Mr. President’s Mind: How Shane Battier Learned to Lead (and Shut the F*** Up)

Transcript

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Speaker 19 Streaming gameplay, scouting new gear, chatting, and shopping all at the same time that's my kind of multitasking and it all happens on amazon live shop on amazon live by searching amazon live in the amazon shopping app and follow your favorite creators today this back to school season one thing is clear kids need a way to stay connected between pickups practices and after-school activities having a phone is a must but it shouldn't come at the cost of their mental health the youth mental health crisis is growing and social media is a major driver teens are spending up to nine hours a day on screens, and studies show a direct link to anxiety, depression, and even suicidal thoughts.

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Speaker 41 Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.
It is time to try

Speaker 41 my

Speaker 41 gravity.

Speaker 41 I think I'll try

Speaker 41 Right after this ad

Speaker 41 I love when a guest has a notebook.

Speaker 41 I do.

Speaker 41 I feel like such a boomer. I mean, I'm getting old.
I'm 46 years old. I forget things.
But if I write it down, I have notebooks upon notebooks of just maxims and quotes.

Speaker 41 If I put it in my phone, it's gone. And you have the good kind of pen, too, by the way, that thin, oh, the Mooji pen on

Speaker 41 pen. That's right.
That's

Speaker 41 better.

Speaker 41 The finer things in life. But I wonder if you've used that Mooji pen to write down at any point the quote I wanted to actually start with, which is, of course, from Mike Shaszzewski, Coach K,

Speaker 41 head coach of your Duke Blue Devils, who said this, quote, Shane was an alien. I wanted at the end of his career to crack his head open and see if he was really human.

Speaker 41 End quote.

Speaker 41 I think that's a compliment. Pablo, I was psycho.
I was a psycho, a psychotic,

Speaker 41 neurotic

Speaker 41 person in my time at Duke.

Speaker 41 And great steal by Forte. He'll go for two.

Speaker 41 No. Oh, wow.
Come on,

Speaker 41 what a play. That's one of the great defensive plays you'll ever see right there, baby.

Speaker 41 When Coach K recruited me, I was part of a very talented recruiting class, number one class in the country, Elton Brand, William Avery, right? Chris Burgess. I grew up watching you guys.
Right.

Speaker 41 And we were going to a team that had,

Speaker 41 you know, at the time, 10 McDonald's All-Americans. We had 10, 10, which is crazy.
So you're saying, like, why would you go to a team that has 10 McDonald's All-Americans? And Coach K,

Speaker 41 people always ask me, like, what's so great about Coach K? Coach K can peer into your soul and know what button to push. Finding the heart of the team is

Speaker 41 huge. I call it a spirit.

Speaker 41 He is a different spirit. Once we get him in our program, I have to give him some more latitude where he feels comfortable

Speaker 41 in instinctively following that spirit.

Speaker 41 He knew this when I was in high school. So he came into my living room and he said, you know, Hayshane, I'm not going to promise you playing time.
I'm not going to promise you shots.

Speaker 41 I'll promise you one thing, the opportunity to earn playing time every single day.

Speaker 41 And if you're good enough to play so he had me hook line a sinker and i'm like i'm gonna show you i'm gonna show you and i'm gonna make you play me

Speaker 41 you're gonna stab people's eyeballs with that fine ballpoint mooji pen i would i would have i would have i used to throw up before every game every game every game my my freshman year i started and literally i'm going out to the jump ball circle i'm so anxious i want to play well so bad i would run back to the run back to the bench grab a gator a towel throw up in it, throw it back out, and then they toss the ball.

Speaker 41 And just to be extra clear about this, Shane Badier barfing his ambitions into a towel before every game as a six foot eight Duke freshman was a thing that pretty much everybody who cared about him found intensely unsettling, I am told.

Speaker 41 And this was true of his college girlfriend, who was now his wife, and it was true of then Duke assistant coach Quinn Snyder was now the head coach of the Atlanta Hawks

Speaker 41 although

Speaker 41 there was one notable exception I think coach K loved it because he's like it matters to me he cares but Quinn Snyder was like this is not healthy you cannot do this and so he literally would like breathe with me breathe yeah breathe he's like Shane breathe breathe breathe

Speaker 41 But when it comes to Barf, the first thing that I personally think about when I think about about Shane, whose brain, by the way, not unlike Coach K, I also plan to just crack open here,

Speaker 41 is a different liquid.

Speaker 41 And it dates back to the first time that I ever met Shane, which was at a bar during the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference about maybe a decade ago, which would be around sometime after he played pickup with Barack Obama, which we'll discuss.

Speaker 41 And probably also around when he was just winning championships with LeBron James, James, who would call Shane, quote, the number one smartest basketball player and person I've been around, end quote.

Speaker 41 But that night, during that conference, Shane Battier introduced me to something else.

Speaker 41 It's a magical mixture of alcohol that was introduced to me by my teammate in Miami, Greg Odin, who learned this drink from Beast Mode himself, which is totally on brand, and that drink is called Petrenacy.

Speaker 41 And what I found out that night is that patrenis is exactly what you think it is, and exactly what Marshawn Lynch apparently envisioned. Half Patrone,

Speaker 41 half Hennessy.

Speaker 41 Which is why I also found out that drinking petrenicy made me feel like Shane Battier during his freshman year.

Speaker 41 And so we were bonded from that moment on. I mean, you look at me, I look at you, and the first thought is paternity.

Speaker 41 And just to clarify here, by the way, I did not grow up dreaming of a bond with this man.

Speaker 41 As I said, I grew up watching Shane take charges, slap floors, become a champion at Duke, and the National Player of the Year and a three-time defensive player of the year.

Speaker 41 But he went to Duke.

Speaker 41 And after the Memphis Grizzlies, the god-awful Memphis Grizzlies, drafted Shane sixth overall in 2001,

Speaker 41 I mostly forgot about him. I think most people did.

Speaker 41 But in 2009,

Speaker 41 no less than Michael Lewis wrote a seminal article about Shane Battier for the New York Times magazine. And this article had an unforgettable headline.

Speaker 41 The no stats all-star.

Speaker 41 Because Shane, at this point, was a 30-year-old glue guy, a nerdy glue guy, grinding away for the Houston Rockets.

Speaker 41 And what Michael Lewis basically did was make the case for why this relatively minor character, who had this vomitously maniacal devotion to defense, to frustrating the most unstoppable scorers in the world, actually represented the modern evolution of sports culture, writ large.

Speaker 41 Shane was analytical. He avoided taking two-point shots because of their inefficiency.

Speaker 41 And also,

Speaker 41 when the story first came out, I had mixed emotions. I'm not going to lie.
Well, you see the headline. Yeah.
And it's like,

Speaker 41 it's the biggest backhand and compliment you can get.

Speaker 41 You know, it's Michael Lewis. So, like, Michael,

Speaker 41 Mr. Moneyball.
That article has generated, you know, a lot of money for me over the years. You know, my speaking career and

Speaker 41 podcast. So, like, I, it was my opus, and I would not be here without Michael.

Speaker 41 And so at the time, when you're, you know, I was still, what, probably eight years into my career, you know, I still thought I was a really good player and, and, and more than just like a glue guy.

Speaker 41 Um, but now I love it. And now I love that that's my, that's my reputation.
That was always authentically who I was, right? So like Lewis hit it right in the head.

Speaker 41 That's, that's how I was from kindergarten all the way to my last day in the NBA. So I'm very proud of that moniker.
It's super nerdy, but I'm nerdy. So it's all good.

Speaker 41 The embedded sort of premise of the no stats all-star is that in ways that cannot be actually quantified, but can be begun to be detected by the most advanced metrics.

Speaker 41 So it's really the advanced math all-star more than it is the no stats all-star. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 41 I want to just quote the thing about you that Daryl Maury, who is now, of course, president of the 76ers, a fellow PTFO guest, as is Michael Lewis. This is all very incestuous.

Speaker 41 I want to just quote Daryl. Daryl says, quote, I call him Lego.
When he's on the court, all the pieces start to fit together.

Speaker 41 And everything that leads to winning that you can get to through intellect instead of innate ability, Shane excels in. I'll bet he's in the hundredth percentile of every category.

Speaker 41 So again, familiar compliment, insult, sort of like layer cake

Speaker 41 instead of innate ability. You know,

Speaker 41 there was something that you were great at that was kind of ineffable. Give us the sort of like

Speaker 41 gallery of people that Shane Badier had to puke into his towel to sort of contemplate defending. A house of horrors.
And the best thing that happened to me my rookie year

Speaker 41 was

Speaker 41 I played two guard. So here I am out there.
I'm guarding Iverson. I'm guarding Paul Pierce.
I'm guarding Ray Allen. I'm guarding Kobe.
The ball comes in. Cody's got it.

Speaker 41 Above the three-point line, taking a little bit of time. One dribble pull-up for the winner's got it.

Speaker 41 And they kicked my ass my rookie year.

Speaker 41 But I learned, you know, I learned so much. I learned so much.
I learned angles. I learned how to use my height.
I learned how to be physical. And that was the best instructor for me.
And so, look,

Speaker 41 I took a great pride in catching all those guys. Carmelo.

Speaker 42 It's Carmelo against Battier.

Speaker 41 His defense has been destroyed.

Speaker 42 Badier's defense, though, is against Carmelo. Inside.

Speaker 41 KD. Drives on Battier, throws it down.

Speaker 41 Kevin Durant. You name it.
I played against the greatest players of my generation and I miss that anxiety. All right, Garden Kobe Bryant is scary.

Speaker 41 I never will forget the feeling of getting on the bus at the Marina Del Rey Ritz. And it's like a 45-minute ride to Staples Center.

Speaker 41 And I'm just thinking to myself, shit, this guy's trying to embarrass me. Like, I know, like, I know he's just like, he's lathered right now.
And he wants to score 80 points on me tonight.

Speaker 41 Like, and so like that anxiety was real, right? And so I call it productive paranoia.

Speaker 41 Instead of being like paralyzing, I use that to be like, man, I better know everything about Kobe that there is to know about him.

Speaker 41 And so that, like, that, like, I tried to learn and threw myself in the data analytics and just learned Kobe better than Kobe knew himself.

Speaker 43 On Kobe Bryant, following the game plan, the strategy, contesting every shot, not giving him a wide open look, fighting through screen. You talk about when he goes up, you go up as a defender.

Speaker 43 Doing an outstanding job of not surrendering an inch. Shane Baddie says, hey, I stay the course.

Speaker 41 And

Speaker 41 it allowed me to stay in the game. And I understood: okay, I'm not going to stop these guys, but I can be a human yellow light.
It's slowing down a little bit.

Speaker 41 And that was my only goal: just be the human yellow light.

Speaker 17 This back to school season, one thing is clear: kids need a way to stay connected.

Speaker 20 Between pickups, practices, and after-school activities, having a phone is a must.

Speaker 22 But it shouldn't come at the cost of their mental health.

Speaker 24 The youth mental health crisis is growing, and social media is a major driver.

Speaker 28 Teens are spending up to nine hours a day on screens, and studies show a direct link to anxiety, depression, and even suicidal thoughts.

Speaker 18 So, this school year, skip the adult phone.

Speaker 23 Get them gab, social connection without the risks.

Speaker 40 Gab, tech in steps, independence for them, peace of mind for parents.

Speaker 10 Streaming gameplay, scouting new gear, chatting, and shopping all at the same time? That's my kind of multitasking. And it all happens on Amazon Live.

Speaker 15 Shop on Amazon Live by searching Amazon Live in the Amazon Shopping app and follow your favorite creators today.

Speaker 41 That's the sound of the fully electric Audi Q6 e-tron and the quiet confidence of ultra-smooth handling. The elevated interior reminds you this is more than an EV.

Speaker 41 This is electric performance redefined.

Speaker 41 The whole thing of like, I'm going to slow you down, but I know I'm not going to stop you. Yeah.
Right. When it came to why these guys,

Speaker 41 as much as they would talk about how, you know, we're not afraid of Shane Badier. Yeah.

Speaker 44 Does it feel different facing this team with Battier gone? You guys had a lot of classic matchups throughout the years.

Speaker 44 Yeah, I mean, yeah, I guess. I guess.

Speaker 41 The stats actually indicate, like, yo,

Speaker 41 you slowed down. I wasn't bad.
You slowed down at the yellow light. As it turned out, as it turned out, I wasn't half bad.
Is there an element of this that is teachable?

Speaker 41 Yeah, because because I had the answer to the test before I took it. Like

Speaker 41 in the NBA, everyone overestimates how good of a 20-foot jump shooter they are. A 20-foot jump shot is a really hard shot to shoot, especially if you dribble once.
It's like a 40% shot.

Speaker 41 That's a tough shot. And people will argue with me, oh, no, it's part of the game.

Speaker 41 No, that is a hard shot for even the best player, unless your name is Steph Curry or Kevin Durant. All right, Devin Booker.

Speaker 41 And the one thing that, you know, I was able to do that a lot of people can't do, I detached myself from the outcome.

Speaker 41 I didn't care. I didn't care if a guy made a shot or not.
I really didn't. I cared where they took that shot.
And I knew if they took the shot in the wrong area,

Speaker 41 in the area where they struggled the most, given enough time, sample size, they would beat themselves. And so I just had to sort of lead them to that conclusion.

Speaker 41 And so you can teach somebody kind of the squares in the court where it's just hard to make a shot.

Speaker 41 A two over Battier.

Speaker 42 Rebound by Bynum.

Speaker 41 Relentless pressure. He's going to put that on you every single possession.
And you know what? You got to give Shane Battier a lot of credit.

Speaker 41 When you look back at how you got to be this way, that's the part where I'm like, I don't know if you can really teach that.

Speaker 41 Look, I grew up in a middle-class part of Detroit. All right.
I was very poor. You know, the roof leaked when it rained.
I remember what a government cheese sandwich tasted like.

Speaker 41 I had patches on my jeans and all my clothes. Like we had like no money.
You know, I learned the phrase, Rob Peter to pay Paul like when I was in kindergarten, right? We were very, very poor.

Speaker 41 I was the only kid in town that had a black dad and a white mom. So in an elementary school of 500 kids, I was the only black kid.
Okay.

Speaker 41 I got a pick on Pitcher Day. Everyone else got a comb.
Okay. On Martin Luther King Day, I was expected to know everything about black culture from the dawn of civilization.

Speaker 41 And I was a foot taller than everybody else. Okay.
So I was the kid who always had to carry a birth certificate with him at the Little League game. So like I was an outcast outcast wherever I went.

Speaker 41 So I was mixed, tall, and poor.

Speaker 41 The only place I really felt at home was at recess

Speaker 41 and playing kickball and playing dodgeball and playing basketball and baseball, all the sports.

Speaker 41 And I realized like when I help my friends win, like I'm not, I'm no longer the poor kid, the mixed kid, the tall kid. I'm just the kid who helped my friends win.

Speaker 41 So I didn't care, I didn't care like about what I did or how I looked. All I cared about is did we win? And did I help my friends win? So I'm going to do whatever it takes.

Speaker 41 I'm going to do whatever it takes to make sure my friends look good and that we win.

Speaker 41 I took that lesson from kindergarten. So it was born out of desperation.
It was born out of just, hey, I want to be loved. I want to be accepted.
And

Speaker 41 that's what put the dog in me to just be just

Speaker 41 intense and paranoid and all those things.

Speaker 41 I find that a big learning that people hopefully have had about

Speaker 41 the nerd as a creature in American life

Speaker 41 is that

Speaker 41 the nerd can be among the most competitive people that you've ever imagined. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 41 The guy who, and again, and this is me fact-checking as a journalist, the guy who had a subscription to Laptop Magazine.

Speaker 41 Yeah, I'm a gadget whore,

Speaker 41 but, you know, there was a magazine called Laptop Magazine.

Speaker 41 I mean, this is just depth that I, I, I'm obviously somebody who is, this is a judgment-free zone, but I didn't know there was a laptop magazine. We share an insatiable curiosity.
Yes.

Speaker 41 And that, that, like, yes, knowing your story, that was my secret power. I was so scared that there's the answer is out there.
I just haven't found it yet.

Speaker 41 And so, yeah, I subscribed to laptop magazine because they had all these new gadgets come out. And I said, oh, shit, like, maybe this could be the answer to like to change my life, right?

Speaker 41 Again, that was my superpower in the NBA. Like, I don't know how to guard Kobe Bryant.
Like, well,

Speaker 41 maybe if I, if I learn this about him, like, it'll help me.

Speaker 41 But the whole idea of like winning over a room, right? Which is embedded in the premise of culture, which is to say that like it needs buy-in. Yep.

Speaker 41 You need to convert people to the thing that you revere. Yep.
How hard was that for you in these locker rooms?

Speaker 41 When I go to the Grizzlies, they had the lowest winning percentage of the four North American professional sports leagues. Okay, they had a 20-winning percentage.
That's a good stat.

Speaker 41 That's a good stat. They won one out of every five games in the history of the franchise.
Okay, so you talk about a franchise that had like

Speaker 41 no idea how to win. This is the Grizzlies.

Speaker 41 So we lose our first 10 games. You know, we're on a bad team.
I think we're like 2 and 15. Their style has not been good.
They have

Speaker 41 stumbled along the way. They have not had their productivity out of their scores.
They have been passive at the point,

Speaker 41 and they've lost 11 in a row. A lot of work to be done here in Memphis.
We call like the most overhyped, overused term in pro sports, the players-only locker room meeting. Oh, God.
It's the worst.

Speaker 41 I've been fascinated by this ritual.

Speaker 41 Okay, so explain. For those not familiar with why this is a thing, please explain the thing.

Speaker 41 So, a player's only meeting only happens when you're, you're, you know, you're getting heat from the media, the fans are on you. All right, look, you know, you're not playing well, okay? So, you know,

Speaker 41 all the movies, you know, say, you know, you know, the captains, the veterans, they call a player's only meeting.

Speaker 41 We're going to air our grievances and we're going to have a kumbaya moment, and that's going to propel us to

Speaker 41 better performance. Okay.
And so during this particular locker room meeting, you know, here I am, you know, full of righteousness coming from Duke, the coach KOA. Yep.

Speaker 41 And

Speaker 41 I'm the first one to stand up and I say, you know, I got to be honest, the veteran leadership on this team sucks. Very honest, very direct.

Speaker 41 And they said, hey, Duke boy, shut the f ⁇ up, go sit in the corner.

Speaker 41 Who are you?

Speaker 41 And I was just like, oh man, I did not read the room. It humbled me.

Speaker 41 And I realized like, man, I can't come in here guns a a-blazing because there's, there's kind of like an ethos and a creed and kind of an unspoken locker room path you got to take to earn credibility.

Speaker 41 And I hadn't done that to that point. And so I shut my ass.
I went to work, right? But

Speaker 41 I didn't become cynical. I didn't become jaded.
I wouldn't allow that locker room to change me. So I kept working.

Speaker 41 And a funny thing happened, like the guys who maybe were on the fence and didn't know how to, how to act and how to win started to have like

Speaker 41 winning attitudes and like winning behaviors. And all of a sudden, like you kind of feel the locker road kind of shift a little bit.
And we started to believe a little bit.

Speaker 41 And Hubie Brown comes in the next year. We start winning some games.
Memphis now 26 and 31 since that 0 for 13 start.

Speaker 41 The team that was once an easy out now holds the key in the Western Conference playoff race. It was pretty awesome to be part of that.
I'd never been part of like a culture change. Yeah.

Speaker 41 But this is a mythical concept of like, how do you change culture, the thing that every business is going to have to grapple with at some point if they meet what is more likely than not, which is failure.

Speaker 41 Yep. It's not

Speaker 41 the rah-rah speeches. All right.
It's not the sayings on the wall.

Speaker 41 It's the small, subtle acts that most people don't even pay mind to.

Speaker 41 It's the unmeasurable. It's the unmeasurable.

Speaker 41 Which is all to say that there are these inflection points in Shane Badier's life when he has had to decide whether it is time for him to take the microphone or not.

Speaker 41 And this can be a difficult political exercise for somebody who loves karaoke as much as Shane Badier does, as we need to explain in a bit.

Speaker 41 But this takes us to a moment for now on the court when the human yellow light wasn't actually trying to slow down a superstar.

Speaker 41 Because it was June 2012, and Shane was playing for the Miami Heat.

Speaker 41 The Miami Heat, for those not familiar, fetishized culture more than any other team in sports, as our own Ryan Cortez will gladly tell you.

Speaker 41 And it's to the point where the Heat would go on to later hire Shane as an executive.

Speaker 41 But on this June evening in 2012, what Shane Badier was mostly trying to do was just not get in the way of one of his fellow starters.

Speaker 41 The issue, however, was that LeBron James, one of the best scorers ever, obviously, who was now being given the greenest possible light, had won zero titles at this point.

Speaker 41 Speaking of measurables, LeBron had joined Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosch in Miami, only to be humiliated by Dallas in the finals the year before this.

Speaker 41 And so here the Heat were in 2012, overhyped and trailing in one of the most tense Eastern Conference finals in memory. And they were about to be eliminated by their most hated rival.

Speaker 41 Welcome to Boston and a sold-out TD Garden. It's game six of the Eastern Conference.
They're saying, look,

Speaker 41 there's no way the Heat are going to win this game.

Speaker 41 a chance to move on. Way double teamed as he has seen all series long.

Speaker 41 David slaying Goliath. Yes.
We know if we lose game six, this is like maybe the most failed experiment. The most

Speaker 41 highly publicized failed experiment, and there's blood on everybody's hands. Yeah, and by the way, there's just salivating from everybody who talks about sports.
These guys are villains.

Speaker 41 You guys are Goliath. Again, that's the other key part of this: is that it's what does Goliath do to save his own ass?

Speaker 41 They drove the hearse to td bank arena that night but like before that game there wasn't like a huge rah-rah speech it was just like look we just got to be ourselves we've been through the fire and there was a trust what was lebron like because this is now in in terms of his the character study the lebron game Yes, and also like adding an inflection.

Speaker 41 Exactly.

Speaker 41 That was the inflection point for his entire Hall of Fame career. The story of his life is so different if that game goes differently.
Different. No one knows, no one realizes that.

Speaker 41 And so, like, of anybody, LeBron knows he has the most at stake. Yes.
The most. Yes.

Speaker 41 The most.

Speaker 41 And so, like, he was very calm that day. He didn't say anything.
He didn't puke into a towel. No, no.
But like,

Speaker 41 I'm going to tell you what. When that motherfucker has that look, man,

Speaker 41 let's go. It's like when Adam turns into He-Man,

Speaker 41 I

Speaker 41 have

Speaker 41 the power!

Speaker 41 It's almost like an aura around him. We're just like, oh my gosh, this is unbelievable.

Speaker 41 Go! James comes flying in and throws it down.

Speaker 41 He's got 27 first half points. I remember watching this game

Speaker 41 and imagining what must it be like to be around him in this moment.

Speaker 41 You didn't talk about it. You didn't look at him.

Speaker 41 You're just like, I don't want to jinx it.

Speaker 41 Here at the TD Garden.

Speaker 41 30 in the first half. These are all second half.
The one-foot step back, and then the little floater as he posts up Rondo at the elbow, and then the 17-foot catch, that jab step, jump-shot game.

Speaker 41 And so we win the game.

Speaker 41 You win big. We win big.
By the way, like curb stomping suffocation. Yep.
Big. Yep.
Because the final score is 98 to 79.

Speaker 41 LeBron, for the record, right? Do you remember his stat line? 45. 45 minutes, 45 points, 19 of 26.
Yeah. 19 of 26.
Ridiculous.

Speaker 41 Also, by the way,

Speaker 41 15 rebounds, throwing five assists, casually. I mean,

Speaker 41 the greatest game I've ever seen anybody play. It's a hard argument to beat.
It was given the stakes, given the gravity of the situation, given like the

Speaker 41 historical implications. Historical.
We're going to be arguing Jordan versus LeBron forever.

Speaker 41 And this game is the reason why it's plausible. I'm always going with LeBron for a simple reason.
For a simple reason. Is it because you scored eight points that game?

Speaker 41 LeBron did something twice that Jordan, I don't think, could have done once.

Speaker 41 He won two NBA titles with Shane Battier as a starting power four.

Speaker 41 No way. No way, Jordan.
No way, Jordan could have done that. As great as Jordan was, LeBron dragged me across the finish line.
The Albatross had never been so heavy.

Speaker 41 And that's my story, story, and I'm sticking to it.

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Speaker 8 It's third down.

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Speaker 17 This back to school season, one thing is clear.

Speaker 19 Kids need a way to stay connected.

Speaker 20 Between pickups, practices, and after-school activities, having a phone is a must.

Speaker 22 But it shouldn't come at the cost of their mental health.

Speaker 24 The youth mental health crisis is growing, and social media is a major driver.

Speaker 27 Teens are spending up to nine hours a day on screens, and studies show a direct link to anxiety, depression, and even suicidal thoughts.

Speaker 23 So, this school year, skip the adult phone, get them gab, social connection without the risks.

Speaker 40 Gab, tech in steps, independence for them, peace of mind for parents.

Speaker 41 Now that we've gone through one of the

Speaker 41 glorious chapters, do you remember the most humiliated you ever felt in a league? My last year.

Speaker 41 My last year.

Speaker 41 When I was told, without being told, that our best chance of winning doesn't include you, Shane.

Speaker 41 When, you know, Spo started to sit me in the fourth quarter, nothing was worse to me than sitting me in crunch time.

Speaker 41 That was my identity. And it hurt me to my core.
And that's when I knew I was done. I was embarrassed.
I was embarrassed. And I checked out and I was cynical.

Speaker 41 And so when I retired, I was very cynical. And so I was sad, but I was also very cynical.
What does cynicism mean at this point in your trajectory?

Speaker 41 I shut people out. I was probably battling some depression.

Speaker 41 I didn't know what depression was. I never had this feeling before, but feeling very isolated.
I didn't feel anyone understood what I was going through. I felt very alone.

Speaker 41 And I pushed people away. I pushed my wife away.
I pushed my kids away. And I just was a jerk.
I wasn't like doing destructive things. I wasn't like I was drinking every night,

Speaker 41 but I was just, I was emotionally unavailable. And I was hurt and I was

Speaker 41 pissed off. And I had all these emotions I had never associated with basketball.
And it was a big mistake to go work for ESPN. I was really bad on TV.

Speaker 41 You can probably go on an awful announcing and say, oh,

Speaker 41 we're going to find some Shane Baddie A. I was low lights.

Speaker 41 I had zero passion for it. Zero.
Congratulations.

Speaker 41 Your father was a great point guard for the Russian national team. What has he meant to your career? Oh, I think now

Speaker 41 he watched this, he watched drafts. You're like, a lot of emotion you have.
So same like me.

Speaker 41 Well, that's great. But at this point in our episode,

Speaker 41 everybody listening understands how insane that is. That you, guy they've been listening to, tell stories with this level of alacrity,

Speaker 41 couldn't do that

Speaker 41 because of

Speaker 41 this internal.

Speaker 41 Was this the hearse? Was this finally you being like, I guess I got to get in this thing now?

Speaker 41 I was chasing relevance.

Speaker 41 When you retire, like, you don't know.

Speaker 41 This is all I knew. It's all I knew.
30 years, right? I had purpose every day. I had a scoreboard above me and told me where I was.
All right. I love my teammates.
I love being part of a team, right?

Speaker 41 The money was great. You know, I had status.
I had all these things that like people are chasing these things in their professional life. I had, it checked every box.

Speaker 41 So to not have that when you wake up one day, because you don't have the jersey, you don't have the locker room, you don't have the purpose. It's scary as shit.
Yeah.

Speaker 41 I was terrified. I was terrified.
There's one quote that I remember you giving at one point, and it was:

Speaker 41 if you had filet mignon every single night, you'd stop tasting it. Yep.

Speaker 41 Which is to say that even though you missed so actively the thing that you weren't doing anymore,

Speaker 41 it felt like by the end, also your

Speaker 41 ability to enjoy it was also changing, which is an interesting tension of like missing something that wasn't even the thing that for you it

Speaker 41 was anymore. Yeah.
Yeah, it's weird, it's a weird feeling. It was a weird, it was a weird time.
I went through a lot of, who am I?

Speaker 41 Who am I? My identity was so tied to basketball. It was tied to the nostat all-star stuff.
Right. Right.
So like, I, in a lot of ways, I felt like I was an actor in my own life,

Speaker 41 that I had to only take, like, I couldn't turn it over. I couldn't take two-point shots because I talked about it.
No, literally. So

Speaker 41 I get it. So I felt like.
almost like I was playing this role of this guy.

Speaker 41 And we talk about authenticity and I played it to the best of my ability,

Speaker 41 but I questioned, like, who the heck am I? What am I about? Like,

Speaker 41 what am I doing? What am I doing? And, you know, going to ESPN and being terrible at it and that disaster of a year didn't help. And so, you know, I had never been to therapy.

Speaker 41 My wife, you know, of 22 years when we met in seventh grade, said, look, Shannon, I know you like optionality. Here's three options.
You can, you know, here's a number to the Marriott.

Speaker 41 Here's a number to your attorney. And here's this number to this life coach/slash psychologist that comes very highly recommended.
I said, Heidi, I'm not a very smart man.

Speaker 41 I'm going to choose door three.

Speaker 41 And so I had to unpack a lot of crap that I just didn't deal with because I was so driven. I was, I was throwing, I was too busy throwing up.

Speaker 41 I was too busy grinding and just like pursuing whatever it was in the basketball career that I did not give time to and like not healthy at all. You know, I was not stable.

Speaker 41 Well, this is is the other thing about like having a superpower in any way, right? Is that there's an implication that,

Speaker 41 man, look at this gift. But the more I learn about sports, the more I realize that extremity in any fashion also implies a certain imbalance if you're not extraordinarily careful.

Speaker 41 100%.

Speaker 41 And I don't,

Speaker 41 would I do things differently? I don't know. That's the thing.

Speaker 41 I know it wasn't healthy. But like, I never had a sports psychologist when I played because I was so scared of anyone getting inside this and taking away my superpower,

Speaker 41 which was like my IQ and my ability to read and react. I'm like, I don't, I don't need to be thinking.
I don't need to be

Speaker 41 emotive here. I just need to be like a great defender and make open shots.
And like,

Speaker 41 I'll deal with the metric. The standard of success is not a health.
It is, are we winning? Are we winning? Am I still here?

Speaker 41 And so. I don't know what I would have done differently.

Speaker 41 Did you get a sense that when you got went to therapy that your psychologist was

Speaker 41 I know exactly the type of person you are? Or were they saying something that was...

Speaker 41 Yeah, I don't think I was out of the ordinary for a retired athlete. I think every athlete goes through some version of this, some form or fashion.

Speaker 41 And the longer you're in the game, the more work you got to do. Right.
And I describe it as, and I think this befalls any

Speaker 41 person of success, all right? But especially young people, you know, entertainers or people who win the first third of their life, right?

Speaker 41 When you're identified as a young talent or even an old talent, you know, you're told you're great, you know. And if you show any vulnerability, guess what?

Speaker 41 We're going to take your dream and give it to that person because they don't show any weakness. So what do you do? You start building walls.
You always have the answer. All right.

Speaker 41 You can't feel anything. You're bulletproof.
Right. So emotionally, psychologically, financially, sexually, like, I got all the answers.
I don't need any help.

Speaker 41 Give me space. Just give me a laptop, magazine, and some space.

Speaker 41 I'll figure it out. And it's all good until it ain't, right? When you don't have that purpose and you don't have that support system of the locker room and you're like, who the hell am I?

Speaker 41 Well, I've been doing it solo for so long that I don't know how to ask for help. I don't know how to, you know, so like, and what you realize is it's, it's all relationships.
It's all relationships.

Speaker 41 And it's being authentic in your relationships and fostering those things. So like, that's what I would have done.
I would have done a better job of fostering

Speaker 41 relationships and allowing people who I care about to help me along the way. When you talk about basically having these relationships, building a cabinet of people around you,

Speaker 41 I think about

Speaker 41 how you are also one of the very special lucky people to have played basketball with a man who had his own cabinet.

Speaker 41 What was playing basketball against Barack Obama like?

Speaker 41 I was actually on his team. So, first of all, to get the

Speaker 41 call to go to the president's birthday. What's that call like?

Speaker 41 Unexpected.

Speaker 41 A call out of the blue. Hey, what are you doing this day?

Speaker 41 The president has requested you to play in his birthday pickup game. He's turning 49.
Turning 49. And like, it was, you know, Kobe was hurt by them, but it was Carmelo, Magic Johnson.

Speaker 41 I mean, it was like Alonzo Morny, LeBron, D-Wade, Chris,

Speaker 41 Hall of Famers. And so, like...
Stuff a kid would do who loved basketball and had the power to invite everybody. Yeah.
And here I am, some schlepp. The coolest part was like getting in the SU.

Speaker 41 Why were you invited? I don't know. I don't know.
I don't. Still to this day, I don't know.
I don't know. They're trying to, you know, bring some, I don't know, IQ to the game.
I don't know.

Speaker 41 But I got to play this team.

Speaker 41 And, you know, the defensive driving, like Navy SEALs who drove us to the gym, that was badass. That was the coolest part.
I mean, those guys were bobbin and weaving.

Speaker 41 But we lose the first two games and, you know,

Speaker 41 President Obama says, guys, bring it in. As your commander-in-chief, I command you to not lose this last game.
Were there hard fouls?

Speaker 41 There are no hard fouls, but there was definitely like they're blocking his shots.

Speaker 41 I think, you know, the president appreciated that. He just, you know, he didn't want charity.

Speaker 41 That was part of it. He said that.
He's like, I don't want charity. All right.
I want everyone to play. We're here to win.
All right.

Speaker 41 So,

Speaker 41 he got a taste, he got a taste, and he hit the game when he shot. You know, he did, he hit the game when he shot.
He's like this, like, like this, this kind of squirrely left-hander.

Speaker 41 Oh, I've seen the footage, you know, yeah, it's weird, but it goes in, it goes in, and he hit the shot, and he's walking around holding that holding that thing up high. So, it was an unbelievable day.

Speaker 41 The coolest, the funniest part was we're on the south lawn having a barbecue, birthday barbecue afterwards, and you know, they got some hip-hop playing, whatever.

Speaker 41 and all of a sudden a pony by genuine comes on

Speaker 41 and i'm just thinking to myself you know our forefathers are are just rolling in their graves right now that genuine wine's pony oh my god is playing on the south lawn first time

Speaker 41 first time ever that somewhere somewhere the ghost of teddy roosevelt i was going to say yeah teddy roosevelt andrew jackson yeah better yet yeah to

Speaker 41 Can't believe it. Ride it, my pony.
My saddle's waiting. Come and jump on it.
If you're horny, let's do it.

Speaker 41 Ride it, my pony. How great's that? I mean, that's the American dream.
That is the, it is the American dream.

Speaker 41 And my wife and I look at each other like, this is on, like, no one understands how wonderful this moment is.

Speaker 41 It's what we worked all these years for.

Speaker 41 Exactly. When you were summoned to the front of the class to explain black history to everybody in Michigan, you did not have the audacity to depict this image.

Speaker 41 One day, I dream of barbecue in the South Lawn,

Speaker 41 and we will play pony

Speaker 41 and we will all be merry.

Speaker 41 Part of what is so interesting about hearing you trace your path through life is that at various points, you have lived

Speaker 41 a movie that I find to be endlessly amusing. And one of the scenes that recurs is just you doing karaoke.

Speaker 41 First of all, who are you telling? Who are you telling? I mean, you know, when I look at my journals and write a book now, and it's just like, I.

Speaker 41 It's crazy that you've lived all of this already it's Forrest Gumpian yes it really is Forrest Gumpian you both met the president yep uh you both love running so I toured China so my karaoke uh story in China uh I wore a Chinese uh basketball shoe called peak yeah okay because Yaoming was my teammate in Houston and they wanted a presence on the Rockets so I went there I never heard of the shoe and I had like 50-foot billboards in like every city you never heard of in China and so I was very I was very very famous in China much more famous in China than I was in America So whenever I go to

Speaker 41 a press conference in the city when I'm touring,

Speaker 41 there would be a bunch of reporters there. And

Speaker 41 they gave me the name Mr. President

Speaker 41 because my cadence and the way I talk and gesture was like Barack Obama. I was going to say, your sleeves are rolled up to your elbows.
This is not a coincidence.

Speaker 41 So I would be in, you know, Qing Tao and

Speaker 41 the press would go, Mr. President, Mr.
President, how do you find Qing Tao? And I said, you know what? It has the most beautiful women and the best beer.

Speaker 41 And then I would go to,

Speaker 41 what a politician. And then I could go to Shanghai.
Mr. President, Mr.
President, how do you find Shanghai? It has the most beautiful women and the best beer, right?

Speaker 41 But they knew I love karaoke.

Speaker 41 And so I went to this beer, actually, the Qing Tao Beer Festival in Qing Tao, China,

Speaker 41 beautiful city on the water. And they wanted me to sing karaoke.
And so this is like a festival. And I swear to you, there was like 20,000 people at this festival

Speaker 41 and they want me to sing billie jean and i'm like all right

Speaker 41 no no no no biggie i'll do it well i get up on stage and so i start singing you know uh she was more like a movie queen from across the scene and all of a sudden the the words just cut out and so i have no monitor your prompter goes dead my prompter goes dead ultimate politician's nightmare and so i'm in front of 20 000 people playing billie Jean,

Speaker 41 you know, fumbling my way through the song, trying to dance to take the, you know, the ice off my horrible. It was a nightmare.

Speaker 41 It was a nightmare of epic proportions to be in Qingta, China, in front of 20,000 people. At a beer festival.
At a beer festival with no words, but they still cheered for me.

Speaker 41 I actually, people don't believe me, I hosted the Chinese version of SNL. What? It's called Happy Camp.
They get like 100 million people. I can't make this up.

Speaker 41 They get 100 million people a week tuning in on Saturday night. And I was the host.
I don't speak of Lickamandarin, like at all.

Speaker 41 But again, I had a translator there on TV and it's like a sketch, it's a comedy sketch show. And so they wanted me to come and sing karaoke.
So I sang New York, New York.

Speaker 41 You know, I came out of the, you know, doing the kick, doing the Sinatra. And yet, is that as weird as the time

Speaker 41 that

Speaker 41 you did this? Jade, listen to me.

Speaker 41 Just stay retired.

Speaker 41 You can still be in the lead

Speaker 41 at the team front office floor.

Speaker 41 You can have all you ever

Speaker 41 wanted.

Speaker 41 I know. So, this is the voice of Darryl Maury.
Yes.

Speaker 41 No.

Speaker 41 I can't want it

Speaker 41 anymore.

Speaker 41 So, Daryl as the Good Witch, and Shane as Alphaba, I suppose, in this condition of

Speaker 41 a brand new game.

Speaker 41 I'm screwed back by these rules. I want back in the game.

Speaker 41 It's too late,

Speaker 41 analytics.

Speaker 41 Too late to take on Hillary.

Speaker 41 It's time to trust my instincts, close my eyes, and lean.

Speaker 41 It's time to try

Speaker 41 gravity.

Speaker 41 I think I'll try

Speaker 41 to find

Speaker 41 gravity.

Speaker 41 And you can't pull me down.

Speaker 41 I mean,

Speaker 41 Daryl wearing a blonde wig and a dress, and you, I mean, when I say that you

Speaker 41 sang your heart out with a broom in one hand.

Speaker 41 Daryl Maury is a very close friend of mine. I wouldn't be here without him, what I learned from him.
And he actually wrote that.

Speaker 41 He loves musicals. He loved musicals.
So he and Ellen, his wife, rewrote the words to that and had an idea. So that was all Daryl's idea.
And, you know, I love that he put on the pink Linda dress.

Speaker 41 So, that's an event called Battyoke

Speaker 41 that we held in Houston, held in Miami.

Speaker 41 It raises money for my foundation, the Batty Take Church Foundation, giving over $4 million in school. It was remarkable the last decade.
So, it's for the kids. Daryl, on the one hand,

Speaker 41 did you blackmail LeBron and D. Wade to do Robin Thick?

Speaker 41 That was their own volition. The bad yoke, we don't mess around.
I dare say that Mr. President has assembled a rainbow coalition

Speaker 41 of people to do the thing that you

Speaker 41 made peace with, which is

Speaker 41 humiliate yourself.

Speaker 41 For a good cause, you know, you can never humiliate yourself too much. That is also a thing that we hear at Pablo Torre finds out that we believe in.

Speaker 41 Shane Badier, thank you for turning this podcast into a very happy camp.

Speaker 41 Pablo, you're my man. I can't wait to do paternity with you.
Oh, God. I'm going to see you next time.
Oh, God.

Speaker 41 I just felt, I just felt, I just felt the need for a towel.

Speaker 41 This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Metalark media production.

Speaker 41 And I'll talk to you next time.

Speaker 10 Streaming gameplay, scouting new gear, chatting, and shopping all at the same time, that's my kind of multitasking. And it all happens on Amazon Live.

Speaker 15 Shop on Amazon Live by searching Amazon Live in the Amazon Shopping app and follow your favorite creators today.

Speaker 41 Right across America, people listen to the Tony and Ryan podcast every day. I'm Ryan.
This is my best friend, Tony. Shout it.
No, we're Australian. They're from from the US.
You day? Perfection.

Speaker 41 But don't just take our word for it. Andrew's in Washington.
Why do you love the podcast, Andrew? Well, I do love some hot, fun garbage. And you're a big member of our podcast community as well.

Speaker 41 I feel like you're in the conversation. You can laugh with them.
And then you can get into the community and have all the same jokes and chat with other people too.

Speaker 11 Get your brain break daily with us, Tony and Ryan.