Pablo Torre Finds Out - Exclusive: Phil Mickelson, the Pipeline and Trump's (Alleged) 14-Inch Pipe

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

Why has the famous golfer (and notorious gambler) been hooking right and tweeting incessantly about insider trading? Hunterbrook Media's Sam Koppelman got inside a group chat even more bro'd-out than the defense secretary's Signal messages — and uncovered audio about trading 18 holes with a cabinet secretary to pump up a gas company. His investigation's findings are... huge.• Read the full Hunterbrook investigation(Pablo Torre Finds Out is independently produced by Meadowlark Media and distributed by The Athletic. The views, research and reporting expressed in this episode are solely those of Pablo Torre Finds Out and Hunterbrook Media and do not reflect the work or editorial input of The Athletic or its journalists.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Toray finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. Big Daddy Trump, ready to swing his 14-inch in front of Newsom's face, will drive up any stock. Right after this ad. What's your caffeine intake? I just do coffee. All day? All day?

I do like two. You didn't do it at all until two years ago? This show? This show. did it. Has ruined my nervous system. Yeah. That's what I need to meet you at this desk again.

Sam, compliment. Yeah, here we are. The last time you're at this desk, by the way, the two of us investigated whether the Chinese government had been stealing athlete brainwaves. Which ended up spurring an investigation by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce announced in September.

I did not know that that committee was listening to the Pablo Torre finds out podcast. Yeah, I like to think that they came for the taste-testing athlete weed episodes. Yes, come for the weed episodes. Stay for the Chinese brainwaves. Stay for the geopolitical scandals we uncover with you. And yet, the story that you're here at the desk to discuss today, the story you've been working on, is even weirder and even bigger in its own key way, I dare say.

Yeah, it's a bit girthier this story, for sure, absolutely. I want to get into this story, as it were. By explaining a thing that I think all of us are numb to in a moment. I mean, you're still quite familiar with politics in the United States as an author, as a former speechwriter, as a guy who studies the political system. And it's mind-blowing once you take just a beat to think about how there is this playbook for every single person who's in trouble legally, financially, which is to just appeal directly to Donald Trump.

If you can just get in front of him, you've got a shot. Yes. I'm thinking of, of course, former New York Congressman George Santos, who has a resume that you'd laugh out of, I mean, was almost literally laughed into jail because of it. I think of the co-founder of aspiration, a guy I'm quite familiar with now, Joe Sandberg, hiring Mark McKaysey, a former Trump attorney.

And then I discovered that Chauncey Billups, another subject of our investigations, hired McKaysey as well because of the NBA gambling and poker. poker stuff. Only did then see that Terry Rozier, the current NBA player embroiled in those same indictments, hired a gentleman by the name of Jim Trustee, which is, of course, a perfect name for a Trump attorney, which of course Jim Trustee also was. The reason people are doing this is because it works. I mean, there's a couple examples. Like there's this guy, Trevor Milton.

I don't know if you remember that company, Nicola, they had those giant trucks, and the scam was that there was this video they posted of this massive truck coming down a hill. And it turned out the truck didn't actually have an engine or anything. They were just dragging it down. And he hired a guy named Brad Bondi. And if the reason that last name is familiar to you, it is because his sister is Pam Bondi, the United States Attorney General. Oh, yes. And Milton gets pardoned and ends up on Tucker Carlson as a conservative icon. Another one that I love is C.E. the guy who ran Binance, you know, the bett noir of Sam Bankman-Fried, who himself... F.TX's rival.

Exactly. Went to prison. And his indictment was one of my favorite ones ever, one of the great smoking guns. Because his CCO said in writing, We are operating a fucking unlicensed security exchange in the USA, bro. He was sentenced and put in prison. And then CZ backed the crypto company of Trump's kids. And he had...

his sentence commute it, just like Milton. Right. And then, in the media circuit, we hear Donald Trump on 60 minutes. The government at the time said that CZ had caused significant harm to U.S. national security, essentially by allowing terrorist groups like Hamas to move millions of dollars around. Why did you pardon him? Okay, are you ready? I don't know who he is. I know he got a four months. And the thing that bothers me is that we're numb as a country to the fact that this is just a practice.

It's an everyday kind of a thing. I mean, I remember playing like Thumb War growing up, and then you'd get the kid who just like goes, helicopters and comes over the top. And it's like, that's what the justice system is like. You can just call for help from up above, and the rules don't matter anymore. But I think the best, or at least my favorite case study,

as it relates to this trend of corruption, has to do with arguably the most prolific gambler, it turns out, in athlete history. and Phil Mickelson is someone who has tweeted both of us in the last week, by the way, which we will explain here. But the message he sent

that is the core of why I invited you into this studio was both private and about privates. It was indeed about privates. It was, dare I say, a fairly erotic message. It was a new addition to, yes, a canon of literature that I didn't quite know existed. Phil Mickelson messages a group of people will identify later.

This erotic fanfic from Phil Mickelson reads, Big Daddy Trump, ready to swing his 14-inch in front of Newsom's face, will drive up any stock. Yeah, I think everybody in America has been waiting for the Gavin Newsom, Donald Trump. Yeah, just like deeply sexual fan fiction. Totally. This is the erotica the kids have been waiting for. Complementary and also very open-minded and potentially deeply legally problematic.

Deeply and bigly, as it were. So just as a matter of what this message is, how it got into my memory seared there for all time now, to whom was Phil sending this? He was sending it to a group chat. Right. So this is a group chat of investors in a company called Sable Offshore. And so I want to just visualize for everybody who is not familiar with anything related to finance and certainly not Sable offshore.

If this group chat was a physical room full of real life people, what would we be looking at? It kind of looked like the hangover to the hotel room in that movie, but with, fewer women. Right. And a deep passion for this specific company, it sounds like. Yes, for Sable Offshore, which I can tell you a little bit of the lore behind. I don't know if you remember, but in 2015, there was this giant oil spill in California. Overnight, the governor of California declaring a state of emergency in Santa Barbara as disturbing new images show the growing impact of the major oil spill off the coast.

Volunteers collecting hundreds of buckets of oil from this beach, yet hardly making a dent. Sable offshore is trying to bring the pipeline responsible for that spill back. Just based on that news coverage, it does not seem like that pipeline would be a great investment. Well, Exxon did spend seven years.

trying to reopen this pipeline. And every time they ran into problems getting it approved by California, which is understandably worried about a travesty like this happening again. All the animals covered in oil. Exactly. And for Exxon,

cleaning up this pipeline, closing it down, would cost billions of dollars. And so instead, they did something else with it. And so as a matter of corporate strategy, that something else is... They basically gave this oil project, the Santa Inez unit, to this kind of cowboy oilman named Jim Flores, better known as Big Jim Flores on account of his large stature.

And so it's hard not to paraphrase there will be blood here, but Big Jim is an oil man. He is indeed an oil man. And his career has been one befitting a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. Big ups, big downs, big swings, sold a company for over a billion dollars, had another company go into bankruptcy. And this is kind of the last big swing for Big Jim. And the way it works, so like Exxon gives Big Jim the pipeline?

They basically gave him a huge loan and was like, you can use our money to go take over this pipeline. And maybe it doesn't work. Maybe you have the same fate as us. And then Exxon, I'll take the pipeline back. But if you can get it approved, if you can get it online, you can bring this thing back. You will make billions and billions of dollars.

It's, in a way, the ultimate gamble. And so, of course, it appeals to the ultimate gambler, Phil Mickelson. And that superlative is not one that we can claim ourselves. This is a reputation that is actually, it seems empirically validated by no less a source than his now-estranged gambling partner, Billy Walters, who provides in his book and audiobook a dossier that is also overflowing with some pretty crude material. Billy Walters, who it should be noted, was known as the greatest sports better of all time. The truth is, feel like to gamble as much as anyone I've met.

I've known some of the biggest gamblers in the world. To give you an idea of how much feel like to gamble, he called me a September of 2012 from Madonna Country Club outside Chicago with an astounding request. He asked me to place a $400,000 wager for him on his own United States team to beat the Europeans in a 39th Ryder Cup. The narrator here is, in fact, Billy Walters himself, not Sam Elliott,

which is understandable. A bit of confusion, if you have that. At least it was on his own team. I was going to say, that is better than the alternative on the one hand. I can't believe that Phil Mickelson did this. He's never going to get into the baseball Hall of Fame. Well, this was a concern, actually, that Billy Walters articulated because Billy Walters very clearly wants you to know that he did not take this wager.

He asked me to place a $400,000 bet for him on the U.S. team to win. Once again, I could not believe what I was hearing. Have you lost your fucking mind? I told him. Don't you remember what happened to Pete Rose? The former Cincinnati Reds manager was banned from baseball for betting on his own team. You're seen as a modern-day honor Palmer. You'd risk all of that for this?

I won't know part of it. All right, all right, he replied before hanging up. I do think it's worth noting here that Billy Walters himself went to prison for insider trading. He is personally mad at Phil for reasons we'll get into later. And so what he says should be taken with some, hefty grains of salt. Well, look, the sheer accounting of all of this, if you trust Billy Walters as your narrator, can also be backed up by just a general accounting of how much money Phil liked to throw around.

Based on our relationship and what I've heard from others, Phil wagered a total of more than a billion dollars during the past three decades. The only person I know who surpassed that kind of volume is me. During a 20-year period beginning in the mid-90s, Phil's losses of approximately. approached $100 million. That amount is two and a half times higher than the $40 million reported by Allen Shipnuck in his best-selling unauthorized biography of Phil. He's a big-time gambler, and big-time gamblers make big bets.

All of which is to say that this big-time gambler making big-time bets meets Big Jim. Yes, they were allegedly on the board of a company together, and by allegedly I mean that Phil Mickelson tweeted that before deleting that tweet. and at some point during their conversations, Big Jim tells Phil about this company he's starting with his son and a bunch of other guys called Sable Offshore to go get this old oil project from Exxon

back online. And over the last few months, if any of you follow Phil Mickelson on Twitter or X, you will see that Phil has tweeted hundreds of times. It's basically his identity. now. Yes, he just tweets about Gavin Newsom and California and Sable offshore because he's a big investor in this company. And Pablo, I know it might sound kind of outlandish, but what you should understand is that for a minute that seemed like an incredible bet, the kind of bet that could

allow you to retire from the live tour, or at least switch from the live tour to the PGA tour, because Sable started getting some momentum. The stock went from $10 to $18, which is, we'll come back to this later, around where I think Phil got invested in it, all the way up to $35. And there was one final thing they needed, which was approval from the state of California, from the fire marshal and a couple other agencies to get this project back online. But as someone who has been following Phil Mickelson and his friends with golf writers, lots of golf reporters who have been following him for even longer, the texture of his, I would say, hundreds of tweets about Sable Offshore, that texture mostly feels like desperation.

Yes, there is a patina of gambler's anxiety in there. Because Pablo, after Sable stock hit $35, things started going a little bit worse for Big Jim and the gang. Despite telling Phil and other investors that approval from California was just weeks away, days away, and I have lots of sources who have told me that Jim and Sable kept making those kinds of assurances. As the stock price started going down, and as those approvals didn't come day after day, week after week, and as Sable started getting charged with felonies by California,

for some of the work that it was doing in the state. Phil and other investors started to become very, very, very worried. Just how worried was our group chat full of rows about this? They were angry enough to reach out to me. Someone who first wrote about Sable around 18 months ago, where I called it a pipe dream. And I think they reached out to me because they started to become afraid that I was right. Right.

So Hunterbrook, Hunterbrook media, I want to explain the premise here as to why these bros are turning to Sam Coppelman. So Hunterbrook's whole thing is we do accountability reporting, investigative reporting, dig deeper than anybody else. You should follow along if you like Pablo Torre finds out. That's right. Like and subscribe. Is fantastic at investigations. The thing about Hunterbrook that's different from a lot of other investigative media outlets is we don't monetize with ads or paywalls. We monetize the impact of our reporting through. two other businesses. One is called Hunterbrook Law, where if a company is committing crimes or

poisoning a lake or poisoning the air, we can sue that company and get some restitution for the people who are harmed. And the other business is called Hunterbrook Capital, which can take positions in the market based on Hunterbrook Media's reporting, all of which we disclose in each of our articles. And so I think some of these Sable Long investors saw some of our disclosures last year that said that Hunterbrook Capital had bet against Sable offshore. And so the bros, seeing all these disclosures, all this information that you're digging up, and you're transparently providing, they send you what? Okay, so they send me two key things, two key pieces of evidence. One is a leaked phone call, a big jam, some other execs from the company with a select group

of elite investors who they tell certain things that they did not tell the public, which we'll get to in a minute. And the second thing is this treasure trove of a group chat. where Phil Mickelson seems to be sharing what I have heard some securities regulators describe as inside information that he got directly from Big Jim. And just to give you an example of this, because some of these aren't particularly close calls, on September 29th, Phil writes the group, I spoke with Jim this morning. An announcement is coming today after market closes. It could be an 8K or press release, not sure exactly what the details will.

be. I couldn't say anything until after the close. Lo and beholds, about an hour later, Sable, in fact, releases a market-moving SEC filing and press release, as Jim told Phil that morning he would. And the stock moves. Yeah, which sounds suspicious. Just on the base, look, again, as a pure, just like what's happening here, Phil knows some stuff that people don't know. And he's teasing the group chat about what he knows and maybe what therefore it suggests about the direction of the company. Correct. And a law professor we spoke to told us that this sounds like violations of a couple different SEC rules, including something called reg FD that I'm not going to bore you with.

But what's weird about this particular potential insider trading story, the saddest part of it is that even with some of this seemingly inside info, Pablo, I don't think these guys were making money. So what was happening to their money? They were losing it. The stock price was going down. And so in terms of that desperation, in the ways that it's expressed on Twitter, I got to say that when I started looking at the messages you were receiving, it put them into even sharper relief because the excerpts from the messages he was sending the chat.

I mean, I should just read some of them here, we'll show them. Because in one of them, he writes, quote, we need an actual prayer. I don't see a clear path forward. In that one, he basically admitting to planning to sell shares. In another one of them that you published, he writes, quote, I'm very defeated right now. And yet another message, he says, quote, I do it again, given the information we had. It sucks that maybe there's a last ditch effort to save it. And I think there should be, but it's not a path to invest in right now.

End quote. He then, according to the messages, sells how. half his stock, he says he wants to de-risk a little bit. But then, Pablo, there's another message very shortly afterwards where Phil says, I'm buying it back. I'm not fucking leaving. I'm not fucking leaving. And so all of this obviously tracks with Phil's alleged commitment to making the big bets that Billy Walters himself, of course, guilty of insider trading had spoken about before in the book,

the audiobook that we played. But this particular strategy, I just want to understand it. I want to, again, as I try to do with you, I want to steal man Phil Mickelson's logic. Why was he buying back the thing he said he needed a prayer to save? Because Pablo, Sable does have one real move left, the same move that Chauncey and Trevor Milton and CZ were running, which is appealing directly to the Trump administration.

And the reason we know that this is Sable's plan is because of that second leak I got, the phone call between Sable and Nassiezer. investors. And the voices you're about to hear in that call include Big Jim and the Sable guys are laying out a plan to have Donald Trump circumvent California entirely. And instead of sending the oil through Newsom's state in a pipeline, they're going to put it in a boat and hope that Big Daddy Trump saves them. So just because I'm not super fluent in the world of oil pipelines, they're going to put the oil in a tanker in a boat.

According to this call, yes. And we're the number one project on the EDC, which the National Energy Dominance Council, because we're on board. And also, you're right here, guys, I've suggested this. It's been ramped up to DJT that we'll change the name to Ocean America instead of Pacific Ocean

and start grilling again out here. And I said, how do you like us? She liked it way too much is the word I got back. So if you hear that ocean America, that's where it came from. What was you telling you here? I put some gold Zee on the platform says, right? Well, we've also added that we're happy to plant. We need to know whether we need to paint the letters 50 feet tall or 70 feet tall

for the Trump one inside so we make sure Oprah can see her, see the tank. for her, uh, Montecito mansion, you know, with the opening operas on.

And he came back soon like to the goal. There's a lot going on in that call. Yeah, I should note that at first, when we asked Sable offshore

about this call, they said that the phone call was AI. So the DJT reference, Donald J. Trump, that's AI. The Oprah

like taunting her. Yeah, the Oprah, uh, a, uh, Montecito, a mansion sound. They claimed that that was AI.

The giant. The giant. The giant. gold lettering on Ocean America, which is just obviously transparently designed in the retelling of this to appeal to Big Daddy Trump. This, they all say, is AI,

which, if true, my God, we should all just quit our jobs, because that is some good, good AI. I want to invest in that company. A hundred percent. In fact, in the group chat, which obviously Sable doesn't know we have access to, we see in messages

that Big Jim went as far as to call investors and tell them, go tell everyone this is AI. which, by the way, itself might have been securities fraud if they knew that the call was real. And I just got to sort of hit on this point here. What's been happening in the reporting of the story is that the bros in the group chat

who are reaching out to you, they're not telling everyone else in the group chat that you're now in the group chat with them, basically. Correct. I just get to watch the group chat happen, essentially as it's taking place. God. It's like that Atlantic story about the signal, the war plans, except significantly dumber, I would say.

You're kind of just like, their... This group chat makes Pete Hegseth and the boys look like they were very, very on their with their operational security. Yes, their obsec in this case. In the case of Sable offshore, not great. But of course, these are serious allegations we're describing here. So Phil Mickelson, a very wealthy and famous man, what does he have to say about all of this? So I get Phil's number. Fun fact, Phil seems to change his number all the time. I figure out which is his current number. Get him on the phone. He talks for a sec.

He's like, who is this? And I'm like, I'm calling from Hunterbrook. He's like, no, thank you. And hangs up right away. And then he does something I've never experienced before as a reporter, which is that he then posts in the fucking group chat my number and his like, warning guys, here's the number they called from. They're very curious about our group chat.

Doesn't think to leave the group chat and instead keeps posting about it. The thing that gets posted in the group chat, which is the part that made me laugh out loud when I saw it, unfortunately for you. Does involve Craigslist. Yes, they tried to docks me by putting up a Craigslist post with my number on it. Yeah. So this is a Craigslist post. The title is Free Dog Food, parentheses Lafayette.

This is a place in California. Quote, Hey, y'all. Sad story, but my old three and a half year Great Dane finally done kicked her bucket. Got here about 350 pounds of Perinia Dog Chow, if somebody just wants to drop by and get it out of the carport. I'm on disability and cannot lift nothing too heavy. There are typos throughout the entire thing, just for the record.

My nephew Till will help you load it. Give him a call at your phone number. Correct. And I'm obviously watching this the whole time. Yeah, they're loving what's happening to you at the time. this point in the story. They are until I put all of this in our investigation, which we published last Friday. And then we finally got a response from Phil. So to catch people up, the way I enter this story in the public record is me quote tweeting your article at Hunterbrook that you referenced before

when you publish your revelations about these messages and this group chat. And what I said in the quote tweet on X, the everything app, was quote, why do I get the feeling that this is not the end of this story. And then, later in the day, as I'm just like walking through Manhattan, it's Halloween afternoon, I get a reply from Phil Mickelson. And the message that was screenshoted in that quote tweet, just for the record here, was the thing we described before about that 8K or press release coming after market closing. Not exactly sure what the details will be. Couldn't say anything to have for closed, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so Phil replies to me, quote, so a company says, I can't say anything to you, but we will announce something at the close.

I don't know if it's a dilution and the stock goes down or a deal for the stock to go up. I have to wait to see what the info is. I make no trades whatsoever and am ultra-altra-careful given past history. I don't even share that information is coming till after the close. And you insinuate wrongdoing? Question mark? This looks like stock manipulation on their part and slanderous. Did they make any trades today?

Question mark. And my response to that, naturally, is Hi, Phil Mickelson. I'd love to continue discussing this on Pablo Fidelius. out and provide a real opportunity for you to answer questions. Could you please have a time for us to talk? Thank you, exclamation point. And I'm here to regretfully inform our audience that he did not get back to me.

So did he get back to you? He did not, despite having my phone number, he did tweet that he would have a lawyer reach out to us tomorrow. Yeah. And so just in the timeline here, when was that? Oh, on Halloween, Friday, last Friday. So the lawyer has reached out to you. No, we haven't heard anything from Phil Mickelson, who, by the way, as I mentioned, had been tweeting about Sable Offshore every day. After his tweets to you and me, he's gone conspicuously quiet.

Sable, though, just as we get all of the legal responses in order here, did Sable offshore respond? So to our initial story, they said, this is AI. Then, on Monday morning, they scheduled an emergency press conference, where they announced. that they'd opened an investigation with a special committee to look into our findings. And I will note that on that call, they did not refer to the leaked audio as AI. In fact, they confirmed a core part of it about how they were going to need to dilute shareholders, which was not great news for that group chat. Right. And so for the shareholders, for the group chat, for the stock price,

what was the share price's reaction, that? It did not pump. It's down like 60 or something percent since we published. Right. The graph that I'm indicating, this seems like bad news for Sable Offshore, but good news, I presume, for Hunterbrook Capital, the financial arm of your company, which took a position on this based on your reporter. Yes, we disclosed that after our story came out, Hunterbara Capital read it and did not

decide to go along on Sable offshore. They bet against it. And then later this week, there was actually a vote from the Santa Barbara Board of Supervisors, where they voted to decline to transfer ownership of the pipeline from Exxon to Sable. The final straw for me was a Hunterbrook article, which was as disturbing as anything ever read. The fallout from that recorded phone call has already been severe, and this is before regulators have weighed in. I have many friends in the oil industry, and I will continue to support efforts

to access our natural resources, but it has to be done responsibly by operators who put safety above profits. The evidence in this case is overwhelming. There is something wrong with the strategy of Sable's leadership. By the way, that guy is pro-oil and gas and had previously voted to approve the transfer, but obviously in light of the new information

just couldn't get behind taking that risk for the people of Santa Barbara. Yeah, that was an unambiguous clip from that guy who seemed to both credit your reporting and also seemed at a loss for a way to spin this. And if you're Phil, like, I just want to get a sense of how much money he personally lost. So we don't know when he or if he resold the shares

he bought back after selling them after buying them. Right. But we do have a sense from that same Billy Walter's book you quoted from earlier of the size of the bets that Phil Mickelson was willing to take. Yeah. That book, by the way, has a truly crazy degree of detail, a truly crazy degree of accounting on exactly how much Phil liked to spend as a sports gambler. After my business relationship with Phil ended, I learned a lot more about his betting from two very reliable sources of, sports gambling. They said it was nothing for Phil to bet $20,000 a game on long-shot-five-team NBA parlays, or wager $100,000 or $200,000 a game on football, basketball, and baseball.

Based upon my detailed betting records and additional records provided by the sources, here's a snapshot of Phil's gambling habit between 2010 and 2014. He about $110,000 to win $100,000 a total of $1,150,000. 15 times. On 858 occasions, he bet $220,000 to win $200,000. The sum of those 1973 gross wagers came to more than $311 million. In 2011 alone, he made 3,154 bets, an average of nearly nine per day. On one day in 2011, June the 22nd, he made 43 bets on Major League baseball games resulting in $143,500 in losses. He made a staggering 7,065 wagers on football, basketball, and baseball.

And if you're wondering, how is it possible that one man could be both one of the greatest golfers of all time, one of the greatest lefties we've ever seen in sports history, as well as this prolific when it comes to sports betting, Billy Walters also has a bit of surrounding context. Phil didn't let his playing in PGA tournaments get in the way of betting. Indeed, according to the 2010-2014 betting records, he made 1734 wagers on games during 29 events. This included 70 separate bets on baseball and pre-season pro football during the Berklee's tournament in August 2011 where he shot 800 and tied for 43rd. He won $415,000 in bets that weekend. On February 11, 2012, a busy college basketball,

Saturday, Phil blew himself up by running his betting losses of nearly $4 million. According to the gambling sources, familiar with Phil's other bets. Even so, he displayed an incredible ability to compartmentalize. He shot 64 the following day to win the AT&T pro-am at Pebble Beach while playing with and demolishing Tiger Woods by 11 shots. All of it just to say that the guy is not afraid to put money down on a thing he thinks there's a shot at winning. Say what you will about Phil Mickelson, the man has conviction.

And so if you're going to mathematically just take an informed guess at what Phil was rooting for here, what he lost, how do you report that out? We don't have the exact financial information here. You know, I spoke to some of the Sable investors who seemed to think at some point he and his partner owned like 2% of the company, which could have been tens and tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars, meaning he could have been tens and tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars, meaning he could have lost like tens of millions of dollars on this. We do have messages where it's clear Phil is just going through it. He's talking about how Sable's making him too anxious to go on a hike or to go fishing, how he's buying certain options but not others, so he'll have peace of mind.

It definitely didn't seem like a low-key casual thing Phil was doing, as by the way is clear to anybody who follows his Twitter account and notices that he's tweeted more about Sable Offshore certainly than golf or his family or anything like that. Yeah, it does seem to indicate that Phil Mickelson was so stressed out by Sable Offshore that he could not actually touch grass, which is a problem when you're, of course, also a golfer, but just as a point of clarification,

his own personal history that he referred to before, right? He said it in the tweet that he said, He set me. Ultra, ultra careful, given his history. Given past history. What is the past history? So you know how Phil Mickelson used to make bets with Billy Walters? He was also embroiled in an insider trading case that the government brought against Walters that accused Mickelson of trading based on tips that were sent to him by Billy Walters. And this did not go great. At the very least, for Billy Walters. Six Las Vegas golf course owner and gambler Billy Walters has found guilty of using inside trade information

to make millions of dollars. And if you just keep digging into Billy's book, his feelings toward Phil about this specific chapter of his life are also unambiguous. Phil had an opportunity to testify out my trial, to tell the truth about whether he received inside information regarding one of two stocks that I'd recommended to him. Phil decided not to testify on my behalf.

How did I feel? Completely betrayed. We should note, Walters didn't actually end up serving that full sentence. Yes. We should note this for legal reasons. And also because it turns out that Billy Walters, Phil Migglesen's old gambling buddy,

decided to run a very familiar play. Well, new tonight to President Trump, commuting the sentence of a Las Vegas philanthropist and professional gambler. William Walters is serving five years in prison for insider trading. He has already served four years of that sentence and has paid also $44 million in fines as well. Which finally brings us back to the 14-inch from the first act. Yes, Chekhov's kuh, we must, of course, pay it off. We must.

and to jog your memory in case it's not seared into it forever. Yeah, I should now, I guess, be on record quoting it, Big Daddy Trump, in all caps, Trump, ready to swing his 14-inch in front of Newsom's face, will drive up any stock. And obviously, the reason that Gavin Newsom is relevant here is that he is in charge, ultimately, of the office of the state fire marshal

that Sable needed for approval. And what Phil is essentially saying is if Trump says fuck off to Newsom with his genitalia, then perhaps the stock price of Sable offshore can become more tumessent. I don't think that's a group...

That's a group chat word. I don't think that shows up in the record. I don't think tumessence is part of their... I wanted to show some class after saying all episode. Well, listen, What Phil Mickelson, apparently what he believes now, as you're reporting continued, is that the game is actually still not over. Correct.

And Sable, for the record, is not dead yet. They are still trying to get support from the Trump administration. And one of the ways that they are going to try to do this, according to that leaked phone call, which I want to be clear, Phil Mickelson was not on. But he was alluded to on that call as part of this final play. Sable wants to run, which involves a round of golf between, quote, a certain left-hander and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik. And by the way, while you're tipping, I'm going to tell you, you might have a certain golf buddy left seat.

I've got a certain golf buddy that's in the Commerce Department. Nice to know. Nice to know. Guys, I'm on the way. I've had to promise Ludnik golf came on the West Coast with a certain left-handler. So about that. I'm right committed. So we'll punch him out.

Howard was totally going up once you can start a guy come to play instead of three radio requests. When you drop to the East Coast, that can take out. There you got to win it. That'd be fantastic. Yeah, so just to translate that again, like, so asserting the lefty, who happens to be, in this case, pivoting way right, is trying to, it's just hard not to take the layups when they're available. It's just hard not to just put it in when available. I think that that joke is more of a flop shot, but, uh, sure. Sure. It's fair. The plan is U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnik, is going to play golf with Phil Mickelson. And this, of course, raises the follow-up journalistic question, which is, what did Howard Lutnik have to say about that?

Okay, so I didn't speak to Howard Lutnik, but I spoke to a source very, very close to Howard Lutnik, super familiar with his thinking, who told me that Lutnik says he's never heard of Sable offshore and does not have any plans to golf with Phil Mickleson. Honestly, and they didn't say this to me, but it seems like they might be a little bit offended that Howard Lutnik would need big Jim to help him book a golf game with Phil Nicholson. Hearing it all spelled out like this in these calls in that quote, it does kind of feel a bit insulting to the Trump administration that the way everyone's trying to charm them is very predictable and very like almost infantilizing. To the people they're trying to, like, charm here? Totally. As you listen to that audio, it's clear that Sable offshore thinks that the Trump administration is going to greenlight them. If only they put up big gold letters, rename the Pacific Ocean, Ocean America, and book Tea Times for their cabinet secretaries. By the way, whatever happened to the group chat?

What happened to the room full of bros that you got to know? in the course of your investigation. Well, Phil definitely should have more time to play in a golf game with Howard Lutnik because, unfortunately, the morning I published the story, there were a few more messages in the group chat, which is mind-boggling,

where some of the people in the group chat said that they were going to go find the rat responsible and show up at their door. Rat, a term used for people fessing up to crimes. Anyway, they said they were going to find the rat. Then the group chat, unfortunately, may it rest in peace.

dissolved. Which is to say that Phil Mickelson has more time to play golf on the beautiful coast of Ocean America, or, you know, just keep writing. Keep writing, Phil. You know, I think he's got a lot of promise as a writer. I'm not sure I would deploy it on the platform known as X. But I do think he should deploy it in a genre that might be described as X, X, X, X, X. You know. Can't top that.

Pablo Torre finds out is produced by Walter Avaroma, Maxwell Carney, Ryan Cortez, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Loman, Rob McRae, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, and Chris Tumenello. Our studio engineering by RG Systems,

sound design by Andrew Bersick and NGW Post, theme song, as always, by John Bravo, and we will talk to you next time.