John Favreau
speaker
67 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
John Favreau’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And then 15 minutes later, that sense of feeling good and feeling like I accomplished something was immediately overwhelmed by the sense that a world in which I can even do this is a bad one. It's one where we are reliant on individuals and shame and... the infinitely small possibility that those things can conspire for good things to happen. So I don't feel good about this story.
I feel pretty damn bad about it. And it is something that is just now stuck with me days later as a vanishingly small victory in a lot of ways.
And I think this is something, again, we'll see a lot over the next four years is people who do have to continue to do business with the government, be part of this, are learning how to operate within it or doing their best, right? So there's, I think, that aspect of it.
This guy's doing, you know, great, incredible, life-saving work is also making an argument that I have heard a lot when people talk about USAID and talk about soft power, which is there is an economic case for this when you consider the return on investment relative to the tiny, tiny bit of investment.
And it's, by the way, no small coincidence that all these cuts are targeting things like that and not the actual things that it would take to shrink government spending. That's where I struggle with is just like dealing in a world where it seems like logic doesn't matter anymore or cases like this can't be actually conveyed or impactful. I think that's what I struggle with personally.
But that's, I mean, I don't mean to get all existential.
I didn't do shit, by the way. I just screenshot an article and sent it out. But that's... There's a larger conversation today about, like, the role we have in terms of, like, we are now the pipes, right? Especially as... Correct. The reason I even screenshotted that is because I was like, how is nobody talking about this article?
It really felt like this story had not gotten a lot of exposure, and that's the only reason... that I focused on it.
And now back to sports. Although this is a big story that's a little bit bigger than sports. It cuts to some, I think, social and cultural questions. So I was in the Indianapolis Combine last week, and... something that happens a lot coming out of the combine is gossip, right?
Gossip, tea, reports, anonymous sources talking about how certain players, high-profile players, perform in these interviews. Because this is the function of the combine, the primary function. It's not the workouts, although guys can certainly lift their draft stock by crushing it in that regard. No, it's like
What happens in these rooms when these teams that are about to make these huge franchise-altering decisions come face-to-face with college kids? So, unsurprisingly, the biggest... and source of controversy and reporting was none other than Colorado quarterback Shador Sanders, the son of Deion Sanders.
There was a Matthew Berry column where he talked about things he learned at the Combine, and he had a note in there about, first he had a note saying teams really loved Cam Ward, who everyone thinks is going to be the first quarterback taken. Then he had a second note saying two teams told him they did not like Shador Sanders. They found him to be unprofessional.
I believe that was the word he used. Then a post that kind of went viral from Josina Anderson, who's an NFL reporter, who, I'll just read the beginning of it, says, I'm disappointed to hear that a quarterback's coach from a team drafting in the top seven referred to Shira Sanders as coming off brash and arrogant, made his assessment known to a bunch of people.
So she talks, it's a very long post where she alludes to potential biases in the industry. It's a little bit confusing because what she's alluding to wasn't, reported she's criticizing a critique that is anonymous.
I would say overconfident is kind of how I would characterize it. I think what's being asked is, where is the line between cocky and confident? And how is that line inflected by... racial stereotypes and biases in that regards. Sanders in particular being Dion Sanders' son and everything that comes with that.
And a third element that I think throws an interesting wrench into all of this, which is the possibility that the Sanders family would like Shador to end up with a specific team, which might be influencing how he's acting in interviews. And that has nothing to do with historical stereotypes around quarterbacks or whatnot. This is a very specific situation. So there is a lot going on here, Dan.
I guess let's start, I would love to know how you interpreted this whole story, this controversy, having said all of that, because I obviously have a lot of my own thoughts.
So I raised my eyebrows a little bit when Dan used the phrase kind of like his confidence is earned because I think that is quietly what's driving a lot of this, which is to say, I had a lot of conversations with people in Indianapolis, not about, I'm sure, his personality, but a lot about his play and, you know, comparing notes, basically, on the tape.
And it's... The perceptions there are very mixed. I came out thinking the gap between him and QB Cam Ward... Pretty big. Maybe I'm wrong that all it takes is one team. But there are, we can get into it, you know, concerns that folks have about him as a prospect in the NFL.
And I actually think that is really informing a lot of this, which is I would hypothesize that if he was a can't-miss type quarterback, like the top three even from last year, I would be very skeptical that any of this would matter at all. Like, I think, and we always go back to this kind of idea that talent begets tolerance in the NFL.
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