Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out Bobbleheads on Spikes: The (Selfish) Case for Rules, with David Epstein About this episode Whether it's A. I. companies pirating millions of books or NBA owners violating the salary cap, the most powerful entities in America are trying to circumvent laws created to restrain them. Bestselling author and investigative journalist David Epstein (no relation!) makes the case for why rules are not obstacles to progress, but the opposite: the very things that make a society — and a market — free.
• Pre-order David Epstein's new book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/737494/inside-the-box-by-david-epstein/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Pablo Torre? Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.
0:06 Speaker 01 I think this is a moment where we need some, like, public corruption heads on spikes.
0:12 Pablo Torre? Right after this ad.
0:16 Speaker 02 With a Discover Cash Back Card, it's payback time when you earn cash back on everyday purchases. Activate and earn 5% cash back at different categories each quarter on up to $1,500 in purchases. That's 5% cash back at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to discover. Terms apply. See discover.com/five for details.
0:40 Speaker 03 Network freedom and flexibility, that's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.
1:12 Pablo Torre? This episode is brought to you by apollo.io. A lot of the stories on this show start the same way. Something that looks pretty simple turns out to be a mess once you look under the hood. Well, it's no different in the sales world. Your team has a tool for finding prospects, a different tool for reaching out to them, and a third for keeping track of it all. On paper, that's a system. In practice, it's a salesperson spending the better part of the day copying names from one tab into another, and not much of it actually selling. Apollo.io is a platform that helps sales teams find the right buyers and reach out to them. It brings prospecting, outreach, and follow-up into one place instead of several separate tools. It's used by sales teams of all sizes,
1:56 Pablo Torre? from small businesses to larger organizations, and it's built for teams who want less manual busywork and more time with buyers. If your marketing and sales teams are trying to work from the same view of the customer, it's worth a look. Sign up for free at apollo.io. That's apollo.io.
2:20 Pablo Torre? I do just want to explain for people who haven't seen your previous appearances on this show.
2:24 Speaker 01 Sure.
2:24 Pablo Torre? That we've known each other for a very long time. We're friends, we're colleagues, dating back to Sports Illustrated. And also, you are not related to Jeffrey Epstein.
2:30 Speaker 01 I'm not related to Jeffrey Epstein, but it did cross my mind that I should name, like, my YouTube channel, The Epstein Files, or something, if I just want to.
2:41 Pablo Torre? Oh, yeah.
2:42 Speaker 01 Maximum. I haven't been able to bring myself to do such a thing.
2:45 Pablo Torre? You're leaving SEO optimization on the table.
2:47 Speaker 01 I know. I even filtered my own last name so that people can't use it in the comments. But they find... They're very clever. It's a creative constraint. They find clever ways to get around that.
2:56 Pablo Torre? What is it like being David Epstein these days? Author of, by the way, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, a book that I really enjoyed reading and listening to over the weekend.
3:04 Speaker 01 If you're still asking about the Epstein last name, it's like the Jewish Smith. I mean, it's a pretty common last name, which is a saving grace, I have to say. Like, I was alphabetized for exams in freshman physics in college, and I was next to another David Epstein. You know? Like, fortunately, there's a lot of us out there. It doesn't make it great when I walk my son to school and we go past people holding signs that just say Epstein. I'm like, "They're not rooting for us, bud."
3:30 Pablo Torre? But the idea that you had to filter out your own name from your own comment section, because you know what people are gonna say, despite the fact that this is your third book, and your sort of oeuvre here is established, you are not the notorious sex trafficker and pedophile. You are, in fact, the guy who had written The Sports Gene and Range, both studies of, like, human performance and performance science. And I often call you the greatest sports science writer in America.
3:55 Speaker 01 And as I always say, out of all three of us.
3:58 Pablo Torre? There are about as many David Epsteins in your physics class as there are such people, I suppose.
4:03 Speaker 01 That's right.
4:22 Pablo Torre? It's an interesting time to be an author because the other thing that's happening is that I'm looking at the news and I'm like, oh yeah, did you get your Anthropic payment?
4:29 Speaker 01 I absolutely did. I got my unique ID that said, "Your work has been pirated." I got several mailings saying that this work has been pirated, that work has been pirated.
4:38 Speaker 04 It's the largest copyright settlement in American history. The AI company Anthropic forced to pay out a whopping $1.5 billion after a judge said it illegally pirated more than 7 million digitized books to train its AI model.
4:52 Speaker 01 I'm pretty sure this one's not even out. Based on some questions that I've asked, somebody has uploaded it already. I think the notice I got said that my books had been pirated on this site called LibGen.
5:03 Pablo Torre? This is like the Pornhub of books.
5:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, I guess so. Had never thought of it that way, Pablo, but I suppose.
5:11 Pablo Torre? The Xvideos of books, excuse me, I'm getting a notice in my ear that I'm mischaracterizing.
5:16 Speaker 01 And I guess Anthropic just like pulled a huge amount of books down from there and digested them. So those were books that were pirated in the first place. And then they kind of like re-pirated them or just downloaded the pirated version. So you can file like a claim and you know, you'll probably get like, I don't know if it's up to 3,000 or 3,000 per pirated work.
5:34 Pablo Torre? But a small price to pay for contributing to the sum total of human knowledge in the form that we all must consume it in, which is to say via a large language model, which is again, for those not reading the news, the good guys.
5:46 Speaker 01 The good guys. Yeah, it's hard to know.
5:50 Pablo Torre? In the Anthropic narrative, OpenAI, Sam Altman, bad guys, Anthropic, the white knights who just happen to be vacuuming up the written word to a degree that, uh, yeah, there has been a $1.5 billion settlement.
6:05 Speaker 01 You know, when I first started interacting with tech people some years ago, like after I started writing books, and they would use that phrase, you don't hear it as much anymore, but "information wants to be free." And it's clear to me that that was just a justification of stealing stuff, right? Because it's like, they weren't about to give you their code or their social security number. Like Mark Zuckerberg built like big ass trees in front of his house. So you can't see like his information doesn't want to be free. But that's this ethos they have that it's like, okay, to steal stuff if you're making something cool. And in the cases where I think it was with Meta, where they said, we could legitimately get rights to some of this stuff, it'll be too slow. So they just pirate it instead. But I understand why they do it. Because again, if you look back at some of the real successes in more recent
6:47 Speaker 01 tech history, like, things that I use a lot, like Uber was, it ignored sort of taxi regulations, whereas some other rideshare companies tried to play by those rules. And YouTube ignored like copyright infringement early on. And so if you just flout all the rules early on, nobody cares until you get big enough, right? And then you just like pay a settlement in retrospect.
7:10 Pablo Torre? That was the year behind Mark Zuckerberg in college when he was moving fast and breaking things?
7:15 Speaker 01 Yes, moving fast and breaking things.
7:16 Pablo Torre? And the question around the rules he is breaking happens to be, conveniently enough, a real key part of this book.
7:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:25 Pablo Torre? Which has to do with, again, it's called How Constraints Make Us Better. That is the subhead. And I think a bit of the through line in this conversation is, we're watching all of the time now incredibly powerful, incredibly wealthy people, the people who are in most control of whatever is happening to us these days. They are deciding that rules as a concept are things they can opt out of if they feel like it's necessary.
7:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:53 Pablo Torre? Or maybe even not necessary, if it's just something they want to do.
7:58 Speaker 01 This is a terrible thing in the long, like, obviously, it feels bad when we see it in the headlines. But what the research shows is when it becomes apparent to people that the rules don't apply to everyone. And I don't think any, not to be Pollyannaish. It's not like everyone every thought the rules applied perfectly equally.
8:14 Pablo Torre? And I do want to establish, like, the case that you make is not, you're a bad person if you don't follow the rules, because rules are what we are taught to obey in school, and therefore, we must obey them.
8:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, no, it's like, for 150 years, the shared prosperity of the modern world has been built upon agreed upon rules that applied equitably enough.
8:35 Speaker 01 That people believed in them and were willing to sacrifice some of their own freedom to play by these rules and it was good for everybody. And now I think we're being hit over the head almost on a daily basis with the law not applying in certain cases. And what the research suggests will happen is that that will lead to these long run trust issues between strangers. Trust between strangers and GDP per capita are like very highly related if you look at all the countries in the world because strangers stop collaborating when they don't trust as much. So in a recent Pew survey just showed that the US is the only country where a majority of adults say that other people have bad morals. And modern prosperity is built on trust between strangers.
9:20 Speaker 01 Like a few centuries ago, people only did business in their kinship networks or in their religious network. And so it was much more contained or with people that they personally knew. And so the engine of prosperity for more people, and by the way, like as bad as things may feel like they're going globally, since 1990, you want to guess how many people per day on average have been lifted out of poverty since 1990?
9:44 Pablo Torre? What are we at?
9:45 Speaker 01 118,000 per day, people have moved above the international poverty line on average since 1990. So shared prosperity, the engine has still been going, but that has been very much built on the fact that we have built structures that allow people to collaborate with strangers, allow people to start businesses despite what their name is or who they know and all these other things. And it's all built on trust between strangers and functioning bureaucracy, large functioning bureaucracy, I should say.
10:14 Pablo Torre? I liked how you've written a book at this moment in time where you're like, you know what is underrated? Rules and bureaucracy.
10:21 Speaker 01 Now, I didn't necessarily think that, but like this, I mean, the work that I really leaned on was by this Nobel laureate named Douglas North. The paradigm in the 60s, when he was starting to do his work, was that tech innovation is the real, the sole driver of shared prosperity. And what he showed is actually that it's usually social norms or political structures or legal structures that change first that enable this kind of innovation and collaboration between people that gives rise to innovation. And so it's actually what he called institutions. As he framed them, constraints on human behavior that give rise to this long run prosperity and allow people to trust one another.
10:59 Pablo Torre? Yeah, I want to quote from your book because in in your discussion of North, you quote him, and this is the opening line of his most famous work, quote, institutions are the rules of the game in a society, or more formally, are the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction.
11:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
11:14 Pablo Torre? End quote, which is to say that we're talking about rules and not the department so much.
11:20 Speaker 01 No, and and North, by the way, says that these are basically perfectly analogous to sports rules, where, so he has informal constraints and formal constraints. The informal constraints are social norms. The formal constraints are like legal laws. So on a soccer pitch, you have the lines and the rules that are the formal structures, but then you have these informal, like, you know, one team will kick the ball out of bounds if another guy gets injured. So it's this overlapping of social norms and explicit structures that combine to allow people to trust and engage in collaborative behavior. And arguably, both ends of that are under attack. And so the prediction that North's work would make, when social norms that constrain people's
12:02 Speaker 01 behavior start to falter, and when legal structures look like they don't apply to everyone, is that strangers will start thinking other people are bad, which is exactly what we are starting to see. So he won the Nobel for this in the early 90s. Some of his acolytes just won another Nobel for the same thing. We're like walking right into the thing that he said you shouldn't do, where you regress from what's called an open access order, where people can access all sorts of parts of society and government without it mattering who they are, to what's called a natural state, where like it really matters who you know if you want to get something done. And implicitly in that, by the way, he makes an argument that big government is a necessary kind of symptom of shared prosperity.
12:47 Speaker 01 And this is like a delicate thing because.
12:49 Pablo Torre? Because you're now advocating for what Doge was trying to trim allegedly.
12:55 Speaker 01 Of course, there's like bloat in the government, right? There's no question. So I don't want to minimize.
13:00 Pablo Torre? Yes.
13:00 Speaker 01 I don't want to minimize that.
13:01 Pablo Torre? Sure.
13:01 Speaker 01 Because bureaucracies often grow to the point where they're, it seems like their goal becomes just perpetuating themselves, right? That happens. At the same time, what North showed was that if you want people to have impersonal access to things, and you do, you don't want it to matter that it's Pablo Torre or David Epstein.
13:18 Pablo Torre? Dealing with our friends and cronies.
13:20 Speaker 01 That's right.
13:20 Pablo Torre? To get what we want.
13:21 Speaker 01 You don't want it to matter who you know. Then you have to have a kind of large impersonal bureaucracy. So that it's these people that you don't know that are vetting your application or whatever it is. And so it's a necessary outgrowth of these more equitable rules that you'll have an expansive bureaucracy, basically.
13:40 Pablo Torre? Well, the thing that you mentioned before that brings us to sports in a non metaphorical way is the notion that actually there was, before Douglas North came along, this popular idea that technology was responsible for all the prosperity that we were benefiting from.
13:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
13:57 Pablo Torre? The speed of innovation.
13:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
13:58 Pablo Torre? And it reminds me of, again, this anthropic lawsuit.
14:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:02 Pablo Torre? In which the argument for why you should have all of these AI companies, all of these LLMs, hoovering up all of the written words humans have made, despite all of the intellectual property, the would be intellectual property laws around it, is because if we don't do that, we will lose.
14:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:21 Pablo Torre? We will lose, in fact, not just to other competitors, but we will lose to China.
14:25 Speaker 01 Yes, China, China. And so they make the argument implicitly and sometimes explicitly that letting tech move as fast as humanly possible is always the right thing to do. Right? And technological disruption, or so called creative destruction, to use the economist's term, has led to all sorts of incredible things. What North's point was, was that it's preceded by these institutions or norms and legal structures that allow it to happen in the first place. And the idea that if we just take, you know, take all bounds off of these tech leaders, and that will lead to shared prosperity magically, is totally ahistoric.
15:06 Speaker 01 Like, take the original tech supernova of the world, which was the Industrial Revolution. Have you read Hard Times by Charles Dickens? That did not automatically lead to shared prosperity. It led to children pushing coal mining carts with their heads for 12 hours a day. And it took different social structures around that. When I was here before, and we talked about AI.
15:32 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
15:32 Speaker 01 We brought up a book called Power and Progress. Those guys won the Nobel Prize since we talked about it, those authors.
15:37 Pablo Torre? You're welcome.
15:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:39 Pablo Torre? The PTO bump is why.
15:41 Speaker 01 Because of us, the Nobel Committee was listening, and... Their main argument is they do a thousand-year history of technological innovation. And what they show is that tech innovation absolutely does not automatically lead to shared prosperity. Sometimes it leads to increasing misery. And it totally depends on the institutional structures, the rules of the game of society. And right now, I think what you're seeing is some of these leaders saying like, no, no, we can't have any of those bounds.
16:07 Pablo Torre? No, don't regulate us.
16:08 Speaker 01 Because it'll slow us down.
16:09 Pablo Torre? Yes, you're shackling the great men of our time if you are regulating artificial intelligence.
16:23 Pablo Torre? This message is brought to you by Apple Card. With Apple Card, you earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases like groceries or merch or tickets to the game. Plus, it can be used anywhere MasterCard is accepted. No matter your team, no matter where you shop, Apple Card is here to help you tackle game day. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.
16:55 Speaker 05 I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone. And I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh, anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them. Everybody, listen up. Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade-in needed. And the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for Watch or iPad required. Additional terms apply for all offers.
17:25 Speaker 06 Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.
17:59 Pablo Torre? All right, I got a quick stat for you. Most employers are sorting through something like 250 resumes for a single job opening, which is a lot of scrolling, a lot of guesswork, and also a lot of time. So if you're hiring, I have some good news. You can now review all these resumes and applications faster, thanks to ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter has a new feature that instantly shows you the most interested qualified candidates first, and today, you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/ptfo. And here's why that matters. ZipRecruiter's matching technology is already great at finding qualified candidates fast, but now, the people who are actually excited about your role rise right to the top. So you're not just sorting through resumes, you're seeing the strongest, most engaged applicants first. And it gets better.
18:44 Pablo Torre? Candidates can even tell you, in their own words, why they're interested in your job. So you're getting more than just bullet points, you're getting personality, motivation, and a clearer picture of who might be the right fit. Cut through the standard and get to the standouts with ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day, and now, you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/ptfo. That's ziprecruiter.com/ptfo. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter.
19:19 Pablo Torre? The notion, though, of sports. I come to this now, of course, because a lot of our reporting on this show, and you are yourself an investigative journalist by trade, by training, and a lot of what I've been turning our attention to as a show has been the billionaires who run sports.
19:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:39 Pablo Torre? And how these are not merely metaphorically tech people.
19:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:44 Pablo Torre? They are actually the people who ran some of the most monopolistic tech companies in US history. And Steve Ballmer, now, of course, the owner of the Clippers, and my good friend.
19:58 Speaker 01 You're a good friend.
19:59 Pablo Torre? Also the former CEO of Microsoft.
20:01 Speaker 01 There's bobble head over there.
20:02 Pablo Torre? Oh yeah, we do have the Steve Ballmer bobble head. Let's hold on, let me bring that. We have it.
20:06 Speaker 01 Only, only good friends get that.
20:07 Pablo Torre? You're the first person to acknowledge that we not only have the Kawhi Leonard bobble head, we also have the Steve Ballmer.
20:12 Speaker 01 He always got a bobble, a bobble, a bobble feet.
20:14 Pablo Torre? Oh, yeah.
20:15 Speaker 01 Oh, he's got to bobble everything.
20:16 Pablo Torre? We might, we might leave him there on top of your book.
20:18 Speaker 01 See, if you're Steve Ballmer, it's like, everyone's got a bobble head. You need more things than bobble.
20:21 Pablo Torre? Yes, look at these, the elbows bobble.
20:23 Speaker 01 You gotta be the best.
20:25 Pablo Torre? But, but the point of this is now, not merely the richest owner in all of sports in the world, and not only the richest owner in the NBA by far, he is somebody who in our reporting has embodied what it means when you decide these rules that are meant to enforce something like fair competition
20:46 Pablo Torre? are things that we ought not abide by.
20:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, and that's really bad. I mean, I think one point that you've made that's important that maybe not everyone understands unless they've been following really closely is that all the owners of sports teams are obviously incredibly wealthy. But Ballmer is incredibly wealthy to those people, right? He's like off the charts wealthy. So the analogy I was thinking of was like, half the world lives with a legal system that was created in, in England, including us in the US, and it was created because the king had too much power. And eventually there was this wealthy merchant class, and they started to have some more power, and the king wanted to borrow money from them to wage wars and all these things.
21:34 Speaker 01 And they were pissed about not getting paid back sometimes. So they got together and said, no, we're going to leverage our power, and now we're going to put some constraints on you. And initially, the king was like, bummer, I'm not going to be able to borrow a lot of money. It actually led to the reverse where now people were willing to lend money because there was a stronger parliament, and they felt like they could get paid back and all this kind of stuff. But it was these other richest people in society who saw the richest person in society and said, we need rules to constrain that guy. And doing that led to shared benefit for all of society. And so it's, it feels like a little bit of a microcosm. You know, I don't want to like. Compare the origins of our legal system necessarily to-
22:14 Pablo Torre? The NBA salary gap?
22:15 Speaker 01 The NBA salary gap. But it's this microcosm of where you have these like really powerful people who are getting the experience of seeing an even more powerful person.
22:23 Pablo Torre? Which is extraordinarily rare.
22:25 Speaker 01 Extraordinarily rare. Who doesn't want to follow the rules, who hasn't had to follow the rules in the past. And now is in the position of potentially, very publicly, being able to skirt those rules, right? Whatever the NBA comes up with in their investigation-
22:41 Pablo Torre? And we eagerly await the results of that investigation.
22:43 Speaker 01 Right, which is the whole thing like-
22:46 Pablo Torre? As you know, there's nothing more credible than an organization investigating itself.
22:51 Speaker 01 Right, right. So I think you start by asking like, what would it behoove them to find? And then start from there. But whatever they find, I think there will be owners who will say, I don't care what they find. I know what happened. The rules don't apply in this way anymore. If there's no punishment. And that's like the beginning of the breakdown of rules that were made for collective good. And I think public examples of that are terrible. Like you see this in countries where, again, we were talking before this about Greece when they went bankrupt, basically. And you could see these surveys where people started deciding that the next guy wasn't paying taxes. So they were like, well, I'm not paying taxes. And then nobody was paying taxes and the country goes bankrupt. And so it might seem frivolous.
23:34 Speaker 01 Like I see people commenting on your stuff all the time of like, who cares? Leave it alone, et cetera. And I used to get that all the time with some investigative reporting, right? Because people tune into sports stuff because they like sports.
23:45 Pablo Torre? And I always have to remind those people that the show has my name in it. And if I find it interesting, I'm going to do it.
23:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
23:52 Pablo Torre? And at its best, we'll also make the case, as I am attempting to do right now, that this story is not merely a story that's specific to a rabbit hole inside of the NBA, but it's also the story of our time.
24:04 Speaker 01 That's what I'm saying. And like, I'm fine if somebody doesn't, if they think it's a killjoy, then just ignore it. Then they can ignore it.
24:10 Pablo Torre? Yes.
24:11 Speaker 01 But to say someone else shouldn't be concerned about this, I think is weird. Because it's almost to me tantamount to saying, we should kind of live in an ends justifies the means sort of world and not care when people break these rules. And I don't want to be like some earnest like-
24:27 Pablo Torre? But the case you're making continuously through this book, you're making- The selfish person's case for why rules matter.
24:36 Speaker 01 Yes, why you want to restrict other people. And like I said, why the Harvard Law commencement starts with that wise restraints make men free, because we know this historically, that agreed upon rules free people within those bounds to do things that they would have no other way to do. And you can look at societies that don't have that advantage, where everything is based on who you know, what you can leverage, where it's not really clear what the rules are today or tomorrow. And those societies do not thrive. So I think this is a moment where we need some like, public corruption heads on spikes. I don't know if that's NBA or wherever it is.
25:13 Pablo Torre? No, but I feel this all of the time. I mean, we are living through this era in which owners in sports, again, as both the actual class of people we're talking about societally, and also the metaphor for the class of people we're talking about societally. Like, these are the same guys. They're coming from Silicon Valley, they're coming from finance, they're coming into the league at a rate and at a financial status, owning these heirlooms that we grew up caring about with resources that are unprecedented. And the thing about someone like Steve Ballmer is always going to be, is it the case that we are merely enshrining, once again, money as the thing that matters most?
25:54 Speaker 01 Yeah. Because I think one potentially nice thing about sports that's actually different from a lot of the rest of society, is it kind of does seem like a meritocracy, relatively speaking?
26:04 Pablo Torre? It's important, I think, that I keep on hammering, that both of us have done investigative reporting, and we know all of the ways in which cynicism may be justified.
26:13 Speaker 01 Yes, human endeavors are always very flawed.
26:15 Pablo Torre? You've investigated performance enhancing drugs, and we've both investigated various financial frauds, and we know, even the criticisms of the salary cap as a concept, I hear all of it, and I understand all of it as best I can. The point, though, is that, on a relative basis, I don't know if there's another laboratory for rules mattering that's more accessible or potentially persuasive than what sports offers.
26:42 Speaker 01 Yes. So I think it's a really important public story. Because there are these other areas all over society, but they're not as mass consumer, they're not as public, right? They're not as engaging, in many ways, also. But if you're gonna have the salary cap, if you're gonna make the law... Then it's even more dangerous to have it clearly not mean anything. That's how you get to the survey where most Americans say other people have bad morals because they're looking around and the norms and rules that they think are worthwhile are getting flouted like in their face. And so I think this is like a proxy for this larger discussion that's going on in society.
27:22 Pablo Torre? Well, we're like importing Silicon Valley's values as well as the actual, again, the great men that founded and ran a bunch of these companies.
27:31 Speaker 01 This brilliant economist who was the central baker of India, one point named Ragaram Rajan, wrote this book called Saving Capitalism From the Capitalists. And it's basically about how the biggest capitalists hate competition.
27:41 Pablo Torre? This is exactly it. It's that sports, again, both literally and metaphorically, is a shrine to competition.
27:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
27:50 Pablo Torre? And if there's any political party that I feel like is being underrated as a concept, it is the pro-competition party.
27:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
27:56 Pablo Torre? Which can encompass both capitalism in its purest theoretical form as well as regulation.
28:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:04 Pablo Torre? Which is, again, like, and she's been a guest on this show as well, I kind of feel like I'm a Lena Khan Democrat.
28:11 Speaker 01 I saw on like bus stops, there'd be these signs for Meta and they're like, "Please regulate us," you know, "to stop kids of a certain age going on." And I'm, I assume that that's because, once you're established, then you want the regulate. You're like, "Yes, we let eight-year-olds get on our platform and do who knows what." But now, once we're a juggernaut and printing money, nobody should be allowed to have eight-year-olds on their platform.
28:34 Pablo Torre? But just like more competition. This is the thing that runs through the story of the NBA. And by the way, from a pure product perspective, I think one test that I thought about while I was reading your book, and I was wondering, like, when it comes to the product that citizens, customers are receiving, one easy acid test for all of this is, is it better?
28:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:59 Pablo Torre? Is the lack of competition getting us better products? Or is it in fact, in the case of the NBA, as all of these incredibly rich people come in, unregulated, is it in fact worse?
29:09 Speaker 01 That's again, where it's a proxy for these other discussions of like, are these rules leading to shared prosperity or better options for consumers or whatever it is? And I think we've deemed that's the case when we have competition, right? That's why we do it this way. But people are getting around those rules or just ignoring them now.
29:28 Pablo Torre? Our reporting on like the NFLPA, the Players Union, right? It's like, why do I care about this? This millionaires' union? Well, it's because if you care about football, which statistically, that's what we care about the most.
29:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:40 Pablo Torre? Is it a good thing when the NFL, which runs professional football in America? Is it a good thing when they don't have a competitor?
29:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:47 Pablo Torre? A check on them? And what happens if that check is the union? And what if that union is also connecting to all of this stuff? Beset by its own corruption scandal?
29:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:58 Pablo Torre? What does the product become? Does it become something that has these countervailing competitive forces? Sharpening it into something better for Americans? Or is it a version that the very, very top of the pyramid people? Are getting to dictate basically at their own personal whims?
30:16 Speaker 01 Again, this isn't just going on in sports, right? It goes on in business in general.
30:19 Pablo Torre? Yes.
30:19 Speaker 01 This is just a public way to see it. It's so in your face that rules don't apply to certain people.
30:25 Pablo Torre? You know, the question of why and how has corruption taken root? How and why did money become the only thing we can agree is important, apparently? It all brings us back to like, again, why are sports cool?
30:38 Speaker 01 I started reading this philosopher named Bernard Suits.
30:42 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
30:42 Speaker 01 Who I use at the very end of this book.
30:44 Pablo Torre? Yes, yes.
30:45 Speaker 01 And Suits was responding to Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was like one of the most influential thinkers of 20th century. And Wittgenstein talked about the fuzziness of language. And one of his main examples was that there is no core essence of everything we call a game. There's only a family resemblance. Like, some games are played alone, some in a group, some are imaginary, some are in the real world, et cetera. Some are luck, some are just skill. And Suits said, no, I think that's wrong. I think there is a commonality to all games, including sports. And I think the commonality is an attitude. And he called it the lucery attitude. And he defined it as the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.
31:27 Pablo Torre? I love this part of Bernard Suits's philosophy.
31:31 Speaker 01 He wrote about it in this amazing book called The Grasshopper, where it's like Aesop's grasshopper fable, where the grasshopper plays all summer long. And so he doesn't hoard enough food like the ants, so he's going to die when the winter comes. But in this case, he justifies it. He's like, because these games give meaning to life. And so this was actually a justifiable thing for me to do. Because I think it really is a metaphor for life. It's like, take field, add lines. You know, it's like, add meaning. And so it's the voluntary attempt to overcome these unnecessary obstacles that adds meaning to the thing that actually makes achievement even possible. And so I think it's such a, sports are such a pure way of seeing people attempt to overcome these voluntarily accepted obstacles. And so then when they're trying to shortcut them, I think it dilutes the meaning of the
32:15 Speaker 01 endeavor in the first place.
32:17 Pablo Torre? It's a way of life.
32:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:18 Pablo Torre? It's a way of life. You described, again, the heirlooms of social attitudes that are really hard to undo once you have a destruction of the institutions we've been talking about, of the rules.
32:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:32 Pablo Torre? And what is better, what is more durable as an heirloom than sports in our country, in which we are actually agitated.
32:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:41 Pablo Torre? By the idea that we are being cheated by another team because we're all opting into this way of life in which we all agree that this basketball court, without boundaries, is just a piece of [bleep] wood.
32:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:54 Pablo Torre? Yeah. We all need to embrace what is seemingly the dismissible, the otherwise easily dismissible fiction, that any of this matters, that the salary cap matters, that putting a ball in a hoop matters. But once you agree they matter.
33:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
33:08 Pablo Torre? Suddenly, you have the ability to engender something like a philosophy that can, in your book's telling, actually benefit more people than otherwise.
33:31 Speaker 04 Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.
34:04 Speaker 02 With a Discover Cash Back Card, it's payback time when you earn cash back on everyday purchases. Activate and earn 5% cash back at different categories each quarter on up to $1,500 in purchases. That's 5% cash back at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to discover. Terms apply. See discover.com/five for details.
34:35 Speaker 01 I've vacillated in various points, especially at some points when I was doing certain type of investigative reporting in sports, and I really soured and was just like, screw this. You know, it would take me a while to kind of recover sometimes. But when you think about the amount of meaning that we've imbued sports with, you know, put this peach basket up here and this line here, and all of a sudden you have this incredibly meaningful activity. I mean, you did this, guys who are on death row, like stating-
35:03 Pablo Torre? That was the death row inmates who spend their last seconds on earth, expending breath to make the noise of, "Let's go Cowboys."
35:13 Speaker 01 Yes, because they feel like this thing has added meaning to their life, and they feel like they're part of something. And I think that's just an interesting sign of how much meaning can be added to this otherwise ridiculous endeavor, just like you have to find ways to add meaning to the ridiculous endeavor of your life. And so when people say, "None of this stuff matters," I'm like, then you're just saying then you don't care about adding meaning to life, basically. And by the way, Suits makes a sort of unexpected argument late in The Grasshopper where he says, "By the way, if we end up in a utopia where tech is handling most of our work, then games are going to matter even more, because that's going to be where if work is no longer the main part of our identity, then really this participation in games and these voluntarily accepted obstacles
35:56 Speaker 01 are going to really be the core activity that adds meaning to our life."
35:59 Pablo Torre? At every turn, I'm always like tempted to remind people, like, "We're not saying that all rules must be enforced because all rules are automatically good."
36:08 Speaker 01 I'm glad that some Americans like defied the colonial rules and-
36:12 Pablo Torre? We dare say-
36:13 Speaker 01 Entrepreneurially- Started a country.
36:14 Pablo Torre? Oh my God. I mean, like, we're living through, again, depending on whether we survive nuclear winter, we are going to have the conversation around what's it like to disobey orders.
36:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
36:24 Pablo Torre? At the highest levels of government. And we are, at the same time, having a conversation in the NCAA around, how are we supposed to pay these athletes? And isn't it strange that we needed to break the rules around non-paying athletes to get them some sort of financial justice before we had these regulations being reformed to enable something like a market? All of that, yes, all of that is being considered. But I think the principles, the core principles around, are you encouraging competition? Are you deterring corruption? And are you creating a society that actually gives a [bleep].
37:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
37:00 Pablo Torre? About holding the most powerful people to some sort of account? You are led to this attitude that I'm always confronting these days, which is, yeah, on its face, it's not cool to be the guy with the book that says, "Rules matter." And yet, like, to be the guy quoting Jack Nicholson while holding a bobblehead, we need you on that wall. This is where we are. We [bleep] need someone to say this.
37:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, you have to care. You have to care, I think.
37:33 Pablo Torre? Like, the pendulum, and all of this is seemingly always, unfortunately, a pendulum, it swung so far away.
37:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
37:40 Pablo Torre? To the point where it has to be this, like, reassertion. Like, we forgot why other things besides money.
37:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
37:48 Pablo Torre? Were virtues in the first place.
37:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, and there's so many things, I mean, you know, like, living through this kind of halcyon 90s, there were so many of these things
37:59 Speaker 01 that I feel like I just got to take for granted.
38:02 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
38:02 Speaker 01 That now...
38:05 Speaker 01 Are more in my face, you know, whether that's because of being investigative reporter, or also just like things that are happening in the world, how nice it was to have a feeling of sort of trust to some degree. People are always getting away with stuff, there's no question about that. But that things kind of functioned in some impartial way and that there were at least regularly consequences for high-profile malfeasance that ended up in the news. And that's a good thing. You want people to be able to take that for granted so that they can go about their business and just rely on that and have this like background of trust and belief. And I think that's, that's really undermined. And obviously, there's a lot of people I call conflict entrepreneurs, I stole that word from this
38:46 Speaker 01 journalist Amanda Ripley, who really profit from making a lot of our institutions look even worse than they are, right? Like Elon Musk, I think it's amazing, some of the innovative stuff he's done. At the same time, he spends a bunch of time on the internet sharing memes that just kind of make people look stupid for caring about regulations or anything like that. Which makes sense for him, because he's like, wants the government money and then wants to block the government money for other people. But that, that kind of making people feel stupid for earnestness, the mob is good at [BLEEP] on stuff, but not so good at having ideas. And I think it's, it's concerning, because there are
39:27 Speaker 01 people who profit from, from breeding this mistrust of everything in others. And I think the fact that we're in this like golden era of conspiracy thinking is, is a result of that.
39:39 Pablo Torre? Yeah, and it's, it's interesting to be a show that has felt, again, the SEO, the search engine optimization incentives around being the person who's willing to interrogate and occasionally even prove what feels like a conspiratorial theory journalistically.
39:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:57 Pablo Torre? It's interesting to be outside of a, of an insta, of an organization, I was gonna say institution, an organization, a mainstream media organization, and get credit for being disruptive.
40:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:10 Pablo Torre? And yet, at the same time, be always trying to follow, again, the Douglas North Star.
40:18 Speaker 01 Well played.
40:19 Pablo Torre? This value of like, man, here's an interesting thing that I have been hearing from front office executives around the NBA. When it comes to gross violations of the NBA's cardinal rules, such as the salary cap, what one NBA executive told me was, yeah, we don't want to have to learn how to do money laundering.
40:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:40 Pablo Torre? We don't want to have to be competing in a market where we can't trust our other competitors because they're orchestrating insane schemes untrampled by any regulation. And now we are going to have to pay a price in a way that I think only continues to erode the premise of a rules-based sport.
40:59 Speaker 01 That's right. So they want to be protected from what they themselves would start doing.
41:04 Pablo Torre? Exactly.
41:04 Speaker 01 It's what you call collective trap, right? It's like you want kids off social media, but you got to get them off as a group because you don't want, it's hard for one kid to get off of social media on their own. So these kind of collective traps are what you save yourself from by having serious rules. And again, not to get too like highfalutin or far-fetched or whatever, but since I was doing all this research on the origins of our legal systems, we talked about the British legal system that we live under now, another half, basically half, or a lot of the world lives under the French legal system that was exported. So in the English case, the merchants were worried about the king having too much power. In France, it was the local magnates, like these sort of like regional power guys who were worried about one another much more than the king.
41:49 Speaker 01 And so that's why France ended up with a different legal system where the constraints were on one another. And that's, I think, in some ways also has something in common with what's going on here was they said, look, I don't want to have to bring my militia to this guy. I don't want him to bring his militia to me. And so they started making rules that constrained one another, actually vesting more power in the executive so that, which maybe would be like the commissioner or something in this case to say, save us from ourselves. Like, we don't want to have to do this stuff. We just want to be guaranteed that the other people also aren't doing it. And so that's what will happen, right? Is if they, if they decide that this rule doesn't actually have any legitimacy, then they're all going to start learning money laundering.
42:29 Pablo Torre? When the people who are meant to enforce fair competition themselves are suffering from a conflict of interest and the public interest is not...
42:40 Pablo Torre? The most heavily weighted interest in that conflict. I think what you're seeing happen in sports is what you're seeing happen in America in general. And I think that we are at the point where, yeah, I mean, look, I want you to get paid for all of your work. But if you need to go to a Russian porn literary clearinghouse, that's the only way you're gonna get-
43:09 Speaker 01 Why are you working porn into this?
43:10 Pablo Torre? I'm just, I'm just saying, if you got a torrent inside the box by David Epstein to help save whatever is left of this American impulse towards, can we please give a [BLEEP]? Then yeah, maybe I'd settle for that, too.
43:28 Speaker 01 I feel like with this bobblehead, he's even gone around the number of bobbling parts cap. I've never seen that many bobbling parts on a bobblehead. Like, this guy just can't, you know? Everything bobbles there.
43:41 Pablo Torre? There is, there is-
43:42 Speaker 01 Steve, you couldn't just settle for bobblehead? It's called a bobblehead for a reason.
43:47 Pablo Torre? I've never contemplated how much bobbling is too much bobbling.
43:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, see, I've had my eye on the Steve Ballmer ball here. I don't know what you've been looking at.
43:56 Pablo Torre? I've been trying not to get sued.
44:07 Pablo Torre? Pablo Torre Finds Out is produced by Walter Raveroma, Maxwell Carney, Ryan Cortez, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McCray, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, and Chris Tumanello. Studio engineering by RG Systems, sound design by Andrew Bersick, digital strategy by Bailey Carlin and Andrew Northern, theme song, as always, by John Bravo. And we'll talk to you next time.
44:42 Speaker 05 I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone. And I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh, anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them. Everybody, listen up. Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade-in needed. And the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for Watch or iPad required. Additional terms apply for all offers.
45:12 Speaker 07 Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at go.gle/workspacewithgemini. That's go.gle/workspacewithgemini.
45:45 Speaker 02 With a Discover Cash Back Card, it's payback time when you earn cash back on everyday purchases. Activate and earn 5% cash back at different categories each quarter on up to $1,500 in purchases. That's 5% cash back at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to discover. Terms apply. See discover.com/five for details.
Previous The Banned Prince Documentary: Director Ezra Edelman Speaks (PTFO Vault) Next The Fandom of the Opera: A Linebacker, a White Whale... and a Secret Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated