How Trump and Billionaires Bend the Rules (And Get Away With It) — ft. Pablo Torre
episode
Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov
34 min
3 speakers
3 chapters
transcribed 5 months ago
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What hidden power structures influence sports and politics?
Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Jessica Tarlow, and I'm so pumped to have Pablo Torre here, the host of Pablo Torre Finds Out. What is it, three Emmy nominations?
But who's counting, Ms. Tarlow? Who's counting at this point?
You definitely are, and I am. To make this intro as splashy as possible, it's so cool to have you here.
Oh, thank you so much. External validation is a poison I love to drink. So thank you so much for having me and for stating all the things my mom wants me to say even louder than I already do.
Yeah, I mean, I'm a Jew, so I totally understand about the moms that want to talk about all the accolades all the time. But no, it's really exciting. I've been, you know, consuming you in a not creepy way for a very long time.
Likewise. Like, allow me to say, as much as my mom is disappointed that I haven't gotten to med school or law school, doing a show like this with you really is something that I appreciate. So I appreciate that.
If you aren't already, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube page to stay in the loop on all political news. I want to start off by talking about the blend of your world and my world. So you do these incredible investigations and the Aspiration one into Steve Ballmer, who owns L.A. Clippers, former head of Microsoft, richest owner in the league, was paying his star Kawhi Leonard through... essentially a shell company, to get above the salary cap. So you got an extra $28 million, I think it was. And, you know, you really blew the roof off of the story. Got a lot of ire from the billionaire class, to say the least. And it feels very similar to what's going on in politics today. Not only the straight up comp between what Bomber did and how super PACs and dark money works, but also this world in which billionaires seem to get away with whatever they want.
Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between the two worlds?
Yeah, I think about this all the time now, the question of accountability and how does it get imposed and who gets to matter when it comes to, oh, there's a report or there's something resembling shame that a really wealthy, powerful person should feel. And in this case, sports is a fascinating sort of like laboratory for it because, you A guy like Steve Ballmer, you know, it's interesting when he was running Microsoft and he was the CEO at the time of the, I would say, most infamous at that point, anti-competitive scandal in the history of the U.S. government and our country. He was so unmoved, I would say, by the idea that you must be regulated and your monopoly must be broken up. Sports is fascinating because there are lots of the same desires of, wait a minute, we're the biggest and the richest.
Steve Ballmer is the richest owner in sports by orders of magnitude in the world. He basically is richer than all the other owners combined. And so the question that he is asking himself, according to my reporting, is, again, why can't I use all of my powers to their full extent? Why am I being regulated and suppressed by lesser beings? And in sports, because he's a basketball fan in sports, because he can't just buy the thing he wants the most, because there are rules around competition that in sports we are we are sincere in our cliches about fair play. Right. He has to answer for this stuff. You know, it was fascinating to see Steve Ballmer, the aforementioned guy who at that point had 150 or so billion dollars.
It was fascinating to see him go to Bristol, Connecticut, to sit down with ESPN the day after this reporting that I published came out. And he did it because he knows how important the rules are in sports, or at the very least, he knows how much he's supposed to care about the performance of of caring about the rules. And so if only, if only in politics, there was that level of sort of like built-in mechanism of public attention. Now, the question, the follow-up question, of course, is will there be punishment? And so there is there is the question of should he care about this? Clearly, yes. And people will ask about it.
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
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