PTFO Exclusive: We Followed the Money in the NFL Union Scandal. So Did the FBI.

As the NFL returns, Pablo and Pro Football Talk's Mike Florio are back with more secret documents, a federal investigation, new government names, billions of union dollars, an O. J. Simpson parking space, the world’s largest strip club... and one big "clusterf*ck." Does the OneTeam Partners saga connect to a Game of Thrones-style power play by the NFLPA's shadow boss? Or could the feds be on the trail of an even bigger scandal? • Part One: The NFL's Secret Collusion Case, Revealed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P42Wq3fmTYg • Part Two: We Got Another Secret Union Document — and Smoked Out Another Cover-Up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P42Wq3fmTYg • Read our latest NFL document on Pablo's subscribers-only newsletter: https://www.pablo.show/subscribe • Pre-order "Big Shield" by Mike Florio https://www.amazon.com/Big-Shield-Mike-Florio-ebook/dp/B0FGH43V6D • Ex-NFLPA boss Howell's strip club expenses sent to investigator (Don Van Natta Jr. and Kalyn Kahler) https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/45703132/nflpa-nfl-agreed-keep-collusion-findings-secret • "If he failed, their process failed": Inside the NFLPA meltdown (Don Van Natta Jr. and Kalyn Kahler) https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/45800610/inside-nflpa-executive-director-lloyd-howell-tenure Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:02Pablo Torre?

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• 1:46Pablo Torre?

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• 2:15Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 2:22Pablo Torre?

  This is an emergency episode, Mike. I don't know how else to put it. Yes, straighten up your back. I'm coming to you from home. I have the chief of documents still with me. And I was worried at the outset of like, do we really do a third episode about the biggest crisis in the history of the NFL Players Association? And yes, [bleep] yes is the answer.

• 2:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, I went through the same thing. The first one went over so well. The second one, in a roundabout way, contributed to some pretty serious action on the back end. But the more time we've spent talking about it and thinking about it, and I think to the extent we're trying to come up with through lines and have a thread that maybe explains a lot of weird things, I think we're getting closer and closer to it.

• 3:11Pablo Torre?

  But first, I do just want to catch people up. Because yes, on the evening of Thursday, July 17th, the night we published episode two in our trilogy, this happened.

• 3:22Speaker 06

  The NFL Players Association Executive Director Lloyd Howell resigned late Thursday, ending his two-year tenure as the leader of the players' union.

• 3:30Pablo Torre?

  Pardon the interruption, but I'm Pablo Torre, and I am pleased to be back on PTI with you, Tony.

• 3:35Speaker 07

  Tony Kornheiser. You know, who just turned off the television? Lloyd Howell. Yeah, he's out.

• 3:42Speaker 08

  He submitted a statement. "It's clear that my leadership has become a distraction to the important work the NFLPA advances every day."

• 3:52Speaker 09

  And then you hear about the collusion, and then you hear about the lost cases, about, you know, how they're telling the players they need to fake injuries or to hold in. You go there, you get your money. It's just, it's just a mess right now.

• 4:03Speaker 10

  It has come out now, of all the things that have been coming out about him, which caused his haste resignation, that he had been sending in expense reports for trips to the strip club.

• 4:14Speaker 05

  I just want to show that guaranteed contracts is a potential for the future of the NFL. Bambi, lower, lower, Bambi, lower, lower. All right. You can see right here from my graph that if we just hold out for two to three weeks, that's X amount of money that the NFL is going to incur in expense. Bambi, move your tits! I'm trying to show my graph!

• 4:41Pablo Torre?

  What was your favorite thing, Mike, from the post-episode two reporting that ESPN and others did into Lloyd Howell?

• 4:49Speaker 05

  I think more than anything else, it had to be the strip club expense report angle. Because until you have that kind of seedy, what the hell was he thinking? It's possible to say Lloyd is in some way the victim of a smear campaign.

• 5:10Pablo Torre?

  Sure.

• 5:11Speaker 05

  Whoever it may be, you and me, or the league, or some powerful block of players.

• 5:18Pablo Torre?

  And that's, by the way, Mike, we didn't even get to the fact that, apparently, per the ESPN report, Lloyd Howell had also ordered the Union Facilities Department to merge two spaces in the parking garage, like [bleep] Barry Bonds in the Giants clubhouse, to create a double-wide parking spot for his Porsche Cayenne Turbo in honor, with the number above 32 of who?

• 5:41Speaker 05

  Orenthal James Simpson. You can't make it up.

• 5:47Pablo Torre?

  And so, when all of this is unfolding, this chaotically, this recklessly, it also is stunning to me that the executive committee, Mike, in the reporting, fought Lloyd Howell's attempt to resign on the call. And I just got to quote this here. Quote, "The EC said, 'No, you're [bleep] not,' a player with knowledge of the call told ESPN. Since elevating Howell to be a finalist for the job in 2023, the executive committee had stood by him throughout the series of revelations about his conduct and side jobs." End quote. So just imagine this. Imagine what the EC of the Union was trying to do as all of this was raining, maybe perhaps as Lloyd Howell himself was making it rain.

• 6:31Speaker 05

  And I know Seinfeld references are horribly outdated, but they are so perfect to summarize reality. The executive committee, for everything it's done, all the way back to the super-secret process that resulted in the hiring of Lloyd Howell, they are George Costanza, who has bought John Voight's car.

• 6:49Speaker 11

  Just driving around in John Voight's car.

• 6:53Speaker 05

  They are never going to admit that the car was once owned, not by John Voight, the actor, but by John Voight, the periodontist. That is this mindset when it is obvious that the super-secret Lloyd Howell hiring process, without the proper vetting, without people understanding all of the various questions, directly contributed to the chaos they're now experiencing.

• 7:16Pablo Torre?

  Yes, and so in that vetting, what was missed, for the record, to catch people up, was, ah, yes, Lloyd Howell's role as the CFO of Booz Allen in the fraud that resulted in a $377 million settlement with the US government. Again, these documents, another sexual discrimination lawsuit at Booz.

• 7:35Speaker 05

  It missed that he did the strip club expense report thing in 2015 at Booz Allen. It missed that, too.

• 7:42Pablo Torre?

  Yes, and so, all of which is to say that three days after Lloyd Howell resigned, this is now Sunday, July 20th, Lloyd Howell's number two, the chief strategy officer of the union, J.C. Tretter, the guy the two of us have been reporting on from the very beginning, the guy who was otherwise flown under the national radar, I would say, and also, by the way, the guy who had predictably emerged, in our view, after Lloyd resigned as the favorite to replace him as executive director, according to the New York Times Athletic. That guy also resigned, and J.C. Tretter, Mike, J.C. Tretter finally did the thing that the two of us had been waiting for him to do.

• 8:24Speaker 05

  Speak, say anything, comment, come out of hiding. It's amazing to me, when you look at the lengthy interview that he gave that emerged in print with Jonathan Jones of CBS Sports, explaining himself, and like, he was exercising restraint when all of these false stories were being put out there about him, like, if there are false stories about you, there are ways, even if you're not doing it publicly, there are ways to get in touch with people.

• 8:51Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 8:52Speaker 05

  I know J.C. Tretter, I have his number, I'm easy to find, I invited him to come on. PFT PM, PFT Live, here with us and have a conversation. He never responded, but if any of the stuff that was coming out from us, the two episodes of Pablo Torre Finds Out, where we collaborated on the 61-page hidden collusion ruling and then the hidden grievance regarding J.C. Tretter encouraging the faking of injuries, wink, wink, nod, nod, we're easy to find. I'm easy to find. All he had to do was pick up his phone and say, hey, we need to talk about this. You're way, way off here.

• 9:28Pablo Torre?

  And I should clarify, too, that I also, here at Pablo Torre Finds Out, reached out to J.C. Tretter for comment. No response. And by the way, I, for my part, never received a single ounce of pushback from the NFLPA via its PR person or J.C. Tretter.

• 9:43Speaker 05

  Same.

• 9:43Pablo Torre?

  In any of this.

• 9:44Speaker 05

  Same.

• 9:44Pablo Torre?

  Any of this, right? But what we get now, finally, is J.C. Tretter complaining to CBS Sports about, quote-unquote, "mistruths" that were out there about him and that I assume directly references the stuff that we have been reporting. And he does something that's kind of amazing. He proceeds to compare himself to a Game of Thrones character, which is very bold, if not very germane to the genre we're working in, because he tells CBS, Mike, that there is, quote-unquote, "one specific scene from Game of Thrones that he has been thinking about over the last few weeks," end quote. Do you remember the scene that J.C. Tretter is referencing, Mike?

• 10:25Speaker 05

  Actually, I don't, because I'm not a Game of Thrones aficionado, so I'll defer to your expertise.

• 10:31Pablo Torre?

  It's from when Tyrion Lannister is falsely accused, in the show, of killing his nephew, the young King Joffrey.

• 10:40Speaker 12

  Have you nothing to say in your defense? Nothing but this. I did not do it. I did not kill Joffrey, but I wish that I had.

• 10:53Speaker 12

  I wish I was the monster you think I am.

• 10:59Speaker 12

  I wish I had enough poison for the whole pack of you. I would gladly give my life to watch you all swallow it. Mr. Maron?

• 11:08Pablo Torre?

  So for the record, J.C. did not quote the whole poison part. It was merely, "I wish I was the monster that you claim I am," that he quoted, saying, "I felt a lot of that over the last six weeks. I'm being accused of being this all-controlling, all-powerful person, and I'm not. And I [bleep] wish I was because I don't think we'd be in the same place we are now if I was." End quote.

• 11:30Speaker 05

  I like the argument that if I had done all this on purpose, it would have been a hell of a lot more effective than the cluster [bleep] I created. I kind of like that. I may use that.

• 11:42Pablo Torre?

  And what happens next, right? As clarity is being urged, J.C. Tretter goes on The Dan Patrick Show to continue to subtweet the two of us.

• 11:53Speaker 13

  Be specific on what you're talking about that is not true that's being said about you.

• 11:59Speaker 14

  Yeah, I mean, there's been a lot of narrative spun. The idea that I buried the collusion grievance. I've never seen the collusion grievance. The collusion, I don't have access to the collusion grievance. I wasn't in any discussions about the collusion grievance, just not part of my job.

• 12:16Speaker 05

  Chief Strategy Officer of the NFL Players Association was not involved in formulating the strategy for the fact that they woke up on January 14, 2025, with the NFL by the tail, with a partial victory in the collusion ruling, and plenty of evidence that could have been used for a PR slash political pushback. How in the world, Pablo? It gets more inexplicable the more I see that clip. How is this guy cut out of the loop on what we're going to do with this thing that he was involved in, testifying, and he's frozen out?

• 12:58Speaker 05

  How does he not storm out the door the day he finds out that he was excluded from developing the strategy for moving forward with this valuable 61-page ruling? It is laughable. It is laughable.

• 13:13Pablo Torre?

  He says, Mike, "I have never seen the collusion grievance." Present tense. So just to even more fully explain what he's saying, right? He's saying, you know, "I didn't discuss it. I didn't bury it. And also, even though this asshole journalist published it on his Substack for free, this thing that I testified in, that my phone got searched for, that I was a character in, that my claims against Russell Wilson were used as an exhibit to help the owners against the body that I love more than anything, the ruling which I was waiting for, because again, I had an intimate knowledge of it." He's saying that even after it got published finally and he could access it, because clearly he had been boxed out by Lloyd Howell in the process of suppressing it,

• 13:57Pablo Torre?

  he's saying he still had zero curiosity in going to actually see it. Even though, by the way, as a related matter, I can tell you that at least one senior vice president with the NFL has been passing this thing around and viewing it dozens upon dozens of times off of my Substack. J.C. Tretter is saying, "Still, still have never seen it. Not really sure." Especially, Mike, especially when the NFLPA then decides, right, to change course and appeal, as we discussed in episode two, after we released it. And he still says, "Nope, never seen it." So to paraphrase Watergate, right? An outstanding question I have. What did the chief strategy officer know? And when did he know it?

• 14:42Pablo Torre?

  And it does not sound, as we continue to listen here, like he wants to tell us.

• 14:46Speaker 14

  I know we lost the collusion grievance in January. That, that, I knew that. I didn't know of any agreements or what was happening with that because it's not part of my department. Once it leaked a few weeks ago, I started learning more. I was on the board call and the EC call when it was explained what had happened over the last six months to the players. So I know more now, but at that point, I knew nothing. I wasn't involved in the discussions.

• 15:11Speaker 05

  I love trying to look for tells and he's very good. But man, there was a lot of shifty eyes.

• 15:18Pablo Torre?

  A lot of eyes starting.

• 15:20Speaker 05

  Anytime things got a little dicey, there was some rapid eye movement for a guy that was wide awake.

• 15:29Pablo Torre?

  Well, is this a nightmare? And what degree of nightmare is it actually? Is why I wanted to continue reporting, right? If someone says by implication, you journalists have published mistruths. Frankly, I take it seriously, right? I want to continue to fact check myself. I want to make sure I didn't get it wrong. And so this is why and how in my would be week off, Mike, we both got sucked into this other even darker rabbit hole that I didn't even understand, frankly, until today. And it turns out that the entity that is also quite curious, just like we are about what's actually happening here, who knew what and when,

• 16:13Pablo Torre?

  is an entity that is perhaps even scarier than the two of us combined.

• 16:17Speaker 05

  Well, it's a combination of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Eastern District of New York, where prosecutors are exploring the happenings related to the NFL Players Association, the MLB Players Association. And once you start putting into the universe, strip club expense reports financed by union revenues, you are going to get the attention of the federal government, which is charged with the responsibility for enforcing the laws against that kind of stuff.

• 16:50Pablo Torre?

  Yes, once enough stuff is being made to rain, documents, money at strip clubs. The government asked the question that I think we are asking still. Where do we wind up if we follow all of this money? And the answer is after the break.

• 17:26Pablo Torre?

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• 19:10Pablo Torre?

  So, something that I just need to stress here is that the NFLPA is extremely different from the overwhelming majority of labor unions in America in this one crucial and generally overlooked way.

• 19:24Pablo Torre?

  It has a [bleep] ton of money to play with.

• 19:29Pablo Torre?

  And so the job of NFLPA Executive Director, for that reason alone, is an extremely enticing, extremely powerful job. And that is true for both a businessman like Lloyd Howell, as well as a proudly adversarial prosecutor like Demora Smith, who was Lloyd's predecessor and philosophical opposite. D. Smith, for instance, made more than $8 million in the last year of his 14-year run as Executive Director. It is hard to imagine an American union leader making more.

• 20:04Speaker 05

  And even then, there's a gross imbalance to the extent that his primary adversary, whether you're D. Smith or Lloyd Howell, is the commissioner. The commissioner is making many multiples. To the extent those are the two, it's definitely David and Goliath when it relates to bank account.

• 20:22Pablo Torre?

  And that is also true. But the NFLPA's total assets, according to its most recent federal filing, amount to roughly $1.4 billion. Much of that coming from all of the dues paid by NFL players over the last quarter century now. This amount, to be clear, is still outmatched by the NFL, to Florio's point, and it's not close. But you should also know that this billion-dollar war chest is just the beginning of the story that we are about to tell you here. And all of this will make it even more baffling that Lloyd Howell, whose job was to oversee this entire enterprise,

• 21:03Pablo Torre?

  was both physically and mentally absentee. Dude was living in South Florida, working as a paid consultant for the Carlyle Group on the side, which also developed a special arrangement to buy shares of NFL teams, as we discussed last time. And Lloyd Howell was also serving on the board of Moody's, because Lloyd Howell loves board seats and private equity side gigs and showing up at the DC office maybe a couple of times a month. And so what I did was start asking eight different NFLPA sources, both players and officials, a pretty simple and logical question.

• 21:45Pablo Torre?

  Who in the office was actually in charge? And a consensus became clear.

• 21:56Pablo Torre?

  The shadow executive director of the NFLPA, the guy who actually lived there in the DC area, was J.C. Treter, who is a former, a proud former Cornell football player, but even more specifically, a graduate of Cornell's School of Industrial Labor Relations, which is a special college devoted to these issues, who became known around the union headquarters for taking on projects and frankly, working his ass off. As one former union official told me, quote, "No NFLPA president has ever studied the union's bylaws as closely as J.C. Treter," end quote. And so, 2022, he gets cut by the Browns in the spring. He moves his entire family, Mike, from Cleveland to Northern Virginia,

• 22:41Pablo Torre?

  takes his office at NFLPA HQ in downtown DC, and his first task is immediately running the search to replace the outgoing, almost $9 million man, Demaurice Smith. And very quickly, he convinces the executive committee to sign NDAs for a reason that, yes, Commander's running back Austin Eckler continued to parrot last Friday to The Athletic.

• 23:05Speaker 05

  You need top talent, and if you're looking for top talent, they already have a job somewhere. We have to protect their name in secrecy so we can protect them at the job they're currently at. So I love what we did as far as our process.

• 23:22Pablo Torre?

  Now, Mike, something that's very amusing in retrospect, in terms of the two finalists that they produce, is that neither of them, it turns out, had a job at the time that they were interviewing for this role. Why are the two finalists Lloyd Howell and also a guy named David White? And David White, Mike, I didn't know a ton about, but his background contains the following headline from Deadline Hollywood in 2015. Quote, "Open secret and lies. How sag after a boss, David White, misled union board on pedophile docu."

• 24:02Pablo Torre?

  End quote. So what I did was I reached out to David White last Wednesday. He replied to my LinkedIn message and then ghosted me. So never got to hear him explain the NFLPA search or the quote unquote pedophile docu scandal. But what I found out from one high level Hollywood source, a union source, is that White had resigned from SAG-AFTRA in 2021 and was subsequently rumored to be in the running to lead the AMPTP, which is the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which I didn't quite appreciate this, is the NFL to SAG-AFTRA's NFLPA. Meaning that David White, according to my source, Mike, is the kind to quote unquote, play ball with management.

• 24:47Pablo Torre?

  If that happens to remind you of anybody.

• 24:49Speaker 05

  It's funny too. I had this image of David White running by a friend, a colleague, an associate, that he'd been contacted by this guy named Pablo Torre and the person saying, don't, don't, don't talk to him.

• 25:07Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. Worried about that part too. I did.

• 25:10Speaker 05

  And I'm having flashbacks to 2023 when I was covering.

• 25:13Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 25:14Speaker 05

  On a drip, drip, drip basis, this unusual process at the NFL Players Association. Let's make sure people understand what we're talking about. We're talking about a union with a rank and file that has a right to know. And ultimately, they didn't know who the finalists were until they got there and they had signed NDAs and there was no opportunity to have any input from the people they represent. From the get go, this top secret with awkward, clunky justification process smelled bad to me. And we see the fruits of that very poisonous tree two years later.

• 25:55Pablo Torre?

  And so what happened was, Mike, I wound up finding an executive committee member from that time, 2023, who did not feel the same way as J.C. Tretter and Austin Eckler. Richard Sherman, the superstar cornerback for the Seahawks, who served on the executive committee for almost 10 years at this point in time, did more than disagree, actually. Richard Sherman, I am told, actually pulled the parachute cord and stopped participating in J.C. Tretter's search process after sitting through three rounds of candidates. And the reason Richard Sherman left, I am told, was because he was sick of how J.C. Tretter was pushing candidates like Lloyd Howell. According to a source familiar with Sherman's thinking, quote, "There was a rigid bias against internal union candidates,

• 26:40Pablo Torre?

  and candidates like Lloyd Howell kept getting leeway, even though they didn't seem that prepared and didn't seem to understand how the relationship between the NFL and the NFLPA works. Lloyd Howell was treated like a project boyfriend. We can fix him." End quote.

• 26:58Speaker 05

  Didn't J.C. try to push the idea to Jonathan Jones of CBSsports.com that when it came down to the executive committee, 10 of the 11 supported David White over Lloyd Howell?

• 27:17Pablo Torre?

  And this is where I just gotta jump in here to confirm that, yes, J.C. Tretter told CBS that the EC was actually 10 to 1 in favor of David White over Lloyd Howell.

• 27:29Speaker 05

  And you and I have been skeptical of that from the get-go. And what you've learned on your reporting regarding Richard Sherman's position was, yeah, Lloyd was his guy. Whatever he's saying now might just be saying what he has to say to try to clumsily put lipstick on the pig. He was always a Lloyd Howell guy.

• 27:48Pablo Torre?

  But I also want to briefly acknowledge something else here, which is that, right now, today, with Lloyd Howell gone in disgrace, the executive committee members would also have an incentive to have people think that they always wanted the other guy. Because of course, they always wanted David White, the pedophile docu-guy who also didn't really understand the NFL. The whole problem here was the voters, the 32 players on the board representatives, those guys who walked in totally blind. The voters are the ones who messed this election up. And in fact, what J.C. Treter said in that CBS interview was one step further, actually.

• 28:31Pablo Torre?

  He said that he did not tell those 32 voters what he thought about Lloyd Howell. Quote, "We're not going to put our thumb on the scale."

• 28:42Speaker 05

  They built the scale!

• 28:45Pablo Torre?

  "We're not gonna push them. We're not going to go in there after doing all this work and make it look like we jammed in the person that we would have picked." End quote. What I am told, though, is that either way, whether he liked David White or Lloyd Howell, what J.C. Treter wanted was somebody who needed J.C. Treter. Someone who wasn't fluent in the relationship between the NFL and the NFLPA. Someone who needed, perhaps, a chief strategy officer, which is literally the role that got invented for J.C. Treter that had never before existed anywhere by Lloyd Howell in October of 2024. And so now we are merging back with the known timeline of reality.

• 29:27Pablo Torre?

  And contrary to his explanation to Dan Patrick, I am told that J.C. and Lloyd did not merely strategically box out the media. The two of them, Mike, boxed out pretty much the rest of the NFLPA, just like in the search process. They cut out long-tenured executives out of strategy sessions. They offered buyouts, I am told, to union employees with more than seven years of service, about half of the 120-person staff. And I ask you, Mike, what's the effect? If you try to say to everybody who's been there long enough to have seen everything, "We would like you to take the money and get out of here."

• 30:01Speaker 05

  Well, it's going to entice them to go because the message is if you don't choose to go with the money, you're going to be told to go without the money. But all of this paints the picture that I suspected was going to exist when they did the top-secret...

• 30:18Speaker 05

  Executive Director's search process, which is we're trying to engineer a world in which no one asks questions. We're trying to engineer a world in which we do what we want to do without anyone pushing back, without anyone asking why, without anyone meddling in our affairs.

• 30:43Pablo Torre?

  And so this brings me now to maybe the most Game of Thrones thing that J.C. Tretter did, which I did not know about until this past week. Because again, J.C.'s whole message when it comes to elections was we're gonna let the players decide, we would never put our thumb on the scale, I would never tell the players what to do. But at the March 2024 NFLPA Presidential Elections in Scottsdale, Arizona, there were two candidates for president of the Union that year. One, of course, was the eventual winner. This is Jalen Reeves-Maven, the special teamer from the Lions, who is now a free agent, who was on the executive committee with J.C. Tretter at the time. You may remember Jalen Reeves-Maven from the Super Bowl presser mic that we cited in episode two.

• 31:24Speaker 17

  From a PA organizational standpoint, I won't steal all of Lloyd's thunder, but there have been some changes being made just from the structure of the PA. And it's really been driven, I keep using the same word, but it's really been driven to be focused towards the players. So with every decision we're making, with every action that we're going, it's driven for what do the players want, what do the players need?

• 31:51Pablo Torre?

  The other candidate was Cardinals tackle Kelvin Beachum. Kelvin Beachum, and I didn't appreciate this until this past week, is a two-time Walter Payton Man of the Year Award nominee, a record five-time NFLPA Community MVP. He's also the kind of guy with a pretty strong business profile. And I say that because I was looking through his game film, and I found his speech that he gave at the 2018 LinkedIn Speaker Series.

• 32:18Speaker 18

  I started to really gravitate to STEM education, science, technology, engineering and mathematics. And if you add the arts, for those who are artsy, it's STEM. And I've really spent a lot of time in that particular space over the last four years. In that, I've really started to find my own niche and where I can really serve the community and where I can really serve young people. So I've really spent a lot of time there. And then investing started to take hold. Startups, looking at the way startups are run, looking at the holes in the pipeline that we currently have within the startup.

• 32:47Pablo Torre?

  And so what I want to impress upon you here, having just heard those two clips of two very different speakers, two very different candidates, one who had expertise in business and beyond, the other who we now know to have presided over the most disastrous NFLPA regime in its known history, is that here's what happened. Instead of what typically goes on at the NFLPA presidential elections, in which the speaker gets up in front of the big room, big auditorium, and speaks to the electorate all together, where everybody can ask questions, everybody can evaluate, in the way that we're trying to simulate right now, J.C. Tretter divides everybody into a handful of breakout rooms. And according to a player who was in one of those rooms who saw all of this unfold

• 33:29Pablo Torre?

  step by step, Jalen Reeves-Maven would walk into the room, struggle to answer questions, and then Jalen would leave. Calvin Beecham would walk into the room and sound like he just did in that clip. He would blow people away. He seemed to have all of this acumen, all of these questions he wanted to ask. And then Calvin Beecham would leave. And then something else happened. J.C. Tretter would walk into the room. And this was a move that no other NFLPA president that I've surveyed can recall ever doing or ever permitting. J.C. Tretter would walk into that same breakout room and start actively campaigning against Calvin Beecham.

• 34:12Pablo Torre?

  According to the player I spoke to who saw all of this, quote, "JC would start [BLEEP] on Kelvin, talking about why Jalen really cares, and how Kelvin may have other motives to want the job, given his offseason activities in the world of finance." End quote.

• 34:29Speaker 05

  So he was going to serve as a paid consultant to the Carlyle Group? Is that what you're saying, in the offseason? I mean, that seems to be exactly what they were trying to cultivate. Yes. A business-forward, strategic, entrepreneurial, diversified approach to union affairs.

• 34:47Pablo Torre?

  But seemingly in this case, Calvin Beacham was asking the wrong, or too many, or inappropriate questions.

• 34:55Speaker 05

  Or any.

• 34:56Pablo Torre?

  Or perhaps any questions. What the player who witnessed all of this told me, by the way, as you note that interesting paradox in philosophies. The player told me, quote, "I thought the executive committee knew something about Kelvin." End quote. As in, maybe his past was the one with conflicts and scandal in it. And so I was led to then be curious, like, so what questions was Calvin Beacham asking? And it turns out, there was one big problem that Calvin Beacham kept flagging in his March 2024 presidential campaign. The big problem happened to be a money problem. And if you follow that problem, Mike, if you follow the money,

• 35:40Pablo Torre?

  as we have, you finally find yourself staring into the same rabbit hole as the FBI.

• 35:58Speaker 19

  Are you the kind of sports fan that wants to dig into the story behind the stats? Then join us daily on The Athletic Live, where we'll be live on YouTube to cover all the sports stories you can't stop talking about. On game days, we watch the biggest matchups, live alongside The Athletic's most tapped-in reporters. Or come hang on an off night for an inside look at how headlines happen. We want you dropping questions in the chat, and we'll bring answers, straight from the source. The Athletic Live is presented by Google Gemini. Subscribe now on YouTube.

• 36:29Speaker 00

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• 37:16Speaker 16

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• 37:35Pablo Torre?

  So we are finally at the part of the story that both of us spent way too much time talking to each other about over the weekend, trying to understand this as best we can. And this part, it turns out, really [BLEEP] matters. You may recall how earlier in this episode I mentioned the $1.4 billion war chest that the NFLPA has. And the war chest, Mike, by the way, for those who are not familiar, what is a war chest for?

• 37:55Speaker 05

  Well, ideally, it would be for providing assets and resources to the players in the event of a work stoppage, either a lockout initiated by the owners or a strike initiated by the players. Even though the players have shown since 1987 no inclination or appetite to miss a game or a game check, it's there just in case. And it's there as leverage. So in the event that the nuclear option is activated, the owners will understand we've got something we can dip into to help the players get through this, however long or short it may be.

• 38:31Pablo Torre?

  And you know, I should point out that in the absence of, I don't know, let's say, a collusion ruling that contained the embarrassing private phone records and texts and emails and testimony of eight NFL owners, Roger Goodell, his general counsel, and various NFL executives, the union war chest, that enticing but outmatched $1.4 billion, would be about all the NFLPA could have when it comes to plausible leverage.

• 38:59Pablo Torre?

  Or so I thought. Because even outside of the collusion ruling stuff, there's something else you need to know about. Because under the regime of Demaurice Smith, Lloyd Howell's predecessor, the NFLPA quietly started developing a new financial weapon. A multi-billion dollar company that the union co-founded in 2019 with the MLBPA and a big private equity firm, Redbird Capital. And this multi-billion dollar company is called One Team Partners. The basic premise, admittedly, is kind of genius.

• 39:40Speaker 05

  The basic premise of One Team is to take the name, image, and likeness rights for as many different athletes in as many different sports as possible and craft them into one giant economic force that can do business with the likes of Fanatics, which is one of its partners, and others that want access to those rights. There's strength in numbers. And unlike the collusion that can happen when independent businesses come together to affect a certain end, there's no collusion law that applies when individuals decide they're going to lock arms and they're going to try to do the best deal for themselves collectively.

• 40:23Pablo Torre?

  And so One Team Partners negotiates with EA Sports for Madden checks, and Nike and Adidas for apparel, and the NFLPA owns the biggest piece of it, by far, at 44.5%, with the MLBPA owning the second-biggest piece at just under 23%. Unions from women's basketball, women's soccer, men's soccer, all of them together representing thousands upon thousands upon thousands of athletes, they all locked arms with the NFLPA since.

• 40:52Pablo Torre?

  And how a union, like the NFLPA, legally oversees One Team is really crucial to understanding this. Because the NFLPA possesses four unpaid board seats. That's more than any of the other unions. And whoever sits in those four board seats is very explicitly obligated to prioritize the best interest of the union, of their union members, which is the fiduciary duty above all else. Even above One Team, the company. And this is, to be clear, a unique arrangement. You know, an NIL company that also has this fiduciary labor law obligation,

• 41:34Pablo Torre?

  it really does amount to the difference between labor law and corporate law, kind of in a nutshell.

• 41:42Pablo Torre?

  Which now brings us to the sale that quietly ignited this whole entire union scandal. And it brings us to a new character, a very important executive who is well-liked by both D. Smith and Lloyd Howell, whose name has not yet been mentioned in any of the reports that I've seen.

• 42:05Pablo Torre?

  Because in September 2022, okay? The private equity firm Redbird Capital Partners sold its 40% stake in One Team for a staggering $600 million in profit.

• 42:21Pablo Torre?

  Which values One Team, therefore, at around $2 billion. And so, by June 2023, the same month Lloyd Howell got elected, I am told, One Team also chooses a new leader, a new CEO named Sean Sanceveri. And Sean Sanceveri had previously served as a longtime general counsel and head of business affairs for the NFLPA. I would describe Sean Sanceveri as a proud former Cornell football player, but even more specifically, a graduate of Cornell's School of Industrial Labor Relations. Again, a special college devoted to these issues he's been talking about. Not unlike his friend and colleague and fellow alum J.C. Tredor, with whom Sean Sanceveri worked very closely at the NFLPA, especially during COVID.

• 43:03Pablo Torre?

  August 2023 comes, and Sean Sanceveri tells Bloomberg in an article about his appointment that he has a new target, a new long-term valuation target for One Team Partners.

• 43:13Speaker 05

  As the headline declares, quote, "Rights Agency for Professional, College Athletes Eyes $10 Billion Valuation."

• 43:25Pablo Torre?

  Which is very intriguing, indeed, right? Not least of all, it turns out, to the board members of One Team, Mike. The board members who have oversight over this potentially $10 billion, but at the very least $2 billion in the president's joint venture.

• 43:41Speaker 05

  What happens is, you've got four seats on the board that are appointed by the NFL Players Association. Two of them come from the union, two come from private industry and are recruited to serve. And all of those individuals had been providing services to the board of directors with no compensation. Well, in comes the number one, sale of the Redbird chunk, and the open aspiration for this to be a $10 billion company. And these board members, at a certain point...

• 44:22Speaker 05

  Start asking very simple question. When do we get paid? When do we get money for what we're providing to One Team Partners? This $2 billion on its way to $10 billion company.

• 44:33Pablo Torre?

  And there's one key part also about this board, which is that the board chair by rule is of course the executive director of the NFLPA. Which means, to check the timeline again, by the time of that $10 billion headline, the new board chair happened to be a newly elected businessman with no union experience who loved sitting on corporate boards. And simultaneously, just very coincidentally, had a part-time gig with a private equity firm. You may recall this character by his government name, which is Lloyd Howell Jr. And so what I can confirm is that the FBI right now, Mike, is actively investigating a very big question.

• 45:16Pablo Torre?

  And this is the question that the National Labor Relations Board would also be quite interested in, I am told, because the question happens to be the same question that one very qualified candidate, Calvin Beecham, kept flagging before he got beaten by J.C. Tretter's preferred candidate in that very conspicuous 2024 NFLPA presidential election. And this bigger question in this whole NFL union scandal is how many of the millions of dollars going to One Team Partners were being siphoned from the players whose personal likenesses are responsible for the entirety of One Team's potential $10 billion valuation? And how many of those millions of dollars are being diverted toward their union-employed board members,

• 46:01Pablo Torre?

  those executives, without the approval of the players? The members they have a duty to fairly represent? And this is where we got to explain, Mike, how there was an attempt, seemingly, to get money to those board members some way, somehow. And this relates to...

• 46:26Speaker 05

  A program known as a SEIP, S-E-I-P. It is a separate program that many organizations use to provide incentive payments to management employees. And at the outset, it allows them to have a certain piece of the action when a sale happens, if various triggers are met. But it could lead to a significant payment when the private company that is investing in One Team Partners, previously Redbird Capital, now someone else, the outside investor, when they sell, that's when this SEIP benefit potentially becomes cash.

• 47:09Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, so a SEIP stands for Senior Employee Incentive Program. It's also referred to colloquially as like a phantom stake, phantom equity that you can obtain. That could be, in this case, somewhere between hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, depending on where in the $2 billion to $10 billion spectrum this very real company lands. And so this brings us to a document that has drawn the FBI's attention, which has been mentioned and rumored elsewhere, but I got to review it over the weekend with my own two eyes. And the document is dated June 12, 2024. And I just want to place this into the larger timeline here because J.C. Treter, as of June 2024, has just overseen the election of Jalen Reeves-Maven over Calvin Beecham.

• 47:53Pablo Torre?

  And June 24 is also the month before the secret collusion hearings would start, Mike. That was happening in July and August. This document is a resolution that is passed in June. And this document, which is entirely specific to One Team Partners, is a resolution agreed to and signed by all nine of the board members. I reviewed all the signatures. The first DocuSign e-signature at the very top belongs to Lloyd Howell, alongside the NFLPA's three other board members, MLBPA Executive Director Tony Clark, the embattled Tony Clark, whose union is also under federal investigation for the same thing we're talking about, as well as other issues that have arisen internally over there.

• 48:37Pablo Torre?

  His signature is also right there.

• 48:43Pablo Torre?

  But as for who specifically got listed as the recipients of the SIP units, which is better understood as union money, that part is incredibly important here also. Because Sean Sansivari, the CEO of OneTeam and his $10 billion vision, rely upon making enormous deals that get approved by the board, which is at this point led by its newly installed board chair, Lloyd Howell. But what Sean Sansivari knew not to do at the same time was give NFLPA leaders union money in their names. That would be unlawful.

• 49:28Pablo Torre?

  That would be a company giving something of influence to a labor organization representative, which is flatly illegal under US Code. And all of this is why Sean Sansivari, therefore, came up with a different solution. The listed recipients on OneTeam's signed board resolution are not the board members, it turns out, listed individually by name. They're not NFLPA Executive Director Lloyd Howell and NFL Players Inc. President Matt Curtin, who is a former Bank of America Managing Director who got hired away by his old friend Lloyd Howell in March 2024, not long before all of this.

• 50:13Pablo Torre?

  Only, by the way, for Matt Curtin to reemerge this month as J.C. Tredder's preferred candidate to replace Lloyd Howell as interim Executive Director. No. Instead, the listed recipients are the actual unions, as in the NFLPA itself, with percentages that just happen to correlate to the exact number of board seats that each of these unions possess.

• 50:41Pablo Torre?

  And all of that, potentially, would have set Lloyd Howell up to obtain approval from his executive committee, led by new president Jalen Reeves-Maven and advised by chief strategy officer J.C. Treader, in order to pay this union money to those aforementioned board members as desired.

• 51:02Speaker 05

  This is where it becomes potentially very complicated, but when you have spent as much time on it as you and I have, I think it can possibly be simplified.

• 51:11Pablo Torre?

  Please.

• 51:12Speaker 05

  The idea was, we have two board members from private industry that want to get paid under the NFLPA umbrella. We've got two who are NFLPA employees or Players Inc. employees. We're going to set up something that potentially gives money to all four of them if and when this SIP becomes cash at some point down the road.

• 51:36Pablo Torre?

  But sometime after all nine board members signed this resolution on June 12, 2024, more than a year ago now, a different decision was made. A decision to do nothing. Lloyd Howell, sources say, never brought the board resolution to the NFLPA for any kind of approval. And so the SIP units, that union money, was also never granted. All of which is extremely interesting, I would say, just on its own. And so, in other words, were these union leaders attempting to get rich

• 52:21Pablo Torre?

  with player money without player knowledge?

• 52:25Speaker 05

  There was no effort to secure approval from either union to proceed, but at the same time, nothing else was done. They stopped, for whatever reason, and that's part of what we've been trying to figure out. Why did they stop? They started, and then they stopped. June 12, 2024, the mechanism is in place to make this happen. At some point after June 12 of 2024, they just decided, despite the fact that multiple board members from private industry were saying, to quote Goodfellas, "Fuck you, pay me", they stopped. And if I'm the federal government, I want to know how it got put in motion and why it was abandoned.

• 53:08Pablo Torre?

  In the timeline to bring us all in the same, single cinematic universe once again, that was happening, that board resolution was happening in June 2024. Again, that summer, parallel track. Everything in the collusion arbitration stuff is happening behind closed doors through November. In December 2024, right? The seal is finally broken on the one team story when Daniel Kaplan, at awful announcing, publishes a story about a whistleblower at the MLBPA, who has been calling out executive director Tony Clark, one of the signatures, again, on that board resolution next to Lloyd Howell. And he's been called out for many things, but I just want to quote this one line from

• 53:48Pablo Torre?

  the article, which turned out to be explosive in ways that we have underrated until now. "On conflicts of interest," the charge reads, quote, "Clark improperly gave himself and other executives equity in OTP," end quote. OTP, meaning one-team partners. So what happens from here is that the article catches the attention of a longtime associate general counsel of the NFLPA, a woman named Heather McPhee, an important character in this story, who repeatedly sounds the alarm inside the building about whether these executives, these union executives, were in fact enriching themselves or attempting to at the expense of union members.

• 54:30Pablo Torre?

  And in December of 2024, Mike, that same month, something happens inside the NFLPA as it pertains to legal investigation.

• 54:42Speaker 05

  The NFLPA, via associate general counsel Heather McPhee, decides, "We need to explore whether or not our..."

• 54:55Speaker 05

  Union representatives who are board members with the One Team Partners were doing the same thing. And is it permissible or is it not permissible?

• 55:06Pablo Torre?

  And so, one thing in the timeline, as this board resolution is passed, but is never fully implemented, right? There's a Zoom call. And what takes place at the top of that meeting?

• 55:18Speaker 05

  Lloyd Howell shows up on the Zoom call with a gentleman named Richard Smith, who has been brought in to explore the NFLPA's involvement with this SIP plan, cluster [BLEEP]. And the point is, Richard Smith is basically there to say, I've been hired by the NFLPA to investigate the cluster [BLEEP] as it relates to the NFLPA. One team is not a target. They've been told by the FBI they're not a target. Because at the end of the day, the unions decide what to do with this. You are giving the interests in the SIP plan to the unions for them to choose what to do with. This is about what the unions, one or both,

• 56:01Speaker 05

  were trying to finagle, possibly, for the benefit of the union employees whose compensation needed to be properly set, approved, increased, et cetera, with the consent of the union members themselves.

• 56:17Pablo Torre?

  Yes, with the caveat here to further complicate, but hopefully illuminate in the same breath, that the people running One Team were from the union coaching tree, had experience with all of these people, and also, furthermore, that board was controlled by the union leaders. What did you know and when did you know it? It brings us now to May of 2025. This is just two months ago now. Because what Heather McPhee, the Associate General Counsel, who sounds the alarm inside the union building about all of these allegations, she writes the NFLPA's Executive Committee a letter. And the letter accuses the Lloyd Howell, J.C. Tretter regime of ultimately deciding to sideline

• 57:02Pablo Torre?

  the Richard Smith investigation that began on that Zoom call with Lloyd Howell. And so, what Heather McPhee further says in this letter is that she has been contacted by federal investigators with regard to One Team Partners, and there have been questions about this alleged self-dealing. And so this brings us now, Mike, to the statement that One Team Partners gave The Athletic in June, which I must refer to because no one involved on the One Team side wants to go on the record about this. Sean Tansaveri declined our request for comment on the record because, of course, there's an ongoing federal investigation and yet more potentially to come. But this is the quote that The Athletic received from One Team Partners back in June. Quote, "This exploratory effort was part of a broader initiative to assess strategies

• 57:47Pablo Torre?

  for attracting high-caliber, independent talent. Following the legal advice of a labor law expert, it was determined that the best practice, if implemented, was to make grants to the respective players' associations. In so doing, any future payments would be governed by each union's player-approved bylaws, policy, and governance frameworks." End quote. And here's where I point out that in both cases, in the case of the executive director's search of the union, as well as the One Team board resolution, the high-caliber talent in question would be who, Mike?

• 58:21Speaker 05

  It would be Lloyd Howell Jr. If it can be shown through further reporting or FBI investigation that he was the prime mover of all of this, because in a vacuum, as you read that statement, it's perfectly reasonable. Because that meshes with the idea that you've got people from private industry who are like, "Hey, you know, I like hanging out with everybody, but this is a $2 billion company on its way to $10 billion. So I kind of like to get a little something for the guidance I'm providing to this organization." So that's why it is such a critical piece, and this is a living, breathing, eating, [BLEEP]ing

• 58:59Speaker 05

  story. But if I'm the FBI, I gotta know. How did this all start? And again, why did they say, once they had this gobbledygook resolution that was the key to the door, why didn't they push the door open?

• 59:28Pablo Torre?

  So Mike, once again, we present for the world, for our fellow journalists, for the union, for the people considering who to elect in this vacant power vacuum role of executive director, which still has yet to be filled. We present a roadmap for what questions we find interesting that the federal government also, in parallel, we can report, is also asking, which means that there's so much more behind the door, man.

• 59:54Speaker 05

  And one of the potential answers to the question of what happened after the board resolution that was never acted upon. It's possible that a decision was made, the heat's a little too hot. To use my original metaphor, as tweaked by you, they were caught with their hand in the cookie jar, but they let go of the cookie.

• 1:00:17Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 1:00:17Speaker 05

  That's entirely possible. We don't know. That's what the FBI needs to find out. And I keep coming back, Pablo, to the extent we're looking for themes and through lines. I come back to the secrecy that J.C. Treter engineered in June of 2023 in the hiring process that culminated in Lloyd Howell getting the executive director job. And this aversion to people who ask questions, this desire to keep everything insulated, us against them, we don't want anyone to know, we don't want anyone to weigh in, we don't want anyone to push back against that thing it is we want to do. Spin it forward.

• 1:00:58Speaker 05

  If they had acted on the resolution and the players would have approved or been in a position to disapprove, what happens? You have a tight group of people who you control, starting with the president, who isn't the guy who was asking a bunch of, you know, probing and meddling questions. You present it in a very reasonable way. You rely upon the power, the personalities of the people involved, whether it's Lloyd Howell, J.C. Treter, or someone else, as to why this is a fair and appropriate thing to do. And all you need to do is sign this document, and it's only fair to compensate Lloyd Howell and Matt Curtin.

• 1:01:38Speaker 05

  And so it gets done, it gets rubber stamped. I mean, this was all a setup to an eventual rubber stamping by a group that had limited information and was basically shoved in a direction like they were with Lloyd Howell, like they were with Jalen Reeves-Maven. That's the whole idea. We want to herd these cats, which they did very, very well, and get them where they want them to go. And they found, I think, the most compliant group of cats. And that's the challenge moving forward for anyone from the NFLPA who has made it this far. Are you going to allow yourself to be herded by others who are trying to get to some point that is better for them than it might be for you?

• 1:02:23Pablo Torre?

  Is the roadmap a plan? Is the roadmap a series of cosmically coincidental accidents that happened to result in what would have been, if not for their resignations, if not for those meddling kids, those meddling journalists, a plan that would have worked to your hypothetical description? That's exactly how it might have gone, given the power structure in place, given the people incentivized to keep the train on the tracks, and by the way, to keep the business booming, right? This is the whole story of all of this. Businessmen replace adversarial lawyers. That was de Smith to Lloyd Howell and J.C. Tretter. That is why this collusion ruling was suppressed.

• 1:03:07Pablo Torre?

  This ruling, by the way, that J.C. Tretter says he has still never seen. And so we reevaluate our grand timeline now, Mike, from episode one to two to three, because everything actually fits together quite neatly, as much as there is arcane stuff to all of this. In January of this year, the suppressed collusion ruling, the confidentiality agreement that is entered into by the NFL and the NFLPA between Lloyd Howell and Roger Goodell. February, J.C. Tretter's fake injuries, arbitration ruling that the NFLPA loses, that no one ever hears about, the alleged curtailing of the one-team internal investigation as claimed by Heather McPhee, that would happen in March, the month after that.

• 1:03:51Pablo Torre?

  And that brings us to, at the very least, a federal investigation which the union learns about in May.

• 1:03:59Pablo Torre?

  Bringing us, the two of us, to spend way too much [bleep] time together in June and now July.

• 1:04:06Speaker 05

  And it really is amazing, Pablo, because all of this really does have the earmarks of a Coen Brothers film. It would be a very [bleep] Coen Brothers film. I wouldn't suggest that they greenlight this.

• 1:04:19Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:20Speaker 05

  But there is so much of this just weird, clumsy, clunky Fargo. The cover up is worse than the crime, as you've said.

• 1:04:27Pablo Torre?

  Cover ups. It's all cover ups, man.

• 1:04:29Speaker 05

  And for this one, how do you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there was some sort of conspiracy to put in place a mechanism that would have unfairly and improperly provided extra compensation to Lloyd Howell and Matt Curtin in a way that violated the fiduciary duties that they both owed to the union members? But that gets back to the two key questions. If they can resolve the two key questions, how did this all get started? And why did they abandon ship? And what text messages and emails might people have stupidly exchanged when they weren't thinking where this is all going to go? That's the stuff the FBI needs before they can come to any conclusions and before we can come to any conclusions as to whether or not somebody was breaking the law.

• 1:05:14Pablo Torre?

  We are talking once again about the attempt to allegedly do something without the proof of implementation. And we are brought back to what we are hoping for, which is an extensive document, Mike. Let's say a 61-page PDF in which people's phones have been searched and people have been forced to testify in front of an arbitrator. And you get all of the information we got from the collusion ruling, but for this part of the story too. We return to the cookie jar and what it means when you're holding the cookie, but haven't eaten the cookie. And so, as we contemplate, is this crime? Is this pre-crime? Is this Minority Report? Is this the Coen Brothers?

• 1:05:57Pablo Torre?

  I feel most comfortable using the language of one of the protagonists of our story, J.C. Tretter. Because the former player I spoke to at the end here, Mike, the player who saw the election of Jalen Reeves-Maven after the campaigning of J.C. Tretter from inside of that small group session in 2024.

• 1:06:16Pablo Torre?

  What he told me upon reading the CBS Sports interview that he gave as his exit interview, when he finally spoke, was that, yes, actually, this is Game of Thrones. But there's a distinction in this player scouting report. J.C. Tretter is not Tyrion Lannister, who was accused of something but didn't do it in the plot of Game of Thrones, and therefore wishes now he was the monster you thought he was. What this player told me is that J.C. Tretter is a different Game of Thrones character. Quote, "I thought of him as Littlefinger." And Mike, for those who are not super familiar with Game of Thrones, this is Littlefinger's most famous quote.

• 1:06:59Speaker 20

  A story we agreed to tell each other over and over till we forget that it's a lie. But what do we have left once we abandon the lie? Chaos, a gaping pit waiting to swallow us all. Chaos isn't a pit. Chaos is a ladder.

• 1:07:23Speaker 05

  And let me just say this, and use this in the final cut if you see fit. Add it to the DVD Director's Edition if you choose. But as I said to you last night, journalism sucks. Journalism is hard. Journalism takes effort. Pablo, you said earlier, you talked to not one person, not two people, eight people. Yes, eight. And I know how much time you put in, because I know how much time I spend talking to you about this, and I'm hardly the only person you're talking to, and I've got other people I'm talking to. And so, look, folks, in this day and age, where life moves at the speed of 280 characters...

• 1:08:10Speaker 05

  There isn't always a financial incentive to engage in journalism. There is no one giving Pablo interest in a SIP plan for engaging in real journalism. So, support what he's doing. I'm glad it's just an every once in a while thing for me. Because it is exhausting, and he does this all the time. And I don't know how you find the energy to do it, because there are many ladders out there, there is plenty of chaos, and you've been doing a hell of a job answering things. We still have more work to do. I hate to say that because it portends another episode.

• 1:08:48Pablo Torre?

  Oh, it does.

• 1:08:49Speaker 05

  And as Rocky said to Apollo at the end of the first film, "There ain't gonna be no rematch." Here we are on the brink of even Drago making his appearance the next time we do this.

• 1:09:02Pablo Torre?

  Yes. Mike Florio, as always, I could not do this without you. And so while journalism, as you have now been inducted into my guild, yes, it sucks, but for that reason, it also [bleep] rules.

• 1:09:16Speaker 05

  And to quote Rocky one more time, "Absolutely." Absolutely.

• 1:09:30Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.

• 1:09:36Pablo Torre?

  And I'll talk to you next time.

• 1:09:56Speaker 03

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