Pablo Torre Finds Out - Bobbleheads on Spikes: The (Selfish) Case for Rules, with David Epstein

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. I think this is a moment where we need some like public corruption heads on spikes. Right after this ad. I do just want to explain for people who haven't seen your previous appearances on this show. Sure. 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. 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 do maximum. I haven't been able to bring myself to do such a thing. You're leaving SEO optimization on the table. 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. 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? 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. I was alphabetized for exams in freshman physics and college, and I was next to another David Epstein, you know? Like, fortunately, there's a lot of us out there that 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. But the idea that you had to filter out your own name from your own comment section, because you know what people are going to say. say despite the fact that this is your third book and your sort of uvra here is established you are not the notorious sex trafficker and pedophile you are in fact the guy who had ridden 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 as I always say out of all three of us there are as many David Epstein's in your physics classes there are such people I suppose that's right 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? I absolutely did. I got my unique ID that said your work has been pirated. I got several mailings saying this work has been pirated, that work has been pirated. 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 digitizing. books to train its AI model. 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. This is like the porn hub of books. Yeah, I guess so. I had never thought of it that way, Pablo, but I suppose. The X videos of books, excuse me, I'm getting a notice in my ear that I'm characterizing.

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 repirited them or just downloaded the pirated version. So you can file like a claim and you'll probably get like, I don't know if it's up to 3,000 or 3,000 per pirated work.

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. The good guys. Yeah, it's hard to know who is the good. In the anthropic narrative, Open AI, Sam Altman, bad guys, anthropic, the white knights who just happened to be vacuuming up the written word to a degree that, yeah, there has been a $1.5 billion settlement. 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? 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 it. 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 tech history,

like things that I use a lot. Like Uber was it ignored sort of taxi regulations whereas some other ride share companies tried to play by those rules and YouTube ignored like copyright infringement early on. And so if you just flout to all the rules early on, nobody cares until you get big enough, right? And then you just like pay a settlement in retrospect. That was the year behind Mark Zuckerberg in college

when he was moving fast and breaking things. Yes, moving fast and breaking things. And the question around, the rules he is breaking happens to be conveniently enough a real key part of this book which it 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. Or maybe even not necessary if it's just something they want to do. 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 polyanish. It's not like everyone ever thought the rules applied perfectly equally. 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. 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 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 U.S. 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. 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?

What are we at? 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. I like how you've written a book at this moment in time where you're like, you know what is underrated rules and bureaucracy. 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. 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. Yeah, I want to quote from your book because 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, end quote, which is to say that we're talking about rules and not the department so much. And North, by the way, says that these are basically perfectly analogous to sports rules. 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 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. And this is like a delicate thing because... Because you're now advocating for what Doge was trying to trim, allegedly. Of course, there's like bloat in the government, right?

There's no question. So I don't want to minimize that. Because bureaucracies often grow to the point where 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. Dealing with our friends and cronies in order to get what we want. 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.

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. Yeah. The speed of innovation. Yeah. And it reminds me of, again, this anthropic lawsuit. Yeah. In which the argument for why you should have all of these AI companies, all 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. Yeah. We will lose, in fact, not just to other competitors, but we will lose to China. 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 Norse's point 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 all bounds off of these tech leaders and that will lead to shared prosperity magically is totally ahistoric. 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, we brought up a book called Power in Progress. Those guys won the Nobel Prize since we talked about it, those authors. You're welcome. Yeah. The PTOFO bump is why. 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. No, don't regulate us. Because it'll slow us down.

Yes, you're shackling the great men of our time if you are regulating artificial intelligence. All right, I got a quick staff 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 slash 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. 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 slash PTFO. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash PtFO. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. 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. And how these are not merely metaphorically tech people. They are actually the people who ran some of the most monopolistic tech companies. in U.S. history.

And Steve Balmer, now, of course, the owner of the Clippers, and my good friend. You're a good friend. Also the former CEO of Microsoft. He has a bobblehead over there. Oh, yeah, we do have the Steve Bomber

bobblehead. Let's hold on. Let's hold on. Let's hold on me bring that. Only good friends. You're the first person to acknowledge that we not only have the Kawhi Leonard bobblehead.

We also have the Steve bomber. We always got a bobble feet. Oh, yeah. Oh, he's got a bobble everything. We might leave him there on top of your book. See, if you're Steve bomber, it's like everyone's got a

bobblehead. You need more things that bobble. Yes, look at these. The elbows bobble. You got to be the best. 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 are things that we ought not abide by. 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 Balmer 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 England, including us in the U.S. 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. 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. 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 the NBA salary gap. The NBA salary gap. But it's, it's this microcosm of where you have. these really powerful people who are getting the experience of seeing an even more powerful person,

which is extraordinarily rare. 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. And we eagerly await the results of that investigation. Right, which is the whole thing like, yeah.

As you know, there's nothing more credible. than an organization investigating itself. 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. 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. 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. Yeah. 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. That's what I'm saying. And, like, I'm fine if somebody doesn't, if they think it's a kill, then just ignore it. Then they can ignore it. Yes. 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 mean sort of world and not care when people break these rules. And I don't want to be like some earnest like. But the case you're

making continuously through this book, you're making the selfish person's case for why rules matter. 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. 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 Balmer is always going to be. Is it the case that we are merely enshrining, once again, money as the thing that matters most? 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?

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. Yes, human endeavors are always very flawed. We'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. Yes. So I think it's a really important public story. 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 going to have the salary cap, if you're going to 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 and 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.

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. 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.

This is exactly it. It's that sports, again, both literally and metaphorically, is a shrine to competition. Yeah. And if there's any political party that I feel like is being underrated as a concept, it is the pro-competition party. Yeah. Which can encompass both capitalism in its purest theoretical form as well as regulation. Yeah. Which is, again, like, and she's been a guest on this show as well, I kind of feel like I'm a Lena con Democrat.

I saw on like bus stops. There'd be these signs for meta and they're like, please regulate us to stop kids of a certain age going on. And 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. 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? Yeah. Is the lack of competition getting us better products? Or is it, in fact, in the case of the MBA, as all of these incredibly rich people come in, unregulated, is it in fact worse? 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. Are reporting on like the NFLPA, the players union, right? It's like, why do I care about this millionaire's union? Well, it's because if you care about football, which statistically, that's what we care about the ball. most. 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, a check on them? And what happens if that check is the union? And what if that union is also connecting to all this stuff beset by its own corruption scandal?

Yeah. 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. Again, this isn't just going on in sports, right? It goes on in business in general. Yes, this is just a public way to see it.

It's so in your face that rules don't apply to certain people. 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?

I started reading this philosopher named Bernard Sutes, who I use at the very end of this book. And Sutz was responding to Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was 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, etc. Some are luck, some are just skill. And Soutts 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. I love this part of Bernard Soutts' philosophy. 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 short cut them, I think it dilutes the meaning of the endeavor in the first place. It's a way of life. Yeah. 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. Yeah. And what is better? what is more durable as an heirloom than sports in our country in which we are actually agitated 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 f***ing wood. Yeah, 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, suddenly you have the ability to engender something like a philosophy that can, in your book's telling, actually benefit more people than otherwise. 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... The death row inmates who spend their last seconds on earth expending breath to make the noise of let's go cowboys. Yes, because they feel like, 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 are going to really be the core activity that adds meaning to our life. 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. I'm glad that some Americans, like, defied their colonial rules. We dare say. Entrepreneurially started a country. 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 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 fuck 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 fucking need someone to say this. Yeah, you have to care. You have to care, I think. Like the pendulum, and all of this is seemingly always, unfortunately, a pendulum, it swung so far away. Yeah. To the point where it has to be this, like, reassertion. Like, we forgot. why other things besides money were virtues in the first place.

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 that I feel like I just got to take for granted. Yeah. That now 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 background of trust and belief. And I think that's really undermined. And obviously there's a lot of people I call conflict entrepreneurs. I stole that word. from this 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

shitting on stuff but not so good at having ideas you know what I mean and I think it's it's concerning because there are 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 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. Yeah. It's interesting to be outside of an institution, of an organization, I was going to say

institution, an organization, a mainstream media organization, and get credit for being disruptive. Yeah. And yet at the same time, be always. trying to follow, again, the Douglas North Star. Well played. 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.

Yeah. 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 untrammeled 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. That's right. So they want to be protected from what they themselves would start doing. Exactly. It's what you call a 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 of the world 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

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 decide that this rule doesn't actually have any legitimacy, then they're all going to start learning money laundering. When the people who are meant to enforce fair competition themselves are suffering from a conflict of interest. and the public interest is not 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 horn literary, clearing house. That's the only way you're going to get... Why didn't you're working porn into this? 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 shit, then yeah, maybe I'd settle for that too.

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. There's... Steve, you couldn't just settle for bobblehead?

It's called a bobblehead for a reason. I've never contemplated how much bobbling is too much bobbling. See, I've had my eye on the Steve Bomber ball here. I don't know what you've been looking at. I've been trying not to get sued. Pablo Torre finds out is produced by Walter Averoma, Maxwell Carney, Ryan Cortez,

Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Loman, Rob McRae, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, and Chris Tumenello. 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.