Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out Share & Burn Book & Tell with Joe Mande and Mike Schur About this episode How did Adam Silver end up in bed with a paper magnate? Why did a 77-point airing of grievances about A-Rod help to free Anthony Edwards? And can this all be solved with an Aspiration credit card? Plus: Moldovan bots, embroidered hats, Sporcle quizzes and one very confusing encounter at the Mall of America.
• Previously on PTFO: How the Billion-Dollar War to Own the Timberwolves Went Nuclear https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmOkcQwZ-s8
• Further content: The Long Days and Wild Nights That Saved the Wolves from Leaving Minnesota by Jon Krawczynski https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/1939924/2020/08/06/timberwolves-sale-glen-taylor-1994-minnesota-new-orleans/
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Transcript 10,942 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Pablo Torre? Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.
0:06 Speaker 01 I auctioned off a bunch of hats for charity, and all the money, obviously, went to Kawhi Leonard.
0:12 Pablo Torre? Yeah. Right after this ad.
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0:30 Pablo Torre? Everybody, listen up.
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2:28 Pablo Torre? Can either of you tell me what this is?
2:34 Speaker 01 Is that an ABA basketball?
2:37 Pablo Torre? Close. Is that a Continental Basketball Association basketball? Here's your hint for what this is behind me. Ready?
2:43 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
2:47 Pablo Torre? Oh, is that Larry Bird three-point contest?
2:49 Speaker 01 That's Larry Bird's [bleep] walk-off three?
2:53 Pablo Torre? That's awesome.
2:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:54 Pablo Torre? Bought it at an auction.
3:12 Pablo Torre? How much did Mike Schur pay for that, Joe? What would you, what would you set the market value for Mike Schur's ownership of? I would say a staff writer's salary.
3:25 Pablo Torre? There's no writers on A Man on the Inside this year, because I had to get some stuff.
3:30 Speaker 01 Too many basketballs.
3:31 Pablo Torre? Why didn't the Field of Dreams show happen? Well, Mike decided to buy a basketball. It's kind of a short story, actually. Spent all the money on memorabilia. How uncut gems was the bidding? It wasn't that bad, mostly because it is not 100% verifiable. This could just be a basketball.
3:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:49 Pablo Torre? Like, it's possible that it's just a ball.
3:51 Speaker 01 You couldn't find a provenance?
3:53 Pablo Torre? There is a provenance letter that was from a guy who was like, I was there with my kid. He was a big Larry Bird fan. Bird sank the shot. The ball bounced to us and the guy, like, brought it over and was like, here, you can keep this. So, like, could be lying. Don't, I don't really care, as far as I'm concerned.
4:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
4:10 Pablo Torre? I'm just, I've decided it's the, it's the ball, so it's the ball. I am fairly certain that someone has, has scammed you, now that you spell it out like that. Yeah, it's totally possible.
4:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
4:22 Pablo Torre? When you live a, a life that, that kind of life I live, you're, you make peace with the idea that you're being scammed constantly with these things.
4:47 Pablo Torre? Joe and Mike, you guys obviously know each other extremely well. Joe, I last saw in person, maybe, I'm sure I've seen you since the All-Star Game in New Orleans.
4:59 Speaker 01 Yes.
4:59 Pablo Torre? When I saw you at that party.
5:01 Speaker 01 Yes.
5:01 Pablo Torre? And I was wearing a Les Misérables shirt.
5:05 Pablo Torre? And I feel like at some point in that conversation, I discovered the thesis for why I've been telling you for months, you need to come on the show.
5:14 Speaker 01 Okay.
5:15 Pablo Torre? Which is that Joe Mandy is the world's number one Minnesota Timberwolves fan.
5:19 Speaker 01 I'm in the, you know, top 10 for sure.
5:21 Pablo Torre? Who's your competition? Yeah, who else is in that top 10?
5:23 Speaker 01 I mean, probably Craig Kilborn. They run, they rolled out the red carpet for Craig Kilborn and Sooty Lee. She, yeah, so, you know.
5:31 Pablo Torre? All right.
5:32 Speaker 01 There was a humiliating moment where I was on the Jumbotron at the Target Center last time I was there, but then she was next and she had just won multiple medals in the Olympics. So she got a, uh, well, she got a reaction, which I did not get from the crowd. But, um, but yeah, I'm, I'm a Timberwolves obsessive for sure.
5:53 Pablo Torre? Mike, how would you explain what the Jumbotron should have said about who Joe Mandy is besides his Timberwolves fandom? It should have said comedian, comma, provocateur. That's how I would describe you. Yeah. Guy who acquired 1 million bots on Twitter. Oh, yeah. Where were they from again? Moldova?
6:14 Speaker 01 Uh, yes, Moldova.
6:16 Pablo Torre? The same place your basketball came from, Mike.
6:22 Pablo Torre? We were doing, we were, it was Parks and Rec era, right?
6:24 Speaker 01 That was, yeah.
6:26 Pablo Torre? It could have said, the Jumbotron, comedian, provocateur, nihilist. I think that would also apply because Joe was like, Twitter is stupid. This is all stupid. None of this matters. I'm going to buy 1 million bots from Moldova for my Twitter account to, to make the point. And this is way pre-
6:46 Speaker 01 Elon, to make the point that follower account is stupid.
6:50 Pablo Torre? I want to quote from Joe's Twitter bio, which may remain frozen in amber. Twitter is trash. Facebook's the devil. I bought 1 million followers for like $400. None of this matters. Antarctica is melting.
7:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:04 Pablo Torre? Watch my special on Netflix.
7:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:06 Pablo Torre? Uh, winky tongue out emoji.
7:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:09 Pablo Torre? You remember your location?
7:11 Speaker 01 Was it Hollywood, but all the O's are like stars of David or something?
7:15 Pablo Torre? That's right.
7:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, okay.
7:16 Pablo Torre? And your website is TrumpPrisonCamp.com.
7:18 Speaker 01 Right. Someone bought that domain for me and it went straight to my website.
7:22 Pablo Torre? Oh.
7:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:23 Pablo Torre? Nice. Uh, I hesitate to inform you that the registration on that has not been kept up.
7:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't expect someone to keep that up for me.
7:32 Pablo Torre? Yeah, and you're also down to now 492.9.
7:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, I was purged. Yeah.
7:38 Pablo Torre? Ah, bummer. You lost like 200 bucks.
7:41 Speaker 01 Yeah. But I may have funded a civil war in Moldova. I don't know where that money went to, but yeah.
7:49 Pablo Torre? So you guys worked together on Parks and Rec, obviously. I looked for some Morris highlights.
7:53 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
7:54 Pablo Torre? Hard to find on YouTube at least. I don't know if you guys can share some archival Morris footage with me? Or explain even who Morris, what Morris's full name is and who he was?
8:06 Speaker 01 I think he's Alerpis. I think he finally became Alerpis towards the end.
8:11 Pablo Torre? We named it, just to fill people in here, we named a character, we gave a character on the show with the last name Lerpis. L E R P I S S. And then we decided that the Lerpis family was like the low rent Kennedys of the town of Pawnee, Indiana, and that they were this like sprawling, multi-generational dynasty of just losers though, not like powerful people. So when, so Joe played a character named Morris who, how would you describe him? He was basically you. He was just a dude who showed up to meetings and like, yeah.
8:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was very much based on me and it was just like informing people that you can download movies for free. You don't have to like rent them.
8:50 Pablo Torre? Yeah, you just showed up in places and pointed out how stupid everything was and.
8:56 Speaker 01 And the name Morris came from a game we played in the room, which was Morris was the name everyone agreed should be my name. If we, if I wasn't given a name by my parents. So everyone has like a name they sort of embody.
9:11 Speaker 04 The movie's 25 years old, Morris. And if you don't like how I tweet, don't follow me.
9:15 Pablo Torre? What are you doing now? I'm talking to you.
9:17 Speaker 04 I'm live tweeting this dumb ass conversation.
9:19 Speaker 01 I was a Morris. I believe, I, Chelsea Peretti was mad that she was a Kim. I remember that. She didn't appreciate that.
9:27 Pablo Torre? Incredibly apt, though. Mine was Mark.
9:32 Pablo Torre? But Morris appeared in a bunch of episodes over the years, but in the finale of the show, it leaped ahead like way into the future to sort of see what happened to every character. And we did this thing to Joe where we put Morris in like a sequence of episodes stretching out like 20, 30 years in the future. And we made his hairline recede and recede and recede until in the, in the finale, he's like,
9:56 Speaker 01 I was at four hours of makeup. I was in a ball cap. For a scene with no lines.
10:02 Pablo Torre? Like classic, classic just hair on the side. Joe was having avatar level prosthetics for this one.
10:08 Speaker 01 I mean, I kept getting, and then in the good plays, I play a lava monster. And for like, for the first three episodes, I played the lava monster. I had to put on a full green, like key, key frame, like green outfit to be like removed later by CGI. And then the, the guy on set on my fourth time putting on the suit, he was like, you know, you don't need to wear that. They're messing with you.
10:34 Pablo Torre? Just gonna replace you.
10:37 Pablo Torre? Which is all a long way of me establishing that Mike Schur was your boss.
10:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, technically.
10:44 Pablo Torre? And the workplace that, sure, you provided and presided over. Um, it is stunning that you are as prolific as you are, given what you just told us about what you guys did. Well, I think that a key part of running a writer's room for a comedy show is that it ought to be fun all the time.
11:04 Speaker 01 Yes.
11:04 Pablo Torre? Like, if you're not having, if you can't have fun doing the job that Joe and I have done for many years now, there's something wrong with you as a person. I believe that. And there are plenty of stories out here of TV comedy writers' rooms where everyone is like, "It was a nightmare. I hated going to work. I was miserable." And I just don't understand that. I mean, it's, it is the best job you can have, is to go to a room and goof off with your friends and write jokes.
11:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
11:29 Pablo Torre? So, I, I am a firm believer in, you know, it's a grueling schedule at times, but like, wasting time with nonsense is one of the great joys of having the job that we have.
11:41 Speaker 01 It's arguably my best, uh, that's the thing I do best, is that exact thing.
11:46 Pablo Torre? Yeah, Joe is an expert at it. And, and it was always a delight to have him around. He was there for Parks and Rec, and then The Good Place, he works on Hacks now. Like, there's always a spot in any room that I ever will run or have any influence over for Joe Mandy.
12:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:01 Pablo Torre? Because he's one of the world's great team player time wasters.
12:05 Speaker 01 Yes.
12:05 Pablo Torre? Which is, I feel like a euphemism for, and again, I've met enough of your writers to know this, a guy who knows a disturbing amount of sports trivia and loves naming the names of athletes.
12:21 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
12:22 Pablo Torre? I mean, it's like a dream. And we, one of the great time wasters for both of those shows, Parks and Rec and The Good Place, was Sporcle quizzes.
12:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:31 Pablo Torre? We had, it was me and Joe, and then Alan Yang was around for a long time.
12:35 Speaker 01 Dave King also.
12:37 Pablo Torre? And Dave King, and we would go to lunch, coming back out of lunch, we would do a Sporcle quiz that was like, "Name the top 500 all-time NBA rebounders." And between the four of us, we'd get like 460 of them.
12:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:52 Pablo Torre? Yeah. Or like, "Name every starting player on every lineup in the 2004, 2005 NBA season."
12:59 Speaker 01 Getting mad at the person at the keyboard for spelling Dallin Bear wrong, you know?
13:06 Pablo Torre? And at some point- And in every one of those quizzes, someone remembered Shays and Hayes.
13:11 Speaker 01 Shays and Hayes was a big one.
13:12 Pablo Torre? Those were two guys we always forgot. And someone would go, Shays and Hayes, Shays and Hayes, like as time was ticking down.
13:19 Speaker 01 Pettit.
13:20 Pablo Torre? It was truly, truly love, like the most enjoyable time I can remember spending. Is this the first time, Mike, that you've seen the shirt that Joe has chosen to costume himself in today? I mean, I don't know. I've seen him wear so many Anthony Edwards shirts over the years. I don't remember whether this is the first time. I don't think I've seen this one before. Is this new?
13:40 Speaker 01 This one I got, this was new.
13:42 Pablo Torre? So describe what you're wearing.
13:43 Speaker 01 I am wearing a shirt I paid a man on the internet for, and it's a giveaway UGA. So this is Anthony Edwards, one year at Georgia, and they gave away a shirt with his likeness on it. Yeah.
13:57 Pablo Torre? Yeah, it is some of the worst graphic design I think I've ever seen.
14:00 Speaker 01 Yeah. What's funny about Anthony Edwards is I think he refuses to go into NBA 2K to get his face scanned. So he's never looked like himself.
14:08 Pablo Torre? He's the opposite of you. You'll sit down in a chair and get made up for no reason. And the average is like, I don't even care what I look like.
14:14 Speaker 01 I don't care what I look like. Right.
14:17 Pablo Torre? Anthony Edwards, what is he to you in your fandom as a Timber Wolf supporter?
14:21 Speaker 01 I think he's already, I mean, it's not much of a Mount Rushmore, but I think he's just below Garnett at this point. Like he's the all time, like he's everything.
14:33 Pablo Torre? Can I say something, knowing you for a long time now?
14:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:36 Pablo Torre? I think he's above Garnett for you. I think that you're like, you're holding on to Garnett because he was the original. But the way that you talk about Anthony Edwards, you refer to him often as your biological son.
14:48 Speaker 01 Well, yeah.
14:49 Pablo Torre? I've heard you say that.
14:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:50 Pablo Torre? You've also, you think of him as a biological son.
14:53 Speaker 01 Then I would, then in that case, it's like, he's my son, but Garnett's my dad.
14:56 Pablo Torre? Well, you also, I believe, said that you would jump in front of a bullet to save Anthony Edwards.
15:02 Speaker 01 Yes.
15:02 Pablo Torre? But not do that for your mom.
15:04 Speaker 01 Right. I mean, because my mom's lived a full life and she can't win a championship. Like she'll never, she can't do that for me. She's done enough.
15:14 Pablo Torre? Her footwork is terrible.
15:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, she's got no handles.
15:18 Speaker 01 I did once, I went to a playoff game two years ago and I stayed, there's a hotel literally across the street from the Target Center and I recognized from like fifteen floors up Anthony Edwards' dog.
15:34 Speaker 01 And like took a photo from that angle of just a dog that I knew was Aunt Junior. He named his dog Aunt Junior, which is the funniest possible name. You know, I know the funniest people in the world and no one has named a dog themselves Junior. That is so funny.
15:53 Pablo Torre? He also has, he has children, I believe.
15:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, he's got a lot, he can't stop.
15:58 Pablo Torre? What Mike Schur is the television show is Anthony Edwards is the children.
16:01 Speaker 01 Yes, my grandchildren I call them.
16:05 Pablo Torre? I don't think I've told Schur any of this. I've given you now on the way into the studio a heads up that I have intended this in part to be an update. In fact, something close to a closing of a loop. If I am ever so bold as to declare an investigation complete into the Minnesota Timberwolves ownership saga.
16:22 Speaker 01 Okay, good, cuz I, look, I wanna be upfront, I have given money to a tree planting service before, but that was more for like tubish farts. So I think I have nothing to worry about now if this is just.
16:34 Pablo Torre? This does revive me before we get into this. Mike Schur, do you have, do you have the evidence that I asked you to bring? I don't have the actual credit card because I destroyed it. You did what? Yeah, I destroyed the card, but I have an aspiration, now GreenFi, I have an account. I opened an account with them many years ago. So the premise of just like who the was signing up for aspiration credit cards?
17:04 Speaker 01 Oh, I get that cuz it was like a car, like a, you could buy carbon credits or something.
17:08 Pablo Torre? Explain the point of why you, Mike Schur, and when you bought this or signed up for it? I have tried to remember since you asked me to come on and talk about this. I've tried to remember how I learned about aspiration. I'm 99% sure that the answer is through the LA Clippers because I go to a lot of Clippers games. I've got two friends who have season tickets and I go to a lot of games. One of, by the way, one of those friends who shall remain nameless, has tickets very close to Steve Ballmer. I have sat many times behind that lunatic as he yells and screams for every, you know, James Harden step back. So I believe I learned, I either learned about it from the Clippers or from the Red Sox who also had a deal with aspiration.
17:53 Pablo Torre? I won't now speculate who I think may have sold you the basketball, but it might be one of the parties that I mentioned now that you all connected. Kawhi though.
18:03 Pablo Torre? I saw this company and they were like, here's the pitch. You deposit money with us and then when you buy things with a debit card, they, we round up and you, the money goes to plant trees. And I was like, look, you gotta put your money somewhere. And I was dumb enough to say yes, but I was smart enough to say like, I'm not gonna give them a lot, a lot of money. I'm gonna give them a small amount of money. And I, because you don't use debit cards very often, but I would go to Rite Aid or whatever and get toothpaste and I would like use that debit card and it would be $7.83 and then 17 cents would get kicked up to a tree somewhere. Right. And I, and you follow along. The tree being Kawhi Leonard. Yeah, that's right. A six foot, seven inch power forward, tree type person. Yeah.
18:47 Pablo Torre? And I, I kinda liked it. It was like a thing I didn't think about a lot. And, and you know, I, I was like, oh, I, I've planted 38 trees over the last year of going to Rite Aid or whatever. So, you know, the only weird thing that ever happened with it is I did go to a Clippers game once and in like the second quarter, this guy came over to me and said, hey, do me a favor real quick. Take this paper bag full of money over to that guy on the Clippers bench. And I was like, why? And he was like, don't worry about it. It's for the trees. It's for the trees. The trees. Yeah. And so other than that, there was nothing unusual about my aspiration account. But I did, I am one of the people, one of the proud few who had an aspiration debit card. Yeah.
19:32 Pablo Torre? You're a Los Angeles area good guy who wanted to do good guy stuff while loving sports. What's the difference? To me, it was like, look, is it better to have like Citibank? Make money off of my debit card transactions? So I have to say that like, that your first report on aspiration, as you started talking about it. He's now going to defend aspiration. This is what's happening. This is an odd turn of events in this episode. As I started to listen to the report, and you started mentioning aspiration, I started realizing what was going on. I was like, I had that like sinking feeling of like, oh no, am I in trouble? Did I do this? Am I gonna be in this episode? You're gonna be in this one. In fact, you're gonna be in this one.
20:09 Speaker 01 That's how I feel about anytime Moldova is in the news. I feel like, oh no, did I fund this?
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21:35 Pablo Torre? As it turns out, the billionaire that I want to start with here in this sequel to the Timberwolves investigation, we gotta begin with Glenn Taylor. A different billionaire, a different longtime NBA owner. And Joe Mandy, how would you describe for people who've never heard of Glenn Taylor, who that is?
21:52 Speaker 01 He's the bane of my existence. He has the Morris haircut, kind of. He has the bald head. And yeah, just a skeleton who sits on the courtside seats next to the Timberwolves bench and has like literally ruined 20 years of my life.
22:14 Pablo Torre? A local guy? He was like a congressman?
22:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, something like that. He was like, yeah.
22:18 Pablo Torre? He was a paper magnet?
22:20 Speaker 01 He owns like chicken slaughterhouses. There were a lot of protests against him and his chicken.
22:27 Pablo Torre? Right. He was a Republican Minnesota state senator from 81 to 1990. He was assistant minority leader from 83 to 85. Minority leader from 85 to 88. And it was like, state senator? What do I know about that? I know absolutely nothing. I had never been to a caucus meeting, any type of organization meeting by either party ever in my life. That's just the local Minnesota politics stuff. Point being, he has that seat next to the bench that Joe referenced, this iconic seat. And also, there is a bit of a table read I'd like you guys to do here.
23:07 Speaker 01 Ooh.
23:08 Pablo Torre? So I'm gonna text you both a transcript. And this transcript is one of my favorite things that The Athletic has published. It is the dialogue, or rather, the oral history of how Glenn Taylor bought the Timberwolves.
23:27 Pablo Torre? It is a two-character play. I am hitting send on it now. Mike Schur, I'd like you to play the part of NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, who was then the Deputy Commissioner of the NBA. A part I was born to play. That's right. And Joe Mandi, I'd like you to be your bane of your own existence, Glenn Taylor. So this is from an article entitled "The Long Days and Wild Nights That Saved the Wolves From Leaving Minnesota" by John Krasinski. And it begins with Adam Silver's recollection. I remember I got to the lobby of the hotel, picked up the house phone, asked for Mr. Taylor, and was put through to his room. He said, "Just come on up to my room." It wasn't like we met in the hotel lounge or something. I went to his room. In fitting with sort of his modest approach to the world,
24:11 Pablo Torre? he had a small room with one queen-size bed.
24:15 Speaker 01 Okay, now me as Glenn Taylor. Those guys in New York, they're so used to staying in the suites. I'm looking at it, and I'm saying, "Which one do you pay $17 for?"
24:28 Pablo Torre? Many of the team owner's hotel rooms I've been in since then have closets that are bigger than the room that Glenn was staying in that night.
24:35 Speaker 01 He was business. I was business. It was strictly, "Get the deal done, and how are we going to do it?"
24:43 Pablo Torre? We spoke for about an hour, just me following my boss's instruction. The goal was to get Glenn on the phone with David Stern. It must have been 11 o'clock at night in New York. I said, "Mr. Taylor, let's call David Stern."
24:54 Speaker 01 Straight to the point, because I wanted to get back to work and get back to Mankato.
25:00 Pablo Torre? I think his wife answered. I said, "I'm so sorry I'm calling this late, but David told me to."
25:06 Speaker 01 He's got a good story to tell for this part of it. It's even worse, what he says. He says, "There were no chairs, and we both had to lay down on the bed to discuss it."
25:19 Pablo Torre? There was a queen-size bed and a phone on each side of the bed. Nobody had a cellphone with a speakerphone on it. So for us to both talk to David, I said, all right, I'll sit on one side of the bed if you sit on the other. We ended up being on the phone with David for more than an hour. Here's this man I just met and we're both, as this call went on, you can imagine us both sort of reclining, not lying on the bed, but sort of as if you were reading a book on each side of the bed, having a conversation with each other and David Stern, lying on this queen sized bed in a hotel room and talking through the deal with David.
25:51 Speaker 01 He said, well, Commissioner, I think we found the guy we've been looking for for the last three years and he's here right beside me.
25:59 Pablo Torre? I think it began with us sitting on the edge of the bed on each side. I think I followed Glenn's lead. He was the first one to lay down while we were talking and then I did too. The rest is history, so to speak.
26:14 Pablo Torre? Wow. This was how the Timberwolves were saved. Right. Yeah. They were saved by this guy Glenn Taylor and a young Adam Silver in bed together.
26:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, a sort of decent proposal.
26:25 Pablo Torre? A very decent documented proposal. And so all of that is to say that from 94 to now April 2021.
26:34 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
26:34 Pablo Torre? As I previously reported on this show, Glenn Taylor does the unthinkable. I mean, as a fan, you've seen him kind of like head fake a sale.
26:43 Speaker 01 Yes, he's like, the one thing you can give him is that he was offered multiple times, I think, to move the team by selling it. And he wanted the team to stay in Minnesota.
26:56 Pablo Torre? And so during the pandemic, Glenn Taylor agrees to sell the Timberwolves and the Minnesota Lynx to an ownership group that on paper, from a pure, just like guy sitting in a writer's room, coming up with hypotheticals, is objectively very funny.
27:10 Speaker 01 Yes.
27:11 Pablo Torre? Because Joe Mandy's team finally loosened, it seems, from the grip of that old man.
27:17 Speaker 01 Skeleton.
27:18 Pablo Torre? Who now is in charge of the T Wolves.
27:20 Speaker 01 It's Alex Rodriguez and the man who owns diapers.com.
27:25 Pablo Torre? Well.
27:25 Speaker 01 Mark Ward.
27:27 Pablo Torre? And a company called Wonder and various other things that have made him a billionaire. But the price of buying the T Wolves and the Lynx, uh, do you remember, Mike Schur, what they paid in April of 2021? It's shockingly low compared to all other sales of all franchises in all sports before and since, is all I remember. The Minnesota Timberwolves have been sold to e-commerce mogul Mark Lor and former baseball star Alex Rodriguez. A person with knowledge of the deal tells the Associated Press they paid one and a half billion dollars to buy the team from owner Glenn Taylor. Taylor previously said the deal was contingent on Lor and Rodriguez keeping the team in Minnesota.
28:09 Pablo Torre? Just to be very clear about the context, you would soon watch the Phoenix Suns get sold for $4 billion in 2022, the Hornets get sold for $3 billion in 2023, the Lakers get sold for $10 billion in 2025, the Celtics, Mike Schur Celtics get sold for $6.1 billion in 2025 as well. Meanwhile, the Minnesota Lynx alone would be valued currently at $240 million. So the whole thing of it's the pandemic, he never wanted to do this, 1.5 is the price. The key bit of detail to that transaction is that it was a pretty complicated but deliberate mechanism called a step transaction.
28:50 Pablo Torre? And a step transaction, just to be very TLDR about it, is you pay it over time. And the big issue here was that come March of 2024, Joe. Yep. Glenn Taylor announces to Timberwolves fans and the world what? Uh, he didn't want to sell the team anymore.
29:12 Pablo Torre? So I just need to jump in here to clarify that this isn't exactly what Glenn Taylor, the bane of Domandy's existence, the owner of the team with the worst all-time winning percentage in NBA history, the billionaire who additionally alienated his own best player, Kevin Garnett, had announced. It was slightly different. Taylor thought his days were done as owner of the Wolves when he struck a deal to sell the club three years ago. But according to Taylor's lawyers, Mark Lor- And Alex Rodriguez failed to meet the final requirement, and thus, the team remains in his control. In fact, what Glenn Taylor wanted everybody to know was that Alex Rodriguez and Mark Lorry
29:56 Pablo Torre? could not and did not come up with the $600 million needed to fulfill their final requirement in order to complete that NBA franchise payment plan, this step transaction. And this is the central allegation at the heart of this ownership civil war, which did seem to blindside Alex Rodriguez and Mark Lorry, by the way, who had made the previous payments totaling $600 million without a parent issue, and who had just spent the previous three years as Taylor's limited partners helping run the team in real life. We get an email that says we've been locked out of the building. We can no longer go into the owner's suite. We can't go into our family room.
30:40 Pablo Torre? We can't talk to Tim Conley. We can't talk to Coach. All the players have reached out. They've been extremely supportive. It's just, it hurts. It really just hurts a lot. Like, I've never had this situation. I've never sued anyone. I've never been sued. Like, the fact that somebody would do that and be planning this and just ambush us, as Alex said, and be so disingenuous. And it's just really, it's really hurtful. I don't know what else to say. I, he was our partner. But Glenn Taylor, on television, continued to claim the high road. I mean, you liked him at first, right? I'm assuming. Well, I like him now.
31:25 Pablo Torre? It isn't that I don't dislike them. I know that they've taken some shots at me. I prefer they didn't, and I won't against them. Yeah, more on that in a bit. But what PTFO exclusively reported in that first Timberwolves episode that we did alongside Joe Mandi's fellow Timberwolves superfan, the great Zach Harper, is that Mark Lorry and Alex Rodriguez were correct. They did, in fact, meet their final requirement. According to four sources, they did, in fact, submit that required $600 million on time.
32:04 Pablo Torre? I obtained the paperwork, I obtained the contract language to prove that out, and yet.
32:08 Speaker 01 You saw the spreadsheets of how many diapers were sold.
32:12 Pablo Torre? It was a bit of, uh, yeah, pants [BLEEP] though. I mean, truly, like, the mess that happened here, Glenn Taylor's allegation is, they're broke boys. Meanwhile, Adam Silver, who's on the bed with Glenn in 84, is now saying in all sorts of ways, privately and publicly, we should probably stop doing this step transaction stuff.
32:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:33 Pablo Torre? Because this is, this is a recipe for this exact disagreement.
32:37 Speaker 01 Well, yeah, you're just in this limbo where Glenn Taylor is sitting across the court from A-Rod and Mark Lorry, and you're-
32:46 Pablo Torre? At like playoff games.
32:47 Speaker 01 At playoff games, and you find yourself being like, I just want A-Rod to own my team. You know, like, I just want this to end. I want the diaper guy in. Like, this is nuts. And then you're like, yeah, you're choosing sides, but you just want it to end because also, the Wolves are good for the first time-
33:05 Pablo Torre? That's the key part.
33:06 Speaker 01 In a generation. Like, just like, don't let this skeleton ruin what's happening here on the floor. Like, it's such a distraction.
33:17 Pablo Torre? This is the important part to me as an outsider because the other difference between when he made the original sale and when it was supposed to go through, besides the Hornets selling for 3 billion and the Celtics for 6 and the Lakers for 10, is when he made the decision, the team was bad, and by the time it was time for payment number 3, the team was incredible and has a generational talent-
33:40 Speaker 01 Exactly.
33:41 Pablo Torre? And a top-line player in the NBA.
33:42 Speaker 01 He's just like, ooh, I, never mind, I like this now.
33:45 Pablo Torre? Wait a second, hold on, now they're good, I want to keep them. It seemed like the obvious read on that. Yeah, and it's important to point out that, like, Glenn Taylor did care about basketball.
33:53 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
33:53 Pablo Torre? I mean, look, did he spend money? No. Did he want the team to be good? Yes.
33:57 Speaker 01 To the, to, signing illegal contracts.
34:00 Pablo Torre? Well, I was gonna say-
34:01 Speaker 01 Well, Glenn Taylor was behind the illegal Joe Smith signing that just crushed the Wolves for years and years. They lost so many draft picks in the process. And he- Has a toxic relationship with my father, Kevin Garnett, and refuses to acknowledge him or put up a, you know, his number in his, in the rafters or put a statue outside, which he absolutely deserves. And yeah, so it's just like, we just want this era to close.
34:31 Pablo Torre? And it should be noted, the difference between that illegal contract and all of the stuff that's been going on with the Clippers and aspiration and everything else that Pablo's been reporting on is that in, in their case, they were dumb enough, the Timberwolves were, to just write it down.
34:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
34:44 Pablo Torre? They just wrote down on a piece of paper, if you, if you agree to this, we will give you more money later in case the owner of the team dies.
34:52 Speaker 01 Right.
34:52 Pablo Torre? And, and though, the reason that it, the only reason that Ballmer continues to get away with what he apparently has gotten away with is because they weren't that dumb. They weren't as dumb as the Timberwolves were back in the
35:03 Speaker 01 They were planting trees, not turning them into paper to write anything down.
35:07 Pablo Torre? Wrapping stuff down on them, yeah.
35:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
35:10 Pablo Torre? It is funny that like, the one lesson you might learn from Glenn Taylor's tenure as the guy who was so guilty of cap surcovention that they got docked at first, five draft picks, he was suspended for a season. Kevin McHale, the GM of the team, was also effectively suspended for a season, various other fines and so forth, is we probably shouldn't write this down insofar as the people we're doing this secret side deal with are worried that Glenn Taylor might die before it can be enforced. And spoiler alert, Glenn Taylor, as of press time, alive.
35:43 Speaker 01 Alive.
35:43 Pablo Torre? And the reason that contract got exposed was there was a separate bit of litigation between agents and that's how it got entered into the public record. And so all of that was, again, just very Timberwolves. It was all very Timberwolves, which is all to say that when this deal is falling apart, a lot of it, I think the broad perception was, of course it is.
36:04 Speaker 01 Yes. Yes.
36:05 Pablo Torre? Of course, like, even though Tim Connolly, who was the guy who was running the Nuggets, who's one of the great GMs in the sport.
36:11 Speaker 01 Incredible. Yeah.
36:12 Pablo Torre? Who was now building this real contender.
36:15 Speaker 01 He had language in his contract that was basically like, if Glenn Taylor stays, I'm out. I will leave this team.
36:21 Pablo Torre? I have been told is that Tim Connolly, definitely on the side of new management, much like Joe Mandi.
36:27 Speaker 01 Yes.
36:28 Pablo Torre? In the sort of emotional, sort of like, matrix of where is everybody? Who's rooting for what? So the point being that finally, finally, we can get to this year when I started DMing Joe and I was like, I think we should do an episode together because it's July 2025. And the Timberwolves are owned by Alex Rodriguez and Mark Lorrie.
36:49 Speaker 01 Inshallah, yeah.
36:51 Pablo Torre? And I want to explain why. So the thing that had happened, which is just very, very funny to me, also takes place in the neighborhood where Joe Mandy saw Anthony Edwards' dog.
37:04 Speaker 01 Okay.
37:05 Pablo Torre? Because what happens here took place in a closed-door, secret, private arbitration, 10 blocks away from the Target Center. And you walk in, it's a five-day arbitration hearing in downtown Minneapolis, and there are three arbiters, of course, in the front of the room, and there's a podium. And the way that I want to have you guys envision it is like some high school debate [BLEEP]. Because that's how it's been described to me by multiple sources. We've got dozens of people in the room, we've got the aforementioned owners and would-be owners and former owners, we've got Glenn's wife Becky, of course, who's always there.
37:38 Speaker 01 Yep, and she forces the players every year to eat lasagna at her house.
37:42 Pablo Torre? Oh, that's right. I've seen video of that.
37:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
37:44 Pablo Torre? Lasagna is supposedly pretty good.
37:46 Speaker 01 I hope, because it looks so wack. These guys have to go to- Good for athletes, too. Yeah. It's like, that's the food you want in your ass. Load up on lasagna.
37:55 Pablo Torre? That's right. The biometric data says we want more of the lasagna.
37:59 Speaker 01 What are the macros in this? This thicker cheese.
38:04 Pablo Torre? But in the room is also, yes, the layers, the lasagna-style layers of this room. We've got lawyers, we've got assistants, we've got dozens of people. And so what is sort of the top-line thing here that has been communicated to me and has been talked about by multiple league sources is that Glenn Taylor's legal strategy, again, this is the thing he cares about the most, the thing he fought tooth and nail, put his reputation on the line for, assailed their reputation in the process of trying to keep his team, his legal strategy was, quote, baffling.
38:38 Pablo Torre? Which is to say that something that Mark and Alex's legal team had discovered in discovery, what they had discovered, what they had found out is that Glenn Taylor, in the months during this push and pull, had two executives create what amounts to a burn book. As in, like a Mean Girls-style list.
39:04 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
39:04 Pablo Torre? A list that has been described to me as numbered and 77 items long. And this list of 77 things Glenn Taylor slash the Timberwolves hate about Mark Laurie and Alex Rodriguez was communicating to the NBA, and then to anyone who would listen, you can't approve these guys.
39:27 Speaker 01 These diapers, they have terrible absorption.
39:30 Pablo Torre? Some items on this are... I'm so happy right now. Mark Laurie had dinner with Kevin Garnett and never told me.
39:41 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
39:42 Pablo Torre? Alex Rodriguez did steroids.
39:44 Speaker 01 Sure. Yeah, he did a funny photo shoot where he was like kissing a mirror or something. That must have been in there.
39:50 Pablo Torre? And has a painting in his room of him as a centaur. Yeah, which we also have as a coaster there.
39:57 Speaker 01 Oh, amazing. Great.
39:58 Pablo Torre? Uh, Mark Laurie came in with his friends into the arena with an open bottle of alcohol, which apparently may or may not have been a corked wine bottle that he was accused of being.
40:07 Speaker 01 Alcohol at a sporting event. Oh.
40:10 Pablo Torre? He was being a drunk. Yeah, A-Rod is a liar. A-Rod is a cheat. A-Rod had the largest suspension in MLB history. Basically, a series of exhibits that were emailed back and forth, which is how they were discovered between these two executives.
40:25 Speaker 01 That's the modern version of writing it down. Yeah.
40:28 Pablo Torre? Yeah, and apparently in the legal proceedings, yeah, it was revealed that these were meant to be shown to the NBA to Adam Silver um, to make the case that these guys cannot possibly own an NBA team. Apparently, another item was they were disagreeing with us about changes that should be made to the arena. They get to 77 things, but it's all along the lines of just like, "Sir, does anyone here remember that this is a hearing?" Related to arbitration about a legal contract. A legal proceeding, a legal proceeding, yeah. And none of this has anything to do with anything. Unfortunately, I am told, what they do is, in the room, they pursue their strategy, which is nonetheless to bring out a series of video exhibits.
41:10 Pablo Torre? One of which is, and I cannot reiterate enough how much this is a part of their strategy, the interview that A-Rod did with Katie Couric?
41:21 Pablo Torre? What?
41:23 Pablo Torre? For the record, have you ever used steroids, human growth hormone, or any other performance-enhancing substance? No. None of it is particularly relevant in a legal proceeding regarding the sale of an entirely unrelated franchise. And sport. And, and also sport. And sport, right. It is just funny to me, though. A lot of what you bill hourly, a lot of this was about like, can we just talk about how much A-Rod allegedly sucks? That was kind of their strategy.
41:54 Pablo Torre? Can I also add here, though, that little exercise you had Joe and me do at the beginning of this, talking, revisiting the Adam Silver and Glenn Taylor in bed? Like, what it says to me that this was his legal strategy is that like, that actually was predictive in some way because he, in his mind, was like, I know these guys, I'm buddies with these guys, there's a backroom, rich dude clubhouse ethos here. I've snuggled with one of them. Yeah, we reclined together in a bed in Minneapolis and that, and like, in his mind, he's like, I just have to appeal to their,
42:33 Pablo Torre? like, rich dude insider baseball kind of club and they'll, they'll be with me, they won't be in. And he's just totally mistaking that level of camaraderie for a legal matter before the court in an arbitration. I'm cool.
42:49 Pablo Torre? Yeah, I'm cool.
42:50 Speaker 01 You've only suspended me once for a year, but like, I'm chill, dude.
42:56 Pablo Torre? I think it's important to remember too that Glenn Taylor, for all of the jokes, is a two-term past chairman of the NBA Board of Governors.
43:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
43:05 Pablo Torre? 2008 to 2012, and then 2014 to 2017. And I think a big part of all of this, like, my crazy pills that I feel like I'm taking, is that you can in fact establish various, I would say, uh, dispositive even, legal exhibits, and yet the only thing that matters is what this backroom conversation that's not a real justice system is gonna do.
43:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
43:32 Pablo Torre? And in the balance hangs lots of principles of like, you think it's framed and sold as fairness, but in reality are just a bunch of people making personal decisions in ostensibly what they perceive to be the best interests.
43:44 Speaker 01 Of the league.
43:44 Pablo Torre? Of the league. Basketball reasons, as I believe David Stern once said, about vetoing a certain trade involving a guy who plays now with the guy who allegedly is
43:54 Speaker 01 planting trees.
43:55 Pablo Torre? All of the trees. Yeah. So that happens, and the arbitrator is like, yeah, we're gonna go with the Centaur guy and the diapers guy. And in reality, what happens is there is a vote where the NBA owners have to gather. And so what I'm told is that there is a vote, it's a remote call. I was told eight or nine owners, plus maybe like 20 people from the league.
44:17 Speaker 01 All on like seven queen-sized mattresses.
44:22 Speaker 01 In the same room.
44:23 Pablo Torre? Thirty people on one tiny bed. But it's a Zoom call, and something that's stunning to everybody is, of course, the face that pops up with some questions, even at the very end, when it seems like this has all been decided because there on a, and I'm told he was muted and didn't know it, and had to be unmuted to then be told this.
44:46 Speaker 01 Oh no.
44:46 Pablo Torre? Is Glenn Taylor.
44:47 Speaker 01 Hmm, yeah.
44:49 Pablo Torre? Who's just like, you know, he's not, he's not gonna let this go down without a fight. But I wanna give you the upshot, because we know, of course, that Glenn ultimately agrees to sell the team. The price is enforced, $1.5 billion. In fairness to Glenn, if you could undo-
45:04 Speaker 01 Do that deal?
45:05 Pablo Torre? You probably should.
45:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, he only made, he only made 1.4 billion dollars in profit.
45:12 Pablo Torre? But it's not in fairness to him. He's the one who agreed to it in the first place. He had no idea how much his asset was worth. But this is the thing that Glenn ends up negotiating. The upshot of this, as Joe Mandy is celebrating that finally Glenn Taylor is out of his life. Anthony Edwards and Anthony Jr. are free from this man. What Glenn Taylor negotiates at the finish line is to have Mark Laurie and Alex Rodriguez purchase for him for the next decade. Four courtside seats.
45:48 Pablo Torre? Next to the team bench. As Joe Mandy had initially mentioned at the top of this episode.
45:57 Speaker 01 Oh my god.
45:59 Pablo Torre? He's not going anywhere.
46:01 Speaker 01 No.
46:01 Pablo Torre? That is the moral of this story.
46:03 Speaker 01 Yes.
46:03 Pablo Torre? You could technically be shamed and forced to sell and have all this enforced upon you, but that dude's not [bleep] going anywhere, man.
46:11 Speaker 01 Oof, alright. Good seats. They're good seats.
46:14 Pablo Torre? Pablo, you said on an interview a while ago about a different subject. That there is, there's a class of people in this country who have determined that shamelessness is a market inefficiency, I believe was the quote. If you were Glenn Taylor, if I were Glenn Taylor, the last place in the world I would want to be seen is courtside at a Timberwolves game for like 100 reasons. But the shamelessness, the lack of self-reflection to think that like, okay, fine. I drove the franchise into the ground and kept it there for 20 years. I don't talk to Kevin Garnett. I blew the sale of this so badly. I made a burn book and tried to get away with it at an arbitration hearing. And after all that, okay, fine, I'm still going to the games.
46:57 Pablo Torre? Like, and I'm still, I'm sitting in the front row next to the bench. How do you, how are you not so embarrassed that you want to slink away and hide forever? Like, I just don't understand how these people have no sense of embarrassment or chagrin. I just, it blows my mind. Built different.
47:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
47:16 Pablo Torre? Built different. Glenn Taylor is walking back onto the court with his finger [bleep] held in the air like Larry Bird, man. That's right. Yeah, he nailed it. He nailed it. He drilled the three at the end.
47:27 Speaker 01 I am curious what the language is, though. I wonder if they, if it says four courtside seats for 10 years at Target Center, because there may be a new arena.
47:36 Pablo Torre? Ooh.
47:37 Speaker 01 In the future. And then maybe he doesn't get those seats, because they, I don't know. I'm, I'm trying to find a silver lining.
47:44 Pablo Torre? I like the idea of trying to find the loophole in this agreement. Such that Glenn Taylor just bought four courtside seats next to the Timberwolves bench in a hollowed out husk.
47:56 Speaker 01 Yes, he, he still shows up. The games are across town, but he's still there.
48:00 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
48:01 Speaker 01 It's like an, it's basically an abandoned mall and he's just sitting in the.
48:04 Pablo Torre? Yeah. It's Glenn Taylor sitting in his seat next to, yeah, the ghost of Joe Smith.
48:11 Pablo Torre? I, I feel like I didn't deliver the congratulations that Joe Mandy was expecting necessarily. But I do think you should be optimistic about your team, man.
48:22 Speaker 01 I am. I, I love them. I, they're so good. Couple of years ago, I went to the elimination game against the Nuggets, I believe, and ended up at some sort of like after-game party. And I remember I cornered Jared Vanderbilt and told him I loved him. And he was like, alright. And then Mark Lorry was doing a magic trick for Malik Beasley's mom.
48:50 Pablo Torre? What a perfect.
48:51 Speaker 01 Interrupted the magic trick to introduce myself and he did not, I kind of ruined the magic trick. So I think I, I think I blew, blew it with Mark Lorry. But A-Rod, I could, I could maybe foster a friendship with him.
49:04 Pablo Torre? Well, as a sports fan, did you have any prior interactions with Alex?
49:09 Speaker 01 There was, when I was in high school, my mall was the Mall of America. And there was a year, I think it was my junior year of high school. I used to do a thing where the day before Yom Kippur was like a mini Rumspringa for me. So I would try to get in as many sins as I could, like the night before Yom Kippur. So like, I was at the Mall of America on drugs with my friend Landon. And we spotted Alex Rodriguez walking around the Mall of America. There must have been a, a game the next day. So my friend and I stalked him. For over an hour while high on drugs. And I got into an argument with my friend Landon because I used the word whack in a sentence. And then he told me I wasn't allowed to use that word. I wasn't cool enough to pull off the word whack.
49:53 Speaker 01 And I said, I can use whack. And we're mere feet from Alex Rodriguez. And then we started shoving each other over my usage of the word whack. And then my friend yelled, hey, A-Rod. A-Rod turned around and then my friend pushed me into a pyramid of shoe boxes that were in, I believe, Bloomingdale's or Macy's. So my only real interaction with Alex Rodriguez is him turning around briefly and seeing me and my friend on drugs, falling into a pyramid of shoe boxes. Yeah, but that's my only memory of Alex Rodriguez, really.
50:30 Pablo Torre? What do you think the chances he remembers that? I'll bet he, there's like a 5% chance.
50:34 Speaker 01 I mean, it was insane.
50:37 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
50:37 Speaker 01 I hesitate to say that the investigation I thought was over has just reopened.
50:46 Pablo Torre? Oh, my God.
50:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, I did ask God to forgive me for that the next day, so I'm clean.
50:55 Pablo Torre? On the holiest of days.
50:56 Speaker 01 I'm sorry, Lord, for maybe kind of confusing Alex Rodriguez briefly in a Macy's.
51:16 Pablo Torre? Hey, I'm Max Brown. You know, The Athletic is home to the world's best sports journalism, but this fall, just in time for football season, we're launching something unlike anything we've ever done. We're building a daily show streaming live on YouTube. Me, Kofi Yoboah, Charles McDonald, and The Athletic's own Zach Harper and Daniel Popper. We'll be hosting live watch-alongs of the biggest games with award-winning analysis and behind-the-scenes insights from athletic insiders. On off days, we'll go deeper into the hard-hitting stories you can't get enough of. And we want you, the smartest fans in sports, to be part of it. Come drop questions in the chat and we'll bring the answers straight from the source.
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53:14 Pablo Torre? Pablo, do you want to see the hats that Joe made me?
53:16 Speaker 01 I would love to see the hats. I would love to see the hats. Actually, Mike, could you explain what this thing is?
53:21 Pablo Torre? I think Joe should explain it because it's like a person in severe emotional distress is the headline.
53:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, I mean, this was a moment of, you know, COVID quarantine mania.
53:34 Pablo Torre? Some people sell the Timberwolves for $1.5 billion.
53:36 Speaker 01 Exactly. It was the same era. It was the same exact era where Glenn Taylor saw the scepter of death approaching and decided to sell the team for much less than it was worth. I was losing my mind, trapped in my house, and I started ordering hats. And I taught myself how to embroider hats. So then I would match the colors of the hats and make the words out of the lettering, the letters provided by the hats.
54:03 Pablo Torre? So for example, the famous Milwaukee Brewers logo with it's a glove, but it's got a B and an M in the logo, that becomes crab meat.
54:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I put a crab in there. That's really good.
54:19 Pablo Torre? Yeah, there's a crab in the middle there of the glove. The glove has caught a crab right there in the pocket.
54:24 Speaker 01 But, you know, I gave, Malaney has one, Detroit Tigers one that says Dershowitz on it. So like, it was just, sometimes it was like, sort of tailored to the person I was making them for.
54:36 Pablo Torre? The Alan Dershowitz Detroit Tigers collab, man, you should put that on, on a, on a web store or somewhere.
54:42 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm. I really, I-
54:43 Pablo Torre? The other one, this requires a little explanation, but I have, my producing partner, Morgan Sackett, years ago started calling me Bubba as a nickname. I think trying to find a nickname that was like the opposite of like the vibe that I give out.
54:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, you're not a bubba.
55:00 Pablo Torre? And then commissioned, this is a commission.
55:01 Speaker 01 Yes.
55:02 Pablo Torre? He, he did a Red Sox hat for me where the B in the Red Sox logo is the middle B in the word bubba.
55:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
55:09 Pablo Torre? Yes, yes. I don't, I don't, it should be noted, do not wear these.
55:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, you can't wear them.
55:16 Pablo Torre? Because the secondary value would be ruined if you, if you took them out. That's right. You gotta, gotta keep them pristine for sale down the road. What other, what other ones, Joe, did you, did you make that I would love to buy that I can't apparently?
55:29 Speaker 01 Um, I know there was one that was the West Virginia Mountaineers. It was a hat that I made, Wilmer Valdorama. And I, I, during COVID, I auctioned off a bunch of hats for charity and all the money obviously went to Kawhi Leonard and, yeah. That was the most special.
55:48 Pablo Torre? Okay, I found, I found some others. There's a Houston Astros cap where the H with the star is the, is the H in the word horny.
55:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, uh-huh.
55:59 Pablo Torre? There is a Kansas City Royals cap where the KC is naturally Kurt Cobain.
56:05 Speaker 01 Kurt Cobain, Kentucky, University of Kentucky says Sepuku.
56:09 Pablo Torre? Part of the thing that I think people who are just listening need to go to YouTube to fully- Appreciate is that it is an incredible work of embroidering. Yeah. But it is. Embroidery is incredible, yeah. But I would say that the the sort of like.
56:23 Pablo Torre? The the way you lined up the letters is manic.
56:27 Speaker 01 Oh, for sure. I was I was in an unhealthy place. The the one that my head is blocking there is a New York Mets hat. And the lettering goes down to say the word NyQuil. Onto the onto the brim of the hat. That was impossible.
56:40 Pablo Torre? We got an A's cap where the A is pasta.
56:43 Speaker 01 Pasta.
56:43 Pablo Torre? The first A in pasta.
56:44 Speaker 01 Waffles.
56:45 Pablo Torre? Nationals cap. That's waffles. This one's good. I mean, this one, the Tampa Bay Rays, the T B is the T and B in roast beef.
56:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, that Noah Garfunkel has that one.
56:56 Pablo Torre? Shout out to Noah.
56:56 Speaker 01 Proudly displayed in his house. Yeah.
56:58 Pablo Torre? The Cal one where it's mezcal.
57:00 Speaker 01 Mezcal.
57:00 Pablo Torre? Yep. And you oh, wait, look at you put you you embroidered a a drink on the side.
57:06 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
57:06 Pablo Torre? A real keep chat.
57:07 Speaker 01 I like I kind of blacked this era of my life out. Yeah, this is I did so many.
57:12 Pablo Torre? This is a Cardinals cap where it's wrestling, which is a hard thing, but the S T L. Yeah, right? All all there. Oh, S T L. Wow. Wait, can you give me? Tell me? Tell me what it is and I'll try to guess. Let's play a game. Oh, that's good. That's good.
57:24 Speaker 01 Oh, we did.
57:25 Pablo Torre? Do that one. Okay.
57:26 Speaker 01 Oh, these are good.
57:27 Pablo Torre? The San Diego Padres, the S D.
57:33 Pablo Torre? S D. Let's do it?
57:36 Speaker 01 Oh, no, I think more like.
57:41 Speaker 01 Seventies movies.
57:47 Pablo Torre? I give up.
57:48 Speaker 01 Shelley Duvall, of course.
57:50 Pablo Torre? Obviously, in the classic Shelley Duvall color block, gold and brown. I'm just realizing now what a bad idea was for me to volunteer to try to guess what these would be. There's a zero. The hometown Minnesota Twins, the T C for Twin Cities, Mike, is? I'm I'm gonna guess that's the middle T C of a word like watch or.
58:10 Speaker 01 You're wrong. This is again, think, think like 2010s movies.
58:16 Pablo Torre? Uh, this one would, I mean, truly maybe fetch the most in the secondary market today.
58:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, probably.
58:22 Pablo Torre? As a hint, Trevor Cahill. So close.
58:27 Speaker 01 So close. Timothy Chalamet.
58:29 Pablo Torre? Oh, shit.
58:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
58:31 Pablo Torre? With an embroidered accent over the first E.
58:34 Speaker 01 Okay, then, but this next one, um...
58:36 Pablo Torre? This one is...
58:38 Speaker 01 San Francisco Giants, SF, and it is the middle letters.
58:42 Pablo Torre? We're looking for a word.
58:43 Speaker 01 We're looking for a word. Sort of a medical word.
58:47 Pablo Torre? Misfit.
58:48 Speaker 01 No, I'm sorry, transfusion.
58:53 Pablo Torre? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the...
58:59 Pablo Torre? Holy shit. What, you had, is that a...
59:02 Speaker 01 That says hamburger.
59:03 Pablo Torre? Is that Baylor?
59:04 Speaker 01 Baylor University says hamburger.
59:05 Pablo Torre? BU comes hamburger. The Phillies is simply pizza.
59:10 Speaker 01 Just pizza. I did like a sort of a food run here.
59:13 Pablo Torre? Yeah, you did. Uh, the Seattle Mariners.
59:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, sushi.
59:16 Pablo Torre? Sushi, yeah. Weirdly, that one's weirdly apropos for the team.
59:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, I know. It's a little on the nose.
59:22 Pablo Torre? People were saying Joe fell off when they saw that one.
59:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, sushi, they're like, come on, man.
59:26 Pablo Torre? I came for Shelley Duvall.
59:27 Speaker 01 I like his earlier stuff.
59:28 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
59:30 Pablo Torre? There's a Pirates P, that's just the second P, and popcorn, uh, with a popcorn.
59:34 Speaker 01 Actually, Shelley Duvall's the only one I bartered. I got, I got a, uh, oh, yeah.
59:41 Pablo Torre? All right, Mike, here we go.
59:42 Speaker 01 This one's good. New York Giants.
59:44 Pablo Torre? New York Giants, NY. Is it the middle letters or is it?
59:48 Speaker 01 Kind of the word.
59:49 Pablo Torre? Well, I'll give you this very specific clue. They're the last two letters of a, of a, of a name.
59:56 Speaker 01 A surname.
59:57 Pablo Torre? And it's followed by a very specific year. Oh, my God.
1:00:06 Speaker 01 Anthony? No, Coney 2012.
1:00:10 Pablo Torre? We were looking for Coney 2012. The New York Giants, Coney 2012 collab.
1:00:20 Pablo Torre? The Dershowitz one I just found is incredible.
1:00:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:00:23 Pablo Torre? Because it has a stitched Alan Dershowitz.
1:00:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:00:27 Pablo Torre? Embroidered.
1:00:28 Speaker 01 I can't believe I survived this. This is like the true workings of a maniac.
1:00:34 Pablo Torre? I remember you texting me pictures of these because I selected, I believe, crab meat.
1:00:39 Speaker 01 You did, yeah.
1:00:40 Pablo Torre? From a number of them that you had, were offering and.
1:00:44 Speaker 01 I know Seth Rogen got Shelley Duvall in exchange for one of his vases. But he, that was his like manic.
1:00:51 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
1:00:52 Speaker 01 Covid.
1:00:53 Pablo Torre? He did pottery and it was more, I would say more practical or more of an art.
1:00:59 Speaker 01 More, more, more dare I say.
1:01:01 Pablo Torre? Of a revenue generator.
1:01:03 Speaker 01 You know, I famously have only lost money on any, anything I've ever done. So like, like in terms of merchandise or this.
1:01:11 Pablo Torre? That $400 seemed to really pay off for you.
1:01:13 Speaker 01 Yes, that is true.
1:01:15 Pablo Torre? In those Moldovan bots.
1:01:16 Speaker 01 Yes, but I did not figure out a way to, um, to make any money off of these hats.
1:01:21 Pablo Torre? So I guess what we leave here at the end with is a challenge for Joe Mandy to do something with his truly new regime change Timberwolves.
1:01:32 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:01:33 Pablo Torre? The next time we gather on this program, Joe, I would, I would beseech you to contemplate a Shelley Duvall level tribute.
1:01:42 Speaker 01 Well, I gotta get the, the, the new retro logo. The old like 90s era logo had like a TW's on the shorts.
1:01:51 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
1:01:51 Speaker 01 So maybe I could do something with that.
1:01:52 Pablo Torre? Oh, shorts.
1:01:53 Speaker 01 Yeah. I'll figure it out. This is a good challenge.
1:01:57 Pablo Torre? It's hard to just give someone, to assign someone work like that, but I dare say that much like Adam Silver and, and our old friend Glenn Taylor, this is the bed that Joe Mandy has made.
1:02:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:02:11 Pablo Torre? I'll make a pledge to you, Joe, that if you make that hat, I'll purchase it from you with my aspiration credit card.
1:02:18 Speaker 01 Oh my God, yes, yes.
1:02:21 Pablo Torre? Yeah, we'll get some trees planted.
1:02:23 Speaker 01 Only way to do it.
1:02:25 Pablo Torre? And we'll get, we'll get Uncle Dennis some, some new sneakers or something.
1:02:37 Pablo Torre? This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.
1:02:43 Pablo Torre? And I'll talk to you next time.
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