Pablo Torre Is Still Asking the Big (and Lightly Stoned) Questions About Sports

Pablo Torre only began hosting ESPN Daily, the Worldwide Leader’s daily sports podcast, in 2020, inheriting it from his friend and colleague Mina Kimes. But you’d be forgiven for thinking he took the reins years ago: over the course of not quite three years, he hosted some 700 episodes of the show, everything from an exploration of NFL draftniks’ preference for big butts to achingly frequent check-ins on the chaotic Brooklyn Nets. 

He brought to the show a joyful, probing curiosity honed both in the longform mines (he was once, long ago, a magazine writer) and in TV’s hot-take economy, having appeared for years on ESPN’s various debate shows—and having, for a time, co-hosted his own show, High Noon, with Bomani Jones. For a daily digest produced by the biggest game in town, ESPN Daily was surprising and smart and even sometimes weird. 

Which made it something of a surprise when, last month, Torre announced that he’d be leaving ESPN (sort of; he’ll keep appearing on TV) to do…something…at Meadowlark Media, the startup founded by longtime ESPN president John Skipper and longtime ESPN radio host Dan Le Batard. He’s knows that he'll release his new project (working title: “Pablo Torre Is Having Second Thoughts”) into a world where many athletes have their own podcasts. This dynamic threatens the traditional sportswriter—but also just maybe creates a lane for Torre to do what he does best. “Athletes are absolutely better at giving you insight into their sports than you are,” he told me when we spoke over the phone recently. “And so I feel like there's this general reckoning—it's an existential question with journalists and with media people. How do we actually add value to this?”

GQ: What do you remember about your first day or week at ESPN?

Pablo Torre: Oh, my God. I skipped rookie camp. I feel like I've been living this off-the-grid existence at ESPN, because I never went to the thing [in Bristol, Connecticut] where they sit you next to Antoine Walker and you both have to learn the equivalent of how to put a condom on a banana, but instead it's a Disney HR video webinar. I avoided that somehow. 

I joined as a senior writer at ESPN magazine (RIP). And I had been appearing on The Sports Reporters—that was the first on-air stuff I had done at ESPN. And so I came in as a bright-eyed longform magazine writer, here to write profiles, who was already being radicalized by the drug of television. I had thrown around the word “multi-platform” before, and for the first time I was actually grappling with what that means. I did Around the Horn in October, started that same month at the magazine, and immediately found myself as this mid-20s sports writer who was either the most Chinese looking man with a Mexican name, or the opposite, for Twitter feedback to ever appear on ESPN. But it was just like, Who is this guy? He's racially ambiguous, and he's also using a lot of big words. Who is this person? And I just remember doing both of those things simultaneously and realizing, I really enjoyed this.

It's barely a decade ago, which isn't that long—but also feels like it's been an enormously long time in terms not just of representation in entertainment, but also how we talk about sports on TV, or on the internet. You seemed comfortable talking about numbers and complicated concepts—and while we're never going to entirely replace the sports yelling stuff, over the last decade or so, that's come into vogue. How did you see the job change over your time there?

I think my mandate was always to try and make complicated things simple and comprehensible for an audience that wasn't naturally predisposed to that sort of treatment. And the job itself, I've only seen the collective brain of sports media get eaten by the internet, in the sense of, where are we getting our ideas and what are we talking about, the degree to which technology has reshaped the rundown of any given show, and therefore the sensibilities of sports fans. We were magazine editors who used to curate sports from this editorial remove, where we got to pick and choose what we found interesting. Now we're now trying to reverse-engineer, essentially, attention, and therefore doing the same thing that literally everybody's doing, which is stumbling backwards into the algorithm.

What's your sports intake these days?

Man, now it's fully, just: get lightly stoned and watch NBA games. I'm sampling the baseball. I love the [pitch-clock] experiment. I really am into it. I loved the women's tournament so much: here is a story in which every thread of culture can be pulled on and unraveled through it. But yeah, I'm trying to be omnivorous. It's weird. I'll watch the Masters this week—I'll fall asleep watching the Masters this week. I'll reflect on how the cheese pimento sandwich is itself a Filipino delicacy, that speaks to a legacy of colonialism and empire building. Because US Army based in the Philippines birthed the cheese pimento sandwich, this cheap thing that became a delicacy for Filipinos. I'll try to make connections across sports, again, in that lightly stoned but also academic way. 

But in general, it's weird, man. I'm trying to wrestle with: why is wrestling a sport now? When did this happen? And am I supposed to treat this seriously in some way? It's weird when the UFC and wrestling are the same company. And it seems like we're just steps away from a card in which, god, Conor McGregor is the undercard for Stone Cold Steve Austin's revival tour. It feels like we're rebooting IP in this increasingly bizarre Mad Libs way. To what degree are we actually just out on the idea that this is actually an event in question? Are we out on the idea that outcome is actually central to the premise of what we're doing in sports? Every debate about sports in the past seemed to revolve around, is golf a sport? And you would begin to dissect, Okay, well you don't play defense, you walk, you don't run. Fat guys can play it. Okay. Is it really a sport? But now it feels like just the business is driving the definition. If you can get a bunch of dudes to watch something live, it's sports.

Eventually in 2020 you inherit ESPN Daily from Mina Kimes. It's successful, it's the flagship podcast. But you also really made it your own. What did you set out to do with it initially, and then how did you find that mission evolving or changing while you were doing it?

I inherited this show that I admired from afar, but I realized that what I wanted to do was essentially turn it into a daily magazine. I keep returning to magazines as this north star for what I'm interested in, because it protects us in some sense from the incentives and pressures of the attention economy that I just described. ESPN Daily was essentially a version of the New York Times Daily: here is what you should know today as a sports fan. But my realization was, it's really hard to guilt someone into wanting to learn about hockey in the way that you can guilt someone into wanting to know about voting rights. Sports fandom is so fragmented in a way that is different from politics and political news. So what I really wanted to do was create a show that told whatever the best story possible was that day. And that often came from the world of features (as well as explainers and analytics-driven examinations, and newsmaker interviews). But to me, I always wanted to turn it into something that felt more like a daily magazine, in which we justified our own coverage of something in a way that felt like a different approach to how to interpret the news cycle.

Occasionally something would pop up and I would hear your excitement at being so captivated by something you didn't expect to be interested in. I'm wondering what sticks out to you—things that you did not think you would care about, but holy cow, I am invested in this. 

Oh, my God. So many things. The thing that I am proudest of is that ESPN Daily came to be a vessel for my curiosities. I was like, what if this is a show where I am perpetually delighted by shit I don't know? And it ends up being a different way of consuming sports. And so literally everything from, God, we did an episode about a cricket scam, and how it led to this larger discussion about the history of scams in a sport that I know nothing about. All the way to all of these stories that are driven, essentially, by memes. One of my favorite stories is, why is crying Jordan the foremost meme of our time? And it ends up being a story about human psychology and virality, and a man who is fundamentally, deeply sad despite all of his successes. One of my favorite stories was about explaining whether Jalen Rose was the first Jalen. The idea that here is somebody who I know who has this boast about himself, and I don't know if it's true or not—well, let's find out. Dude, we're doing stories about distance runners, and just sports that I don't authentically have a super large interest in. 

What ESPN Daily did for me, also, was open me up to women's sports, to be frank. Here's a bunch of characters that I'm not as well versed in, and I end up realizing, wait a minute, Kelsey Plum is this fascinating protagonist. And I'm a fan of hers for life because I did an episode that was a profile of her. 

What's the great lost ESPN Daily idea? What was the one real boondoggle, wacky, weird, out-there idea that you didn't have a chance to do?

I'm going to say this to you at the risk of jinxing it. But there is a soccer player who is currently one of the best prospects in the world who plays for Barcelona, and his name is Pablo Torre, and he started taking over my whole shit. There are not many Pablo Torres on this planet

He was fucking with your SEO.

Yes. My Google alerts got all fucked up. My mentions got all fucked up. Because fucking young, handsome, Spanish, Barcelona-playing Pablo Torre emerged on the scene last year. And so I have been on a quest to confront him about the Highlander aspect of being the one Pablo Torre in sports, and possibly the world. And it involves me going to Spain and using my Spanish language skills that I learned in college, despite my name suggesting that I would be able to speak it fluently. I wanted to meditate on names. Am I the beta now? Do I have to be be Pablo A. Smith? Am I leaning further into my initial? This is about celebrity. This is about colonialism. 

It's about where names come from.

Exactly. It comes from a heritage of raping and pillaging the Philippine Islands, the Spanish Empire. And so it's about all of these big-picture things, and it's about this kid who's apparently legitimately awesome. And the question that I always had was, am I rooting for him or am I rooting against him? And as I thought more about it, it was clear that I saw him as my enemy. So I wanted to do an episode entirely about how I was going to try to defeat him.

I say this all to say that I'm still coming for Pablo Torre. For the other Pablo Torre.

In hearing you reflect on this stuff, these are not necessarily the most obvious stories. There was an embrace of the weird and the specific, and the particular, and the surprising, that isn't necessarily what you'd think of for ESPN's flagship podcast.

We were constantly inadvertently subverting the notion of playing to the algorithm. You need to trust us that this is something you're going to want to listen to. Because on paper, the notion of, here's an obscure hockey rule is not the thing that's going to lead the A block of First Take. This is not how most shows get programmed. And certainly even podcasts, which are all about trying to find audiences where they are. We're essentially tugging on the sleeve of people who are pointed in another direction to be like, But check this shit out. There's something here that you should listen to and think about that you haven't before.

I think the art of being a generalist in sports right now has resulted mostly at the very extreme end of the spectrum. Where it's Stephen A., it's Bill Simmons, it's PTI. And it's people who traffic in takes. And what I'm trying to do, what I've been trying to do at ESPN Daily and will be doing at my next thing, is explaining why there is an umbrella under which your interest is actually deserving of consideration. And it's not going to be the things you already know you love, it's going to be the stuff that exists at the margins of sports. But without being a generalist, you don’t end up realizing that there's value in the stuff that isn't immediately obvious A-block or clickbait material. 

I should say too, I am somebody who has learned a lot from Stephen A. Smith. There's this funny thing of trying to be the guy who is defining opposition to his general approach, while also recognizing that I learn all of the time by watching him do television. 

What's one really specific thing you've learned from Stephen A.?

The art of negative space. His ability to confidently say nothing, to pause, is breathtaking to me. Because when you're on TV, everything feels like it's moving at a million miles an hour. And so you need the supreme confidence to just be quiet, to make the next thing you're going to say impactful at a level that other people are mostly afraid to try. He had a sentence once where he was like, “Carmelo Anthony is…”—one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi—“bad.” And it was incredible. I think Tony Kornheiser is the best to ever do sports television, but I think Stephen A. Smith is the best at, and this is ironic given the scouting report on Stephen A., I think no one has been better at saying nothing than Stephen A. Smith. 

Unique among a lot of your colleagues, you did a bunch of different stuff at ESPN—which, historically, I don't get the sense is the easiest place to do a bunch of different stuff at. I'm curious about the degree to which that was intentional and the degree to which it was the way things broke for one reason or another.

It was intentional insofar as I knew that I wanted to try everything. What I didn't realize is that I would enjoy essentially everything. And that once you can figure out how to do something reasonably well, they just keep on throwing you in that pool. And so something that I have defined myself by is just versatility. This is something that was true to ESPN Daily, but also the world of sports talk shows in general. If you need someone to talk about the most serious topic on the docket, I'm here for that. If you need somebody who is going to laugh way too hard at his own double entendre that undoubtedly refers to an athlete's dick, I'm also here to do that. There is a real scope of interests that I have. 

But where it has left me, as I now begin to tumble backwards onto this therapy couch, is that I do feel like I'm trying to build a home. What I have not yet done is build a home that is of my own design. You could say that I've attempted to renovate a couple things. I've been a partner in the construction of a house, like High Noon. But in terms of the thing that is mine, that is built—and this is going to sound like a giant egomaniac speaking—but that is built in my image, which is to say an image that is fragmented across every platform that is covering and touching stories of all kinds of varying tones, that hasn't happened yet. And that's the challenge that I am giving myself to take a swing that is that big, that ends up feeling at the end of it like I built a home for myself.

Alright. Tell me about the new thing. I want to know about the new thing.

The new thing is currently a blank piece of paper in front of me that is terrifying to stare at. Truly what I'm trying to do is figure out, how do I create a home on the internet that allows me to be all of these versions of myself that I have learned to like in the last decade at ESPN? I am the guy who loves to do original storytelling, who loves to do narrative podcasting, as for ESPN Daily. But I'm also the guy who likes to be a gasbag on PTI and Around the Horn. In between there is this challenge of, how do I zag away from the news cycle while also directly engaging with it? How do I be somebody who talks about ideas, but in ways that they actually resonate with people who just want to maybe get stoned and watch a basketball game? How can I be a guy who is highbrow and lowbrow at the same time? 

And so I settled on, unsurprisingly, the metaphor of a magazine. I want to create a magazine in sports audio that allows me to be different versions of myself, that allows me to play every emotion in that register. I want to do serious investigations. I want to laugh at shit. I want to be the guy who is unpacking the history of a meme. It's horrifying to be the person who is asked to have creative control over that kind of a thing. But one thing that I absolutely want to reckon with is that progress in sports is coming at costs that we have not yet fully accounted for. If I can chronicle the future of where this thing that I love is going, and warn people as well as articulate for them these complicated things that should be more simple, then I'll feel okay about it. But it's fucking scary.

Will this take the shape of…a daily podcast about sports?

I have promised myself that I would not make a daily podcast, simply because I know what it takes to do it really, really well, and it is the thing that became unsustainable to me by the end.

By the way, there is freedom in a daily podcast. You're playing baseball at that point. You don't need to feel like every at bat needs to end in a home run, even though you're going for that in a real sincere way. For me, I'm Goldilocksing all of this: how engaged with the news cycle am I, on a scale of, not at all to fully immersed. I'm Goldilocksing, is this a weekly show versus five days a week? Do I land at three? I'm Goldilocksing the degree of straight-up conceit. Am I a defined thing that is trying to fit everything inside of a box, or am I trying to survey the world of sports in general? All of this stuff is what I spend every day of my life now grinding my teeth about.

Is there a way in which you suspect that maybe High Noon was early, or ahead of its time?

Yeah, I do. What we wanted to do there was get to deeper layers and levels of a story and deconstruct it, with a point of view that is not so easily replicable. To the point where I think it was ahead of the curve. The question that I've always wondered with High Noon was, what if this was a podcast? How would its fate have been different? I think it's kind of a perfect podcast, when I think back on it. Oh, we're a formatted show that allows for all of these digressions, but also a focused conversation using expertise that isn't widely available in sports. That feels more future-proofed than a lot of other concepts, except it was too early, I think for the future.

When do you want to get this thing out in the world?

We're going to launch this summer. That's the plan. Not sure beyond that. I can tell you that one working title that I have for it is, Pablo Torre Is Having Second Thoughts, which is both an embodiment of the size of the project I'm going to embark on, and also the idea that I want to rethink and report on sports. So that is a placeholder title. But it makes me laugh when I think about it, so that's labeled on my Google Doc right now.

In the meantime, I'm basically doing a crash course in how to prepare for the future of this uncertain media economy by studying the people who do it really well. So I'm deconstructing Bill Simmons' pod and Ryen Russillo's pod. I'm talking to producers at This American Life: how the fuck do you do this? I just had a call today with a producer who worked on Reply All. My vision board of shows spans everything from the chat show, super, super-sports heavy, to the most prestige narrative journalists who are here to do audio storytelling infrequently. And I'm trying to figure out, what's in between that hasn't existed in sports yet?

This interview has been edited and condensed.