Who would have thought a battle between a pop star/talk show host and a Brooklyn magic shop would dominate the cultural conversation online?
Indeed, Kelly Clarkson and her Very Online beef with Art of Play over a $15,000 (or is that $15,000,000?) bird automaton has been the story that everyone was talking about this week. But it was Pablo Torre, the host of Pablo Torre Finds Out, who actually advanced it by obtaining the security camera footage of Clarkson’s visit to the store, letting viewers see the interaction in question for themselves.
Torre, of course, is the journalist who broke the Los Angeles Clippers-Kawhi Leonard salary cap scandal, an investigation that resulted in the team and owner Steve Ballmer facing steep penalties and a possible criminal investigation. He was also on The Hollywood Reporter’s New York power list earlier this year thanks to his work breaking that story. Oh year, he won a Pulitzer for it too.
THR caught up with Torre to find out why, exactly, he wanted to look into the Clarkson spat, what goes into producing his show, and sitting at the intersection of the worlds of journalism and the creator economy. (The interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
First of all, why did you even decide to look into this?
On my show, we do have a tendency to take stupid things seriously, and also sometimes serious things stupidly. But this is a story that I became obsessed with because I live here in New York City. I had been to that shop before. I am actually a big on-the-record Kelly Clarkson fan, and this had the making of a modern morality play, in which everyone was trying to figure out what’s true. My show does, I would say, investigations into culture in every investigation that we do into sports, and this felt like something that I think we could contribute to.
I was gonna say one of the things that I love about the show is that you will take months on a really serious deep-dive investigation, but if something’s happening in pop culture, you are not afraid to dive in and explore that. How do you balance those? I have to assume you have a lot of investigations happening at any given time, but sometimes stuff happens. What does it take to reach the level where you feel like, okay, I think we can contribute something to this?
Torre: We are learning that in real time. This is all feeling to me as we make the show, like an experiment, and the returns on our many month investigations, our deepest dives, have yielded a level of result that is beyond our imagination.
But the thing we’re also doing as people who exist on the internet and in the real world is always trying to figure out: Is this thing that’s breaking right now something that we can we can illuminate? And in that way, I don’t think there is anything resembling a rule or a standard for when we blow up a given week that we had planned very carefully for months because a fucking bird automaton became the center of a national controversy.
That is a sentence that, if you were to tell that to me a week ago, I would have felt like I was on acid. But maybe there’s a breaking news story that makes you feel like you’re on drugs, and the only way to sober up is journalism. I’m sort of workshopping this with you now on the phone. Maybe that’s the standard for us, but I don’t know. And that’s kind of the joy is that the unpredictability of what our show ends up being is a mystery box sometimes even to ourselves.
It’s interesting because, when you have a real investigation that I’m sure you work on for a long time, it can lead the news cycle. But you’re right; sometimes following something that’s happening, following the news cycle, if you have a way to contribute, is a way to break through in a way that stands out. We certainly see that. We are just as guilty as everyone else of following the Kelly Clarkson magic shop story.
Well, it’s interesting because something I’ve discovered about my show is that we will do the very deep dives that take sometimes a year, and once they get published and they make an impact on the news cycle, we have seen that the news cycle itself become the best method of our distribution.
We are truly organically benefiting from the fact that we have made news, and I mean that in the sense of the conversation and the coverage, which is organic and not something we can ever control, but then I also mean it in terms of the fact that things happen in real time in response to the story, and also in the unfolding series of events that we’re covering. So it becomes a series, and we never know how many parts.
Obviously, with the Clippers story, we’re at part 16. In this case, I have no idea if we’re ever going to do a sequel on Kelly Clarkson bird stories, but I’m open to it if it’s the right approach. But it has all felt like we’re stumbling into a pseudo-psychedelic true crime series that we’re reporting in real time.
I mean, to be honest, I feel like this is one of those stories that a month from now, 99.9 percent of people will have forgotten about, but in the moment, everyone’s obsessed with it, and that’s fine. That’s part of culture.
So to me, the thing that I grapple with to your very fair point is how do you make disposable things last? And for us, we’re always prioritizing stories with durability that have depth and substance. I should point out that the real tipping point for why we wanted to cover this story, in terms of how we did it in our full episode, was we did recognize that there was a depth of conversation around the power of celebrity and how that power can perhaps be abused when it comes to the audience, and that conversation is not just about Kelly Clarkson. That’s about Taylor Swift and Beyoncé and Donald Trump and BTS and any super famous person who exists in public for whom their fandom is their business, and what happens when they direct it without explicitly saying the thing, but implicitly it seems like there’s a call to action.
At any given moment, how many stories would you say you’re in the process of kind of reporting out?
Torre: Oh gosh, our docket is comical. I mean, we have currently right now — I’m looking at our Google Calendar — we have a dozen things in various stages of production. It’s hard for me to say because the way that our show works is we are always on some sort of a runway, and we’re always unfortunately notifying the people who’ve been passed with, “Hey, can you focus on this story?” “Can you fit inside of this plane?” “We’re gonna get ready for you guys to take off on Tuesday.” Sometimes you end up waiting on the tarmac, and so there are some planes — and I’m not kidding — there are two planes right now that I think are A-plus stories that just have zero news peg, and so we’ve been having these poor people wait on the tarmac for a year, and I so look forward to getting to tell people those stories.
But stuff like this keeps on happening, whether it’s the bird automaton or the next huge Ballmer lawsuit or the next sports gambling development in the Eastern District of New York, it’s all quite a lot.
To what extent would you say your investigations play out in public versus working behind the scenes? With the Clippers investigation, as you said, it’s kind of ongoing. There’s installments that have come up after those first couple episodes, but then you talked earlier this week about Fanatics and LeBron James and that relationship.
That’s a public conversation that maybe turns into something down the line. Is there a benefit to speaking about this stuff publicly? or is it easier to operate privately and then show it when you think it’s ready?
It’s a great question, and we talk about this specific question a lot. In general, I would say that we are always doing more than we can share in public, and that’s the nature of research. That’s the nature of — we’re going to make so many calls and follow so many trails into so many weird rabbit holes — and some of those are dead ends.
But sometimes those end up being the signposts that we follow to the actual truth, and so there is a great inefficiency here, just in terms of man, we are that duck that is paddling furiously under the surface. Even as you can see us flapping our wings wildly, you know we’re still doing a lot more than I think people can ever see. And I don’t mean that to dramatize ourselves. I don’t mean that to say that’s how neurotic we tend to be, but there are also points in any given story when it’s time to show your work, and what we show is what we have deemed to be publishable, what’s deemed fair for publication, and once that’s out there, yeah, we we pride ourselves on telling you this is why we’re doing this. This is how we arrived at this. These are the questions that we still have.
And when we pose a question, sometimes we have a sense of what the answer might be, but sometimes we just don’t know, and so it brings me into, for instance — I’ll just refer to the Clippers thing because it’s the most common frame of reference — It’ll lead me into debate with Mark Cuban, in which I think I knew more than Mark at the various points that we were debating. There were things that I had not published that I did have a pretty strong sense of, that informed my confidence and my convictions, but I wasn’t ready to report that, and I wasn’t ready to say that, and so I didn’t say it. And when I was ready to report, that’s when the public got it.
One of the things that I appreciate is that you sit at this intersection of journalism and the creator economy, and as someone who is a journalist but follows the creator world pretty closely, it’s fascinating to me because there are a lot of journalists at traditional news outlets that have the luxury of spending a lot of time to develop an investigation and publish or release the segment when it’s ready.
But if you’re a creator, you do have to have a regular cadence of stuff. How did you figure out how to do that? I know you have the partnership with The Athletic, which is obviously very helpful, but how do you make sure that you can feed the beast? Whether it’s pure journalism or something like when you had [art critic] Jerry Saltz review sports trophies, how do you make sure you feed that while also doing the journalism that I think you’ve built a reputation for?
So it’s a reverse engineering problem, and so very specifically as a person who has looked into the eyes and I’ve gotten to meet — I guess they’re my fellow creators? Although I don’t think I’m necessarily quite doing what they do. But I, like you, I’m fascinated by them because I didn’t grow up that way, and I also now have a job that requires three episodes a week.
And so, in that reverse engineering of okay, you have three episodes a week, but your goals are different. Your goals are journalistic, they are along the lines of both following your curiosity and making impact. So within that framework, what do you do? I remember meeting MrBeast recently. He was on Morning Joe, and I was co-hosting the show that day. He’s prolific, but also so tired.
Yeah.
Like, they’re all burnt out. I think some of them are superhuman, but a lot of them are just tired. And so, really, the reverse engineering problem is: I have myself, and I think I’ve been privileged to prioritize what I find energizing. At the same time, when I start to create a docket, what I reverse engineer is “Okay, what is the most important stuff that we want to do? What is the shorthand here? What is the Aspiration-level investigation?” Because we’re going to work around that, and so once we sort of place that along our calendar, then we start to backfill, and we’re like, okay, so that’s going to take the most time, the most resources. What’s going to take the second most?
There’s a version of our show where we come out six times a year, and we just do like the deepest dives … But then there’s stuff happening every week, and then you look at the news cycle, and then you figure out, okay, wait a minute, Jerry Saltz. We’re fans of him. We love that guy. We’re trying to always figure out ways to do sport differently. What if we have him review statues? What if we have a butter sculpture of myself made? Did that feel like a parody of my ego, or also a way to make fun of it? So I think it’s sort of how do we plot in things that are different in concept but aren’t as heavy a lift? And once you’re along that path, which is like a different genre of show, you have a lot of fun. And that’s how we have this whole cast of characters who get pulled in to do weird shit. And it’s a bit of a palate cleanser for me, and probably I hope for the audience.
To bring it back to Kelly Clarkson: You did end up buying an automaton for a good cause. It’s a silly story, but you were able to squeeze in something that I think would actually bring some good to the world. Can you explain why you decided to do that when you when you chose to cover the story?
So, among the levels of why that story passed the bar for us, I should point out, is the fact that as soon as I saw that there was this other preferred automaton that Kelly Clarkson had no interest in, and she had so little interest in it, as evidenced by the tape we obtained of the security cameras, that she didn’t even stick around to hear how much it costs, which was $2,000, which is a lot of money.
That occurred to me … Is that too much money for us? Like, if we were to go and buy that other bird, what would we do with it? In that we are I thinking in the spirit of a show like John Oliver’s, frankly, where there’s a third act, and we’ve done our own iterations of that.
In the Aspiration Part One episode, we had a guy dressed as Iron Man plant a tree, a sad little apple tree, a sapling, in front of the Intuit Dome. That was our climactic sort of reveal at the very end of that one. This was another little version of that that we’ve been inspired to do because, in this case, we actually got to bring attention to a real life tragedy. David Samson, who is on these Aspiration episodes with us, who’s a friend of the show and is frequently contributing to the show, his daughter Kyra died over the summer, and I had gotten to know her, I’ve gotten to know David’s family, David’s now one of my closest friends, and his response to that was the most superhuman thing I’ve experienced. Which is that he decided to create the Kyra Fund, fighting glioblastoma, searching for a cure, and he proceeded to go back to work. And so, in honor of that, in honor of having a charity and a cause close to home, I thought, what better way to harness the attention to something that feels profoundly stupid, like a truly petty grievance that had saturated all of our brains. How could we turn all of that attention to something positive?
And so we put it up for auction. And my hope is that some incredibly fiscally irresponsible person can realize that they can own a piece of pop culture history and find a cure for one of the worst forms of brain cancer that exists. So, yeah, I hope people take that part seriously as well.