Pablo Torre Finds Out
Bobbleheads on Spikes: The (Selfish) Case for Rules, with David Epstein
10 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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. Oh, yeah. 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. 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. That doesn't make it
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Chapter 2: How does David Epstein view rules in society?
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 pirated 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 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.
I 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.
Yeah.
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, right?
They are deciding that rules as a concept are things they can opt out of if they feel like it's necessary. Yeah.
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 Pollyannish, it's not like everyone ever thought the rules applied perfectly equally.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of AI companies pirating books?
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 and Progress. Those guys won the Nobel Prize since we talked about it, those authors.
You're welcome.
Yeah.
The PTFO 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 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.
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Chapter 4: How do powerful entities evade regulations?
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 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.
But it's 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, 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... 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, etc. 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.
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