PTFO Sneak Preview: Share & Tell with Dan, Pablo, and Mina Kimes

I was muted.

Hello.

Hello, Mina.

Look, it's happening right now, Mina.

Do you feel it?

Do you feel it swelling in your soul?

It's happening right now.

The thing that you, me, and Pablo talked about doing while we were taping Highly Questionable, years from now, we can be together just doing a show where we're screwing around.

It's happening.

Look at it.

You're in the middle of it.

Is this like the end of Shawshank when they're on the beach?

Is that what's going on in your mind right now?

That's what's happening right now.

It's the sequel to Shawshank.

I have come out through the sewage and the sh, and I am there to greet me at the other end is you and Pablo on a boat.

Look at you, just fixing things, shining the boat and preparing for another voyage.

I am so excited about this, Pablo.

It does feel like joining Meadowlark has been like jumping into the embrace of a giant sewer monster.

I've got one foot on the boat.

I've got to alter this metaphor a little bit.

I am legitimately, palpably, goosebumpy excited that we're even trying to do this.

And I want to be clear that, like, what I'm going to be doing on this show, on my show, Pablo Torre finds out, is not going to always be like this.

But this is a very special episode that I want to try and do with Dan, like once a week, where we get to sit down with our friends and have conversations that are only kind of vaguely structured, but are longer formed that get to us hanging out with people that we really like, people of interest about stories of interest that we are all individually like obsessed with in a given week, whether it's sports, whether it's non-sports, whether it's inevitably gazing into our navels, our nostalgic emotional navels about how we don't do this enough.

So yes, Mina, Dan, and me are on what feels like a teetering dinghy towards high-minded content.

Come on, it's a cigarette boat.

Let's go.

Let's go.

We got some star power around here.

Enough with the boat analogies.

and let's uh let we've got something substantive here me not i i just want to tell the audience though you me and pablo when we were doing i love doing highly questionable with you guys and we talked years ago that it would be very easy for us to do a fun easy show where we're just enjoying ourselves talking about things outside of the parameters of you know bears falling on trampolines and guy getting hit in the junk by a sledgehammer that we could actually have some fun while doing this.

So thank you for

partaking in our nonsense.

Thank you for having me.

I'm excited.

I will not be engaging in any navel gazing, mainly because my navel is about three feet in front of me and I try not to look at it these days.

But otherwise,

I'm really excited to talk about a wide variety of esoteric things.

I just want to be very clear.

Your navel protruding three feet out in front of you has never stopped Dan before.

So we should be able to.

Ouch, ouch.

Was esoteric said correctly there?

I've always said it esoteric.

No?

Yeah.

You know what I was, I was, is it esoterica?

What is it when it's the erotica?

No.

What is that?

That was unnecessary.

What are you doing?

What are you doing?

He's doing the popular thing.

He's seeing an HR-built barricade and barreling through it.

Many years ago on PTI, I called it Panache instead of Panache.

Oh, I remember that.

Yeah.

I think I told you, I do that.

I mispronounce words a lot.

And as an excuse once, I was like, well, I wasn't raised by an American, which is total bullshit.

Oh, come on.

You threw Sunman Times under the buzz.

Which you can't pronounce esoteric.

You know what?

Not all of us went to Regis, Pablo.

Some of us grew up with the hoi polloi in the public school mines of America.

Pablo, you're a rich man north of Richmond or whatever the f ⁇ .

I give her so much benefit of the doubt that I simply assume that I've been pronouncing it wrong my entire life and that she pronounced it correctly.

This is the privilege, the privilege of being Asian American Ivy League graduate.

Book ending,

University of Miami.

Oof.

This is the intimidation that we project deep into Dan's psyche.

We should just say a few words wrong and see if he catches it like little Easter eggs for himself.

Sorry, the show, the show.

Let's do the show.

The show.

All right, so I want to do this little show in tell style, right?

So that means that I have asked both of you to bring in a topic that you love, that you want to set up.

I have done the same, and I'm going to go first because it's my goddamn show.

So I like to imagine this James Harden story through the eyes of one particular

person.

I want to figure out what it was like for Adam Silver to get not the video that we saw of James Harden in China, the like very quick clip of him talking about how Daryl Murray is a liar.

Let me repeat that.

Daryl Murray is a liar.

I want to imagine Adam Silver getting the fuller version that I had to go and find manually that has like two retweets and 30 likes that has a little more of the context clear.

What do you think about a current team climbing for the end trade puff and trying to

bring you back to the team?

Well, Gary Maury is a liar,

and I will never be a part of an organization that he's a part of.

Gary Maury was a liar, and I will never get more of an organization that he's a part of.

Legally, it's more card.

It's the let me say it again that sings.

It's the whoops.

It's the applause.

It's the fact that a guy in China clearly asked this with all of the information that he was seeking already, obviously, like explosive.

Like, this is a story to be about China, as well as it is about James Harden, but not just in the standard, like, let's talk about human rights and free Hong Kong and Daryl Maury.

Obviously, that is, to me, clear subtext for why this was so effective, like James Harden stitching a geopolitical fat suit and stepping into it to get traded away from Philly because he can't work for that guy who said that thing that this country cannot abide by.

The reason I think it's a China story also, and that applause, that question are so important, is because

it occurred to me that James Harden is about as good as you can be at sports while also being a stateless athlete.

James Harden does not have a fan base really in the United States of America America anymore.

His fan base, the real fan base he has, is the fan base you heard hollering and whooping at the mention of Daryl Maury, enemy of the state, being a liar.

And I just think it's fascinating when you have a commissioner of the NBA who is managing all of these spinning plates.

How do I deal with China, human rights?

How do I deal with the fact that young people aren't really rooting for teams or watching games anymore?

And into this controversy walks a guy who is as deeply unpopular in America, has no real base.

I just want to say two things.

One, this is not, we're not putting out the video.

Every time Pablo said, this is a China story, Dan's ears perked up like my dog when a piece of food drops 200 yards away.

Kind of remarkable to witness.

But the second thing I want to say, and I guess I want to make sure I just understand you, you seem to be imputing.

a lot of intention here to Harden because

that is I don't think that's the

the mainstream read on this the mainstream read is just like he happened to be in China he's embarrassed because you know he's been on himself multiple times it hasn't worked out so he spouted off but you are you you got you know James Hardin playing 4d chess I have him inadvertently playing 4D chess.

I don't think he walked in.

I don't think the guy who asked the question, Dan, was a plant.

I don't think it was James Hardin planting one of his fans to ask him the question he's been dying to answer.

But I have to imagine that James Harden repeating himself in that context.

And by the way, after riding the highs of being James Hardin in China, like I don't think it's unconnected.

I think it's actually entirely about what it's like to be a guy whose entire fan base, millions upon millions of people, Dan, are in China.

They've been treating you like you're the f ⁇ ing Beatles.

You're having roses thrown at you wherever you get off a bus.

And then you walk into this setting and get asked a question about a guy who does not believe that he is somebody who who wants to invest his franchise in you anymore, as he used to, uniquely.

I think that hit James Harden's ego in a pretty special way.

I am with Mina on this, being incredulous and skeptical that you are making James Harden, who I view as largely a bearded tool, a geopolitical chess master who is

making the people of China go against Daryl Maury because he had that one sentence of tweet when he is addicted to strip clubs, not politics, and lasted all of six months with the Nets or however long it was.

I mean, I just like to think of

wherever it is that the cultural differences are, the idea of Yao Ming coming to this country and in front of a bunch of American campers saying the most inflammatory thing he's ever said, put in quotes and saying again to people who might not understand the language he was speaking, let me say it again in the same language so that you cannot understand it again.

Yeah, when you flip it, it's pretty funny.

I suspect in the bizarro version that you're positing, the American campers would have no idea what Yao Ming was talking about.

And where I think Pablo does have a point is, you know, that was the most sympathetic audience James Harden will find in any place, anywhere.

But I don't think that matters.

I don't think it.

Maybe it matters insofar as he clearly feels backed into a corner, which is why I think he did it, frankly, not due to,

you know, he's been reading the Art of War or something, but because he's embarrassed.

He's upset.

I mean, this is, we always talk about how athletes, we applaud them for betting on themselves, right?

Oh man, he played one year on his left house contract.

He didn't take the deal.

He was awesome.

James Harden has bet on himself now like four times and come up short, starting with the Nets contracts, then thinking the Rockets would want him, then thinking the Clippers would pay up for him.

The dude has been, I don't want to say humiliated over and over, but it's always come up against him.

And this, to me, Dan, and maybe again, being in front of a sympathetic audience is relevant, Pablo, but it really felt like a guy who has run out of options and was simply less.

Pablo, rare is the time that a guy this great at something, MVP caliber, and really sort of a crossroads intersectional player where as soon as the league changed in the evolution, D'Antoni made him somebody much more valuable than he was before that.

Rarely has that person been this kind of laughing stock that, as you say, has no real fan base, no, no real allegiance to anything.

He's just a beard floating through the universe, being excellent, and us laughing somehow that he's excellent, but also that he doesn't seem to care all that much.

I think this is deeply poetic.

Like, that's the thing.

Wait, why is Mina laughing?

Why is she already taking it?

Did you see the movie Tar?

Yeah.

I haven't seen that yet.

Have you you seen it?

No, I have not seen it.

Oh, okay.

I don't, well, oh, God.

What I'm about to bring up, Pablo might know, is the ending of Tar, but I can't explain it because you haven't seen it.

I don't want to spoil it.

You should really see it.

It's a really good movie.

And I just want to say to those in the audience who watched Tar, what we saw James Harden do really reminds me of the end of Tar.

And if you watched it, you will love that.

Okay, sorry.

And spoiler alert, earmuffs, I believe that the ending of Tar might take place in the Philippines, which is what I took away from that scene.

And I was like, this is humiliating to me for reasons that Dan can't fully understand right now.

So you'd really like it.

But the point, he would.

He wouldn't understand have vocabulary in it, but it'd be really good.

It's really good.

The point of the poetry, though, and whether James Harden can be shamed is really essential here because it speaks to him actually being far more chess master than both of you guys are giving him credit for.

Daryl Maury and James Harden are both people who exploit inefficiencies to points where you need to change the f ⁇ ing rules on them.

James Harden, that's why they were such a cosmic pair, why they were a perfect duo, why they understood each other seemingly longer than any exec and player, star player ever had in the history of sports, maybe.

They were just that simpatico because James Harden exploiting the inefficiencies of those rules that Dan was alluding to before, uglying the game up to get benefits.

Daryl Muri did the same thing by shooting all of these threes and only shooting layups, right?

Change the rules on me until...

Until then, I'm not going to stop looking for edges.

And what James Harden is doing now is poetic because he was in China with the only fan base he has left.

And what he was doing was finding the messiest possible way to get leverage.

That is James Hardin doing the James Hardin thing to Daryl Maury for the first time in a way that Daryl Murray hates.

No, that's just him beginning it.

The next step is he's going to get Embiid in ensnared in this somehow.

I hate this part.

But this is the part that mattered.

This is the only part that matters from a

standpoint.

It's unfortunately true that when Joelle Embiid takes out Philadelphia as his geotagged location or whatever it is on Twitter, which he did as we tape, and he took out processing, dot, dot, dot, from his bio, that actually unnerved me in a way that this James Harden thing only amused me.

Can I play for you guys just as the world burns with the 76ers?

I simply want to play for you guys because I don't know how Daryl Maury is going to handle the geopolitical chess master that is James Harden.

But I just want to play for you guys that the guy at the center of this crisis was on our show and he is dealing with this crisis, but he might be uniquely equipped to deal with this crisis because he decided to sing some lyrics from the play that he wrote about, I think, giants in basketball or small people having sex.

Let's play that sound.

The guy immersed in flames as Embede and Harden might both leave and just leave him in ashes.

Do we want to have sex with giants?

Or no, it's it's between four and six.

How to bring the parts into compliance?

I just cannot grasp the mechanics.

That's it?

I'm sorry.

It's all he would do.

I'm sorry I couldn't get more out of him, Mina.

Wait a Monday morning quarterback this one.

I'm sorry that all I'm playing for her again.

She's dissatisfied that I'm

at least ridiculous.

Do we want to have sex with giants?

Or no, it's between four and six.

How to bring the parts into compliance?

I just cannot grasp the mechanics.

He's saying he, upon further reflection, he did sing that last verse like he had just been insulted by James Hardin and Chyduck.

It sounded like he was losing confidence at the end that he realized that his singing voice was terrible and that mechanics didn't rhyme with anything.

I just like that we're spending so much mental energy analyzing the strategic moves of these two brilliant masterminds when one

wore a fat suit to get out of whatever, and then one did that.

They're very complicated, the mechanics.

We spend so much time analyzing their genius.

I just cannot grasp the mechanics.

Sounds like a dying robot.

Speaking of robots, okay, my story isn't really

not a discrete story, although I sent a couple of articles.

We sent a couple articles, including one by my friend Simon Rich about the threat that AI poses to screenwriting amidst, of course, the writer's strike and all of that.

I had two conversations last week.

One with a friend of mine who is a lawyer who is very deep in legal applications with ai and then the other one is a friend of mine who was kind of into ai before he was a coder who knew who was telling me about it way before uh everyone else and i laughed a lot and

you talked to an ai hipster you talked to somebody who knew ai before who was building like bots and things like in you know 2012.

and um anyways the conversation we had was about whether ai affected my industry Industry is a little bit too broad, probably, when it comes to this because the immediate effect is certainly more on sports writing, which none of us do anymore.

But

I have a newsletter.

How dare you?

I should keep up with that.

But yeah,

I guess I just, I don't know if you guys are

thinking about it and reading about it as much as I am.

I have a lot of fears.

I got to 50 years old, I feel like, without having a great many fears.

And now they've all come rushing in like an avalanche.

And this is one of them, right?

When you read about how it is, because I think a lot of people hearing this are like artificial intelligence.

I have a vague idea of what that is, but they don't think about like all of this very cheap labor that has been gathering data about us so that all of our computers in the future can be much smarter than us based on information gathered by humans so that everything can become more more efficient as a value.

And I ask you,

sincerely, do you even need the intelligence to replace us in what passes for content in this industry?

Like, I think we are easily replaceable, more easily replaceable than Hollywood screenwriters that this, that creating arguments on television, I could absolutely create a bot within five years that can destroy Skip Bayless on television more than Nick Wright can.

I think that that's what I want to take a moment to kind of, for those who aren't maybe not as invested in this or reading as much about it, I think it's worth kind of laying out where we are.

So we're talking about generative AI, not traditional AI is you know looking for patterns and data, which by the way, I use all the time in my job.

We can talk about that.

A lot of the stats and tracking stuff I use with the NFL.

We're talking about what Dan is describing, which is AI that is trained to look at content, sports writing, takes, tweets, videos, whatever,

crunch it all, and then spit out new things.

That is generative AI.

Now,

the state of play at the moment is crappy.

Like you guys have seen the same examples that I have, like when news websites like Gizmodo or I don't know, maybe it wasn't BuzzFeed, famously,

AV Club.

Everything they put out sucks.

And we all point at it and we laugh and we're like, the robots can't do what we do.

Right.

Chat GPT isn't getting us straight A consistently.

It seems to be getting worse.

So what Simon, who is very interested in AI and has been for a while, was arguing in his article was, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Y'all, like,

this is like step one of a hundred-step process.

And when it gets to 100, it will be better than us.

Yeah.

But Mina,

what's even more disturbing is the implication that, in fact, the doses of AI we've been getting are deliberately making us confident.

Like we are being played by the actors.

So like this is the thing about AI that's so scary, Dan, too, is that AI to me is not like crypto.

Crypto was full of this sort of like get rich quickness that you would see everywhere.

And you see all of these club scammer bros in Miami often basically hustling to get rich quick.

And you're not seeing that with AI.

AI seems to be playing the smart people at Google, DeepMind, IBM, wherever.

They seem to be playing a longer game where they're not even showing us the best shit they got because I think there is a confidence in what they got.

Bina, I think when you explain to people how layered this is,

I do believe it's possible that the people running all of the artificial intelligence that is coming to consume us, that they sent chat GPT at us just to allow us to laugh at it, just to smoke screen, like, look, it'll never get here when it's already here.

Because when you read about the people who are immersed in the secrecy of this, you realize that this is a lot further advanced than we think it is and if you're laughing at it you're a fool i will say my friend who was the who was the coder did say that you know what you're seeing now sucks and you know i who knows how deliberate i mean i don't think it's deliberate but but it sucks however he was like you should also note that when the sam altmans and zuckbergs or whatever of the world go before congress and they're like regulate us this is more powerful than you could even imagine.

They're boosting their own stock prices.

And they have a vested interest in making us afraid of this because it makes it seem more important and exciting.

I want to go back to Dan saying that AI could replace Nick Wright.

Not Nick Wright.

Not replace Nick Wright.

I'm saying that a skip bayless looks for someone to argue opposite him.

Mina, I am as dependent as possible.

AI is going to grow his hair out.

It's going to be unstoppable.

Look sloppy, look a little bit like a degenerate, dress poorly, just certainly.

We got to hit that side of it, which is the visual side.

Like, we're talking about, can AI write takes?

Can AI do construct arguments?

I think we all believe that's possible.

I don't know if it can put sauce on it,

but

you know, we are human physical entities that people listen to our voices and our.

Oh my God, Alvis, that isotarek.

I think what I'm worried about is AI being able to eventually replicate the mistake you just made.

I'm worried about AI working in human flaws to be relatable to a human.

Like that's the part where I am unnerved.

Like AI can come up with a better argument, but can it simulate human error specifically to fool humans?

Let's set aside the visual side of it because I do think that that's very far in the future.

Like, and I, that, and you don't see, I mean, I guess the actors are worried about it, right?

With the actor stuff, but that's not, you know, I don't think that's a pressing concern.

Would you listen to a sports podcast

if you knew the voice, the scripts, the analysis, the little eccentricities?

Dyra Glass stumbles, the Mina Kimes, esoterica.

If you knew it was AI and not a human.

Oh, but are you kidding me, though?

All I'd have to do is be able to program one to pick well at fantasy football and I'd have a hit podcast.

Like I'd have a monster podcast if I could get gambling advice from a computer that was actually doing it better than the people analyzing it on television.

I do think there is something about sports analysis that we should all be afraid of.

If you care about to Dan's point, if you care about like actually getting the games right, we should all have been listening to Vegas and not like individual takes to begin with.

and if we are able to now actually just outsource actual real rigorous calculated answers from the wealth of human knowledge then that's yes I don't know how to beat that that's where the traditional AI machine learning and the generative stuff intersects so I told you guys that I use data generated by machine learning.

So like all the really smart stats in football, all the great player tracking stuff that Amazon and the NFL are doing, all of that, a lot of that is based on machine learning.

I use it.

Now, I am the human interpreter of that data.

I go and I look and I say, oh, great.

They tracked everything.

They tell me what an average quarterback would throw.

They told me how much better this quarterback is, whatever.

Now I'm going to look at all this data and come up with something funny to say out of it.

The question is,

can someone replace that step?

Or maybe they're not ready to deliver it, but maybe they can say, hey, Mina,

I have observed everything you said on NFL Live for three years now.

I have looked at all this machine learning-generated data, and I noticed these 10 apparitions.

Perhaps you would like them to construct a take for use on TV.

That feels plausible.

Dan, Mina just outed herself as a traitor to the human race.

I don't know if you caught that, but she's a lot of people.

I'm the one rating our new robot overlord.

She's been training the computer.

That's how this works, by the way.

You get underlings to our

robot overlords to do the work of make me sound more human.

Pablo, Mina at this very, very crowded take trough has become a person who is known for giving information that others don't have.

We are just learning now in our Maiden Voyage episode here that she is stealing it from the machines.

She is giving the machines proper credit, but we are not totally sure as we talk to her whether she is not AI generated.

And frankly, honestly, like the only thing that she's not going to be...

But explain some things.

The only thing that convinces me she's not is how bad she's at the mechanics of radio and television, how they confound her.

But that might be proof that she is AI because the machines haven't taught her how to properly put the on button on when her microphone is needed.

I was about to say, which who do you think actually is the most likely to be AI?

But I feel like that is such an insulting conversation that we can't have a publication.

That's got to be awful.

It really is.

That is.

I do like the idea, though, that we're all already in pods with like the matrix wire sticking out of the back of our skulls.

And what we've been doing this entire time is living the dream, the illusion of human potential by arguing about whether we're going to be replaced by the robots that already replaced us.

That's when the simulation blows up, right?

Is when you realize you're in the simulation.

What's the term for that?

I think the term is being super stoned.

I do think, Dan, it does require a useful Benedict Arnold.

And that would, in fact, yes, as Mina pointed out, be Mina and also future Minas who betray us.

Future Minas, otherwise known on the birth certificate of her soon-to-be baby by the name of 01101100.

I have thought about that.

Do I have to, Pablo, like, we have children.

We have to AI-proof their jobs, their lives yeah you don't have to worry about them climate change is coming for all of them and the robots don't worry about any of that don't worry we're already all dead

all right dan bring bring us home with with the uh

the truly uh sunny topic that you've got lined up yes

i read a story this week that made me laugh.

A handful of people in the mixed martial arts community in Miami have told me last year they were analyzing the games better than I was because they were saying, hey, Tua, no one has taught him how to fall.

Someone needs to teach him how to fall.

These were martial arts people.

And then he, you know, over the offseason does jiu-jitsu and trains in jiu-jitsu so that he can protect his brain in a violent sport from falls that might harm his brain.

But this gives me an avenue, Mina, because I really did want to talk to you about what Tua is because in my history covering sports in this market I've never seen a player this polarizing around is he good or is he not good the country is arguing about it I believe it's at least in part because a whole lot of young people from this generation

social media generation and also the generation raised in Miami on LeBron Wade and Bosch and fighting everybody I believe they finally got a national figure at quarterback.

They finally got hope for what has been largely a regional franchise this entire century.

They have a player they think is a national

entity that will take them to championships.

And I'm not sure people

believe in how good he is because his coach is very good.

His skilled position players are very good.

His numbers are exceptional, inarguably exceptional.

And yet there is doubt about him beyond the health for reasons that I find confusing.

And so everyone fights, even though his numbers, when he was healthy, mean to last year, he was Josh Allen without the turnovers.

He was Patrick Mahomes passerating.

Whatever numbers you want to use to measure him, he was absolutely great.

Health is the biggest concern with him, obviously, but I want to know what you think of him and if you're willing to rush into fights with Tuanon by daring to question whether or not his excellence is because of him or it's because of all of the pieces around him that make him more excellent than he actually is.

How did you use a jujitsu story to lure me into this toxic fray yet again?

A bit of a jiu-jitsu move, you might argue.

No!

Oh, I was ready to make a bunch of jokes about the

martial arts experts saying that, of course, martial arts helps you.

Well, I think you put your finger on something that's not just true of Tua, but is true just largely of the quarterback position, which is that the discussion of who is truly great and who is not is always going to be incredibly fraught because it's the most contextual position in professional sports, any sports, not the NFL.

It is so hard to separate quarterback play from circumstances, coaching, schemes, all of that.

Actually, this kind of goes back to what I was saying about the

machine learning.

One thing that I like is that a lot of the stats being spat out are trying to isolate this because to your point about to a stat stan like Jimmy Garoppolo statistically is one of the greatest quarterbacks in the history of the NFL and I'm not comparing them again don't yell at me dolphins fans kind of am but my point is feels like you are it's really like

you he really is by the way like if you look up you know all-time career leaders like hundreds of years you will see Jimmy G at the top of every list um it is amazing I love that you have them playing football in the 1600s and there was some guy hundreds of of years ago just tearing up the field with slams.

When two boots, Carlson was.

I don't know.

But anyways, my point is,

you know,

stats matter, but with the quarterback position, it's not that they matter less.

It's that they're harder to evaluate.

And I think with a guy like Tua or just any quarterback, when the circumstances are good or when they're really bad, by the way, which was obviously the case with him earlier in a career,

when context is like so complicated, it's really hard to get at this sense of like what's real, I think.

Or at least it's hard to arrive at a consensus of what is true.

There are certain quarterbacks, we watch them and we're like, yeah, Patrick Mahomes, that's the best, Aaron Rotten, whatever.

I look at that, I know it's great, it's borne out in the stats, I don't care who's playing with him, I see it with my eyes.

And I think with Tua and some of the other quarterbacks

like him, it's complicated.

It's really, really hard for everybody to agree.

And that's why it's so toxic.

Because if it was easy, if everybody agreed he was good or bad or mediocre, I don't think it would inspire this kind of reaction.

And it is unique to the position because the position is so freaking important.

It's a position that's the hardest to evaluate.

the most contextual and the most important.

And like, that is such a toxic brew from a take perspective.

Yeah, it does feel like the accidental through line of the three topics we selected are human beings, flawed human beings asserting that they matter, that they can control their own destiny.

And in each of these cases, we're finding that there are complications that lead us to have great doubt about whether actually any of us are that good at what we think we're good at.

And in Tua's case, it makes me laugh also.

The other 76ers sort of...

Parallel here is that the other time, the only other time I heard about an athlete, Dan, being taught how to fall is Joellen Biade.

Joelle and Biede falls all of the time.

And Mina has made fun of me for bringing up that, in fact, these are not flops.

These are biomechanically optimized moves to protect a very large and fragile.

Offensive flops.

Offensive flops.

He has been taught to protect himself by, yes, doing the thing that may look to the naked eye like he is, in fact, just trying to draw a foul.

And This just speaks to the nature of what you're trying to do, the fool's errand of self-protection, right?

Like the whole thing about Tua learning to protect himself.

I remember talking to Alex Smith about this on ESPN Daily after the concussions.

Like Alex Smith went through a career in which he was the problem.

It wasn't NFL rules.

It wasn't the idea that, oh, someone is oppressing this quarterback into injury.

He would lie.

He would figure out how to game the concussion protocol so he could play.

Like the idea of being job insecure because of all the reasons, all the reasons Mina said, people have doubts about you.

Are you really that good?

Those are all reasons to go and push the envelope even further to prove that you're tougher and you're stronger and you're better.

And the only enemy in that really is the fact that Tua wants to do it to himself.

That's where I think it's a fool's errand.

Mina, he is such an apologist for all things the process that not only can he turn James Harden into a geopolitical chess master, but now he has turned

what can be argued is Joelle and Bede's clumsiness into grace that is self-protection of of the franchise and of his body.

Have you seen, though, even what we're talking about at the quarterback position, it's the glowing nuclear epicenter for that city's hope in the most popular sport.

I don't believe I've ever seen anyone like Tua.

What happens around him, where it's not only toxic and you say negative syllable X or not even negative syllable, just mildly critical thing that makes him not the greatest quarterback in the universe.

And what ends up happening to you is a rabid, passionate defense.

That I don't think that you have that gulf of difference on any other quarterback's measurement in the entire league.

I can't believe that this one guy has more extremes around him in terms of disagreement between excellence and ah, he's a product of the system.

I don't, you tell me, is there anyone else like that in the league?

I've encountered a very similar dynamic in the past, always with quarterbacks, always

with teams that are good or playing well or contenders, because nobody gives a if the team's bad, right?

And

always

where there's some disagreement over how much the quarterback is responsible for the team's success.

I mean,

I am not, I want to be able to do that.

Are we going Dak?

Are we going Dak Prescott here?

Yeah, I want to be clear.

I am not comparing these two quarterbacks.

But honestly, when I used to criticize Ms.

Trubisky in Chicago, I would get similarly very angry.

And I think Tua is much better than Ms.

Trubisky.

I want to be clear.

Trying to build protection.

Yeah, she's scared.

The legal language.

All the disclaimers.

We should get her to talk really fast.

We should get her to do like those car commercial disclaimers.

Anything Mimi says about Tua is not to be held against her in any sort of way.

She's not comparing him to any other quarterback.

She is simply saying an opinion on Tua, and you're going to find it unpopular.

We can put like the guitar acoustic music they put underneath like the warnings on like violence.

Yes, like a happy ukulele.

I want to be clear.

I am not comparing these two quarterbacks, and I think Tua is much better than Mr.

Bischio.

I want to be clear.

Anything that Mina says about Tua is not to be held against her in any sort of way.

She's not comparing him to any other quarterback.

She's simply saying an opinion on Tua, and you're going to find it unpopular.

Listen,

the point I'm making is,

you know, the fans really wanted to believe, because I think,

and I also saw this with Jimmy, although I think Niners fans were much more split on him, but I don't think, and this kind of actually weirdly connects back to the AI discussion, Pablo.

I don't think fans like the idea of a team not being quarterback driven, even though we just like the San Francisco Foreign Niners, it does not matter, right?

Like, we have seen that, yes.

And uh, and I think their fans right now are like, all right, we get it, you know, whatever.

Although, actually, they're not, no, they're starting to be like, Well, you don't believe in Rock Purdy, and I'm like, oh my God, we're going to do this again.

How many times are we going to do this?

Like,

I feel like it's a little different between Trubisky because you have a very small sample size of Tua being amazing.

Like, you have, it's not just this false hope.

Trubisky didn't have games like that where everyone laughed at Trubisky laugh, you know, nationally, even if he may have been one of the best quarterbacks.

I thought he was good, Dan.

I've lived through a full season of people arguing that he was quite, I remember it very vividly.

And I'm not, I do think Tua has played at a higher level.

I think Tua has

very like unique traits in terms of his accuracy anticipation that are responsible for his success and are not, he's not just a cog in a machine in the way that like a Shanahan quarterback, whatever.

But my point is that I want to make is like, you know, I just think you're asking about why is it so toxic and why are fans so impassioned around this one quarterback?

And I really think fans want quarterbacks.

They want to

obviously they want their quarterback to be good and they believe, but they also want him to be the driver.

Like they, they, they don't, they want you to look at this team and say, we've got the guy and he is why we are winning.

And if you're like, well, there's a lot of reasons why you're winning, you know, they don't like it.

It does remind me of AI.

It also reminds me of how, have you ever seen those like

those videos of scientists feeding a baby condor?

What they do is they wear a very sad and obviously fake puppet on their hand of a condor, kind of bald, like fake feathers, and they feed food into the baby's mouths because the babies need a familiar face to give them this even if it's a shitty facsimile and that's what it feels like with AI that's what it feels like with a quarterback who isn't responsible but the coach knows that actually it's better if this guy is the face of our team because I can't be the face of the team he needs to be the quarterback we just need to be fed something in a form that we're familiar with it's like how John Harbaugh So he's got nerds in his ears telling him when to go for unforked down before the cameras he's like hey Lamar you want to go for it all right dude yeah.

And it's like the fans, yeah, yeah, yeah, our quarterback wants to go for a

nerd in his ear telling him to go for it.

No, but that, that,

same mechanism, same mechanism.

Yes.

Mina, I just wanted to say, in completion of the thought on Trubisky, what I was trying to get to is the Chicago Bears fans, given that Jay Cutler is the best quarterback they've ever had, have no idea what a good quarterback looks like.

So they would choose to believe in Trubisky.

But I was derailed by the uh bird example of pablo because i'm not making up what i'm about to say here ron mcgill our resident zoo expert went many many steps beyond that there was a giant bird i don't think it was a cassowary but it was somewhere near the cassowary family a cassowary can disembowel you and is dangerous so it wouldn't be a cassowary but ron mcgill had to dress like a bird and do a mating dance in front of him and then bend over in front of the bird as the bird came and released into a receptacle that he had in his,

in, in, in a, you know, where it had to be,

where it had to be.

Yes, that's something our animal expert did, and I just thought I'd share that story with you because it's one of the most magical stories I know.

He was like a blow-up doll, bird?

That's right.

He was dressed in a bird costume.

He's got a ridiculous mustache, but he brought that bird to

climax, Yes, by doing a dance in front of it and then bending over in front of it.

That's correct.

Can furries be birds?

Because birds have feathers, not fur.

I just cannot grasp the mechanic.

So, do have we reached our climax.

I don't believe Ron McGill at all that that was the reason he did that, but I think we're done.

I think we too, like that bird, are done.

Um, do we want to?

There's one, I think the final thing is we can try to do is we all go around and say one thing that we learned today.

My chief takeaway from this entire delightful hour we spent together is that Mina thinks that Jimmy Garoppolo is better than Tua.

You know what, Dan?

It's funny you mentioned that because my chief takeaway

is that Mitch Trubisky is a lot like Tua.

That's what I found out today on Pablo Torre finds out.

Mina, what did you find out?

What did you learn?

What did you learn?

I'm still thinking about Ron McGill as a bird furry, but

I do want to say it's been a, you know, I haven't had a chance to work with Pablo now for a little bit.

And your ability to turn

everything into a serious topic is truly incredible.

Like,

it's

really unparalleled in our industry.

And honestly, I'm not even sure an AI could replicate it.

Thank you.

I've always said that my process is uniquely trustworthy.

I thought Mina was simply going to say I learned how to say esoteric correctly.

They're not trying to remind me about that.

Admittedly, by the way, my real takeaway is that I'm still thinking about Ron McGill that bird.

No, keep up.

No, yes.

Thank you.

Mina, thank you.

Thank you for the correction.

That's correct.

My real takeaway is.

I'm not that hard to understand.

Ron McGill bottoming that bird.

I just cannot breathe the mechanics.

Oh, God.

Horrifying.