The Best People with Nicolle Wallace
Jun 22, 2026 · 51 min · 22 segments
Pablo Torre thinks sports are the “skeleton key.” The journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning host of the podcast of “Pablo Torre Finds Out” joins Nicolle to talk about the potent power of the game: how…
Pablo TorreGuest
Nicolle WallaceHost
Um, and I get it, because my whole thing in sports is I'm the guy who's trying to convince everybody else, "Hey, sports is a liberal arts education.
We should and are empowered to, in fact, obligated to talk about everything as it connects to all of the issues that have always been in sports." But that's inside of sports.
When I get to the place that I've been enjoying being in, in cable news and in political conversation in the last several years, it's the reverse dynamic.
And if we're gonna fight a culture war as a civilization, you might wanna know which terrain the opposition has already taken the high ground on." And, and for me, look, it's just basic math.
If you're fighting a culture war and the monoculture, the biggest cultural institution available happens to be sports, it would be insane and self-defeating to cede that territory, especially when the people who are planting their flag on it are themselves pretenders, pretending in ways that they are getting away with because of the lack of fluency maybe in the subject matter-
I think that sports, you mentioned, right, like sports has been effectively the toy department.
We look down our nose through our reading glasses at sports, collectively speaking, as like proper whatever, uh, journalists or, or again, highbrow consumers and purveyors of political information.
But in reality, what sports is is an incredible TV show that, sure, has various, um, aspects that should make you a bit discomfited in terms of corruption and conflicts of interest and all of that, but really what it is is what and how America talks to itself.
Um, and I get it, because my whole thing in sports is I'm the guy who's trying to convince everybody else, "Hey, sports is a liberal arts education.
We should and are empowered to, in fact, obligated to talk about everything as it connects to all of the issues that have always been in sports." But that's inside of sports.
When I get to the place that I've been enjoying being in, in cable news and in political conversation in the last several years, it's the reverse dynamic.
And if we're gonna fight a culture war as a civilization, you might wanna know which terrain the opposition has already taken the high ground on." And, and for me, look, it's just basic math.
If you're fighting a culture war and the monoculture, the biggest cultural institution available happens to be sports, it would be insane and self-defeating to cede that territory, especially when the people who are planting their flag on it are themselves pretenders, pretending in ways that they are getting away with because of the lack of fluency maybe in the subject matter-
I think that sports, you mentioned, right, like sports has been effectively the toy department.
We look down our nose through our reading glasses at sports, collectively speaking, as like proper whatever, uh, journalists or, or again, highbrow consumers and purveyors of political information.
But in reality, what sports is is an incredible TV show that, sure, has various, um, aspects that should make you a bit discomfited in terms of corruption and conflicts of interest and all of that, but really what it is is what and how America talks to itself.
Every episode on Radar is fully transcribed, speaker-labeled, and rich with metadata. Here is a taste of this one. Try Radar for free to see the rest.
3 of 6
UFC Deal = Pure Corruption
Here's Torre on UFC politics and corruption
Towns, Grief, Knicks Joy
Remembering loss through Karl-Anthony Towns' story today
World Cup Pop-Up Jail
Kansas City's secret World Cup jail exposed
+3 more clips · 4 min 39 sec of audio in all
7 of 25
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
All 6 clips — the highlight moments, each cut as its own audio, with a title and a speaker
All 22 segments — the transcript broken into labeled sections, every ad read marked
All 25 topics — jump to every other episode discussing the same subject
Every related episode — other shows Radar links to this one
No account is needed to search Radar.
