Pablo Torre

I just do coffee.

Which I didn't do 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 Koppelman.

Yeah, here we are.

The last time you were at this desk, by the way, the two of us investigated whether the Chinese government had been stealing athlete brainwaves—

Yeah, I like to think that they came for the taste-testing athlete weed episodes.

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.

I want to get into this story, as it were, by explaining a thing that I think all of us are numb to in America.

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.

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.