FIX DEFENSE

“I would say that this was a weird occurrence if it hadn't been happening for, like, a month straight now on and off. Like, he's had so many of these games where, like, you would have to work really hard to have less of an impact on the flow of basketball than Mikhail Bridges in this game. Like, completely transparent. He hasn't always been the defender he's been hyped up to be for the Knicks, but this was a especially glaring case of that. I thought Deuce was, like, easily outplaying him.”

“There's people who played long in this NBA and in in sports, but there's not a lot of people who are still able to carry your organization at 41 years old. So that's a big difference. What he's doing is is unbelievable, and it's just a testament to who he is, man, and taking care of his body. That shit is hard to do.”

“It's must win Saturday. Win. You lose, it series might as well be over. They came out super flat. Mikhail Bridges, twenty twenty one minutes, zero points. I don't know if it's coaching. I don't know if it's he feels like he has to do too much, but I they're gonna be just fine.”

“I would say spending the last several months not preparing the team to, like, function whatsoever on offense. Like, these are the problems right now, but this is the same team that if you turn them on two months ago, it'd be like, why don't they know how to play out of a double team for Kevin Durant? And here it is all coming home to roost when he's the only guy who can actually handle the ball. So if you wanted Reid Sheppard to be a bigger part of your team, maybe you should have invested more in his actual encore development.”

“The United States military and the prime contractors that dominate the military industrial complex have none of the right tools, talent or incentives to apply autonomy to the systems they do. There's no reason to save costs because they don't get paid for making things that work. They get paid for doing work. And in a world where you get more prestige and more money by having more people working on bigger things, there's no reason to use autonomy to reduce costs and increase capability.”

“The United States has the strongest commercial artificial intelligence industry in the world, followed closely by China. But at the same time, the United States military and the prime contractors that dominate the military industrial complex have none of the right tools, talent or incentives to apply autonomy to the systems they do. There's more better AI in John Deere tractors than there is in any US military vehicle. There's better computer vision in the Snapchat app on your phone than any system that the US Department of Defense has deployed.”

“His inability over these last two games to get anything going whatsoever against Rudy Gobert is a massive problem. And I think it's fair to hold him to a different standard. Like, we talk about him as one of these stars who doesn't need ideal circumstances to be effective, who doesn't need everything to be just so to win. And yet in this series against an opponent like Minnesota, it kinda feels that way.”

“Silicon Valley didn't just predict the importance of defense in the 2020s. It largely took the exact wrong position, the opposite position. First of all, you have obvious examples like big technology companies explicitly refusing to do work with the Department of Defense. Google is one big example, but the worst examples are really in the startups that don't exist because people didn't want to even get into such a controversial space lest it ruin their careers.”

“I love what the giants did because the giants now, they could probably trade Thibodeaux. They they might do that, but they have Burns, Abdul Carter, and Arvel Reese. And then they got an offensive lineman to hopefully protect Jackson Dart. So, yeah, I like what the Giants did.”

“CJ has just been sitting there on the shelf waiting for someone to trade for him. And I think a lot of teams overthought it. And he couldn't be this for just anybody. Like, you need the right supporting cast. You need the guards who can compensate for him defensively. You need the movement to work around the fact that he's not, like, the most natural playmaker in the floor on, in the world. But he gives them and this group, like, exactly the kind of squirrelly one on one game that they need.”

“He did do a press conference, talked about family, owning up to his actions, and that he's gonna put family first. But he owns up to his his actions. As we all we all should. To own up to our actions. Yeah. But family family, my biggest takeaway was it was family comes first and then football.”

“I guess the giants, because Reese fell to five. A lot of people, including our own dating, Kelly had him as the number one player in the draft. Not even 21 years old yet. Awesome pass rusher, you know, just do it all defender potentially. Who knows with these guys? But, but he fell to five and then they got an offensive line with 10. It did seem like there was a moment when they were going to get downs, the safety who Dallas took at number 11 and they were going to get Reese and downs.”

“He's really the piece that elevates, like, the two man, Murray Jokic stuff into, like, a three man action that's really sophisticated and really hard to stop. He's the connector of so much of what they try to run. And so not having him out there you saw it in the first half. Like, just the drop off from going to from Aaron Gordon to Cam Johnson, Spencer Jones, Christian Brown, I think combined for two total points in the first half between the three of them, Minnesota can just sit in every passing lane.”

“This feels like a terrible omen just for the season, not to mention all the personal stuff. There's no way this isn't gonna affect the coach. There's no way this isn't gonna affect the team. Also coming off some of the other stuff that happened and the way variable carried himself last year is like such a leader and the Patriots are a family. And is this going to seem genuine now? And it's just one of those sports stories that just sucks in every capacity other than, you know, unless you're on social media, get jokes out of it.”

“The reality is that that's not where they're going to fight us. They're going to arm proxies or if they engage directly, they're going to use technologies that give them an asymmetrical advantage in the areas where we are the least competent. These are the areas where they are putting a lot of their resources. The reason that Vladimir Putin is saying that the ruler of the world is going to be the country that masters artificial intelligence is because he thinks that that is one of the only ways that they're going to be able to get the best of us.”

“Perhaps Matt Stafford had something to do with it. Perhaps he and McVay are having dinner in the off season, and maybe Stafford said, I'm gonna do it one more year. The one thing about Simpson, he can do the two things that McVay likes. He has a football mind. He can handle all of it, and he can make all the throws.”

“Nine offensive lineman in the first round. We talked about this on Tuesday's pod. The over under was seven and a half, and that kept moving up. They really could have made eight and a half, and I think it was ended up being nine anyway. So the Giants, they were fun to talk about. Ty Simpson goes to the Rams at number 13, and it was one of those where if he didn't go 13, he might have fallen all the way to the end of the first round.”

“The NFL draft, Fernando Mendoza went number one, which was a shocker to absolutely no one, and then we were off and running with some actual shockers PFT. Then it was smokescreen season. It was Arvell Reese falling all the way to five with with the the cardinals taking Jeremiah Love.”

“I love watching them play. I just love watching them play. I love their camaraderie. I love their their their freedom to play basketball. I love the position that that the coach and also the front office put those guys in to just be able to go out there and play basketball and and and focus on trying to win a championship.”

“The vast majority of conversations that we had were about whether or not it was even ethically okay to ever build a company that would build weapons. And the people who turned us down, the ones who decided not to invest in Anduril, actually believed that we had a good team and good people and good product market fit. The issue is that they thought that it was inherently wrong to build tools capable of being used for violence because they believed that the idea of deterring violence through having a strong arsenal was fundamentally obsolete and itself wrong.”