I'm a

seat warmer at the highest level.

Really good.

And I am proud of my legacy.

One of the things you learn, though, when you're, you know, flipping through the dial.

Yeah.

They're still trying to make this happen.

Go

I can see why it's helping El Sayed's campaign.

And there's now reporting about, OK, well, Mike Rogers is staffers.

Registered for an agent.

Right.

For Israel, this is one of the questions.

This is one of the questions around corruption.

And so, look, it's not new that you would have someone with main character syndrome who reveals herself at the end to be in it for her.

a variable is so clumsy

They said in the report that she tried to retract it, and they still went with the story because they had the good.

Yes.

And so in this case, it is not a letter of the law issue from a legal perspective, but it is a why are you covering this up and what does that allow you to be criticized for and characterized as, which is to say, just like everyone else, which is not the message.

I just like to think like if you're.

you know, at the federal level here, if you're a national Democratic strategist, you're like looking at Alaska, just like facepalming, like, guys.

Did we

But

there is an epistemological question.

I'm not going to do that to my, I'm not going to do that to my, to my,

you know.

We know better is the point though.

We should know better.

Our generation specifically coming out of the Catholic Church, Jesuit educated.

This is not stuff that is like, oh, let me think about that for a second.

This is kind of the thing that makes you uncomfortable with the religion that you perhaps faithfully in our case.

I wonder what you made of it.

If I'm someone who has not tracked your work but want to know where these kind of intersections live, give me a couple examples of how I see some of the issues from the midterms playing out in the sports arena.

Yeah.

So just like as a general observation, sports has never been more valuable in the ways that I said, but that translates into money, meaning that to buy a sports team now, you need to be not just a billionaire, but a billionaire who can afford perhaps a $10 billion purchase, which is to say that really what we're getting into is.

Beyond individual wealth, we're getting into the need to welcome in money from sovereign wealth funds, from private equity, institutional investing.

You're looking at these consortiums of individuals who are not just less human as like a sort of descriptive judgment, but actually as a fact.

You're getting into money that is so beyond our ability to comprehend it that we are, I think, entering a phase in which we're testing how much people can effectively have an inelastic demand for something.

What do I mean by that? What are the limits? How much can you test the public trust until it breaks? So the thing about sports, I mean, and I'll give you one example of, I mean, you can look at the New York Knicks just as an example because they just won the title and it's amazing and I'm in New York and, of course, we feel that in a very real sense.

nuance behind? What if we left complicated ideas behind? What if we made it easy to either confirm what

Week

seven.

Much like the SEC, the players are getting paid millions of dollars.

Right.

And lots of people are mad at them.

Look, the NFL, we say this and I don't want to rag on it because it's, of course, the most popular thing we have going in our country.

But this is mediocrity and it doesn't matter because it's football.

Like this argument is over.

Right, right, right.

That's basic stuff.

This is table stakes, you know? And I do think, look, your point about...

We shouldn't run on truth and reconciliation as an abstract political strategy because there are so many things at the buffet of electability.

I do think, though, that there is a through line in general incompetence and corruption that can connect all of this.

Why would you trust someone who doesn't know the basics of geopolitics to be at the table deciding geopolitics? Exactly.

When your welfare, financial, literal, is on

But we've got to make sure we're making the proper investments.

in a legendary

class.

In like the big Harry Potter theater.

Right.

And into the air would shoot Vivek's hand in the shape of a V to the point where if you told me.

What do you mean by shape of a V? Just like.

Almost like a bad signal for himself, for his takes.

It's like we made the shock jocks into the people running for student council president.

The

theory of football, as we've discussed for years on this show, is that politics is downstream of culture.

The biggest vector of culture is sports and particularly football.

And if you look at how they've been attacking him, I mean, the whole Palo Frico, let's say he's crazy, let's say he's gay, let's say he's in favor of weird trans things.

What brings us back to the center? It's football.

And so, look, Friday Night Lights is about as uncontroversially football and Texas as it gets.

Now, of course, this is Hollywood wearing the costume of football.

It is, man, the playing field is level, isn't it? That's it.

Yeah, there are historical analogs and it's problematic that they exist.

Well, and now combine that with a guy who was literally serving in government, who controls information on one platform where, unfortunately, I resemble this problem.

We're all still there.

The media is at the trough where he is serving up.

conspiracies.

And so, look, I'm not saying that James Tallarico in a mental health facility was something that worked.

Obviously, it didn't.

An animatronic bird.

Pablo, what do you make of the Brewers' accomplishment, and where do the Dodgers go from here?

Before I make anything of it, I should say [clears throat] that I've never seen it.

I've- I was born in 1985.

Brewers haven't been to the World Series since '82.

Their first pennant in the National League, and this guy Jake Bowers is now somebody that I also need to be thinking about because I said yesterday, "We'll deal with the Brewers when they get to the World Series.

The Dodgers, they seem done." Jake Bowers being the MVP of this thing, Tony, this is his fifth team, Milwaukee.

He's a journeyman.

He's gotta go back to what he was last year in the playoffs when he had five touchdowns and no interceptions.

I was going to say, Walter

Isaacson.

No, look, part of what I think about when I see a story like this is how we are all occupying the same room on the internet.

And so the scammers and the conspiracy theorists, the grifters, and this is a story of where all of us are along that spectrum, they got to dictate some element of a real news cycle.

And Walter, look, as a historian, I'm curious who has... interviewed some of the architects of the public forum, in fact, that we are talking about.

What do you make of what's going on in Texas?

The incentives of our

modern information economy.

But, but the fact that, but more on a more serious note, u- utilizing DOJ again Is a big deal.

Yeah, the story here is that the White House loves to run against the press.

It is the comfort zone of this administration, and if we are not so numb as to realize that our federal justice system is being used towards that end, well, perhaps this is worthy of, as it is on the New York Times, uh, A1 coverage.

Um, the victimization is where it's also just insane.

It's the idea of we actually are the ones who are being victimized in this administration by the press, as opposed to having the carriage, so to speak, of the actual Justice Department.

So the whole idea of we are, we're the underdog here, fighting against the big, bad press, it's where it's insult on top of, in this case, potential legal injury.

So, so there are so, so many, uh-

A nation of, of snuff videos is what our timelines feel like, and that's what this administration has been embracing.

The, I mean, the fact that my 11-year-old playing Madden was like, "Hey, I can manage the clock better than the Commanders can," in that game.

There's, there's few things more painful.

I just wanna, I wanna imagine not being Richard Haas, but a Commanders fan right now.

The helplessness of watching in slow motion terrible decisions being made, it's, it's so painful.

And this is a team that was not supposed to be like this.

Just remember, Jayden Daniels was supposed to be the Messiah.

Yeah, he's-

Talking about quarterbacks and how do you get them, last pick in the draft, the guy who was a fluke or a product of the system, and we've seen many other rival quarterbacks emerge, whether it's Justin Herbert, whether it's Jayden Daniels, and they're all more ballyhooed than Brock Purdy, who looks like he's doing, I don't know, '98 Steve Young karaoke.

He's not officially Kawhi's agent, he's more like his shadow representative.

Uncle Dennis is his own sort of variation on the only person I can trust is the guy I grew up with kind of phenomenon.

Um, it's a familiar sort of template, except Uncle Dennis is distinguished by not only being known as simply Uncle Dennis, which is its own phenomenal branding.

He effectively orchestrated a frankly understandable conflict with management in which the Spurs were like, "Hey, we think your injury situation is A," and Uncle Dennis, speaking on behalf of Kawhi Leonard, was like, "Actually, we think it's B, and we're gonna get other opinions, other second medical opinions in other cities to prove the point." And so when Uncle Dennis comes around and says, "Hey, we don't trust your view of the health of Kawhi Leonard's body," that is more than just like a, a, a slight conflict.

That is the precipitating event that led to the split between the team that drafted Kawhi Leonard and, you know, everything else that happened.

Kawhi Leonard.

The document that tipped the entire story from, "This is a weird environmental thing that I don't totally understand," into, "Oh, this is a thing that the NBA might care about," was the employment contract between Kawhi Leonard and Aspiration, which I think it's really important to point out was never announced by anyone.

Like, there was no press release.

[laughs]

Um, you know, it's funny, Wachtell Lipton is one of the finest white shoe law firms in the world.

Uh, they were hired by the NBA to do their, to do their, quote-unquote, independent investigation.

They're an outside counsel, in other words.

Um, Ballmer paid for the bill.

Ballmer has claimed now that he's paid $50 million in legal fees on top of the $30 million in fines.

I have seen, my staff has seen no percentage of those billable hours.

Yeah

Do you think criminal charges are warranted here?

I think that the investigation is absolutely warranted.

I don't get paid enough to make the assessment that you've just asked me for.

I do need to start billing people.

You know, it's funny.

Wachtell Lipton is one of the finest white shoe law firms in the world.

They were hired by the NBA to do their, quote unquote, independent investigation.

You've got to have it buttoned up in your

Do you think criminal charges are warranted here?

I think that the investigation is absolutely warranted.

I don't get paid enough to make the assessment that you've just asked me for.

I do need to start billing people.

You know, it's funny.

Wachtell Lipton is one of the finest white shoe law firms in the world.

They were hired by the NBA to do their, quote unquote, independent investigation.

You've got to have it buttoned up in your

Okay.

What's the conversation happening behind closed doors? What is the conversation you are hearing? So I'll speak about it big picture, and then we can get into the LifeSurge and the Tebow stuff.

Big picture, I just think we're living in the golden age of scams.

And I say that because there has never been more of it that I am personally seeing.

You look into one rabbit hole, and there's a warren of other burrows connected.

I say that also because we're living at a time when we can't necessarily rely on the federal agencies to regulate, you know? And I don't wanna just jump into the politics of this, but that's the era we're living in.

Flows of money are being hidden from us.

Are you protecting the NBA? You protecting the CBA? Like, that, that side of the story, I don't feel sorry for anybody.

But after game one, I mean, it's a reminder, look, I don't wanna just call for a constitutional convention about how to reseed playoff brackets, but the reason the Yankees had the best two records in the AL-

AL-And this is a very long regular season in this sport, and the idea that they gotta play each other right now after the Yankees survived the wild card against your Boston Red Sox, I don't love that.

And you're seeing the Rays in a 1-0 shutout, yeah, prove why they actually are deserving of the respect of everybody else that we tend to focus on in the AL East to their detriment.

So kudos to them, but Cam Schlitter is the young ace that I just count on to relieve my mental health issues.

I think it's good for the country to see that.

I'll tell you that the thing that neither, uh, Senator Slotkin nor I will ever budge on is that you ought to be safe in your place of worship, whether you are Jewish or you're Muslim or you're Christian or you're Hindu or you're Sikh.

And we all believe that this is a place that is better because of our diversity, and we wanna fight to protect that.

It's just inexplicable with the talent they have that they just, their offense looks so... dismal every week.

Yeah, and the Eagles, their defense last year, just to add to that, the defense last year was excellent.

This year for the first three games, it has been just bad.

And that wasn't even the biggest problem against the Rams as we watched some of these highlights.

The problem is that the Eagles are supposed to be a contender top to bottom in a city, by the way.

This is the funny thing about, as you know, Joe, sports.

Philadelphia is unsparing and detailed in its criticism.

As weird

Because of the

marriage.

I think that a union under God does tend to do these things.

Amen.

And all the people said.

But Mr.

Irrelevant, Brock Purdy.

Why is it predatory?

Would you be on board with the Yankees not starting Schlittler in game one?

I find only one justification for even entertaining that Cam Schlittler wouldn't be starting game one, and that is because you're somehow trying to avoid throwing Gerrit Cole against the Red Sox.

That's the only th- I'm trying to, like, play this out, reverse engineer it.

Like, why are you even talking about this? And as somebody who watched Gerrit Cole choke, of course, in the World Series, didn't cover first base, all that stuff.

You've heard me complain about this before.

Yeah, I'm also concerned about that guy.

I think the Wild Card round is in fact the thing you gotta care about.

Oh

Why?

We have a current LifeSurge employee who's on tape with us attesting to the very things that people who have been not just leaving negative reviews, but making these allegations outside of the company.

We have that employee saying it inside of it.

You know, this is a big place, LifeSurge, that I think people are perhaps right to have fear of retribution around.

And so we have the current employee, we have a former employee, we have an attendee who put in tens of thousands of her money and lost it, and is talking to us about it.

We have another attendee, who is a sports gambling addict, who wound up putting in to LifeSurge not just his trust, but his money, to help him figure out, "How can I climb out of the hole that I have in my life?" We have our reporter, Kira Butler from Mother Jones, attending the conference as well.

We have this sort of panoramic view in addition to tapes and recordings and video from inside of this thing that tells the story, yes, I, I think as a documentary would, but one that did not get formal access to it, but as a result got to be inside of it in a way that no one actually, I think, expected us to get.

So, so I'm more inclined, because it's Tim Tebow, because of the reputation that he's deservedly earned because of his good work, I'm inclined to just believe he's gotten caught up in something here, and he is a, a, a victim What's a you?

That was the intention of that drill.

Sports were always, to me, a liberal arts education.

What do I mean by this? I mean that, as you know, inside of it, you can talk about everything.

You can talk about race, you can talk about business, you can talk about religion, you can talk about psychology, you can talk about science, you can talk about politics, all of it.

And so sports for me has always been my, I was always the guy at Sports Illustrated and at ESPN who was using sports as the way to get to other stuff because everything is sports if you sort of like look hard enough.

It was my view.

But then over time, I just realized, what if I stopped the pretense and just talked about the stuff I wanted to talk about through sports just directly? And so a couple of years ago now, this is I think June.

you know.