Why Did the Knicks Fire Thibs? Plus, a Belichick Debate (and More) With Pablo Torre

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons reacts to the news of the Knicks firing Coach Thibs, and he makes his NBA Finals predictions (3:33). Then, Bill is joined by Pablo Torre to squash their Bill Belichick beef once and for all before discussing journalism, conspiracy theories, and Tony Kornheiser (29:21). Host: Bill Simmons Guest: Pablo Torre Producers: Chia Hao Tat and Eduardo Ocampo The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit⁠ www.rg-help.com⁠ to learn more about the resources and helplines available. 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.

• 0:00Bill Simmons?

  The Bill Simmons Podcast is brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network, where I made pop culture appearances on two of our podcasts. One was the Rewatchables. Me and Kyle Brandt broke down Out for Justice with Steven Seagal. It was the most fun I think we've had for any of the four Steven Seagal movies we've had. This is great. Producer Craig was great. Everybody was great. Really fun episode. You can watch it on the Ringer Movies YouTube channel, as well, you can watch it as a video podcast on Spotify, listen to it wherever you get your podcasts. That was one. I was also on the Prestige TV Podcast, because Joanna Robinson and I both watched The Better Sister, with Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks, a murder mystery. I kinda liked it. Had some thoughts, had some critiques, had some nitpicks. We broke all of it down.

• 0:44Bill Simmons?

  You can find it on the Prestige TV Podcast, which is also on the Ringer-TV YouTube channel. Hey, you know how I've been working with FanDuel? We've been doing Taylor Fade, doing it usually either Wednesday or Thursday. We won last week. Basically, I pick a player prop. You decide whether you want to tail me and back the pick, or fade me and go against it. Either way, if you win, you get a 50% profit boost token that you get to put toward it. It's super easy. The bet's on the app. All you have to do is apply the Taylor Fade, and you can decide whether you want to go against me or not. I was psyched that we created a brand-new bet for FanDuel. I like being on, yeah, I felt like the Neil Armstrong of this kind of bet.

• 1:28Bill Simmons?

  Anyway, check out FanDuel's Sportsbook. Usually, these are going to be Wednesday or Thursday, so I think game three of the finals is a Wednesday, so that'll probably be the next one. You can, you can tail me, you can fade me, whatever you want to do. I like when you ride me, I think, for karma purposes. It's great. So, check that out on FanDuel's Sportsbook. Coming up on this podcast, I'm going to talk about the Knicks at the very top, because right after we recorded most of this podcast, they got rid of their coach, Tom Thibodeau. Who we'd been talking, we'd been talking about that possibility on this podcast since April. So a bunch of things that I found interesting in this, I'm going to talk about that on top. And then Pablo Torre is coming in after that. We're in a huge beef, just we had to be security guards on both sides.

• 2:12Bill Simmons?

  Really making sure that it was like in UFC when the two guys are coming in on the way in and they both have their teams, just make sure we don't start fighting. No, it's fine. I've known Pablo for a long time. I'll explain at the very top of when he comes on, why he came on the podcast, but I had a great time and it was fun to have him on. I appreciate that he came down. So that is the podcast for today. We're going to take a break. We're going to bring in Pearl Jam and then my thoughts on the Knicks. This episode is presented by State Farm. It's no secret that great teams need great teammates. I've been saying this for years and when it comes to insurance, State Farm is there to help you find the right coverage for your home, car and more. Whether you need an in-person or digital assist, they're ready when life hits you with a full court press.

• 2:55Bill Simmons?

  Get a game plan that helps fit your life. Talk to State Farm today. State Farm with the assist. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability and eligibility vary by state.

• 3:33Bill Simmons?

  All right, I'm recording the top part of the podcast here. It's about two o'clock Pacific time. The Knicks relieved Tom Thibodeau of his duties as head coach a couple of hours ago. I was going to have a guest, but you know, honestly, there's a bunch of stuff I want to hit. I feel like I can do it in 15 minutes and we're just going to go for it. I wasn't surprised. Zach Lowe came on this podcast in April. We did all of our, we did a most intriguing playoff people draft and we've got to the hot seat category. And this was, I think Zach's first appearance back on my podcast. And we had a hot seat category and he had a, I forget who he had. And then I had, I had Tibbs and Zach did like, it's like cold body. It was

• 4:16Bill Simmons?

  like he got electroshocked. And I was like, look, I think there's a chance, you know, I don't, I don't know if it's going great. And you know, if they lose to the Celtics in five, or you know, the first round's rocky, whatever happens, I think this is in play. And there were, there were reasons I thought that. There was stuff that I heard. There was stuff percolating around. But then they beat Detroit in six. They beat Boston in six. And you know, Tatum goes down at the end of game four. They're about to win game four. They're gonna take a three, one lead against a 60 plus win team. And then they take Indiana to six and they were one of the 14 teams left. Basketball's reignited in New York. And the question is, well, then why would you fire your coach? Well, I think

• 4:59Bill Simmons?

  there's one, two, three, I'm gonna give you five reasons. And we'll give you a couple of conspiracy theories as well. Just, just for the hell of it. Five reasons Tibbs got fired. Number one, this is an admission that they actually weren't as close to winning the title as maybe you think you were if you were one of the final four teams left. And there's previous examples of this, right? The Warriors in the Mark Jackson year before they hired Steve Kerr, where there was a feeling like Mark Jackson took us from here to here. And now we need somebody to take us from here to here. I talked about this on my podcast on Sunday with Van and Rossello. The better example, and one that I think

• 5:40Bill Simmons?

  is weirdly applicable in a bunch of different ways here is the 2003 Pistons, who moved on from Rick Carlisle. They hired Larry Brown. And people were really surprised because Rick Carlisle had done a good job with Detroit. He's a good coach, as we've seen, won a title in 2011. He's in the finals this year, ironically beat the Knicks. But the, the question was, did Carlisle take this roster as far as it could go? And on top of it, could Larry Brown bring us up an even further level? Well, a guy who was intimately involved with that Pistons team, behind the scenes, back when he was very shadowy and nobody really understood what he did or what his role was, was Worldwide Wes, William Wesley.

• 6:22Bill Simmons?

  He was a confidant, he was a big Larry Brown guy. He was behind the scenes with those Pistons guys in all these different ways. Still close to a lot of them. I'm not saying he was responsible for the decision. I'm just saying he was there watching the effect of it. And I find it hard to believe that him and Lea Rose, who run the Knicks team right now, weren't thinking about that specific example when they were thinking, did Tibbs take us as high as we could possibly go? Is there another level for us to go and what has to happen to get there? Did we max out with Tibbs? And the case would be season played the starters too much. Trailed by 10 plus all the time in the three playoff series, as we talked about on my podcast on Sunday. At some point you are who you are.

• 7:06Bill Simmons?

  And if you're down 10, 12, 15 in 75% of the playoff games you're playing, that's a really bad sign that you have to always constantly claw your way back. And then you got to think about circumstances too. You're gifted a Cleveland collapse. Cleveland has home court throughout the playoffs and they won 64 games and Indiana just thumps them. You're gifted Boston's inexplicable collapse in game one and game two, which I may or may not look at the box scores once every two days. The Celtics in the third quarter with a huge lead of game one, took 20 shots and 19 of them were threes. And you just think back to some of the decisions Boston made offensively in that series, how

• 7:47Bill Simmons?

  slow they played, how many threes they took, how they didn't use some of the Knicks weaknesses against them, didn't push the pace, didn't constantly hunt Brunson and Towns. And those two games are just two of the worst losses combined as a loss in the history of Boston's franchise. And it's gonna be a long time before you get over. And that's before you get into what happens to Tatum in game four. But just how they played those first two games was such a gift to the Knicks, who then went and grabbed it because they're a tough team and they have a lot of talented players. You also lose out of Milwaukee and Philly, Orlando gets hurt, all that stuff. So a lot of things broke in New York's favor and yet. I don't think they would have come anywhere close to beating Oklahoma City,

• 8:28Bill Simmons?

  right? So the line for that finals is, I think it's minus 700 right now with Indiana. I think, I think it would have been higher if it was the Knicks. So at some point, you have to have an honest assessment. Are we trying to be good every year? Are we trying to win the title? And could we win the title with what we just watched? With the coach we have, with the way the players responded to him? And they obviously looked at it and said, we can't. So that's one. Second reason. I think Tibbs, who I really like as a coach for the most part, and I appreciate how much he cares. And you could feel with some of the reactions today. The press was really shocked and in a lot of cases upset that it played out this way.

• 9:10Bill Simmons?

  He's an all in, all the time basketball maniac, like a real obsessive. And he lasted in the Knicks for five years in a player's league, which we'll get to in a second, why that's an important number. Didn't really listen to anybody on lineups. Just played his guys as much as possible. There was real dissension that you could feel from March on. The Bridges stuff was always weird with McHale Bridges and him talking openly about playing too many minutes. And then, oh, we hashed it out behind the scenes. That was never a good sign. And then you could see as he started to kind of change stuff, changed his defense in the Boston series, which were, started experimenting with these big lineups in the third, in the third round against Indiana, because he realized his players couldn't play seven guys against the pace

• 9:54Bill Simmons?

  that you could do against, with how Indiana wants you to play. And then all of a sudden Shamet's out there and Delon Wright, and guys that really should have been playing all year. And it's just, when you start changing stuff that drastically in the end of May, that's a sign like maybe you didn't use the regular season to your benefit correctly. And I think that's just undeniable. We were saying, we were talking about this on this podcast all the time. Like didn't understand the rotations, didn't understand the minutes, didn't understand why there was any, no desire to develop a bench at all. See of that, I don't think that helped them once they finally flamed out against Indiana. Here's the third reason. He was there five years, which doesn't seem like a long

• 10:38Bill Simmons?

  time. Well, you've heard about the 10 years of the remaining coaches, the longest running coaches in the NBA right now. 2008, Erik Spoelstra. 14, Steve Kerr. 2020, Billy Donovan at Chicago. 2020, Tyron Lou for the Clippers and then Mark Dagnall in OKC. 2020. So three of our five longest coaches showed up in the NBA on those teams five years ago. And all right, so what is that? Our owners impatient? This is the league now. The players run the league. The players run the league more than ever. The money is so high and so crazy. The turnover and the musical chairs of somebody's unhappy with their situation, their teammates,

• 11:23Bill Simmons?

  their coach, they're complaining. They have more power than they've ever had. And it's just a fact. Like this is the dark side of player empowerment. You have guys making crazy amounts of money who if they don't really like their coach, guess who's not going to win that battle? The coach. We, the, the, the real eye opening one for this was Brad Stevens in Boston because that last Celtics year he had, the team basically packed it in on him and, and really seemed like they, they just were starting to tune him out and he wasn't reaching them in the same way. And Brad Stevens was an incredible coach. He only had a seven year run for the Celtics. Think about that. So the run is usually five to seven years unless you end up with a Spoelstra situation. By the way, Spoelstra

• 12:06Bill Simmons?

  didn't have a great year this year either. Steve Kerr. I think Dagnall will be at OKC for a long, long time. Other than that, you know, we're going to hit a point where Doc Rivers is like the seventh most tenured NBA coach. And I think he got to Milwaukee five minutes ago. I just think this is the league now. I think there's too many outlets for guys to push unhappy buttons. The league is hyper covered. Every sort of interaction on the bench, every quote that comes out of any sort of press conference, it's just, there's just a big spotlight or anything. And once there's any unhappiness at all.

• 12:45Bill Simmons?

  You could feel it blow up and I just think it's, it's really hard. The Knicks didn't seem that happy the last four months, I would say. And I thought, we talked about this on Sunday. It was so interesting that they lost game six and the Athletic immediately had this long, long, as Brian Curtis would call it, the now they tell us piece, which seemed like it was just in their archives for four days waiting to get published. And it had a lot of stuff and the two big losers in that piece were Towns and Thibodeau, as we talked about on the podcast on Sunday. So there was clearly a lot of smoke here and some fire. And that's why I wasn't surprised. I, it's why I first mentioned in April. That's why I mentioned on Sunday's pod, I thought it was 45, 55 that he stayed. And, uh, and now he's gone.

• 13:29Bill Simmons?

  But there's two other dynamics that I think are really important for this. Mikael Bridges. He makes $24.9 million next year. They traded five first round picks for him. He can leave and sign with another team. 12 months, 12 and a half months from now, basically 12, 13 months from now, July 1st, 2026. If they don't sign him to an extension. They traded the five first round picks for him. They got the Villanova connection together. He's the one that we're pretty positive wasn't that happy this season. Talked about the minutes, was just an afterthought offensively. They were like begrudgingly getting him involved. I thought he had moments in the playoffs, but also moments where he disappeared.

• 14:14Bill Simmons?

  I can't say they ran a lot of offense for him. I thought he was a better offensive player than they used him. And then you saw the way he was harassing Halliburton, especially in game five. Maybe they should have used him a little more like that. But, uh, there, there was a lot of times where he just felt like the odd man out. He felt like the drummer in the rock band or the second guitarist. And, uh, Listen, this is a league where players butter each other up. Players text each other, you should come here. People wink, wink all the time. Agents have off the record conversations with people they shouldn't be having. And the moment other people feel like, yeah, that guy might be a little unhappy. You just, you kind of have to monitor it.

• 14:54Bill Simmons?

  And he's in a situation where I think he's the ideal third piece for San Antonio, right? A team like that. And San Antonio is going to have some flexibility and they have a bunch of picks. And it's a team like that that can start batting their eyelashes at Bridges in a different way. And for the Knicks, that matters because if he doesn't sign an extension this summer and bets on himself, now you're potentially screwed. And I think they have to extend him this summer, period. They have to keep these five guys together, these four guys and the town's asset, whether they trade it or keep it, they have to keep that nucleus together. And he's a huge piece of this. So if you sign him to an extension,

• 15:38Bill Simmons?

  it still helps you this year going forward. You know how much money you have and he likes playing with these guys. And obviously, I just refuse to believe that wasn't a piece of this. I'm not saying he demanded they fire the coach, but you can tell if somebody's all in on their, on their coach or not, just as a, as a unit, as a player or whatever. And this gives them a better chance to figure out this Bridges thing. Which brings me to the fifth piece, the extra dynamics. I think one of the things that was, I don't want to say underreported about the Knicks because people do about it, but there's kind of quietly a lot of people in the kitchen. And I'm not going to say there's a lot of chefs in the kitchen, right? There's Leon and Wes built this team.

• 16:22Bill Simmons?

  And they worked for Dolan, who's the owner, who I think really loved the Knicks renaissance. There's been reports about him handpicking where every single celebrity and everybody sat courtside every game. And I think he really was re-engaged, especially when you think like from 2022, or 2002, all the way to maybe 2021. Wasn't it fun 20 years to own the Knicks and be named James Dolan? So, you know, he's in there, he's got his buddies in there. He's typical rich guy owner. So you're worried about him. Jalen Brunson's dad is an assistant coach, Rick Brunson.

• 17:01Bill Simmons?

  And Tips can say all that he wants about, no, no, it was great to have Jalen's dad there. Was it?

• 17:07Bill Simmons?

  Was it awesome to coach Jalen Brunson, but also have his dad be your assistant?

• 17:14Bill Simmons?

  We see so many times in NFL and NBA specifically, when you have people, um, coaching staff and then somebody leaves and somebody gets the job and then you hear afterwards like, oh, man, that, that wasn't great and that person shanked this person. I'm not saying, I'm not saying Rick Brunson shanked anybody. I'm just saying that's a weird dynamic. When you then add Carl Anthony Towns comes in, his dad is super involved, right? You have the Villanova guys as a group. These guys have all this history together, right? Jalen, uh, Josh Hart, Bridges. So you have all these different little factions. You have family members. You have people that have real connections to Wes and Leon, like Rick Brunson, who's one of Wes's oldest friends.

• 17:58Bill Simmons?

  He's got tentacles going everywhere and Tips is rowing the same, in the same way on the boat with a lot of these people. But then, once that starts to shift,

• 18:09Bill Simmons?

  that gets a little dicey, right? And the Knicks, again, are locked into these five guys. Once they do that Towns trade for Randall and DiFenzenzo, and they break up those contracts, and they break up the flexibility of them and trade them, now they're in the Towns business. Now they have to figure out, how are we going to have a team built around five guys, two of whom are the really smart teams are going to attack constantly. See that as well. And then, uh,

• 18:35Bill Simmons?

  I just don't think that was great. And I think they did a nice job of pretending that everything was hunky dory, but obviously not, because Tips just came within two wins of the finals and got fired. So there was some real stuff going on here. There's some conspiracy stuff too. Again, I'm taping this. It's 2:15. It might've already been a motion now, but Johnny Bryant, who I think is an assistant, and some people like there, he may, he was named one of the two finalists for the Suns job. That happened five hours later. Tips got fired. I'm just flagging it.

• 19:05Bill Simmons?

  There's a Jay Wright possibility that I think I floated on my Sunday podcast, the old Villanova coach, does he want to coach again? I don't know.

• 19:13Bill Simmons?

  Mike Malone's sitting there, but the Johnny Bryant one, I think that's the one I would probably shove the chips toward that bet. Whether that's a good idea, I have no idea. But if you're trying to get everyone on the boat roaming one way and you're worried you're going to lose to the Suns, maybe. The deeper conspiracy stuff is they're about to trade Towns for KD and KD doesn't want to play for Tibbs. Again, don't aggregate that. Do not aggregate that. I'm just saying, it's if you're trying to figure out, why would they fire a coach when they're two wins away from the finals if they think they have a move coming? Did KD want to play for a certain coach? Did Giannis want to play for a certain coach? I have no idea. Do not aggregate it. Just pointing out, like, maybe a month from now,

• 19:57Bill Simmons?

  that part will make way more sense. Like, oh, of course, because this guy was coming in and he wanted this guy. That's how the league works, unfortunately. My guess would be Johnny Bryant. But in general, like, Tibbs lasted five years. There were real cracks there in the last year that you could feel and you could hear when you talk to different people. And I think this is a complicated team's coach, because you have Brunson, who took less money to stay with the team, at least for two years, whose dad is one of the assistants, who I promise you, he's not going anywhere. You have this huge Towns contract that's got four years left after this, after the

• 20:37Bill Simmons?

  season that just ended, that ends with 61 million. Do you keep that? How many teams would even want it with the second apron stuff? You have all the second apron stuff looming, repeater tax stuff. And you don't really have a ton of ways to make this roster better, except for some of the lower mid-level exemption stuff and whether potentially they would want to. Trade Mitchell Robinson, which I would not do. And could they be a Yanis team? Anyway, there's a lot going on here, but this is the NBA in 2025. You can coach a team to a four seed. You can win 10 playoff games. You can look back at an Indiana series and go, holy shit. If we hadn't blown game one, we'd be in the finals right now, which I think is a fair thing for the Knicks to think.

• 21:21Bill Simmons?

  And you could still lose your job. And I have a ton of Knicks fans in my life and they're pretty split on this. I have some people in my life who are like, thank fucking God. This is Mark Jackson, Larry Brown all over again. Thank God they did this. And then I have some other people in my life who are like, this seems super dysfunctional. And every, the Knicks, we loved that team two years ago. And since then they've traded for Karl Anthony Towns and they fired Tibbs. So in the span of 13 months, we went from, we love this team to, what are we doing? We'll see where it goes. But the most important thing is the Knicks are relevant again. Not only are they relevant as a team that wins games and has really good players, including one of the best 10 players in the league, but they're making news and it's not news like this terrible thing happened. They did a stupid trade.

• 22:05Bill Simmons?

  Oh my God, why'd they do this? Although I guess why you fire your coaches or why'd they do this? But you know what I mean? The Knicks are relevant in a different way. And there's a moment here and the best case scenario is this is 03 Larry Brown and the Pistons. So one other thing I wanted to say for the finals before we take a break. Cause I wanted to make a finals pick really quick and I really wanted to do OKC in a sweep. Even though I, as you know, I respect Indiana. I've been picking them every round or picking them as a possible upside or saying Pacers in six are the best bets, et cetera, et cetera. I think OKC is absolute freaking juggernaut.

• 22:46Bill Simmons?

  To have a chance to go 84 and 18 or 84 and 19, you were in a list of six, seven teams in the history of the league. They have a chance to have one of the best seasons ever. I don't think any of us would say that's one of the greatest teams ever. There's a performance slash in their prime slash, they don't have one of the best seven, eight to nine players of all time at the absolute peak of their powers piece that they don't have. They might have it two years from now.

• 23:17Bill Simmons?

  But this is a truly great team. And I broke down on this pod a few days ago about all the way they're just torching people at home in the playoffs. They're eight and one in the playoffs. The one loss was by two points and the other eight wins were like by 233 points. So they just kill teams. And I really wanted to pick a final sweep because I thought everyone's going to pick OKC in five. Can I zag? Is there a smart zag actually? But man, you go through the history of final sweeps.

• 23:47Bill Simmons?

  There's been nine in 78 years. Let's start there. So you're batting about

• 23:55Bill Simmons?

  11%? I wasn't good at percentages. Last one, 2018 Golden State over Cleveland. Think about that series. Cleveland should have won. Cleveland could have won. LeBron played the best game I've ever seen him play. They squandered that one and then end up losing in four. But that first game was pretty close. Like to sweep somebody in the finals, you have to be so much better than them. 2007 San Antonio over Cleveland is a good example. LeBron drags Cleveland in the finals. The team sucks. San Antonio's last really great Spurs year of Duncan's prime. They kill him. 02 Lakers over the Nets, which we that was the last gasp of that awesome, awesome

• 24:37Bill Simmons?

  Shaq Kobe run. They had just snuck by Sacramento. There was some buzz with with Jersey that maybe watch out Jason Kidd and then the the Lakers just killed him. Houston over Orlando, which was an upset. Houston wasn't even favored in this series, but that was yet another. It was like the JR Smith game, a fluky moment of Nick Anderson missing four free throws in a row and swinging the karma of that series in a way that I've almost never seen anything like that. You don't you really have to compare it. It was like the that first Indiana New York game from a that was so amazing that I actually think the series just swung. So anyway, they end up sweeping. The Pistons killed the Lakers in 89 and that was a

• 25:22Bill Simmons?

  we have arrived as the new champs. The Lakers were on their last legs in a lot of ways. They had some injuries. I don't think that necessarily should have been a sweep. 83, the Sixers killed the Lakers and then pre-merger.

• 25:35Bill Simmons?

  Warriors killed the Bullets. The Bucks killed, I think, the Bullets and then the Celtics. That was in 1971. Warriors were 75 and then the Celtics, their one sweep during the Russell era was 1959 against Minnesota. In all of those cases, pretty great teams. See that piece. 18 series have ended 4-1. And then if you're talking about like biggest odds and how it played out. Just this century, teams are favored by minus 400 or more. Denver minus 430 in 2023, they went in five. Golden State was almost 1100 in 18, they swept. San Antonio is minus 450 in 07, swept.

• 26:17Bill Simmons?

  Lakers were 7-1 favorites against the Pistons in 04 and lost the series 4-1. The Lakers were minus 750 against the Nets and they swept. Minus 2000 in 2001 against the Sixers, they lost the overtime game, won the rest. And the Souths 4-1 and then 4-2 against Indiana, which was a dumb line.

• 26:39Bill Simmons?

  LA was minus 800 in 2000.

• 26:45Bill Simmons?

  I think 4-1 is the move. I hate doing it. It feels very bandwagon-y. It's plus 190, I think, on FanDuel. I think it's the move. I think Indiana gets one of these games. And maybe even on the road. But they're going to play zone, they're going to push the pace, they're going to do that thing that they love to do where they, they play with such a fast pace, you get caught up in it and like, we could play this too. And now you're on a track meet with them. But I think, big picture, this is just, just such an awful matchup for them because their best thing is their guards and the ball handling and OKC, that's their best thing is basically making life miserable for guards. That's the number one thing. That's how they killed Minnesota with Mike Conley.

• 27:27Bill Simmons?

  That's why they struggled a little bit against Denver because Jokic basically became the guard. But just in general, this is like, OKC does everything Indiana does. Way better. And this for Indy to win even more than one game, they would have to have win one of the first two, have a game three or game four, because OKC is a little more vulnerable on the road because they're young. We saw that in the Minnesota series, the Denver series, even in Memphis when they fell behind by 20 plus. So I think, I think OKC takes one kind of haymaker from Indy in the first two games, maybe fights it off, kills them in the other game, like kills, they'll win one of the first two games by like 28. Then

• 28:06Bill Simmons?

  game three, maybe that's the one Indy gets, come out, Indiana's going nuts, OKC's feeling it a little bit, Indy's playing with crazy pace, then OKC figures it out and they win in five. So I'm going to say OKC in five. And it's boring, but that's my official 2025 finals pick. I'll be rooting for Indiana because I want this to be a long series. Anyway, we're gonna take a break and come back with Pablo Torre. This episode is brought to you by Verbo Private Vacation Rentals. Verbo, you can save over $200 on select homes when you stay for a week or more. Say if you wanted to go catch a couple of baseball games in

• 28:48Bill Simmons?

  Boston, take some time off work, fly into Beantown, watch the Sox play. After that, you can do anything. You can go book a Verbo in Cape Cod for a week. The world is your oyster, or your lobster roll, or clam chowder. Really, it has shells, gills, and it's indigenous to the Atlantic. It's your edible metaphor of choice. They're crustacean crazy around there. Guess what? Since you stayed longer than a week, you saved over $200. You know what that means? More shellfish. I love shellfish. Hope you're not allergic. Next vacation, stay longer and save. Make it a Verbo. All right, we're taping this Tuesday morning. Pablo Torre is here. We're beefing.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:24Bill Simmons?

  Big beef.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  What camera can I look into just to stress how angry I am?

• 29:29Bill Simmons?

  It's such a beef.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 29:31Bill Simmons?

  We know a lot of the same people. We have a lot of mutual friends. We have a disagreement about this Belichick thing, and I thought it'd be fun just to... Argue about it.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:41Bill Simmons?

  Embrace debate like old school 2010 ESPN. Jamie Horowitz.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. Yeah, we can do we can do PTI from hell and make Tony Kornheiser disappointed in both of us. I do want to stress, A, thank you for having me in your lovely studio.

• 29:55Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, brand new. We got Sly, we got Swayze.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wish I could say that I flew here for this specifically, if people are wondering why I'm in LA. I was here for other things, other fancy highfalutin things.

• 30:06Bill Simmons?

  You were here for an award show.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  I was here for the Peabodys. And so when I was alerted to the beef that I had yet to engage in.

• 30:14Bill Simmons?

  From a podcast that was six days ago?

• 30:16Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 30:16Bill Simmons?

  That nobody said anything?

• 30:17Speaker 01

  That's right. Not a great investigation by my part.

• 30:19Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Just to figure out when and where this was set. But I was there, like, pathetically, like, looking at my phone as very serious. Journalism was honored, and I was, like, totally distracted. So fuck you for that.

• 30:32Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I'm sorry.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  You know, ruining the crowning. The crowning journalistic nomination of my life while being questioned for being a real journalist, which is what bothered me, Bill.

• 30:44Bill Simmons?

  I know, but let's talk about that, because I didn't feel like I was doing that. I was I felt like I was questioning.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Is this the table? This is the table, by the way, where Chris and Van were like, Bill.

• 30:54Bill Simmons?

  This is the table. It's funny. We brought you to the scene of the crime. I was questioning the story more than the journalism, but I think that was I think that was probably my disconnect with it was you were doing real journalism. That's the point of your show. My thing was I thought it was stupid.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Which part?

• 31:12Bill Simmons?

  Well, just like Belichick, like, ultimately, he's a guy in his mid 70s. I guess he's never coaching in the NFL again at this point. He's dating this 24 year old. And I it kind of feels like he's lost the steering wheel a little bit.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Well, you said a number of things that I think are very interesting.

• 31:29Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  And which is kind of why I've devoted a disturbing percentage of my life, admittedly, to this. Like, Jordan Hudson, this is a sentence that I'm not proud of saying either, but Jordan Hudson tweeted or retweeted about me saying I need a hobby, a new hobby. She's not wrong.

• 31:45Bill Simmons?

  So you so it was pretty polarizing even within your circles. Like, why do you care about this so much?

• 31:50Speaker 01

  On the episodes we did, we've done two of them in a docu-style, you know, way in which I basically unboxed journalism for friends.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  They made fun of me. So this whole thing of like, I, of course, I'm here to acknowledge the absurdity of guy who won an Edward R. Murrow Award for an episode about trans athletes, also being the guy who has like this, uh, you know, I'm, the reason I'm like a dog with a bone on this, um, speaks to some of the, some of the things you just said.

• 32:21Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  One of the things that I found baffling was that you just depersonalized Bill Balaschek into a guy in his seventies. I'm like, Bill, you more than anyone else know why Bill Balaschek is fascinating.

• 32:34Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  And why the archetype of him, who was the paragon of discipline, privacy, do your job, defensive strategy, public relations mastery. The guy had in his office at Gillette, Sun Tzu, The Art of War, you know, the war, the battle is won or lost before it even begins.

• 32:53Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  And so just him as this unique archetype in American life, not just sports, but American life, that you personally, of course, have a deep understanding of.

• 33:02Bill Simmons?

  Six Super Bowls.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  I said, I'm told he's the greatest coach of all time.

• 33:06Bill Simmons?

  I think he is.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Well, in that case, we should consider him significant enough to fact check, certainly interrogate when it comes to why is he acting the opposite from the way that Bill Simmons remembers him?

• 33:17Bill Simmons?

  Well, I think that thing for me is it felt like you did the podcast for whatever reason, and it's a dopey thing, but I'm the same person who just did a rewatchable's episode about Alfred Justice with Steven Seagal.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, you did criticize me on a Heaven Can Wait centric.

• 33:31Bill Simmons?

  I did.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Rewatchable.

• 33:32Bill Simmons?

  A movie that came out in 1978.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 33:35Bill Simmons?

  So, and also like when I was doing my mailbag once upon a time, when we talked yesterday, it's like, yeah, I used to obsess over a bunch of dumb shit and try to answer questions like this.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Well, used to?

• 33:44Bill Simmons?

  Well, maybe still do.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  We both take stupid things seriously.

• 33:49Bill Simmons?

  But I guess that the difference here is I felt like you were then dining on it and doing a bunch of things. And that, the media tour was what bugged me more, which I'm happy to discuss.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  So I have questions for you. One of the questions I have.

• 34:00Bill Simmons?

  Because now, now I guess I'm part of the media tour.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, which camera can I break the fourth wall into?

• 34:05Bill Simmons?

  Jesus.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Why did it bother you? The media tour, the quote unquote media tour, and I can explain what that was even from my perspective, of course.

• 34:14Bill Simmons?

  Okay, because I think if you're gonna do a story like this, to me, there's a, there's kind of a fun element, right? This is like in a Nicole Smith, what was that guy's name?

• 34:25Speaker 01

  If one of your producers can yell the name of that older man in the wheelchair who looked infirm and.

• 34:29Bill Simmons?

  It seemed like you were so serious about it. I was like, why is he treating this like Watergate? Ultimately, who fucking cares that this guy is dating somebody who's 50 years younger than him? Who wants to be on his work emails? Is this actually an important story or is this just a fun story to get clicks?

• 34:45Speaker 01

  I feel like.

• 34:45Bill Simmons?

  That was my issue. Is that fair?

• 34:48Speaker 01

  You are not alone in that. More than, more than fair, it's, I would say, a popular perception of what it is that I've done. If you only consume it via the aggregated, and this is now where I sound like you.

• 35:01Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  I am bothered by the aggregation insofar as it did not lead people towards the story, which was exhaustively reported, citing 11 sources in which we are in fact laughing at the story and ourselves insofar as, of course, part of what I do in taking stupid things seriously is apply real, award-winning investigative journalism, but to stories that real people find fascinating. And so the thing I'm bugged by with you beyond the.

• 35:27Bill Simmons?

  You're still bugged?

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Well, beyond the credulous.

• 35:29Bill Simmons?

  Thought this was like a beef squash.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Well, we'll see by the end. We'll find out together.

• 35:33Bill Simmons?

  We're gonna be fine.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  The thing that I am baffled by more.

• 35:37Bill Simmons?

  I'm gonna have David Chang come in, throw some, throw some kimchi at you.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Some knives.

• 35:42Bill Simmons?

  He's cooking in the back. He's gonna cook for us after this is done.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Chang is very, is very, I'm sure bothered that the two of us are, are.

• 35:49Bill Simmons?

  No, he, not only is he not bothered.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  Bogogi beefing.

• 35:52Bill Simmons?

  First of all, Chang loves conflict.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, he does.

• 35:55Bill Simmons?

  He's, he's a dark guy with a lot of dark things inside him. But he's also like, you guys should just do a pot. It'll be fun.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  But, okay, so to torture the metaphor here, right? The recipe of why I actually wanted to do this.

• 36:06Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  It was important. It is important. So I'll just give you the, the very brief log line of this.

• 36:11Bill Simmons?

  Well, tell me the, what you think the most important thing is before you do the log line.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 36:15Bill Simmons?

  So you think this is important because you feel like this guy is losing his marbles, but he's also in charge of a North Carolina football program?

• 36:22Speaker 01

  I think this is important because Bill Belichick himself is a significant figure. And he is the highest paid employee in the state of North Carolina. He makes $10 million a year in taxpayer money. And also.

• 36:34Bill Simmons?

  Might be making that money back for the school.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Well, we shall see.

• 36:38Bill Simmons?

  But did you watch a lot of North Carolina football last year?

• 36:41Speaker 01

  But this speaks to actually the real reason why I'm interested is that this is not merely a wow, an age gap relationship story because frankly, this is not, my podcast is not a puritanical one in which I'm saying, mm, uh, they should find someone more in their age range. That's not what it is at all.

• 36:59Bill Simmons?

  You're not being the moral authority.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no. What this is though, is to me, a story in which one guy who we understood to be the actual archetype of one way of living life in America as a public figure.

• 37:13Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Deeply private, do your job, PR, fuck the media.

• 37:18Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Is now pivoting after he's thrown out of the NFL bill, as you well remember, right? And has to launch a half dozen media enterprises that he hands to a woman that yes, he met, as we reported on a plane when she was, and this was not known until we reported it, 19 years old, and he says, you're going to be my gateway into public life. And then the CBS thing happens and that's when the floodgates open. So to me, there is a media story, there's a business story, there's a college sports story, there's a public money story, there's an NFL story. The question, by the way, of why didn't the NFL want Bill Belichick? What we reported.

• 37:57Bill Simmons?

  Well, that's.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Well, please, I don't want to filibuster the whole time, but like, why do you think Bill Belichick wasn't brought back?

• 38:02Bill Simmons?

  He ran his course. I think Kraft probably shit on him to the other owners. And the question of if I bring in, you own a team, it's a $5 billion, $6 billion business. You bring this guy in who thinks he's better than you, who doesn't want your opinion on anything, people just don't want to do that.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  So what I have been reporting is that it's also, it's also the case that people did not trust who Bill Belichick wanted to bring into their building. And so this question, which you know of like.

• 38:28Bill Simmons?

  So you think that was the case a year ago or?

• 38:31Speaker 01

  What we report in the second episode is that, and I found, I mean, this is, there's a thing on the website of the New England Patriots, Gillette Stadium, called a fan camp.

• 38:43Bill Simmons?

  Okay.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  And we found Bill Belichick's seats, he has a row of seats right underneath the overhang, near the 50 yard line, and they're his seats. And we found Jordan Hudson sitting there in November 2021.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  So you could say-

• 38:58Bill Simmons?

  Trying to think what the record was that year.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  It wasn't good.

• 39:01Bill Simmons?

  Year after Mac Jones.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  It wasn't good. And so what I've been hearing parallel to this is that-

• 39:06Bill Simmons?

  Cam Newton's season. I can't remember.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  I refer to you on how shitty it was to be you at that time.

• 39:12Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I don't think about 2020s.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And by the way, parallel to this is that I've also heard that by the end, Bill Belichick wasn't exactly dialed in in the way that even people on the Patriots wanted him to be.

• 39:25Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  And I mean, from above and below. And so the question of, and this speaks to the larger question of Bill Belichick, the guy is a football genius without question. Without question.

• 39:36Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  But his coaching tree, right? Think about the branches on it.

• 39:43Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Who does he got? Seriously, who does he have?

• 39:45Bill Simmons?

  Well, he does a lot of his own shit. I think a lot of people have gotten jobs because of him.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 39:51Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 39:52Bill Simmons?

  But it worked. So I don't know what's the criticism.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  But this is the story, is that Bill Belichick freed from the NFL, in which he has been terrible at picking people around him to support him, who could stand on their own two feet, and in fact are these remora fish, right, attached to him and his business.

• 40:10Bill Simmons?

  So you don't like third place Miss Maine?

• 40:12Speaker 01

  Well, second runner up, I believe.

• 40:15Bill Simmons?

  Second runner up, that's what we say?

• 40:16Speaker 01

  That's what we say in the world of beauty.

• 40:17Bill Simmons?

  Tough loss, I was rooting for her. No-

• 40:19Speaker 01

  The betting markets, the betting markets.

• 40:21Bill Simmons?

  Were there odds?

• 40:23Speaker 01

  I was, I was hoping that there would be a Bill Simmons super boost on Jordan Hudson.

• 40:27Bill Simmons?

  Like a same game parlay?

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Same game parlay.

• 40:29Bill Simmons?

  Could have done her with one other word?

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 40:31Bill Simmons?

  I would have tried that.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  But the question is, okay, this guy who teams already knew to be bad at developing, supporting talent from a just managerial perspective. And let's just, I will name them so you don't have to, right? Matt Patricia, right? Josh McDaniels.

• 40:49Bill Simmons?

  Well, Josh is overqualified offensive coordinator, underqualified head coach.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Your guy Mike Lombardi.

• 40:56Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  I mean, he needed

• 40:59Bill Simmons?

  Raiders.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  To get this job at Carolina, to get a job of some promise.

• 41:02Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, but that's just people taking care of whatever. I mean, we, we know a lot of people that do that.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  No question.

• 41:07Bill Simmons?

  Maybe even in the media.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Maybe even, maybe even people that we both know or used to know and like.

• 41:13Bill Simmons?

  Right, right.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  So, no question. But the point is, when it comes to Bill Belichick now, leaving the Patriots, and being trusted with staffing a building, teams didn't trust who was around him. And one of the people who was around him, I'm saying, as early as November 2021, and certainly by the time of the Ring camera, which was released in November 2023, but happened to be taped because, again, I took a stupid thing seriously and went to the Airbnb after summoning an army of GeoGuessers. You know what a GeoGuessers is? Like, these guys who like-

• 41:43Bill Simmons?

  I didn't listen to that podcast.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  I know. I don't think you listen to either podcast in full.

• 41:47Bill Simmons?

  Well, I'll say this.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Can we, can we just establish that?

• 41:50Bill Simmons?

  Well, first of all-

• 41:50Speaker 01

  It's okay, it's okay. But I just want-

• 41:52Bill Simmons?

  I think the disconnect here is I didn't understand part of the point of this podcast is you will investigate something no matter how stupid it is.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  But also, I will make the case as to why it's actually worth your time.

• 42:04Bill Simmons?

  You think this one wasn't stupid because of all of these things, the case you're laying out with Belichick? My thing is, where's the line when you, when you deep dive something like this? Where's the line where it's like, alright, I probably shouldn't do that versus, no, this is fair game? Like, let's say Popovich. Like, Popovich has, I think, a stroke, right, in October, November? And then it's like, is he coming back? Is he not coming back? If you would just dove into that, why aren't they telling us the truth about Greg Popovich? You could have done good journalism about it, but is that a story you would want to do? I would say no.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  And we haven't, incidentally, although there have been rumors that I think both. So, I think this is an important distinction, actually, and I thank, I thank you for letting me articulate what journalism even is anymore. Because you're right, like, the Columbia School of Journalism might not cosign everything I'm doing from a just topic selection perspective.

• 42:52Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  But that's why I launched this independently. You know, like, I wanted to pick the stories and investigate the stories and prove that these stories, according to my own curiosity and journalism, were worthwhile. So Popovich, for instance, yeah, I don't think that, I don't think that private medical records for a sick man alone justify a deep dive, multi-part investigation.

• 43:16Bill Simmons?

  I would agree.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  But give every other ingredient that we've been talking about with the Bill Balachek story in there, and it's like, yeah, I want to make a docu-style treatment of something that legitimately, I think, has connections to real stories that we've been covering without full knowledge for years. And so a parallel one to this, by the way, and I'll bring it up because people have criticized me for it as well, is the question that was at the heart of the whole Stephen A. LeBron beef.

• 43:42Bill Simmons?

  That was the, that was the other time I felt like, ah.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  So to me, right?

• 43:48Bill Simmons?

  I don't should, because to me, that's about Kobe's widow and maybe decisions that she made at the funeral, and why are we talking about this?

• 43:55Speaker 01

  Well, I think to get to that impression, you got to explain why it's plausible that that might be the takeaway from any understanding of this beef between Stephen A. and LeBron, what really happened. And so to me, like, what I like to do is, because, Phil, I know that you know lots of stuff, you don't say into a microphone.

• 44:13Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 44:14Bill Simmons?

  Well, you're doing the curious thing.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  And, and it's important for me to use this network of strange weirdos that I have gotten to know, famous people and GMs and owners, and-

• 44:24Bill Simmons?

  You do know a lot of weirdos.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  I, my rolodex over, I mean, I started Sports Illustrated as a fact checker.

• 44:28Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  I've collected since then through ESPN and otherwise, a bunch of people who, for some reason, trust me, and what I want to do is take these nuggets that you both, you and I both find fascinating.

• 44:40Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  And turn it into reporting insofar as I can actually report them out. And so the LeBron thing, LeBron not being at Kobe Bryant's memorial, right? On paper, in isolation, as an aggregated headline, is so beyond the pale, right? Like, it's bad taste, anybody can mourn how they wish, and all of that is true, right? On some level, in isolation, that's true. But to me, the story was, wait a minute, how is it that the most public celebration of a man's life, at Staples Center, live, Beyonce, Jimmy Kimmel, right? Every celebrity, every, it was a royal, it was a state funeral. And so the question of-

• 45:21Bill Simmons?

  Well, and also there was reporting that he was there.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  And there was reporting specifically that he was there that was strange because no one could provide any indication that there was consensus around it. It was all very confusing.

• 45:33Bill Simmons?

  So the hook for you is you felt like this was a piece of the Stephen A. LeBron thing?

• 45:38Speaker 01

  It was a thing that everybody was arguing about in public, but no one had reported.

• 45:42Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  And so I was like, I'm gonna report this out.

• 45:44Bill Simmons?

  That's when you're like, that feels like an episode for me.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  And in the episode in full, just to be very clear, on my show, I do explain all of the context and the reasoning such that people who are skeptical about my ethics or my motives understand why I think it's interesting. And all I can do is hope that they find it persuasive. And if they don't, that's okay.

• 46:04Bill Simmons?

  The ethics are one thing because you're doing real reporting.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 46:08Bill Simmons?

  The motives are where you open yourself up a little bit because from afar, somebody could look at and go, you're just doing this because you want clicks.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Okay, so-

• 46:16Bill Simmons?

  Right? And I'm sure you've heard that.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  But Bill, I think everybody who's ever made something online has heard that.

• 46:22Bill Simmons?

  True.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  It's like, unfortunately, the death of the classifieds in newspapers, the death of the cable bundle in television has led us as independent media people to have to subsist by basically putting onto an altar your content and hoping that the sun god that is the algorithm shines upon us.

• 46:42Bill Simmons?

  The algorithm's getting worse.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  It's, and it's worse. And so to me, it's like, yes, we have to play the game. And it's not, look, it's not Hollywood where it's one for me, one for you. It's not what I'm doing here. I believe in every episode to a degree that is almost disturbingly sincere.

• 46:58Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  But to me, the whole game here is if I'm gonna do a Peabody Award nominated episode about why it is at the end of their lives on death row, all of these sports fans spend their last words, literal last words, shouting out their favorite sports team, which leads us to an episode in which we go to a supermax facility in Texas and a man named Charles Flores, who was unjustly sentenced because of police hypnosis, ends up being the character? Like, that's not gonna be as popular as the Belichick stuff or the LeBron stuff.

• 47:31Bill Simmons?

  You're doing the Belichick stuff to get people to listen to the-

• 47:35Speaker 01

  That's, we need to be-

• 47:37Bill Simmons?

  That's how I feel with the Star Wars rewatchables, setting up Out for Justice.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  I just want you to acknowledge that you just compared my Peabody nominated journalism to your Star Wars rewatchable.

• 47:48Bill Simmons?

  I was using an analogy.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Noted. I'm a Star Wars fan, so I have.

• 47:53Bill Simmons?

  No, I get it. It's a one for us, one for you.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  But it's not even specifically just that because it's not, look, you know, I'm trying to think of the Hollywood example.

• 48:02Bill Simmons?

  Well, but wait, are there, I mean, are there ideas you went down the road with and you backed off?

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 48:08Bill Simmons?

  It must have been, right? So what are the reasons you back off?

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Because I don't think I could get it on the record. I don't think I could report it. I don't, so even more troublingly, I think the question of like, what is journalism today? To me, the fundamental question, the the difference and key distinction between gossip and journalism is that we are definitively saying we have reported this and we believe based on all of these sources and and facts and bits of research that it's true. It's not, ah, I heard this thing, might be true, might not be. No, we are rigorously investigating something in order to say we are here to publish this as true.

• 48:45Bill Simmons?

  So for Belichick then, you're reporting and you're trying to determine these things are true. So the things that are true are teams backed off for him on the NFL partly because of this weird Jordan Hudson situation, you believe.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  They were aware of this, had questions about the Ring Cam video. I don't think they knew necessarily that she was at a game in November of 2021, but I do know that lots of people around the Patriots knew that, that she was around.

• 49:16Bill Simmons?

  See, I would say the thing that was more, I'm not to sidetrack you, but the thing that was more troubling with Belichick was the way he was doing that job. And I've talked about this on the pod where he's basically doing everything. At some point, because of your age, does not become sustainable.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 49:30Bill Simmons?

  And he's trying to do all the draft, all the free agency, every single aspect of everything. And the proof that he couldn't do that was in all the moves from basically like 2017 on with the roster, the draft picks.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:43Bill Simmons?

  The free agent signings. It just felt like, and that was, I still felt like he was an excellent coach. But the other stuff was submarine and the coach, which was him.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  And this is why I think this is a story. So I should say this on our call and we're gonna jump around here, so forgive me, but like, when you called me saying you should come on my show, I reminded you that I emailed.

• 50:05Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  So the media tour, just to close the loop on that briefly, I responded to incoming requests because people found the story fascinating.

• 50:12Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Because the New York Times, Vanity Fair, certainly every NBC, Good Morning America, everybody wanted a piece of this story.

• 50:21Bill Simmons?

  Good Morning America.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  I mean, Belichick lounge, the Strahan.

• 50:24Bill Simmons?

  But it actually seemed like some people just took the story and didn't credit you for their reporting.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  Also that, also that.

• 50:30Bill Simmons?

  I thought that was an interesting wrinkle to it, where you started the ball rolling and then it just became its own story, but people would have mentioned the podcast.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  So part of what's weird about doing investigative journalism in this way on a podcast is that people sometimes just assume that I'm also simply aggregating. And so they're just facts that are exclusive to my reporting that people just started reprinting in papers of record. And I'm like, this is strange. Again, I asked for it. I'm doing podcast investigative journalism, but it's not, it's, it's, it's been funny to watch how that stuff gets made down.

• 51:02Bill Simmons?

  That's a last seven, eight years thing.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  You think so?

• 51:04Bill Simmons?

  I do. I do. I think that's a, I think social media plays a big part of that. The Apple news where, you know, people just click, oh, what's that story? And like some pick a generic magazine and they basically just have the bones of a story. I think AI grabs some of the stuff too.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Well, I know, I know that all of this feels harder to fact check. And so fundamentally for me, the question is, what am I fact checking? Is it interesting? Can I solve this mystery? Can I advance public knowledge, even if that knowledge is mostly interesting to sports fans who take sports very seriously? But politics are like this, by the way. So there are lots of Trump stories, for instance, where the story itself is deeply stupid.

• 51:45Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Like, the actual thing happening is stupid, but if you consider the people important, you're like, An interesting development in our understanding of this very significant American. And that's my perspective on how sports is both smart and stupid. And you know this.

• 52:01Bill Simmons?

  It is true.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  I'm in a building that is premised on your empire doing something very similar to that.

• 52:07Bill Simmons?

  I still am staring at you right now.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 52:09Bill Simmons?

  I mean, that is a great one.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  I feel, I feel many great Americans gazing upon me as I try to figure out, am I doing something that is worthy of attention? Or cravenly seeking it because I'm a creature of the internet who wants the algorithm to love me?

• 52:24Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  I am not unself-aware about the way in which it's really hard to disentangle those two premises. But what I told you in the email was like, Bill, I think you'd be uniquely qualified to have a view on this. And it's because of everything we've got into, unfortunately, because at this table, while talking about Heaven Can Wait, you said I was pretending to be a journalist.

• 52:45Bill Simmons?

  I didn't say, that's not what, you know what I meant, though.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Now I'm just making fun of you.

• 52:49Bill Simmons?

  But my thing was, you were approaching it like this was like important journalism. And I just didn't feel like it was.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  But do you understand, though?

• 52:57Bill Simmons?

  I understand it better now. That's why I wanted to talk to you about it. I get, I get why you're doing what you're doing, but you have to understand how I was seeing it. Whereas like, it just seems like you're thirsty and you're trying to get clicks and then doing a bunch of interviews about the podcast.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  So.

• 53:10Bill Simmons?

  And I like Belichick, and there's a small piece of this that felt a little mean to me because I don't know what's going on with him. Because that's, that's over here.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  Shall we talk about what's over here?

• 53:19Bill Simmons?

  I think we should. I, I think this is kind of alarming how this has gone for the last couple of months. And again, I mean, obviously I'm a lifelong Patriot fan. I really admired everything he's built and stuff. And something about this makes me uneasy. I think this is really weird, which I guess is the whole point of why you did the podcast.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Bill.

• 53:42Bill Simmons?

  But I think there's other stuff that was weird that happens in sports where I'm like, eh. Maybe leave that on the side. So the question is whether, but you're making the fact that he's the highest paid employee in North Carolina, like those, all right, maybe.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  But what if I told you now, again, not to quote 30 for 30, you know, language back at you. What if I told you that Bill Belichick's own family has been deeply concerned about this? What if I told you that his inner circle of actual coaches on staff, including a certain Mike Lombardi, is deeply concerned about Jordan Hudson and her presence in the building?

• 54:15Bill Simmons?

  Who's the one, Edelman or Gronk, one of those? Somebody said on a pod?

• 54:19Speaker 01

  They've all.

• 54:19Bill Simmons?

  Somebody, somebody who was kind of in the circle.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:23Bill Simmons?

  Talked about it, being concerned. I thought that was, and then there was some Instagram stuff too with, uh, who is it? Like somebody's wife or somebody's?

• 54:31Speaker 01

  The, the people around Belichick professionally, personally, as well as the administrators at North Carolina, their life behind the scenes has been shaped, reshaped, blown up by having to deal with Jordan Hudson. And when they hired Bill Belichick to this job, they thought they were getting New England Bill Belichick. They got, I cannot stress this enough, something like the exact opposite. When it comes to PR in this way is now the thing we're stressed out about. This guy who could handle the media alone by saying nothing, has this person who's on tape at CBS, and I can tell you, by the way, I don't know if I've made enough of a deal on my own shows about this, wherever she goes.

• 55:15Bill Simmons?

  Shows?

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Well, what I'm trying to say is wherever.

• 55:19Bill Simmons?

  You mean episodes?

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Episodes.

• 55:20Bill Simmons?

  Okay. I didn't know there was a show.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  We're doing a spinoff. Just me, just me stalking Jordan Hudson. Um, Pablo Torre finds out what life is like in jail.

• 55:30Bill Simmons?

  That'd be good for algorithm.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it would. Unironically, it would work. Uh, but I don't want to do that. Uh, but what I'm saying is every time she shows up at an interview with Bill, like what she did on the Pivot podcast, like I'm so deep in the lore here, so forgive me if I'm just like. Part of what happened after my reporting was that North Carolina had to clarify, she doesn't work for us. She's not going to be around here. She is only handling Bill's personal stuff. And I ask you, right, in this era, can there possibly be a distinction between Bill Belichick person and Bill Belichick, the face and head of North Carolina football? Like, how can you, when you're promoting a book in which, nope, that's Bill over here,

• 56:17Speaker 01

  of course, it's also Bill Belichick, the North Carolina representative. And so the idea that there is any sort of dividing line, some wall between the two is part of the farce. And when it comes to her in interviews, what I was trying to say is everywhere she goes, CBS, these media ventures behind the scenes over that offseason at NFL Films, in Matt Lohr in Jersey.

• 56:39Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, blew up the Hard Knocks deal.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  Everywhere she goes, there is a trail of wreckage that suggests that the man who was basically undefeated against the media and press conferences is not only losing the public relations war, he is self-destructing. And he hasn't coached a game. And so behind the scenes, all these people are like, again, family, coaches, people around the building that hired him. And again, the chancellor at Carolina wanted him. A D, Bubba Cunningham, did not.

• 57:10Bill Simmons?

  That's his actual name?

• 57:12Speaker 01

  His real name is Bubba Cunningham. It's a bit on the nose.

• 57:15Bill Simmons?

  Sounds like a movie script about Belichick and A D Bubba Cunningham.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  A lot of the story is on the nose in terms of like, wow, it's really like that. Yes. So there is a power struggle.

• 57:25Bill Simmons?

  But it goes back to the last couple of years of the Pats, when it felt like the wheels were starting to come off a little bit. And they bring in Jared Mayo and Kraft anoints Mayo as the successor.

• 57:39Bill Simmons?

  And is still on Belichick's staff. And it seems like it's going to be one year, two years, three years, whatever it is. And Belichick stops talking to Mayo, basically by all reports. And it's just super weird. And at the same time, apparently, he's with this Jordan Hudson. But listen.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  These are the things that are all happening outside of public view. Yes, yes. When Kraft says, Bill.

• 58:01Bill Simmons?

  But I think it got, I think it was weird with them. And look, I mean, that's, Wicker Sham wrote about this in 2017. I got mad at my podcast about that because we're protective about the Pats, right?

• 58:11Speaker 01

  And I get that.

• 58:12Bill Simmons?

  And Wicker Sham's reporting was dead on. I've had him on many times to talk about it. But the Garoppolo thing, Alex Guerrero, there were all these things, Kraft versus Belichick. All of these things are, people were like, there's a problem, there's a problem. And everybody was like, we're fine, we're winning, we're fine. And then it all leads to the dynasty and Belichick writing a book where he doesn't mention Kraft.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  And also the Apple TV documentary.

• 58:34Bill Simmons?

  That's what I meant, it's called the dynasty, right?

• 58:36Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 58:36Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, that Apple documentary.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  In which it's, so the public relations war, right? There's Kraft, there's Belichick, now there's Jordan Hudson. There's everybody trying to control a story that has been deeply embarrassing for everybody involved. And it reminds me of something that Seth wrote in his book. Seth quotes Bob Kraft saying, "Bill Belichick was an idiot savant." And I believe that the more I learn about Bill Belichick outside of football, there is this notion of a guy who is a total genius at football, who has proven in terms of who he surrounds himself with, the decisions he makes, how the people around him are afraid to deal with him,

• 59:19Speaker 01

  even as they are literally in the same room, watching Jordan Hudson, rolling their eyes, some of the coaches on staff. I believe that there is a great deal of this man being a genius and also a fool. And if that feels rude, because Bill Belichick is someone you revere, I just ask you to do this thing.

• 59:39Bill Simmons?

  Revere strong.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  But, but Jordan Hudson is trying to do this thing where it's like, there's personal Bill and professional Bill. And for right now, I will do the same.

• 59:46Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  Football Bill, genius. Personal Bill, utter superfund disaster. And that's what the story is.

• 59:55Bill Simmons?

  Well, you could feel some of it last year with all the, the media of stuff that he did. Where all of a sudden he was on like five, six different things.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  Was any of it good, in your view?

• 1:00:09Bill Simmons?

  I thought there was some inside the NFL stuff that was interesting. But for the most part, he seemed to me, this is a problem a lot of times when coaches do media for a year or two years, they don't really want to say anything because it might be coaching again. And I thought, I thought he was very safe, which was, we talked about it on a podcast. My, my fear was, are you going to be too safe? Because we've seen that over and over again with people. That's why Doc Rivers was amazing to have on pods.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:36Bill Simmons?

  He didn't know if he was coaching again or not, but he still said shit. He still was like the doc that you would hang out with if you weren't doing a pod.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:43Bill Simmons?

  I never felt totally that way with Belichick.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  What I've been told from people who worked for me, I mean, at this point, I'm talking about a half dozen humans that dealt with Bill and Jordan together at these media ventures, right?

• 1:00:56Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  I mean, I talked to 11 sources in total, but I'll be more specific to these media things that launched last offseason. They explicitly encountered Bill Belichick and Matt Patricia using the media to audition to get back into the NFL. And they were deliberately, de facto, tanking. No one understood why Bill Belichick in the pre-production meeting was one thing. And then on mic, he was so bland as to destroy the very premise of why they were paying him all of that money. And it was very clear by the end, he and Jordan Hudson had a plan for what this was going to be. And throughout that, it was, it was so bad as to, I mean, be admitted by the people

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  who were responsible for the idea. Like, talking to them now, they all know this was disastrous. And in fact, they found it fascinating that like, Peyton Manning's not having Bill Belichick back. That was just announced this past week.

• 1:01:55Bill Simmons?

  I thought he was bad on the Manning cast.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  He's gone, he's off now.

• 1:01:58Bill Simmons?

  Where he was good was when it was talking about in the past, when he could talk about like LT, Ed Reed. And that's when he really opened up because those guys were retired and they weren't somebody he would potentially be coaching or coaching against.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  Where was?

• 1:02:10Bill Simmons?

  Which I thought was, was planned.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  And where was long snapper monologue Bill Belichick? The guy who loved the minutia of like, oh, wait a minute, a left, a left footed punter? He's charismatic, almost, right? The stuff of the specifics and the history of football. He's so good at. But what we saw was a guy using the media to get back into the NFL. And now at Carolina.

• 1:02:35Bill Simmons?

  Openly using it.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, so I would, I would say even frustratingly and almost irresponsibly, given that he was entrusted as the host of shows. In one case with Matt Patricia as his co-host, speaking to like, the Remora fish kind of dynamic of like, neither of them wanted to be good at media. They wanted to be NFL coaches.

• 1:02:59Bill Simmons?

  I thought there was an idea for him. If he really wanted to have an awesome podcast and committed to it, I think it would have been amazing.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  What's your pitch?

• 1:03:06Bill Simmons?

  No, I just think when he was doing all these different pieces of what he was doing. But what he really cared about was the NFL Films footage, the breakdowns, kind of teaching people about football and what was happening in the moment. I think would have been really good, but I don't, also don't feel like he wanted to do it. He wasn't going to talk about weaknesses. He wasn't going to be like, here's the problem with Trevor Lawrence. Here's why he struggled for five years. Look at his mechanics. Here's how I would attack him if I was playing him. He wasn't doing any of that. So once, once I realized that, like in mid-September, I was like, I'm not consuming this anymore. But I think, you know, you could argue it worked. Like he got, he got like four or five different paychecks, right? Like his, it seemed like his goal was to make a ton of money for one year

• 1:03:48Bill Simmons?

  and then come back and get an NFL coaching job in February. And that did not happen.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  Well, in fact, the, the contract with Carolina has this fascinating buyout clause that just passed. So congratulations to Bill Belichick for not exercising his $1 million buyout clause to get out of Carolina. It dropped after June 1st from $10 million to $1 million because he was trying to engineer an escape hatch. If the NFL said, you know what? We watched a half dozen Bill Belichick media ventures. In which, by the way, the COO of Bill Belichick Productions is Jordan Hudson.

• 1:04:21Bill Simmons?

  So was that your reporting? That was out there.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  That was on LinkedIn. That was her on her bio being like, I'm the COO of a company that's not incorporated as an LLC anywhere, but was de facto the person you had to negotiate with. And in fact, Bill Belichick requested, after calling her brilliant to various media partners, hire her for six figures. Like, this was not just, she's the girlfriend and she's very young. It's, she's running the business and his, even more crucially, his public persona, which is the key evolution here. Private man becomes public figure. And how he does it is so illustrative of, again, all of these industries, media, business, college, the NFL, on and on and on, that we've been talking about.

• 1:05:04Bill Simmons?

  Um, can we go big picture on journalism stuff?

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  Please.

• 1:05:07Bill Simmons?

  Cause these were your bones initially. Where'd you go? You did Columbia grad?

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  No, I went to, I went to Harvard and I was a...

• 1:05:13Bill Simmons?

  Where'd you go to grad? Or you didn't? You just went right in?

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  The Sports Illustrated Fact Checking Department.

• 1:05:18Bill Simmons?

  Wow.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  After college. Uh, my origin story is that...

• 1:05:21Bill Simmons?

  Well, I just remember hearing from you when we were doing Grandland and you were doing Jeremy Lin stuff. And I was like, who's this guy? And then it was like, he's 23. I was like, Jesus. It was one of those.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  It was one of those. Uh, Frank Isola still, you know, makes fun of me. Cause I was the guy, like with this story, who emerged kind of out of nowhere for a bunch of people and had these scoops that were beating, certainly for Jeremy Lin, like the New York media ecosystem, but also the national...

• 1:05:47Bill Simmons?

  Cause we had Kang at Grandland who was doing great stuff. And you were doing the great stuff. And it was like, the two of you felt like you kind of owned the story for, I don't know, how long was that story? A month?

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  It felt like...

• 1:05:58Bill Simmons?

  It felt like two years.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  It felt like it's still going for me, um, actually. No, it was, it was two weeks and change in terms of his actual run, but in terms of his, like, actual significance as a figure? Yeah, a month, couple of months. But Kang was writing, I think, very thoughtful, like, some reportage, but like a lot of essayistic stuff. And I was the guy who had the Jeremy Lin beat for Sports. Yes, because again, I have this weird Rolodex of people. He was a freshman when I was a senior in college.

• 1:06:24Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  Ryan Fitzpatrick was there when I was there. Um, one of the first interviews I did in college, I was, uh, covering the heavyweight crew team. And I interviewed then, uh, Olympic rower Tyler or Cameron Winklevoss. I don't remember which one I interviewed.

• 1:06:42Bill Simmons?

  Social Network guys?

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:06:43Bill Simmons?

  Wow.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  One of the Winklevi, it was one of my first interviews.

• 1:06:46Bill Simmons?

  Winklevi.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  So anyway, the point being, I went to Harvard, I, uh, wanted to go to law school. I did the thing where I had a panic attack taking the LSAT because I wanted it too much. And

• 1:06:56Bill Simmons?

  You had a panic attack?

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, man.

• 1:06:58Bill Simmons?

  Like for, like an actual one?

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  I need, I need, there's an Asian person in here and I just need them to affirm me as somebody who is reasonably having panic attacks during tests. I need, I, yes.

• 1:07:09Bill Simmons?

  But you were taking the test.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I didn't

• 1:07:13Bill Simmons?

  Trying to think, I don't think that's ever happened. The only time, I don't think that ever happened to me taking a test, probably because I felt like it probably wasn't going to turn out that well.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  I was gonna say Holy Cross playing, I don't know, like beer pong. You didn't like have a

• 1:07:25Bill Simmons?

  I had two five freshman year.

• 1:07:28Bill Simmons?

  Went up though.

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  Oh, God. Uh, yeah, look, I cared deeply about school.

• 1:07:33Bill Simmons?

  So you're gonna be a lawyer or like what?

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  There's an alternate world in which I am a lawyer right now.

• 1:07:37Bill Simmons?

  So if you don't have a panic attack during the LSATs?

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  I probably go to a, a law school that, uh, that I had dreamed of and I never do journalism full time because I did not, I, I, first one, my family born in America, parents from the Philippines, like structure and a roadmap towards American success in some conventional graduate school way was absolutely the gravitational force in my life. And because I failed, not failed literally, but like because I bombed a test, which is a nightmare for me, uh, I had to figure out what do I do in this gap year? And in that gap year, I said, the thing I've been doing for fun this whole time is writing sports.

• 1:08:13Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  And I'd been in internet Sports Illustrated because I love sports and have always been a sports fan and nerd and, and fan of writing. I mean, I'm also somebody who read Sports Illustrated growing up and like

• 1:08:24Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  worshiped these long form bonus writers, you know? So fact checking Gary Smith and Scott Price and Tim Laden and all of these guys, Tom Verducci, like that was my job and I nerded out on it. I had to cross out every word in their stories to make sure it was true. What an incredible like dissection of how to do this job at the highest level. And so for me,

• 1:08:48Bill Simmons?

  When did you go to ESPN though?

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  2012, the fall of the Jeremy Lin year.

• 1:08:53Bill Simmons?

  ESPN.com or?

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Magazine slash dot com. But Chad Millman.

• 1:08:57Bill Simmons?

  I was doing five jobs.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  I know, I was gonna say you were.

• 1:08:59Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I don't have a lot of long term memory from that era.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  We were living very different existences at ESPN.

• 1:09:04Bill Simmons?

  Well, mine was just tired all the time. That was one of my existences, two small kids.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:09Bill Simmons?

  But yeah, yeah, so I remember.

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  But to be clear, I also grew up reading you.

• 1:09:14Bill Simmons?

  Thank you.

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  I mean, I didn't say it was good.

• 1:09:16Bill Simmons?

  It was really good.

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  Genuinely, though, like, the idea of, uh, wait a minute. I could evolve a medium into something that feels more like me and my sensibility. Like, the progression of what I went through from, like, Harvard to Sports Illustrated to ESPN to getting on to Around the Horn, R I P, and then P T I, and then doing, like, cable political news now and doing other stuff. Like, I've been waiting to do something that feels more like my own sensibility. And so to get from wherever I started, guy who didn't want to do this professionally, to a guy who cannot imagine what it would have been like if I had gotten the score I wanted on the LSAT, in which I'm not in this room right now, terrifying sliding doors possibility that I never got to do this.

• 1:10:01Bill Simmons?

  Why couldn't you have done what you want to do with ESPN Daily? I don't understand that part, because that was a daily podcast with a lot of resources. So did you, like, make a mistake with how you attacked it? Or you felt like it was too entrenched with the idea?

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  I wanted to do, as soon as I realized what, so to credit the New York Times Daily as, like, the original sort of format that ESPN Daily essentially looked at and said, we want one of those. The idea of a two-way conversation into which you slide docu-style elements, interview tape, scoring, editing, structure, all stuff you know from documentaries. That was so eye-opening to me as a host and producer that I realized I wanted to do this for stuff that I reported instead of stuff that other people did.

• 1:10:47Bill Simmons?

  So you just basically have reporters coming on? And you're just setting them up and they're talking about their reporting and you're basically just a

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  Cruise director.

• 1:10:57Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, cruise director.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  I'm like smart.

• 1:10:58Bill Simmons?

  Uber driver.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  It was like, but by the way, and part of it is

• 1:11:01Bill Simmons?

  But why couldn't you have changed that, though?

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  So I, I, I really liked doing that because I was truly like getting to do a, in my ambition, an even better execution than the written piece was because I would pick, like, this story could be something that's three dimensional and has like interview tape and can make this into a docu style. I started calling these things, and this is very lame, but, uh, documentaries, like conversations that also felt like documentaries. And that was the sort of medium that I still work in now. But I found it to be something that left me too busy to do the passion projects where I was like, man, this format is so perfect for me. If I can evolve it and report these myself and being a cruise director in which I have to bring energy and smiling and selling stuff that sometimes I didn't want

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  to do as much as the other stuff. That became something that I would have done, frankly, if, I think, to be very blunt, ESPN cared more about it.

• 1:11:55Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:11:55Speaker 01

  And it was just sort of like

• 1:11:57Bill Simmons?

  But in, in their way, they care about it because they gave it resources, but that doesn't mean they cared about it in the correct way, I would say.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  I believe that they liked the idea of it.

• 1:12:06Bill Simmons?

  They were like, no, this is it. And you have resources for it. Do this.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. And by the way, it no longer exists, right?

• 1:12:12Bill Simmons?

  Well, that's

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  So Mina did it, then I did it. And then there was a rotation of people who did their best with a staff that was overworked. And in the end, it's not around anymore because I don't think they ever fully understood the potential. And so for me

• 1:12:24Bill Simmons?

  You're saying ESPN didn't understand the potential of a podcast?

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  In that way, our lives are quite similar, Bill. In that way, you and I, not so different. Uh, no, it's crazy. It's crazy to, to see what has left ESPN in the world of podcasting from a pure cynical self-interest perspective.

• 1:12:41Bill Simmons?

  The podcasts you have now, did you spitball with Ride Home at all?

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, Eric and I, I mean, look,

• 1:12:46Bill Simmons?

  Because what you're doing, I don't know if he told you this, but he wanted me to do this show in 2009 called Bill Simmons Investigates. And I still have the email. He sent me this long email. He was basically like, we're taking your mailbag and just investigate the dumbest things. And I think this could be a TV show. And at that point, I kind of, I kind of knew where I wanted to do Grandly and I wanted to do a bunch of You did fine. I didn't want to do a TV show.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:10Bill Simmons?

  But I always thought it was an interesting idea and it was a great email. And I didn't know if that was What led to part of what you're trying to do? Not that, not the idea, but a piece of it.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  Eric mentioned this to me, like, maybe a year into the show.

• 1:13:24Bill Simmons?

  Because it was a great idea.

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  Dude, the whole idea of using journalism to solve stupid and or serious and or smart, funny mysteries is, it's funny, like, I talk to people, like, I'm using journalism to solve mysteries. And some journalists will look at me and be like, you mean, do journalism? And I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm kind of just rebranding what journalism is. But that's kind of the point. It's a great, I mean, look, my brother helped me come up, my younger brother, who is not sports fluent, really, at all, except Tottenham sports, he loves Tottenham football. He, he helped me come up with the name Pablo Torre Finds Out. And I think that only once the name crystallized, did it become clear that this was a through line through my curiosity.

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  And so the whole idea of, yes, I'm going to investigate something, solve a mystery. That, man, I, I, I think the name ended up crystallizing the ambition in a way that I only realize in retrospect. But I would have loved to have subscribed to Bill Simmons Investigates, in which, I don't know, what mysteries you would have done, but.

• 1:14:28Bill Simmons?

  I don't know how I could have done it for ESPN. I don't know how I could have written my column.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  It would have been, I mean, I can tell you that, like, this thing is my second child, this show. And I take it.

• 1:14:37Bill Simmons?

  I think that's the way you have to do it. Yeah, it's the way you have to, honestly, that's the way you have to do anything.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  It's probably unhealthy, honestly. But, like, the Belichick story, to me, is such a thin slice of my brain, but the thing that everybody wants to talk about. And meanwhile, I have, like, these other things that I'm, like, working on right now, that I find to be, in many ways, so much weirder and more important. And, but by the way, I, I reached out to you. When we did the LeBron tape, the Knicks video to recruit LeBron, The Sopranos' secret video.

• 1:15:12Bill Simmons?

  Oh, I already knew that story, though.

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  But I, I got the tape, Bill. You can actually watch the video. You can see James Gandolfini and Edie Falco in this weird apartment, acting like a super sweet 16 video for LeBron James at the behest of James Dolan, in which the next face you see after they play this scene, in which, by the way, yes, turns out, The Sopranos subreddit was very excited about this, uh, they're alive. Like, they're in the cinematic universe somehow, looking for an apartment.

• 1:15:41Bill Simmons?

  The Sopranos subreddit is still going?

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  I mean, as a metaphor, maybe, for the topic at hand, yes.

• 1:15:47Bill Simmons?

  I didn't even know it existed.

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

  It faded to black and still went going.

• 1:15:50Bill Simmons?

  It sounds great.

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  So, the point being, though, that, like, that video, in which, by the way, the first face you see in this episode, and we got the whole video, is Donald Trump. James Dolan assembles a murderer's row of people, and in that list, Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani.

• 1:16:08Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  Harvey Weinstein. Like, you see all of it, and then we also got the...

• 1:16:13Bill Simmons?

  Harvey Weinstein?

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 1:16:15Bill Simmons?

  Wow.

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. We also got, uh, my favorite part is that they also, and no one had known this before, they did versions of this for Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. And so, we have the alts, where it's like the same script, but they swap out the names. And it's just like the comedy of, again, behind the scenes, how does the team that has everything lure LeBron James? And the reason I reached out to you was that you've long been on this thing with the Knicks and LeBron, where the Knicks messed it up.

• 1:16:44Bill Simmons?

  Well, part of it was, I think they, Donnie Walsh was running it.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  He was in a wheelchair.

• 1:16:48Bill Simmons?

  And he was in a wheelchair, and they wheeled him in, and it, and it just was...

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  Well...

• 1:16:52Bill Simmons?

  Wasn't great.

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

  Well, the missing...

• 1:16:54Bill Simmons?

  I think they were like, wait, this guy's running the team? He seems old and weak.

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  But the missing piece is that in roles, Donnie Walsh and this contingent. And again, LeBron has everybody visiting him in this hotel, in this, sorry, this building. And into the boardroom, it's these delegations.

• 1:17:10Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  The SUVs roll up, and it's the Clippers, and it's all these teams, right?

• 1:17:16Bill Simmons?

  Sterling. Didn't, didn't really win the room over. It was tough for him.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  Did not. But into the room walked the New York Knicks and the lights darken and they press play and this video starts. And so the missing piece was like, what's it actually like to have seen this?

• 1:17:31Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  What I can tell you is that after I published the episode, people in LeBron's camp were like, thank God, people finally understand what that was like. They didn't have the tape either. But again, because I'm a kind of unhinged dog with a bone on these like sports culture mysteries, I, I take it as a point of pride that I got to finally close the loop on one of these ongoing, yeah, like urban legend, but actually real stories.

• 1:17:58Bill Simmons?

  So like the lottery stuff. It's a frozen envelope. Have you done that one yet?

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  So I, I've been, I've been doing reporting around this. I'll spoil a little bit of it. I just know that there was one NBA owner I talked to recently who was absolutely convinced this is rigged.

• 1:18:16Bill Simmons?

  It was the easiest one to rig because it was seven envelopes. You, I, I studied it. I remember doing a mailbag thing about it at some point. I studied it. There was one that seemed a little bent, but it, that footage was really grainy and the, the way apparently he could have done it if you were going to do it. I don't even know if that you could do it. And by, by the way, it would be massive fraud and a whole bunch of

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:18:36Bill Simmons?

  terrible things that come out of it. But if you froze one of the envelopes and made them extremely cold and your finger, like you can see his hands going in there. And if you just felt the one and you would know that's the one, that's how you would do it. I think with now at the ping pong balls, I don't know how you would do it.

• 1:18:52Speaker 01

  Well, I think there's still, well, on the frozen envelope theory, I talked to David Falk, who was, as you know, Jordan's agent, Ewing's agent also. And I asked him about NBA conspiracies, specifically that and the gambling, you know, alleged suspension, retirement, Michael Jordan, you know, which you've talked about also endlessly. It's very surreal, by the way, to get these conspiracies directly from you at this table, having heard you.

• 1:19:13Bill Simmons?

  Well, those are, I mean, those are the two most famous ones.

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  But so I asked David Falk about them. He's, he's the agent for both men. A unique perspective. And he says, the Jordan one, that's bullshit. Doesn't make any sense. But the Ewing one, he says, I could kind of see it. And I'm like, okay. And so we have this conversation and the whole thing about conspiracies in the NBA and in life.

• 1:19:35Bill Simmons?

  You've triggered Conspiracy Bill, by the way. He's like, I'm full alert right now.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  I felt, I felt the temperature changed.

• 1:19:41Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, hair standing on my arms right now.

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  The barometric pressure in this studio has, has shifted.

• 1:19:45Bill Simmons?

  Didn't realize he was gonna show up today.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  It's, it's an honor to meet you, Conspiracy Bill.

• 1:19:49Bill Simmons?

  He's right here.

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  The thing about NBA conspiracies and conspiracies in politics and life is that the difference between truth and plausibility is an interesting distinction. Because if you have either, truth or plausibility, people care.

• 1:20:05Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  And so now we've come all the way back around to the difference between gossip and journalism, between clickbait and something that's popular, between algorithms and curiosity. Like, yes, these are hard things that have eaten the brains of everybody in America. Because there are incentives to be dishonest in the service of some larger conspiracy. But sometimes, sometimes there is truth. And that's what journalism is trying to get to.

• 1:20:34Bill Simmons?

  Sometimes you learn things as the years go on. And you get a tidbit and you go, and then it makes you revisit. Like, for me, I forget when Shaq did this. Shaq told the story, might have been on a podcast, about how David Stern asked him if he wanted to be warm weather or cold weather before the lottery? And he said, warm, and then Orlando. And he's like, just, that's something that happened. So then you hear that and you're like, wait a second. And now you have to go backwards and revisit, you know, especially 84, where, or 85, the lottery.

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  I think that-

• 1:21:10Bill Simmons?

  They, it's by far, if you look at all the teams, by far, Ewing to the Knicks was the best case scenario for them. The Jordan one, here's the part that's never added up.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:23Bill Simmons?

  And if I had to put a ratio on it, I would go 80/20. I think he actually, like, there was no chicanery. He just, he was upset about his dad and retired.

• 1:21:32Bill Simmons?

  Every story about this dude, which we revisit now because we have to argue about the GOAT contractually, all of us, like once a month. Every story is about what a homicidal competitor he was, most competitive guy ever, competing on everything, be in the airport waiting for bags and he would pay off the baggage handler because he had to win that badly. And we're all supposed to accept that he just shut that off and left basketball after he won three straight titles because he had nothing left to prove. So were you homicidally competitive or are you the kind of guy who can just shut it off because you have nothing left to prove? That, I've never reconciled those two things.

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  I think that is one of the things that's most fascinating, big picture about sports to me. Is that here you have the greatest winners, right? So we start with Balashev, we get to Jordan. The greatest winners who have assembled everything that everyone else lusts after.

• 1:22:26Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  And still there are these gaping holes in what makes them feel fulfilled.

• 1:22:31Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  And that to me is why sports is, sports is both the perfect metaphor for everything else, it's also just on its own fascinating. And the Jordan stuff, I mean, look, I, I think that when it comes to, I mean, I'm the type of guy who found, this is, this is the other story that I did where people were like, this is beneath you. And I'm like, I got bad news for you. This is eye level for me.

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  For months, right? I'm, I'm seeing these stories about Marcus Jordan dating Larsa Pippen. And I'm like, on one level, unbelievably superficial, empty, vacuous, tabloid trash. For someone who's an NBA fan, who grew up watching the Bulls, the idea that Scottie Pippen's ex-wife is dating Michael Jordan's son and everybody around them is like, Having to deal with this.

• 1:23:28Bill Simmons?

  And on top of it, Pippin and Jordan had the fallout after the last dance, like.

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so the timeline was not merely, wow, interesting through the lens of history, actively contentious now, informing our understanding of how Michael Jordan operates, how Scottie Pippen operates, who cares about what? The power dynamics on a team being relitigated decades later in public through their loved ones and former loved ones.

• 1:23:53Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:23:53Speaker 01

  So what I did was, and this is again, my insanity, is that I listened to every episode of the podcast that Larsa Pippen and Marcus Jordan were hosting together, which very few people remember.

• 1:24:04Bill Simmons?

  How many episodes was that?

• 1:24:05Speaker 01

  I think they did about a dozen. It was called Separation Anxiety, and it was horrible.

• 1:24:09Bill Simmons?

  You listened to all 12 episodes of that?

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  I'm a journalist.

• 1:24:13Bill Simmons?

  Oh my, like, were you doing other stuff? Were you playing like video games? Like, how do you just concentrate on that? That sounds horrible.

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  Just know that parenting a child while having that in the background is probably something I'll get sued for by my daughter.

• 1:24:25Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, yeah, fair.

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  But what happened was, we did all of that, and then the coup de grace was I invited Marcus and Larsa together onto my show and interviewed them and got to talk and confront them about this story. And it resulted in a number of New York Post headlines in which they called me miserable and that I was unfair to them and all that stuff, which is okay, because they shouldn't necessarily like what I have to say to them. But the question of, is it true and interesting and significant for a certain quadrant of people that actually is in my audience? I think that's kind of, that's what I enjoy, is like, yes, it is kind of envelope pushing to take this seriously, but if I can prove to you that it's worth your time, then I think everybody got what they wanted here.

• 1:25:09Bill Simmons?

  So you're basically taking, somebody's on a text thread with four of their buddies who love sports, and there's this Larsa Pippen thing's happening, like, what the fuck is going on with this? That's an episode for you.

• 1:25:21Speaker 01

  For me, group chats and texts from people who are like, I don't know if I can say this, or I heard this, is a huge source of just incoming ideas. And the question is always, can I do this responsibly and accurately and rigorously, such that I can still plausibly be considered a journalist by the Murrow and Peabody people, while also satisfying my friends, who I use as like these proxies for my audience? Like, I like to, I like to take stories seriously, but not myself so seriously. And that's why I'm here, is to say like, yeah, please do laugh at me. Like, I am not here to be insulated from criticism.

• 1:26:04Speaker 01

  Just know that I am so bizarrely prepared to discuss it, if you have questions, that all I ask is the ability to explain maybe what people did not hear or listen to, because it got clipped out, because that's the game too. And I am not fighting it, I just want people to look at the stuff in totality.

• 1:26:22Bill Simmons?

  So if somebody wanted you to do an episode about how Cornhazard didn't leave his house for four years, other than to play golf once a week,

• 1:26:32Bill Simmons?

  do you bat that around with somebody else? Or is it just like an instinct, like, I can't do that, that's not going to work as an episode?

• 1:26:38Speaker 01

  The first question I ask myself is, does voice-modulated Bill Simmons still discernibly sound like Bill Simmons?

• 1:26:46Bill Simmons?

  Bill Simmons AI in French.

• 1:26:48Speaker 01

  Can we get you?

• 1:26:49Bill Simmons?

  I'm gonna say it for AI, me.

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  It's, it's-

• 1:26:51Bill Simmons?

  Different languages?

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  We had to-

• 1:26:53Bill Simmons?

  It's gonna be great for a lot of us, I can't wait.

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  We turned down, I mean, not that this is a noble position, but we turned down, there was an offer from a tech company that will remain nameless, to like, hey, you have an archive of shows with people talking in this conversational way. Can we pay you to train our AI bots? And we were like, no.

• 1:27:11Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, that sounds-

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  No, you can't. And by the way, parallel to that is this media tour thing. Like Harvey Levin and TMZ asked me to talk to him about Belichick. And I said, I don't think I can do that. I think my standard for the lowest brow programming I can do is the Bill Simmons Show. And so that's why.

• 1:27:30Bill Simmons?

  That was a dig. We were getting along so well. What the hell?

• 1:27:35Speaker 01

  I'm sorry.

• 1:27:35Bill Simmons?

  This is on the higher end of shows.

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  Remember when you founded Grantland? Wasn't that fun? That's, that's the spirit of what I do is honestly like, we, we have so many friends in common because your coaching tree said, I'll do the compliment thing, right? Your coaching tree.

• 1:27:51Bill Simmons?

  It's not a coaching tree. It's a tree. I don't know what.

• 1:27:53Speaker 01

  What kind of, what, what kind of tree is that, Bill?

• 1:27:55Bill Simmons?

  It's a lot of, lot of great people have passed through my life.

• 1:27:58Speaker 01

  And I have become friends with them in part, sometimes because I first encountered them through things that you had made. And we then went on to become friends who then text me, what the fuck's happening with you and Bill? And which I say, I don't know. I'm not sure he knows what my show is, but I'm happy to explain it. But then also it is the recognition that who you choose to surround yourself with is kind of the through line in all of it. In the reporting I did with Balatchek, in why I'm here with you. And to the degree that, you know, the media is a bizarre, chaotic industry that I now I'm trying to navigate as an independent training wheels entrepreneur with a show.

• 1:28:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, man, I'm like, I, I, I could use good ideas. I could use help. I could use people just saying, hey, they do stuff that is like this, that you might enjoy.

• 1:28:48Bill Simmons?

  So are you getting pitched ideas and concepts and you're like, eh, it doesn't pass. Ah, maybe. Like what's the, what's like the incubation process?

• 1:28:57Speaker 01

  I am, my staff makes fun of me. Like.

• 1:29:00Bill Simmons?

  You have a staff?

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

  We, you do realize you have two producers over there who are like.

• 1:29:06Bill Simmons?

  No, but I mean, what's, like, what's the staff?

• 1:29:08Speaker 01

  I mean, we have them in the credits of every Friday episode, in which we shout them out, but I tried to make.

• 1:29:12Bill Simmons?

  Is it like researchers, like all kinds of people?

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  We have a couple of people who are devoted. Everyone does more than one thing, but yes, I wanted to make a, a mini newsroom. Because what I can't do is, we do three episodes a week.

• 1:29:23Bill Simmons?

  It should be called Pablo Torres' Deep Pockets.

• 1:29:25Speaker 01

  I mean, Dan Lebatard's Deep Pockets, man. I'm using his money to, to fund a weird project that no one really asked for. But is the thing that I'm like trying to make sustainable. I am somebody who wanted to hire people to simulate what feels like a modern. Newsroom, tongue in cheek, but not, in which, yeah, I get tips, but more than that, I'm like perpetually pressure testing these ideas that I have. So my phone, my Slack channel is just an endless stream of me pitching my staff ideas. Like, I think we should do this, but we gotta make these calls. Can we do that? I found this weird nugget buried in this other thing. There was this bankruptcy filing. This is a breadcrumb for a future episode. There's this bankruptcy filing that I think everybody would find fascinating

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  if I can get to the bottom of it. These are, my skill, if I have one, is hopefully trying to discern whether someone who's not me would find something that I find interesting.

• 1:30:22Bill Simmons?

  Chang's golf career?

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  You know, I wanted to do when you got, were you with him at Augusta?

• 1:30:26Bill Simmons?

  Chang was supposed to be, I was. With Chang, Chang was, his dad wanted him to be a PGA golfer.

• 1:30:31Speaker 01

  I was walking around with like torn rotator cuffs, getting like Tommy John surgery.

• 1:30:36Bill Simmons?

  He filmed 35 straight weeks of Netflix episodes and his body like literally broke down.

• 1:30:41Speaker 01

  I wanted to do the episode, and I've talked to him before about this, and I'll just spoil it because you have first dibs. Yeah, like the secret world of food at Augusta beyond like the stand in front, but like the secret, you know what I'm talking about.

• 1:30:54Bill Simmons?

  They don't, they just don't do, I mean, I guess you could. They're not, you're not going to find anything out from Augusta.

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  Oh, that, this is why, this is why I do what I do.

• 1:31:05Bill Simmons?

  Oh, so you think you could?

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  I think I'm gonna wear a trench coat and David Chang's gonna be the top part, and I'm gonna have a mech suit underneath.

• 1:31:12Bill Simmons?

  We're like Mission Impossible, like a David Chang mask?

• 1:31:14Speaker 01

  One ticket, please. And we walk into Augusta together. Yeah, man, I'm, I, yes, by the way, I, I love doing stuff, and this is gonna sound very retrograde and, and edgier than I think. I love doing stuff that people don't want me to do. Like, if I find something interesting and the people in charge of it are like, no, now I'm like, well, what do you got to hide? Why don't you want people to know that there's a secret special, like, food court for rich people? Iluminati in the back of Augusta.

• 1:31:43Bill Simmons?

  You know what would have been a good episode that you can't do now? I was obsessed with this for like two years when Stern was commissioner. Apparently at every NBA party, I think I've talked about this, he loved pigs in a blanket.

• 1:31:59Bill Simmons?

  And they had to be at every NBA function and party. And there was this one party where they didn't have NBA pigs in a blanket. And he freaked out and was really upset about it. And I was like, this sounds amazing. I don't know if that's quite an episode, but David Stern's obsession with pigs in a blanket feels like the formation of something.

• 1:32:16Speaker 01

  I hesitate to inform you that I would have greenlit that.

• 1:32:20Bill Simmons?

  I don't, I don't know if there's a, it feels like there needs to be a second piece to it.

• 1:32:24Speaker 01

  Well, what kind of pigs in a blanket? We're talking about the microwavable kind. Does David Stern want like super bespoke?

• 1:32:29Bill Simmons?

  So somebody told me that. And then it like, I don't know, nine months later, I was at one of those functions and they had pigs in a blanket. And I was watching him eat it and I was the most ripped I've ever been in my life. I was like, he's eating the pigs in the blanket. It's true.

• 1:32:43Speaker 01

  There's a metaphor there for Scott Foster somehow. You know, it's like, yeah, you gotta.

• 1:32:47Bill Simmons?

  Dipavetta.

• 1:32:48Speaker 01

  By the way, I, I'm sure you've had this experience, but like when you do stuff that the NBA doesn't love sometimes.

• 1:32:55Bill Simmons?

  Oh, I haven't had that experience ever.

• 1:32:56Speaker 01

  Never. But the number of calls you get, like just even uttering Scott Foster into this microphone, I'm gonna, like Tim Frank, if you're listening, I'm sorry that I did this, but like, yeah, man. I, I would love to, to make a pigs in a blanket metaphor for NBA officiating and the dial they turn to get an outcome. Not explicitly to conspiratorially rig a game, but just like more scoring, less scoring, more fouls, fewer fouls, just like big picture stuff.

• 1:33:23Bill Simmons?

  This has been out there for a bunch of years now, and I think people are at least a little bit aware of it. You know, that's, there's a reason they released the ref assignments the day of the game. There was also ref stats that I think some gamblers took advantage of in the 2000s. But just in general, teams can complain. This is the big thing people need to understand about officials. Teams can complain about how a game was called. They'll send the things and then the league will tell the officials for the next game. Like they're getting away with too much stuff. They can't do that. Or they'll give them some sort of directive that will then shape the next game. And it's one of the reasons the games will feel a little differently. Like if Neesmith, and we're taping this before game one of the finals. If Neesmith is just hounding SGA and he's just bumping him and touching him and it's like crossing the line, but they let it go.

• 1:34:08Bill Simmons?

  The league will then tell the rest for the next game like, here's footage of Neesmith, you can't let him do this.

• 1:34:14Speaker 01

  Pointed emphasis.

• 1:34:15Bill Simmons?

  That's the good version of this. There might be some more sinister versions of it, too.

• 1:34:19Speaker 01

  So I think it's true.

• 1:34:20Bill Simmons?

  In the past, maybe not now.

• 1:34:21Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's inevitable that the NBA, because you officiate games at the end differently than you do at the beginning.

• 1:34:29Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:29Speaker 01

  Is inviting an arbitrary, I know it when I see it standard, which is up for interpretation, judicial interpretation that varies depending on what the instructions are of that game. The thing, though, about, and I love this, this is a thing I have looked into and that I want to do something with. But again, I'm happy to just talk about it a bit. The complaints that teams make to the league.

• 1:34:52Bill Simmons?

  Pointed with video.

• 1:34:54Speaker 01

  What I've been told is that the teams that complain the most often, I'll name two of them. I'm curious if you're surprised. One is the New York Knicks.

• 1:35:03Bill Simmons?

  Huh.

• 1:35:04Speaker 01

  The other is the Oklahoma City Thunder.

• 1:35:08Speaker 01

  Just like which teams file the most complaints because of stuff that causes them to think we got chopped. And it's, I'm told reliably, those two teams are among the most offended. And yeah, liable to file paperwork.

• 1:35:27Bill Simmons?

  Conspiracy Bill was on alert for game six of Knicks Pacers. And it was interesting. They let basically Brunson and Halbert get manhandled the whole game. So they basically just, because Halbert was dribbling the ball up and there, Bridges and, and, and Obi were like clubbing him as he's just dribbling a straight line. I was like, Jesus, but they were just as physical with Brunson. I think it's better. I think social media has really evened it out. Because the darkest moment, other than Donahue and other than the Artest melee, of the 21st century for the NBA, I think, was that 06 finals. And how appalled everybody was by how it was officiated.

• 1:36:03Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:36:04Bill Simmons?

  And I think Wade shot 25 free throws in game five, but it's just, it didn't sit right. Cuban staring down Stern after a loss, which has never happened before since in the history of the league. Him just from the court staring at him, stink eye.

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  Do you miss David Stern?

• 1:36:23Bill Simmons?

  I do. I think he was starting to really lose it at the end and it was time for him to retire. And obviously people come and go.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  I mean, from the planet.

• 1:36:33Bill Simmons?

  Well, but for jobs and from the planet.

• 1:36:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:39Bill Simmons?

  There was something about how he shepherded stuff that I thought was maybe it belonged to its own era. He just didn't put up with shit, you know?

• 1:36:49Speaker 01

  What a, I, I, I think Adam Silver has succeeded in ways that are indisputable financially.

• 1:36:57Bill Simmons?

  Not with his last CBA, although maybe that's not his fault.

• 1:37:01Speaker 01

  What's, wait, what's your take on tripling the CBA?

• 1:37:05Bill Simmons?

  No, it's not the, not the money they made. It's, it's what it did competitively to the league with all the aprons. I think it's really gonna badly fuck up the league.

• 1:37:12Speaker 01

  So to that point, by the way, as we're looking at the second apron, basically doing something that the NBA has always needed more of, which is reduce the platform in the most expensive settings for superstars to be even more important. Right? Like that's the, the thing about the second apron and Adam's tenure, I think, is that it's just very funny that he learned at the knee of David Stern and operates behind the scenes so differently. And I think David Stern, what would WWDSD, what would David Stern do? Is a question I ask myself very often when it comes to.

• 1:37:50Bill Simmons?

  It's funny when people get to that point, because I actually think Belichick was at that point. How people put together their roster was almost like, would you sign this guy for 85 million? Well, would Belichick do that? Probably not. And he had hit that point at least through the mid 2010s and then it kind of faded away. But I think Stern was, for the most part, had really good instincts. I thought near the end, I thought he lost, I, I will never understand the OKC Seattle thing.

• 1:38:15Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, oh, sure. When he was running the team or when he relocated the team?

• 1:38:19Bill Simmons?

  No, when he let the OKC guys buy Seattle to steal them and steal them away. I'll never understand why the conflict of interest with the New Orleans owning that franchise.

• 1:38:28Speaker 01

  Basketball reasons remains just an amazing thing that I still marvel at, man.

• 1:38:32Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:34Bill Simmons?

  Wait, we, we don't have a lot of time left because you gotta fly to LA.

• 1:38:37Speaker 01

  Gotta fly, yeah, home.

• 1:38:38Bill Simmons?

  I had more topics for you, though. We gotta talk Kornheiser.

• 1:38:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:42Bill Simmons?

  Because I've never really talked about him. On a podcast with somebody who's actually worked with him and spent real time with him. Because I think it's hard, he's a hard person to explain. And it was interesting to think about him in the context of Around the Horn ending, whether that show would go to an hour. And I heard those rumors and I was like, there is no way in a million years, Tony will go to an hour unless they pay him some ungodly sum. And even then, I don't even think he'd want to do it.

• 1:39:09Speaker 01

  Dollars per minute is the stat that Tony Kornheiser values.

• 1:39:12Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, it's like, I'll do it, but here's the, but anyway,

• 1:39:17Bill Simmons?

  you know, I first did TV with him in 09. And I'm sure you remember losing your PTI virginity as well when the day, when the day, I was September 09, when were you?

• 1:39:26Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, I think I filled in, um, this must've been five or six. Phil, I'm old now, man. I don't remember the exact year.

• 1:39:34Bill Simmons?

  So mid 2010 somewhere?

• 1:39:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. No, no, no, it would have been 2013, 14, probably 2014.

• 1:39:40Bill Simmons?

  So I did four days. I flew to DC. I'm still writing my column and I was completely terrified. And Kornheiser basically walked me through like a young puppy on a leash on the sidewalks and helped me kind of buy and just sold everything I did. And by the end of it, I was like, all right, I think I actually understand the mechanics of this now. Now it's going to take years to figure out how to do it. But I get it. It was like the, one of the best educations I ever had in four days.

• 1:40:10Speaker 01

  He's, he's my goat. Tony Kornheiser is to me, the greatest of all time. And I say that not because whatever, he would appreciate that. I say that because when it comes to a teammate on TV who presents as very hard to win over.

• 1:40:27Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:40:27Speaker 01

  Once he agrees that he can trust you.

• 1:40:30Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:30Speaker 01

  He is the best salesman of the person across the desk from him. In the history of television. And he's smart and he's funny and he's quick. And for all of the things we've been saying, uh, the through line of this episode is also, what happens when you get older?

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

  His fastball is still humming, man.

• 1:40:48Bill Simmons?

  I know. It's, I don't like when he says like, um, no one wants to see me on TV.

• 1:40:52Speaker 01

  He always says that. They want to throw me over the side. They want to get rid of me. I'm like, Tony.

• 1:40:55Bill Simmons?

  You're saying that in 2015.

• 1:40:56Speaker 01

  And he's wrong about that. He is so sharp still and in, not a, I'm grading on a curve because he's like my TV grandpa sort of a way. But merely in the way of, I've done a lot of TV at this point and he is still so fucking good at it.

• 1:41:12Bill Simmons?

  See, that's the age difference between us because I always called him Uncle Tony.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  I'm grandpa.

• 1:41:16Bill Simmons?

  And you called him Grandpa Tony.

• 1:41:17Speaker 01

  He's low, low Tony.

• 1:41:18Bill Simmons?

  Because we're, we're a different generation. Yeah.

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  He went to my wedding.

• 1:41:22Bill Simmons?

  I'm not surprised.

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  I invited him and he said, I'm going to leave at nine 30 and he left at nine 29.

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  And, uh.

• 1:41:33Bill Simmons?

  I'm amazed it wasn't nine 30 exactly.

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  Well, he, so I, he went around and shook everyone's hand because it was also kind of like, he was the guest, he was the celebrity guest.

• 1:41:43Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:44Speaker 01

  And everyone loved it. Tony Kornheiser to be as just, what he is in real life is so much. Anyway, he doesn't want me to say too many things in public about what we talk about, uh, personally, but my God, he's so fun to talk to. And the fact that we share him in common as a person that we adore and will be both confused when we have to recap why we did this show.

• 1:42:12Bill Simmons?

  We probably should have done it sooner anyway, because I've had a good time.

• 1:42:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, man. Like I.

• 1:42:16Bill Simmons?

  But yeah, the thing with Tony, um, I think my favorite thing about him is the phone will just ring. You, very few people where you just get a call and I'll be like, all right, I know this is going to be 30 minutes, but I'm excited for it. And then he's just, there's no hello, how are you? He's just right into the conversation.

• 1:42:35Speaker 01

  It's always a cold open.

• 1:42:36Bill Simmons?

  What is going on with dot, dot, dot? And then it's just, you're just kind of doing a show with him.

• 1:42:42Speaker 01

  It's the best.

• 1:42:43Bill Simmons?

  But that's why like, you know, I, I actually think PTI is now underrated for, um.

• 1:42:49Speaker 01

  People don't understand, from a pure metric perspective, the highest rated show in the daytime lineup, still, still. We talk about all the other shows a lot, still number one.

• 1:42:59Bill Simmons?

  Doing, doing stories that are like 10, 11 hours old, compared to like the advantage Get Up and First Take half.

• 1:43:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:08Bill Simmons?

  By the time it gets to those guys, the story's like done. There's been, now in the podcast era, there's a million podcasts that are out every day and people have already reacted and done their thoughts. And then those guys come in and they're, to me, the, the two of them together, it's like an old married couple that still like works 100%. It's a lot, Inside the NBA is the same way. Like those guys just still work as a group.

• 1:43:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:33Bill Simmons?

  And that's just the way it is.

• 1:43:34Speaker 01

  It's chemistry. You can't fake it. Again, you do know it when you see it in that regard. And Eric and Matt, producers of PTI, and it's the staff and Tony and Mike, they take it, again, they take it seriously, but they don't take themselves in the way that they do the show so seriously. And Tony and Mike.

• 1:43:52Bill Simmons?

  No, but Tony takes one thing seriously. And I, I can't speak for Mike because I think Mike's, Mike's easygoing. Like he would have gone to an hour and been fine with it. Tony's very committed. He's pot committed to the structure.

• 1:44:05Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:44:05Bill Simmons?

  He won't, he won't change. They haven't, what's really interesting about that show, they haven't really added anything to the structure. It's still done the same way, that fourth segment with the birthdays and racing thrills.

• 1:44:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:17Bill Simmons?

  That's from 2004. I don't know, I don't know how many years it took them to figure it. Tony will not touch that and he will get mad if you even suggest it.

• 1:44:25Speaker 01

  Tony refuses to say the words, pardon the interruption, because he just never liked the name.

• 1:44:32Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:32Speaker 01

  He always says, welcome to PTI, boys and girls. He noticed, just like he is, I mean, when I say he didn't say himself seriously, I mean, in the sense of he's willing to be laughed at.

• 1:44:41Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:41Speaker 01

  And will be the class clown and perform. And that is a key trait I find in television. But he's also so deeply devoted to.

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  Why PTI has worked. And I think it's because he and Mike see this as an extension of their journalistic selves. You know, they're not in locker rooms anymore. They're not at press. Mike still is.

• 1:45:03Bill Simmons?

  No, but they still.

• 1:45:04Speaker 01

  But.

• 1:45:05Bill Simmons?

  But those. They still have the DNA of it. I mean, Tony wrote some of the better features of the late seventies and early eighties. Like, he has a whole era that nobody even remembers anymore.

• 1:45:13Speaker 01

  I was talking to somebody who is not a sports fan, but just read randomly. They were doing research.

• 1:45:17Bill Simmons?

  The Rick Barry one?

• 1:45:18Speaker 01

  No, but Rick Barry being an asshole and that being a Sports Illustrated feature is an all time great story.

• 1:45:23Bill Simmons?

  That I thought that was probably the best thing. What were you gonna say?

• 1:45:26Speaker 01

  So I didn't know about this one, but while in LA this weekend, someone who's a big star, bring it full circle again, a Star Wars fan was like, Tony Kornheiser for the Washington Post, for the style section, did a piece about the Empire Strikes Back. And I'm just like, and it was, this person didn't know that Kornheiser did this and like, got this column that was so funny and smart and all that.

• 1:45:50Bill Simmons?

  So like from like 1980?

• 1:45:51Speaker 01

  Yes. And like, Tony has been out here doing the shit that we say, we're innovating new forms of media and it's culture and sports colliding. Tony's been out here doing stuff for whatever year. I mean, it's crazy, 50 years.

• 1:46:06Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, he had, I remember the last couple of years at ESPN, he had this whole thing. He kept saying like, and I was like, you know, pretty close to him at this point. And he would always be like, well, when LeB, when Tony, when Mike and I turn it over to you and LeBatarde. And I was, and finally I got mad at him and I was like, you gotta stop that. I don't want to take over PTI. It's your show. You guys are gonna die with that show. Nobody wants to take that show. Nobody wants that responsibility. It's your show. Like, like, stop even thinking that.

• 1:46:36Speaker 01

  That's, that's the thing is that as much as Tony likes to talk about, oh, take over the thing.

• 1:46:43Bill Simmons?

  The show should die when they don't want to do it anymore.

• 1:46:45Speaker 01

  I think.

• 1:46:45Bill Simmons?

  Nobody should take the show over.

• 1:46:47Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 1:46:48Bill Simmons?

  Come up with another idea.

• 1:46:49Speaker 01

  I also fully think that the show will die when they die.

• 1:46:53Bill Simmons?

  They literally had to say.

• 1:46:54Speaker 01

  They, I mean, they're not gonna stop doing it.

• 1:46:56Bill Simmons?

  Wilbon was doing Get Up the last couple of weeks, like.

• 1:46:59Speaker 01

  Wilbon's motor.

• 1:47:00Bill Simmons?

  Wilbon's available.

• 1:47:01Speaker 01

  Wilbon's motor is a remarkable thing. As a prospect, Wilbon, um, I don't think there's been a lot of people at that age who've done, who've done it this way.

• 1:47:10Bill Simmons?

  I was always, the year I was doing the countdown with Wilbon and Magic, those guys were just machines that could come to life on camera. And we could have, we would be like, they would give us like this big meal, you know, they'd give us, cause we were, taping the show would be like four thirty, five o'clock, west coast time, and then we'd have to be there for the basketball, come back in. So they'd have food. And those guys could eat like entire dinners and go out there two minutes later and just, just light up.

• 1:47:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:40Bill Simmons?

  And I was like, that's a skill I'm not sure I'll ever have. And by the way, I'll just have a small salad because I don't want to be in a food coma and seem like I'm luggage on this.

• 1:47:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, farting on air is probably not the best.

• 1:47:51Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:52Speaker 01

  Career choice.

• 1:47:53Bill Simmons?

  Anyway, so I, so you agree with me that show should die with them?

• 1:47:56Speaker 01

  Look, I.

• 1:47:57Bill Simmons?

  It's when they don't want to do it, I think that should be it for the show.

• 1:47:59Speaker 01

  I don't think there's any following them.

• 1:48:03Speaker 01

  I don't think that that show could be done without, I think as a fill, as, as a fill-in, love being a substitute teacher.

• 1:48:12Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:48:12Speaker 01

  Have no illusions that PTI should be mine or whoever else's, once those guys leave. I wouldn't want that burden. Like, uh, talk about being set up to fail. You know, just being set up to disappoint people. Like, yeah, I'm not Tony and Mike, and I miss them too. Would be how I felt every time I would fill in as the hypothetical replacement.

• 1:48:39Bill Simmons?

  I'm sorry I'm here.

• 1:48:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I also wish they were still here.

• 1:48:42Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. It's better when they're in person, though, which we were talking about before we started. Like, and that was one of the things COVID really fucked up because the Zoom made it easier. I used to interview everybody. We had all these people coming in. And then people asked why I don't do the interviews as much anymore, which I think we're gonna change because we're building a couple of studios.

• 1:49:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:02Bill Simmons?

  I just didn't like doing it on Zoom. Even like you and I talking today, it was like, we could have done it on Zoom, but you were here and it was like, let's do it in person. It'll be way better.

• 1:49:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, we could have a phone call in which both of us immediately start yelling at each other, which is what happened.

• 1:49:16Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:16Speaker 01

  But then it led to a conversation that, to me, I think clarified that even if Bill Simmons, guy I grew up reading, may not be a subscriber to my show, Conspiracy Bill absolutely is. And I'm so glad that Conspiracy Bill-

• 1:49:30Bill Simmons?

  Conspiracy Bill's now, he's aware of-

• 1:49:32Speaker 01

  Like and subscribe, Conspiracy Bill. Like and subscribe. Yeah, I can tell.

• 1:49:36Bill Simmons?

  Well, what show, what episode would you want me on?

• 1:49:40Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:49:41Bill Simmons?

  Would be like-

• 1:49:43Speaker 01

  Oh, I like the way you're thinking, Conspiracy Bill.

• 1:49:44Bill Simmons?

  No, what episode, like, what would be the best use of? It doesn't have to be Conspiracy Bill, it could be Bill, but what would be the dream episode for you?

• 1:49:53Speaker 01

  There's, there are actual answers to this that I will tell you about as soon as we're done recording.

• 1:49:58Bill Simmons?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:49:59Speaker 01

  Because I don't think that I'm not gonna take you up on something that might actually be worthwhile.

• 1:50:05Bill Simmons?

  I'm like, Corn has it. I don't really like to travel anywhere.

• 1:50:07Speaker 01

  I've noticed. You may be come to, can I say the neighborhood we're in? Or is that, am I doxing you if I say that you may be come to this?

• 1:50:13Bill Simmons?

  Well, we're at the Spotify Studios in downtown LA.

• 1:50:15Speaker 01

  Very convenient.

• 1:50:17Bill Simmons?

  Well, that's why we're building studios elsewhere to try to fix some of this.

• 1:50:21Speaker 01

  In all honesty, I am very glad you asked me to do this.

• 1:50:26Bill Simmons?

  I'm too. I, you know, because I felt like, you know, when we do like AnyPod, we have these little asides. You get caught up, you're trying to make the host laugh, whatever. And then sometimes, you know, as I explained, I didn't love the Belichick stuff, but I get why you did it. So I think I have a better understanding of the whole thing, which is the whole point of why we wanted to talk.

• 1:50:49Speaker 01

  What you're saying is that Bill Simmons finally investigated.

• 1:50:53Bill Simmons?

  Bill Simmons investigated. Pablo Torre, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it.

• 1:50:57Speaker 01

  You're very welcome.

• 1:50:58Bill Simmons?

  All right, that's it for the podcast. Thanks to Pablo Torre for coming to downtown LA to talk to me. Thanks to the Knicks for doing something interesting for the top of the podcast. And thanks to Eduardo and Gahow as well. You can watch this as a video podcast on Spotify. You can watch on Bill Simmons YouTube channel as well. And don't forget to rewatch those new Prestige TV podcasts. I'm on those as well. I'm going to be back on Thursday night with a big juicy fat podcast right after game one of the NBA Finals. In the meantime, if you want more basketball, listen to Zach Lowe. I think he has a new podcast. I think we moved it up to Wednesday and the Ringer NBA guys as well, The Mismatch. We're still going to be on Friday. So we got a lot of basketball content for you this week, a lot of stuff on the website as well. I will see you on Thursday night.

• 1:51:56Bill Simmons?

  Must be 21 plus and president select states for Kansas and affiliation with Kansas Star Casino or 18 plus and president DC. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit rg-help.com. Call 1-887-897777 or visit ccpg.org/chat in Connecticut or visit mdgamblinghelp.org in Maryland. Hope is here. Visit gamblinghelplineMA.org or call 800-327-5050 for 24/7 support in Massachusetts or call 1-8778-HOPE-NY or text HOPE-NY in New York.