Chuck Klosterman on the Cinema Revival, Sports Tsars, Owners and Commissioners, Analytics, U.S. Soccer Groundhog Day, and State of Reading

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons is joined by Chuck Klosterman to discuss why soccer has not taken off in the U. S. the same way other sports have. Then, they talk sports commissioners, eras of owners, evolving ticket prices for movies, and much more! (0:00) Intro (1:41) Soccer in the U. S. (32:35) Sports commissioners and eras of owners (1:06:21) Ticket prices for movies and more Host: Bill Simmons Guest: Chuck Klosterman Producers: Chia Hao Tat and Eduardo Ocampo Discover something new on TikTok. The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit https://fanduel.com/playwithaplan to learn more about the resources and helplines Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 2:06Bill Simmons?

  The Bill Simmons Podcast is brought to you by PayPal. We are also brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network, where I did a rewatchables last week. We did Ali. If you missed it, it was our ninth Michael Mann movie. And the one we have coming up on Monday. It's a movie that's also on Netflix, by the way. She's the One, 30th anniversary. Very important Gen X movie. We're going to explain all the reasons you should care about this movie. It's an interesting one to discuss 30 years later. So we have that, and then we have Hitch with Will Smith and Eva Mendes. That is going to be the week after. So that is the plan. Coming up is a long conversation I had with Chuck Klosterman over the weekend.

• 2:51Bill Simmons?

  It goes in all the directions it always goes with Chuck and I. Sports, culture, all kinds of things. And it's a really good one. So if you haven't heard me and Chuck do it, we've been doing these shit since I got my podcast at ESPN in '07. So I don't remember when he started coming on, but we do these a bunch. And this was a rollicking, rollicking effort. So it is all coming up next. We're going to take a break, Pearl Jam, and then Chuck.

• 3:42Bill Simmons?

  All right, Chuck Klosterman is here. We're recording this on a Friday, even though it's running on Sunday. So there's going to be some World Cup stuff this weekend. Hopefully, nothing too crazy. Have you been into the World Cup, Chuck?

• 3:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, not really. I haven't watched much of it.

• 3:58Bill Simmons?

  It can never suck you in.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  You know, now, now you you don't even have to try to follow things. Things just come to you. So of course I hear nonstop conversation around it. I know that the games for the United States are supposed to be like a good times now, but the times have not worked out perfectly for me. So I I've seen here and there. I've seen some of it. Yeah.

• 4:19Bill Simmons?

  Do you feel like we're in a loop with US soccer where every four years, everybody decides this is the time that it's I I feel like you and I have talked about this for 20 years. And it's just becomes Groundhog Day every four years where they build our hopes up and then people get disappointed and then everyone says how soccer is taking off. And I feel like we've been doing this since the 2000s.

• 4:41Speaker 03

  There is some similarities with the conversations, although I will say every time this happens, the conversations become a little more serious. Like, you know, in in the in the 90s or whatever, it would almost be sort of, you know, people would make more jokes about people are less willing to joke about soccer now. In the same way, they're kind of less willing to joke about everything.

• 5:02Speaker 03

  What is, of course, I think to me, always fascinating is then the the as soon as the the US gets eliminated, there's the immediate conversation about why don't we dominate soccer? Why aren't we more dominant? What do we need to do? Do we need to have our best athletes not play football and basketball? Is it that we have to change youth sports? Is it the financial structure? It's very interesting. I kind of have my own theory about this, but I'm wondering, first of all, what you would say if you were tasked with this idea that everybody seems to want, that we need to have like a a a national team that's as good as anybody in the world, what do you think would need to happen?

• 5:42Bill Simmons?

  Well, I want to hear your theory first. You said you had a theory. What's your theory?

• 5:45Speaker 03

  Well, sort of I do. Okay, so.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  Okay, it's a kind of scene meandering, but uh so like after the communist revolution in China.

• 5:58Bill Simmons?

  Okay.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  Okay, China's this sort of was the once like this mostly agrarian country, you know, now it's it's it's it's poor, uh the this the the entire country has been sort of thrown into chaos. But they need they want to become a world power in every context. They want to sort of be a, you know, a, uh, you know, not just in economically, but also like in things like sports and arts. So, you know, they made a very conscious decision. They looked at the world of sports and they said, what is a sport that is not emphasized anywhere else? And that there is no sort of a, a problem with the physicality and the, the, the, the size of our athletes or whatever.

• 6:42Speaker 03

  And what they came to the conclusion, one of those things was like table tennis, like ping pong. We can dominate, like they made a choice to become a ping pong power. And that happened, it was like they saw this vacuum, right? They saw this empty space that if we want to be a dominant, you know, and they did this with lots of things, like the manufacturing of very small, cheap, plastic toys. You know, like the kind of toys that are like, you know, 99 cents or whatever. They're like, well, no one's really thinking to themselves, we need to build an industry around this. They did all these things, they made all these choices based on sort of seeing what wasn't there and then like kind of filling that vacuum. I don't think that can be done with a sport that is basically the most popular sport in the world.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  All these other countries are obsessed with soccer and have this big head start and I I like, I I'm not sure what could be done. It it might be that you just can't decide, we're going to be great at something, have it happen. And like, maybe that shouldn't even be a demand, you know?

• 7:41Bill Simmons?

  I have a friend of mine, David Diamond, sent me this long text after the World Cup, after we lost, talking about, just, everyone was like, oh, see, we weren't as good, this was all mirage. And, and his take was, we actually did have a lot of talent. And the difference with our team compared to, you know, some of the other teams that you see out there is like, the experience, kind of the nastiness, like the edge, which I mentioned on the pod the other day, Berhalter came in at one point, and, you know, was like, energy guy, and, and they actually felt like they had some cohesion. And his question was, it's not a question of how do we get more athletes, it's how do we get the type of athletes that seem to succeed in the World Cup, who are all these guys that have these

• 8:25Bill Simmons?

  edges, right? And we have this in the NBA, we have the NFL, all these other ones. And in soccer, it seems like our teams are always too nice. Like, the best, the most successful team we ever had was the '02 team. That was the team that beat Mexico, and then probably should have beaten Germany, and there was the handball and the net, that would have been a big deal if that happened now. But that team was just feistier. And I wonder, like, if I'm trying to do like, the blame pie, for all the different reasons, we can never get over the hump. The athletes thing's a piece of it, the youth soccer's a piece of it. But I also wonder, like, is there some sort of mentality, personality thing, that we're just never gonna have? Like, it's basically at some cost. There's, there's

• 9:08Bill Simmons?

  just, there's no way we're gonna have it compared to what some of these other countries have, where they know all the tricks, and pulling jerseys, and, and there, there's a nastiness to even the best players, right? And, and I always feel like, over and over again, we don't have it. So why don't we have it?

• 9:24Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, that would, that would suggest, though, that there's like, these kind of intangible secrets to soccer, that somehow we can watch and not, I mean, that shouldn't be the case, right? I mean,

• 9:34Bill Simmons?

  But that's it. How do we, how do we copy, how do we build on these intangible secrets that we apparently just don't have? And, and I guess the other question would be, why don't we have it? Right? Is it something about the structure we have, that building from youth soccer, the culture of it? Is there some sort of weird toughness that?

• 9:56Bill Simmons?

  We seem to be missing because the weird thing about the Belgium game was they really like pulled our pants down like that. That was like one of those football playoff games you watch in round one where one team just gets blown off the field and embarrassed and knocked around and they just don't seem tough or gritty or anything at all. So I, I just, I don't know how we get those people because it feels like those are the type of athletes that drift to the other sports. So to me, it's less like athletic talent and more like all the other stuff that comes with being great. Like somebody sent me a great email about Anthony Edwards, how he just carries himself in a basketball game. And did you see anybody in America who carried themselves like that? Right? That, and you watch these other countries and you

• 10:41Bill Simmons?

  see somebody like Mbappe and you know, he's not like the biggest, most intimidating guy, but he's got like some, some oomph to him, you know? And that's what we seem to, and it's a weird thing to be like, oh, how do we develop that? But I don't know how we do.

• 10:56Speaker 03

  But I like, okay, there are more people in the United States playing soccer than there are in Belgium. So we have, we have a larger

• 11:04Bill Simmons?

  Way more.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, we have a larger pool to choose. So it's not like, you know, that's why this idea that it's like, if well, all our best athletes played soccer, I'll be different. I'm not sure that would necessarily be the case.

• 11:15Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  It's just, I mean, I don't know. Like you can use Anthony Edwards as this example. So like, let's say, let's say we lived in Norway and we were like, well, we want to challenge the world at basketball. So we look at our basketball players and then they look at the Norwegian basketball players and they're like, why don't you guys carry yourself like Anthony Edwards? I don't like, like, I'm like, how does that?

• 11:39Bill Simmons?

  I'm just saying that's a piece of it. But they, so Norway is a good example, right? They have Holland, who carries himself like a cross between, you know, Rob Gronkowski and Ray Lewis. And he just moves around the field like a shark. And that's somebody who his dad was a really successful soccer player. Like they have like a whole infrastructure in place that if they have somebody like that, they can develop them differently. Everyone's talked about this youth soccer stuff, which I, I have some experience with because, you know, we're in California. My daughter went through the whole thing. It is expensive.

• 12:13Bill Simmons?

  It is one of those things where the coaches put a lot of pressure on people to only play soccer and do nothing else and not play multi-sports, which I've talked about on past podcasts. That seems to be really dangerous when you're specializing in something from like age seven, eight on. But I don't, I don't think there's some grand solution. I just feel like this is going to be the way it is for the rest of my life. We're gonna be, we're gonna be solid, but never great.

• 12:40Speaker 03

  In the course of your life, in the course of your life, they have gotten better. So maybe that will, maybe they'll continue this in the, you know, same sort of general up. I mean, I would think overall the trajectory is upward, right?

• 12:53Bill Simmons?

  Maybe, like, we were really good in 2002, like, we were good in 1994, like, and I would say all the countries got better because there's just more people playing soccer and probably a better infrastructure for it. Now, the people like the, the diehard soccer fans that I know, and we've had some of them on the pod, are saying, we have the most players playing abroad on good teams that we've ever had. So that seems like a bonus, but then you, you go against a team like Belgium and they have people all over the place that are like playing key roles for the best teams. And that's where, you know, I don't know how we get over the hump with that. I mean, it also might be that you might have to do more ballgame stuff where you're just basically getting people to switch citizenship and, and come here.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  Well, how, how good, how good should they be? This is, I think, a question that is kind of the unasked thing here. It's like what people keep thinking that we should be able to challenge for the World Cup, we should be a consistent world champion or a world power. I'm not, you know, the biggest country in the world is China. Most popular sport there now is basketball. They're not a World Cup power.

• 14:02Bill Simmons?

  I agree.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  Second biggest country is India, is India. Most popular sport there is cricket. Their biggest country is the United States. So soccer is the most popular sport in the world, except in the three biggest countries. It's a separate thing. So I mean, maybe this is just maybe the natural way these things kind of work out. I mean, it's like that that there has to be sort of a distribution of of sports excellence or whatever. And the United States is not in a position to have that role in soccer. You know, I it almost seems like people are saying like, well, we've got to be good at the World Cup, otherwise soccer will never be popular here.

• 14:42Bill Simmons?

  But it is popular here. I the thing is, I think soccer has gotten more popular here over the last 25 years. Like, there's no question. And I think even you see some of the stars that are in this World Cup are people like we have real familiarity with now that we've been watching on all these different channels and streamers for 20 years. There's there's one piece that I don't know how we fix this, but like, you know, if you're in England, growing up in like Manchester, the moment you're like three years old, they're putting the soccer jerseys on you. And if you have any talent at all, you're playing and you're just dreaming like someday I'll be on the World Cup team in England. What do what do kids dream about here? It's all kinds of things, right?

• 15:23Bill Simmons?

  Like, if I'm in Florida and I'm growing up and I'm a good athlete, maybe I'm dreaming of playing for University of Miami football someday or, you know, or Florida State. Or if I'm in Alabama, maybe like my dream is to play for Alabama someday from the moment I'm four. Whereas like in some of these other countries, the dream is to just be playing soccer for, you know, the best possible teams and for the for the country, and that's it. So so all those young, like fledgling athletes are just thinking about that. But here they think about all kinds of sports. And that might be a piece of it.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  I guess it depends if, you know.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  Dude, does the like, what you're saying is the dream sort of manifests itself as reality. And that if kids here dream of winning the World Cup, eventually that will happen. They will almost sort of like wish cast it into.

• 16:15Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, it's like you take like somebody who has awesome genes and athletic ability. And at age four, they've just decided, I love Messi. That's my guy. I want to be the next Messi. Like, a good example is what happens in Canada, right? Canada has been pumping out hockey players forever. And they have this whole system. And when you think about even like, like we finally, I think, caught up to them. The you could see from the Olympics, like our best 30 guys are probably pretty even with Canada's best 30 guys. But if you talked about the percentage of Canadian athletes who are like, four years old, like someday, I want to do blank. It's the hockey is going to be way, way higher there than it would be here.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  I mean, what you're basically saying is this is a cultural thing.

• 17:00Bill Simmons?

  Yes.

• 17:01Speaker 03

  Okay, okay. So if that is true, if that is the case, and that's a very good argument, but if let's say if it's the culture, well, then it's not just the culture directly around the sport. Like, the reason that we produce great football and basketball players here is not just the culture of football or the culture of basketball. It's sort of the culture of everything. In Canada, for example, you're saying, well, why is, what makes that different? Well, it's not just their interest in hockey. It's not just them getting kids on the ice young. It's not just them worrying about what month their kid is born or whatever. It's everything about living in Canada. You know? So if that is what does, if it is the totality of these cultures, then it's got to be everything about the United States has got to, in a way, change.

• 17:45Speaker 03

  And I think some people think it kind of is. I think there's a lot of people who feel like the, the culture of the United States is changing. But I don't know if it's necessarily changing in a way that's going to produce more soccer players. Like, these, these questions might be too big to solve. Like, there's nothing that can be done. Now, somebody would say, like, the people in Norway would say, well, you know, 40 years ago, we changed youth sports. They all became free. And now, look what's happened 40 years later. This is, you know, this is the result. Maybe that's true. I mean, it would be, it would be really, I think, wonderful if the United States decided all youth sports were going to be free for everyone, something that they could do, but they never will. That's never going to happen. But if we, if that

• 18:30Speaker 03

  did happen, I wonder if that would change a lot of things, you know? I mean, it would change the, the kind of kid who, you know, it would become something that if it was free, that like some parents would be like, you're playing football this year, you're playing soccer, you're playing tennis, because it would be like a free summer camp, essentially.

• 18:49Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 18:49Speaker 03

  And that would, there's probably some kids we miss do to that. Like, they just have no chance to be involved, so we never know if they could potentially be.

• 18:57Bill Simmons?

  No, it's, once you get to the travel club soccer level, it's legitimately expensive. You know, for some people, it becomes prohibitive unless there's scholarships or teams raising, raising money to pay for a couple of extra kids, things like that. I, there's one other piece that we didn't mention. We've never had the transcendent soccer player here that would become like, like the hero for somebody, you know, like, like, for instance, Katelyn Clark, dating back to the last two Iowa seasons and then going to WNBA, had a profound impact on girls who play basketball. Like, that, it's just a fact. People watched her, they're

• 19:40Bill Simmons?

  like, I want to be like her, I want to shoot like her. We saw this with Steph Curry, too, with three-point shooting in America, where Steph started having that, basically, it started at Davidson, but when it really started to happen with the Warriors, you just saw the sport transform and all of these people all over the place were like, I want to shoot like Steph does. We've never had a soccer player like that here. We've never had an Ameri, we've never had an American Messi. And we probably, we might, we may never will. But, but I do wonder if we had somebody like that, how different it would be. Like, how many people did Tiger Woods affect when he made his golf run in the late 90s? Did he, did he cause more people to play golf? I would argue that he did.

• 20:19Speaker 03

  Are there, did golf in the United States improve in the wake of Tiger Woods?

• 20:25Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I think, I think more people played. I do think he had an impact. I mean, I don't, I don't have, I don't have a research paper handy, but.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  I mean, it's it's actually in a way, starting to seem like Tiger Woods' impact is slightly less than we thought it was going to be if we'd had this conversation in, say, 2003.

• 20:50Bill Simmons?

  Sure. Well, you're talking about minority golfers, definitely.

• 20:53Speaker 03

  I think we would have imagined a world of golf now that would have been like many guys who looked like Tiger Woods and like a different, you know, and like and and golf has changed. But I think that not as much as we thought it would.

• 21:08Bill Simmons?

  Well, it's another sport that you need money to get really good at, which, you know.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  But that's, you know, it's like a, it's not like there's not like there's not money here.

• 21:19Bill Simmons?

  Well, the best example is.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  There's enough money in the United States for enough people to play golf. I mean, if they

• 21:25Speaker 03

  I don't, it's, I mean, I like this question. Actually, like, I don't follow, obviously, I don't follow soccer. I'm not watching these games, but I find this this concept real interesting because, one, it's just this belief that as the United States, anything that we want to be good at, we should be able to be great at, you know? And it's like, we should be able, we should just be able to do it. Like, we have the resources, we have the people. But it kind of is proof that, like, there's just a different way of of thinking, you know? I mean, I had mentioned that, that thing about, you know, after like the Chinese, you know, revolution, whatever. Have you ever seen the documentary on General Zhou's Chicken?

• 22:08Bill Simmons?

  No.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  Okay. It's fascinating for a ton of different reasons, but particularly for one. Okay? So it was just sort of, it's also kind of like a history of like Chinese food in the United States. So, you know, after like, you know, the rail world, railroads were built, there are all these, you know, Asian people in California. And, you know, and they did this, they made up this draconian law, okay, where it was like, if you were of Chinese origin, you could only operate a restaurant or a laundromat. Like, they changed the laws of who could own these businesses. And they, and so the people there that did something that's just incredible to me. It's like they got all the people, all the Chinese people into like essentially got a big meeting or whatever.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  And they said, look, if we all open restaurants here in San Francisco or whatever, we're going to kill each other. Like we won't be able to survive. So here's what's going to happen. You and your family, you're going to go to Kearney, Nebraska. You're going to open a Chinese restaurant. You and your family, you're going to go to Stillwater, Oklahoma. You're going to open a Chinese restaurant. And they just sent these families to these places where there was no one else like them and said, you know, open a Chinese restaurant. And that's why sometimes you drive through a town, like a small town in the middle of the country. And like they have like a subway, a grocery store, but there's a Chinese restaurant there. You know, it's like, like it really worked. Okay. That's the kind of mentality that I don't think, like, it's not a very American way of doing it. It would be really hard to do that.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  To take Americans, put them together and go like, look, I'm going to send you someplace you don't want to live. You're not going to know anybody, but you're going to start a business because it'll be better for all of us if we do that. You know, it's just, I, I don't know if the way that the, you know, like the, the, if the US mentality, like the things that we're good at, maybe create problems that make it very difficult for us to improve at things that don't naturally come. You know what I'm saying?

• 24:05Bill Simmons?

  That was really interesting. Right. Would it, did they figure out who came up with the general Gao or Sauer?

• 24:11Speaker 03

  Here's the deal. There is no general Zou. Okay. There used to always be this idea. There used to be all these, okay. They, they basically took a Chinese food and they were like, we got to make this palatable to Americans.

• 24:22Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 24:22Speaker 03

  But what's it, what's it, you know, we, we, there's going to be people who have never seen Chinese. You know, this is the past. People have never seen Chinese food before. They're going to be freaked out. So we're going to use chicken and we're going to make a sauce. It's kind of sweet and kind of crispy. And we're going to throw some broccoli in there. Then there were all these kind of myths about it. Oh, General Zhou was a general and when he would win battles, he would reward his troops with this food. Or General Zhou, when he was fighting battles, needed an easy food to make to feed his troops, you know? So that's what they ate when they were, you know, sort of out in the wild. None of this is, is true. And then even though General Zhou's chicken is a completely constructed, Americanized food.

• 25:02Speaker 03

  There's now sort of an issue over its authenticity. Can you use white meat in it? That people say no, traditionalists say no. How spicy or sweet is the sauce supposed to be? Like, even though this thing was a completely manufactured concept, there's now a debate over whether or not it's real.

• 25:21Bill Simmons?

  Tradition of it, yeah.

• 25:21Speaker 03

  You know? And it's just, what's great about this documentary is it really does show like this is how culture actually works. Like, things that that become so entrenched in our life. It's like, we seem to think in some ways that like they're arbitrary, or that there's some puppet master, and it's kind of a weird hybrid of those two things. Where it's like, you can't control how people feel about things. We can't really control how people feel about soccer. Every four years, they try. Like, the soccer community in the media tries to do this every time the World Cup happens. They try to convince people that both soccer is going to become more popular, and that it's actually more popular than you realize. That people actually already like it.

• 26:06Speaker 03

  And you're just not going to talk people, like, they gotta actually feel that way.

• 26:11Bill Simmons?

  Which I think is what's happened in the last 15 years. 15 years or so, I actually feel like more people do like soccer, myself included.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  They do, no, there's no question about it.

• 26:21Bill Simmons?

  But in the 2000s, it did feel like they were, that that community was trying to sell us on it, versus it actually being the reality.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  It's also unique in that it has a different meaning in the United States than in other countries. The idea of liking soccer. Like, the idea of liking, you know, when we think about, say, in the UK or whatever, like, you know, like the book, like Among the Thugs or whatever, like, it's like, that was the world for people who were cut out of everything else.

• 26:51Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  It's like, they don't have a relationship to art. They don't have a relationship to making a lot of money and entrepreneurship, but they have this thing. Soccer is for, like, the kind of person who has, you know, that's what their union. In the United States, it's the opposite. That if you're really into soccer, it tends to mean like, well, you kind of have a globalist mentality, and that you're kind of, you're not like some SEC football fan or whatever, like, you're, you know, they call it like The Beautiful Game or whatever, and they read like how soccer explains the world and these things like. So, I think that the, that the rise in...

• 27:26Speaker 03

  Popularity of soccer in the United States is also the rise of a certain kind of person. That there's a certain kind of person who likes to see themselves as a sports fan who is not like a retrograde thing. It's like that they're sophisticated, that they're by, and you really see this on like on social media, like there's there every time the World Cup happens, there's these people who wanted like suddenly become like soccer tacticians and want you to describe all the things you're not seeing.

• 27:53Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  And it's like, oh, it's like, I know you like watching, you know, you like watching baseball or whatever, but like, we know this is how it is. So it, but you're right. It is more popular for sure. There's no question. I was, when I wrote about soccer back in the 90s, they're like, I was wrong about that. Like soccer is going to become like one of the major US sports if it isn't already. But it doesn't necessarily mean we're going to do well in the World Cup.

• 28:21Bill Simmons?

  Well, there's, there's history with it too, because people have teams that they picked. You know, when this was happening in 2000, like I wrote that piece about picking a Premier League team in 07, I think. And I, at that point, I was in my mid 30s. What you're seeing now is people are picking their team when they're eight or nine, like they become an art, and now those people are in their 20s. So they have like the same way you would pick any team. It's not like they jumped in late. That's been part of their lives. And I think that's, that's what's probably changed the most. But I still feel like, you know, big picture with the soccer stuff, like basically what we've been certainly around is the concept of a sports czar and, you know, which I've joked about for 25 years. But we actually

• 29:05Bill Simmons?

  saw a glimpse of it when Trump did the red card thing and got it lifted for, for Balogun, the striker of the American team. And there was some wheeling dealing going on. And I was thinking about, I don't, this is the first summer I'm like, we actually might need somebody whose job that is for real. And I've made the cases in the past, but even like with this Kawhi situation right now, it's ostensibly supposed to be the commissioner of a league, right? But it almost feels like we need somebody who has more oversight than that, who can be like, yo, what's going on with this aspiration thing? Like, we have to, we have to come up with a decision. Somebody who could float around, who has, I don't know, a little bit of authority.

• 29:49Bill Simmons?

  And I don't know why that's not a job. Like, we have a Department of Transportation, we have all these different parts. What, what part of America generates like more, more money from an entertainment value than sports? And why wouldn't we have more oversight over it?

• 30:08Speaker 03

  Well, you know, when you

• 30:09Bill Simmons?

  Or would oversight be bad?

• 30:11Speaker 03

  The sports czar thing, like, back when we first started doing the podcast, it was more like a joke. I will admit, it doesn't seem insane now, in that same way. We were just talking about youth sports.

• 30:22Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 30:23Speaker 03

  Like, if I was sports czar, before I would deal with anything with pro sports or college sports, I would first get involved with youth sports. That is the, the place where it really does need, it seems like somebody could have enough oversight to say like, look, this way, this isn't good for anyone. It's not good for the parents.

• 30:41Bill Simmons?

  Well, same thing with the NIL and the college conferences where

• 30:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 30:44Bill Simmons?

  It's like, all right, we've now drifted to this place that I think everybody feels like is pretty rocky. Like, this, this could maybe be not sustainable in 10 years. So how are we going to fix this? And nobody seems to care.

• 30:58Speaker 03

  Well, like the situation like with the Texas Tech quarterback and the gambling stuff, it's like, there was a point when it was like, this seems crazy, but what can we do? Like, what could really be done here? Like, there is, there isn't anything that can really, like, it's not really made up that way. It's as crazy as this is, is like, pro sports are actually probably, you know, a little more stable than all the things below it. I mean, it's like, there, there's just

• 31:22Bill Simmons?

  Right. At least pro sports has commissioners and billionaires and smarter.

• 31:28Speaker 03

  The thing is, though, it's like, the commissioner's tough because he's working for the owners. So of course, it always seems like the commissioner's not doing what they should be, you know? And if there was this next level, if there was this next political level. I mean, the problem, of course, is that, like, people

• 31:44Speaker 03

  Do not like the intersection of sports and politics. And you'll go like, well, people don't like it when it's against them. It's like, well, that's going to happen half the time. It's like, it's not, you know, we used to look at the World Cup or whatever, like, you know, Mandami coming out and he's like, I'm looking forward to like Morocco be upsetting France or whatever. And it's like, that's a weird thing to say, kind of. I mean, it's like, I understand why he wants that. I understand his feeling, but it's like that, that is, it's not really, it's not really necessary to the, like, I, I don't, I don't like when this happens. Well, we, I was having a debate about this with some people over text just yesterday,

• 32:23Speaker 03

  kind of, it's, it, it's, it, whatever a, a political figure uses sports in any way, it seems to make things less comfortable for everyone.

• 32:35Bill Simmons?

  Well, we saw it twice with Trump, right? We saw when he went to game three of the finals and the Knicks, the Knicks lost. And then we, the red card, which, um, just made people crazy that he got involved, right?

• 32:48Speaker 03

  Well, especially since so many people who love soccer hate Trump. So they didn't know how to feel about this. It was like the most complex day of their life, sort of. It's like, the person I hate most has done this thing I need more than anything. It's like, you know?

• 33:01Bill Simmons?

  Right. Yeah. And also like technically the red card was kind of ridiculous and it's weird that that act would cost somebody a game and a half. But this goes back to like, even the concept of a sports czar, like, hey, what's up with this red card situation? So you, you're basically out, like, like in the NBA where they have a commissioner, Wemby, when he elbowed, uh, the Nas Reed and he got kicked out of that game. By World Cup rules, he would have also had to miss the next game. And Adam Silver looked at that and said, all right, that's, that's kind of dumb. We're not going to, he's not going to lose two games for that. So he brings him back. There was like common sense prevailing, which I'm not sure we always have. We gotta take a break.

• 33:40Speaker 03

  You think of the, oh, if you, a sports czar, it can't be a world sports czar though. So it's like, how could, how could they affect?

• 33:46Bill Simmons?

  No, it would have to be an American sports czar.

• 33:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. So it's like they couldn't have them.

• 33:49Bill Simmons?

  Wait, we, we gotta take a break. I wanted to talk commissioners with you for a second. This episode is brought to you by Tik Tok. Did you know you can use TikTok to connect even more to the sports you love? I love a lot of sports. It's not just highlights, it's everything around the game, including the sports community. You can find breakdowns of classic basketball plays, I love that. Deep dives on baseball stats, even videos on how athletes train and recover. I guess they don't have podcasters. There are people teaching strategy, sports history and ways to improve your own jump shot. Mine doesn't need improving, it's a great 18 footer. It's kind of like the biggest locker room ever and everyone is sharing what they know on TikTok. Join the fun.

• 34:33Bill Simmons?

  Download TikTok today. So we're talking about how leagues and World Cup, all these different things, youth sports, all these different things could run, do we need a sports hour? But then the commissioners of these different leagues that we've had forever, you know, going back to, I don't even remember what the first NFL commissioner was. In baseball, we had, you know, but most famously when a commissioner used his power and in the 1900s, it was the Black Sox scandal. Yeah. That was the first time where a commissioner was like, I actually need to take over and take control of a situation that got really bad and I have the authority to do so from the owners. And I was thinking about that, I'm sober.

• 35:17Bill Simmons?

  And just in general commissioners, because we've seen this with Goodell. When a commissioner takes over a league, they come in initially and they care about the sport, the sport itself and the good, the good things that can, that they can affect in the sport. But then also the owners and the business side of the owners and making everybody more money and making the, making the league healthy and sustainable, right? So you have these two separate things. And what's interesting is the owner, the commissioner will come in with the, you know, a little more idealistic, right? And then as the years pass. They basically become Michael Corleone Godfather 2, it's all about the business.

• 36:01Bill Simmons?

  And we see this over and over again with everybody. And I don't really know why it happens. But I feel like we're seeing it right now at the NBA. And I think Silver, for the most part, has done a good job. But some of the things that are happening with the league, the second apron thing they did, the CBA that they negotiated with the players to put in basically a hard cap, is having so many bad ramifications already for team building, for players staying in the same place. And they did this to basically protect the owners and so everybody could make more money. Now they're going to do expansion, which I think is, I personally think that hurts the league and I would much rather see them relocate. They're also doing this NBA Europe thing.

• 36:42Bill Simmons?

  And all these things are really smart financial moves. But I don't think any of them have made the NBA better. I think the NBA is in a worse place than it was four or five years ago because they're making business decisions and not league decisions. And when I say that, everyone in the league gets mad at me. And then it's like, well, why, you know, why are you so hard on Adam? And it's, to me, that's not the question. The question is, is his job to elevate the league or just make money? And they would argue, well, both. But have you elevated the league this decade? And I don't know if the answer is yes. And even I look back to the COVID thing. And when they had the COVID, they come back, they play the bubble playoffs,

• 37:27Bill Simmons?

  they start the next season, they have to do 72 games or whatever. They ended up 71, whatever. And there was that grind and then playoffs. And then the next season, there was basically no off seasons for two years. They basically played almost three seasons in two to try to keep all the money the same. And I think it had real damage to the players and to the teams and the competitiveness of the league. And it was just kind of like, well, we had to do it that way. Everybody can't lose money. I'm just, I'm concerned about the intentions of the league. And even some of the owners they've let in like this Portland owner, some of the stuff he's done.

• 38:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's weird.

• 38:08Bill Simmons?

  You know, and, and, you know, they, they greenlit this Dallas owner. I still don't know why Mark Cuban sold.

• 38:17Bill Simmons?

  But just in general, I just think the league's in a weird place. So what's your take?

• 38:21Speaker 03

  Okay, like the thing you said about how they begin sort of with the good of the league, what's good for the sport? How can we grow this over time? And then over, and then eventually it becomes this thing where they're just kind of like the owner puppet. Well, I mean, the first part is like, how you get the job? It's like they're trying to pick a new commissioners. They talk to guys about basketball and about the meaning of basketball or, or its place in the world and all these things. But then as soon as they're actually doing it, then it's like, well, okay, but you remember you work for us. We need to make money. I'm glad you have those ideas. Try to implement those ideas while also doing exactly what we want.

• 39:00Speaker 03

  It's a, the amount of money is part of, I mean, it's just the sheer mass of money, the expansion, right? You can make a lot of arguments over why expansion is just going to water the league down. There's already too many teams tanking. There's already too many games where you turn on and no one's playing. How will, you know, putting two more teams in there help? You can't really make the argument for it, except that the buy-in is now, you know, in the, so what every, every owner gets what? If this one, I think you know the number exactly.

• 39:32Bill Simmons?

  So it's like, so if they get, let's say they get seven and a half billion for each team.

• 39:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 39:37Bill Simmons?

  It's 15 billion for the combo. There's 30 teams. They would, they would all get a check for $500 million that they wouldn't have to share with the players, by the way.

• 39:47Speaker 03

  We, so, you know, cause, so if that check, you know, is like, you know, $80 million, it's possible somebody can go like, well, though, it's like. This could hurt the league, maybe in the long run, it could cost me money, you know, but when the number is 500 million, it's just too big. It's like the expense, they're going to expand the NCAA basketball tournament again to like 76 teams now. Is that the number next year, 76?

• 40:12Bill Simmons?

  They're going to expand World Cup too, to probably, they'll probably go to 48.

• 40:16Speaker 03

  I do not know.

• 40:17Bill Simmons?

  Or 64, I forgot.

• 40:18Speaker 03

  A single person, I've not talked to one person who's like, I think the NCAA tournament needs more teams. I think it'll be better if they do that.

• 40:26Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, but here's the difference, here's the difference with the NCAA. It's completely rudderless and lawless right now, right? Who's in charge? Nobody even knows. And people just do whatever they want and they're afraid of all the big universities and people can just form new conferences and super conferences and we're in this situation where now where you have UCLA who's flying around to all these different parts of the country, which makes sense if it's the football team, but not if it's like a cross-country team or the women's soccer team, just flying, all these, these alleged college athletes are just flying around because of, because we just let college sports go to shit. I think the NBA is a little different because they have actual control over

• 41:10Bill Simmons?

  what they should be doing, where the team should be, how many should they have? What should the salary cap be that could be? You know, I, I just think when we get to the point when, you know, and there's a lot of reasons why Brown and Tatum couldn't have stayed together, but when it makes no sense for them to stay together financially, that's not good. Because if you go back to the, the league that we loved and we grew up with, you're basically saying, all right, I love the, I loved watching the eighties Lakers and Celtics and it was really fun when MJ and Pippen were together. Well, I don't know, I don't know if Pippen, they have to do that Pippen, the famous Pippen trade now in 94. Right? We don't get those other three titles with MJ and Pippen because Pippen's on Seattle.

• 41:53Bill Simmons?

  You know, Kevin McHale's not on the Celtics in the mid eighties because they absolutely would have had to trade him in like 1985 because they couldn't have afforded max contracts for Bird and McHale. Like, I, and honestly, I think this is what the league wants. I think they want complete parity like NFL. I don't think they want teams to be good for more than three or four years.

• 42:11Speaker 03

  Well, one thing I think, and, and this kind of happened this year, to be honest, is, you know, I felt that. From a consumer perspective, this was a real troubling NBA season. Like it's, it's, you know, I, I've mentioned this so many times, I just, I can't count how often I tried to watch, you know, look forward to a basketball game and then realized a bunch of guys weren't playing suddenly. Or it's just, but they're always like, when the playoffs happen and the playoffs were

• 42:41Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, we're great.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  We bailed out at the end and that kinda happened. We had this great sort of Western Conference Final where this guy suddenly is like, oh, this is the new Wilt Chamberlain or whatever, then he goes and plays the Knicks, becomes the villain. It's like for, if you're trying to write it, if you're, the NBA trying to write this narrative, it can't be any better than this.

• 43:00Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 43:00Speaker 03

  Plus they lose to the Knicks, one of the most likeable teams.

• 43:04Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  And I can remember in a very long time, but also from New York, it's just like this contradiction. Like it all kinda works out at the end. That's kinda how the NBA sort of looks at this.

• 43:13Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  But like, you know.

• 43:14Bill Simmons?

  And then they had a great draft with a whole bunch of great players that came in.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  You have all these problems, people will forget. People will forget when they see these amazing games, they'll just sort of be like, oh yeah, I still, you know, you know, fantastic or whatever.

• 43:26Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 43:27Speaker 03

  I wanted to ask you something about Jalen Brown though, and not really about him, but sort of about kind of the debate going on around him.

• 43:35Bill Simmons?

  Okay.

• 43:35Speaker 03

  And I'm sure you've probably talked about this already, but maybe not in this specific way. So, you know, if you, I listened to like Bob Meyer talking, or maybe it was Winhurst, it was kind of, it was a rational guy, right? It was a rational guy talking about analytics. And what do you think they said about the use of analytics? What's the rational take about analytics in basketball? What are you supposed to say if you're like not a crazy person?

• 43:59Bill Simmons?

  You're supposed to say it's part of the puzzle for evaluating a player and a team.

• 44:05Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 44:06Bill Simmons?

  It's not the, it's not the part, but it's part of the process.

• 44:10Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 44:12Speaker 03

  But can that be like, can it if you know, like one of the stats that was really hurting, you know, Jalen Brown was, I think, was it was one where it's like Jokic was number one. And then he went down a little bit in the

• 44:26Bill Simmons?

  On off stats, yeah.

• 44:27Speaker 03

  It was the one that hit. Yes. Okay. Him and DeRozan were the ones to box.

• 44:31Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  And when you looked at all the other guys, it actually did seem pretty accurate. It was like Jokic was the Joker was the best player, but he didn't play as well in the playoffs. So it went down like he kind of went down the list. It kind of made sense.

• 44:42Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  Like, if, if the idea is that analytics watch every game, that the other human eye sees one, but analytics sees them all, um, can you actually say we need a hybrid of these two things? I mean, it doesn't work that way in chemistry. If we're doing chemistry experience experiments, we can't be like, we got to measure everything out, except when we use, you know, uh, uh, like a radioactive material, then we're just going to eyeball that. Cause that's like, like if something has kind of a numeric underpinning.

• 45:18Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 45:18Speaker 03

  You can act, you know, it doesn't have to kind of be all or nothing. Either you have to say that we're not going to look at this because this is a

• 45:25Bill Simmons?

  Good point. I think

• 45:27Speaker 03

  I, I don't know if it can be both. I mean, you know what I'm saying? Kind of it seems counterintuitive. It seems like it should like a reasonable person to be like, well, of course you consider this, but you also got to consider the old stuff. But if it's numbers and it's math, isn't, don't you have to sort of accept it in totality? If you accept it?

• 45:47Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. How's that? I talked about this a little yesterday because I went back and I looked at, there was 85 guys ever who had a usage rate of 30% or more. And then averaged at least 28 points a game. There's like 85 guys ever in the history of the league. And then if you rank those guys by like win shares and BORP and some of, you know, some of the better advanced metric stuff that we can understand. Jalen was like the worst or one of the worst on every list. And the, the best guys in the league that you would think would be the best guys were the best guys in, in the list. So then the question becomes, can you have outliers with numbers like this?

• 46:26Speaker 03

  Or, or

• 46:29Bill Simmons?

  Is this telling you like, yeah, the eye test is actually fooling you. It's a tough one for me and I tried to explain it when I talked to House about it like, because I obviously watch more Celtics. I watched the Celtics the most out of any team I watch. Like I have the most opinions on them. I have the most thoughts. I have the most memory of year after year. And I just thought he was really good last year. And it was one of the only times like what I saw with my eyes did not match the stats. Usually I'm like, oh, I see that, but I can see this too. This one, I'm like, I'm seeing this and you're telling me this instead. But, but the good news is they did win 56 games and maybe that's the ultimate advanced metric.

• 47:13Bill Simmons?

  And you could argue like, well, how'd they do that? But so it's possible you can just have outliers with stats, right? It's not a massive sample size.

• 47:21Speaker 03

  What, how can that be? I mean, I'm not, I'm not even disagreeing with you, but I'm saying like, how can there be like?

• 47:29Bill Simmons?

  Well, here's a good example. Allen Iverson.

• 47:30Speaker 03

  Numbers are in a sequence. There isn't sometimes where a number actually is larger than it seems. That actually, you know, six items is more than eight items sometimes. If we're using these, if they're actually doing what they're saying they're doing.

• 47:44Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 47:45Speaker 03

  The idea of the outlier doesn't really, I mean, it's granted, these are still humans.

• 47:50Bill Simmons?

  Here's where it applies though. So Iverson's a good example too with the 2001 Sixers where Iverson was a pretty flawed player by the, by the stats year after year. Cause it wasn't a good three point shooter. He needed the ball a lot defensively, even though I loved Iverson, but you know, he was five foot 10. So you could take advantage of him and you really needed to build the right kind of team around him to protect him. Right? And you couldn't have like, he played with Jerry Stackhouse. It didn't work. You know, he needed like people like Eric Snow, Aaron McKie, Theo Ratliff, these Keith Van Horn. These people that filled specific roles, trying to build the right kind of team to make Iverson succeed. Right?

• 48:31Bill Simmons?

  So if he comes out of the lineup from that and the team's built around him specifically, it's going to be weird. Right? Maybe it may, so maybe the. On off stuff will look better with him, but it doesn't change the fact that they built this specific team for him that really only succeeded once. Like he lost in the playoffs every year except for oh, one and you could argue in oh, one like Toronto took them to seven. Milwaukee, the next series is one of the most rigged playoff series we've ever had like, like the ask any Bucks fan about that series. So he didn't have as much success as it seemed. And then every other year he had no success.

• 49:06Speaker 03

  So is Iverson an argument for or against analytics? You're saying it's an argument for analytics?

• 49:11Bill Simmons?

  I think, but that's the thing. I think he's an argument for and against because they succeeded and made the finals in 2001. And the analytics are actually a little bit more favorable to him that year than the other years. But he's basically playing the same style every year. So it feels like the team they put around him affected his numbers in the right ways. So last year with Jalen, the Celtics were supposed to be a 500 team. The only way they're going to do better than that is if he played 90% of the games to had this huge burden scoring wise, right? Where and had to guard the other guy's best player and do all this stuff that nobody thought he could do. And he did. And they won more games than they thought, but then the analytics said, well, I don't know.

• 49:54Speaker 03

  He said they were supposed to win 50 games, you said?

• 49:56Bill Simmons?

  No, they're supposed to win 41.

• 49:58Speaker 03

  Okay. Why are they supposed to win 41?

• 50:00Bill Simmons?

  Because they didn't have Jason Tatum.

• 50:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. But who said they were supposed to win 41? What was the, what was the thing that says if you remove Tatum, this is a 41?

• 50:08Bill Simmons?

  Well, they, you also remove Porzingis and you remove Drew Howitt. So they lost three and Al Horford. So they lost four of their best seven guys. Including their best guy.

• 50:19Bill Simmons?

  And Vegas looked at that and all the advanced, everybody who runs numbers is like, yeah, that's a 500 team.

• 50:24Speaker 03

  So do you suspect that the 41 number was mostly an analytic conclusion? Or was that a conclusion of this hybrid where they were using analytics?

• 50:35Bill Simmons?

  It's tough because I think it was kind of people throwing that number in the middle because they didn't know if the Celtics were going to tank. So it's almost like that's the safe number. And if they tank, you don't get killed. And if they don't tank, you don't get killed either. But I, I never thought a million years had went 56 games. You know, so that's where it's like, and that's where I the eye touch just didn't match the analytics in that case. Here's the difference, though. Baseball, which we've discussed in the past, like, that is a math sport. In basketball, the teammates and who you put around people and your bench can affect on off stuff. If your bench is awesome, your on off stuff is going to look worse than it is. Somebody like Denver, who's had no bench the last few years, Jokic comes out, they crater.

• 51:19Bill Simmons?

  You could see with Wemby in the San Antonio games, when he came out, they were crater. So his on off would be better. But baseball is just math. And as we've discussed in the past, it's made it less fun to argue about because the argument's solved by math every time. It's just, that's it. You're just like, oh, here, here's the evidence. And then the argument's over.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  I'm not, because what I'm expressing when I'm asking these questions, I don't want to seem like I, I, I, I'm really unsure about this, but like, does it not seem possible? That, you know, there's been all these, I've heard all these discussions about why the Celtics would have done this. And what no one seems to be saying is this possibility. Maybe they just didn't want him.

• 52:02Bill Simmons?

  Oh, I think that's, I think that's a big piece of.

• 52:05Speaker 03

  Who look at him, they're like, we don't, he's, we actually don't want him.

• 52:09Bill Simmons?

  I think what they, but what they didn't want, I think, is the, him as a complimentary player did not make sense to them at $57 million. If you're paying him to be the best guy on your team, and you're trying to overachieve, maybe that's worth the money.

• 52:25Speaker 03

  George's contract is also real large. The money.

• 52:28Bill Simmons?

  For two years.

• 52:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, I, I, I, it's just, I mean, if, if, if you think about analytics as like, this is like, as just like a small tool, I guess, but if you think of it as something that's, that's like a real thing, and this is a way to understand the world, I mean, maybe that was just, I, I, I, do you, does this trade still like, have you kind of changed your view on this trade? Do you feel better about it now? Or do you feel worse?

• 52:57Bill Simmons?

  I still don't like it. I maybe understand it a tiny bit more. I do think it was more of a personality trade than an analytics trade. I just feel like they felt like they ran their course. And when Jalen ran the team last year, now he can't go back to the other way of doing it. The question for me is like, you know, you have these people that own teams. It was interesting that more teams didn't go after them. And I thought that.

• 53:22Bill Simmons?

  That piqued my interest. Like, what are the reasons? Is it, like, if you, if you, if you're some owner on another team, do you look at him and be like, I don't know, I saw him going at Stephen A. Smith last week. I'm not sure that's the kind of guy we want around here. Like, I just kind of want guys who are just gonna play some basketball and go hang out with the kids in the community.

• 53:43Speaker 03

  Or like, some other guys, like, I trust Brad Stevens, why does he want to get rid of this guy?

• 53:48Bill Simmons?

  Well, that's, that's another piece of that too.

• 53:50Speaker 03

  It's like, what, what, what, why are they doing this? Like, there must be something else there.

• 53:55Bill Simmons?

  Well, that's, that, but that's a real thing, though. If it's like, why is this person trying to sell his car so frantically? You'd be like, huh, what's wrong with the car? It's a nice car. I thought you loved it.

• 54:08Speaker 03

  Or, or like-

• 54:08Bill Simmons?

  Now you'll take half price?

• 54:09Speaker 03

  I would guess people don't want to trade with Danny Ainge. Because they feel like he might screw him over.

• 54:15Bill Simmons?

  The Lakers just did. Well, one of the things that's happening in Boston is they're talking about the new owner, Bill Chisholm, who's, you know, a VC hedge fund background. And people are really worried about,

• 54:28Bill Simmons?

  you know, and I don't think this is a fault of his, but a lot of the moves he's made since he took over the team were shedding salary, right? Because they had all this tax stuff. And now if you're gonna offend him, you'd say, well, there are all these penalties with the tax stuff. There's repeater tax, there's frozen picks, you can't make two-for-one trades. Like, it really does hamper the way you can build a roster. So, but they got rid of Porzingis, they got rid of Drew Holiday, they let Luke Korneco. Now, they, they traded Simons for Vucevic last year, which was whatever. And then Jalen goes for Paul George, who's a year less on his contract and makes like three, four million less. But it did make me think, because I was reading this book, you know this book, Tall Tales by Terry Pluto.

• 55:11Bill Simmons?

  I was zipping through that because I was, I was interested in owners. And I was, it has some good stuff about the owners back then. And I was thinking there's five eras of sports owners.

• 55:22Speaker 03

  Five eras, okay.

• 55:23Bill Simmons?

  We're in the, we're in the fifth era. And I don't know how this era plays out. First era basically takes us all the way through the 60s. And it's the people that own teams are like local business owners and families. Right. Wasn't like, very rarely was it just somebody who was like Mr. Moneybags. It was like that, the guy who owned the Syracuse Nationals, he owned like a bowling alley. You know, Walter Brown, the guy who owned the Celtics. You know, wasn't like the super rich guy, not down the line.

• 55:55Speaker 03

  It was not an impossible dream to own an NBA franchise during that time.

• 55:58Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 55:58Speaker 03

  It was very doable.

• 56:00Bill Simmons?

  And maybe you didn't want to own it. You know, and same thing for NHL, maybe had a little more money because there was only six teams. So they were a little more desirable. Um, but then we go into the seventies and eighties, which is the era we remember as kids. So now you get wealthier people. You get like the Dr. Jerry Buss types. You get the goofy characters, like we grew up with Charles O. Finley. People like that, like these people were like, you know, their own documentaries. And then you would get that, I wrote down misguided local heroes. People who felt like they either had to save the team or keep the team, but maybe didn't totally know what they were doing. Like we had the Solivans in New England for the Patriots.

• 56:40Bill Simmons?

  There was local guys, but they really kind of, kind of overski'd. What's that saying when you shoot over your skis? Yeah. The third era, this is nineties now. Legacy kids, ego guys and smarter local heroes. We had some ego guys coming in here and be like, I'll, I'll buy whoever.

• 57:05Speaker 03

  So it's like Mark Cuban, you're kind of saying?

• 57:06Bill Simmons?

  No, we're not there. Mark Cuban is the next era. This is more like nineties, like, oh, it'd be cool if I owned a team. And it's starting to, you know, the prices are starting to go up. I'm going to get in. Um, but you also had the kids from the families or style. Like the Celtics had Paul Gaston, who was Donald Gaston's son, who was terrible. But there was a lot of like legacy kids. Dolan takes over the Knicks in 2000. The fourth era is the 21st century. And this is internet guys, guys with internet money. Early VC guys and smarter legacy kids. And all of a sudden, now you have, you have like the guys who bought the Celtics, where it's like Rick Grossbeck, son of Irv Grossbeck, one of the most respected,

• 57:50Bill Simmons?

  you know, business guys out there. And he buys it with Steve Pagluko, who I think was with Bain Capital. And they're like, we'll buy the Celtics. We're going to blow this out, make it bigger. That happened with the Red Sox. That happened with the Warriors. You know, there was like real purpose to this where, oh, these are better assets in these big cities. We're going to blow them out. And they were right. You know, the Red Sox are worth 20 times probably what they paid. Now, in the mid twenties, I feel like we're in this kind of massive money state where you just need like a shitload of money to buy any team, right? So you have like, you buy the Broncos, it's like the Waltons, right?

• 58:31Bill Simmons?

  You buy the Lakers, it's the guy who had the Dodgers and probably has like, you know, Middle Eastern money behind them. The guy bought the Celtics, he puts this whole consortium together and then gets, as the final piece, the, I think, second richest family in India throws in another billion. And the groups that are being put in with Vegas, these are now like buying these giant, giant things. And I guess the question is, why? What are these people trying to get out of this? And how do you, how do you gain value when you could argue that the value is already there? So like, if we wanted to buy the Bears right now, let's say the Bears became available.

• 59:14Bill Simmons?

  What type of person wants to buy the Bears? It's not somebody who's like, I lived in Chicago and I'm rich. That guy has no chance.

• 59:23Speaker 03

  Okay, so I, I don't know what era, according to your kind of sequence there, this fits, I don't know if this is three or four, but I remember there'd be kind of a cliche a lot of times that was like, these rich guys buy these sports franchises and they're not trying to make money off this. Like it's like a tax write-off, like they, they make their money in.

• 59:41Bill Simmons?

  That's the second era. Yeah, that's, that's like when John Y. Brown bought the Celtics and he owned Kentucky Fried Chicken.

• 59:47Speaker 03

  But now, like, when you look at someone like Jerry Jones and like what he paid for the Cowboys in 1989 or 88 or whatever year it was, what is now? It's like now that it's, I guess it's completely sort of lost its relationship to the idea of like, the ultimate rich guy hobby. Like, you know, like, I think there was a time when it was like a rich guy was like, yeah, my friends buy racehorses, you know, I buy, you know, the, the Boston Bruins.

• 1:00:16Bill Simmons?

  That's what happened to the Celtics over and over again. They would have these guys buy it in, they'd have it for two years and they'd sell it.

• 1:00:22Speaker 03

  I mean, because now you're buying something that, I mean, as long as the world exists as it does now, it's like, it's an asset that's just going to be worth more and more because it's almost like, it's kind of like, you know, when I, I first started making a little money, I remember my dad trying to tell me, he was like, come back here and buy a bunch of land in North Dakota. I was like, I'm not going to do that.

• 1:00:49Bill Simmons?

  That would have been a good idea.

• 1:00:50Speaker 03

  Because they can't create land. He's like, they cannot make more of it. So yeah, I was like, hey, now I obviously I should have done that. I mean, I like, I probably it would have been smart, you know?

• 1:01:00Bill Simmons?

  You'd be like the new Taylor Sheridan. You just have this giant ranch.

• 1:01:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just, I thought it was just a crazy thing he was suggesting that I do. I was like, buy it. But, you know, you, there's, so now these franchises are these things where it's like, you know, it is the thing itself. The rest of the world is becoming this sort of this kind of digital, almost like, like, false simulacrum of reality, but these things are real. So I suppose a guy who would be buying the Bears, he would be saying like, well, I'm really investing in, in many ways, the NFL. And that, that, you know, that there's this thing that, in his maybe opinion, is like, one of the few things that is not only stable, but has the potential to get bigger in big weights, you know, like, I, I, I think

• 1:01:48Speaker 03

  that it is, the meaning of the franchise has less to do, there was probably a period where it was like, I want something kind of for me, for fun. Like, I love sports, so this is a way to do it. Like, I think if you had become extraordinarily wealthy when you were a young person, you would have attempted to buy into some sports franchise.

• 1:02:08Bill Simmons?

  Oh, no question. Well, I remember, this really was the, like, the late 2000s, when at one point, I remember writing about this for ESPN, it was pre-Grantland, and there was, at one point, it was like nine or 10 NBA teams available, because, including New Orleans, which the league had to take over. Like, think about that. They could have missed out New Orleans for like, I don't know, 500 million or whatever they wanted for it. Because there was this lockout coming, they were really scared about what was the future of the business? What's gonna happen with media? What is the internet gonna mean? Like, they, everyone kinda looked at it the wrong way. And I remember when Lakeup and those guys bought the Warriors.

• 1:02:50Bill Simmons?

  I think they paid like 360 or like 400 or something. And it seemed like a lot and they outbid, um. What's his face? The, the, the Ellison? I think that's who, or the Oracle guy, one of those guys. And everybody was like, wow, that's a lot of money. And I was either writing about it or talking about it, I was like, that's. That's an amazing purchase. Like, they, they just bought this, everyone loves that team in the Bay Area. That's one of like the seven best teams you can own. Like, it's been poorly run for 20 years. Now I had, now you have that asset. You can turn that into something great. The problem is there's not a lot of those opportunities, I don't think, anymore in 26. Like, even the Bears would be, if you get the Bears, that's amazing, right?

• 1:03:35Bill Simmons?

  You have, it's the third biggest city, it's the only team. But you're paying like 11 billion. Like, right now, the Seahawks are available.

• 1:03:44Bill Simmons?

  And there's two groups going for it, supposedly, who knows if Bomber's gonna be in it? One of the people is Whit Grossbeck, who combined with that, uh, that Indian family, the, the middles. And, you know, that might go for like 9 billion? So if, like, if we were, if he was on right now, I'd be like, why would you do this? The answer would be, no NFL franchise has ever gone down in value. Right? That's, that's why these guys get in. It's like. Go back and look at the values, five years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. Is the arrow just pointing like this? Yes. Well, why is that? Because people love football, live rights, media, all that stuff. So I guess the, the answer to your question is, it probably is still a great investment.

• 1:04:28Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, it certainly seems that way, although it's just like, you know, we for, so easy to forget things. Like, you know, like, do you remember why Monday Night Football moved to ESPN?

• 1:04:40Bill Simmons?

  I don't. I used to know this.

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  So bizarre.

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  ABC was like, Desperate Housewives is more popular.

• 1:04:51Bill Simmons?

  Right. They didn't want.

• 1:04:52Speaker 03

  Now, that seems impossible now, that if you had a chance to have a prime time NFL game somewhere, what could you possibly be like, well, this TV show could be bigger? That wasn't that long ago.

• 1:05:02Bill Simmons?

  No, that was what happened. You have the right thing, but it was, they could have had Sunday Night Football, Monday Night Football.

• 1:05:08Speaker 03

  Well, that was part of it. That was part of it.

• 1:05:09Bill Simmons?

  And NBC ended up getting Sunday Night Football because Disney decided, I think this was Iger, decided, well, Disney, we have Desperate Housewives. It's a huge night for us. You take something like the NBA, it's like, why do these values keep going up? Because people want to buy in, because they want to own teams. You have a lot of wealthy people that have extra money that they can spend. But you also have a league that seems to be perfectly willing to just let everything kind of, all the prices, all the salaries, everything just go up and let it, and, and that's just how it's going to go. Franchises are going to go up, players are going to make more money. The media rights are going to make more and the tickets are going to go up.

• 1:05:51Bill Simmons?

  The ticket part's going to be the one that's going to be hard. Because already the cap went backwards because the local TV stuff kind of wasn't what they thought, right? Local TV revenue got really hurt. The national TV revenue went up. But if the ticket prices keep going up, but they can't solve the schedule piece and having the players be more available in regular season games. Now you're really playing with fire, I think.

• 1:06:17Speaker 03

  But we know, we kind of say this with everything, with like concert ticket prices, movie ticket prices.

• 1:06:22Bill Simmons?

  Concert tickets, you're paying for Taylor Swift. You know Taylor Swift is going to be in the arena for the date you paid.

• 1:06:27Speaker 03

  That's true, I guess. That's true.

• 1:06:29Bill Simmons?

  If you paid for Warriors Come to Portland, you're like, I want to see Steph Curry. And then he doesn't play. Are you less likely to go see the Warriors the next time they're in Portland? I would say yes.

• 1:06:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I would think more so, the thing is, okay, using Taylor Swift as the example. Okay, she played SoFi or whatever, five nights. On the last night, the worst ticket was $1,800. So that's the worst seat in the place on the fifth night was $1,800.

• 1:07:01Speaker 03

  To me, it's less the security about knowing whether or not she is there. The question becomes like, how is what I'm getting worth what I'm investing? Like you say, with the Warriors come to Portland, and even if Steph does play, okay. So I can take, what is the price point where it's like, this doesn't really-

• 1:07:24Bill Simmons?

  I can't do this, yeah.

• 1:07:26Speaker 03

  Well, no, even if you can do it, because there's always going to be people who can do it. But at some point, even they will be like, this is crazy. Like, you know, like, you know, you, uh, you would, we'll always have enough money to pay for these things, but I think at some point, somebody's being like, it's just, I can't justify it, like, it's ideologically too weird. Like, I'm not going to pay $3,000 to see a play or something, and people will be like, even if I have a billion dollars, like, I'm not going to pay this much for that. I wonder if, like, will this, will that become what it is?

• 1:08:08Speaker 03

  Not the idea that you're not getting your money worth, like, that you're missing Steph Curry or whatever, but like, the event itself can't equate with the amount of cost.

• 1:08:16Bill Simmons?

  This leads into the movie conversation I wanted to have, but we're going to take one more break.

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• 1:09:21Bill Simmons?

  All right, quick break. This episode is brought to you by Fire TV. You ever sit down, ready to watch the game, only to search and scroll endlessly? If so, you need Fire TV. It shows your live games from your favorite teams all in one place, right on the home screen. No more searching. Just sit down and turn on Fire TV. Separate subscriptions may be required. Feature and content availability may vary. This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Excitement is in the air. That's right. It's the start of NBA season. I can't wait to get together with friends, share some Michelob Ultras and watch Tip Off. Plus, as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting you closer to the action with experiences that make you feel like you're courtside to actual courtside tickets.

• 1:10:04Bill Simmons?

  Enter now for a chance to win at michelobultra.com/courtside. Michelob Ultra Courtside 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to U.S. residents 21 plus. Begins on October 1st, 2026. Ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes and details. All right, so we were talking about tickets for movies and I was thinking about this with The Odyssey, which I actually went to a screening for, so I didn't have to get tickets. But.

• 1:10:34Speaker 03

  Did you know, did you give your response to the movie yet? Because one day on social media, I just saw all these people saying, "The Odyssey is wonderful. The Odyssey is amazing."

• 1:10:41Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I mentioned the tail end of a podcast last week. I was just saying, I thought it was awesome. You know, it's under embargo till it comes out. I'll have more thoughts, but I thought it was an awesome movie theater experience. I had a great time. And there was a lot of care and great casting and a whole bunch of things. But what's interesting is post-COVID, we had this moment in, I think it was maybe late 2000s, early 2010s, when they started to try to shove 3D down our throats. Remember, it's like 3D is the next thing. You gotta get 3D TV. 3D theaters and nobody really liked it. It took like three years, but it was, they were able to charge more money for the tickets, all that stuff.

• 1:11:25Bill Simmons?

  Now they have half stumbled and half um because of the best directors like seeing their movies on these awesome theaters. Now it's like this 70 millimeter and all the IMAX. The experience of going to the theater is actually back. It's been an amazing resurrection this, this decade, which seemed inconceivable. Even pre-COVID, but definitely during COVID, like wow, movies, oh my God, TV, you're just gonna watch everything from home. And that's flipped. But now there's this next piece and I wonder if it's gonna happen. And you think about it with something like the Odyssey, where Odyssey, it's like, oh, it's the 70 millimeter and Universal City here in LA. Oh, I wanna, I wanna go the Friday night.

• 1:12:09Bill Simmons?

  It's just the tickets are gone, next night, gone. Tickets are just gone for a month. Do you think we're gonna get into a world where like the best 25 tickets or best 30 tickets, the best 30 seats in a theater, when these things come out, are gonna be treated like we do with sports? Where it's like Odyssey Friday night, $1,000 a ticket for the, for middle row, center, best seat in the thing. It's not, it's not gonna be $25, it's gonna be a thousand. And do you think people would pay it?

• 1:12:41Speaker 03

  Um. Short answer, yes. Um, I think what is going to happen or might already be happening is the idea of seeing movies in theaters now is going to become closer to a luxury experience. It's sort of like the lowest tier of the luxury experience. Because you know, when people talk and, and you know, this is a common thing now. It's like, uh, Tom Cruise, I guess, is the forefront of this. You know, we must save movies. Movies are important, the experience of going to a movie and eating this popcorn and all these things. Like this is central to the American understanding of like how we understand the world. Movies teach us this and all this.

• 1:13:26Speaker 03

  But what so we're trying to save that, right? There's this real attempt to save this.

• 1:13:31Bill Simmons?

  Like Nicole Kidman walking down the stairs with that smile on her face, sitting in the chair. What was that for AMC? That you know, that little preview they would show and Nicole Kidman be like, the magic of movies.

• 1:13:43Speaker 03

  But this is what I think is kind of getting like, it like could be like, kind of a misstep, or maybe not a misstep. I guess there's maybe no other way to do it. But I think when people talk about the magic of movies and the experience of movies, and how that is so different. It's actually a somewhat simpler experience than we're now sort of evolving into. The thing that was magical about a movie is that like, the screen was big. It was totally dark. Nobody was talking. You're just looking at the thing. So the reality becomes that screen. There's not no other part of your life is there.

• 1:14:23Bill Simmons?

  And you're and you're feeding off like some reactions from everybody else, like laughter, scared silence, all that stuff.

• 1:14:30Speaker 03

  Horror movies and stuff.

• 1:14:31Bill Simmons?

  You're sharing it with other people.

• 1:14:33Speaker 03

  But I think it was mainly just that, to me, maybe I'm just speaking from my own experience. It's like, for me, it was sort of like, when you go to a movie, that's all that's happening. There's no other part of your life that's going on. You're only with the movie. Your vision of sight is encompassed by the screen. That's all that is. That is reality for you for two hours or whatever.

• 1:14:54Bill Simmons?

  You zone out of everything else in your life.

• 1:14:56Speaker 03

  But now they're sort of like, well, okay, we got, we've got to make this something people that's like different from their house. So it's like, the seats have to be better, you know? And maybe we're going to give better food or feed them during this thing, or doing all these things around it and stuff. I, I, I, I think that that will sort of make it into, like I said, this like this luxury experience where it's like, you have to pay a lot for all the trappings of seeing the movie, even if the movie is now almost secondary. Like it'll be like something like, I, I, I, I suspect in the future, 20 years from now, there'll be people who are like, we really got to take the kids to a movie. They got to know what that's like, because maybe no one will do that that much. Because there'll be one theater down or whatever.

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  There will be this high end place.

• 1:15:44Bill Simmons?

  See, I would argue it's gone the other way. And people are going to movies more than ever. I think especially with the younger generations. Yeah, I think it is. I think especially with people 25 and under, which I don't think we're going to movies quite as much for a little bit there. I think it's back. I think especially like, and they've found out ways with like the 70 millimeter. Um, or the IMAX, like the special experience of it combined with like horror movies are the hottest they've ever been in years and years.

• 1:16:20Speaker 03

  That's like, people have been talking about that for like two months.

• 1:16:22Bill Simmons?

  But it's kind of happening. Like what just happened with obsession?

• 1:16:26Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:16:26Bill Simmons?

  Was really unusual, like over the course of movie history. We've seen hit horror things before. This became like something else and it it infiltrated culture in a way. I thought I talked about this on a podcast last month, but I felt like TV had taken the baton from movies for setting cultural conversations and like a, you know, and like a consistent, um, just kind of elevated way. And it feels like it's shifting back to movies now and TV's just getting worse. And these shows are, these TV shows are just like Bs and B pluses. And then the movies are where the really interesting stuff is happening. We've seen a bunch of them come out this year already.

• 1:17:06Speaker 03

  Does it not seem though, like the cultural conversation about obsession and backrooms? Seems to be about the idea of those movies being popular though?

• 1:17:16Bill Simmons?

  No, there's, there's stuff coming out.

• 1:17:19Speaker 03

  Do you feel like the ideas from those movies?

• 1:17:21Bill Simmons?

  Especially obsession. I don't know if you follow it some of it, but obsession has led to some, some pretty intense discourse and it's a little like what's happening with the WNBA now, where it becomes like this, this kind of thing that we use to discuss all the other things we want to talk about anyway.

• 1:17:40Speaker 03

  That is interesting because it's like, you know, uh, sometimes I think we've talked about, I think you and Derek Thompson have talked about this idea that, you know, it's possible to follow the NBA in one of two ways, like you can watch the games or you can just follow the narrative and the discourse. And it's almost as if the WNBA is like, we're doing this, we're doing this. And then like they do it in a way that's actually much more elevated than the way the NBA does it. I mean, it's like, like the WNBA, it's just, it's, it's incredible to follow as something if you're not watching the games. It's just so. It's just crazy.

• 1:18:18Bill Simmons?

  Well, the craziest thing about WNBA.

• 1:18:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:21Bill Simmons?

  Um, no, there has not. And Seer wrote a really good piece for The Ringer about this this week, that now the, now politics has gotten involved and there's like, you know, and it's, I think that's probably going to unfortunately get worse and worse, but what's interesting is, um, I really want to talk about movie theaters, but I did want to say this one WNBA thing. Um, have you seen Olivia Miles play?

• 1:18:45Speaker 03

  A little bit.

• 1:18:47Speaker 03

  Like her glasses?

• 1:18:48Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. I think probably the most fun WNBA player for me. I like the Lynx anyway, cause I, I just for, you know, not like I like the Celtics, but that was kind of the team that I was, you know, fair weather fan rooted for. Um, but, but Miles is like pretty special. And it's crazy to me that all the discourse has just centered around Katelyn Clark, our teams being mean to her, and then politicians coming in and it's, and, and the commissioner being terrible, which is, you know, a topic people should talk about. Um, but it's not like they don't have, like Paige Becker's and Olivia Miles, like these

• 1:19:28Bill Simmons?

  are really fun people to watch play basketball and none of the dialogue is about them, like nothing. It's all about all this other stuff. I've never seen anything like it.

• 1:19:39Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, they just, uh, I, I, I mean, it's always like, it's just, there's just no, there's no league like this. It's just, you know, it's like, uh, where, uh, you know, it's like.

• 1:19:54Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, like you, you're even like.

• 1:19:56Speaker 03

  Something happens to Katelyn Clark, you just know immediately now, like, you know, she gets punched or something and you're like, now she's got to apologize for getting punched. Like it's, it's gotta happen, like, you know, it's like, like there's, it doesn't, it, it, I, it's so. And like listed like the 11th best guard or something by the players or something. That'd be like if it was like

• 1:20:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, the bigger Somebody was like Eddie Van Halen is the seventh best guitar player in Los Angeles or something. It's just so weird. I I can't think of any. When Caitlin Clark came into the league, I think a lot of people would have been like, boy, you know, it's just going to get sickening. They're going to ram her down our throat. All we're going to do is hear about

• 1:20:34Bill Simmons?

  It's literally the opposite.

• 1:20:37Speaker 03

  Beyond the opposite. It's like, it's like, I, I, I just, I, you know, it's just, it's so. I, I, I guess in a way

• 1:20:45Bill Simmons?

  Just in the past couple of years.

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:48Bill Simmons?

  They left her off the Olympic team, which she clearly just should have been on because she's the most popular women's player we've had. It's the same reason like LeBron and Durant will be on the 2028 Olympic team for the men. Like, sometimes you got to do it. The Nike, who you would have thought would have gotten behind her right away, like they did with Tiger Woods, like did the opposite. I don't, they took like forever to put her shoe out.

• 1:21:11Bill Simmons?

  The, the players definitely seem like, like they resent the attention she got. I don't know whether they don't like her or not, but it, you know, like they're not doing any of this stuff. I haven't seen to Olivia Miles, who's come in this year as like the rookie phenomenon and she's not getting knocked around. At the same time, it's been kind of, kind of fascinating, a little bit fun to watch. It's almost like there's like a hockey omen to the league now where like

• 1:21:38Speaker 03

  I really like the old like Knicks Heat series from

• 1:21:42Bill Simmons?

  It's like really an ambassador on both sides.

• 1:21:44Speaker 03

  Or whatever. I, I just, you know,

• 1:21:47Bill Simmons?

  But it's

• 1:21:48Speaker 03

  The WNBA almost seems like, kind of like this psych op where it's like, someone's like, you know, these stereotypes about gender and race and sexual orientation. We've got to bring these back into the world, like let's put them all into this league and have them just sort of, it's, it's, it's just nothing comparable to it. I can't think of anything that's comparable to it.

• 1:22:10Bill Simmons?

  And it's, I, I I just don't know how it plays out. What's ironic is the, the quality of play is easily the best it's ever been. Like the games are good. Like you watch some of these games, like this is like really good basketball. Like it, like it's a lot of, I, I just think the, the, the play has evolved so much. And yet I don't feel like people talk about that at all. And it almost seems like you're better, like I'm sure this will get cut out and aggregated in some way than, you know, but that, that's how this has gone where it's become like almost political to even talk about it in any way.

• 1:22:44Speaker 03

  And well, yeah.

• 1:22:45Bill Simmons?

  Like here's a really good example.

• 1:22:47Speaker 03

  Controversial by saying that everyone knows that.

• 1:22:49Bill Simmons?

  But here's.

• 1:22:50Speaker 03

  Everyone knows this.

• 1:22:51Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Here's, this is where I thought, like, if you're going to be a giant league. So Dallas has the first pick in the draft last summer, right? And they take UConn guard who's Paige's former teammate.

• 1:23:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:05Bill Simmons?

  Who they.

• 1:23:06Speaker 03

  Brilliant move, brilliant move in terms of getting people to talk about the WNBA.

• 1:23:09Bill Simmons?

  Well, and they were, had been in a relationship at one point and they don't seem like they were. But, um, if you go back and you read all the draft, mock draft stuff and everybody's like, this isn't, why, why are we trying to make a big deal of this? It's like, if this happened in the NBA, this is all we would talk about for months that they didn't take who the best person in the draft was. And now you think like they could have had Miles and Paige Beckers together, who I think, you know, are probably as fun or maybe even more fun to watch than Caitlyn. And they could have been on the same team. I don't even know how that would have worked, but holy shit. If this was the NBA, we, I, this would have led like seven podcasts for me.

• 1:23:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:50Bill Simmons?

  Just pretty funny. Yeah. So people are like, you know, I think, we'll see how it goes with the league, but it, it does feel like, uh, this Caitlyn situation. I talked about it like two months ago.

• 1:24:03Bill Simmons?

  I don't think, I, I think it saps some of the joy for her. I don't think she ever wanted any of this. I think she just wanted to play basketball and shoot threes.

• 1:24:11Speaker 03

  I can't imagine what it must be like to be her.

• 1:24:13Bill Simmons?

  She seems miserable.

• 1:24:15Speaker 03

  She is having a singular experience in American history.

• 1:24:19Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:24:20Speaker 03

  Like, I mean, she's not the first person who's ever dealt with problems as an athlete or anything, but like, her specific experience is so strange, and she seems to be handling it extremely well by just saying nothing and letting it all happen around her, but it's got to be wearing on her. I mean, I just, I don't see how.

• 1:24:39Bill Simmons?

  No, it definitely is. If you, if you go back and you look at even footage from her, like, three, four years ago versus now, like, she looks like she's carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders now. By the way, she's making a lot of money. She's famous. Like, there's a lot of good things that come with it. It's just, this was not what was happening with Steph Curry in, like, 2013 and 14. It was like, who the fuck is this guy? He's not, he's 11th, 11th best guard thing, which granted was, you know, a player poll, and I think too much has been blown out of proportion for her, but there's just no way, if you actually watch the league, there's no way she's not one of the five best guards. You could say she's fifth, third, whatever, but it's just like, you know, it's, the whole thing's just bonkers. Anyway.

• 1:25:22Speaker 03

  Can I make my bold prediction now?

• 1:25:24Bill Simmons?

  Oh, go, let's hear it.

• 1:25:25Speaker 03

  Okay. This is my, is the bold prediction. Okay.

• 1:25:31Speaker 03

  Sophie Cunningham.

• 1:25:35Speaker 03

  In the next, maybe, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say 2050.

• 1:25:43Speaker 03

  Is gonna be Vice President of the United States.

• 1:25:49Speaker 03

  She's going to be Vice President of the United States.

• 1:25:52Bill Simmons?

  By 2050.

• 1:25:53Speaker 03

  I think that, you know, I think that will be the year. I think that will be the, that will be, I don't know what party she'll be in.

• 1:25:57Bill Simmons?

  Senate election that year? Forty two, thirty eight, thirty four, thirty. Oh, so it'd be like twenty forty eight or twenty fifty two.

• 1:26:05Speaker 03

  Twenty forty, again, yeah.

• 1:26:06Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't, I don't know what party she'll be in. I don't know anything about her political views. But she will be the vice presidential candidate, at least the candidate.

• 1:26:14Bill Simmons?

  I love this. I hope we still have the internet.

• 1:26:19Bill Simmons?

  In twenty years, twenty plus years, that people can be like, oh, remember? Remember that? That Simmons podcast and that guy Chuck that?

• 1:26:28Speaker 03

  You know, I was, I was pretty wrong about Cooper Flag. Okay. And but she also, so I, I feel I'm gonna go the other way and take even bolder attempts. You know, even bolder predictions. I don't know what it is. Like, I have no, you know, that's, it's something about the fact that she wears like she wears those sleeves on the court. Something about the way she triggers inbound plays at the end of games makes me think she will be someone's ideal vice person. You know, she's a likable personality and you know.

• 1:26:55Bill Simmons?

  She's definitely likable. I thought the finger pointing thing was one of the funniest things that's happened in like three years. I, I thought it was like genuinely hysterical and she was just. She kept it going for twenty five seconds.

• 1:27:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, and at one point she kind of cocked her head to her side and that was like, you know, it's like that, that was, you know.

• 1:27:14Bill Simmons?

  She really is funny. Well, I, I don't know. Now that World Cup's gonna be done. Like, there's gonna be no sports on. I feel like I'm gonna wa, I feel like I care about the characters in the league now in a way that I haven't before. I have real opinions on the teams. I like Minnesota the most. I also like watching Indiana. I like watching Becker's. You know, Wilson on Vegas is. Yeah, I don't even know what her NBA equivalent would be at this point. She's basically like. Putting together like a Kareem nineteen seventies kind of run. But there's a lot of good stuff going on. Did we have any more things you wanted to hit on? You said you had a big picture thought about movies. Did we hit it?

• 1:27:54Speaker 03

  Oh, well, you know, um, uh, this is, you know, sometimes, um, uh.

• 1:28:01Speaker 03

  You guys with the ringer, like you'll do these live events.

• 1:28:05Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:05Speaker 03

  Okay, you know these live events. If you ever do a live event around the rewatchables.

• 1:28:11Bill Simmons?

  We have.

• 1:28:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. I'm saying important. Okay.

• 1:28:14Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:15Speaker 03

  I'm not angling for this, but I'm saying if you do.

• 1:28:18Bill Simmons?

  I'll go there tomorrow.

• 1:28:20Speaker 03

  I would like to be the person who like moderates the event because I think something interesting has happened. Okay, I'm going to start this with a compliment. Okay, like I think it can safely be said that you absolutely changed sports writing when you were writing a lot of ESPN. I think that that was incredibly, you know, like, I think that that you altered the way people wrote about sports. And in some ways, maybe even, you know, thought about sports, but it can really alter the way people consume sports or watch sports. I feel like now you, Sean, Chris, and Amanda, you're cooking, like, the whole idea, sort of like the success of the rewatchables

• 1:29:04Speaker 03

  has had a very interesting impact on the culture of how the average person thinks about movies now.

• 1:29:12Bill Simmons?

  Okay.

• 1:29:12Speaker 03

  And I would like to interrogate that idea with you guys.

• 1:29:16Bill Simmons?

  You want to do that in Portland instead of a live rewatchables?

• 1:29:19Speaker 03

  Somewhere like that, you know, because it's it's almost as though the rewatchables and the big picture and you, all the, all this together, you have kind of created this aesthetic for consuming film and what's good about film. And I find it to be a very interesting kind of collection of ideas. And there's some things like you really overrate and and and sort of made things like, like, I, I, I feel like you guys obsession with Tom Cruise is weird. I feel like you've now made Heat an overrated movie where for a long time it was underrated and now it's vastly overrated.

• 1:29:58Bill Simmons?

  Oh, I'm so excited we're part of that.

• 1:30:00Speaker 03

  Like, there's, there's like a, a, a variety of things. I, I just sort of the idea of like what a movie is supposed to do in your life. I think that this has been like a real kind of like, you like, you've affected movie culture and I think it's very interesting, not in a negative way, but in a different, in a, in a way that's, that's surprising to me. I wouldn't have thought.

• 1:30:20Bill Simmons?

  All right. So, Connor, you don't feel like a lot of that stuff was in there already? Like, we, like, TBS would show Shawshank Redemption every two weeks for, you know, 20 years. Like, I do think people were rewatching stuff over and over again. I remember.

• 1:30:33Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 1:30:34Bill Simmons?

  Even with my, like, going back to the Boston Sports Guide days, when I was writing about, like, sports movies and stuff, we were all watching the same 20 sports movies over and over again. I don't know if that's the case.

• 1:30:45Speaker 03

  But here's the difference. So, if it's like 1999 and they're, like, re-showing The Shawshank Redemption, and someone is at home, and they're like, "Oh, well, I guess I'll just watch this. I've seen it. It's good. I'll watch it." Now, you've sort of created this idea that there's a meaning to that.

• 1:31:02Bill Simmons?

  Right, there's an outlet.

• 1:31:03Speaker 03

  Because it used to be if you, if people who rewatched movies.

• 1:31:07Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:07Speaker 03

  Those were people interested in filmmaking, cinematographers. That's why you would rewatching movies. You guys have sort of introduced the idea of rewatching movies for the content.

• 1:31:19Bill Simmons?

  Hmm.

• 1:31:19Speaker 03

  Like.

• 1:31:20Bill Simmons?

  For, for nitpicks and what it meant in the moment, all that shit, yeah.

• 1:31:25Speaker 03

  It's, um, and it, it, it's what I love is that sort of, it sort of dovetails with, like, my ongoing, you know, slow cancellation of the future stuff I always talk about, because it seems as though the idea that what we have in the world of cinema now is kind of just going to be the world that we exist in going forward, we'll just sort of re-watch and reinterpret and remake and reboot these things over and over again.

• 1:31:48Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:31:48Speaker 03

  I just think that, I think that there is something that is changing about what a movie fan is supposed to be now, and that there was a time when the idea of movie, being a movie fan meant you liked a specific kind of movies, and now it means you support movies ideologically, like, the political idea.

• 1:32:08Bill Simmons?

  But it's more, it's more than just us. Like, there's other, there's other movie podcasts. I think Letterboxd is a big piece of this.

• 1:32:15Speaker 03

  Sure, that's part of it.

• 1:32:16Bill Simmons?

  Which, by the way, that's the one part I've never dove in on, the Letterboxd. I always make fun of Sean and Chris about this, where it's like, oh.

• 1:32:23Speaker 03

  I haven't either, I guess.

• 1:32:24Bill Simmons?

  Oh, I won't.

• 1:32:25Speaker 03

  But even like the idea of, like, Sean buying, you know, all these Blu-rays and stuff like that. It's, it's a, it's a different kind of possession. He's possessing them seemingly more like artifacts than, than like ways to watch a movie, like, you know.

• 1:32:41Bill Simmons?

  Or a combo, yeah, the physical media. It's interesting. I found this piece I wrote. Um, cause we were doing Ali for rewatchables and I wrote about Ali back in 2001, whenever that was. And I had written a piece heading into the holidays, my favorite DVDs. Um, you know, if you want to buy stuff for the holidays or ask for stuff, here are all these different DVDs I like, cause I really liked DVDs back then. And I realized I'm actually the king of physical media at The Ringer, not Sean, cause I have this column. He didn't have, he doesn't have anything. I mean, as 2001, I had like 30 DVDs. So I don't know, I feel like I should get more credit for that. I was talking about the director's commentaries and the deleted scenes. I was doing this years ago. So I don't think Ben Segat's credit anymore.

• 1:33:22Speaker 03

  I mean, this is, this is a tough thing in a way for you to respond to, but like, okay, you know, you did that list, you did that episode with Sean and Chris about your most rewatchable.

• 1:33:33Bill Simmons?

  My 50 most rewatchable, yeah.

• 1:33:35Speaker 03

  Yes. And I think I saw this clip of you mentioning Limitless.

• 1:33:39Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, yeah. Number 16, Limitless. Yeah.

• 1:33:42Speaker 03

  Why do you think that happened? Why do you think that specific moment was what people were so like, that almost seemed in a way to be a, like a, like a, like a totem of your entire sort of film world? Cause that's kind of what, you know, why do you think that was?

• 1:34:00Bill Simmons?

  I, it seemed like people liked that pod because, um, it was just the thing, everyone was doing all those lists, the whole, the first 25 years, all these different movies, TVs, all this stuff. And the premise of that list kind of, I think, just flipped it where it was basically the premise was, I can't defend this list. These are the 50 movies I've watched the most the last 25 years and I'm going to rank them from 50 to one. I, I don't know why this was the list, but this was the list. And then I got to Limitless and 16. I think it was the reactions of Sean and Chris.

• 1:34:34Speaker 03

  Well, that was part of it for sure.

• 1:34:35Bill Simmons?

  I think the reactions made a clip.

• 1:34:37Speaker 03

  Their reaction was very telling. Like their reaction.

• 1:34:39Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. But we've, we've all been working together for 15 years. So it's like, we all, we have like a shorthand with each other.

• 1:34:44Speaker 03

  But it's sort of in some ways describ-, I mean, I guess if somebody was like, if they were like writing an academic paper about it and they were kind of like Ringer Noir or something, or like what, like what is the Ringer? aesthetic for what makes a film great, you know?

• 1:34:59Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:59Speaker 03

  And it's like all these things. It's like, well, it's kind of like old Michael Mann, you know, anything he does is great or like, you know, but it's also this idea that it has to be like hyper populist, but it also has to have like kind of a major star because you guys are really into stars more than acting. Like you like actors way more than acting, like you like the people, right? And so of course.

• 1:35:22Bill Simmons?

  We've, we've had movies that we were going nuts about the performance more than.

• 1:35:28Speaker 03

  There are always like, I'm doing broad strokes here. I'm sort of describing like what is the overall.

• 1:35:33Bill Simmons?

  To me, Limitless though, is like the ultimate rewatchable because it's a pretty dumb movie. But it's got a great premise. You put yourself in the thought of how far would I go if I was in the shoes? There's good actors. It's well done. And it's just easy to watch.

• 1:35:47Speaker 03

  It's also like, it has essentially low stakes in reality. You don't really look at that, you know, and yet, but it, uh, but it also, it's like, it has high stakes in terms of like, you say like, like, like the, the pitch, the concept of this.

• 1:36:02Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:03Speaker 03

  I just think it would be interesting to, because I, I feel like when I, when I listen to the rewatchables, you guys are always kind of like talking around these ideas. But they're always there. Like what is, but you know, and I just, I think it would be interesting.

• 1:36:16Bill Simmons?

  Well, so we did, we just did rewatchables about she's the one. The Ed Burns movie from nineteen ninety six.

• 1:36:23Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:36:24Bill Simmons?

  Which is not a movie that should probably be on the rewatchables, but it's a really interesting movie to talk about. And that, that's always what the premise of that podcast is like. Is there a good conversation to be had about this movie? What, what is the reason for it? So sometimes it's easy because it's a classic and you've come on, you've done a bunch of them with us. Um, so like we did, did we do reality bites?

• 1:36:46Speaker 03

  We did reality bites. We did, uh,

• 1:36:52Bill Simmons?

  Reality bites is a perfect conversation for rewatchables because we get to go into Gen X and early Ethan Hawke and Ben Stiller directing and uh, the music that's in it.

• 1:37:02Speaker 03

  Kind of like that, that the, the strangely brilliant part of this is like when like when Spielberg goes on through watchables, right? In some way, and like, he's really up for it. He really wants.

• 1:37:12Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, he loved it. It was shocking.

• 1:37:15Speaker 03

  In some ways, this kind of rewatchables concept has tapped in to like the primitive, primordial feeling people have about movies.

• 1:37:25Bill Simmons?

  Hmm.

• 1:37:26Speaker 03

  Like what they like, like what is really important about these movies to them? Like the reason that like, you know, 2001 or whatever is important to him. He can talk about all these little detail, he knows Kubrick, knows all these things. But it's like, it's like I, it's more like, I want to say this about the movie. I want to be able to say this thing that resonates with me because that, that show was like, what the meaning of this movie is, you know?

• 1:37:51Bill Simmons?

  Right. Well, that's the thing you have, like I watched Kramer versus Kramer a couple of nights ago, just because it was on and I still have cable. But we've already done that on rewatchables. Like I wasn't watching it to scout it for the next one. And sometimes when you've seen movies a bunch of times and then you're watching them again, you're watching them for different things, right?

• 1:38:11Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 1:38:12Bill Simmons?

  And for whatever reason, I started watching it this time and I was really focused on the structure of how they do it with the Dustin Hoffman character, the first 20 minutes versus how things change and how much they're showing and not telling, which I think for some reason I Taylor shared it on the podcast a couple of weeks ago and he was talking about how he structures storytelling and how the mistakes people made. I thought he had some really interesting comments in there, but one of them is, is he thinks basically he's, he's, one of his takes was everything's overwritten. I want to show stuff to you. I want, I want you to like feel the location and I'd much rather like dwell on an actor and how they're reacting versus like having this like witty repartee back and forth, which you can have too.

• 1:38:57Bill Simmons?

  And there's this great scene in Kramer versus Kramer near the end when Dustin Hoffman, he's, he's lost the suit, right? Meryl Streep's going to get the son and they have one last breakfast together and they're just like kind of making the French toast, which in the first, in the earlier in the movie, they make French toast and it's a disaster. They spill it like it's everything goes wrong because they haven't made a meal together. By the end of it, it's just like the routine of them making the French toast and they never say anything. And then the kid starts, you know, he's, the kid wells up and it's like this emotional moment. But I was thinking like, You know, I was watching this time and I'm thinking like, this is, this is like a,

• 1:39:38Bill Simmons?

  the kind of thing you should show young directors like that are thinking about, how do I make a movie? Like little moments like this that we don't seem to have in movies in the same way anymore. And I feel like they're starting to come back. So I wonder like the next generation of people that are moving into movies and making films are really starting to think of these moments now? Instead of just being like, oh, if I can do two movies, maybe I'll, maybe I'll be able to do a Marvel movie. You know what I mean?

• 1:40:05Speaker 03

  In, in general, though, movies are becoming less visual.

• 1:40:09Bill Simmons?

  But my, my point is maybe it's going back the other way. Cause obsession has moments in it. I thought obsession was really interesting. But obsession has moments that are all about the visuals. It's all about the choices the actress is making. You know, with, with like some of her faces and stuff.

• 1:40:26Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, it's a, it's a visual medium, but by saying it's getting less visual in the sense that I always hear these things now that, well, I mean, like actually your buddy's old Matt Damon and, and Affleck talk about this. How like Netflix wants you to give exposition at times for no reason, because people might be folding laundry.

• 1:40:43Bill Simmons?

  The streamers, yeah, there's, yeah.

• 1:40:46Speaker 03

  So that, that's, you know, it's kind of the opposite of like what Sheridan would be saying or whatever. That, that, you know, if you're folding laundry while his shows are on, I suppose it might, you might not know what's going on.

• 1:40:54Bill Simmons?

  But I would argue the streamers have different, different kind of, uh, I don't know, things they have to solve, right? Like in a streamer, there's so much content now and they've, they've been open about this. There's so much content, you have to grab somebody in the first four minutes or they go. Right? You click on it. I don't know if I like that, you're out. If I'm going to a movie, I'm stuck there. I already made the decision to go. So whatever, whatever ride you take me on for the next two hours, I'm not going anywhere. I already, I already bought my ticket. So

• 1:41:27Speaker 03

  when you texted me about this podcast, you'd mentioned that Atlantic story about like the end of reading or whatever, you know?

• 1:41:34Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's another

• 1:41:35Speaker 03

  Oh, it seems like no one's got, you know, the reading might be over or whatever, you know? So a couple of weeks ago, I read this book, it's a book called Stoner. You're familiar with this novel?

• 1:41:47Bill Simmons?

  No.

• 1:41:48Speaker 03

  My whole life, people have told me to read this book and I assumed it was because the guy must be stoned all the time. That's not what it is. It's about, it's, you know, it's, it's just about the story of this guy. It starts in like, you know, you know, early 1900s and kind of goes through his life and it's a really quiet novel. And now I'm reading a book called, you know, Butcher's Crossing by the same author, similar kind of tone in some ways, but you know, it reminded me of how like, how you're reading these books, you know, and, and everything that you visualize has to be described to you, like, you know, everything about the way that guy's hair sits on his face. The way he walks into a room, all of these things, you know?

• 1:42:33Speaker 03

  And it is, you know, it's really deliberate and it, it, it's easy to understand why the way things have changed makes reading novels harder now. And that we're just so accustomed to the idea that we're just going to have like a, like a passive relationship, like this thing's going to be dumped on us all, what, what everyone looks like, however, like I, I think part of the reason that people struggle reading now is because it's like they just aren't willing to imagine everything they have to imagine. Like it really isn't, it's been an erosion of the potential for imagination.

• 1:43:12Speaker 03

  Like people are just like, I'm not going to spend time to visualize what a green shirt looks like. I just want to see the guy's shirt, you know? And I wonder if this part of, you know, everyone thinks this, this, this reading situation is all solely because of phones and the internet. And I think that is the biggest factor. But I also wonder if our imaginations now have changed in a way that it makes it very difficult to understand anything that isn't obvious. Like, you know, that, that

• 1:43:43Bill Simmons?

  Because it's where it's work to

• 1:43:45Speaker 03

  To render the reality. Yeah.

• 1:43:48Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Do you think people? Like I, I feel like more people in my life listen to books than read them is the other interesting piece to this. They're basically like more elaborate podcasts, but like my wife is more likely to listen to a book than read it at this point. And I don't know what that means either.

• 1:44:08Speaker 03

  And you know, a lot of that had to do with the overcoming of what was a prejudice. Like when I wrote my first book in 2001, there isn't an audiobook. And at the time, the idea of doing an audiobook, I mean, they almost said like, well, you know, that's for people who can't actually read, ha, whatever, for blind people or whatever. Now it's like, it's almost like half the market. Like the book I have coming out this September, I'm recording the, doing some of the audio stuff next week. And it's, you know, now any book I write, I will always do the, the audio for, you know? But it's great. It should, but it's, you know, because I know people, people want that. Like people want to hear, um, yeah. I did want to mention one thing that I find is kind of interesting. It kind of ties back to this.

• 1:44:53Bill Simmons?

  Wait, I had, I had more on books.

• 1:44:55Speaker 03

  Okay, go ahead, go ahead.

• 1:44:56Bill Simmons?

  Cause I had to, I had the, this office where I used to do my podcast and it became, before we moved out and finished this thing, the studio we have now. And so I fixed the office and I really like, my wife was making fun of me for weeks. Cause I was like, really like, I should post a picture of it on Instagram, um, putting all my books in the red show.

• 1:45:19Speaker 03

  Oh, you should be those.

• 1:45:19Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Well, so, well, I redid it. I found more books in the attic and now I have even more books and I have it stacked. And I had these two shelves of basketball books, but I found this, I found these two, basically things of paperback books that I had. Not like the smaller paperbacks, but the bigger ones. Cause you know, in the nineties, we would buy the paperback books because they were cheaper. Right? So I had, I had basically like 10 years of books I read that were just in these two things. So I added that to the thing. And then I was looking back and I was looking at all the books and I've actually read all the books. You know, and it's, it's a lot of books and you, and you think like,

• 1:45:59Bill Simmons?

  Fuck, this probably shaped 95% of the choices I made in life were all these books I read because I was an only child. I read books all the time. So did you.

• 1:46:12Bill Simmons?

  And so when I read this stuff about how people don't read anymore, or reading has turned into texts and, you know, internet stuff and Twitter and Reddit and that's, people are reading the same amount, but they're not reading the actual books. Like, the question I get the most from everybody, you know, if people are like, people with young kids who want to be a podcast or a writer, or somebody who's breaking into business, or somebody who's in college, like, hey, do you have a tip for me? And I'm always like, fucking read. I feel like the reading, that was how I learned everything. That's how I learned how to pick styles. That's how I learned information. That's how I learned what happened in the course of history and how to not repeat the same mistakes or decisions people made, or analyzing the decisions. And, you know, every book you read

• 1:46:55Bill Simmons?

  is gonna have a different effect on you. But that's the part that scares me is that if people are reading less and they're just going to these other things, is it affecting their brains in the same way? And I don't know the answer to that.

• 1:47:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's wild. You know, like, one thing, okay, so this book I have that's coming out

• 1:47:13Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:14Speaker 03

  September, okay. I'm doing an interesting event in October.

• 1:47:21Speaker 03

  So the book comes out in September, but I am doing a book event at New York Comic Con. Okay. Now, I was completely baffled when this was initially thrown at me. I have to say, it is my son's ultimate dream. It's the greatest thing that could have possibly happened, you know? So we're all going to New York to go to the Comic Con or whatever. So I don't even care if no one comes to this event. Because in my mind, I'm like, well, can these people are paying a bunch of money to like, see the stuff, you know, see comic books and Marvel movies and, you know, Magic Gathering, all this stuff.

• 1:47:56Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, how do you fit in?

• 1:47:57Speaker 03

  Are they gonna come want to see this, like, a book reading or whatever, like a book event? Then, you know, I was starting to wonder if maybe what will happen going forward is this.

• 1:48:08Speaker 03

  Maybe if reading really does kind of fade from the culture, people will still buy books as collectible objects.

• 1:48:18Bill Simmons?

  Like physical media?

• 1:48:20Speaker 03

  Almost like Pokemon cards or something. It's like, oh, I like this author. Uh, I know what, yeah, I've heard him on podcasts. I've seen him or whatever. Oh, buy this book. And this book will sort of be like the physical representation of who I, why, what my identity is, what I like, what I'm interested in.

• 1:48:37Bill Simmons?

  Put it out in the bookshelves.

• 1:48:39Speaker 03

  Maybe I won't. Maybe it'll just be on the shelf or whatever, you know? But I wonder if there is, I mean, I don't, I mean, in a way, that's kind of a scary thing to think about is somebody sells books for a living or tries to sell books for a living. But I, I, I do wonder if the possession of physical books in the future.

• 1:48:59Bill Simmons?

  Could help save books?

• 1:49:00Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, well, like, it'll be sort of like how, um, you know, there was, it, there was a time when people would buy vinyl records, even though they had it on CD or they had it on cassette. They like to collect records. They like the gatefold. They like the feel of it. They like the smell of it. They like the idea of what it was, you know?

• 1:49:24Speaker 03

  Like, maybe that's how it's going to become for books in a way. That like you'll, you'll, you'll still have to write them. You can't, you'll, the books have to be written. You have to put all the work in it. If someone actually does read it, it will need the merits of a book in the classic style. But they won't just buy a book just for what it looks like. It's gotta be the thing. It's gotta be that if people see that you own this book, they know that it's like, that's, you know, it's, it's all this information. So I've maybe, so maybe like going to like a Comic Con is like a reasonable thing to do. Sort of like, you know, maybe the kind of people who go to that are already in the mindset. It's like, I buy the things that are, you know, important to my life. Like I,

• 1:50:07Speaker 03

  you know, a guy buys like a figurine of like the Incredible Hulk or whatever. He's not gonna play with the Incredible Hulk. He might not even take it out of the box, but maybe he will and he'll put it on a shelf. And it'll be like, when people see this, they will know, not only do I like this, but like I'm invested in this. So I'm, I'm very curious to see what this is going to be like. I've got very curious to see if I do this book event at Comic Con New York and people show up or not, you know? And, and if they want to buy the book or if they have questions, I just have no idea. Yeah.

• 1:50:37Bill Simmons?

  This episode is brought to you by Expedia. You know how at the end of the season, your team goes to Cancun? Sometimes earlier than expected? Sometimes after blowing a 3-1 series lead? But what if you went to Cancun? With Expedia, save up to 30% when you bundle and save. You can book the flight or the hotel now, then book the rest later. In all fairness, though, hopefully, your team doesn't go to Cancun. One, two, three, Cancun. Or if they do, you go with them. Expedia, the one place you go to go places. Sign in to save, savings vary. This episode is brought to you by PNC Bank. In today's sports, everyone is constantly trying to outdo each other. Trick formations, infield shifts, constant rotation changes. Yet it's proven time and time again that strong fundamentals are the thing that will lead you to victory. Banking, no different.

• 1:51:22Bill Simmons?

  While everyone else tries to outdo each other, PNC Bank just keeps going right down the middle with steady, calculated money moves. And the financial wins just keep coming. PNC Bank, brilliantly boring since 1865. Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Incorporated. PNC Bank, National Association, Member, FDIC. One thing about books, you said this earlier, because you mentioned Among the Thugs, which I knew immediately what you meant because I have it and I read it.

• 1:51:57Bill Simmons?

  I didn't know anything about early 90s hooligan soccer fans in the UK, right? Neither did you when you read that book. So it was like, it brought me into this whole world that I would have known nothing about otherwise. And it's, by the way, an excellent, excellent sports book.

• 1:52:13Bill Simmons?

  Is it too easy to discover stuff like that now where you don't need a book?

• 1:52:18Bill Simmons?

  I feel like people now would have opinions on hooliganism and soccer and different things. And they would just know more and they wouldn't even necessarily have to read a book to learn all the same stuff we learned from the book.

• 1:52:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean-

• 1:52:33Bill Simmons?

  Like, there's shortcuts to it now. You wouldn't have to read the book, which is kind of frightening.

• 1:52:37Speaker 03

  I mean, the scary thing about this is that-

• 1:52:44Speaker 03

  It is possible that maybe books are just not the most effective way to learn things.

• 1:52:50Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:52:50Speaker 03

  I think you and I both were raised or kind of with this idea, but maybe it's not because I will admit some nights I'm at home, you're lying in bed and I'll just go to YouTube and I will watch, say like.

• 1:53:03Bill Simmons?

  Just random shit.

• 1:53:04Speaker 03

  A nine minute documentary about, oh, um, like, uh, like the, like how, uh, primitive men, uh, were able to keep fires burning during inclement weather. And it'll be like nine minutes long.

• 1:53:23Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:23Speaker 03

  But like, I will get it all. Like I will learn this thing, you know, or I'll like, I watched one, I think I maybe have mentioned it on another part. It was just a fascinating, short little documentary about like how they selected Hiroshima and Nagasaki is two places they dropped atomic bombs on like the conversation that.

• 1:53:41Bill Simmons?

  That sounds amazing.

• 1:53:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, like, like one city was saved just because one guy at the meeting was like, I've been there. It's nice. Don't drop a bomb on there. Yeah. It's like, you know, that was like, there, there were these, you know, and it's these things that, you know, like in a way I almost didn't even had never even invested the time in wondering about, you know? Um, and that can be done so quickly now that you can watch so many, you can watch them at time like 1.5 speed. Like, you know, so you're, so even something that's nine minutes is now six minutes and you've got all this stuff. Um, it's, it is hard sometimes to, to, to like, I'll, I'll, I'll write a book and I'll be like, okay. So who's the person is going to read this? Who's the person is going to put the time in to do this? Like.

• 1:54:23Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:54:24Speaker 03

  It's just kind of praying that there's a hundred thousand of these people out there, but you know.

• 1:54:28Bill Simmons?

  That would be a great Letterboxd sequel is just you log crazy things you watched on YouTube.

• 1:54:36Bill Simmons?

  Because like yesterday, I went on, I went on my YouTube. That was, it was literally, I was like a half hour from going to bed. And I went to search for something on YouTube and you know, the algorithm really knows me now at this point. So for some reason, it suggested this Mark Knopfler. This concert that he did in 1996. Where he plays what some people think are the great, is the greatest guitar solo of all time. I think it's from Espresso Love or Tunnel of, uh, one of those.

• 1:55:08Bill Simmons?

  And it was on some concert thing and then he didn't like. I guess he messed up like two things during this like three minute solo. So he took it out of the concert. So the song wasn't out there. But all these people had sworn they had seen the thing. And then in 2024, it appeared again on YouTube and people were like Knopfler guitar god. It's back. And they were, so I watched the whole thing and it was amazing. And then I was like, I feel like I saw him on Letterman once in the mid eighties. And he did a song with the band and it was like the best thing I've ever seen anyone do with a band on late night. And then I went and I was right, it was 1985.

• 1:55:48Bill Simmons?

  Mark Knopfler came in and he sang Espresso Love with the band when the Letterman band was like the best it's ever been like. Schaefer had, Steve Jordan was there.

• 1:55:59Bill Simmons?

  And it's like this awesome five minutes. My point is that was just 15 minutes of my night last night where I watched those two things. And then I watched um, five minutes of a 1980 Dire Strafe. And all of a sudden I was down a 20 minute Dire Straits. Deep dive out of nowhere. And that's just what happens night after night if you let it, you know?

• 1:56:20Speaker 03

  It's very easy to do that. I mean, I.

• 1:56:23Bill Simmons?

  That would be a good Letterboxd.

• 1:56:25Speaker 03

  Well, but also it's just that the fact that like it's all there.

• 1:56:30Bill Simmons?

  Like you have memories that you don't even know were real memories.

• 1:56:33Speaker 03

  There's a section in like, I wrote Fugger Rock City like in 1999, 2000. Comes out in 2001. There's a chunk in that book where I talk about the strangest thing about rock videos is that you. See them constantly for two months and then you never see them again.

• 1:56:51Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:56:51Speaker 03

  So like one summer, I saw the Black Rose video for the song Remedy. Every day. At some point, because MTV was at my house all the time, you know, I saw the video for Remedy every day. And then it was like gone and it appeared like this was just sort of how the world was going to be. There would be these things you're hyper involved with and then it's pretty much gone unless you like buy Black Rose DVD or something. Now there's nothing like that. Like there's nothing that, that if you experience, you have to, you know, but like you, you know it. You know that if I, well, if I don't see it now, I can see it again, or I can see it at my leisure or whatever. I wonder if that has changed the way that we watch these things. We're not doing it consciously, but I wonder if unconsciously we now realize that these things

• 1:57:36Speaker 03

  can of course be accessed at a different time or a different way. And as a consequence, I don't have to care as much. I don't have to invest anything in it intellectually because it'll always be there and that we're kind of doing this with everything now. And maybe that's why everything seems less satisfying than it used to.

• 1:57:54Bill Simmons?

  I remember I had these VHS tapes of different things from the eighties that I'd just recorded in real time, including, I think, three Letterman anniversary shows in a row. Right. And I was like, I, I would have put these in a safe. I had that. I had a whole bunch of stuff, like a whole bunch of games and just things like, I'm so glad I have these because if I didn't have these, would be gone. And one of the, one of the, like the tape melted or broke and it was just gone. I think it was the Letterman anniversary ones, maybe it was something else. And I was just like, oh my God, it's gone. Now that shit's on YouTube.

• 1:58:32Speaker 03

  It is.

• 1:58:33Bill Simmons?

  It was like my, one of some of my prized possessions, you know, the Michael Jackson Motown 25 and shit like that, that I actually recorded in real time. I was like, ah. Oh my God, what would happen if somebody stole this?

• 1:58:46Speaker 03

  You should keep those though, because actually what is amazing is that the stuff that you didn't think you were recording, the ancillary stuff.

• 1:58:54Bill Simmons?

  Right, the commercials and stuff, yeah.

• 1:58:56Speaker 03

  From, uh, for my birthday, my wife, I guess, went on eBay and got me a bunch of Sports Illustrateds from the early eighties. So I was like, reading through them on, on, on July 4th or whatever, you know? And like, you know, like there's this story about like, uh, I think, I think it's a Frank de Ford story about like Wilt Chamberlain at the age of 50.

• 1:59:14Bill Simmons?

  I remember that one. That was a good one. Yeah.

• 1:59:16Speaker 03

  Also, I'd forgotten about this. It was like, he almost came back and played for the Nets. Like, you know, and like, he probably could have, you know, like, almost certainly could have. It's like, um, you know, and I kind of did vaguely remember that story because you might remember this at the front of the magazine. It's a close up of Wilt's hand, how big his hand is. And, you know, in that you could put your hand on, it's like a.

• 1:59:38Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:39Speaker 03

  So I did remember that story and I remember that happened, but it was so weird, like looking at some of the cigarette ads in this thing. Or like the 19th hole, all the letters, like the lit, somebody wrote a letter to Sports Illustrated. There's no way you can't, you cannot go on the internet now and find like random letters to Sports Illustrated from 1983, but here they all are.

• 2:00:00Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 2:00:01Speaker 03

  And it's like, and it was also strange to hear, to, to read some of these letters and like, see like, boy, you know, people are still saying that now. Like he's, he's describing this thing as a new thing, but it's like still happening now.

• 2:00:12Bill Simmons?

  People complaining about announcers, which now we have with Alexi Lawless, where everybody's just like, I can't stand Alexi Lawless, but in the eighties, we had somebody else.

• 2:00:21Speaker 03

  So like, I bet if you went back and like, watched like a, like a, or like when I was writing the football book, you know, it, at, uh, I was, uh, uh, like went back and I rewatched like the, the Boston College Miami game or something, you know?

• 2:00:36Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. When the Flutie game or whatever, but like before it happens, I think it's like Brent Musburger talking about like, Felkin Kryst is going to be on or whatever. Like these things, I just totally forgot he'd forget to happen, but.

• 2:00:48Bill Simmons?

  Well, there's this, first of all, I don't, you must have watched some of these old NFL games, just random week six Browns versus Steelers, 1978, and it just will be the complete NBC broadcast. It's kind of riveting. There's this account on YouTube called Rare NBA Footage, which has only 8.4.

• 2:01:11Bill Simmons?

  K eighty four hundred followers right now. And they just, he, I don't know where this person gets all the video stuff. But he'll have some good fights every once in a while. And he had, he had the, uh, when Kareem punched Kent Benson. He had that whole thing, but then the aftermath of Kent Benson with this huge black eye being like, what the fuck just happened? Um, it feels like everything's out there. There's, I, it just, there's more and more footage people are just finding. And it's really crazy.

• 2:01:45Speaker 03

  Point now where it's like, it's almost more surprising if you can't find something. Like you almost expect you should be able to find it.

• 2:01:52Bill Simmons?

  Um, uh, Yeah, cause there's stuff, there's NBA stuff from the sixties and seventies where they did, they literally didn't televise the game. So there's no way to find it unless somebody, for whatever reason, had a camera in the upper deck or something. It's just games that don't exist. Most famously, the Will game, but that was nineteen sixty two. But there's, you know, a whole bunch of stuff. Anyway, all right, we went two hours, we went too long. Can you plug some stuff?

• 2:02:15Speaker 03

  Well, no, I mean, I, I, I gotta, I have, uh, I got this book that's just called Rock. It's coming out in September.

• 2:02:22Bill Simmons?

  What's, so what's Rock about quickly?

• 2:02:25Speaker 03

  Okay. I don't want, one thing I found promoting that football book, I just, I did so many podcasts that occasionally you'd end up saying the same thing on multiple podcasts. And I really feel like a lot of people are like, I kind of read this book. Like I heard him talking about it enough, like, you know,

• 2:02:41Bill Simmons?

  I like it, keep some mystery. So this is just called Rock.

• 2:02:44Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm going to try to, to not talk about what's in this book as much, but I will say this. Okay. So it's like, it is a fictional history of rock music. It's fictional, but it starts in nineteen sixty seven with the premise that the Velvet Underground's first record is released and immediately becomes.

• 2:03:06Speaker 03

  Twenty-five times more popular than The Beatles and The Stones combined.

• 2:03:09Bill Simmons?

  You told me this idea. This is a great idea.

• 2:03:11Speaker 03

  And it completely alters all of the culture over the next, you know, many years and then ends in two thousand and two where nine eleven has been blamed on the Strokes.

• 2:03:27Bill Simmons?

  Okay.

• 2:03:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, but, but there's a lot that happens in between that. So that's, those are kind of the bookends of this book.

• 2:03:33Bill Simmons?

  Wow. You, you really were a podcast whore for that football book.

• 2:03:37Speaker 03

  Well, I guess, you know, but they can't, you know, people ask me to go on a podcast, they'll do it. Why not? Cause the thing is also they don't, it's amazing how little they overlap. There's only a certain kind of person who listens to all of them, but you know.

• 2:03:51Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, true. It is like pieces of different audiences.

• 2:03:53Speaker 03

  But it could, I think it could have been a mistake though, because I did so many of those podcasts and people always wanted to talk about one section of the book. They wanted to talk about the one chapter near the end about the eventual sort of erosion of football or football receding from the culture, which now I think many people think that's what the book is about. It's like, it's like five percent of that book, maybe at most, but I did, I probably did too many podcasts for that, you know?

• 2:04:21Bill Simmons?

  Trying to think of what the Velvet Underground, what the sports version of that would be. Cause I was gonna say like if, if the Knicks had bought Dr. J from the Nets in seventy-six, is the next fifty years of NBA history different? But it was, Dr. J had already been around for, for half his career. So maybe it's not as impactful.

• 2:04:43Speaker 03

  But the conceit of this book though, is that all the records from nineteen sixty-seven till two thousand and two, they're exactly the same. The, the records haven't changed. It's the perception of the records and the perception of the artists.

• 2:04:57Bill Simmons?

  Oh, so that could only, that could have been with sports. Yeah.

• 2:04:59Speaker 03

  So, well, no, a sports version would be that all the games played out exactly as we remember them, but everything we think about sports is completely reversed because of the way it is perceived.

• 2:05:15Bill Simmons?

  I'll have to think about what the sport, I, I, I need, I don't want to say the wrong thing here.

• 2:05:21Bill Simmons?

  Trying to think of what the basketball version of that would be.

• 2:05:27Bill Simmons?

  For some reason, I was thinking about the late 70s. If Gus, if, if the Sonics Bullet Series was considered to be the series that saved basketball and Gus Williams was like Magic Johnson or Magic Johnson, and then we just go, all right, Chuck, thank you for the two plus hours. I had a great time as always.

• 2:05:45Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:05:46Bill Simmons?

  Now you made me want to come to Portland.

• 2:05:48Speaker 03

  Well, you ever do, you know.

• 2:05:49Bill Simmons?

  Well, I don't have to twist Chris Ryan's arm. He goes there anyway, just to socialize.

• 2:05:53Speaker 03

  He does. He comes quite often.

• 2:05:54Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. All right. Sad everybody in Portland for us. Thanks for coming on.

• 2:05:57Speaker 03

  Okay. Bye bye.

• 2:05:59Bill Simmons?

  All right. That's it for the podcast. Thanks to Chuck Klosterman. Thanks to Gahal and Eduardo and Jack and Chris and everybody else at The Ringer as well. I'm going to be coming back midweek with a podcast. It's going to be a very unique podcast, probably on Wednesday. So stay tuned for that and don't forget Rewatchable. She's the one is coming. See you next week.

• 2:06:43Bill Simmons?

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• 2:07:28Bill Simmons?

  winner, Martin McDonagh.

• 2:07:31Bill Simmons?

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