Jordon Hudson, Kash Patel and MJ's fax machine: Pablo Torre's ‘terminal content brain' battles the algorithm

New York Times

3 days ago

He remembers the sweat trickling down his forehead, feeling the weight of his ambitions and the future he'd mapped out.
Pablo Torre could see it: a spot in an esteemed law school, a summer clerkship for a Supreme Court justice, a corner office for a corporate law firm in midtown Manhattan. It wasn't the path his parents had pushed for — both were doctors and badly wanted him to attend medical school — but it would certainly suffice.
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He was an honors student at Harvard, the sociology major who edited The Crimson and won an award for his 114-page thesis, 'Sympathy for the Devil: Child Homicide, Victim Characteristics and the Sentencing Preferences of the American Conscience.' Next up was law school. Torre spent the summer holed up in the library, studying for the test that would open the door to the rest of his life.
'If a genie had appeared to me and said you have three wishes, I would've used one on a perfect score on the LSAT,' he says now. 'It was the thing standing between me and the dream.'
A panic attack wasn't a part of the dream. But while he sat at his desk and started the test, the angst, the pressure — all of it — began crashing into him.
I'm ruining my life, he told himself. He bombed the test.
Everything swerved that day, and Torre still wonders what life would look like if it hadn't. 'Failing that test ended up being the thing I am most thankful for in my entire life,' he says. Because without it, the 39-year-old isn't the busiest man in sports media and having the moment he is.
There's no fact-checking job at Sports Illustrated, no 11-year run at ESPN, no chance to start his own show, 'Pablo Torre Finds Out.' There's no Edward R. Murrow award, nor Peabody nomination, nor headline-generating investigation into Bill Belichick and Jordon Hudson, Belichick's girlfriend and business manager. There's no recurring seat on MSNBC's 'Morning Joe,' either, with the possibility of bigger things on the horizon. None of it happens if Torre doesn't bomb the LSAT his senior year of college.
He retook the test and passed. But a year passed — then another, then another — and Torre never got around to applying for law school.
'By the time my LSAT score expired, I had realized something,' he says. 'I was a journalist.'
He remembers feeling like a fraud, mostly because he was.
He was a year out of college and sitting across from Bill O'Reilly on Fox News' top-rated show, trying to make a salient point about Michael Phelps' historic haul at the 2008 Summer Olympics.
It didn't go well. O'Reilly barely let him get in a word. But for Torre, it opened a door.
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He was doing two things at once: honing his journalistic chops at Sports Illustrated by going line by line through work from some of the best writers in the business: Gary Smith, S.L. Price, Tom Verducci — the 'f—ing lions of literary sports journalism,' Torre calls them — and simultaneously inching his way into debate television. Whenever a network booking agent asked for someone from the magazine to fill a seat and dish on the day's sports news, most writers shrugged. Torre jumped, credentials be damned.
In time, he admits, he became 'radicalized by the drug of television.' He'd pre-write arguments and rehearse lines in private. He'd anticipate rebuttals and memorize witticisms, then pounce on the air when he sniffed an opening. Within a few years, the grunt from the fact-checking department had found his voice.
He also was climbing the ranks at the magazine. Torre's 2009 investigation, 'How (And Why) Athletes Go Broke' started as mere curiosity. He spent months reporting and writing the story on his days off, not telling anyone. After publication, it would become one of the most-read stories in SI's online history and later the inspiration behind the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, 'Broke.'
The road wasn't as smooth as it sounds. Torre is a first-generation American — both parents are from the Philippines — whose athletic career failed to extend beyond seventh-grade CYO basketball. When it came to sports television, especially in the early 2010s, he didn't look like most on set. Didn't sound like them, either. He recalls telling a few friends at a barbecue in 2012 that he'd just taken a job at ESPN. 'So, like, in IT?' he remembers someone asking.
'Because he's not a former professional athlete and because he's Asian-American and because he uses big words, it makes him different. It can be scary to people,' says Mina Kimes, an NFL analyst at ESPN of Korean descent. 'It can make people question you in ways that other people aren't questioned.'
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But, Kimes says, there are advantages, even if they're hard to see. 'It makes you stand out,' she says. 'It makes a different set of people who haven't been able to see themselves on TV excited to watch. I think Pablo's always recognized that, which is something I admire about him. He's never tried to be anything other than who he is.'
What he became at ESPN was a Swiss Army knife, capable of writing 5,000-word profiles for the magazine while holding his own on shows like 'Around the Horn' and PTI. In 2016, Torre was rumored to be in the running to fill the chair opposite Stephen A. Smith on 'First Take.' Would he fit? Depends on who you ask. Torre's 'schtick,' as he calls it, doesn't always land, and his high-brow vocabulary turned off some viewers.
'Smug, condescending, arrogant,' New York Daily News media critic Bob Raissman wrote in a stinging assessment at the time. 'In other words, a perfect fit for ('First Take'). Looking down from Mt. Pablo, he delivers highfalutin sports edicts designed to make the rest of us schlubs look like idiots. Overnight, he would turn (Smith) into a man of the people.'
Torre didn't get the job, but in 2018 he got the chance to co-host his own show alongside Bomani Jones. 'High Noon' was canceled after two years, with ESPN citing poor ratings. That led to Torre's initial pivot into podcasting, but hosting 'ESPN Daily' left him largely unfulfilled. Five days a week, he was essentially interviewing other reporters about their reporting. Privately, he never felt the buy-in from the bosses. 'I got the sense they really didn't care,' he says now.
He felt stuck, a pinch-hitter in a bottomless lineup capable of holding his own on whatever show they threw him on but rarely doing something distinct. Part of Torre loved being a fill-in, riding the wave of success that others had built. It was safe. It was easy. 'I was a coward for a long time,' he admits.
But something was gnawing at him. The more he became a bona fide talking head, the more his visibility grew and his paycheck fattened, the less he picked up the phone. He used to love picking up the phone.
It went back to his first job in the business, the job that made him forget about law school. At SI, Torre was constantly calling sources, double- and triple-checking details gleaned by the likes of Smith, Price and Verducci, and offering him a glimpse into how great stories come together. 'It was like taking an MRI to art,' Torre says. It's what made him fall in love with journalism.
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'Pablo never actually left reporting,' says Erik Rydholm, a Torre friend and the producer behind PTI and 'Around the Horn.' 'It's part of his essence as a human being.'
But that essence, Torre felt, needed a new outlet. When he surveyed sports media, he felt the industry had lost a sense of curiosity. Gone were the days he'd pick up a magazine eager to be wowed by what was inside. He knew he was as guilty as any. So much of his world was former jocks yelling at each other about LeBron or the Cowboys.
He wanted to pick up the phone again. So he decided to leave ESPN.
'I tell my wife this show is our second child,' Torre says of 'Pablo Torre Finds Out,' his show for Meadowlark Media that launched in 2023. He's been accused of having 'terminal content brain,' which means he can't turn it off. Every interaction, no matter how trivial, could end up being a bit.
'When your job is professional curiosity,' he says, 'it's all-consuming.'
Some of Torre's closest friends had a running joke after his daughter was born: How long until she shows up in an episode? To their surprise — and relief — it hasn't happened yet. 'He's shown great restraint not turning his daughter into a content mill,' jokes pal and regular PTFO guest Katie Nolan.
Torre is still part-time at ESPN, filling in on PTI and 'Around the Horn' — until its 23-year run ended this month — while his presence on MSNBC continues to grow. He's a regular on 'Morning Joe' and recently guest-hosted for a full week. MSNBC producers were so impressed when Torre came on to talk sports that they decided he should be talking politics, too.
It took longtime host Joe Scarborough all of five minutes to recognize the budding talent. 'Oh,' Scarborough mouthed to a producer during Torre's first appearance, 'this guy's good.'
'We really think we've found somebody,' Scarborough says. 'He jumps on a few times with us and we immediately start hearing from people all over the company, 'This guy's great!' Management seems to love him up and down.'
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All those reps Torre logged debating Dak and the Cowboys and LeBron and the Lakers helped ease the transition. He's become an incisive voice on the network, whether discussing the downfall of Twitter — 'It's like Elon Musk moved into my phone and I have to leave,' he said on air — or the country's immigration crisis.
'Pablo makes TV look easy,' Scarborough says. 'I can promise you, it's not.'
Despite two high-profile television roles, it's 'Pablo Torre Finds Out' that doubles as both a passion project and the biggest bet of his career. One of the reasons Torre had to leave ESPN, he realized, 'was that I wanted to take on subjects and investigate stories I didn't think I had the green light to do there.'
At PTFO, he says, 'adversarial journalism is something I strategize around.'
The reason? Fewer and fewer were doing it. Torre felt that too many sports podcasts were built on the same premise: tackle the day's news, interview some big names, churn out takes of varying temperatures. 'This is something Pablo and I have talked a lot about,' Kimes says. 'These days everybody just talks about what's trending on the internet instead of opening up a magazine or a newspaper and being led to stories they never expected to read, stories that are incredibly well done and fascinating.'
What Torre wanted, he says, was a show 'that would cut through the noise in a way people were not used to in this medium.' It all went back to a lesson he learned at Sports Illustrated. 'When you're reporting a story,' he says, 'the best stuff you get is the s— you don't predict.'
PTFO wouldn't traffic in typical sports fare, even though he knew that's what the metrics told him audiences wanted. 'The algorithm rewards the biggest headlines and the biggest characters and the biggest stories,' Torre concedes. But where was the surprise in that?
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'I look at all the races being run,' he continues. 'I'm not a former professional athlete. I can't sit around and tell stories about my decades-long career. I'm not going to do f—ing pizza reviews. I'm not going to sing karaoke in cars. I'm not gonna eat hot wings across from celebrities.'
So he hired a staff of around a dozen producers and editors, added a rotating cast of correspondents and sought to find stories everyone else was missing.
'I knew it'd be good,' says Meadowlark Media co-founder and longtime sportswriter-turned-radio host Dan Le Batard. 'I knew it was going to surprise me. I could trust that I would follow him on a journey that would end up with a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.'
In the 19 months since its launch, PTFO has interviewed a Cowboys fan on death row in a Texas supermax prison (the episode that earned the show a Peabody nomination). It uncovered how Russian oligarchs were quietly puppeteering the world of Olympic saber fencing. It interviewed Ember Zelch, a transgender athlete at the heart of one of the country's stickiest debates (the episode that won an Edward R. Murrow award).
'Pablo could be doing anything he f—ing wants, which is why he's hosting four hours a day on MSNBC,' says Ezra Edelman, a Torre friend and the Academy Award-winning director of 'O.J.: Made in America.' 'He's got a huge brain. He just chose the toy department as his lane because he wanted to use sports as a way to explore bigger issues.'
Current and former colleagues like Le Batard, former ESPN president and Meadowlark co-founder John Skipper, Kimes and Nolan are staples of the show. One episode featured Torre and a few friends sampling every brand of athlete-sponsored cannabis they could find, complete with reviews. For another, they tried to track down the fax machine Michael Jordan used to send his world-shaking 'I'm Back' memo in 1995. Another featured a tongue-in-cheek inquiry into whether Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo was deliberately missing fourth-quarter free throws to gift the home crowd free Chick-Fil-A.
'The hardest thing to do these days at the algorithm trough we're all feeding at is to constantly produce the things that people say, 'Oh, I wish I had thought of that,'' Le Batard says.
'That's being friends with Pablo,' Nolan adds. 'He'll tell you a story idea he has and you'll whisper to yourself, 'Why can't I think of stuff like that?''
The show has its detractors. Marcus Jordan, son of Michael, and Larsa Pippen, ex-wife of Scottie, bristled at the way they were portrayed in an October 2023 episode of PTFO. 'It was very one-sided,' Pippen said on an episode of the couple's podcast. 'It was a hit piece.'
PTFO has been threatened in the form of nasty emails and phone calls but has yet to be sued. Torre calls this a win considering some of the subject material covered. A recent episode dug into how and why a Venezuelan soccer goalie — a man with no criminal history — disappeared amid the Trump administration's anti-immigration efforts. Another centered on FBI director Kash Patel and his relationship with Wayne Gretzky.
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'This is a famously vindictive guy who has pledged to investigate journalists and seek retribution against the deep state and their enablers in the media,' Torre says of Patel, before half-jokingly adding, 'He might be listening to this call right now!'
No story has generated more traction than his reporting into Belichick, 73, and Hudson, 24. After 'The Jordon Rules' was released on May 9, Torre appeared on dozens of shows to discuss the findings and the fallout, a media car wash of sorts that catapulted PTFO into the mainstream. The University of North Carolina refuted some of his reporting, including the allegation that Hudson was banned from the UNC football facility. Hudson called Torre's reporting 'slanderous, defamatory and targeted' on Instagram before deleting the post.
The attacks on his credibility have irked him — 'I'd be lying if I said that didn't bother me,' he explains — but Torre says he stands by his reporting 'in totality and in specific.' He won't apologize for the tabloid nature of the stories, nor will he hide from the fact that he genuinely enjoyed uncovering what he did. 'It's both highbrow and lowbrow,' he says, 'a study of power that's rarely this unvarnished and this embarrassing.'
PTFO, it seems, is straddling an ever-graying line in modern journalism, balancing the need to attract and maintain an audience without compromising its ethical backbone along the way. Torre knows he's playing the game. He believes for his show to survive, he must.
'I would love it if the Jordon Hudson story was not 10 times more popular than the thing that got us nominated for a Peabody,' he says. 'But I also know that the hardest thing in podcasting and digital media is people literally being aware that you even exist.'
Thus, the unifying premise of the show remains unchanged: uncover something surprising. Mix the silly — even the salacious — with the smart.
'All I want people to know is we do three of these a week, and if you think this one's a little too lowbrow for you, A.) my mom agrees and B.) we're doing stuff that I think proves we are defined by, more than anything, our range,' he says. 'I just want (the Belichick/Hudson story) to be a reason people click on the other stuff.
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'To me, that's the joy of trying to navigate the algorithm in 2025 … as well as the torture of it.'
For Torre, the greatest affirmation comes when someone tells him they listened to an entire episode of PTFO after initially having no interest in the topic. He hopes to ask — and answer — enough questions to keep them coming back.
'It occurred to me that the show's name was the perfect title because it embodied what it meant to be a reporter and discover and be surprised,' he says. 'But it will also be the perfect epitaph if all of this goes horribly wrong.'
(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; photo courtesy of Meadowlark Media)