John Favreau
Appearances
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And I think this is something, again, we'll see a lot over the next four years is people who do have to continue to do business with the government, be part of this, are learning how to operate within it or doing their best, right? So there's, I think, that aspect of it.
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This guy's doing, you know, great, incredible, life-saving work is also making an argument that I have heard a lot when people talk about USAID and talk about soft power, which is there is an economic case for this when you consider the return on investment relative to the tiny, tiny bit of investment.
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And it's, by the way, no small coincidence that all these cuts are targeting things like that and not the actual things that it would take to shrink government spending. That's where I struggle with is just like dealing in a world where it seems like logic doesn't matter anymore or cases like this can't be actually conveyed or impactful. I think that's what I struggle with personally.
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But that's, I mean, I don't mean to get all existential.
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I didn't do shit, by the way. I just screenshot an article and sent it out. But that's... There's a larger conversation today about, like, the role we have in terms of, like, we are now the pipes, right? Especially as... Correct. The reason I even screenshotted that is because I was like, how is nobody talking about this article?
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It really felt like this story had not gotten a lot of exposure, and that's the only reason... that I focused on it.
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And now back to sports. Although this is a big story that's a little bit bigger than sports. It cuts to some, I think, social and cultural questions. So I was in the Indianapolis Combine last week, and... something that happens a lot coming out of the combine is gossip, right?
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Gossip, tea, reports, anonymous sources talking about how certain players, high-profile players, perform in these interviews. Because this is the function of the combine, the primary function. It's not the workouts, although guys can certainly lift their draft stock by crushing it in that regard. No, it's like
Pablo Torre Finds Out
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I don't like watching anyone do anything hygienic in public or not hygienic, but like, I guess, grooming or personal care, cutting their nails. I mean, I guess people don't really do that in public, but I just don't like.
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What happens in these rooms when these teams that are about to make these huge franchise-altering decisions come face-to-face with college kids? So, unsurprisingly, the biggest... and source of controversy and reporting was none other than Colorado quarterback Shador Sanders, the son of Deion Sanders.
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There was a Matthew Berry column where he talked about things he learned at the Combine, and he had a note in there about, first he had a note saying teams really loved Cam Ward, who everyone thinks is going to be the first quarterback taken. Then he had a second note saying two teams told him they did not like Shador Sanders. They found him to be unprofessional.
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I believe that was the word he used. Then a post that kind of went viral from Josina Anderson, who's an NFL reporter, who, I'll just read the beginning of it, says, I'm disappointed to hear that a quarterback's coach from a team drafting in the top seven referred to Shira Sanders as coming off brash and arrogant, made his assessment known to a bunch of people.
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So she talks, it's a very long post where she alludes to potential biases in the industry. It's a little bit confusing because what she's alluding to wasn't, reported she's criticizing a critique that is anonymous.
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I would say overconfident is kind of how I would characterize it. I think what's being asked is, where is the line between cocky and confident? And how is that line inflected by... racial stereotypes and biases in that regards. Sanders in particular being Dion Sanders' son and everything that comes with that.
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And a third element that I think throws an interesting wrench into all of this, which is the possibility that the Sanders family would like Shador to end up with a specific team, which might be influencing how he's acting in interviews. And that has nothing to do with historical stereotypes around quarterbacks or whatnot. This is a very specific situation. So there is a lot going on here, Dan.
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I guess let's start, I would love to know how you interpreted this whole story, this controversy, having said all of that, because I obviously have a lot of my own thoughts.
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You've seen it.
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So I raised my eyebrows a little bit when Dan used the phrase kind of like his confidence is earned because I think that is quietly what's driving a lot of this, which is to say, I had a lot of conversations with people in Indianapolis, not about, I'm sure, his personality, but a lot about his play and, you know, comparing notes, basically, on the tape.
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And it's... The perceptions there are very mixed. I came out thinking the gap between him and QB Cam Ward... Pretty big. Maybe I'm wrong that all it takes is one team. But there are, we can get into it, you know, concerns that folks have about him as a prospect in the NFL.
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And I actually think that is really informing a lot of this, which is I would hypothesize that if he was a can't-miss type quarterback, like the top three even from last year, I would be very skeptical that any of this would matter at all. Like, I think, and we always go back to this kind of idea that talent begets tolerance in the NFL.
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I think the fact that he is somewhat divisive purely as a football prospect is actually leading to a lot of this skepticism. Or let me rephrase that, not leading to a lot of it, but maybe amplifying a lot of this skepticism.
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When we talk about his personality here, I think there is some sensitivity because historically, a lot of the traits, some of the words being thrown about brash, overconfident, have been assigned to black quarterbacks in the past disproportionately. So when you hear that here, you know, immediately, I think Spidey sense kind of goes off. What's kind of...
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I wouldn't say funny, but ironic, though, is that who he is as a player is actually the opposite of the quarterbacks that we have assigned— the stereotypes, pardon me, that NFL teams and anonymous scouts have assigned to quarterbacks, black quarterbacks in the past, where they have over-indexed on emphasizing the athleticism at the expense of things like accuracy, football intelligence, processing, all of that.
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So to actually answer your question— I think Schroeder-Sanders is accurate. He is tough. He is very smart. He throws with anticipation. He's a good processor. He throws over the middle of the field. He is not a great athlete, and he does not have great arm talent.
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Yeah, it's like he has to lubricate his entire body to be involved in this. I don't know. It's just something, I just don't like watching it, that's all. I don't like watching people brush their hair. I don't like watching people put in contacts is a thing that I find really rewarding.
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So in some ways, there's like a little bit of Tua Tungavailoa to his game, to be honest, which is to say he wins with anticipation and accuracy, not with arm strength.
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Oh, he's so cute. He looks the same, but little. Same haircut. This, to me, it drives home... I just think being the son of a really famous person is so complicated. And I think it leads to... a lot of different outcomes, maybe could be leading to him performing confidence in a way that maybe, I don't know, I don't want to psychoanalyze or speculate here, but I think it's very difficult.
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And yeah, I mean, the fact that he even got to this point and has continued to be is like, hard of a worker and as driven, because again, you know, I know I probably sounded like I was damning with faint praise, but to stress his football IQ, I mean, this is a kid who on tape, you see him reading coverages, post-snap, identifying the leverage defenders.
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Clearly somebody who has grown around football, been around football, pardon me, his whole life and actually leaned into that from the mental side of it. And that to me should be appealing to an NFL team.
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I'm so used to being around that because I work in television that at this point it doesn't bother me. But it did bother me at first, I think. I was still like a little bit put off by it. I don't know.
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Being like the perfect quarterback prospect is, is really, it's walking such a fine line. It's like being a woman, to be honest. Like, you want to be confident, but not too confident because then you're cocky. You want to be assertive, but not too assertive because then you're aggressive. You know, you want to be smart, but not too smart because then you're questioning authority.
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You know, you got to be, you want to be nice, but not too nice because then are you a pushover? It's, you know, it's just got to like be just right.
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Yeah, I'm very squeamish about all of these things.
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Her husband who lives in a different place, it should be noted. I think one thing I found, there's a lot of things that are interesting about this. One thing I find interesting is, Dan, so much of the time when we think about chatbots and her, we think about, you know, the Joaquin Phoenix character being this kind of loner. This woman's not a loner. She has friends. She has a husband.
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This flies in the face of a lot of stereotypes, I think, that we have around artificial intelligence and chatbots to begin with, obviously starting with her gender. So there's that element of it. It feels to me less like a woman who... is like so isolated and this is her way out. More just like, hey, this is like entertainment. It's like another thing she can use to like spend her time.
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I'll tell you what. Having an 18-month-old, and you asked how my life is going, is very humbling for anyone who doesn't like hygienic things in public or nudity. Yeah. Especially when you're 18-month-old, just decides randomly that baths, the thing he was totally cool with for the first 18 months of his life, are now like being dipped in hot lava.
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Maybe it's a stand in for therapy for people, you know, which is another side of the whole AI thing. That was the read I had on it. The other thing I was curious about was to how good it was. So this woman is so addicted to this product, and it is an addiction, that she's spending money on it for a subscription, but it resets every week. Leo forgets who she is, so she has to coach him up.
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She also has to coach him up to be sexy with her because ChatGBT doesn't allow it, so she's come up with all of these workarounds for it. So much so that In the article, it links to a Reddit post she did where she teaches other people how to do this and also had some of her chats with him. Did you guys click on any of these?
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I did because I wanted to see, like, how good is this? Like, how good is that? And again, I know I've been something of an AI skeptic because just because every time people talk about how good it is and how useful it is, I go to it and I look at it. It's not good. But here's an example of a woman who's like, this is working for me. It's not good. It's like, I'm sorry.
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These chats are not, everybody always says that. Great. Show it to me when it's good. But these chats are, they're not like particularly, it's not well written. It doesn't seem personalized to me. The sexual stuff is, you could find better sexy stuff and like, you know, the erotica show. It's just, it's, it's, it's, and the guy, they're like, she was shy because his photo was, too good looking.
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It's AI slop. It doesn't look like a man. It looks like a, you know, AI drawing of a man. So that was something I found interesting because this whole article is, I mean, it's obviously good enough to suck this woman in, but I found it to be really, really bad.
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Yeah, don't read it.
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I didn't read this one.
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I would also like to quibble with the idea that any of this is new. Like, okay, so like a woman who's not getting something from her partner, so she, you know, or maybe wants something else or wants entertainment or wants connection, goes to the internet. I mean, chat rooms were doing this for people in the freaking early 2000s.
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And he will scream an ear-splitting screech unless Mama, fully clothed, gets in the bath with him. So that was the thing that happened last night.
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The only difference now is just instead of actual humans on the other side, it's a bot who's replicating humans with glorified autocomplete.
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I just get offended by bad writing. I just do.
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This was a journey, this show. This was a real journey. I don't even remember. We were talking about a lot.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
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Yeah, I guess I've, well, not learned, but in our discussion at the top... Never stop posting. I'll never stop.
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I'm going to post through it.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
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Keep on posting.
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I've also learned that, by the way, it really takes, it doesn't actually, it doesn't take that much to make Dan leave. But I do think you reading that actually made him legitimately uncomfortable in a way that.
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I get a couple newsletters, one of which is the Times newsletter. I think that's the one I could probably go back. But in any case, eventually it took me back to a CNN story where it laid out what this man in Georgia is describing in detail, which is amidst the... non-discriminate cuts to USAID, and they have been, this has been reported, this is just simply fact.
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Elon Musk made claims that they were being very careful about not cutting off life-saving aid or whatever. This has all been proven to not be true. They're just slashing and burning and then figuring it out later, which has, of course, been the approach to a lot of things. So one of the things lost in this process was this contract.
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And the story talked about how this particular company had $10 million worth of this life-saving, nutritious food in a warehouse in Georgia, ready to go, but then they couldn't ship it because all of the money had been cut off, putting the lives of hundreds of thousands of children at risk around the world. And I Yeah, it just stuck me when I first read it.
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And then I think a day later, I was still thinking about it and just the senselessness of it. So I just screenshotted those facts. Again, the facts. This is not an opinion story. This is not a column. And just shared it on Twitter, which we can talk about. I have mixed feelings about using generally.
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And then this dude, Jon Favreau, who's one of the hosts of Pod Save America, the political podcast, who's a former Obama speechwriter, reshared that. Then he got in a back and forth with Elon Musk about it, where Musk... lied and denied. And then he looked into it as well, I guess, or had his minions do. And less than a day later, they, I believe, restored that contract.
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So then there was a follow-up from CNN saying that this guy was now able to ship all of this food around the world purely because Musk saw the story and decided that he didn't want to, I don't know what motivates him these days, and decided to release the funding.
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Not all Americans can agree. This is, was to me, and the reason why I did a screenshot it, I was like, this is about as straightforward as a bad thing that gets in the world, and an obvious thing. It's not only just like, hey, should we help starving kids, but also we already created the capability to do this. This is not just shameful, it's wasteful and stupid, right? And
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I did look at some of the replies, and there's people saying, it's not our job to feed the world. We need this. Teach them. Some guy said, teach a man to fish, and he'll fish forever, which that one really got under my skin. And then there's this belief that we have been overtaxed in helping other people.
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We're talking about, as you just said, a very tiny amount of money in this grand scheme of things. And by the way, when this money is overtaxed, you know, saved, which is a word that I hate, it's not going to help the people who need it. It's going to give tax cuts to people like the three of us. But whatever, that's not neither here nor there.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
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And look, the worst of the people are being amplified. So when I look in the replies, I am seeing the worst possible people. But it was so unbelievably disheartening just to see something that seems so simply good and right be subject to controversy and debate because of the misinformation being propagated on that platform.
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Pablo, your point about, like, this should be, like, a feel-good story. I felt good about the role that I played in this for about 15 minutes. 15 minutes. I thought, hey! All right, maybe I can use my platform to do good things. This thing happened, and it's obviously good, and I am very relieved.
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And then 15 minutes later, that sense of feeling good and feeling like I accomplished something was immediately overwhelmed by the sense that a world in which I can even do this is a bad one. It's one where we are reliant on individuals and shame and... the infinitely small possibility that those things can conspire for good things to happen. So I don't feel good about this story.
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I feel pretty damn bad about it. And it is something that is just now stuck with me days later as a vanishingly small victory in a lot of ways.
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How many fans demanded this? So many. What was the outcry like?