Pablo Torre follows three rules when choosing which mystery to solve on his influential podcast: smart, funny and surprising.
Plus maybe a little sexy.
An investigation into the best football coach ever and his 24-year-old girlfriend? Nothing says sex appeal like a shirtless Ring camera video.
A conversation with Hall-of-Famers Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe? Let’s just say it involves hooking up at the World Cup.
A documentary on the civil war between competitive bird-watchers? Torre says that was his most graphic episode yet.
In the two years since the launch of “Pablo Torre Finds Out,” the show has been referred to as as one of the 100 best podcasts of all time (by Time), “the future of magazine-style reporting” and “as if ‘This American Life’ and ‘Real Sports’ got together and started microdosing.”
Torre has traveled down the rabbit hole on episodes ranging from transgender athletes (which won the Edward R. Murrow Award for Sports Reporting) and football fans on death row (which was nominated for a Peabody Award) to collusion in the NFL (which led to the resignation of top union officials) and romance in the NBA (which led to Scottie Pippen’s ex-wife calling Torre “miserable”).
That range — high-brow silliness meets low-brow seriousness — is now joining The Athletic Podcast Network. Every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, subscribers will receive a highly-produced narrative surprise on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, The Athletic app, The New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts.
You might get a deep dive, in which Torre and his “curiosity correspondents” unbox weeks of obsessive reporting to answer the internet’s most urgent questions. Which can varying from the absurd (Does Giannis Antetokounmpo intentionally miss free throws to win free chicken for fans?) to the historic (Did Wilt Chamberlain really score 100 points?) to, yes, the political (Why the hell does FBI director Kash Patel play so much hockey?).
Or you might hear Torre sitting down with a hand-picked personality in sports, culture and/or the real world. And this isn’t just your average sports gas-bagging. Each hang tends to zero in on a single topic. Like that time the future Lakers head coach J.J. Redick stopped by to talk about maniacally coaching his nine-year-old son’s basketball team. Or when Torre introduced the rapper Action Bronson to his own parody account. Or when a U.S. Senator explained tyranny with a vegetable slicer, by way of Cooper Flagg.
Every week, Torre also plays “Share & Tell” with friends like Wyatt Cenac, Domonique Foxworth, Mina Kimes, Katie Nolan and Dan Le Batard (a.k.a. his boss at Meadowlark Media), as they laugh their way through the viral storylines blowing up their group chats. And every month, Torre unlocks the secrets of sports business with former Miami Marlins president David Samson and former ESPN president John Skipper.
You probably know Torre as a long-time commentator on ESPN. He also regularly appears on MSNBC as a contributor. Previously, Torre was a senior writer at ESPN The Magazine and staff writer at Sports Illustrated. But he also owns the record for biggest comeback in the history of “Celebrity Family Feud,” to which he devoted an entire episode of his show that breaks all the rules. Obviously.
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photo courtesy of Meadowlark Media)