Share & Walz & Tell with Mina Kimes and Dan Le Batard

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I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

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What's up, guys?

She's glowing.

She's glowing because there's a quarterback story in what we're doing today.

Look at her.

She's just, we're in her wheelhouse.

No matter how far afield we get, we always return to the quarterback stories.

Oh, you want to talk Ada McConnell versus Gardner Minshew?

Can we do that?

I want to talk gender spectrum at the Olympics.

Dan's, okay, this is what the group chat is like.

Dan pitches, can we do like RFK?

Can we do the transgender, non-transgender Olympic controversy?

Can we finally get to Celine Dion?

And Mina's like, here's a 9,000-word Bill Barnwell article.

First of all, you pitched RFK, not Dan.

You suggested the Olympics.

Well, I applauded vehemently.

I supported all things, Pablo.

Look, you're not going to sit here and try and claim that Pablo is the one who led us toward quarterbacks and salary cap.

You're not going to claim it.

What is there to discuss other than this is weird?

Which I think is

a fair question.

It is, but I think we could do 12 and a half minutes on weird.

We've got some specialists here.

Weird.

We've got some weird specialists.

The photo of him with the bear cub is pretty phenomenal.

I mean, just the idea that the video is him talking to roseanne barr the video of him telling you know i'm watching the video and i'm like wait a minute what how is the weirdest thing about this video not that the man just picks up roadkill bear on the side of the road also in that article you learned that rfk is on testosterone replacement therapy It's sort of like, oh, he's just on steroids all the time.

Also, we didn't.

Somehow that hadn't sunk in with me that the dude is on PEDs and also running.

Have you not seen President?

Shirtless working out on Venice Beach in jeans like he's Lenny Kravitz.

You haven't seen this.

RFK has kind of faded from my

world right now, I guess.

Maybe because we haven't had his

strongest soldier and fellow Bears killer, Aaron Rodgers.

There's a joke here with Aaron Rodgers in this bear thing.

Look at her.

Look at her.

She just gave you the Stugatz finger guns.

Limply celebrating making the joke.

Hypothetically, but now actually.

I did the tim waltz you'll see what i did there kids

i want to start by talking about coach waltz And Coach Waltz, guys, is not the way that I even planned on introducing him.

I kept on watching Kamala Harris at this rally introducing Tim Waltz, governor of Minnesota, as her running mate.

And she made it very clear that the reason this is happening, the reason she's picking him, is because he is, in fact, Coach Waltz.

The dude was the defensive coordinator of the Mankato West high school football team, the team that had lost 27 consecutive games, Mina, before Tim Waltz arrived.

And three years later, he explained, we were state champions and then a powerhouse.

When I see how they're trying to respond to this introduction of Tim Waltz of Coach Waltz,

it makes me feel like I'm watching a team, a defense actually, on the right, that has no idea how to stop this.

And it's very, very funny to me.

I feel like the presentation of Waltz leading

Cleat first, if you will.

There's a connection between that and what we talked about last time with Kamala Harris and sort of the memeification of it and this being sort of a vibe-based election.

And what's notable is

Waltz himself, like if you actually look at the things he did in Minnesota, his policy positions, it's not like

he's a very substantive candidate.

And I think one that a lot of

liberals on the Democratic side feel pretty good about because of his positions, the way he talks about issues, the way he's talked about the things he has done.

However, the idea that vibes maybe matter more now than ever really supports this sort of positioning of him and why he seems to be resonating.

And honestly, Frank, like why he is the candidate based on my understanding of it.

Well, he says he's convinced that winning that state championship is why he's the governor that he is, that that's why he got elected, because the story is you lose 27 straight games.

And the year they won the state championship, they started two and four.

I have questions about that.

I do not have a lot of eight and four state champions like what's going on with the football in minnesota that you're allowing him to run roughshod with shutouts through your postseason with an eight and four championship down steve bannon we get it all right

i'm just saying i have a lot of questions this is the kind of oppa we can expect no no no no no i i i'm saying that question authentically and legitimately how weak was that bracket a wild card second wild card high school team does everyone get into the playoffs participation culture strikes again.

You know a lot of eight and four state champions, do you?

Because we play good football in Florida.

There it is.

Plenty of our teams.

There it is.

Plenty more teams.

Well, Florida, look, we're armed here.

And if you disagree with us, we'll tell you your eight and four football team is not good enough, and we will shoot literal holes in your arm.

Let me tell you about Florida football.

You're not stopping Florida with a 4-4 stack, which is what we learned at old Waltzy Rand.

Because in Minnesota, you know, it's great.

If you just ground your pound, you're stopping the option.

you're teaching your defensive linemen to read those pulling guards.

That's not going to fly in Florida, where half of the NFL's wide receivers are from.

But there is something to how Tim Waltz as the nominee feels like the Democratic Party just realizing we just got to run the ball.

Like there's a giant open lane that is called sports that is for us on the left, speaking as the DNC, to take.

And, you know, what's funny about this is that I even, I was listening to like, I've been, I've been grinding some Ben Shapiro game film.

Just like, what are they saying about this introductory press conference?

And even he has to concede, like,

they look like they're having so much fun.

And this was a really good introduction.

And he's quite good.

I mean, let's just be frank about this.

Tim Walls gives a speech, and the speech is avuncular and it's charming.

What the right realized with Trump, by the way, was that as much as, of course, we can debate policy and substance, American politics today is so much more about the casting call.

It's so much more about who presents as your idea of something.

And Tim Waltz, you could argue, is super leftist relative to

certainly other, I mean, whatever.

You can get down the list of would-be VP nominees for the Democratic Party.

But because he looks and sounds and has the vocabulary of a suburban dad.

This right here is the headlight harness on a a 2014 Ford Edge.

Ford, this is unacceptable.

It burned out hot on the connector.

So for $7.99 at Napa Auto Parts here in the city, you can replace this.

It's just hard to make him present as anything short of a moderate.

And that feels like such a winning strategy, Bita,

in a political...

in a political conversation that is going to be so much more superficial than any of us would actually like it to be.

The most coherent attack you're seeing on Harris, and just this is not nothing new, is oh, California liberal, extreme left, whatever.

And it's funny because Waltz does have more liberal positions than a lot of candidates in recent years, and even some of the people being talked about as potential Veeps.

But it's really hard to mount that argument against a guy who looks like that and sounds like that with this story.

And that, to your point, is aesthetic more than anything.

And it's why I imagine they viewed him as strong, such a strong candidate for this moment because of how who he is, how he feels, how he talks.

I will say, though,

I know we're talking about him.

He's Coach Waltz and, you know, he's football and he's Midwest and wears camo.

But the guy seems to smile more than any human I've ever.

He looks so happy.

And I think that's what is also fascinating.

He is much more like Dan Campbell than your stereotypical kind of grumbly football dude.

He also presents very kindly and joyful.

And I think that's what makes him so unique.

This is something that Tim Waltz can bludgeon J.D.

Vance with.

J.D.

Vance is trying to make noises now.

I saw him being interviewed by, and this is just a sad sentence for me to say out loud, the Nelk Boys podcast.

And his whole point about like not being weird is that like, look, I'm a football fan just like you guys.

Like I'm a pretty normal guy.

I've got a wife and kids, and I like to hang out and you know, watch football, and I care about this stuff because I care about the country.

And I just love the idea of Tim Waltz going on to a debate stage and basically asking very basic sports fan questions of a guy who does not present as anything like the level of sports credibility that Tim Waltz has, a guy who is actually a sports fan.

And if Tim Waltz is going to be Mr.

Sports and he's going to be plugged into all of these scenarios in which, oh, yeah, he's that's a sports fan.

i just think that is such a layup that the republican party has abdicated because they're trying to campaign against sports because they're trying to do culture war stuff and meanwhile the most normy dude in presentation feels fundamentally moderate because he just loves football There's a lot of substance there.

If you dig into the things he has done in Minnesota, the ways he talks about real issues, his positions.

Okay, but that's not why he's the candidate.

He's the candidate because of

his image, how he presents, how he talks.

And I got to tell you, I can't wait to debate the guy.

Waltz made a couch joke about J.D.

Bands.

That is,

if he's willing to get off the couch and show up.

You see what I did there?

And I saw some hand-ringing on the part of like, I guess, moderates or calmness, right?

Oh, this is not who we are.

Why are we doing why we're not trying to be like MAGA?

What has been winning is Trump tweeting out a bunch of nicknames for people and people thinking, well, that's anti-politics.

That's new and fresh.

And what's now being countered is, well, that side is weird.

Look at all this weird stuff that the Republicans are doing.

This is not policy.

These are not policy debates.

I think a lot of liberals replied, we're tired of losing.

We're tired of trying to take the higher.

We're tired of trying to talk about issues.

It's not working.

So I think what you're getting at here is this sort of debate between pragm, it's a little bit of a pragmatism versus idealism thing.

I would feel a lot worse about it personally if there wasn't the substance there.

Everything suggests that this is a person who is good at governing and has, you know, stances on issues that are to believed in.

Is it worth hand-wringing if that's not what he's leading with or that's not why he was chosen?

Does that make sense to you, Pablo?

Yeah, yeah, but it's not, excuse me, I'm taking Pablo's space here.

But when you say pragmatism versus realism,

what I'm objecting to is perception versus reality.

I want reality to be reality, not perception to be reality.

And so when you tell me that what's going to win is someone looking presidential or seeming or acting presidential versus their substance being presidential.

And I'm not saying it's an either or, but what often wins in these circumstances is just, are you likable?

Are you someone I want to have a beer with?

And I just like it.

I'd like it to be a little bit deeper than that.

I'd like deeper to reach further.

I just want to run the ball.

I just want to run.

That's right.

This

is a big working.

Punch him in the mouth.

Punch him in the mouth.

And because, and look, some of this is, you know, if you're Kamala Harris, right, this is a funny thing on some level because, of course,

She was added to Biden's ticket because it felt like at that time in American history, you needed a black woman.

Joe Biden needed that as a matter of political strategy.

And so let's just be frank about how that all came to be, right?

That was,

of course, what she needs to rebalance her ticket is a dude who absolutely is what feels like in presentation, a non-extremist guy that you like to run into.

at the supermarket.

And so when it comes to just like, what is the substance here?

What is the myth?

What is the reality, the perception problem?

The reality of this to me, Mina, is that the response here is directly reflecting the era of Donald Trump and the fact that as much as we can get into policy, and that would be a winning argument, really

what you're trying to remind people is America doesn't need to look like that.

In fact, it could be the guy from your favorite sports movie.

That's not the whole ballgame.

There's a reason why

he is a candidate who feels more substantive than, I guess, like the equivalent would be like someone who's pure vibes, Sarah Palin, right, was a candidate who,

wow, great on TV, look, brings a different feel to the ticket.

And there was this huge bounce when she was picked.

And then people, the American, you know, electorate kind of

learned more and heard her speak and whatnot.

And that's not the case here.

So

I think I would be a little bit more

apprehensive of what we're discussing.

We're not talking about, you know, him if this was a candidate who felt like whatever the liberal equivalent of Sarah Palin is, because he's clearly not that guy.

I do want to take this, though, outside of politics briefly.

There's something to me

really important about seeing someone like this

modeling a different kind of masculinity that we just haven't seen.

And I think we're kind of seeing it a little bit in the NFL with the Kelseys and Dan Campbell, this idea

big tough football guy doesn't,

isn't separate from showing emotions and empathy and that kind of thing.

And I, and I, when I see them leading with, because Kamala, dude, she's, yes, they're calling him coach and whatnot, but in the same breath, they're emphasizing this man, the year he was a football coach, also ran the gay straight alliance at the high school.

That's really powerful in a way that goes far beyond politics and electability, which is what the discussion we're having.

There are very few models of like, like that in American public life.

There's a big difference here, right?

Tim Wallace feels...

I'm big.

I'm big.

I'm bigger than he is.

Dan looks like he should have played football and didn't.

I could have been the pulling guard on his Minnesota team that won the state championship.

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mina what is your topic today it's the topic every day in mina's mind

you guys ready to talk some football some real ball yes we just talked a little bit of high school football coach minutes

coach kimes has showed up dan you know i'm a nebraska football fan and This is, I feel like, by the way, Tim Watts is from Nebraska.

So some of those

Have you been clocking mean and just sort of lapsing into that southern accent again, by the way?

I would feel a lot worse about it personally.

I don't have to southern accent.

Okay.

So Bill Barnwell has been writing about this particular issue for quite some time.

Should your team pay a quarterback who is, it's debatable whether or not they're one of the five best quarterback, five to ten best quarterbacks in the NFL, a second contract.

Given how much quarterbacks make now, you know, $50 million, $55 million a year plus,

are you better off just saying, hey, let's try a draft and see and spend that money elsewhere on making a great team?

He talked about it.

I remember he wrote a great column about it.

He, I think, advocated for it with Jared Goff with the Rams before they gave Jared Goff the big contract.

And then they moved off of Goff.

So he was kind of vindicated.

But then weirdly, Jared Goff is now doing well and the Rams are great.

So that worked out for everyone.

But he brings this up because there's been these massive quarterback contracts going around.

And quarterbacks who I think, you know, there's been certainly debate about whether or not they're worth it.

Trevor Lawrence, Tuotanga Viloa, Jordan Love are the ones who just got big contracts.

We got a big Brock Purdy contract coming down the pike.

And there aren't that many teams who have had success doing this.

Like more often than not, when teams have given these quarterbacks these massive contracts, even quarterbacks who we would agree are good, they have not been as successful as when those quarterbacks were on their rookie deals or were underpaid or whatnot.

When we talk about like Tua and the deals I'm discussing,

there's just this assumption that they're going to get paid and that these teams are going to do this because

no team wants to roll the dice on just going back to the draft or free agency.

So I don't, what I want to hear from you guys is whether or not you think that's logical, whether it's coming from a place of fear, not wanting to get fired.

And maybe like if you were an NFL team or

a GM, would you be willing to say, hey, let's, this guy's fine, but let's move on and spend the money elsewhere.

Yeah, I love this topic because Bill Barnwell, who, again, who I've read for so long, gets to do something that I imagine is infuriating to NFL GMs, but is the same reason why I love reading him.

which is he gets to make arguments based on data, not driven by the political pressures that are actually the reality of the job.

And so when he points out, and I want to read this stat, that 21 quarterbacks inked a second contract between 2011 and 2023, just three of those 21 made a deeper playoff run after signing their extension.

He's basically saying that the second quarterback club for these, for these players who are otherwise like considered really good, it just doesn't work out.

And so it reminds me, Mina, of like your favorite catchphrase, which is that wins are not a quarterback stat.

What Bill is actually laying out here, Dan, is that wins are not a quarterback stat.

Sure, there's so many other players on a team that affects the outcome of a game, but it is so incredibly important

what a quarterback gets paid because it affects the other parts of a team and the decisions you should make in recognition of that.

And so many teams are losing, losing playoff games, losing so much more than they want to because of the price tag that they pay these quarterbacks quarterbacks that it's hard to avoid the fact that the quarterback is a big reason why it's happening.

I feel like Mina's Seahawks taught us the value of having a cheap quarterback and what you can do and build, sort of brought on this age in the salary cap by having a cheap quarterback and then building a dominant defense.

I love that she brought up McVay because the golf example is such a tricky one, such a ballsy move for the Rams to decide with conviction to pay him and then move off that quickly without fear.

The amount of confidence in moving off of golf and recognizing what they thought was a mistake that quickly, that they could upgrade the position and game the system that way was so smart and fearless that I believe a lot of these leaders don't tend to be fearless.

They're afraid of being fired.

And when Chicago's best quarterback ever is Jay Cutler, you understand why they'd want the security of do I have safety in the quarterback position that will make me competitive?

Wins are not a quarterback stat.

But all of those $50 million quarterbacks who are being paid more than Mahomes, they're 16 and 17 in the playoffs and they've made three Super Bowl appearances and they've lost all three of them.

So while it's not a quarterback stat, you do have to think about the new age of football.

Is what's most important, having good value at quarterback?

or having a great quarterback because in the age of the transaction, Mina, I'd argue that to build yourself correctly architecturally to afford Kittle and Trent Williams and McCaffrey and Debo, you have to have the cheap quarterback.

And so I'd prefer to have, obviously, Brock Purdy, whatever you think of him, cheap if I can put six guys around him that will make him look good.

But this is all very tricky because I don't know how to disentangle some things here that would, you can answer for this, Mina.

I don't know what Justin Herbert is going to look like if I don't have Mike Williams and Keenan Allen out there.

I think he's going to be great, but you have to be able to pay the people around it.

Justin Herbert barely had

Mike Williams and Keenan Allen out there at the same time.

Yeah,

so the playoffs are an interesting metric because I normally am like, I really hate when people say, oh, you know, Super Bowls is a metric because so few teams actually win the Super Bowl.

And Brady and Mahomes have just skewed the data so much.

But I do think looking at these playoff runs the way Bill does is useful because we're talking about team-wide performance and the ability to put together a team.

And I'm just looking at like the teams that were in the playoffs last year.

And

Philly, you know, paid Hurts, disappointment.

Tampa, cheap quarterback.

Rams,

they were, that's an interesting one because they did pay Matthew Stafford and they were arguably ahead of schedule.

But I believe he's one of the five or six best quarterbacks in the NFL.

Detroit, Goff was on a relatively cheaper deal.

They just paid him a lot and gave him a big extension.

Green Bay, rookie deal.

Dallas, obviously got bounced.

Miami, rookie deal.

Chiefs, Steelers, no quarterback.

Bills, Josh Allen.

Cleveland, rookie deal.

Or probably, Cleveland, no quarterback.

So they had, that's an interesting one, too, because they're paying.

Watson a lot of money.

The wrong quarterback.

They're paying the wrong quarterback.

And then you have the Texans who had a quarterback on a rookie deal.

This body of work, what it tells me is if you have one of the five or six best dudes, you're fine, right?

Like Josh Allen.

I think Matthew Stafford's in that category.

Obviously, Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson.

Otherwise, I think you are in trouble.

It is very hard to build a true contender

if you don't have one of the better, the five or six best quarterbacks in the NFL.

The margin of error is just so, so small.

It's frankly incredible that Cleveland, like, and that's what's amazing about this roster is everything else they've done has been like unbelievably smart draft picks signings hires coaching everything except for the quarterback position but it is really really really hard so we know this we see it we it's real it's obvious

teams still want to do it man

and i think some of that is the fear of

moving on and going to the draft.

But I also think a lot of it is the quarterback position is one that's imbued with so much emotional investment.

Fans,

owner,

the Dolphins being example.

I mean, that fan base has gone so hard defending Tua Tenga Pello over the years.

Can you imagine a world in which they would have moved on?

Like just the sell that that would be required, even if it was the right thing to do.

I just can't fathom a team doing that because of what it would do, the amount of blowback blowback you would get from the fan base.

No, the political pressure here is not like a metaphor.

It's actually like what it's like when a bunch of people say, We want to get you out of office if you don't do what we want.

Is Bill Barnel Nancy Pelosi in this analogy?

Exactly right.

The Chris Jenner of the DNC, Nancy Pelosi.

Abe Lincoln, I'm going to quote Abe Lincoln saying that real leadership risks unpopularity.

He did some unpopular things.

Like you have to be willing as a leader of people to make the decision that crushes your customers because,

you know, you're doing leadership.

It's not about just believing in hope and hoping that you're not unpopular for making a decision.

McVay, you think McVay made the decision on Goff worried about his unpopularity

with a quarterback?

But this is so Bill makes a point to point out, like a lot of what he's doing too is just reverse engineering.

Okay, what have the Chiefs done?

What have the Patriots done?

The teams that are really good at dynastic runs with a quarterback making more than 20%

of their cap.

What are they doing?

And they have these leaders who at least feel like they have job security, who are making longer-term decisions, and they're getting rid of other people that are also popular, but not quite as popular as the quarterback, right?

And so the Chiefs will lose Tyreek Hill, right?

The Patriots will cycle through all sorts of dudes and they will get draft picks and they will get these.

So it's funny, right?

Like you're star, you're super star hunting to the point of we need a top, top, top flight quarterback, but then you're bargain hunting.

And that is what really a, what's required to be a good bargain hunter is just the knowledge that you'll be around long enough.

You'll be incentivized to be around to reap the benefits of those longer,

longer deals.

The Chiefs have a cheat code, though, outside of obviously they have Patrick Mahomes who compensates for, let's say, you don't draft well on offense.

Your wide receivers are not great.

Well, it doesn't matter, right?

Cause you have Patrick Mahomes, but they have another cheat code, I think, which is

their defensive coordinator, C.

Spragnolo, should be probably a head coach.

He's the best defensive coordinator in the NFL.

He, they have rolled out the second youngest defense on NFL, in the NFL now for like, you know, a couple years.

And

that is when we talk about this dynasty, I think that's something that gets a little bit slept on is like, yes, you got to have the quarterback.

Yes, you got to hit on some picks and make good choices.

But having a guy like that in the building,

because last year, they don't win the Super Bowl without that defense, man.

And,

you know, that you can't, as a team, you can't strategically say, okay, we're going to like let the quarterback go, but, or we're going to pay our quarterback, pardon me, if you want to do that, which is what we're talking about.

But we also have the best defensive coordinator in football and we're going to be on a tear drafting.

Like, that's just too hard.

When you mentioned, though, Mina, and I'd be curious to get your answer on which you'd prefer if you had to choose,

value at quarterback and an above-average quarterback in the salary cap age when we're always talking about architecture, or a quarterback that is simply great and you pay him and you take your chances with that.

But when you mentioned Tua,

The Dolphins' best window to go through Mahomes, who is now cheaper than Tua per year, was when they had Tua cheap and they could not win a playoff game with Tua with a bunch of parts all around him.

Now you have to go through Mahomes and you've got a quarterback who's not as good as Mahomes and is also more expensive than Mahomes.

Architecturally, that seems like a very tough ask of your football team.

Yeah.

I mean, their

best shot is gone.

This is true.

As true of, you know, most of these teams, even ones with quarterbacks who I have in higher regard.

I think like the Cowboys example, their best shot is gone.

but football's weird, man.

Like, people get hurt, weird stuff happens, crazy things, you know.

So, you can't just throw your hands up and say, Well, we're, you know, we're paying Tua, we're not as good as Patrick Mahomes, we don't have a Josh Allen, you know, and I think that's what kind of like it comes down to for these GMs.

It's not just about job preservation, but like

this is kind of interesting because it goes back to the whole like the process debate or whatever.

The goal of the GM isn't just to maximize, to to say, what is the most optimic, like the most optimized approach towards winning a Super Bowl?

That's not the goal of being GM.

And maybe it should be.

And I think what Bill is getting into here is like,

you know, is the better way to win a Super Bowl to say, we're going to go to the draft again.

We're going to try to build a team.

And that probably is for a lot of these teams.

The goal is to win games.

And there's a big spectrum between

doing the best strategy to win a Super Bowl versus doing the best strategy to win 10 or so games.

And most GMs are oriented towards that, not towards doing whatever it takes to,

they wouldn't say that, but it's true.

What's more important, Mina?

Which would you rather have?

Brock Purdy at his contract

or Josh Allen at his

contract.

Josh Allen.

So in the modern age of architecture and salary.

We're going for a take there.

We did not get an aggregator.

No, no, I'm no, I'm Jen.

I think that it's changed so much.

You've got to win in the margins.

She's talking about if you have the best defensive coordinator, how much does it change?

When you have to win in the margins, it doesn't matter how you pay your assistant coaches.

You have to find value.

I do believe there's been a distortion in that sport, but Mina, you're more qualified to discuss this than I am, a distortion on team building.

I just saw Hard Knox focused, fascinated by the executives of the Giants.

And I do wonder if the executives are trying to win so much in the margins that some of them might argue.

And I don't know the answer to this.

You're telling me you'd rather have Josh Allen, that some of them might argue, no, let me build the rest of the team and know that I have a good quarterback that can be made great by the money I'm paying a bunch of different players.

Where this kind of falls apart a little bit is it's not that easy to build the rest of the team.

Like we can point to the Niners and say, oh man, you know, they're the cheapest quarterback in sports.

So, of course, they're good.

No, not, of course.

There's a lot of teams with rookie quarterbacks who suck.

They've also been phenomenal at identifying talent, not just in the first round, in the draft and elsewhere.

And they have the best play caller of my lifetime.

Like it just,

you know,

it's not a given that if you don't pay your quarterback, you're suddenly going to be good as long as you get competent quarterback play.

And then I'll say, like, you know, two of the quarterbacks who I mentioned, our rookie contracts, CJ Stratton and Jordan Love, both just look awesome.

And yeah, they're in good teams and they have good coaches and good players around them.

But I think those two young quarterbacks would be good in a variety of situations.

It certainly helps from a roster construction standpoint that they've been so cheap, no doubt.

But it's not like, it's not a foregone conclusion that if you don't pay a quarterback, you're just going to have this awesome team.

Pablo, I can make this tougher on her.

Who would you rather have?

Russell Wilson on that contract in his prime or Josh Allen?

Oh, wait, oh, in his prime.

Yeah, well, on the cheap contract.

They're winning the championship with Russell Wilson when he's cheap.

14 Russell Wilson versus

current Josh Allen.

When he's at his cheapest and you can build the defense.

Yeah.

Then I might.

Oh, it's more interesting because you're emotionally investigating.

Oh, you can choose.

I can give you.

Yeah.

I'm trying to think of other.

I mean, like, Dan, ask me C.J.

Stroud right now or Josh Allen.

That's an interesting debate.

Oh, I'd take C.J.

Stroud there, right?

Because I mean, you're getting so much value there.

But the thing is, though, but guys, like this article about, but like, this is not about Josh Allen, you know, right?

Like, this is about Tuatanga Veloa.

This is about...

No, No, it's about two things, I believe.

It's about two things, I think.

One is,

is the NFL going to get to a place where the gulf between the most inner circle quarterbacks and everybody else is so vast that everybody else, the Tuas, the Trevor Lawrence's, they're going to end up getting one-year prove it deals.

Whereas the other guys are going to be able to be a fifth of a salary cap.

I believe that Bill is foreshadowing that future because of all of the recognition that we've outlined.

The second thing this conversation has been about is that when Mina gets mad, the southern accent gets out of control.

Play that soundback before.

When you're talented as a quarter, but you sound like an Ozark character.

Play that soundback from like a question or two.

She is.

She's Darlene from Ozark.

She is.

Where this kind of falls apart a little bit is it's not that easy to build the rest of the team.

Am I the Tim Waltz of our world?

What a retail politician.

Pablo, I'm hoping that you can create a character to rival my grief-eating truffle pig.

I didn't do a southern accent there.

You literally not hear yourself.

I

you were about to do it.

You were about to do it.

You were about to do it, and then you heard yourself, and you stopped.

There's no voice.

There's no voice.

Do the voice.

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All right, Dan, take us home.

I really enjoyed this story.

The empathy punishment.

A woman hurled a burrito bowl at a Chipotle employee.

Then a judge made her walk in the victim's shoes.

It is New York magazine.

And what are you laughing about, Mina?

The video?

No, no, yeah, thinking about the video.

I assume we all watch the video.

So we're inside a Chipotle and my worst nightmare, by the way.

Well, you're being, it turns out, surveilled by your fellow customers at all times.

And so she's pointing, yelling at the person giving her this burrito bowl.

And you can't really hear what's happening, but you can just sort of see the body language, Dan, just sort of get more and more animated.

He's furious because she's been waiting for 35 minutes and she sent back the burrito bowl because it was disgusting and it had four ingredients and she didn't like it and she gets elevated it was cheese sour cream rice

as you can tell maybe in that yeah it's just violent it's the worst judgment this woman showed in the entire video was ordering a burrito bowl with only four ingredients That woman was interviewed by,

as I said, New York Magazine.

She was with her lawyer.

And what was funny is she kept saying how wrong she was and then defending all the reasons that it wasn't that wrong and why it is that she wasn't that wrong.

And

so the judge, instead of giving her a three-month sentence, which seems excessive, I got to be honest.

Three months in prison for that seems like a stiff crime, made her instead work at InFast Food for a couple of months.

And it seemed like a very creative punishment.

And she went to work at Burger King and she was a good employee and didn't like it.

But there's just a bunch of stuff here that was interesting, including how traumatized the employee was by having to work the rest of that shift with something thrown at her.

Now, before we get into the meat, so to speak, of this article, some of the things that are interesting in it

is just how crazy we all are.

After the pandemic, in the pandemic, short-tempered, and how much of this stuff is happening in the customer service industry that is burdened by the fact that we're all addicted to the convenience of, I don't want to go into that place and get my order.

I want that order brought to me.

And therefore, all these workers are overloaded and customer service has gone to total shit everywhere because low-paid employees are totally overwhelmed and everyone is angry.

So take it where you will from there.

I just found, I hope you guys found this article as interesting as I did.

Oh, I loved the deep dive into all of the perspectives on this story.

We meet meet the burrito bowl thrower.

We meet the burrito bowl victim.

We meet the judge.

This judge,

Michael Ciccinetti, I believe is his name.

Stop.

His name's Ciccinetti.

That was it?

How did I not notice that?

Sorry, keep going.

My Italian-American.

He's a little rusty, but I believe it's Cicconetti.

Served as a judge for 25 years.

Became known for his unusual sentences.

Quote, making a woman who abandoned a litter of cats in two local parks spend a night in the woods herself.

Apparently, you can do this.

I guess short of an Eighth Amendment violation of the Constitution, which prohibits cruel, unusual punishments, you can just do stuff like this, which feels Mina like sort of

what a, it's like Mr.

Beast is a judge.

It's sort of like you have a viral crime, you get a viral punishment.

To focus on what happened here, it didn't work.

I think it's really, that's, we got to lead with that here.

His creative punishment did not work.

As Dan alluded to, this woman was very unapologetic, seeming in the story.

She, at one point, this is when I kind of gasped when she said the Italian-American came out of me.

And I was like, okay, okay,

okay.

I think also, like, I have read a lot about like rehabilitative.

punishments generally and it seems like it works when you have someone who has to come face to face with their victim and talk to them and apologize to them that to me i get and this was by the way meeting the judge was trying to force empathy right he this was like the whole goal was make her feel for the other this just seems like a stunt and it seems silly and i don't think telling someone to spend a night in the woods is going to make them realize that they should be nicer to cats like stuff like that it doesn't come across i came up out of this feeling very bad for the woman who was the victim in this case

this went viral in a way that i guess It's embarrassing.

Even if you're the person who is clearly wronged, nobody wants to be known.

And she says she was known.

And like when she tried to get a new job, people found it as a person who had a chicken ball thrown at her face.

Like that sucks.

I know that people, I mean, you could say people were posting it to hold the woman accountable.

It seems like people just want to go viral or like participate in that culture.

But I felt very bad.

If you're a normal normal person, yeah, damn, if you're a normal person, like.

And you don't want to monetize this experience, it sucks.

It outright sucks.

And she says in the story that like, you know, allegedly Chipotle was going to say, you get security.

We're going to, we're going to sort of take care of you.

There's counseling.

None of that per her claims came true.

It reminds me, look, to get back to your pandemic, like, how did the pandemic warp all of us collectively?

I think there's something to that.

I also think that one of the worst and most pernicious principles that have been instilled.

in the American mind is that the customer is always right.

And that premise of like, we have some authority as a person who's paying 10 bucks to eat some Mexican food over the person behind the counter is just insane to me.

And it results in this level of

I should be the powerful one here, not you.

I make a point of it very often at the grocery store, because I'm in Miami and Miami can be a very rude place

to engage the cashiers in conversation, just so they don't think everyone in Miami is an

because those seem like terrible jobs.

If a lot of people are coming by, you're not being paid very much, and a lot of people are just being rude because we're a little bit angrier, and customer service is falling apart in a way that I can't go yell at Bezos about what's happening at Whole Foods.

And Bezos is monetizing all of these inefficiencies in a way that leaves low-paid people catching the brunt of a lot of anger.

I don't know what you found most interesting about this article, but at the top of my list would be how traumatized the victim was in this circumstance by having the burrito bowl thrown at her.

I had not considered that that would be something that would endure for months, but these are jobs.

And I ask you guys, you've had this experience, right?

I can't get anybody on the phone anymore.

You guys are making fun of me for being old, but nobody answers the phone anymore.

So if I need customer service, I got to email somebody.

And that doesn't help me.

And it's going to only make me angrier.

I'm going to want to put my blame somewhere if I'm really angry.

That's the way rage works.

That's where I struggle the most with,

I guess, rage generally or just.

trying to be polite, not in-person interactions, but when I'm on the phone and they keep redirecting me to, and if I do get to someone and it's clearly not the right person and they'd have no idea and they have to transfer me and it's like automated, but it doesn't, the automation doesn't work, I have to really

like

catch myself from being, I wouldn't say rude because I'm not going to, I don't yell at anybody.

I'm not like that.

You know, the verbal readable is not being thrown here, but

I get upset.

And I know I'm upset with the system and the infrastructure and all of it, but I have trouble sometimes

separating that from the person who's on the other, the end of the line who's incredibly unhelpful, you know, and I, and I think,

yeah, it, it, it does strike me as like, oh my God, like

everybody in this interaction is being set up to fail.

Now, I want to say this woman is not like, I am not exonerating the, the, the, the thrower, even though you, she gives her side of the story and you see it's, it's very obvious why she's upset and frustrated and stressed but 99.9 of people experience those things all the time and don't do what she did i want to say that what what as as as now i guess her defense attorney what she says in the piece is that she has never thrown anything before that this is so out of character that she's not a thrower at all She's never done anything.

Rookie, burrito bowl thrower.

She is, this is a rookie.

She's on a rookie contract throwing burrito bowls.

Yeah.

Would you rather have that lady or CJ Stroud, Dan?

Who you taking?

I'd rather have that lady at value than Deshaun Watson's contract.

I just also like, if it's so out of character and you've never done it before, don't you think you'd be a little more apologetic?

Man, that was funny to see her.

She's with an attorney.

She's got an attorney doing the interview with her.

And he keeps pointing out, hey,

I'm saying that you're wrong.

Yeah, this is not a defense.

Yeah.

And so she's saying that, yeah, I was wrong.

However, here are all the ways i'm not wrong which is how my wife reminds me that i apologize then trying to explain why it is that i was sorry instead of just saying i was sorry you guys have read uh the

the david foster wallace speech this is water this is water yeah i i thought about that really you've never read that um it's really beautiful

caveman i've read so much david foster wallace i've watched the movie with jason segel about david foster Foster Wallace.

I missed this.

You're defending you

horrible.

Shaming me for not reading enough, David Foster.

I will never talk to you guys again.

He used to dress like David Foster Wallace.

Damn.

So, Dan stormed off.

But, you know, what did we we find out today at the end of Hobbitori Finds Out, a show where we find stuff out?

That Dan might have crafted the single best attack on Tim Waltz that I've seen thus far, which is try it in the SEC, buddy.

About you, what did you learn today?

Well, what I learned is that

I believe I can visualize what it's like to listen to you.

on a customer's office call.

Enough.

Enough.

No, because

I can only imagine how southern that your accent becomes while you're on the phone with like Verizon.

The one time that I did try to impersonate a southern accent was when I complained about my Ouija, Ouija, Ouija board.

What?

Because

I've told you this story.

I don't know if, wait, wait, wait.

You complained to who about a Ouija board?

I got a Ouija board.

Ouija, Ouija board.

Ouija and Ouija.

And

I had gone to a party where everybody was like, oh, it's still in our fortune.

So I bought one.

You communicate with dead people through at Toys R Us.

Six-year-old or seven-year-old Mina sat at home with it, put her hands on it.

I was like, all right, let's do this.

Nothing happened.

I was so mad that I called the customer service hotline.

Oh, my God.

And I did a southern accent impersonation.

And the person on the other end laughed at me.

I said, my child purchased this Ouija board and it is non-functional.

And the Toys R Us Help Wine person

said, your child, and started laughing, haunted by this.

I've told Dan this story.

Did Dan go and print out This is Water?

Did you go and print out that speech?

I've got a good Ouija board story for you guys when I was in college.

Wait, wait, what were you?

Why were you trying to commune with the occult in college?

I didn't know anything about Ouija boards.

I didn't,

I grew up religious, so I was still at an age where I was a little scared of everything that was happening.

And so

this was amazing in that we were sort of asking a demon how much change one of the people in our party had in their pocket.

And the answer ended up being like 87 cents.

And then our friend reached into his pocket and grabbed and counted the money up.

And it was, I think it was, yeah, it was 62 cents that he had in his pocket.

And so we're laughing, oh, ridiculous demon.

And then he later, like an hour later, he found a quarter in his wallet that wasn't in his pocket that made it 87 cents.

It was horrifying, totally horrifying.

I just like how Dan met a demon cashier

who actually was right the entire time.

You ungrateful, ungrateful.

Pablo Tori Finds Out is produced by Michael Antonucci, Walter Averoma, Ryan Cortez, Sam Dawig, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Loman, Rob McRae, Rachel Miller-Howard, Ethan Schreier, Carl Scott, Matt Sullivan, Chris Tumanello, and Juliet Warren.

CEO Engineering by RG Systems, sound design by NGW Post.

Our theme song by John Bravo.

All of us will see you on Tuesday.