazine was effectively: “You trust us to surprise you.” And so, when I thought about, like, YouTube, I was like, What’s a way to blend this stuff? And the thing I settled on was: What if the toy was journalism?
What if, on YouTube, instead of a printed product, I put on a desk in front of my friends—who are my actual friends—a box, inside of which there would be documents or a folder, inside of which there would be these tax forms. Or in the case of Bill Belichick, sometimes, like, a literal wrapped gift, inside of which was a thumb drive, on which there was, like, leaked video of his 24-year-old girlfriend.
Like, it’s just that process of getting to watch someone actually open something up and genuinely be caught by a surprise and have to react. And then getting to, I don’t know—give that to people and see if that felt infectious.
Warzel: Yeah, I mean, “Ryan’s Leaked Emails,” right? I mean, it’s just: It works. It works so well.
But I think that’s the thing. Like, when we are, you know, journalists trying to figure out how to do this craft, we’re always taught “down the line by people,” right? Like, tell it to people. Like, you tell it to a friend in a bar, right? Like, you get these sort of, like, maxims that just float around.
Torre: Yes.
Warzel: And then, you know, you proceed. One proceeds to tell it in a very structured, formulaic way. Right. You are literally doing that; gathering people. And I think, too, this is something that I think a lot, so much, with the algorithms. And to what you were saying, which is like: Taste is so important now, right?
Like, it is just curation and taste. Like, those words can get lost and sound like they have no meaning. But what it really means is: that idea of You were not expecting this. And it’s, I think, a real way, we talk about this somehow in every episode we’ve taped so far. But it’s a way to build trust, right?
Like if you have good taste, it’s a way to build trust. And if the media could use anything right now, I think it’s that, right? It’s this notion of trust.
Torre: It’s also the thing I found myself talking to, like, journalism students about. Because I have no, I mean—genuinely, it’s like you get called to a class sometimes, and you’re asked to give your, whatever, your advice. And I don’t have many good specific pieces of advice. I’m happy to, like, explain anything that I do and reverse-engineer it and explain that. But in terms of advice, all I can tell them is: Your sense of taste is the most important thing for you to be able to explain. Both to yourself and to others, so that you can understand why you like the things that you do. And how you could possibly do, and collect, and point people toward more of it.
Yeah, and by the way—hard for me to not think of magazines, but that’s the premise of editorial authority at a magazine. There is an editor, who has the ultimate power to greenlight something: to put this in the book, or to not. And your desire to pay that person monthly revenue subscriptions—which are still, by the way, perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, still the thing we’re chasing. Everyone’s still looking for subscription, monthly revenue. In that way: “Sight unseen, I trust you to deliver me something that will validate your taste, and therefore my own in entrusting you.” That’s the whole game, still, and it’s so underrated. It’s underrated, because what we’re supposed to be doing—or what we’re incentivized, on some level, to be doing—is giving people more of what they’ve already said they wanted, right? Like: Oh, you clicked on this. I’m gonna feed you more of that. I’m gonna follow you as closely as I can across the internet such that I find the biggest crowds and give them more of the thing that they are already searching for.
And that’s just not actually what I mean. Look, I will say: In the strategy of, like, what to put in this metaphorical magazine, right? Like—nd this is just my personal theory, and god knows, I am sure I’m messing some various strategies up. But like, you do wanna occasionally talk about things that are popular, right?
I’m not here to say, like, “Only make your weird art,” but there’s a way to do both.
Warzel: This is the sports. This is like exactly why you buy a sports team. You want to have the venue, right? And sometimes buying the sports team is figuring out a way to tell a story that involves Taylor Swift or whatever.
Right. Or Sydney Sweeney’s jeans or whatever it is. Because people know who that is. They care about it.
Torre: Correct.
Warzel: I absolutely think that’s the case. I wanted the hard pivot here, because I wanna use our time well here, and I want to talk about something. A lot of your work lately has been focused around gambling. The problems, you know, that have arisen—the scandals that have arisen, in the major leagues, in professional sports.
But I also wanted to get your thoughts on sort of the nature of how everything feels like a casino, right? This idea of legalized sports betting in our society, and the ways that I basically think that professional sports is, you know, it’s one of those places. It’s a canary in a coal mine, right?
Like, it’s showing us a problem that is embedded in so many different levels of society. And you know, one of the things I wanted to ask you, first off, was that this is interacting so much with the actual business that you are in, that your peers are in.
Torre: Yeah.
Warzel: Gambling and sports journalism are kind of fused. You have even said you’ve gone through an unconscious uncoupling with DraftKings—which was, I think, there was a business partnership there. Can you tell me a little bit why you stepped away from that? And also, just what this pressure feels like, to have this industry—which is playing a real role in the actual sports and the consumption of it, but is also injected itself into the actual editorial journalistic layer as well.
Torre: Yeah; so I’m happy to do that from the micro—with me personally—as well as the macro.
Warzel: Yeah.
Torre: So, for me, when it comes to just like my experience through sports media, I worked at ESPN. And so when I was at ESPN—I mean, this has been the dream for, I think, not just me, but many journalists.
It’s like, I would love to be a rounding error for somebody. I would love to be a thing that doesn’t have to make money, get supported, because it’s a good thing to have, and I get to do my good work as funded by someone for whom money is actually not the concern. And so at ESPN, I go back to that point, because the whole thing there was: ESPN, of course, had direct business relationships with the leagues. But they cared, or at the very least at the time that I worked there, they really did make a show of investing in, “We’re gonna also fund serious journalism. We’re gonna create this firewall in between.” That is familiar to any media company of a certain size in which there are business relationships. And also, the people in the newsroom who are protected from the compromise that those businesspeople are ostensibly always trying to push on the journalists.
So that is sort of my origin story when it comes to “What’s it like to work for a larger corporation that is being funded with lots of money?” That seems like a dream. And so, sports gambling, as cable television has declined; ESPN’s business model has radically changed, right? The rounding errors are less frequent now, harder to identify inside of ESPN itself.
Sports gambling comes along. The gambling operators like FanDuel, like DraftKings. DraftKings was the partner that I launched the show with. And so, in that way, there was this promise of We’re gonna give you money. We wanna have a media side of our business. And we’re not gonna get in the way. And I will say that from my micro personal experience, they never got in the way.
They didn’t tell me what to cover, what not to cover. And that was great. And so I have no complaints in terms of like, “Here are my sob stories about being funded by DraftKings.” They just didn’t get in the way. I did lots of weird journalism and investigated things, but I should also acknowledge that part of what my show became was never a natural fit for a sports-betting company. And so the question became like, both a self-interestedly “Who’s the best partner for me in terms of the branding and being able to develop audience and funnel, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?” Probably not DraftKings, admittedly. But then it was: If I do want to be a show that investigates things, and gambling is the story of the business of sports in 2025, it’s intensely weird for me to constantly be managing that conflict of interest. And so I just need separations from that. And so, that was sort of the story of me wanting to find a new partner, and we’re now licensed by The New York Times and The Athletic, and that’s cool. And it’s been going on for about two months. And you know, that’s another experiment that I am enjoying, and is very different in that key way.
The reason, though, that sports gambling is this thing that feels like it’s not just practically seeping into everything—licensing and advertising and funding so many things. Which it is, just objectively. Like any sports fan, any consumer of anything, can tell that: can hear the ads, can see the commercials, can see LeBron James doing ads, can see Kevin Hart, can see ESPN creating various partnerships.
It’s also this larger thing that you’ve described. Which is, it is not just symptomatic, but like driving the casino that is the American economy. To the point where—I remember doing an episode in July investigating the NBA gambling scandal and its connection to poker. And this was three months before the federal indictments came out, announced by Kash Patel behind this podium.
And he’s, you know, very proud of this thing, that it actually started under the Biden administration years earlier. But I digressed. It’s just, you know: sports, the funnel, that’s all. Let’s have everybody here to celebrate it. The point being that when I was doing that July episode, I remember—too much to recap here, but a key sort of vector of my curiosity was NBA Twitter. And how it seemed to learn things about what the federal government was investigating—before even the public was told by the federal government or any journalistic institution was aware. And I remember just falling into this rabbit hole, into which we found a guy who was not only big in sports betting, but big in meme coins. And it just felt like this, again, unlock for me—where there was truly like—I think it was like a bio on Discord, where it was like gambling, crypto, meme coins were identified as this “holy trinity” of three things that this subculture was really into. And I’m like, why is it that sports betting feels like it’s … not just part of a Venn diagram, but like poker chips stacked together? Like that’s the Venn diagram: just like overlapping circles, so neatly.
And I’m like, Why is this? And of course you can throw poker now, obviously, in there too. It feels like, I mean, not to be so grandiose about it. But it feels like, you know, we’re living at a time in which lots of young people were promised things they were not delivered. Perhaps because of the generations that continued to wield power in our government, economy, et cetera, the Boomers—and the way to, like, Chutes and Ladders your way to the American Dream is gambling on shit. And in that casino premise, I think you just see, again, a throughline across all these sectors of American life. Now, sports being one that has so naturally taken to it. Because, my gosh, here’s an unlimited menu.
I mean, literally, ever-expansive, Cheesecake Factory–size menus for anything that you can bet on, that can involve any sort of alleged edge that you can get your hands on.
Warzel: And it feels to me like, you know, it’s easy to make like a pearl-clutching, moralistic argument. And I actually think that the gambling situation, especially since it’s legalized, is very complicated.
It’s already wound its way into the fabric of our society. It’s very difficult to figure out exactly how one would regulate it. There’s this notion by this guy Matt Glassman at Georgetown. He wrote this great post about the gambling society in America. And basically says: You know, the closer that any kind of gambling gets to a slot machine, the more dangerous it is, right?
Because it’s like—there’s no skill involved. There’s this randomization; there’s a house. It’s not people, you know, betting against each other. All these different kind of theories about it. And basically that the way that sports gambling works on the internet has taken a kind of diverse style of wagering and gambling and brought it sort of lower down, into that slot-machine territory, right.
But I think when we talk about what the gambling is doing, like I think it adds this layer of chaos and distrust to all the things, right? Like, I think about sports media and I think that, you know, it’s easy to see—as a consumer of it, on my side—that a lot of listeners feel like they’re being treated like idiots, right?
Like, oh, you know, yeah. There’s this big scandal on the horizon. You know, we’re gonna talk about it a little bit, and then we’re gonna go like straight into the, you know, the FanDuel parlay. Or, you know, you’re gonna have, like, the ticker where it’s got the, you know, the “bet” logo on it or whatever it is.
And so you have this way, which—it’s, like, kind of eroding, or at least giving people that ability to doubt whether or not, you know, these institutions are covering the sport the right way. Then you have—which I’d love to hear you speak to—like, how worried are you about the credibility of these leagues, right?
You have, you know, the scandal that’s come out with the [Cleveland] Guardians. You’ve got the NBA stuff, which you’ve been all over with [Chauncey] Billups and [Terry] Rozier. I mean, it has this feeling. And you know, consuming what you’re putting out there. That I’m like—I feel like we’re on the verge of these leagues losing some of the credibility. That, like, you can’t put that toothpaste back in the tube.
How do you feel about that?
Torre: Yeah, I think it’s existentially important. And I don’t mean, because I think, wow, every NBA superstar is gonna start, like, throwing games. I mean, from where we started our conversation—honestly, like what is valuable about sports? And this is where it’s hard not to sound like a Boomer, ironically.
But integrity of competition and fair play are so truly, unironically, essential to why sports matter. If you don’t have the confidence that the product—product is the less romantic way of putting it, but the game—if you don’t have confidence that the game that you care about is on the up and up, and that the incompetence you’re watching is earnest, is genuine failure. And the opposite, genuine success. Then the whole premise of why you care about it is, in fact, eroding. Is, in fact, being corrupted. And you don’t need to see this through a moralizing, high-horse kind of a lens. Just see it from a capitalist perspective. That’s the advantage of your product.
Live sports feel real. AI is simulating everything. It is giving you less reason to think that anything is genuine. And in sports, I’ve always said: Sports are fascinating. And so, for me, irresistible—because it feels like humiliation is on the line in every sporting event. Someone cares deeply. Someone’s ego is at risk. Someone might get embarrassed and turn into a meme or worse. That happens in everything in sports.
And if there is some loss of confidence that the stakes are not actually that—that it’s not genuine humiliation, that it’s not genuine defeat—then I think you’re really risking the supremacy, culturally, of the product.
And I also think, when it comes to like what a league is supposed to do … by the way, like, of course a league’s foremost motive is to shrink the PR scandal. And so, when it comes to anything—when it comes to any investigation that they undertake—the goal is: How can I make this seem like less of a problem than it might be in reality?
Right. And that is familiar to any corporation in America. It is certainly true in sports, as well, for all of the incentives that are obvious. I think it’s poetic that when Adam Silver came to power in the NBA, and he became commissioner, he did two things of note in his first year. The first thing was orchestrate the transfer of power from Donald Sterling to Steve Ballmer with the Clippers.
That was a massive scandal that he, personally, shrunk down to a victory. And then that fall, in The New York Times, he writes an op-ed. It is just him. He has no co-bylines from anyone else. No other commissioners, no other executives at the NBA. And he says: It’s time to legalize gambling. And so think that—
Warzel: We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.
Torre: We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.
And it turns out that the hot-dog costume may well be, you know: Pick your favorite NBA mascot, right? Like, that’s what you’re sort of like gesturing at. Staring into the camera, hoping that no one quite realizes that maybe you didn’t realize what all—and this is where it feels like tech—maybe you didn’t realize all the unintended consequences.
And I think that, for sports—and I’m with you. Like, I think there’s a … I mean, look, it’s very complicated to regulate. As always, it’s like: What does that really mean? There’s a whole, like, granular series of reforms. Shrinking the menu of prop bets, making it so you can’t bet on obscure players, on and on.
It is another interesting conversation. But the thing, I wonder, if sports realizes is—you know, and this is where the oil stuff sort of recurs for me. The “pipeline” language. I wonder if the leagues realize that they’re basically fracking their products? Because what they’re doing is saying, “We can go deeper and find more money by mining this same thing, going deeper into this sort of, like, subterranean layers of what we think sports fandom is. And we can create these individualized economic engines that didn’t use to exist before. But in the process, do something dangerous.”
Speaking to the larger, like—what’s different about the product? They’re creating a series of individualized, hyper-specific, sometimes microscopic, sporting interests. Rooting interests that are not the same as I care about—this team, or even this star player. And when you do that, I think you’re just changing what the product is.
The product at its best—in the way that it’s become culturally supreme—is: There are all these teams, all trying to win a championship. It’s pretty simple. In the world that they’re building now, the product is different. They’re convincing people to watch these games not because of the teams involved, or the quality of the players, but because there are these other things to root for. And in a world in which we’re worried—and the NBA’s worried, existentially, about this—that in basketball, individual stars have become even more popular and important than the franchises. Then, you’re actually doing something even more mutated than that. That can, long term, feel like you’re fracking something. And poisoning, potentially, the entire well that you’re supposed to be profiting off of.
Warzel: It is like, put that way, feels—to just sum up the mega problem, the hyper-object problem of, like, kind of everything now. That feels just so tech-enabled, right? Like, I cover this stuff, and I do not want to always just be the guy who has a hammer and only sees nails. In, you know, the algorithmic internet.
But I just think that there’s this way that these technological tools … they decrease friction, right? Like, gambling’s gonna exist. It’s gonna exist in these ways. All they do is just decrease the level of friction here, until you can, you know, pick this thing up and do those micro-bets on what’s gonna happen in the next 45 seconds.
And in doing that—like, that’s the fracking element, right? And it’s the ethos that a lot of these companies and, you know, this style of 21st-century capitalism, rewards. Where it’s just like—extract as much as you can, scale as much as you can. Get it. And you have to get it now; otherwise you’re an idiot.
And there’s just no—there’s no long game, right? There’s just no long-term thinking.
Torre: It’s really not a long game. I mean, that is a great articulation of my frustration here. That when you think about what is being disrupted. And I think about this, by the way—we’ve mentioned a couple of industries already where it’s, like, very funny to think about cable television being “disrupted” only to be replaced by something that is now trying to be a version of cable television.
Like where it’s just funny—like, dude, there are a zillion different ways that you can point to Silicon Valley, Elon, whoever. Saying, like, “We’re going to reinvent this thing,” only to accidentally invent a bus.
Warzel: Right? Yeah, yeah.
Torre: A cable network. I mean, we’re realizing over time—and this is where it’s the oldest I will sound—but it’s like: Sometimes things were that way for a reason. And the thing of, like, what I’ve really figured out here—as my big-brained founder, sort of like, psychology—has led me to move fast and break things in the service of this apparent revelation that, “Wait a minute, I can make more money doing it this way.”
And then the question that never gets answered until it’s too late is: But what if it ruins the entire equilibrium that allowed you to disrupt that system in the first place? And then it’s like—well, now the game’s over. And we’re fucked. So thanks, dude. Really appreciate your insights.
Warzel: Oh, man. So, Pablo Torre finds out he’s a Boomer. Right? That’s it. That’s how—
Torre: Honestly, what I found out today in this conversation with you, Charlie, is that I am the machine I rage against.
Warzel: Aren’t we all, man? Ugh. This has been fantastic, Paolo. Thank you for coming on Galaxy Brain.
Torre: Thank you for making me more depressed and, somehow, more excited than I was, you know, 45 minutes ago.
Warzel: That’s my music, man. That’s what I like to do. That’s it. If you can walk away with a thousand-yard stare—but then you also kind of want to go make something—then I did my job. There you go.
Torre: Vision accomplished.
Charlie Warzel: That’s it for us here. Thank you again to my guest, Pablo Torre. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday.
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