The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: Pablo Torre ’03 on His Hit Podcast

On the acclaimed Pablo Torre Finds Out, the 2003 Regis alumnus investigates the highbrow, the lowbrow, and everything in between.

While a student at Regis, Pablo Torre ’03 thought he had his whole career planned out. He would sit in the Hearn room and look through old copies of the Regian, pausing on alumni thriving in the legal industry — Supreme Court clerks, federal prosecutors, and the like. He wanted that for himself.

As he wrapped up his four years at Harvard and looked ahead to law school, he took the LSATs, expecting it to be the first step on his path to a career as a lawyer. Even when the test didn’t go well, he considered it a detour. He’d do something else for a year, he figured, then take the test again.

Torre had covered sports for the Harvard newspaper and had interned for Sports Illustrated online, where he got his first byline on a story about an up-and-coming competitive eater named Joey Chestnut. And so he applied for a job as an SI fact-checker, intending to do it for a year while studying for his LSAT re-do.

He got the job, and he found that not only did he like the work, his friends in their first years of law school were suddenly jealous of what he was doing.

“I was like, wait a minute, I should maybe reconsider what success can look and feel like,” he says. “Writing and reporting was exercising my brain and curiosity in ways that frankly, I think a lot of people who go to law school tell themselves that the legal industry will, but I was doing it as a journalist, and that was wildly, wildly fun to me.”

He stuck with the job at SI, and the career shift has paid off. After stints at some of the most storied outlets in sports journalism, Torre in 2023 launched Pablo Torre Finds Out, a podcast that has since won an Edward R. Murrow Award for Sports Reporting, been nominated for a Peabody Award, and been named one of Time magazine’s 100 best podcasts of all time, one of just six sports podcasts on the list. The podcast, which explores topics both serious and silly with equal vigor, has allowed Torre to explore the full range of his interests and to build a following that’s eager to join him on these varied investigations.

Torre’s big break at SI came in 2012, when Knicks guard Jeremy Lin captured the attention of the sports world with a string of incredible games. Torre had previously written about Lin, a fellow Harvard alum, and was assigned to write a cover story about him for the magazine. When “Linsanity” stretched into a second week, Torre’s scoops graced the magazine’s cover for a second consecutive issue.

Later that year, Torre joined ESPN as a writer for its magazine, and he also began to appear on the network’s TV programs, giving him a new platform to share his sharp insight. Among those shows was Around the Horn, the daily roundtable show on which he’d appear on more than 600 times and occasionally guest host.

Torre’s work at ESPN eventually grew to include a daily TV show (High Noon, co-hosted with Bomani Jones) and the ESPN Daily podcast, which would focus on a new topic each day, often featuring other ESPN personalities.

When Torre left his full-time position at ESPN for Meadowlark Media in 2023, he had the opportunity to design his own show — one that took advantage of his talents as a dogged reporter, a skilled interviewer, and a generally curious person with good instincts for what makes for an interesting story. That show, Pablo Torre Finds Out, can take on various forms: in-depth interviews, original reporting, or discussion with other journalists who operate on a similar wavelength to Torre’s. The common thread is Torre’s singular sensibility guiding each episode and inviting listeners to at least temporarily care about, to give just one example, competitive birdwatching.

The topics covered are intentionally eclectic. One episode explores what sports fandom is like for prisoners on death row. Another tells the story of an investment banker moonlighting as an independent wrestler named JP Lehman. Torre has done serious reporting on the NFL Players Association, as well as less-serious reporting on the Sopranos-themed video the Knicks used to try and recruit LeBron James in 2010. He’s conducted thoughtful, long-form interviews with guests like journalism legend Connie Chung and Mets President of Baseball Operations David Stearns, and he’s also reviewed athlete-branded fragrances and investigated rigging at MTV’s Total Request Live.

“My comfort zone has always been how to be both smart and stupid, how to be highbrow and lowbrow, how to be sports but also non-sports,” Torre says. “It’s like a mystery box, and every so often, will you want to open it up and see what’s inside? I’m betting on the curiosity of our audience.”

And, he hopes, listeners who learn about the podcast on one of its headline-making episodes — such a series of shows about football coach Bill Belichick — will discover the back catalog and dive in.

“I hope they’ll realize that there’s 250 prior episodes, which are 250 more mystery boxes,” he says.

On several occasions, he’s been joined by members of the Regis community. Martin Bell ’99 appeared on an episode to discuss prosecuting an illegal importer of stolen dinosaur bones. Patrick Wolf ’03 joined the show to talk about performing in high school with Stefani Germanotta, the Convent of the Sacred Heart student who’d later become famous as Lady Gaga. Jon Sciambi ’88, the Cubs play-by-play announcer who also serves as the broadcasting voice of the MLB The Show video game, appeared on an episode to surprise a superfan of the game. Stephanie Ruhle P’27 joined Torre to talk about the economy, while Mike Breen P’09’15 appeared on an episode celebrating NBA halftime performer extraordinaire Red Panda.

“I think that a part of what makes the show great is the degree to which Pablo has managed to distill his own essence into the show,” says Bell. “It really is just an hour spent with some particularly resonant aspect of Pablo, whether it’s the guy who asks good questions, the mischief maker who will sit around throwing tons and tons of genuine brain power at just about the silliest question you could imagine, or the trained journalist at work.”

Torre, who also appears regularly on MSNBC and who reached a licensing agreement this summer for his show to join the podcast network of the New York Times’ The Athletic, says that the seeds of his career can be traced back to 84th Street.

“When I look back, the dominoes start with Regis,” he says. “I was encouraged to speak in public at Regis. My confidence in writing comes from Regis. My fantasy football league that I still belong to started at Regis. It’s been very traceable through all of this.”

This article appears in the Fall 2025 issue of Regis Magazine.