Coming up, special two-part holiday extravaganza of the BS podcast. I got meats, I got sides, I got desserts, I got everything. It's all next. We're also brought to you by the Ringer podcast network, put up a new Rewatchables on Monday night. We did Mr. And Mrs. Smith, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, probably the peak of celebrity paparazzi culture and a very fun movie to talk about. A movie that still holds up. I was surprised. Did this one with Amanda Dobbins and Chris Ryan. Check that out. You can also check out Wedding Scammer. Episode six is out. It's the big episode. It's the second to last episode, but it's basically the climax of the big confrontation. We're calling it Undercover Cowboy. A great show to binge during Thanksgiving week, driving around, putting your headphones on so you don't have to talk to your in-laws. We have six of the seven episodes are out. And it's our first true crime podcast. I can't tell you how many people have mentioned it to me, so glad it's going well. Congrats to Justin and Vikram and the whole team. Wedding scammer, go check it out. Coming up on this podcast, we're going to talk to Kevin O'Connor about the Boston Celtics and specifically, Jalen Brown and what has to happen with him for the Celtics team to reach its potential and why it's become a pretty interesting situation.

We have that. We have Derek Thompson coming on from our Plain English podcast who's going to explain this whole OpenAI thing to us, basically, an idiot's guide. What a fascinating story. And talk to Elon Musk as well. And then last but not least, Austin Gale is going to do another episode of NFL nerd out, some facts and some stats that he found that he thinks are helpful for this NFL season. And then part two is going to be basketball and football as well. So I got a lot for you. This is part one. First, our friends from ProGy. All right, Kevin O'Connor is here from The Ringer. You can read him there on the ringer. Com. You can listen to him on The Mismatch Podcast. We have a big Celtic Bucks game coming on Wednesday. There's a Jaylen Brown conversation that's brewing. It's not a bad thing. There's nobody taking sides. It's not damaging in any way yet, but it's just been an interesting subplot to an 11-3 Celtic season, especially considering he signed for $304 million extension last summer. I got this tweet forwarded me to a bunch of times today, and it was from somebody whose Twitter name is ryb_311.

And he said, Jalen Brown got it better than anyone. Super max money. If the team loses its Tatum's fault. Lowest expectations of any All-Star. No one even cares when he plays like shit outside the playoffs. Not expected to play make, not expected to guard the first, second, or third option. Multiple people in my life sent me this text, including people who aren't Boston fans, because I think people want there to be a Jalen Brown conversation because he got all this money. It's like, Oh, there's going to be a Jalen thing. At the same time, I am on a lot of text like, God damn it, what the hell is going on with Jalen Brown? Is it panic time yet? Where are we with this?

Well, ryb_11, spot on, right? I mean, he is. That is a spot on tweet. I think with Jaylen Brown, Bill, I think with him, the conversation, how much is really different? The sloppy ball handling, that's nothing new. We saw him have as many turnovers as he did shots and a finals game against the Warriors. We saw him do it again against the Heat in game seven last year when he had eight turnovers, eight made shots. The four shots aren't anything new. I think what's changed with the way we're perceiving Jaylen Brown is the fact that now with Boston, they have Kristap's Porzingis. With Porzingis, he's shooting 11.9 times per game to 17.8 for Jaylen. Even though Jaylen is sacrificing a little bit, he was at 19, 20 shots per game the last three seasons, now you have him who is, let's just be real, he's inefficient in the half-court compared to some of his all-star peers. Now you have him with Kristap's Porzingis, who has a 67% true shooting this year. Jaylen Brown is at 54% true shooting. He's in this situation where his role is effectively the same as it's been in recent years, just a little bit fewer shots per game.

When Poizingas, meanwhile, has been amazing, he looks like he should be the second option or should at least close the gap with Brown. I think that's where not much has changed other than the other guy on the team that should be getting more shots and crissaps for Ziness.

Yeah. You could argue Poizingas should be the second option. And really, Derek White or Drew Halley destroying whoever the defensive guard is on the other team and putting that guard in a pick and roll and running it with anybody else in the team, that could be the third option. It's weird to say this because Jaylen is in an incredible situation. This is probably the most talented team in the League. I think them and Denver are the two favorites right now still. Murray will come back at some point. And Jaylen is in an awesome spot for a lot of the reasons laid out in that tweet, right? Anything he does is additive, positive if he's playing well, doing well, that's and all that stuff. I just wonder if this is a great situation for him because you could say he's the fifth most valuable guy in this team. It doesn't mean he's the fifth best player. But you saw when White is in... White, they lose to Charlotte on Monday night. White's not in the game. They're one and two without White. They're 10 and one with White, including the one loss was that Philly game that was pretty close.

They lost by three and it came down to the last play. Poor Zengas, the stuff that he's brought to the Celtics. Has been honestly way better than I think any of us ever expected. He seems super happy. He's a really, really, really, really good offensive player. I have no idea how long he's going to stay healthy. I think every game with Porezingus is a knock on wood. And it's like at some point, he'll probably get hurt for three weeks. I'm just factoring that in. Tatum, I think, has been maybe two % better than he was last year. And the White holiday combo are great. So whatever Jaylin brings to the table is basically a bonus. But this is also a guy who's taken 18 shots a game, who's taken a few times the biggest shot of a game, whether you wanted him to or not. And that's the little tug of war. I mentioned this two weeks ago after that Minnesota game. They get a stop, get the ball 10 seconds left. Mazzola should have called a time out. He didn't. Jaylin had the ball half-court. He had, I think, McDaniels on. It might have been Edwards.

It was one of the two. And it just became clear. It was like, oh, we're headed toward a hero ball, Jaylen 3. And it's like his odds just aren't good on this. He's going against an awesome defender. And I am not confident he's going to make this. He misses it. Then it goes to overtime. The question for me, KC, is how much does he have to sacrifice? How much does he think he has to sacrifice? And does he want to sacrifice for this team to ultimately reach its destiny?

That's going to be the question of the season ultimately. There's going to be a point where I think Pourzing is going to have to close the gap in shots per game. Like you said, Derrick White had some moments through holidays, going to take plenty of shots as well. I would expect at some point, Jaylen's 17.8 shots per game comes down. How much does he want to do that? I mean, sometimes with some of the shots he takes, doesn't it feel like he's trying to prove that he deserves the 300 million instead of just doing what is ultimately best for the team. He had that shot the other night, obviously, the one that everybody was talking about the three. Portzegas is pretty open in the paint.

Didn't find him.

Pretty open. He was wide open. Wide open.

The Charlotte announcements are like, Oh, my God. He had for Courseegas.

Moments like that, that's where I'd struggle to say it's because he's trying to prove himself when he's always had moments of tunnel vision and he misses guys. Jaylen Brown has always been somebody who scores and isn't somebody who elevates his teammates. That's why I think, yes, maybe you could ask he could have a bigger star role on another team. Is this the best for him? That's what you said earlier. In a way, I think it is because this is where he doesn't have that pressure to be the guy. Because I don't think Jaylen Brown is the guy who elevates all of his teammates. He's not the playmaker. He's not the guy who's a shot creator. With this team, the way it's constructed, there's flaws in terms of them getting to the rim, getting to the free throw line. They don't roll the basket. Their bottom 10 and getting to the basket. With Jaylen, it's the offense where everybody shares that creation load. I don't think it would be good for Jaylen if it were all on him to do that.

Well, you know what that looks like? In the future. It ends up booking the Chicago Bulls and a couple of these other teams we have where it's like, All right, Zach O'Vine is your best player. Where are you going?

Winning is for the.

Best for him.

The answer is the lottery. This is for what's best for him. This is where the Celtics need to figure out, particularly Jaylen Brown, considering all the talent that's around him now. What is my place in the team? What are the things that I can do that leads to winning a championship and taking 18 shots per game? There will be nights that he should be taking 18, 19, 20 plus shots per game. But there's going to be a lot of nights where I think his best role is going to be 10, 11, 12 shots per game and shooting more spot-up three-pointers. Because I think with them, at the beginning of the season, there were some times, Janeline would dribble the ball the floor and back his man down into post-ups, inefficient looks. That's not his game. I think with him, I would like to see Boston... Again, to me, this is all about Porezingus here. With the jail and frustration that some Celtics fans are feeling right now. It's because of the other option in Chris Deppes, Poizingas. Poizingas is one of the League's most efficient post scores going back to last season. You heard me on Verner with the podcast earlier this year.

The year he had with the Wizards. Nobody's watching The Wizards. It could be a good stats, bad team type of situation. But Poizingas looked like an improved guy last year with Washington. It's carrying over this year with Boston, where he is just beaten up smaller guys when they switch on post-ups. I don't think the Celtics are finding him enough. There was a play against the grizzlies on what? Sunday, Saturday, whatever night that game was? Sunday night. Sunday night. I think it was John Conchar got switched on to Poorzing. Poorzing has a foot on him. Meanwhile, Drew Holiday had an ISO against Jaron Jackson Jr. Why is Drew Holiday taking a contested ISO jumper against Jaron Jackson Jr. When Poorzing has amazing post-positioning on Conchar. So I think the Celtics collectively need to figure out how do we get poor Zingo more than just twelve shots per game because he's been that good going back to last season. And I would like to see his usage tick up over the course of the year.

Yeah. And some of this is we were only a few weeks into this season, 40 % of the starting five is new. These guys are all trying to figure it out. And that's why this is not, oh, the Jaylen Brown thing is not working out. This is a discussion. I think anybody who watches The Celtics all the time, it's the number one thing people are talking about. How is he going to tweak his game to fit into this embarrassment of riches where there's moments where if the other team's guards suck, White and Hall, they can just dominate a game or they can dominate a half. If Tatum is feeling it like he was in Charlotte last night, you have to tell me about that. I think the thing that surprised me with Jaylen because I really like Jaylen. I've been defending him in some of these cases. The Miami series was indefensible. He was terrible. But I think for the most part, hard. He's got some faults the same way some other great players does. But he brings so much else to the table that you want to forgive some of the stuff where it's like, I wish you wouldn't do that.

If Westbrook is the number one person of all time like that, Jaylen, he's below, but he's not that far below. Oh, man. Oh, he's going to do the thing where he tries to dribble through five guys. Don't do that, Jaylet. Come on, you're going to lose the ball. But I think he plays hard. I think he's unafraid. He certainly has the confidence of somebody who's been in five, five, and five games and some real wars already and had to guard people like LeBron and Jimmy Butler, people like that. What's interesting about the situation he's in now is he's in this role that I think Chris Boshcott was in with Miami. We've seen it over the years. Doc Rivers talked about it on my podcast last week where it's like, it's actually better for the team if you double down on the defense, on the little stuff, maybe take some drop down to 14 shots and become more of an all-around guy, that's going to be more impactful. We have a big enough sample size KOC. He's not in most of the best lineups this team has had. And it's pretty eye-opening. Like, Bryan Barrett had some stats about when he's on the court, he got this from clean the glass, they're plus 7.4 net.

And when he's off the court, they're plus 16.4. It's not a giant difference, but it's not nothing either. When he's just this year, he's shooting 44.8 % from the field, but he's 52.2 % on twos, which is 83 in the league. At the rim, he's 38 for 68, which is the 28th percentile. And then the minutes when Tatum isn't out there, the team's minus. They have a 108 rating. And Barrett said only three teams were south of that this season. There's also some usage rate stuff with him. So 29 players in the League have a 28 usage rate or higher? Only 29. We have a 30 team league. He's got the third lowest assist percentage behind Wemby and Cam Thomas. Wow. Not sure that's the company you want to be in. He's 23rd in true shooting out of the 29. And just for Per-36, he's 119th in assists. So what we're getting is like, this guy who really should be the do-it-all-glue guy, what he was in the end of the 2010. So it's like, I'll just do everything else. I'm here to help. But he doesn't seem to think that that's who he is.

And how that tug of war with him and Missoula and the rest of the lineup and the better options they have, how he figures out his place to me is the ceiling of this team.

Even more so than Tudor reaching even higher level? You think Jalen Brown is going to be that X factor in the postseason?

I do, because I still think Tudum is probably a year away from being the guy that he's ultimately going to be. This year, the big difference was he got stronger. And when you talked about Poor Zeng as punishing smaller people, Tudum can do that, too. And they have this superpower that they did not have last year, where if you go smaller against them, they're going to find a matchup and beat you in the paint and get a 10-footer, an eight-footer, or a six-footer with either Tudum or Prasingus against a smaller guy. Last year, I remember, was basically the guy they would do that with. I knew that the results were mixed. So they have that. And also Drew has like, I'd forgotten he's got this crafty, herky-jerky, post-up game he can go to sometimes. So they have ways, depending on who you're throwing at them to punish them. But then you see last night, it's like, why weren't they attacking La Mello in the fourth quarter and overtime? That guy can't guard anybody. I know he guarded Haliburt on that one play, but that's just somebody like, I would want to be attacking whoever he's on.

But with the Jaylen thing, it's just not the best match up most of the time. And I think he might be one of the last ones to realize that is the fear I have with the X Factor piece.

Is there a point where even if he doesn't realize it, that he could be forced into that type of role? Could there be situations that come this season? Yeah, Boston's been one of the best teams in the League, but there probably will be a moment that was doesn't have him on the floor in a big moment because he's riding one of those great lineups that you're talking about where it's featuring role players. I think with Jaylen, there could come a moment where that happens. But then like, Selfix win the game. It becomes an even bigger conversation. We're on this podcast again talking about, well, where's Jaylen's place? With Jaylen, it might be his choice, but it could also be the team saying, Hey, this is what we need from you. This has been your role in recent years, but look at past championship teams. You mentioned Chris Bosch, that Doc on Ray Allen sacrificed. Clay Thompson.

Clay Thompson during the Durant years, he sacrificed a shitload. He took three, four less shots a game.

Ultimately, that's what leads to winning. What is best for the team? If taking 13, 14 shots instead of 18, 19, 20 plus last season is what leads the team to winning a championship, then you got to do it. With Boston, you got to look around that locker room and see the amount of talent that's around you. Whether it's obviously, Tatum is the best player on the team, but Kp, Drew, Derrick White, other guys that can have hot shooting nights where maybe just the ball finds them more often. With Jaylen, we saw him, like you said, the late 2010s when he was younger in his career, pre-All-Star. He could lock in more often and do some of that stuff on defense. He became a better spot-up shooter. He was a 40 % guy off the catch for two or three straight seasons, and he hasn't been for, I think, since 2021. So if he can get the catch and shoot three-point number back up to 40 %, that gives him more value even when he's not running, pick and roll or not isolating. So with Jayden, I think with the boss, we're nitpicking because this is what you do with Championship contenders.

You find what is the weak spot, what could hold them back, what do they need to solve?

Well, and a guy who signed a $304 million contract. We're nitpicking because he has a huge seller cap figure, and that's just the fact.

For sure. And if they fall short this year, he's the guy that they probably move next summer.

I think that's fair. Listen, the Red Sox sucks. The Patriots have been an absolute abomination. So the Celtics have either the Bruins are doing well. But for me personally, I'm more into the Celtic season than I normally would be because the Pat's have been so sad. And we've also been watching Jaylen now since 2016. And when you spend that much time with a player just day in, day out, you get to know after a while, all right, he's going to do this or this is going to happen. And one thing with Jaylen this year, if he doesn't get the ball for three, four minutes, it's going up. And you just know it. You know it's sitting on the couch watching the TV being 2,000 miles away from where the game is. It's like, he'll get the ball over half-court. And it's like, oh, he's shooting this. He has not won for a while. Now, Tatom, same thing, but Tatum is a better offensive player. I just feels like there's been some... Which started last year because he took 21 shots a game last year, 20.6, something like that. So it was happening last year, too.

But it made more sense last year because they didn't have Port Zengas. They didn't have Drew Holiday. Smart was always going to be the inferior offensive player in the team. Now, Jaylen's, in my opinion, the fifth option, if I really need a basket against a good team. And that Minnesota game was a really good example. There's just not good options for against... If they're guarding him with McDaniels or Edwardss who's invested and actually trying to play defense with those guys with Gobert, protect and rim, Jaylet's not necessarily the best matchup for us in that game. And whether the light bulb goes off with him or not, I just don't know. When you're 27 as an NBA player, you are who you are. It's not a lot of change, not a lot of growth at that point. So this might be who he is.

Do you at all worry about, I think these last two games against Memphis and Charlotte, the inability to get to the basket with any consistency. I mentioned earlier, their bottom 10 and free throw rate, bottom 10 and add-room shots.

You're talking the whole team.

The whole team, even bottom 10 for that matter, in consecutive years now, when you set a pick and roll, roll into the basket, it's a team that pops. Even Poizingas. Poizingas can shoot off the catch, pick and pop and all that. But I think getting to the rim more often would be nice to see them experiment with over the course of the season, forcing some of those at-rim shots instead of drive and kick, forcing some of those rolls to the basket with poor Zingas, try to get some lob opportunities. He can finish off one or two bounces as well on his way to the basket. I'd like to see that because we know the team is good. We know they're going to be in the playoffs. I'd just like to see them add that wrinkle to their offense, just like you're talking about the post-ups earlier. That's a great addition. It's awesome to have that with Porezingus and Tudum. I think a little bit more rim-attacking would be something that Joe Mazula should look at over the course of the season, too.

Well, they're 11 and 3. We mentioned the Philly loss. Philly outplayed them that game, but they still had a chance to tie up. Poretingus missed a three. That could have sent it to overtime. They lost to Minnesota in overtime in a game that they had the ball. The Charlotte loss yesterday was disgusting, but it was also no Derrick White. And it's Thanksgiving week. You can't totally overreact. The thing that has shocked me over everything else with what you're talking about, or do they get to the line enough? I just can't believe how good Poor Zyngus is. And I don't know if it's just because certain guys on a team with an embarrassment or riches, it actually makes them better. Because all he's doing is shooting wide open threes. And then if somebody puts a small on him, he's either trying to post that person up or they're trying to throw lobster to him. And he's super happy. It doesn't even like he's necessarily breaking a sweat in some of these games. He's just jogging around this big smile on his face. And his rim protection, which we knew was the sneaky piece of the porzingus package, I think has been pretty good.

But he's also not a huge foul-shot guy. So it's going to be Tatum or it's going to be The Guards. But I guess my fear with this team is it's like in football, when you have the team that's throwing in the first two months of the season like a Miami, it's like, Oh, this looks great, in October when it's 75 degrees. But can you, Audible, when we get to December, January? Can you start running the ball? Can you start winning 17, 14 games? I do worry about with this team a little bit when things really slow down, is it just going to be guys jacking up threes and not actually trying to run offense? What Denver can do when Murray's back is the cheat code in the League right now. And do you feel like Boston has anything like that? Because I do not.

No, they don't have that two-man game. That's unstoppable. There's nothing you can do about Yokech and Murray or even like Yokech and MPJ or Yokech and whoever you plug and play with him, it doesn't matter. He's the cheat coach in the halfcourt. In Boston, it still feels like there's going to be stretches where... And that's why I want to see them do a little bit more wrinkles with pick and roll and just see how it looks over the course and see if we're rolling to the basket. But that's not a cheat code either. They just don't have that. They're not on the level of Denver, in my opinion. They're a tick below.

Yeah. In Denver, Murray has been out. And now Denver is like, Oh, somebody beat Denver here. Whoa. What is it? Denver is the best team in the league. And all that's happening now without Murray is their young guys are getting more experience that they're going to need more. But Yokech, there's nothing like him until Sengun replaces him as Yokech 2.0, which might be happening faster than we anticipated. If I had to rank my Celtics, things I'm worried about the most, to me, it's the poor Zengas getting nine months at him is number one, because you just have to look at his game logs and basketball reference and his injury history. I just think every day that he's out there and healthy and happy and smiling is a huge win for the Celtics. That would be one. Number two would be, I still feel like they're a guy short. And I wish they had one more guard with size that in certain games against long, big teams like that Minnesota team, that they had somebody else with somebody between 6'4 and 6'6 who is either a two guard or a three or even a point guard.

Even if it was Austin Rivers, who I've been hoping they had signed for two months, not just because he's at the ringer. I thought he had good moments in Minnesota last year. But one other person that gives them protection against bigger teams. And then the third thing is this Jaylen thing. And is he going to accept the Chris Bos piece of this? Or is this just who he is the rest of the season?

On that number two, how many first round picks would you trade for Alex Carusso? How many.

They have left?

So they can trade first in 2024 and 2026, and then they have swaps in 25, 27, and 2030. He makes about $9 million. So you could get there with Pritchard and a couple of the $2 million guys.

So Holiday was worth two plus Rob plus Braglin. Yeah.

How many given for Carusah? You're going all in with two. Are you going to two first for Carissa?

I do think the price for him is two first, and I don't think it's crazy. But I also think somebody other than the CeltX is going to pay that. They also don't really have the contracts to add up to trade for him. I was looking at this the other day. It's hard.

It's Pritchard at four million, and then you have six guys making about two million.

They just extended Pritchard. Does that make it impossible to trade him?

I believe he's tradable.

Oh, is he?

I believe so.

I never understand that role once the guy gets extended. Don't you feel like there's other teams that make more sense for Caroso? How do the Lakers not have him already?

He is the poison pill provision, which makes it more complicated. But he can be trade. It's just more complex. But the Lakers will be after him. A bunch of teams should be after Carrusho. You're right.

The fear would be Philadelphia because I think Philly is one guy short right now, and that's somebody who could play crunch. Now I know what their crunch time lineup is, right? It would be Max, it'd be Carusso, Tobias, and Bid. Then who's the fifth? Just one of the wings.

Are we going to be talking about an Alex Carusso bidding war in January and February? Is that what's.

Going to happen here? How about this? You know what's crazy? He's unquestionably a better asset than LaVine, who makes four times as much money as him. I can't think of three teams that LaVine could go to that, let's say, Golden States and fucking Clay Thompson's washed. Here's Clay Thompson and Camingo and a first for Zach LaVine. I wouldn't recommend that. I don't know if Zach LaVine changes their destiny. To me- You.

Want Caroso in it. You need Caroso in that deal if you're Golden State, right?

Right. Or if you're the Lakers and it's like, all right, they might get Zach LaVine. Cool. Well, I have to get Caroso if that's the trade. But they can't do anything until mid-December. It feels like it's going to be a move in the deck chairs and the Titanic type trade where Portland is in it, Simmons is involved, and Brogdon is going a different place. And LaVine either goes to Portland or some third team. Maybe he goes to Charlotte, where it'll just be like three bad to mediocre teams just moving pieces around. He goes to Toronto. From what I've seen of his career, he doesn't seem like somebody who's a missing piece for a championship contender. Carusso is.

I've been up and down on LaVine throughout his entire career. I didn't love him pre-draft. When he was a terrible defender, I was way against him. He became average at one point. He's improved offensively. I think with LaVine, that salary number is where I'm like, whoof. Lavine and that money, 40 plus million for multiple years coming up, that's my drawback with him. However, the situation that he's been in throughout his career, he's never been like, if you plug him into Philly and you have their motion and movement that you have next to Maxi and is surrounding Joel LeBid, that becomes interesting. If you plug him in with the Lakers and he's running high pick and roll with Anthony Davis and activating him, that becomes interesting. I think with LaVine, I'd have my hesitations trading for him, but I'd be very intrigued in seeing him next to that star-level talent because we just talked about Jaylen Brown, how is this the best situation for him? Well, it's the best situation for him to win and not have to be the guy. Zach LaVine really hasn't had that situation in the prime of his career where he hasn't had to be the guy.

All of his flaws are on display. I'd like to see him in a situation where some of that's covered up and he can focus on his strengths because there's some skill there as a score, off the dribble, off the catch that a team could activate and he could help elevate some other guys like an AD and pick and roll and whatnot.

Right. And Jaylens had real success in playoff games. Of course. Even you think the Golden State Finals, he was probably the most reliable player they had that series. I thought that was the best. Probably he's played in his career and that wasn't that long ago. So we'll see. I think this Milwaukee game that's coming up on Wednesday, and you look at the team that Milwaukee has versus the team Boston has. And Boston has such advantages at the wings, right? So even if they tilt everything to try to worry about Tatum, Jaylen is going to have the worst guy on the box, probably guarding him at all times, whoever's out there. And it should be a great match up for him. But he also knows that. And it's like, are we going to beat the Bucks if Jaylen is 12 for 25? I don't know. It's a fun basketball conversation situation. I'm not ready to panic. I'm not ready to say it's not an issue, but it's definitely something. And I think as we go over these next few weeks, it's probably the storyline of this season for the Celtics. And so I don't think he determines their ceiling.

You still think it's Tatum?

I still think it's Tatum. Tatum is the best guy in that team. But of course, Brown is in the top three for sure, and what's going to determine Boston's ceiling.

All right, KSE, you can hear him on the mismatch talking more basketball with our guy, Chris Vernon. Chris Vernon, by the way, if anyone in Memphis needs a Little League coach or a youth soccer coach around April 16th, Chris Vernon is going to have some time on his hands. He thought he was booked the last two weeks of April, maybe first two weeks of May, but he's going to be available now for some assistant coaching.

Can we fly out to LA and do some in-person pods and whatnot?

Yeah, let's do it. He's got plenty of time. Verno was the last person not to be afraid of what was happening with Memphis. We're fine. We're fine.

We don't have Oldama.

You said to him, we were texting about it a week ago, and you just coldly texted him, Verno, you're going to be five and 20 when Joc comes back. And it was like you just threw like a thing of water in his face. But you were right. That was the case. All right, KSE, good to see you.

Good to see you, too, Bill.

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What are we going to buy on Black Friday? But there's so much shit going on that is in your wheelhouse. This OpenAI story that unfoldstold it over the last five days, I think even for Crazy Stories was one of the craziest stories I've ever seen. And what was interesting for me, I didn't really understand any of it. So I was trying to read. I'm trying to read smart people's tweets like you, and I'm trying to read all the coverage of it, just trying to wrap my head around it. I've never really seen a story like this. I guess the only comparison would be as the Internet is coming up in the mid-90s, if there had just been an ideological split between two factions who were shaping the Internet at the time. Because I remember back in the day, in the mid-90s, people were like, The Internet is going to ruin everything. Y2k is coming. The Internet is going to shut down society. All of our information is going to be online. This is going to be the worst thing ever. And then the Internet, it hasn't been fantastic, but it's been really good. There's been some things we wish we didn't have, but for the most part, it's been good.

This feels like a crazier version of that. So this is unfolding for you. You're hosting Plain English for us. You're writing for The Atlantic, and you're just getting ready for year-end stuff. And then this blows up. What's your first reaction?

Well, my first reaction, which was a lot of people's first reaction, is that I can't believe this is the second consecutive November where the most famous young guy in startup tech world who happens to be named Sam, suffers some scandal that is intimately related to both effective altruism and the future of technology. You had Sam Bankman-Fried and the implosion of FTX and Alamedar. Com. You're talking about this very tiny research a year ago, exactly. And now you have Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, being unceremoniously fired. I got to say, Bill, you're saying that you don't understand exactly what happened as you feel like an outsider here. I think the insiders of the story don't understand exactly what happened. It's not entirely clear to me that people at OpenAI who work directly under Sam Altman understand why he was fired and the lack of transparency from the board that just seemed to fire up Google Meet and fire one of the most famous people in technology all of a sudden without any detailed explanation to the company or the general world of what they were doing is a huge part of the interest around this story.

It is not just important because OpenAI is arguably the most important young company in artificial intelligence. It's also this huge mystery. What the hell are they doing and why?

Did your mind go to the gutter? Like mine did immediately. I was like, I must have an affair with somebody in the office, or he must have harassed somebody or they must have found some damaging. And it wasn't any of that. All of a sudden, within 24 hours, it's like, Oh, this was actually two ideologies that just were opposed with each other, and that was it. But then he gets fired. He wants to come back. And now he's going to be at Microsoft. And we could talk about who are going to be the winners and losers from this down the road. But just having all this unfold over the weekend, which is usually the worst time to report anything. And it felt like the story was changing every six hours.

I absolutely thought that this was a worst-case scenario reason for firing initially. The letter itself that explained why OpenAI fired their CEO said he had not been consistently candid with the board. They didn't give him an opportunity to resign. They clearly, all of a sudden fired him. You think back to other times that tech CEOs have set down from companies that they helped found, something like Adam Newman. Adam Newman ran WeWork as a private checking account. He did all sorts of malfeasance there. Absolutely, lure conflicts of interest. He wasn't fired. Even after he became a joke and the company's valuation plummeted, he resigned. So the idea that OpenAI would fire its CEO without any warning, I immediately went to the idea of clearly something incredibly bad has happened here, something I can't even fathom, something truly, truly horrific. And then an hour goes by and two hours and three hours. And I start to see some people that I know who also clearly know Sam very well in Silicon Valley starting to tweet really nice things about Sam Altman. We're so sorry to see you go. You're such a star, yada, yada. And I start DMing some of these guys.

And I'm like, Why are you tweeting such nice things about Sam Altman when it's possible that this guy might have committed some terrible, terrible crime? And they answered with a bunch of very cryptic messages. They said, I know what happened, but I can't talk about it. I know what happened, but I can't talk about it. So then I went to, okay, well, it's not the worst-case scenario. It's not some sexual assault or something like that where they clearly had to fire this guy immediately because he had broken some terrible law. And the driptrips from the company are all about the things that Sam hasn't done. So, for example, the CEO comes out and says this wasn't about malfeasance. And then the new CEO of the company, Emmett Shear, says this wasn't about AI safety. So the board fires him for vague reasons, and then other people start telling the public all these reasons why they didn't fire him. But we don't get the answer to the question of why they actually did fire him. We can talk a little bit about what the conventional wisdom is now of why he actually was let go and why OpenAI right now is like falling apart at the seams.

But it is absolutely fascinating and unprecedented in my experience, to have someone of this stature fired for reasons that are not explained to the public or to the company that he runs.

And we're typing this. It is Tuesday, like mid, late morning Pacific Time. So the story might even change as we're talking about this. There were so many fascinating pieces of how people reacted to this story in the world. You had the Bill Gurley types, like the angel community. And they're all like, Wait a second, this is the whole point of building a company like this is to try to do good things but also be as profitable as possible. You can't just be in the, We don't care if we make any money from this. We're trying to do good for the rest of the world. Can you do both at the same time? I think that's going to be one of the legacies of this story. What is the responsibility of a company that clearly has the ability to shape the next couple generations of how we interact with each other? Do they have a responsibility to make that good? And I don't really know the answer to that.

Bill, you're asking such a good question. It's the right question. It's how did a company like this end up in a situation where you have a nonprofit owning a for-profit company? And here I think it's worth doing just like a little bit of history into what OpenAI actually is because it's not like almost any other company that exists in technology. Back in 2015, OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit by Sam Altman and Elon Musk and a couple of other luminaries and artificial intelligence. And they found it as a nonprofit because they had a specific bet on the future of artificial intelligence. They said, We think that this technology is going to be the most important thing that humanity ever invents. And we don't want that technology to be owned and operated entirely inside of the big tech system. We don't want Meta and Facebook to exclusively own the most important technology in history. We have to find some way to build it so that it works the benefit of all of humanity. The best way to do that, they said, is to make it a nonprofit entity. Now here's the problem. It turns out that building technology like ChatGPT is incredibly computationally expensive, and the engineers who are smart enough to build it are also very expensive to hire.

At the same time, you have people like Elon Musk who used to be associated with OpenAI pulling out of the company. And so the funding that they used to rely on from the richest guy in the world, they can no longer rely on. So what do you do if you're a nonprofit?

And the money goes away- You left out the safety piece, too, as the tool is growing, they have to figure out all these different checks and balances to protect it, which also costs a ton of money.

You have to hire the safety team to check the technology and the engineering team to build it. Exactly right. So you're in 2018, 2019, and OpenAI says this is too expensive to run as a nonprofit. We need to open up a for-profit subsidiary of OpenAI that can raise equity and get venture funding and build stuff that can actually turn a profit that can earn money.

So OpenAI- Is there a parallel to this in previous to 2019? Has anyone ever been in a situation like this before? Because it doesn't seem like it.

I can't think of a really good example of a for-profit operating underneath a nonprofit, where the board of the nonprofit can fire the CEO who essentially runs the for-profit company. And to skip to the end, that's essentially what seems to have happened here. You have a board of directors, which is, as of Friday, today. It's Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, the chief researcher, the chief scientist of OpenAI, Ilia Sutsgiver, and three non-employee board members who essentially oversee this for-profit entity. They fire Sam Altman for running the for-profits side of this company too aggressively. They build ChatGPT. They're building these products that are incredibly successful, that are making hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. They're raising tens of billions of dollars from Microsoft. They're pushing forward this technology really quickly. And the answer to the complicated question of what happened on Friday seems to be this is most plausible, it's this. The nonprofit that felt like it had a mission to protect this technology from moving too quickly felt like Sam Altman and the for-profit side of the company was moving too quickly. And therefore, they decided to take the measure of most extreme in caution and fire the guy, even if it might cause the implosion of the company.

That seems to be what happened here.

It's almost like a self-debt nation. Yeah. The way I was like everybody else just trying to understand the story. And it felt like an act of self-sabotage. What was interesting in some of the reporting was that they made a billion dollars in revenue this past year, which is a lot for a relatively new startup. Especially if you think like, All right, we're trying to sell OpenAI now. What would the valuation be? It'd be like 10 times that. So the company is already worth 10 billion bucks and this was a nonprofit to start. I guess the Sam Altman side of it is probably the most. If you're just thinking about this, what are the TV shows and movies about this going to be like? Sam Altman will clearly be the star. What is he as a character? Because it seems like, unlike some of these other people, like the WeWork guy and some of the other people that have been in this spot or the Uber guy, Travis, where people were like, That guy is a duche. He was out of Hollywood. It doesn't seem like Sam was like that at all. He seemed really well liked by everybody.

So I don't even know what character he would be in a movie. What does he stand for? Does he stand for 60 %? Let's do this because this is good for society, 40 %. Let's also make money. What's like the pie chart of it?

The best way to understand Sam Altman is that this is a guy who before he ran OpenAI, was in charge of Y Combinator, which was the and is the most successful and largest accelerator of young tech startups in Silicon Valley. It's a guy who's really plugged in. It's a guy who believes in growth, who has incredible relationships with venture capital, incredible relationships with big tech corporations throughout Silicon Valley and up into Washington State. He's incredibly plugged in, and he's really brilliant at running businesses. I mean, he took a company that has 600, 700, 800 people and built the most successful generative AI product in the world, arguably. I mean, Lapt Google and lapped Meta and lapped all these other companies that were trying to do the same thing. So he's great at growth. I think that's the simplest way you can put it. He's great at growth. And the problem for OpenAI, the problem for Sam Alton is that again, like I said, in the story of its founding, which is so important, I think, for understanding the last 100 hours, this is a company that in many ways was designed to eshoe growth. They were designed to not be like just another company.

And so I think a really profound question here is what were they thinking building this house that was divided against itself where you had essentially... I was thinking about what's a metaphor to make it really stick to people who are outside of the tech community. And I thought of like, okay, imagine if you had an owner of a new NFL team, let's say the new commander ownership comes in and they say, We have a dual mandate for running the Washington Commanders. Number one, we want to win games. Number two, we want to limit injuries. We think it's really bad that a lot of NFL players get injured and we're really moral and ethical. We want to limit injuries. The first year their ownership, let's say the Washington Commanders are having nothing like the season they're having right now. In fact, they go 10-0. They are 10-0. They're the most successful team in the NFL, and the head coach is fired. All of a sudden, no warning, the head coach is fired. And people are like, Why is the head coach the Washington Commanders who are 10-0 fired? And it turns out that actually the Washington Commanders got to 10-0 because their defense was really, really good, and it was knocking people's heads off and breaking arms and breaking legs and causing a bunch of concussions.

And so the Washington commander ownership fired the head coach because even though he was winning, he was also causing a lot of injuries. And if you went back to the founding document of the Washington commander's ownership, it was all about, yes, winning, but also limiting injuries. And so this is an incredibly strange situation for any sports team to operate under because you don't have any sports teams that have this weird dual mandate of be really commercially successful, but also operate by this moral standard. But that's what you have with OpenAI. It's an unbelievably unique and maybe even nonsensical corporate structure. And I do think that this unique and nonsensical corporate structure is exactly what people need to look at in explaining why did this happen? Why did one of the most successful, as you said, Sam Alton, one of the most successful young tech startup guys get unceremoniously dumped from one of the most successful companies in Silicon Valley? It's because of this bizarre corporate structure.

All right. So to continue your commander's analogy. So the board is basically like, we don't want you to run any pass routes over the middle. We've done all this AI studies on how offensive players get hurt and it's passes over the middle. You're not allowed to do the tush-push anymore. We've studied that. And then the coach comes in and he's just thrown over the middle and he's doing the tush-push. He's doing all the things that they were asking him not to do, basically.

And he's doing all these things to win. That's what I want to emphasize in this analogy. I'm sorry if the analogy is too convoluted for some people to be sticking. No, I like it. -it's totally sticking. But the reason I think the analogy fits here is that it is what's so confusing to most people is that OpenAI is thrillingly successful. Ceos don't get fired from their companies for being successful. It doesn't make any sense unless you fill in the fact that the ownership model is not designed to maximize success here. It's designed to maximize something else, the benefit to humanity, this slowness and the safety with which artificial intelligence is created. So just as with a scenario where the Washington commander ownership doesn't actually want the team to focus on success, it wants the team to focus on limiting injuries, on wide receivers running over the middle, that's essentially like what we're seeing here.

Well, I remember, what was that? Like May or June, and you were about to go on leave. And the AI story was moving so fast that I called you and I was like, I feel like we have to do something about that. And you ended up coming on my podcast and we ended up doing a long pod because it felt like, holy shit. This feels like the most significant thing that's happened in a while. Now fast forward to Thanksgiving week, and it feels three times more significant than I think we even realized in May. What's crazy about the story, just in general, is that this has all happened over the past year. And I wonder... I mean, obviously the company existed before that, but the growth and all the shit that it was actually going down felt like it was contained to last November to now. I wonder if that's part of what made this story so weird. This was such accelerated crazy growth. Even something like Uber, they had years where they're in some select cities trying to make sure, see if it works. Will people pay for this? How do we handle the drivers?

Where do we find the drivers? How do we check their backgrounds? And it just took forever. This was within a year. This became the single most powerful thing that happened in the last 30, certainly since the Internet, they had a bunch of copycats. So Sam's competitive and he's thinking, we have to keep growing, growing, growing. Somebody's going to pass us. Somebody's going to take our turf. So maybe it was altruistic in some way on his side because he's thinking, we're the ones that actually have our hearts in the right place, but the people that are coming might not. And that's why we have to grow.

So.

I actually feel like there's a world in which everybody's motives were still aligned. He probably saw the competitive piece of it a little differently than the board. Is that like a fair theory?

I do think they were fundamentally misaligned, but I absolutely buy the idea that I think you're hinting at, which is that it's possible that in the fullness of time, we'll think that the board, as shambolic as the process of firing Sam Alman has been, had the right idea in mind. Artificial intelligence, I don't think, is like most technologies that came before it. If we indeed do build a machine that is as smart as the smartest person and can train itself, therefore, to be even smarter, that's an unbelievably powerful technology that I think we should be incredibly cautious about developing. And maybe the board recognized that and saw something that you and I and a bunch of other critics of the board simply don't, that they are making the right decision to slam on the brakes here, seeing that Sam Alton while following all of the right ideas in terms of pushing forward this piece of commerce in a really competitive industry where everybody else is gunning it. Google is going full throttle and Meta is going full throttle and Amazon is going full throttle and Apple has its own investments. He's like, We have to accelerate if we're going to compete.

I get that as an idea, but it is possible, yes, that this technology that we're all going headlong toward inventing could be dangerous. Now, I'm trying to give the board some credit here. I should say the way this has turned out is catastrophically ironic because as I said just a few minutes ago, OpenAI was founded in 2015 because the last thing that they wanted was for artificial intelligence to be developed within the biggest companies in the world. What happened 48 hours after Sam Alman was fired? He was reportedly hired by Microsoft, the second biggest company in the world after Apple. And so he and Greg Brockman, the President of the company, and a bunch of other smart engineers and maybe also AI safety researchers are going to potentially decamp to Microsoft. And this entire effort to keep artificial intelligence outside the hands of the largest tech companies might, ironically, in like a Greek tragedyway. And with the smartest people in AI working directly under Sachin and Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft. That would be an unbelievably ironic conclusion.

But isn't that what makes this story so distinctly American? That's been every American company ever, right? What American company- Capitalism wins. -didn't get bought up by the bigger gun? I'd be really interested to know how far Facebook, Amazon, Google, all the Alphabets basically competing against OpenAI, how close they are, what the standings look like, what the total yardage, what the first down efficiency. I wonder how far ahead OpenAI is. And that's one of the things that I think is so fascinating with this story is I don't know how big their lead was. It might have been smaller than we think.

It might be smaller than we think. And it's also possible that the next big story in AI is going to be a paradigm change. So you mentioned that this story of ChatGPT is so young. Let's see, what day is it? November 21st. Chatgpt debut on November 30th, 2022.

Right. We're not even at.

The year mark yet. This technology is 51 weeks old, and it has reshaped the corporate AI struggle. You have every major tech company, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon pouring billions, sometimes tens of billion dollars into AI right now. It's a huge consumer story. Chatgpt is the fastest growing consumer product in history. It's being used by millions of people every day and software and engineering and design and publishing. And it's a big cultural story. I don't know if your kids talk about this, but high schools and colleges are trying to figure out how do we weed out ChatGPT cheaters because this is a universal B-plus replicator. You can ask any question. It will give you a B-plus answer, as Matt Bellany has been reporting.

I've watched it unfold because one kid in college and one in high school, I've watched it unfold in real time where even by now, I think they have a lot of checks and balances where they can tell if somebody used AI and there's been warnings and we'll know if you do this and it's got to be your work. All that shit is happening already. That happened within a couple of months.

But you asked, how close are they to OpenAI? And I guess where I wanted to go with my answer is ChatGPT has been such a successful commercially and culturally successful product. It's possible that large language models like ChatGPT aren't the future of AI at all. That when it comes to the most powerful AI, there's going to be a big paradigm shift and that there's something that Meta is building or that Amazon is building or the ChatGPT is building that's going to surpass what we think of as the frontier of AI. So just yesterday, for example, there was a report that came out in Nature Magazine that found that they had developed a machine learning AI for sensing pancreatic cancer in patients much better than the best radiologists in the world. Now I lost a parent to pancreatic cancer. So to me and to the millions of people that have lost people to pancreatic cancer, which is the worst cancer, the most serious and malignant, hard, solid cancer in the world, the ability of AI to detect cancers before they become stage four, that's going to save way more lives, I think, than ChatGPT. So it's possible, Bill, that the next chapter of this revolution makes chatbots look like absolute child's play.

That is honestly the hope here that we can find some way to use this technology to make an inflection point in medicine, engineering, and not just in fun, images, and essays?

Think about the internet in 1996 versus what the internet looks like now. It's pretty crazy. We're going to take a break and I want to keep talk about this. So you were talking about some of the things that are going to change short term with OpenAI and just the things that we know, it feels like it's having a dramatic impact on science. I even think the stuff that we saw in the Hollywood, the strikes. And all of a sudden, it became the number one thing that every side was worried about and trying to figure out. That changed in real time over the course of the writer strike and the actor strike. There's some sports stuff that I think is going to be fascinating with it. All the things I care about, it's going to have a dramatic impact, even like, how do you prepare to play for a game? Who is more possibly injured E versus other people? Are there things we can do to avoid knee injuries for high school and college basketball players? I thought there's going to be a million thousand things of that. Then there's all the dangerous stuff that we talked about the last time you were on the pod talking about this, which is the deep faking and being able to replicate somebody's voice, being able to call a bank pretending to be somebody and be like, Hey, can you take $50,000 out?

But it's not your voice. So we've all those things. Is it sad that I think about the companies getting involved in this stuff. And it's just scary because I don't trust them. I don't trust really any of these giant companies. And I think they've lost our trust in so many different ways over the last 12 years that this feels like this weekend, I really hope we're not looking back at it and going, this was the weekend that AI fell apart or AI went and fell in the wrong hands, where it's almost like an action movie, where it's like, the villain's got this now. That's my big picture overreaching. Holy shit. I hope that's not how we remember Thanksgiving weekend 2023. But I feel like that's how we're going to remember it.

I think your fear is totally warranted. I mean, you look at Meta and you look at Facebook and you look at what Facebook has become in so many parts of the world where it's just become a pure amplifier of hatred. You look at the effect that Instagram, which look, incredibly successful product brings a lot of people a lot of joy, but also has been clearly shown to increase anxiety among teenagers and especially among teenage girls. These big tech companies have shown over and over that, yes, they make some incredible products. They run some incredible logistics systems. I think Amazon's logistics are absolutely extraordinary, better than maybe any other logistics system in the world. But at the same time, you have every right to be concerned about a really important technology being held by a scarce few and by a scarce very rich few who are out of touch with the needs of and the concerns of the masses that their technology is being deployed on.

It's an unbelievable- And don't care about human welfare.

Yes, and care more about returning value to shareholders than they do about human welfare. You are retracing, Bill, every single concern that I think was present at the dinner table when Sam Altman and Elon Musk and Ilia Satskiver sat down with a bunch of other AI figures in 2015 at a dinner that ended with the creation of a nonprofit called OpenAI. This is exactly why I think it was reasonable for people to want OpenAI to, I should say, one of the major bets in artificial intelligence to be a nonprofit bet rather than the many, many big bets that were going to be placed on artificial intelligence throughout Silicon Valley. It's a completely reasonable fear. And while I'm making fun of the fact that I think that OpenAI was catastrophically misaligned, that it was like an NFL team where you have ownership that's maximizing no injuries while the team just wants to win. And therefore, you can have a coach who wins 10 games and gets fired. I'm comparing it to that in a way that makes it seem like I'm making fun of OpenAI, but you could absolutely imagine how 10 years from now, 15 years from now, we see that AI has retraced the very problems that we've seen in other internet creations like social media, Instagram, and it's affect and anxiety.

So your fears are absolutely warranted. This technology I take really seriously. I know some people don't, and they think that my interest in AI is a little bit like people's interest in NFTs from a few years ago. No, I take this stuff really seriously. I think it really is going to be the next big wave of technology. And I do think that it is different than just inventing a slightly faster car. It's a total paradigm shift that we should be very careful about. And if it's just going to be like three companies led by three dudes with Meta and Microsoft and Alphabet just going at it, and that's it. That's the race. It's just three people overseeing AI divisions. Yeah, that's a scarier world, I think, to me, than a world with a bunch of bets on developing a technology that is systemically regulated by a smart government.

Well, we both heard the same things about in the rich guy investment circles, the AI industry has single-handly rejuvenated, very similar to early 2000s internet and just these little runs we've had where all the money is going to specific places and this next startup and we talk to this guy and he's working this and this lady has this. And my guess is that there's going to be a couple of things coming that will at least come close to this. I just think the stakes are different. I look at how we've treated social media the last 15 years. And I think you and I have even talked about this before in the pod, but I feel even more strongly about it now. It's very similar to the cigarette smoking. It just is. You go to the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s. I was watching Mad Men, season 1 a couple of weeks ago. And just how everybody smokes and how they're selling cigarettes to people and they know they're bad. By the 60s, you knew they're bad, but they didn't care. Social media now is the same thing. Social media is bad. It's bad for people if you use it too much.

Anything's bad for you if you use it too much. But social media specifically, it ties into a bunch of different stuff: depression, loneliness. I don't think the COVID era helped, but I just don't feel like we're worried about its effects on young people enough, not to mention all the other shit that comes with it. But it's not as dangerous as this AI thing where this is what the movies have been telling us since the late 60s, right? The machines are going to win. The machines are going to take over. And you see some of this stuff and you're like, Man, the machines might actually become smarter than us. And then how do we police that, which is the basic premise of this open AI battle. So my point is the social media stuff scares me. The ceiling of this or the basement, I guess you would say, is so much scarier. And that's why the flux. I think this is the story of the year right now. I can't think of a bigger thing that's happening.

Yeah. People made fun of me for saying this, but the last time I was on this show or maybe two times ago, I said, I think it might be the story of the decade. It is hard for me to think of a developing story that's happening right now that could potentially touch every single country in the world, and that is only going to grow because technology, unlike other trends, unlike, say, politics, technology doesn't end. The chips just get smaller and faster. The phones just get more developed. Technology just grows. And if ChatGPT is able to do all these things right now, you have to imagine that five years from now, it is very likely capable of doing exponentially more. I would say that on the social media part, I sometimes compared social media, I see the comparison to cigarettes. I prefer the comparison to alcohol because alcohol, it tastes good. It's a social lubricant. You can use it in a way that is beneficial and fun. In that same way, I think there are millions of people that use Instagram in a way that's just basically fun. I found a lot of use from X, Twitter, Threads, finding communities of experts that I can just plug into as they just burp up thoughts to the world.

That's been really, really useful for my job. But as with alcohol, social media, when you use it too much, and especially when young people use it too much, is a huge detriment. And it is, in fact, a toxin. It's a poison. And just this overuse among young people of alcohol or overuse among anyone of alcohol can be a problem. Overuse, I think, of social media is in many ways one of the more severe undiagnosed, I think, psychological problems in this country. What makes AI interestingly similar but different is that I still don't know what the metaphor is. With social media, I really do feel strongly that it's attention alcohol. With AI, it's hard to think of an analogy for developing a technology that can teach itself to become smarter than its inventors. I suppose you can reach back to Mary Schelly and Frankenstein, and there's certainly not a lot of hope that comes out of that book when it comes to analogies here. But we don't have a great metaphor or a historical echo of what it's like to develop a technological species that is smarter than and more capable than its inventors across an array of subjects, including improving itself.

Yeah. That's a really unbelievably, I think, profound concept. And so while people are... While the OpenAI story, it is a movie. It is lured. It is funny and pathetic, and the board's behavior and lack of transparency has been shambolic. I do want to make sure that we keep coming back to this idea that I think this technology could be really profound. And I want to make sure that we design human systems to develop it in a way that we get the most out of this profound invention.

I would put it like this. It has the capability and the probability of prolonging and improving everybody's life, while also the possibility of ending it immediately. Right? Yeah. So glass half-full, it's like, This is going to be amazing. We're going to be able to take so and so's body. Here's what's good for you. Here's what's bad for you. We're now spitting out this diet that you should stick to every day, and you're just going to be 20 % better at everything you do. And there you go. We're going to have basketball players playing till they're 50, although LeBron might do that anyway. But I said there's going to be all these benefits that are awesome. And at the same time, there's going to be this fear that it's Terminator 2.

Yeah. What comes to mind right there is just nuclear technology. Oppenheimer is really interesting in that at the end of that movie, spoiler alert, everyone should see it. He's so afraid that he's invented a technology that's going to create a chain reaction that destroys the world. Now you can take that one of two ways. You can take very seriously his fear that he's invented a technology that really could destroy humanity. Or you can look at reality and be like, Wait, we're 70 years, almost 80 years removed from the invention of the nuclear bomb- Figured I had to police it. -and nuclear fission is an incredibly successful form of clean energy generation. And in fact, the threat of mutually assured destruction has coincided with, arguably, the period of most peace between major powers in the world because we can't attack each other without destroying each other. So that paradox, that paradox of nuclear technology, I think, has a lot of resonance when it comes to the paradox of artificial intelligence, which, as you said, has the potential, I think, across a couple of different subjects to make us a little bit better at Excel, a little bit better at doing research or coming up with podcast ideas, a little bit better at answering history questions.

But maybe in a few years, a little bit better at discovering pancreatic cancer, a little bit better at predicting biomarker health and allowing us to be healthier while containing within it the possibility of creating this really, really big disaster. I do think that's probably a fitting metaphor.

Or how to improve eyesight, how to fix a spinal cord injury. There could be all these benefits from it. Well, the story is going to keep going. So you're going to have to come back to maybe three, four weeks because I know that this thing is going to change. There's a couple more things we got hit really quick.

Twitter, which.

This is one of those stories that I've been trying to avoid for the most part because it's just awful. It's an awful story. Everything that's happened, as you know, I thought that the site was a dumpster fire to begin with. So in some ways, maybe this is how it should finally end. But it got super dark in the past week, and you have all these advertisers pulling out now. I know you talked to a bunch of people. What is the consensus on what's happening at Elon Musk these days because just knowing nothing, just watching from afar, it seems like he's doing like an Austin Powers, Doctor Evil bit almost. It almost doesn't seem real. I don't even really understand the upside for him. He bought this company that's lost 65 % of his value. I think he's tarnished his name irrevocably. I don't even really understand what he's trying to stand for or what his goals are. He just seems deranged. And is that not the right takeaway?

I'll answer it like this. If you asked me my opinion of Elon Musk before he bought Twitter, I would have said, This is a guy whose political views I don't necessarily share, but I consider to be a genius and one of the most important people in the world. Tesla, whatever you think about Elon Musk, accelerated the electric car revolution in America and in the West. And that is a mitzvah if you care about climate change. Spacex lapsed NASA in terms of its ability to make reusable rockets. And if you care about not just getting to Mars, but putting stuff in space like satellites, like Starlink, that is a huge mitzvah. He's building other things like Neuralink. He's an interesting guy who is incredibly successful at solving these difficult, knotty, hardware challenges and a bunch of different subjects. My God, what a smart guy. And I'm glad that he's working on these serious problems.

By the way, I'm 100 % with you. I felt the same way.

You fast forward to today, my opinion of Elon Musk is that he is a deranged conspiracy theorist whose purchase of Twitter has allowed his freak flag to fly in plain view of not just the average person, but the average advertiser. And it has destroyed his investment in this company and his reputation. I mean, you are looking, when you look at Twitter or X, at a company that already before his anti-Semitic musings or his anti-Semitic engagement with people in the last few weeks had already lost 60 % of its ad revenue. That was before Apple said it was pausing or excuse me, pulling its ads before Disney. And Paramount said they were pulling their ads before the largest tech entertainment company said they were pulling their ads. Revenue was already down 60 %. He has run this company catastrophically, and he's run it catastrophically, I think, because he has run it through his personality, which was always an albatross, rather than through his business acumen, which was always, I think, pretty top class.

So.

That's my brief take on Elon Musk. It's always easy, I think, to lean into the idea that, well, he's always just been a bad businessman. He just got lucky with SpaceX and Tesla. I don't believe that's true. I think he's actually- No.

You can't say that. Nobody gets lucky with two things like that.

I agree. I don't think that's luck. I think that's skill. So I resist this temptation to say that he's always been somewhat clownish and incompetent. But I also really resist the people who respected him and are clinging to this vision of him as some hero who transcends what we expect from business leaders. He's made a clown show of himself in the last few weeks, and he's getting exactly what he deserves.

And I don't really understand it because I think he was definitely eccentric. And there are some things you could have picked at. But the guy from the last year doesn't really have a resemblance to the guy from the 2010s, I don't think. I think they're two different people. So I don't know what happened to him, I guess, is my point. I don't know what the catalyst was or the trigger for him to go sideways. And this isn't about politics, any of that stuff. It's just how you present yourself to the world. It seems like something has snapped with him. Even him trying to threaten and sue media matters this week for just reporting stuff, that was insane. I kept reading the story like, Am I missing? Oh, I'm not missing anything. This is just insane behavior. He actually seems insane with some of this stuff.

This is a self-described, free speech absoluteist who is suing a media company for reporting on his company. Correctly. That says it all right there. Right. Exactly.

I don't understand how you can do those two things at the same time.

Well, I think the parcemonious explanation is that he believes in free speech absolutely up until the point where that free speech directly threatens his business, at which point his values switch from being a free speech absoluteist to being a chief executive. I think that's probably the simplest explanation here, and I don't think that's too cynical to say. To your earlier question of what happened, in my mind, there's only two possible diagnoses here. One is that he's always had these cookie beliefs, but he didn't own a social media network where he felt totally free to communicate all of these beliefs that have always been a little bit conspiratorial and wacky, or something has changed. Whether that's him, whether it's his wealth, whether it's his response, as so many people, I think, have been radicalized by the experience of COVID in the last few years and Donald Trump, whether it's something emerging from that cesspool of news events that he's come out of it by being just a little bit wackier than he is before. Maybe something has changed. Maybe he's always been like this. I can't diagnose from afar. But clearly, as a third party observer like you or me, clearly, and appears like something has changed.

This is not the person who did CNBC interviews about what you're trying to do with Tesla and SpaceX or hosted SNL. This is a different figure. And look, you cannot not be in the advertising business while spouting, anti-semic nonsense and suing people for pointing out the anti-Smitic nonsense that you spew. It is an impossible situation. And I do think that X, Twitter is in, if not quite a death spiral in a terrible, terrible place. And I would not be surprised if there's more shoes to drop in that particular story, whether it's the CEO resigning, other resignations from within the company, other if he's hitting the company. As we've seen throughout tech and throughout media, sometimes these stories can really snowball. And so I don't think we've seen the end of that story at all.

I remember in the 2000s, I wrote about the Tyson Zone, which was named after Mike Tyson, as he got weirder and weirder and hit a point that I would have believed literally any story about him. You could have sent it to me. And I would have been like, Oh, that adds up. And I think Elon is there. The Elon Zone, in some ways, is even crazier than Tyson's zone. Because if somebody, let's say, the Atlantic, wrote some feature about him, they're like, One of the things we've learned is that he has 15 monkeys shipped to his house each week, which he then drinks the blood out of their skulls because it gives him strength and virility. I'd be like, I believe that. I honestly don't know what story I wouldn't believe about him at this point. He's operating. Even Tyson wasn't like this. Tyson was like, Oh, my God. Oh, Tyson got in a fight and beat. You'd believe that? This is different. If you told me he just got in a space rocket and flew away and he's like, I'm going to circle the Earth for two years. I'm like, Yeah, that adds up.

I could see that.

And I think we should say the Elon zone is the Tyson zone, except it matters. The guy is worth $200 billion. In fact, he.

Has millions and millions of people.

Yeah, exactly. This is the guy is worth $200 billion. He runs a satellite program that delivers internet to Ukraine. He has $4 billion worth of government contracts that send stuff into space. He's an incredibly important figure, and you don't want important figures to descend into madness. So it concerns me that Elon Musk is entering his version of the Tyson Zone because this is not like someone getting a weird tattoo on their face. This guy has a lot of power, and you want people with power to recognize the discipline that they have to use that power with.

Yeah. What if he's like, I've updated our Tesla computers and now it's going to do this? Wait, what? What's going to happen? We're just tweets are going to pop up on my dashboard? Who knows what he's capable of? Last thing, you've done some great podcasting on Israel and Palestine. I don't know how many episodes you've up to at this point, but you've tried to be balanced in the middle, just trying to understand exactly what's happening, try to explain it in the right ways. It's also an incredibly scary story to just talk about and converse about. How have you been able to find that balance with the podcast of my responsibility here? And you've written about it, too, obviously. My responsibility here is to inform and explain, but this is the most polarizing story and conflict that we've had probably since you've had a platform. So how have you balanced it?

It's been really hard. That's the first thing I should say. It's been really hard. And this is a situation where typically on my show, I love to provide solutions and answers to problems. I love to be able to look at the OpenAI saga, for example, and say, I think I know what this is about. It's about corporate structure. Or look at something that's happening in the economy and say, Here's my thesis about why Americans feel the way they do about the economy. It's been really hard to do that with Israel, Palestine. And look, it would be completely ridiculous for me to imagine that I can somehow solve a crisis that has bedeviled this region for 70 years, 80 years. So it's been very hard to do. But it's really important for me, I think, doing a show that is about finding ways of framing the news to be honest with listeners about when I'm struggling to come up with my own frames and to say, I don't know what the right answer is here. So we're going to listen to an Israeli historian who takes Israel's side in this conflict. We're going to listen to a Palestinian historian who's going to take Palestine's side.

And then we're going to talk to a counterterrorism expert about Israel's military strategy. But then we're going to talk to a Palestinian peace activist who rejects the very idea that there should be any military intervention in Gaza. The only solution to the anguish that I feel about this problem is balance. I don't have the answer here. And so what I can provide in lieu of an answer is answers from across the spectrum. And all I can say is I hope that people who listen, and I would encourage people to listen, especially to some of the episodes like the history episode where we go through, we really try to tell the 70, 80-year history. Actually, we go back to the late 19th century, the 150-year history of the Israel-Palestine conflict in about 1 hour. I've tried to be as balanced and as fair as possible and to call out unfairness where I see it, wherever I see it. So it's been hard, it's been valuable. But it's why I love doing what I love doing, which is getting into subjects that initially I don't understand and trying to pull some comprehension out of it. So from that standpoint, it's been a really rewarding effort.

And I hope that listeners to those shows appreciate.

Well, I appreciate that. I did a great job. All right, last thing, because we started talking about OpenAI predictions. Let's do first take style. We'll be Steven A and Shane and Sharp. But how do the next two weeks play out? What do you think happens?

Well, you mentioned the Tyson Zone, and this is a story that is very firmly in the Tyson Zone. I could imagine very seriously, I could imagine OpenAI going back to Status Quo Antebellum, where Sam Altman is reinstated as CEO, everyone stays at OpenAI, and the only people that leave are the three non-employee board members who led the effort to fire Sam Altman. So essentially everything is the same as it was one week ago. I think that's possible. I think it's possible that OpenAI doesn't exist in one month because if what is real now continues to be real for a few more weeks, Sam Altman isn't there. The entire company, 700 of the 800 employees have signed a letter to the board saying bring back Sam and fire yourself, or we might quit and go to Microsoft. They might do it. They might all be serious and Microsoft might just welcome all of them with open arms. It's the easiest aquahire ever. They might all go to Microsoft. Openai no longer exists essentially as a company, and Microsoft essentially.

Eats.

The entire thing that's possible. So this is my way of get it, of slithering out of a clear answer. When you're living in a world where the company exists exactly as it did a week ago is an option, and the company no longer exists in two weeks is also an option, it's very, very difficult to have any confidence interval about what's going to happen. I'll make this prediction. I'll say nothing in the last few days. It gives me any confidence that the board is going to budge from its position. And so what's the status quo? The status quo is that Sam Altman is in a deal to join Microsoft with Greg Brockman, the former President of OpenAI. Hundreds of people join him and a new research/commercial AI entity that is either within Microsoft or co-sponsored by Microsoft opens up. It's basically OpenAI 2 and original OpenAI no longer exist. I guess that's my prediction.

So what would happen to the original technology? It was like, couldn't they sue you're copying the technology we created in this company? And then it gets into a whole other thing where it's like, Wait, I thought you didn't care about this stuff. Now you're suing for profits when you're nonprofit. It just feels like this is going to end up in some lawsuits.

This is where my even pretend expertise entirely runs out. I have no idea how it works if you essentially have all of the members of a company start a new company, but the intellectual property resides with the nonprofit that formerly paid them their W-2s. I have no idea how that works out. This is where lawyers will be paid billions and billions of dollars in working on all the details. But my prediction is yes, that OpenAI as it currently exists, I suppose I'll guess that it won't exist in the exact same way two.

Weeks from now. This would be an unbelievable fanduel bet where it could be like, we'll OpenAI exist in three weeks minus 250. Will Microsoft acquire OpenAI plus 500? It does feel like there's so many different options. There's also the option that it just limps along and doesn't... And Sam takes all these guys to Microsoft and then OpenAI is like, we're still here. We're still doing stuff, but they don't have any of their best people anymore. And they missed their window, which we've also seen happen a bunch of times, not just in the tech industry, but even companies like Funny or Die. Sometimes you have your window and then it's gone.

That's absolutely true. The one reason I guess I would guess that they won't have missed their window is that if all the same talent moves to some new entity and they understand how to build large language models and they have the same relationships with companies to store the data and get the data, it seems very plausible to me that they end up building something that's very much like ChatGPT. It within this new company. But you're absolutely right. Sometimes you need lightning in a bottle. And clearly OpenAI was lightning in a bottle. And we should add to the menu of possibilities here. Openai stays the same. Openai no longer exists. Something like OpenAI exists, but it loses enough talent or loses enough juice in some way that we look back on this as the end of a certain chapter for this incredible company. And we say, wow, they peaked in late October of 2023. And then this board decision threw it into chaos that actually led to a worse outcome for everyone from a commercial standpoint that none of them essentially achieved their former glory.

You can listen to Plain English with Derek Thompson. You can read them at The Atlantic. God knows what else is up to. You had a busy 2023. A lot of stuff happening. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on.

Thanks, Bill.

We're supported by NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube and YouTube. Don't change your team when you change your town. Get an NFL Sunday ticket on YouTube and YouTube. Tv, where it's easier than ever to keep up with all your favorite teams on Sunday afternoons. Right now, you get the Thanksgiving sale price starting at $89 when bundled with YouTube. Remember, traveling during the holidays is a drag. Constantly dealing with long lines, flight delays, and worst of all, you could miss some of the most exciting matchups of the NFL season. I was on the road last week. I was still able to watch four games at once. Thanks to YouTube, TV. Thanks to Multivview, my buddy. We have some awesome games this week. I think my favorite is Jags, Titans, just because whoever wins that game is probably winning the AFC South. We have no idea whether CJ Strat is ready, but he might be. I'm also a Steeler's Bangles. I picked the Stealers before the season for a whole bunch of things. I thought they were going to be good. This is the make or break week for them. They got to beat the Bangles without Joe Borough.

Those are probably my two favorite games, but I'll be watching everything as always. Thank you, Multiview. Don't let holiday travel get into the way of your entertainment. Watch wherever you are with the NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube and YouTube. Tv again, I did this last week in Boston. Catch your favorite out-of-market NFL teams in the go and on your favorite mobile device. Thanks to NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube and YouTube TV for sponsoring the segment. It truly is the best place to keep up with all your favorite teams out on the market. Sunday afternoon games. Right now, Thanksgiving sale price starts at $89 when bundled with YouTube, TV. All you have to do is sign up at YouTube. Bs, my initial is YouTube. Com/bs. Offer ends 11:27. Terms, embarkos, device and content restrictions apply. No cancelation. Austin Gayle is here from The Ringer. We played a little game called nerd out a few weeks ago. We said we would do it again around week 10, week 11. Well, now we're headed toward week 12, Thanksgiving in the NFL coming up. I asked you to come up with, I don't know, six, seven crazy stats from the first 11 weeks of the season or numbers or things that jumped out, caught your attention, made you go, Whoa, what the hell is that?

What's your first one?

I'm actually going to go to college football for the first one. Bill, since we are getting into week 12, I know the Pats are in maybe a quarterback, maybe a wide receiver in the 2024 NFL draft, Caleb Williams, who everyone sees as this next Trevor Lawrence, this next Andrew Luck, over the last couple of weeks, maybe not playing as well, crying in the stands, creating discourse. The stat that jumps out to me.

Fifth.

Longest time to throw in the entire FBS, holds on to the football.

Sixteen.

Turnover worthy plays, this is according to PFF, on pressure drop backs. That's five more than any other quarterback in the power five, and this is the kicker. That's holding onto the ball, that's not playing well into pressure. 30 % of the pressures allowed in USC's offense on Caleb Williams's drawbacks have been assigned to him, according to PFF. What does that mean? Running into pressure, doesn't have the pocket presence, in clean situations, still creating pressure on his own by bailing out of clean pockets and not doing it. The other quarterback that was 30%, in the last five years, Bryce Young, whose biggest struggle right now is pocket presence. I really do feel that Caleb Williams, his Achilles heel right now is how bad he's been under pressure and how much of that pressure he's creating himself.

So it's interesting because he seems like he's just gotten worse as the season's gone along. Everybody had him either one or two in the draft. And the first time I saw some mock draft this week. I'm sorry, I can't remember who wrote it, but they had Williams at five. And I was like, Whoa. But I do wonder, we've seen this happen before with quarterbacks who have the lead in September, October. And then by the time we get to April, they're not in the top five anymore. I just feel like if the Pats got the number two pick, I'd want them to take Marvin Harrison or the left tackle who's supposedly an absolute beast. I don't want them, this is such a rare opportunity to have a high pick, I don't want them to take quarterback and have it be a coin flip. And it's not even a coin flip. It's usually like 40, 60 or 35, 65. You point to CJ Straud. You go, Well, that one worked out. But a lot of times it doesn't. So, man, the Caleb Williams stuff, I think, is not to mention he's been a little erratic, just in general.

It just makes me nervous when the spotlight gets bigger. He got an NFL fan base during these games. So yeah, that's not great. So who do you think should be the newborn pick, or have you not done all the research yet?

Right now, I'm still leaning Caleb Williams. And the reason for that is as I bring up the stat about him under pressure, and I think he's been under a lot of pressure, not just on the football field, but pressure from a spotlight standpoint. You've seen the tweets about him not doing press conferences and all that stuff. He's covering his face, crying with his mom on the stands. Every single move this dude makes is under the spotlight, which I think has been pressure on it, under itself. The reason I still back him is the arm talent. Bring up, Bryce-Jong, in terms of not having the pocket presence coming out of Alabama. Caleb Williams has infinitely more arm talent than what Bryce Young is bringing to the NFL. He's obviously a lot bigger. The other piece that I have here is he's the highest graded quarterback, according to PFF, win, kept clean. When the situation is good, when the offensive line is fine, he's not panicking, he's not under pressure. He's one of the best quarterbacks, if not the best quarterback in college football. I pump the brakes on him like sliding past Drake May or sliding, hell, into the five spot of the 2024 NFL draft.

But these are things that we have to bring up when we're talking about quarterback prospects. I think the reason they're coin flips and the reason this draft media I do think gets hyperbolic is like, we see a quarterback, we'd say, Best since Trevor Lawrence. Best since Andrew Locke. And we're not willing to talk about like, Okay, but he still needs to work on this and this and this. I think this stuff will carry into the NFL. He's going to run out of clean pockets. He's going to create pressure on himself. He's going to struggle on these pressure drop backs in the NFL. It's about seeing that, knowing what you're getting and creating an offense that you can win with around him, not just pretending that he's going to be perfect when he answers the League.

Yeah. It'd be interesting if you switched Bryce Young and C. J. Strad this year, what would have happened? Because I don't know if any rookie quarterback would have succeeded with that goofy Carolina team with no weapons. They don't seem like they can block. And it just seems like the coaches, every piece of it is... That was one of the few things I got right this year, was I thought Carolina was going to suck. But they just seem poorly coached and poorly organized. All right, what's your next nerd out?

You bring up poorly coached and poorly organized, the Carolina Panthers under Matt Rule, which was an abject disaster. I remember Kevin Clark here at the ringer writing about how we don't need to see this anymore. We do not need to see Matt Rule coach anymore. That offense averaged negative 0.51, EPA per drive and 18.8 points per game. This offense under Frank Reich, is almost double as worse, negative 0.99 EPA per drive and only 14.4 points per game. You can say, well, they didn't have Bryce Young andthe adult and the veteran. This has been nothing short of a disaster after what was already a disaster. What is happening in Carolina is obviously from the top down not being able to hire a good head coach because you bring in Frank Reich, expecting him to bring this offense forward. They try and bring in Evero. They try and do all these things. They bring in Bryce Young. It's not panning out. They try and build an offense that caters to his strengths and minimizes his weaknesses. That's still not working. People may have predicted that the Carolina Panthers were going to be good this season, but to be almost double as bad as what the Matt Rule era of Panthers were, that to me, something has to change significantly at the top in Carolina.

Yeah, it's weird because even though they didn't make the playoffs, I did feel like they stumbled into something of identity last year. One stage got brought Steve Wilkes in, and they were this power running team. They seemed like they were pretty good on defense. They had some injuries, especially in that last game when they were trying to make the playoffs. But at least I knew who they were. I don't know what this Panthers team is. It's interesting because they're playing the Titans this week. And the Titans are another one where it's like, Oh, you guys might not win again this year. But now all of a sudden, here it is with Carolina. I think Carolina is hands down the worst team in the League. What's crazy about it is they don't have the incentive to tank because Chicago has their pick. So on the fly, they're going to be... I don't think they want to go 1-16. So I'll be interested to see what desperations can they have, not just with how they change stuff on the field, but also could Frank Reich just get fired after if they lose on Sunday? Could Tepper just be like, Fuck it.

This is a bad hire. Let me try to bring in another voice. Let's try to see what... I just don't know where it goes. Us, but it's not going to go well.

And we've already seen there's reports about how Tepper love, Bryce-Jong, but maybe Frank Reich like C. J. Straud, and then you already have comments on Frank Reich in the press conference, like calling out ownership and who he brought in, all that stuff. That to me, when you don't have buy-in a head coach and who is supposed to be the leader of your franchise on the football field in the quarterback, it's hard to create any sense of ownership. I think it's more likely that Frank Reich is out after his first year because of the discontent he clearly has with the quarterback they selected at the top of the draft.

I think it's a wrap. But this was what happened to him in Indianapolis. He could never find the right quarterback. And I thought he was incredibly overrated as a coach. I couldn't believe people are like, Oh, now they brought in the steady hand of Frank Reik. What was steady about it? Go back and look at all the Indianapolis seasons. I'm sure they'll do something else. Next one for you.

So obviously, baby, there were reports that Frank Reik wanted C. J. Strauss. C. J. Strauss has had the Electric start to his rookie season. So I went back and I looked at every quarterback drafted into the NFL since the year 2000. There's over 190 quarterbacks drafted in the NFL since the year 2000. In their first.

Eight games.

Who generated the most EPA on their drop backs? Here's the list ahead of Strauss. Patrick Mahomes, Jack Prescott, Justin Herbert, Robert Griffin, Philip Rivers, end of list. That's better than Andrew Luck. That's better than Matt Ryan. That's better than Cam Newton. That's better than Ben Rothisperger. He right now is in rarified air, and that's coming after a game where he threw multiple red zone intersections, which kills expected points added as that nerdy metric I always bring up. What CJ Strowd is doing is as good, if not better, than any rookie quarterback we've seen over the last five years. And borderline, up there in the top five, in the top 10 with any rookie quarterback that's entered the league this millennium.

Wow. Well, the Ed test backs it up because he threw that pick on Sunday, and I was shocked. He's hit this point already as a rookie quarterback that when he has a bad three, you're like, What the hell, CJ? And it's like, Oh, this kid's 22. He's going to have 10 of these. The whole point of being a rookie quarterback is to make two terrible throws a game and then you try to cut those down. But you know somebody's good when you're surprised when they fail. I also think because we've heard this with Mac Jones and Zach Wilson, you hear like, Who are their weapons? They can't block for him. It's like, Well, is CJ Strow's position that great? He's tanked out with, what was he? A fifth round pick, a fourth round pick? Yeah. Nico Collins, they're running game. Damian pierce was a disaster for them. They finally got some life from Singletary. I wouldn't say they have the greatest offensive line, but when you watch what happens with CJ, it makes it harder to make the excuses for these other younger quarterbacks that have failed. The Mac Jones, he just missed his throws every week.

And you could say like, Well, their offensive line is bad. Look how much he has so little time to throw. But it's like, Well, his weapons aren't that great.

I honestly think that's what impresses me the most about the CJ Strauss situation. Because if he was playing poorly, we'd be making Bobby Slowik first year offensive coordinator to that excuse. We'd be making, Oh, Nico Collins, Tankell, Dalton Schultz, this isn't a good receiving core. They've had multiple injuries along the offensive line. That's what make this almost double as good than what it is. He's having an insane, historic, efficient season to the start of his career with a supporting cast that if he was playing poorly, we'd be blaming. We'd legitimately be blaming Bobby Sloak, D'Amico Ryan, this offensive line, these receivers, if he was playing poorly. Instead, we're like, these receivers. Someone texted me, a buddy from college texted me. He's like, maybe Nico Collins is actually a number one receiver. It's like, no, CJ Strowd is insane. That's what's happened. He's legitimately changed the trajectory of the team single handedly.

We watched bad football all week. So even that play at my home said yesterday when he floated that 30-yarder and hit the guy in the sidelines. And it was just the perfect throw. And both the announcements were like, Oh! It was just such a great throw. And the quarterback play is so bad week to week that whenever somebody has a throw like that, it really jumps out because you're like, Oh, I'm not used to seeing somebody thread the needle like that. And CJ seems to have four or five of those a game. Anyway, what's your next one?

My next stat, I'm staying with number two of world picks. I'm staying with quarterback play, but it's the opposite. It's not good quarterback play of C. J. Straud. It's Zach Wilson. Because the era is ending and we're bringing in Hem Boyle for the New York Jets, I had to tie a bow on this for you. It's rare that you get to see busts at the quarterback position play 30-plus games. He has gotten the opportunity to play a lot. It's like J. Marcus Russell, how much games he had in Las Vegas or Oakland when it was. No quarterback using that same number of quarterbacks, drafted since the year 2000, has generated more negative EPA on their drop backs than Zach Wilson. That's worse than Jarmarkus Russell. That's worse than Bruce Gradkowski. Some of these quarterbacks, that's worse than Joey Harrington. That is the worst, literally the worst, 30 games by a quarterback, we've seen to start their career since the year 2,000. It was that bad in New York. He was a bust of bust. He's going to go down as one of the biggest busts in NFL history. People are like, Oh, maybe not because he wasn't the number one overall pick.

The number two overall pick, who after Trevor Lawrence, legitimately never lived up to expectation won't even be a backup in this League, but we got to see 30 games from him, and it will go down, I think, as the worst, if not one of the worst, quarterback starts to a career we've ever seen.

Wow. Yeah. You were talking about disconnect with ownership and coaches. You could tell a couple of weeks ago with Sawa, where he was just like, I'm not going to talk about this anymore that they were making him play Zach Wilson. But I think when you stick with a guy for that long who's clearly incompetent, I almost wonder, are you trying to kill your own season? Because they might not want to be good... It's a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy bill is out now. They might not want to be good enough to have the possibility of Rogers coming back in mid-December. So it's like, Let's just keep playing Zach Wilson. Because there were guys that could have traded for, there are guys that could have signed, even like Flacko, who has been good for four years. It's still better than Tim Boyle. Tim Boyle- 100 %. There's never been a situation like this Tim Boyle thing. You mentioned all the bad Zach Wilson. Tim Boyle is worse. There's no indication at any point in his career that he can be a competent quarterback at any point, not even senior in college his stats weren't good. And then through the years, he's had chances over and over again to win back up jobs or have this or have that happen.

And every time he's gotten his ass kicked by somebody in the preseason, I was on an airplane last night just reading up on him. I was like, Is this the worst quarterback anyone's ever created? And now he's starting on Friday in the Black Friday game.

Unbelievable. All because he's Aaron Rodder's friend. I still don't really understand how he got into this position. To join you on the conspiracy theory, Bill. I honestly feel that Jet's ownership looked Sala and Douglas in the face and said, Hey, you drafted him number two overall for plays in the season. This is your mess. Yeah, we're going to see it. I bet Sala had to beg ownership like, Dude, can we please bench this guy? Because he didn't have answers. He's pleading the fifth on Jet's radio on whether or not he bench him or not. He legitimately has hands are tied. He's like, Ownership is telling me to play this guy. I have to play him. I have to own my mistake. Douglas and I have to own our mistake. We have to watch this guy play and lose the locker room. You know the group chats of defensive players in that Jet's locker room are firing off on Zach Wilson every single week. It was sad to see how bad it went before they finally made this change.

Yeah, Garrett Wilson at some point was just going to stop running past routes and just run two feet and stop and just stare sadly at the ground. What's your next one?

Brandon's Daily, baby. It's time. It's the- The defensive guru? The defensive guru has become truly a what exactly do you do here situation? The Chargers defense ranks 28th or worse in the following metrics since Brandon's Daily took over in 2021: points allowed per game, success rate based on EPA, and yards allowed per play. Why does that matter? In the three years prior, they rank 12th or better in those same stats. The defense has legitimately gotten worse by multiple degrees since Brandon's daily took over, and that's after they allowed him to go get JC Jackson. They allowed him to go get Kaleel Mack. They brought in Sebastian Joseph-Day. They brought in Kyle Van Oie. They drafted Kennethor-Murray. The amount that the GM and ownership have invested in Brandon Staley and given him the opportunity to bring this defense not just back, but to maintain its relevancy and that was the last three years. That utter failure that has happened in Los Angeles, honestly, has gotten to the point where every Brandon Staley, mic'd up moment is laughable. Like him saying, Yes, I'm calling the boys. He's getting mad at me. It's over. It's been over for Brandon and Sayle.

It was over probably when they lost that comeback or that blowout that went against the Jacksonville, Jaguars, and the playoffs. It's been over since then. He's been parading as this defensive guru and legitimately has brought the Chargers defense to its knees.

He's the quarterback rejuvenator, but it's not his own quarterback. It's other quarterbacks. He's a single-head and they turned around Jordan, loves career last week. I was dealing because now we've had enough stats now for a couple of weeks that it's actually, as I try to match up what I'm doing million-dollar picks. I write down different things. The Chargers being their 32nd in first downs allowed, their 32nd in pass yards, their 28th in yards per play, and they're playing Baltimore this week. And it's just like you just fundamentally just look at this game now, both is out. And it's like, how is Baltimore not just going to drive down and have 13-play drive after 13-play drive? Everyone else in the League is doing this. Detroit who had 533 yards against them two weeks ago. And then last week really struggled against Chicago for three quarters, almost because a team was playing real defense against them again. I'm with you. I can't believe how bad it is. And I do wonder who's the splashy hire for them after the year? Because, Staley, there's no way now. But is this a team? Could this be a trade a second round pick for Mike Vrabel type of team?

What's their move? Because they have no identity. They're number two in LA and a team in a city that didn't even really care if they had a football team to begin with. So they're worse than the Clippers. They're at the rock bottom of the LA landscape, and they have this top six quarterback. They got to do something.

I legitimately don't think the Los Angeles slash the remains of the San Diego fan base will allow them to go defensive mind a head coach. I legitimately don't think that's possible. I think it's got to be Ben Johnson, the Detroit Lions Offense Coordinator. I like what Shane Walden is doing with Gino Smith in Seattle, even though it hasn't been the year it was. What he does creatively, I think, would be an injection of life into this offense that they desperately need. If they bring in anybody on defense, it'll be better than where it was. It can't get much worse. That's why I don't think you go defensive minded. The number one way that Chargers write the ship is the defense becomes league average, 20th or better in any of these metrics. And Justin Herbert continues to be Justin Herbert because I do think that there are points in the season where you're like, maybe he's a bit overrated. After this past week and after the last few weeks, seeing how the Chargers defense and now the Chargers pass catchers with Quentin Johnson with that massive drop, you can see what they'd be capable of if the defense could stop a nosebleed and they had receivers that could catch the football.

Yeah, fair. What's your next one?

I wanted to finish with a potpour, if you.

Will- Let's hear it.

-of Celebratory Matt Canada, Steeler's.

Offense- Oh, yeah. We forgot to bid him a due, Matt Canada.

Poor Matt. It's over. It's over. It's the first time I saw someone tweet out it's the first time they made an in-season coordinator change since the 40s. The Steelers are such an awesome organization for that. By the way, being a Raiders fan my whole life, I feel like we change coordinators every week. So to see that change, it's significant. And I'll start with the running backs because that's the fantasy football community. They know Jaylen Warren is better than Nadey Harris. How much better? Jaylen Warren leads the League among running backs with 50 carries and yards per carry at 6.2. A lot of that's a big run, but he's had over 100 carries this season. That difference between Nadey Harris and what he is, 6.2 to 3.9, a 2.3 yards per carry difference between Jaylen Warren and Nadey Harris is the biggest of any running back tandem. With 50 or more carries each over the last five years. And yet, Nadey Harris had three more carries than Jaylen Warren did last week. That to me, by itself, is what are we doing here? The others that I have for you, there are 30 quarterbacks this year that have had 200 drop backs.

Obviously, only 30. We've had a lot of injuries. There's only one that has generated zero EPA. Not positive, not negative. Zero EPA on clean drop backs this year. That's when everything's fine. That's when the protection is fine. Clean drop backs. Kenny Pickett, his average is 0.0 for a drop back. That is hard to do, man. That is so hard to do. And I think it's a combination of two things. One, Kenny Pickett doesn't have it. I think we've seen that this year. He doesn't have it. He's not someone you want to develop. Two, this offense, even when things are clean, even when things are fine, cannot find a way to score points. I love Mike Tomlin's answer. We're like, What do you want to see change with the offense? He's like, I just want to see points. I think that this firing is honestly too late to save anything with this offense, but it was much overdue.

Well, I went big on Pittsburgh for the year and bet on them a bunch of times in the first 10 weeks. And it was always, why don't I just play Jaylin Warrenmore? Can they just play Jaylin Warramore? Then last week, bet against them in the Browns game. And the whole time I'm like, Holy shit. I hope they don't realize to give the ball to Jaylin Warrenmore. Either way, it's whatever side you're on, it's so clear that he's the best offensive player they have. I do think, Pickett, I'm like Pickett's last defender. I'm not even a defender. I do think he throws a nice 30-yard ball down the sidelines. And sometimes just maybe play the hits. If your chef in your sports bar can only make like, boneless chicken wings and a burger, maybe that's the menu. And with him, he's good at scrambling around and buying himself time. And he's good at throwing that one pass to Pickens. I think Fryermuth coming back. I think that's going to help. I do think there's a world where gets rejuvenated because their offense... How many times can you run a bubble screen that gets tackled behind the line of skirmage?

How many times can you run a screen pass where there's seven guys where the guy catching the screen passes? It was like just basic shit where it's like, What was that play? Yeah, we know at second eight, you're going to run. They know you're going to run. That's why they have eight guys there. There was just no imagination, play action stuff, anything. I thought it was dumbfounding.

I feel like it was a lack of imagination, and that was like, anybody who's watched the offense is like, This offense lacks creativity. We're seeing other offense quitters do so much cooler shit with their offenses. And I think the other thing was confidence. On third and long, it was bubble screen. It was not pushing the ball downfield. If it was pushing the ball downfield, it was in a vertical route, isolated to pickens in one-on-one situation. They did not trust him, or Canada specifically did not trust Pickett to throw the ball downfield and read the defense. I think he's going to get that opportunity now. And for me, I don't know if maybe there is a starting caliber quarterback in Kenny Pickett that you could develop him into. I just don't think it's worth it. With where the league is going and what you can go get, what you have to go get to.

Compete with- They're six and four. They're probably going to win this week. They're favored this week. They could be seven and four as bad as Pickett's been. I don't know. I make this joke all the time, but I thought Baltimore really stumbled into something 10, nine, 10 years ago with Flacko, where they're like, Flacko is not that good, but we're just going to chuck it down the field. Either there will be a PI or somebody will catch it or be incomplete. The only bad version of it is an interception, but then that's basically a pun. And with Pittsburgh, you could make case just throw to Pickens five times a game, 40 yards down field. And two of those five passes, something good will happen, which is better than what your offense is. And then the Jalen Warren piece. I have a nerd out for you. Yes. I have a hot take. That play that Valdes Gantling dropped to decide the Monday night game. I watch football every week for 13 hours a day. I think 50 % of the receivers in the League who are a top three receiver for their team would have dropped that pass.

Wow.

Really? Yeah. Really? I watch people drop that pass all the time. It's a hard catch. You're running full speed. You're running like a 4-4. You're outdoors. It's raining. You got lights. You're looking up. It's got to be perfect. You got to catch it. You're worried the guy is going to hit you as you're catching it. Nobody in the past could have made catch. I watched Pets every week. Nobody in the past. I think Garrett Wilson, he would have made it. You go through the best receivers in the League, both Miami guys would have made it. But I think there's only like 25 guys in the League that would have easily made that catch. There's a couple of people who might have juggled it and held on. But I think that catch is harder than people realize. And we all sit in our couch and we're like, Oh, we should have had it. Oh, it hit his hands. Oh, here's the freeze frame picture. But I'm telling you, man, that's a hard catch.

My gut reaction was like, no way. I think maybe that number is 60 % or 70 %. But I think the bigger problem is, here's the bigger number, 0 % of the Chiefs receivers make that catch. That's the problem. The problem people want to say is drops and all that stuff like that. I think they lead the league and drops now. The Kansas Chiefs do. The problem is we saw this week one, and they did nothing about it. I honestly feel that you cannot blame that loss on the receivers. You have to blame that loss on whoever is making the roster decisions in Kansas City not making a play to go get a guy. Go get a guy or maybe pay more for Odo, Beckham Jr. In the offseason. Pay more for DeAndre Hopkins in the offseason because this isn't good enough. Justin Watson is not good enough. Sky Moore has not lived up to what we wanted him to be coming out of the second round of Western Michigan. Marcus Valid to Scanley is clearly not good enough, has the most drops on downfield passes of any receiver in the League, this is not on them anymore.

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, it's shame on me. The Chiefs.

Failed to.

Add enough talent either in the offseason or after they found out week one that these receivers are going to be a problem. And now they're going to make the postseason. They maybe don't have the first round by, which is a problem. They're going to have to go three games with those receivers with the volatility of those drops. I don't know if they make it through that gantlet.

I've been saying this all season. It happened in 2006, Pats. They were able to get to the AFC Championship game, and then they couldn't get the big third down when they needed it. But it was and Jabbar Gaffney and Daniel Graham, and they just didn't have the guys. Here's the thing that I think people forget with the Chiefs. You can only pay so many guys. Nobody ever makes this point. Myhomes is the most expensive QB in the week. Travis, Kelsey, although they have him on a pretty good contract, but he's still super expensive. They just paid Chris Jones. You go look at their spot track, Justin Reed is making like 13 million a year. Joe Tooney is making like, I think, 13 or 14. At some point, something's got to give. You can't pay for everything. You can't have a good offensive line. You can't have Chris Jones. You can't have Kelsey. You can't have the homes. You're going to have to try to get lucky. The big mistake is they paid Valdez Gantling 11 million a year, which seems like that 11-15 million range for receivers seems to be like the death range. That's where you get JuJu, Smith-Schuster, and you get the Patz pay Nelson Aguilar a couple of years ago.

You're paying money, but the guy is not totally reliable. I think what they tried to do was they were hoping Rashee Rice, they were hoping Skye Moore. These young guys that they were invested in, they just haven't come through. I actually like Rice. I wish they would throw on the ball more, but I just don't think people understand. It's really hard to pay everybody. Kelsey is supposed to be their main guy, and he couldn't get open last night.

I think another roster decision that still pains them is drafting Clyde Edwards-Tolair over T. Higgins, and drafting even just a running back or any of those receivers that were going to be available to them at the back into that first round. He's not even a rotational player for the team. I know he had a couple carries, but Clyde Edwards-Tolair, when he was drafted, I remember so many draft analysts are like, He's the missing piece of the offense. That's the only thing they needed. You lose, Tyree Kill, and now Clyde were to their, barely plays 10 snaps a game.

They needed to invest in high value positions with every pick they had. And I love what they've done on the defense. Leo Shinall, Billy Gay, they've added a lot of talent there. But any offensive player you picked better than a tackle or a receiver, because you are going to pay my home a lot of money. You're going to pay Kelsey a lot of money. And then you had Tyree, kill, on the books. To me, drafting and running back then is going to haunt them in this window for quite a bit.

Well, we'll see. You can't pay everyone. And Kelsey, everyone's like, they have no receivers. They have Travis Kelsey. He's basically a receiver. It's not like he's Rob Grunkowski in the mid-2010s, but I think they were hoping Rice more and then they missed on Valdez Gantley. But I still stand by my statement. I don't know if half the receivers don't drop that pass, but I just think it's a harder. So, Rudy, what do you think before we go?

I think you're insane.

You think I'm insane?

It hear the case.

I mean, listen, I'm not going to be like, hey, I was good when I was 18 years old, but, man, a high school kid makes that catch. You're just running straight. Stop. You said he's waiting to get hit. Man, he catches that and he's in the end zone. It's over. That's it. And all right, the conditions are the conditions. But, man, they brought this guy in as a free agent. That's his one thing, is he's a deep threat.

Catch the ball, dude. I watch people drop that pass every week on every TV. Somebody's dropping that pass.

I don't know. I honestly felt, too, the ball tracking of that, like him getting two hands on that was impressive since it was overhead and the lights, like you said.

Yeah, he's flying. I don't know. I felt like he got a bad rap last time. I felt bad for him. If he had made the catch, it would have been amazing. How about that? People would have been like, Oh, my God, what a catch.

The commentators would have been like, That's a handoff. You can't do it.

Better than that.

You can't hand it to him. I feel like all the love would have been on the homes. It would have been like an expect.

How about to hit my homes? Throw it a little bit better. Maybe throw it a little closer to him.

That's what I'm asking. So my homes like, Oh, yeah, I could have threw it a little bit less. He's 100 % just taking the bullet there. There's no way he actually believes that. That was a perfect throw. No, he doesn't believe that. He doesn't believe that. My homes is a stand up guy. He's not blaming guys. I like it. I like my homes. Listen- Sorry, I think my homes is good now.

Listen, Valdez Scantling is a backup receiver, and that would have been an incredible catch. I'm sorry, but I watch football every week and guys drop that, Quinton Johnston, last Sunday. Easy catch, right? These guys always freaking screw this up. Anyway. All right, Austin, Gale, great to see you. Thanks for coming on.

Absolutely. Thank you.

All right, that's it for part one of the special holiday extravaganza. Thanks to Steve, Serudik and Kyle Creighton. Thanks to Austin and to Derrick and to Kevin O'Connor. Don't forget for part two coming late night, Tuesday night, we're going to be talking NBA with Rob Mahoney and we're going to do a million dollar picks with dangerous Danny Kelly, who brought us home undefeated last week. We'll see if we can keep the momentum. I will see you for part two in a little bit. I'm going.

To.

See.

Them on the way.

So I've never gone to say.

I.

Don't have.

Feelings with them on.

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