A Holiday Check-in on Anything and Everything With Chuck Klosterman

The Ringer's Bill Simmons is joined by Chuck Klosterman to discuss a myriad of topics, including the current state of college sports (3:45), lessons learned (or not) from the 2024 election (30:50), modern NBA superstardom, how the public's relationship with celebrity has evolved, the next generation of documentaries, thoughts from the Tyson-Paul fight (59:56), HBO's ‘The Sopranos,’ and more (2:08:56). Host: Bill Simmons Guest: Chuck Klosterman Producer: Kyle Crichton 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.

• 0:01Bill Simmons?

  Coming up, the longest podcast Chuck Close and I have ever done, and it's next.

• 0:07Bill Simmons?

  This episode is brought to you by Uber Eats. It's football season. Uber Eats is delivering deals every game day. This week, get 10 free boneless wings from Wingstop on qualifying orders. Game on, flavor on, Wingstop is here. So if your fantasy league is coming over for some in-person smack talk, order Wingstop on Uber Eats and get 10 boneless wings free. It's the perfect way to keep everyone fed tonight so you can focus on the game. No matter who scores big tonight, you'll score a great deal. Order now and get 10 boneless wings free from Wingstop only on Uber Eats. Offer valid from September 14th to September 27th and from November 2nd to November 16th. Order minimum before taxes and fees is required. See retailer storefront for details. Taxes, fees, and terms apply. Product availability

• 0:52Bill Simmons?

  varies by region. Exclusions may apply. See app for details. All right, quick break. This episode is brought to you by Fire TV. You ever sit down ready to watch the game only to search and scroll endlessly? If so, you need Fire TV. It shows your live games from your favorite teams all in one place, right on the home screen. No more searching. Just sit down and turn on Fire TV. Separate subscriptions may be required. Feature and content availability may vary.

• 1:20Bill Simmons?

  We're also brought to you by The Ringer Podcast Network. Put up a new rewatchables on Monday night. We did Running Scared with Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines, one of the first great buddy cop movies. Also, the end of Yacht Rock. Also, a super fun movie to discuss. It was me and Chris Ryan. You can check that out on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts, plus The Ringer Movies YouTube channel. We will have that as well. Speaking of YouTube channels, so the Bill Simmons YouTube channel, which I hope you have subscribed to, do it for the holidays for me. We put all videos and clips from this podcast on that channel. I'm not going to do another podcast this week. I'm just warning you now. But I still want to do Million Dollar Picks. I think. I haven't dove into the slate yet.

• 2:04Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I use that correctly. Great. I used to be a writer. So what I'm gonna do is if I have million dollar picks this week, I'm going to do it on my YouTube channel. So I haven't decided on Thanksgiving. I don't really like the Thanksgiving slate, but if I do anything with the Thanksgiving slate, it's going to be on the YouTube channel on Wednesday. I'll put up a video there on the Bill Simmons YouTube channel. On Friday, I'm gonna have some million dollar picks, I think, for week 13 to keep it going. Basically broke even this last week. I'm still mad at the Cardinals. But, uh, but that's the plan for million dollar picks because there are no more podcasts this week. Oh, by the way, if you want to bet on the NFL,

• 2:48Bill Simmons?

  go check out the Ringer specials on FanDuel Sportsbook on their NFL page because we put up all of our favorite bets on that. And you should also watch the Ringer Sunday pregame show on Sunday, which is on YouTube TV and FanDuel TV with Sal and JJ and Raheem and House. So we have a lot of stuff covered, though. Anyway, the Bill Simmons YouTube channel, I will have million dollar picks on there in some form, maybe even two of them. One last thing. We know Thanksgiving is Thursday. We know we have three football games. We know we have some family time, some food, some drinks. You know how it's gonna go. Well, what you weren't expecting. You knew Black Friday was Friday. You know, there's a football

• 3:30Bill Simmons?

  game. You know, there's college football. You also have a brand new Music Box documentary. It is called Yacht Rock, the Documentary. It premieres on Friday on HBO and on Max. And maybe even if you're a night owl, late, late Thursday night, it's really good. There's no way you're not gonna enjoy it. I'm just telling you. And you can watch with your whole family. You know who's gonna like it? Your parents, your uncles, your aunts, maybe even your grandparents. Uh, this is a great one. Please check it out. Yacht Rock Documentary premiering Friday on HBO and Max. Coming up on this podcast, Chuck Klosterman had not been on the podcast for a while. He's a BS Podcast Hall of Famer, and we had a lot to

• 4:11Bill Simmons?

  discuss. We want to talk college football. We want to talk NBA. We want to talk sopranos. We want to talk documentaries. We want to talk about the election. We hit everything. This is a really, really long podcast, but listen, you're probably traveling the next five days. You're in the car, you're driving around. I'm not going to have a podcast on Thursday, so it's basically all the content here. Right now Chuck is next. First, our friends from Pearl Jam.

• 4:58Bill Simmons?

  All right, our friend Chuck Close from InNocia, we're taking this on a Tuesday morning before Thanksgiving. Lots of topics to get to, but it's really, it's college football time. College basketball feels like it's back. I've been thinking about you because, you know, you're a giant college sports fan, a giant college sports believer. Feels like the 12-team college football playoff is working. Cooper Flag's back. Like, college sports is back.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Well, sort of, yes. I guess it kind of is, but you know,

• 5:28Speaker 01

  this 12-team playoff in football, like, it's still keeping things interesting, but in a very different way than it used to be. Like, I'm, I'm, I guess, pleased, but surprised that it has changed things as much as it has. And yet, the games themselves are still really good, and I guess that really is the bottom line. But it, it definitely, this is a, this is a weird feeling, college football season, because of the way things are now.

• 5:53Bill Simmons?

  Well, when you say they've changed, what's changed? What's different than it was 10 years ago?

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Well, okay. So, when there was a 14 playoff, and I think this was, at times, kind of a combative issue for people, but that, the whole idea really was to figure out who would be the national champion. That was really the only goal. So like, last year when Florida State didn't get in, it was because, well, we know that they can't win the national championship. So even if their resume sort of looks like they should be in, it doesn't make any sense to put them in. The whole idea of this 14 playoff is so we can clearly figure out who the champion is. But with a 12-team playoff, it's a little different. Now, it seems like making the playoff is the reward. Like, it seems less about just figuring out who wins in the end.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  And that has changed things quite a bit. It feels different now. Like, you know,

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Like Indiana, for example, okay, so Indiana is like there's 12 or 14 guys who played for James Madison last year. So it's like they moved over like, you know, like a third of the best players on that team went to that team. The coach is from there as well. And it, nobody is really bothered by that in a way, like, like not, I'm not even that bothered by it, I guess. It's just, it's strange now how it is. And I, it doesn't seem as though,

• 7:19Speaker 01

  the, like, the portal and then they have stuff and all that is, and the playoff, an orchestra all together has sort of completely reinvented this. And yet, the interest in it seems relatively the same, which I don't know what that says about fans, that, that, that they don't seem to really care about the structure of the sport. Maybe it was silly to think that they did.

• 7:40Bill Simmons?

  So it's almost like the habits of a college football season. And if you cared about a team or a conference, you were just going to care regardless of what they did. Even, even if they changed where it's like, oh, we have 20 new guys who were on a different division one team last year. They're just on our team now. It's becomes more like professional sports, which people are used to.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's almost more than professional sports, because professional sports at least has like free agency guidelines and stuff and salary caps and all these things. I mean, this is, it's, it's in a way more professional than pro sports is. Like I see people say like, oh, you will Deion Sanders, you know, go to the NFL now. And it's like, this is actually where he should be at college, because he really speaks the language of a kid who's like, I want to win, but also what's in it for me. And that seems to be sort of what the nature of this is now. That people were just more accepting, accepting, I guess, of this idea that this, you should be able to just like, put these teams together instantly.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Because what it really has happened, I think, is that You know, sort of the teams who are always like the elite power teams, they've lost their depth. Basically, that is what has happened that these coaches have said like, well, you know, there's three strong safeties at LSU or there's, you know, four offensive tackles at Texas A&M. They can't all play. They all think they're going to play, but some of them aren't. So now we're going to strip those things away and it really has balanced things out now like, I don't think the SEC is as dominant as it was in the past. I, I, I don't know if the difference between these teams, not just them in the big 10, but sort of them and everyone is much less than it was in the past. And that's why I think when they kind of figure out what teams to put in the playoff this year, at least,

• 9:25Speaker 01

  I think this idea of really trying to find the 12 best teams sort of in a vacuum. I don't think they should do that this time. I think they should kind of like go, well, okay. We're going to have this many teams in the playoff and we can't really tell who is superior because this thing has been so shuffled. They almost have to just kind of go like, look at it like professionally. Like it's just who deserves it based on what they did during the year.

• 9:53Bill Simmons?

  Well, I'm about as casual of a college football fan who knows what's going on as it gets. I was invested in that Colorado game. Last weekend because I knew what their ranking was and I knew if they lost, they were probably out of the playoffs. I just thought it would have been fun in the playoffs. But if it was a year ago, I wouldn't have cared because they just would have been, it's like, the question would have been, are they going to play on the December 30th? Bowl or the 31st, or will they be on New Year's Day? And that really would have been all that was at stake. But Saturday actually cared if they won the game or not. So in that respect, it feels like it's worked.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  I mean, it is, it seems to me like there was be a situation where if it was the old system and they went to say they were going to like, you know, uh, oh, I don't know, whatever, whatever bowl they would be going to, if they were going to some lesser bowl, like Travis Hunter wouldn't play and all that stuff. I don't think, I mean, that's almost seems like a guarantee that would have happened.

• 10:44Bill Simmons?

  But that's another reason why they did this, right? Because they wanted to protect against shit like that.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  But now it's like, I think there is a sense, maybe it's going to be.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Four SCC teams, four Big Ten teams, Notre Dame, probably Boise State, and then one each from the ACC and the Big 12. Maybe the ACC will have two teams. Maybe it'll be like SMU and Clemson, Miami, and then maybe then it would have to be probably three SCC teams then, which is, I don't know, maybe that was the goal all along, basically, to have it mostly be the Big Ten and the SCC. Yeah, those are the two best conferences. But it, I, I'm really interested in this, but it does, it does feel like a different experience watching these games. The games are still good. The games themselves, when it's happening, feels exactly the way it always did. But I know in my mind, it's not

• 11:39Speaker 01

  how it always was. Like, you know, now it looks like kind of in perpetuity now Notre Dame is always just gonna have the fifth year quarterback from a school who was kind of academically comparable. Like, they're just gonna, every year, that's just gonna be the new quarterback for Notre Dame. Some guy who's in his fifth year who went to school like Wake or Duke or a school that they find acceptable to pull over. So, you know.

• 12:03Bill Simmons?

  I can't even imagine what kind of commitment this is academically, wink, wink, but also like just, like, they must start, they have spring practice, right? Then they start actual practice for the season, I'm guessing, like, late June, somewhere in there, like, early July, and then they're going all the way through for the next six, six and a half months. Like, I, you know, my daughter plays in Div 3. Like, she plays soccer, they show up in mid-August, the season goes, if you make the playoffs or not, it's like, basically ends like first week of November. And even for that, she's like, man, I'm, you know, it's nice that the season's over. I can finally like concentrate on doing schoolwork and go,

• 12:44Bill Simmons?

  we can go out again. And that was a two and a half month commitment. These football players, they're going potentially through, you know, at least January, but there's more even playoff games. I just, I, to me, it almost, it almost feels like it should just be a pro sport anyway. I don't know how that's a college experience.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, here, like, here's one thing I don't know. Like, Is, is there anybody who's on say Texas's roster or Ohio State's roster, anyone on the roster who's not getting paid? Like are walk-ons even making money in some way?

• 13:17Bill Simmons?

  I don't know. I mean, so you're telling me the backup quarterback can get paid and not even play?

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Well, I, I, I'm kind of under the impression that some of these deals are sort of umbrellas for the entire squad, that everyone's getting something. Because that would also, you know, that would, if, if, if they didn't, that could cause like real inner squad dissension. Like it would be a real problem, you know, it's like, it'd be one thing if one guy's getting paid more than another. It'd be another thing if one guy's getting paid a lot and someone else isn't getting paid anything, you know? I mean, I gotta believe there's-

• 13:45Bill Simmons?

  But it's tougher in football, though.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Sure, sure.

• 13:48Bill Simmons?

  Football, football is harder. Like basketball, you're talking about basically three to six guys really matter on a basketball team. So then if you get to like the eighth, ninth, 10th man, and they're just being, like this guy AJ DeBansa that's coming into the, to college next year, who's, you know, really has, really looks Kobe T-Mac-ish and has a chance to be pretty massive. Like, he's just gonna make more money than everyone else on his team combined, probably multiplied by six, you know?

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Well, it, but it's, it's one thing if the money is coming from NIL stuff, like you're in a commercial for like the local sandwich shop or whatever. I think it's another thing when these guys are just sort of like, you know, you see this now, that boosters get letters and they're like, we need linebackers. Like, we need, you know, it's like, what are you gonna fucking do for us? We need to do this, you know? Um, I, I think I've said this probably on your podcast before. I've said it many times. What I, I mean, it, to me, I have a sense of where this is going. Like, I might, I'll probably be wrong, but I have a sense of it. It seems to me like we're probably five years away from the SEC-

• 14:58Speaker 01

  And the Big Ten. Yep. And maybe one other conference breaking away from the NCAA. Just, just with an ending that relationship, setting up everything themselves. And then like, if you play for Ole Miss, you can go to school there if you want, but mainly you represent Ole Miss. That you're just like, you play for the team, you're on that roster, you wear those colors. You might be involved in the academic program there, maybe not, not Ole Miss in particular, all these schools, you know? And I think that they're banking on something, which I think they're right about, judging from how sort of this has played out. Which is that if you really care about Tennessee, or you really care about USC, or all these things. You, you just, it's really just the uniform.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  That's all you really cared about. Like that, that's who you're rooting for. And it doesn't matter if there's absolutely no relationship to college at all. I don't know if over time, this will, uh, be like a, a pretty significant detriment. Because of like, right now, nobody cares because we're just kind of psychologically shifting everything. It's just like, okay, well, we're not going to really think about the relationship these have, these guys have to college. But if, if it turns out that it doesn't matter at all. If it turns out that none of these guys have to even go to the school, they're just basically employees of the school. And we're just watching football. It happens to be played by guys between the ages of 18 and 23. And it doesn't mean anything else. There's no regional quality to it.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Then it will, then it will basically mean a lot of the things that I thought about college football were fucking wrong. Right. That my whole perception, even what I've told myself, what I like about it, might be wrong. Uh, like if, like it, because all these things that I've been talking about, they certainly don't inform my experience of watching the games. I do not think this when I'm watching it. I only think this when I'm talking about it. And it might be possible that we can just make this split in our mind, because obviously there's lots of things about pro sports. Like we don't, no one. Spends time watching the game thinking it's kind of weird that I'm watching this 33 year old guy play baseball. Like this is weird that an adult is doing this for a living and he's making more than everybody in my town or whatever. We don't think about those things.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  So maybe we just won't think about it. I mean, because the the games themselves are still excellent. I mean, I, I, every week, there's a bunch of games that are interesting. Although I gotta say, I was a little disappointed. I really did for a while think that the Army Navy game was going to be two undefeated teams.

• 17:32Bill Simmons?

  Hmm.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Or a team that's undefeated but against a one loss team. That's the only game on that day. I think for people like me, the idea of watching the Army Navy game as a de facto playoff game.

• 17:44Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Would have been one of the greatest experiences of my college football watching life. Not that I have any relationship to the military. It's just that you're so used to watching that game and convincing yourself, well, there's something like I gotta, you know, it's raining and the guys are in the stands and it's the only game on. Like, it would have been amazing if that game would have mattered. Um, yeah, but I, I, it was kind of a, it was probably a hopeless dream. I, I, but that's, that would have been amazing.

• 18:11Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. So off of everything you just said, the reason I think college sports is basically invulnerable, there's two sets of fans that I think cannot be killed. The first is like South Sun, Archie's going to Oregon, right? He's a sophomore. He's coming home for thank, South did this on parent corner. So he's coming home for Thanksgiving on like Wednesday. And then he's going back to school on Friday because they're playing. They have a huge game that weekend. He wants to be there. So it's like these students, it's still a factory of if you go to a school like that, you're going to get swept. He didn't care about, you know, that team before he went there. And now it's like he's an Oregon fan for life. So you have this factory of fans that go to those schools that, once it's in, they're

• 18:53Bill Simmons?

  like, they become Scientologists. It's over. They're in, they're in for good. And then the other side, the other piece that just seems infallible is the, is the alumni. And I saw it here in LA when, when Michigan was making its run. And I, for some reason, knew a bunch of people that went to Michigan and they lost their fucking minds that, that, that this was going and they had groups of friends that they hadn't seen in a while, or they were going to the game, or they were going to watch parties. And that, I think you put those two subsets together and it just, it will never end. Because you, you're constantly regenerating new fans that are just going to care for their entire life about their school.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Uh, I, I, that's probably true. And I think that with this new influx of new money coming in, I think this change should be made. I don't think anyone who goes to a college, who's attending a college, should have to pay money to watch that team play. It should be free for any student to go to these games while they're there. And if you graduate from a university, as long as you keep proof of their student ID or whatever, you should be able to attend games of that team for the rest of your life for $10.

• 20:07Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  There's, there's no reason if this, all this money is coming in. Like when I was in college, football games were free. It was a division two school. They're not anymore, but they were then. That seemed like a completely reasonable thing. It seems very weird to have someone pay tuition to go to an institution, but you can't see the goddamn football team play unless, that makes no sense. And it seems like if you graduate from there and you've paid to go to college there, one of the benefits is for the rest of your life, you should be able to go to these games extremely cheaply. And I think that not, like, now a university would hear this and they would be like, that's insane. Because like the, they would just think about the amount of revenue that they would lose. But think of the revenue over time, if you were essentially guaranteed that this will always be an essential thing

• 20:49Speaker 01

  in people's lives. Like, I think it would be good for society. I think it'd be good for sports society. And I think it would be good for the schools over time, you know?

• 20:58Bill Simmons?

  You know what's interesting? We've had 50 years of movies that have talked about how stupid this is. Like, what's the point of student athletes? Why can't we move around the system? Like, think about One on One with Henry Steele, the Robbie Benson movie. But the big one, Fast Break, when Gabe Kaplan gets my, you know, one of my favorite sports movies. That's the most politically incorrect sports movie probably of all time. It is not age well. But Gabe Kaplan gets this job in Vegas and he's just like, I'm just gonna bend the system up. I'm gonna grab a bunch of people who have no business being in college and we're just gonna try to beat the UNLV school that he has to beat. So this is, this is in the 70s where we're thinking about how can we buck the system and it's still going, going, going. Now I wonder, like

• 21:43Bill Simmons?

  you mentioned, um, where this is going ultimately. Like you said, in five years, these conferences will be together. Just feels like there will be a 32-team league. None of those schools will be considered Div I NCAA anymore. They just won't even be in the NCAA. And the new Div I will be all the schools that are a little more academically serious, maybe, combined with a whole hodgepodge of other schools. They'll have conferences. And then Div II will be Div II and Div III will be Div III. And that's just how it'll be.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  I don't know if the academic seriousness will be part of it. I think it will be like, it'll be 32 or say 40 teams and it will just be the 40 teams who can get into it and they're all gonna want it. Like, they're all, like, you know, it's like, uh, it does, it's not gonna, I think that the value of this is gonna be so incredible, the financial value of this, that, that there isn't somebody, I can't imagine the school, it'll be like, like if Cal can get in, they'll do it.

• 22:42Bill Simmons?

  So you think like Cal, Stanford, Duke?

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah.

• 22:45Bill Simmons?

  All these like high-end academic schools would still be like, fuck it, we're selling out, we're gonna be part of this?

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know if they would consider it a sellout. I think that they would see it as a value added to the university system.

• 22:58Bill Simmons?

  Well, not what you laid out, though, if the people weren't even in the school. I mean, that's like a whole other level.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  I know. I know. In real terms, it wouldn't. But in the sense that it's like if somebody wants to go to Stanford or whatever, it's like, they, I think, would like the opportunity to also have this other institution attached, this football institution. It'd be the same way. It's like if, I mean, I feel like you'd be the kind of guy who you would not love moving to a town that wouldn't have a sports franchise, pro sports franchise. You'd feel weird about that. I think you prefer to be places where-

• 23:28Bill Simmons?

  I like knowing that I can go see NBA stars.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 23:31Bill Simmons?

  I just think that's a non-negotiable for me. Yeah.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I think that there, you know, it's when sort of kids and their parents are making up the idea of what this college experience should be, part of it might involve, you know, seeing the football team on Saturdays or whatever. So I think that those universities will still want that. It's also gives them, you know, like such a higher profile. I mean, there are some colleges, like, you know, like, football sort of raised the profile of like Texas Tech to a high, like, no one really ever thought of that school at all before they got-

• 24:05Bill Simmons?

  How about Boise State?

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Boise State's another great example. Yes. You know, that may be even a better one.

• 24:12Bill Simmons?

  Well, it is funny, like, like, my son's a junior right now. We're just starting to think about college stuff. I'm trying to put it off as long as possible. And when you talk to like counselors and stuff, they all, and we, this went with my daughter a little bit too, but they all say the same things, like, what kind of experience does your kid want when they go to college? And one of the things they'll mention is, do you want to go to a big school, a school that has like a good football team and you just get swept up in the whole campus thing? And it's, it is a selling point for some people, you know, like you go to the University of Texas, you are now buying into that team for the rest of your life, if you care about sports, right? If I'm a freshman at the University of Texas- I will not care about this team for the rest of my life.

• 24:55Bill Simmons?

  And some people, you know, that's, that's, that's a selling point for some people. Or it's an unexpected bonus when you get to that school and you're like, oh my God, I'm completely swept up in this. And I don't think that's ever going to change.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  I mean, the meaning of college, I feel like has certainly changed though. The meaning of going to college in general, that there is like just a super high degree of skepticism now among about the kind of elite colleges with still the understanding that it is this kind of ultimate networking opportunity. So like, when you say when kids are like, they're asking you, like, what kind of experience you have? Like, it would seem obvious that you would, that the answer should be like, well, I want to go somewhere where I can sort of pursue the education I want to have a job later. But that's not even kind of, they would never use that language. They would use the language of like, it needs to be sort of like a satisfying experience. Cause everybody has to be happy now all the time.

• 25:51Bill Simmons?

  You want to be a doctor or a lawyer, maybe you're thinking about differently.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Yes, that should be the experience. Yeah.

• 25:56Bill Simmons?

  College was so much scarier when we were going to college. Because you're just being sent off. And if you're going like relatively far away or far away from your parents or your family, it's a big deal. Right? We, you, you basically, you could, they could call you. You might, maybe if your phone in your room, they could call and check in. They could write letters. We didn't have the internet, right? When we, when we were in college and the way we had it, but you got sent off and it was like, you were kind of on your own really to figure it out. And I look at the way, like even my daughter, like I talk to my daughter all the time. We FaceTime, I would say almost every day. I always know what's going on with her. I can check on my 360 where she is. And, you know, and she's in a big city.

• 26:40Bill Simmons?

  My dad's there, like, it's just not scary. Like my son, maybe it'll be different if he goes to some place, but I would still feel like I could at least check in. And, and more importantly, he would feel like I at least still have a connection to the people that were in my life. When we were in college, it was like, you were kind of just off.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, but I think the difference is that. In the past, there was a much greater motive to be by yourself and get away.

• 27:08Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  I mean, this is, you know, I, I saw somebody was talking about, it was just some random person talking about how they had had a conversation with someone who'd been a high school teacher for like thirty, four years or forty years or something. And they asked them, what's the biggest difference? And the teacher apparently said, and this is of course anecdotal, but it seems to make a lot of sense to me. Says that in the past, the default setting for a high school student was boredom. And now the default setting is anxiety. And I think as a consequence, the idea of going to any college is probably scarier than thirty years ago would have been for a kid from California to go to school in New York. Even though it'd be totally across the country, everything would be different.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  I think that they were probably more interested in decreasing sort of the static boredom of their life. And now it's the opposite where it's like, the hardest thing about my life is life. I'm afraid of life or whatever. Not that all kids are afraid of life. I'm not saying that. But I do think that the amount that kids feel anxiety and are told they need to recognize that feeling makes going to college super complicated. I, I just, I, I, I would guess you were more ready to go to college than your daughter is, despite the fact that you have all this relationship with her ongoing, you know, through technology. I'm just guessing.

• 28:28Bill Simmons?

  There's been, there's been really good pieces written about this the last few years about why teenagers and kids have more anxiety than it used to. And one of the theories is that they're more, they're more self-aware about the anxiety than maybe we were, you know. In, in general, kids are more self-aware because they're reading more stuff, they're seeing more stuff. They know about therapy. They know about all these different things that we just didn't have any access to. We, you know, we, our generation was like, yeah, you're on your own. Figure it out, man. Oh, shit's going down. Ah, maybe you should talk to your roommate about it. Like, what, what were we gonna do?

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, therapeutic language too, has just moved into everyday language now. Like people using terms like triggering and all these things or like, oh, like, you know, all these, all this language is just sort of like.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  My kids understood that at an age way before they understood things that I thought they should be knowing, you know, that they had a just a real sort of like a um like sophisticated understanding of these things and it probably like it there's no question that kids are in a better position to deal with emotional and mental problems now. It's just that they seem to have many more emotional and mental problems. So it's like good that they can deal with them because they're just there all the time, you know?

• 29:47Bill Simmons?

  Or we had or like our generations and the ones before had way more problems than we realized because we were like dumb and happy. We didn't know what was going on like that might have really been the case.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  But how many problems in life, whether you're young or when you're old, are actually temporary and not that meaningful and will just dissipate on their own? You know, you say like you were you didn't know you had these problems. You still don't fucking know you had them, right? Because they just happened. They just moved on. It's like, you know, it's like it's it's really, I think, tricky to tell someone going through this complicated phase in their life that they need to be aware of all the complications. I mean, it's like you have to look for them almost and it's it's good in some ways. It is like this is maybe kind of moving off topic or whatever. But you know, I had a this most recent election, the main thing that I have taken-

• 30:40Bill Simmons?

  Can you can you hold this so we could take a break and then talk about the election? Because we've just gone a half hour interrupted. We'll take a break, come back.

• 30:49Bill Simmons?

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• 31:33Bill Simmons?

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• 32:16Bill Simmons?

  alike. And the same is true off the field. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you, so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. All right, coming back. You were gonna bring up the election. Let's go.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I'm not gonna talk too much about the election itself. As much as I want to talk about this, I really feel that I do not know what's going on in the world now. And I don't mean because of the outcome of this election. I mean of my understanding of what the world was like, and then the manifestation of the reality. It's like, I was so, like, in 2016, you know, it was like kind of a shocking outcome or whatever. This was less shocking. But yet, it seemed as though, I thought, I had a pretty clear or decent understanding of what the situation in the country was, and I was just totally

• 33:13Speaker 01

  wrong. It's like, I think the country is, you know, we spent so much time, myself included, talking about how polarized the country is. I think in a lot of ways, it's much less polarized than we realized, especially on a whole handful of issues. I suspect it, like, I just...

• 33:32Speaker 01

  You were one of these people where I, after the, the, the election, I texted people and I just said like,

• 33:38Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  On a scale of one to 10, um, how surprised were you by this election? Not how you feel about it, just how surprised you were. And I found kind of a disturbing pattern. Okay. There are some exceptions to this, but for the most part, all the people I texted are, you know, they're intelligent people who follow the news, but some people really follow the news. Some people voraciously follow it. They follow all the narratives. They kind of know anything you reference, they're like, oh, I already saw that story or whatever. Those people all gave answers like eight, nine, 9.5. It didn't matter what their political leaning was. Like if they were really engaged with media, they were shocked by not just the outcome,

• 34:21Speaker 01

  but the fact that Trump won all the swing states, that he won the popular vote, all of these things. The people I know, like a lot of them are doctors and engineers and stuff who follow the news, but don't give a shit at all about the narrative. Like when they look at the New York Times website, they do not look at the right side of the page. They look at the left side of the page. They all were like one, two, three, like they, they weren't surprised at all. And I now sort of have the creeping suspicion that engagement with media distances us from reality. That the more information I get, the more information I take in, the less I understand the world. And I don't know what to do about that because that's a real issue if that is true. And that's how it feels for me now. It feels like that, that the, that

• 35:09Speaker 01

  my perception of what the world is, is being so shaped by these things that I'm not even close to what's actually happening.

• 35:16Bill Simmons?

  Well, the betting markets would agree with you because I think like five, six days before the election, Kamala was almost even.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:23Bill Simmons?

  And there was, there, part of the thinking was the abortion, women are going to come out for this. People don't realize there's a lot of women even telling who they're married to or people in their lives that aren't coming out. So you'd hear that. There was an Iowa poll. Right? That it was like, wow, she's doing great in Iowa. So when you're talking about how the media influences stuff, a lot of it is just the media influencing narratives. That if you want to believe the narrative and you hear the narrative, you grab on to it. Right? So you see the Iowa poll and you go, well, that's, that's a great sign. She's doing really well in Iowa. Or so it almost feels like stuff was nudging people different ways. But to me, it was like, I thought when, uh, when Elon went on Rogan, I felt like that was the most important part of the election.

• 36:09Bill Simmons?

  Whether people want to admit it or not, like Rogan coming out and, and saying that he was going to vote for Trump and that he was in on Trump. I think that influenced people and I don't know if another media figure has that kind of power to, to shift votes. I'm not blaming Rogan one way or the other. I'm just saying there was real momentum that I think some people didn't want to overlook because they were like, oh, look at the Iowa poll.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  But I mean, isn't, isn't that a little bit of reverse engineering though? Because let's say the.

• 36:36Bill Simmons?

  I think that's what every election is.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Well, well, it probably is. Okay. But if that's true, then, then we have a bunch of things to rethink. Because in a sense, it kind of looked like, well, you know, Oprah, Taylor Swift, all these people, they endorse Harris. Nobody cared. Didn't seem to have any influence.

• 36:53Bill Simmons?

  Celebrities, celebrities had no impact at all.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  But you just said that you think that Tim going on Rogan was one of the biggest things, like Rogan's endorsement matter. It only because it worked out that way. I don't think any of these endorsements mattered. I now think that basically any Republican candidate would have won this election. I think that, that, you know, if Nikki Haley would have ran, I think she would have won probably by a very similar margin. I think that there is the sense now that there's all this news going around, kind of shifting these stories. Like you say, these stories like, oh, there's, you know, people are canvassing and, and women are closing the door saying, I'm secretly voting for Harris. I'm not telling my husband. Now it kind of looks like maybe the opposite of this was the case, that people were saying they were going to go vote for Harris because they didn't want to be maybe judged

• 37:38Speaker 01

  or have an issue with their friends who they thought were like, it was actually, they were saying the opposite of what this supposed sort of, uh, trend. You know, cause hours before the election, you could go on social media and there were people saying things like, what if I told you this isn't going to be close at all? Thinking that it was going to be a blowout in the other direction. So no one really had any sense of these things. I mean, I, I think that, that the. In this situation, it kind of felt as though-

• 38:04Bill Simmons?

  No, but wait, there's one thing on the Rogan point that I think people didn't want to see as it was happening, which was that there was young men, basically 18 to 35, that were shifting a certain direction in all these different ways. And the Rogan, the Rogan thing was symbolic to it. It just, it just felt like that was a demographic that I think the Democrats were probably counting on that wasn't there in the way they thought. And, and there were just a lot of people ready for a change. I was thinking, is the opposite of what happened, like when we were both in college in 92, right? And it felt like there was this Republican stranglehold on the country. It was 12 straight years a Republican president.

• 38:45Bill Simmons?

  And Clinton kind of showed up, you know, a year before the election, he was, became the hot young candidate. And people kind of got swept up in it. And just, and people our age are around in the college campuses, all of a sudden, something shifted. And you could say this was legitimate, or maybe this is what we wanted to think. But all of a sudden, like Bush, who was heading into his second term, the older Bush, he just felt like this old establishment that people didn't want a part of anymore. And Clinton, who he barely knew anything about, was this voice of hope. And it was like, oh, this guy. And, and it just became a ground swell. And it, it felt, it felt to me that 2024 was a little like that.

• 39:29Bill Simmons?

  And weird way, it was a little like 2008 too, where it was just people rejecting whatever the infrastructure was. And that was the thing I don't think the Democrats really fully came to grips with, that they had become this infrastructure that a lot of people, especially young people, just didn't want to buy into anymore.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Well, you know, 1992 is a particularly strange case though, because, okay, so, so Bush is popular prior to the run of the election and actually becomes sort of more popular again after he loses it. It's just this window of time. When he became extraordinarily unpopular, the third party candidate of, you know, of Perot getting like 19% of the vote. That, because you know, it's not like, it's not like Clinton got a majority that time because there were three candidates. I mean, that, that was a kind of a strange one. I mean, this is a strange one too. You know, but like, even the way we're talking about this, you said like, you know, these young men who are sort of moving in a different direction. That was the immediately the, the, the day after the election, two days after. It was sort of like, why have these young men become radicalized? And then I was like, well, or is it-

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Is it the opposite? Is it that all of culture has moved away from young men and they have remained static? That they have actually changed the least? Because, you know, they're like, I mean, they're sort of, you know, they're, they know 55% of the electorate is women. Uh, you know, 60% of people in college now are women. So if you're a college age student and you're a guy in a class and like you, you see someone wearing a T-shirt that says the future is female. Maybe you conclude, I guess it is. It seems, seems that way to me too. And they maybe just did not, that they were like, we're, I, I, we're just going to sort of check out in a sense. Not, not, not pay attention, but just, we're not involved with the way culture is changing.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  And everything else in culture changed sort of to, you know, leaving them behind maybe to some degree. And they were kind of like, well, I, you know, I'll, I'll vote for Trump because he doesn't care either, or whatever, however they thought. I don't want to say, I don't, I don't, here again, I feel very reluctant to even give this a opinion because I feel less confident about any of these things now. Like I, I, I really have a sense that, uh, that what is really happening in people's lives is the chasm between that and the way American life is projected through mass media now is so vast

• 41:53Speaker 01

  that, uh, the projection is actually giving us confusion over the reality. Do you know what I'm saying? Kind of, it's like, it's like, so like what, what we think the average American is like, or what we think life is like, or what we think people are thinking, or, uh, how we think they feel about relationships, or how they, all of these things are no longer, um, sort of looking at the reality and saying, well, okay, this is what's going on. It's like, we're sort of building this, like we're constructing this idea of what the country is like. But there is this whole country that is completely untouched and ununderstood.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  And then when these things happen, when that, when this, when we have a surprising outcome to election, we gotta like go in and then try to re-explain it. That we have to like re-figure what, what, what, what we thought and, but it's the same thing. It's just guessing again, like it's not, um,

• 42:47Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, but you know what it's like? It honestly is like what happens after a sports season abruptly ends. And like, like, let's say the Chiefs lose in round two this year, right? And then people are like, ah, the Chiefs, Mahomes, he's gonna win it. It's just that you gotta trust the infrastructure, Mahomes, Reid, they'll figure it out. And then let's say they lose by 20 in round two and they can't score. And then the next day, what happens? We're like, oh, see, the Chiefs, they, they, they got old, they gotta reboot. They're not explosive enough. They gotta really, they gotta give Mahomes more weapons. And then we do the whole next two, three days thing. It would be like, like the Democrats, the day after, I thought that was a lot like that. There was all this stuff that was just sitting there that anyone could see.

• 43:30Bill Simmons?

  And then when they lost, it's like, ah, the Democrats have to figure out how to reinvent themselves. They don't have anybody to, they don't have anybody to inspire, they don't have a message that inspires the country. They don't have politicians that inspire people. They don't have leadership, even the way they handled the Biden thing the last two years, where he was clearly old and they just kept, they kept denying it tonight. And it's like, we need him, we need him, we can beat Trump again with him. That did like, just ignore all these other signs. Even Jon Stewart, when he came back, whatever he did that first Daily Show, and he did that thing about how old Biden was, and a bunch of people got mad at him about it. And the same thing happened with Charlamagne a couple of months ago. And it was this elephant in the room that everybody was just like, don't look, don't look, don't look.

• 44:11Bill Simmons?

  And now you see him the last couple of months and it's like, how did anyone not stop this? Where were people? Where were, where were the leaders of the party? Why didn't, what happened to him just having one term? And then trying to find his successor and build a succession plan? And they just didn't do it in time. To me, it was like just bad strategy. And then they, they shoehorned somebody in who had 107 days to try to figure out how to get their message to the country like that. In retrospect, it seems crazy, but everybody in the moment thought, oh yeah, this'll work, this'll work, this'll work.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Well, it's hard to, like, who's in a position to tell the president to step down? That's, that's one of the problems there. Like, even, even if there's a bunch of people who think two years in, it's like, it would be better to transition to something else. No one's in the, I mean, he's the president, right? So no one can really tell him.

• 44:59Bill Simmons?

  Well, his, it would be his wife and his son. And obviously they wanted to keep him as president. But it's, that's the kind of thing where your family steps in and goes, hey, dad. Start laying the legacy now to see who replaces you. Do one year, you can be, one term, you can be a hero, but he's just trying to keep his job like everybody else.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  Is that realistic though, to imagine?

• 45:18Bill Simmons?

  Probably not.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  Someone's, I mean, like, it would be sort of like, if like, like, if, if, you know, what would you do if your son started telling you, you need to retire? Would you be like, ah, good point. He's like, no, I know. And he's like, you'd be like, no, I, no, I'm not, I'm not gonna, why would I retire?

• 45:33Bill Simmons?

  I'm fine.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  It's like, yeah, exactly. You would, anybody would think that.

• 45:36Bill Simmons?

  I gave a great speech two days ago. Had a good podcast with Chuck.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  It's, it seemed as though the shorter runway, I thought, would help Harris, right? Because it would, you would have all this enthusiasm and it would kind of bleed on through. I think what, one of the things that you mentioned that is a real problem though, and this is the kind of thing that I feel like I was, my own fault, that I was sort of deluded about, which is that the day after the election, many Democratic strategists are like, yeah, we shouldn't have done this thing. I don't know why we were saying that. Like, like they almost immediately admitted that they regretted this. And what was, what is probably true is that people sensed that lack of sincerity during the campaign. It's like, they're like, you don't really believe that. Like, you don't really believe these things you're saying, or you're afraid to talk about these things

• 46:23Speaker 01

  in public, so you're just gonna say nothing. And, um, and that, uh, you know, I, and, and I think that I, that, that a lot of people got a sense of that, but like, someone like me, who's trying to follow this stuff so closely and sort of, you know, know the information, like, I'm the one who ends up being the idiot.

• 46:42Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Yeah, but even in the moment, like, their whole strategy with Kamala was, they were basically treating her like she was a game manager quarterback in football, right? Like, just, just try to get us some first downs, don't say too much, let's, let's try to protect, protect certain things with you. Like, even the fact that she was doing, like, some, some carefully planned podcasts or show appearances, right? Where it's Trump, who's insane, who would just be like, I'll do anything. I'll talk for four hours on whatever platform, I don't care. And she never, she never found that middle ground. I still never felt like I had, even after those three and a half months, I never felt like I had a complete sense of everything she stood for and what her

• 47:25Bill Simmons?

  message was. And I, I think if the Democrats probably learned anything from the last two years, it's like, people still want to be inspired. Like they still want to feel like I'm this person resonates with me in these ways because

• 47:41Speaker 01

  But that was the that was the attempt, though. I mean, up into the la, you know, getting down close to the election, it was sort of like the Republicans have this cynical view, this nihilistic view that America is getting worse. We don't think that. We think that, you know, we're we have, you know, we're and it didn't work. It didn't happen.

• 47:57Bill Simmons?

  That's what everybody says during every election. It's like, we were, are you better off four years now than you were four years ago? That's like, we've been watching that for 30 plus years with the with both sides. Right? That's what when you're the other side, you always try to make it seem like the other side. Everybody's worse off. That's that's the dialogue of an election. And sometimes it's bullshit. Sometimes it's real.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Well, is it ever real? Is it really?

• 48:23Bill Simmons?

  Maybe it's not.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  I mean, what does it's like the you think about the Chiefs, for example, is that the Chiefs go to the playoffs and lose immediately. If they lose immediately, then of course the response will be like, well, they played all these close games during the year against relatively bad teams and they barely squeaked it out over and over again. They can't do it forever. If they win, of course, then those same wins validate why they won. It was like they were always ready to just, you know, flip the switch and turn it on. So anything in the past can prove anything, right? Like, all these things that people have been saying about Harris, if she had won, would still be part of the discourse. It would just be, see, it was right. It was true. You know, so it's like it because all of this, these, all this discourse is just, it's, it's,

• 49:07Speaker 01

  I don't, I hate to say it, but it is like, it's, it is clearly just made up. And what drives me crazy is there's a bunch of people listening to this podcast right now who are hearing me say this and they're saying like, of course, how did you not know this? We all know this, you know? And like, I, but, but, and, and they're justified in saying that. It's like, I, I, I,

• 49:33Speaker 01

  I just, I don't fucking know what's going on. I don't know what's happening. Like, I don't know what's happening in the world. And I just, I have to accept it. I have to accept that I have no idea what's happening. Because I don't. Like, it's just, it's, it's not, and I'm not saying this from this position of outrage. I'm saying this from a position of sort of like, I guess, in some ways, vulnerability. Like, just my recognition that, that I am now receiving my understanding about life through, through external sources that are not giving me a real depiction of what's happened.

• 50:08Bill Simmons?

  Here's a question for me. If the Democrats had actually done this correctly and said Biden's a one-term guy, it's going to be really hard for us to win with Kamala because she was in the Biden administration the whole time. So she can't really criticize the current president, right? So anybody who has, anybody who's like, I don't want to vote for Biden again. I'll take whoever the other side is, or they like Trump, whatever. And you have this new candidate running who can't also distance themselves from any of the mistakes Biden made, like whatever you think those mistakes were. It's just a really unusual situation. Like, we haven't had this situation that many times in American history where somebody's had a one-term presidency

• 50:52Bill Simmons?

  and then somebody in their same party is running who then can't, basically, they're like, I stand for change. It's like, well, you're the vice president for this other guy. Like, so what did he do wrong? And she was never able to really answer that. So if you're the other side, it's like, well, I'm just voting for Biden again. I don't want to vote for Biden again. It's like they never figured that out. So I wonder, like, if they just said in 2022, we're going to have, Biden's going to leave after one term. We're going to have this, we're going to do this correctly with the convention, with people running. We're going to have new voices and then, you know, people that come in and want to have their version of what they think the country should be. I, that might have worked. But whatever they did, obviously, in retrospect, it's like, oh, man, that had no chance.

• 51:35Bill Simmons?

  Because she, she got kind of trounced. Like, in, in ways that, when you look at some of the polling data, were pretty surprising.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  Well, it is, it is weird how, you know, okay, in a sense, the, the election is proving to be, the popular vote is going to be closer than it initially seemed. But it's a little bit like if- Like if Ohio State plays Michigan and it's 28-3 at halftime and half the crowd leaves and then the end, the final score ends up being like 31-24, it still feels like a blowout. That's kind of how it was. Like, I think some people felt like I'm going to have to stay up all night to see who wins this election. It was over so quickly, it kind of creates the sense that it was a bigger blowout than it was. I just, I guess now I'm pretty skeptical of this idea of you're saying like, well, if they had done this messaging, or if they had, or if they had sort of been better at explaining this, it would, I feel maybe

• 52:26Speaker 01

  people now are just voting for full administrations, one of which they felt was moving left, one of which was moving right. And the sense is, we're just gone too far left. We need to tack back the other way. I think that's probably what it was. That's why I say like, I really doubt it would have made a difference if there had been an open primary, if Trump had been killed and Nikki Haley or whatever had taken over, or JD Vance had been the candidate. I think that people were going to vote not about the person, because it's now, it's so clear that these things are moving in diametrically different directions. Like, there's just no, there's just no overlap between the two policies at all, and the

• 53:10Speaker 01

  two philosophies at all. There's so, there's only, you know, and to a degree that now it seems like there's probably more shared ideas among the citizenship than there are among the parties. That there's more things that Democrats and Republicans agree on as people than they do as sort of political ideas. You know what I'm saying? Like, like there might be more things that people who seemingly have different political views actually go like, well, that's too much, or that's like, I want this, you know? That they maybe have more shared values, because the parties are incapable of sharing these values. A great example of this is like, all this like RFK food stuff, right? Like, this idea, it's like, we got, we need to take all of these things out of Fruit Loops

• 53:53Speaker 01

  or whatever. We gotta, you know, we, why does, you know, our food have 19 ingredients? And like, you know, in England, the same product as four? If someone had said this was going to become an issue in 2024, 10 years ago, we would have assumed it was coming from the left, right?

• 54:11Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  That seems like something the left wants to do, like when Bloomberg was like, we can't have big pops at, at the movies or whatever. It's like that, that tends to be something that you, you kind of typically seem from like, like from a, a progressive side of things and somebody wants, um, you know, to, to, to make food other. But because it is, it's just arbitrarily now, it's, it's, he's into it. So, and he's a Republican now. So now it's a Republican issue. It is, it's just, it is just goofy. Like it doesn't, it has no meaning about, uh, there, you can no, I shouldn't say it has no meaning, but you can't connect it to any kind of larger ideology. Like these things are now sort of like we, we've almost separated ideology from what these policies are supposed to be.

• 54:56Bill Simmons?

  So going back to your one to 10 test and the initial premise of this, you were saying that, um, you just felt like, why were you so surprised by this? Was it because of the media you're consuming? It does feel like, like maybe you're consuming, not you, but just anyone where it felt like abortion was going to be the biggest deciding theme in the election, right? And then now that we have like all the feedback and the polls and what happened, it actually seems like immigration was just as important, right? People's feelings on crime, inflation. There were other things that were just as important and maybe even more important than abortion for what determined the final voting results. But I don't remember reading

• 55:40Bill Simmons?

  it in the same way or hearing about it as abortion. Now, maybe I'm reading the wrong things, not the wrong things, but maybe I'm just going to a certain sector. I don't know. Um, but then in retrospect, everyone's like, well, of course. And that goes back to, I think, your point of like, you know, sometimes, sometimes you don't know until the election happens. It's almost like a game. It's like, well, that clearly was more important. It's like, how would we have known that a week before the election? I don't know.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, it is.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  I mean abortion is one issue, but and there was a sense that this was going to be a real critical thing, that that that there were people who would maybe, I think the assumption was, it was, it was actually, here's a better way to describe it. It was almost sort of,

• 56:30Speaker 01

  like, we conceded that it was going to be a huge issue. We didn't actually think like, well, it's like, certainly, there's going to be a ton of women who are going to vote against Trump because of, you know, Roe v. Wade no longer exists or whatever. And it was his decision to put those people in the Supreme Court. I, I, I, I think that that was just an idea that was never really interrogated. I think that the idea of that, that the, the way we perceive, uh, who is in favor or against abortion is probably not accurate,

• 57:10Speaker 01

  not as accurate as we think. But we sort of think that there's that, um, that if, if you show a picture of someone, show somebody a picture of somebody, that they can look at that picture and say like, I think this person is going to be in favor of abortion, or this looks like a person who might be against it. And it's just not, it's not right. I mean, how, the fact that, like, you know, Trump did well, did much better with, um, like Latino men, that there was almost no, there was nothing prior to the election that was giving us any indication that this would be the case, you know? And then you, or like, you know, there was, uh, you know, you, after, I'd, I'd seen this before, but

• 57:52Speaker 01

  after the election, many people brought this up. There was this idea that, um, actually a lot of people, uh, a lot of minorities did not like the term Latinx. Okay. And then there were, you know, that, that, you know, so then Harvard, like, I think it was Harvard did a study where it was like, not only do they not like Latinx, they're, they're, they're, you know, less likely to vote for a candidate who uses that term. So it's like somebody of like Mexican heritage hears that term and is repelled by it. And the response seemed to be like, well, that can't be true. And maybe they're racist too somehow. It made no sense. It was like, they just, like, so the information was there. This study happened before the election. It was, we saw it. Um, but then it's only after the election, they're like, how did they not?

• 58:37Speaker 01

  Listen, how did they not respond to this? Well, you could have said that at the time. But at the time, when it was actually happening, when it was still like a dynamic issue, it was just like, well, I don't know. It's probably wrong. It's probably not accurate. But then after the election, it's like, oh, see? It absolutely is.

• 58:55Bill Simmons?

  I mean, the one thing everybody could agree on is that the Democratic Party seemed completely rudderless in 2024. And that's the biggest reason they lost over any other reason. And that's just it. There's no, there's no counter to that, that. And this has been a thing that's been happening for a while. I feel like the last Democrat that's actually really inspired people was probably Obama. And Obama left office in 2016, you know?

• 59:20Speaker 01

  I just didn't hear this conversation, though, in August.

• 59:23Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  I did not hear people saying that. So like, how, so how can something be so obviously true now that we weren't saying 21 days?

• 59:30Bill Simmons?

  Because here's the reason. Because people were like, well, look, we can't let Trump win. So I, whatever, whatever we have on this other side, that's just who, who has to win. Trump can't win. That was basically became the message of the party. They didn't actually have a message. All right, we gotta take a break.

• 59:51Bill Simmons?

  Now it's time for a special part of today's episode, brought to you by NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV. My friend, I love YouTube TV. Racing to the playoffs right now. I'm happy to announce, Sunday Ticket is only available right now for $89. That's it. When you bundle NFL Sunday Ticket and YouTube TV, which I would highly recommend, because then you get the local games into your multi-view, you can watch every game, every Sunday. So I would suggest you thank yourself this holiday season. Again, NFL Sunday Ticket for just $89 and the offer ends on December 2nd. So, I mean, you got Thanksgiving, we're all gonna watch the three Thanksgiving games. But then on Sunday, some really good early games.

• 1:00:37Bill Simmons?

  Chargers, Atlanta is a good one. Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Cincinnati playing basically to stay in the playoff picture. Arizona, Minnesota. And then I'd probably throw in Seattle and the Jets just to see what's going on with Rogers, plus Seahawks trying to protect their NFC West title. But those are four really nice multi viewers. I'll personally have Drake man, one of my four screens, because that's how we roll in the Simmons house. But thanks to our friends at NFL Sunday Ticket YouTube TV for sponsoring this part of today's episode. Don't forget right now, again, the Thanksgiving sale price on NFL Sunday Ticket, just $89. And all you have to do is sign up at youtube.com/BS, my initials, youtube.com/BS.

• 1:01:21Bill Simmons?

  Offer ends December 2nd. Local and national games on YouTube TV. NFL Sunday Ticket for out of market games, excludes digital only games. Terms and embargoes apply. Device and content restrictions apply. This episode is brought to you by WeatherTech. Whether it's a pumpkin spice coffee that goes splat in your seat or a weekend tailgate that leaves your trunk full of gear and who knows what, you're going to want WeatherTech in your vehicle, whether you call it fall, autumn, or spooky season. Whether the mess is your fault, the kids, the dogs, or the weather's fault, you're going to want WeatherTech for American made floor liners and a cargo liner that laugh in the face of fall weather. Visit weatherTech.com today.

• 1:01:59Bill Simmons?

  So I was talking to Van and Big Waz on my pod about NBA superstardom and the concept of Kobe and Curry and LeBron being the last three American stars that we've had. And how they, each situation was a little bit of unicornish, right? If Kobe, the son of an NBA player who ends up on the Lakers, playing with Shaq, he's in the finals by the time he's in year four, then has a bunch of, they win three straight titles. He has the trial, like the whole arc of it. Then he has to come back and keep reinventing himself. The whole arc of it can't be replicated.

• 1:02:40Bill Simmons?

  Curry comes in, son of an NBA player, completely changes how basketball is played and kids gravitate to him like he's a Pied Piper, like, and he's playing in a big market in San Francisco. Can't be replicated. LeBron comes in as the most hyped non-center we've ever had. Lives up to it and then some, then has the decision which pushes him to another level, wins titles, keeps going and going and going. Now he's in year 22 and still relevant, can't be replicated. And people are asking like, well, where's the next NBA star? What happens when Curry and LeBron leave? And I don't know if there's another unicorn coming, which is what I said to Van and Waz, but I need your take. Like, can we have a giant

• 1:03:25Bill Simmons?

  American NBA superstar again? Or is the culture just changed against it? What needs to happen?

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  Well, okay, you kind of went through all these guys and you all, and with every case, you were sort of like, this sort of unique scenario happened. Okay. Unique to them, you know? I mean, that will happen again, right? There will be unique situations that we can't foresee, that somebody will, you know, achieve sort of a level of fame that will be, you know, unlike any other superstar from the past.

• 1:03:57Bill Simmons?

  I would argue it's happening right now with Anthony Edwards. And yet, there's, I don't know why it feels like he doesn't have the same chance that those other three guys had. But I would argue that, that like, I love watching Anthony Edwards. I was, I watched the Celtics Timberwolves game and I was just like, fucking love this guy. I love the way he plays. I love how hard he plays. He's so charismatic. We always talk about how NBA players hold back or they're not authentic. This guy's completely authentic at all times. He's amazing to watch. He really gives a shit. He's an awesome two-way player. And yet, I don't think he'll ever be as famous as Kobe was.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  I don't think so. No, I think that's unlikely. I also don't think he's, he's going to be as good as Kobe relative to his peers. So that's part of it as well.

• 1:04:42Bill Simmons?

  He's right. He's on the same track for Kobe at least. Like stats, ability, stuff he's done already at his age. Like, he's parallel at worst.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  So, so you, so you think that there is a high likelihood that he will retire among the 15 best players of all time?

• 1:05:00Bill Simmons?

  I don't. But, you know, he's also not playing with Shaq for the first seven years of his career. Like, which goes back to like, the question I was thinking for you is like, if Kobe, so these are two separate questions that are the same question. Kobe just gets drafted by Charlotte and plays at Charlotte for his entire career. Is he Kobe? I don't think he is.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  No way.

• 1:05:19Bill Simmons?

  If Kobe's... If Kobe's just Italian, never lived in America and his name's Kobe Bryantini, and he's an Italian, you know, full phone through comes, he has an accent, and ends up on the Lakers, but he's Kobe Bryantini, the Italian. Is it the same?

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  I, I don't, I don't think so. I don't, okay, so, um, that's a little tougher one. I mean, so like, so, so, okay, by this logic, so like, if Luca was from Nebraska.

• 1:05:55Bill Simmons?

  Right. We talked about this with Waz and Ben, if Luca's name was Luke Jenkins.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, would he?

• 1:06:01Bill Simmons?

  White guy. He's basically the Matt Novak character in Blue Chips. Cause like, grew up here tractor, is that a drac tractor? And it's just, cause there's this whole other piece that a lot of the best guys in the league now are foreign. And we haven't seen a foreign player yet resonate with American fans the way that, you know, the, those three guys that I mentioned, plus MJ, plus Bird and Magic. Nobody, no foreign player has been able to even touch those six guys.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  Huh. Well, you know, I, we, uh, we did a podcast, uh, before, I think, Wemby's rookie year, or maybe during Wemby's rookie year. And I said that I thought he was going to have a good rookie year and a good second year. And he was going to have sort of a statistical explosion his third year.

• 1:06:52Bill Simmons?

  You're on pace.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  Oh, I, yes, because I, I feel like this year, you know, it's probably going to be very comparable to his rookie year a little better. He's getting a little more time. Uh, but I think he could have like a, I don't know, I wouldn't say a wilt like year, but like, like he, he could have some real, I think he's gonna have a couple of seasons where he is, if he's healthy, he'll have some sort of insane numbers. He'll be an interesting test case, I think. Like if, if, um, um, I, uh, but like with, with, you know,

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  Luca would be more, I think, popular among Americans if he was an American player. But I also think that there's also a certain cachet to him because he's a foreign player. I mean, it's really, it's really hard to deduce of like, what is the prejudice? Level of prejudice against European players? Because it's a different kind of prejudice, right? It's a different kind of prejudice than, than sort of a solely sort of race-based or faith-based sort of prejudice. Like, when someone, if someone doesn't like a foreign player or doesn't like them as much as they would if they were American.

• 1:08:01Bill Simmons?

  Or they're apathetic.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:02Bill Simmons?

  It's, the apathy is the number one thing.

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  I, I do think sometimes it's, it's just the, the sort of the ease in saying the name and sort of like the, the understanding of what this person is like. I mean, certainly, you know, the Joker should be, uh, as famous as any athlete in the country, right? Wouldn't, shouldn't he be? I mean, it's like, like in terms of what he has accomplished and the way he plays and all of these things. And he is a popular player.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  You know, like you mentioned Cooper Flag or whatever. So, um, how good does Cooper Flag have to be to sort of become, uh, the biggest player in the league? Does he have to be the, does he have to be the best player in the league to be the most famous player? Are you sort of suggesting that Cooper Flag could be maybe a tier below Anthony Edwards and be more famous? I don't know.

• 1:09:01Bill Simmons?

  No, I would say the, the comparison to me would be Cooper Flag versus like Tim Duncan.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:09:07Bill Simmons?

  So, and Tim Duncan, he's from St. Croix, but is somebody that I don't think resonated and probably in the way that he should have. And even now I find myself trying to defend him all the time. He won five titles, two straight MVPs. I think he's-

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  Who are you defending him against? Who's criticizing him?

• 1:09:24Bill Simmons?

  I think as the years pass, especially like if, if it's a basketball reference slash TikTok culture of Tim Duncan, like he's just not going to do as well. Because- His, his game and the stuff that he was good at was so day to day, week to week. He didn't care about stats. He affected his team in all of these amazing ways that, that I just think as the years pass, it's, people are gonna start chipping away at it. The same way that Karl Malone's gonna gain steam as the years pass. Be like, oh my God, look at those Karl Malone stats. With Cooper Flag.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't feel like that's happening though. I don't feel like Karl Malone's status is, is being elevated over time.

• 1:10:08Bill Simmons?

  Well, he has other issues, but no, I'm just saying if you're, if you're basing it on stats and you're in 2075, the year 2075, just studying basketball players, you'd be like, oh, Karl Malone, if he just won a couple more titles, he's right there with Tim Duncan. And it's just like this, that wasn't the case. But with Cooper Flag, I think you'd have to win titles. You'd have to be this Duncan KG type player, which I think he is, and then it depends on the situation. Would people root for that in a different way than they would root for it if he was, you know, from a European country? Or he was like from Slovenia? Like, I do think people would have more of a connection to it.

• 1:10:50Bill Simmons?

  It's, it's the sad reality of, of how NBA stars are treated. He's from Maine. He grew up idolizing the 86 Celtics. Like that shit's gonna play a little differently. Wemby is the interesting test case for me though, because it seems like if he doesn't get hurt, he is gonna be the dominant player in the league at some point. And, you know, what is that gonna look like? Are, is that gonna sell shoes? Is he gonna have the most commercials? Like, I'm just dubious, because we've never seen it before. I said to Waz and Ben, Hakeem, who was amazing, who was one of the 12 or 13 best players ever, who was super fun to watch, who was great to watch in person, who was unlike anybody on the planet, who beat Shaq in an NBA Finals, who won two titles without really an all NBA

• 1:11:35Bill Simmons?

  player in his team, and had one of the three best, one of the best three-year stretches in the history of the league, is just not as famous as Shaq is, and wasn't as beloved. And I think if you ask most people who had a better career, Hakeem or Shaq, just about everybody would say Shaq.

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  Well, it's possible that right now that might happen. Yeah, right now they would say Shaq. I don't know if they will in 10 or 20 years, though, because

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  it's like you say, like you mentioned, like TikTok or whatever, like in the TikTok world, Tim Duncan is, you know, not beloved because a collection of Tim Duncan highlights is not, you know, an amazing thing to watch. It doesn't work the way you say like, you know, there's a ton of players who you've mentioned before.

• 1:12:27Bill Simmons?

  Like T Mac, Vince Carter.

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  But is that really a real reflection of how these things are going to be remembered?

• 1:12:34Bill Simmons?

  See, I think it is. I think that's the part you're missing. I think for people under 25, who I'm just shocked, I see it with my son. I'm shocked by how much information he gets from these YouTube videos and TikTok stuff that makes him think he understands the history of basketball. And that's the part that scares me.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  But look what you just said. Makes him think he understands the history of basketball. In the same way, I'm guessing when you were his age, when you were his age, you believed you had a full understanding of basketball and the history of basketball that now,

• 1:13:07Bill Simmons?

  Well, we had to, but our generation had to work harder at understanding basketball, though. We had to read all of these different books. We read Sports Illustrated every week. We, we were watching whatever games we could watch on TV. We weren't, they weren't like these digestible 20 second, 30 second, 60 second videos. I sound like an old guy complaining about it. I'm not. I'm just saying it's, it's way easier to shift perception now than it was in 1989.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  Well, it is. Yes. It like, is it possible that if I, if TikTok had, TikTok had existed when I was younger, would I have like, would I think Connie Hawkins is one of the five best players of all time?

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  Would I think World B Free is better than he's? I guess maybe. I mean, this is like,

• 1:13:51Bill Simmons?

  World B Free is a good example. It would have been a whole, World B Free is a problem. It would have been like LaMelo Ball right now. LaMelo's averaging 30 points a game. And if you're just dissecting him on the internet, he seems like he's one of the seven best guys in the league.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  I read this book a bunch of years ago. The book is called Black Swan. The guy who wrote the book, he gets kind of a punching bag now for some reason, but this book had some interesting ideas in it. One of the things he mentions is this, kind of as a, just as a side, sort of, is something that I've always kind of kept in my mind, which was this test that one time was done on people, where they would say like, take a picture of a fire hydrant, next to like a Volvo, okay? And then they would make the photo extremely blurry, okay? And then they would have two groups of people look at that image, slowly become sharper. They would, you know, they would, they would take away the fuzziness. Some people were given 25 steps, like there'd be 25 steps along the way

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  from, from the most fuzzy to the least fuzzy. And some people would be given 10. I'm just kind of making these figures up. But one is it's like, it's 25 incremental steps against 10 incremental steps. And they did find that the people who had 25 incremental steps, more information, figured out it was a fire hydrant in a Volvo later. Because every sort of wrong image allowed them to sort of make up what it could be. Maybe it's a, maybe it's a Dalmatian.

• 1:15:16Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

  Oh, no, maybe, maybe it's a, maybe it's a Rubik's Cube or whatever. Whereas the people getting only the 10 incremental changes were better, because they were like, they, they, they didn't have the ability to sort of project other ideas onto what it was. What you're saying is kind of the same thing. That you're saying that because of TikTok in a way, people are getting all these sort of random images of things. It allows them to have sort of obscure, arcane, inaccurate thoughts. That they're seeing more stuff. That could be, you know, that, that's not, that's not such a crazy thing.

• 1:15:47Bill Simmons?

  I think the perception right now, if you, if you ask an entire generation, people under 30, who is better Kobe Bryant or Tim Duncan? Based on the last 10 years of how those careers and highlights and everything else has been pushed out. I think 90% of the people would say Kobe Bryant.

• 1:16:09Bill Simmons?

  If you ask anyone under thirty, who is better Kobe Bryant or Tim Duncan? I feel like Kobe will get ninety percent of whatever this imaginary vote is.

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  Okay, but this is a mistake that you make and a mistake I make too sometimes. But one thing is like these ideas, like you ask the random person under thirty.

• 1:16:24Bill Simmons?

  I'm saying anyone, I'm saying every single person under thirty.

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. That's the mistake.

• 1:16:30Bill Simmons?

  Yep.

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  The idea that sort of like we can have an understanding of these things by casting the widest possible net, so any random person's ideas have to be sort of taken seriously. But that's not actually how it works. Like if we, you know, say with music, for example, when we think about like, um, you know, which acts from the past are significant? It can't be that you ask every single person, like, uh, like who was, you know, like who had a bigger impact on music, you know, um, you know, uh, if you ask like Fleetwood Mac and the Velvet Underground? Well, it's like more people have obviously heard of Fleetwood Mac. They're gonna give that answer, right?

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  But if you keep moving over time, say we get like fifty years down the line, where the commercial significance of something will matter less and sort of what the sort of very small sliver of people who really care about these things say, then the answer maybe flips. I mean, like you talk about, you say like, you know, you ask some random twenty-seven year old, like, uh, you know, who's better between Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan? They probably do say, you know, Kobe Bryant, but you can ask that same person, a lot of binary questions, and they'll give an answer that would be rejected by an expert. But you will still be talking about this in twenty years unless like your son convinces you retire. But like if you're, like, you'll still be talking about, right?

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  You'll still, you'll still be talking about, uh, you know, basketball from the early two thousands, okay? Most people will not, and those end up becoming what the true answers are.

• 1:18:04Bill Simmons?

  Early two thousands, how about the eighties? I'll still be talking about all the eras.

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  Well, sure, sure. Well, what I'm saying with any of these, I was using, we were using Kobe and Tim Duncan.

• 1:18:12Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, yeah, no, no, I'm with you.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  What I'm saying is that like, it is. You you see this all the time. Remember, okay, there was a time when like Kanye West made a song with Paul McCartney. And it was really popular during this. We don't see this much anymore, which is good. But there used to always be a situation like that would happen. And you'd see a story where somebody would just link to a bunch of tweets about, "Look at all these people who don't know who Paul McCartney is." Like, you know, all these people going like, "Who's this person Kanye West is making a record with?" And we look at that and we're like, "Oh, man, young people are idiots." Well, actually, no, those people are idiots. There's always some idiots, right? There's always some people who don't know about the past and are going to be very vocal and almost happy about it. But those opinions don't stick.

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  I mean, like, those opinions fall by the wayside. So like, you know, it's like if, you know, you would use, you sometimes will like, have mentioned, I think, Jason Williams sometimes is an example of a guy.

• 1:19:09Bill Simmons?

  Oh, white chocolate. White chocolate is a problem.

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  That drives you crazy, kind of. And he's like, you know, and he's a great example of this because his highlights are amazing, but his statistics, his performance makes him like, you know, you know, I mean, he was, he was the second best player on his high school team. Um, yeah. You know who his best player was? Randy Moss. But, um, but regardless, what I'm saying is that sort of, that, that interest, that interest in Jason Williams, uh, that, that sort of like, that, no, this is no criticism of him either. But it's like, that's not going to sustain a reputation over time. Like, that's going to appeal to the most casual person. Yeah.

• 1:19:49Bill Simmons?

  Well, unfortunately, it's a lot of sports fans. What's interesting to me is when we've all, we all decide something when we're there in the moment. And it becomes like, "Look, we're locking this down. Just put this in the vault. We're done with this." And then as the years pass. It starts to shift. Like, I look at Joe Montana this way. And now Brady, I think Brady took the GOAT title from Joe Montana. There's no question. But I think as the years pass, now we've hit a point where if you showed somebody two minutes of Steve Young highlights and two minutes of Joe Montana highlights, they'd be stunned that Steve Young didn't take Joe Montana's job like immediately when he was on the 49ers. It was like, well, we were there. We were watching all the football

• 1:20:32Bill Simmons?

  games. Joe Montana was the best. If your life depended on a game, you would just pick him. I don't care what the stats are. He was absolutely the best. He was the best at crunch time. He was the best at everything. Him versus Marino versus Elway, Joe Montana was the answer. And then the years passed and it's like, ah, Joe Montana. Well, he did have Jerry Rice. Well, he did have Bill Walsh. Well, they did have some luck. And you could start picking it apart, which I think it's weird to me as I get older that certain things that we just thought were irrefutable are now being, are now up in the air. It's like, like Joe Montana to me was like unassailable. Somebody's gonna have to take the GOAT title from him. The same way I feel about Jordan.

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it would have been interesting if, if Montana had not went to the Chiefs. Not that he played poorly with the Chiefs, but you know, he went over there and if, if he had just ended his career after, say, the fourth Super Bowl or whatever, I think it would be different because not only then did the Niners win with Young.

• 1:21:27Bill Simmons?

  Yep.

• 1:21:27Speaker 01

  And that Jerry Rice basically had similar statistics with both guys. It was almost like they did seem a little bit, you know, like irreplaceable in that regard. And then there was a whole glut of guys who came after Montana in the 90s, who, you know, it was, who had kind of huge years and didn't seem that far below him.

• 1:21:52Bill Simmons?

  Like the Favre types, yeah.

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  Favre, you know, sort of the end of sort of looking at Marino's career and the statistical achievement, the fact that Elway still played pretty late into the 90s effectively. Steve Young did have a good period there. Jim Kelly had some great.

• 1:22:07Bill Simmons?

  Jim Kelly had a good run. Fun to bet against.

• 1:22:09Speaker 01

  So, but yeah, and, and it wasn't, it wasn't as though, like, you know, like when Jordan left the league and there, there did feel like, well, now there's this, there's this huge hole and this huge gap and, and, and the best guy now is, is not even like, if Jordan comes, you know, while he's playing baseball, the assumption is he's the best.

• 1:22:26Bill Simmons?

  Well, let me ask you this.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  And he comes back and says.

• 1:22:28Bill Simmons?

  Why do we, why do we spend so much time more? Football is way more popular than the NBA, like way more. It's not even close. Yet we spend way more time talking about legacies and all time greats being measured against each other and how the current guy measures against some guy from 30, 40 years ago than we do with football. And it's, I, it almost makes me wonder, do we just not understand footballs? Cause the only things I will, I will believe till the day I die or till somebody passes them. Jerry Rice is the best receiver I've ever seen. Lawrence Taylor is the best defensive player I've ever seen. And that, those are like the bars to me. And I don't, I don't even, I, I wouldn't even bother like doing evidence because it's,

• 1:23:12Bill Simmons?

  it's a little harder to do in football. Montana was the QB for me and then Brady took it. But I just feel like that's always going to be the case for me. And I don't think people would challenge it in the same way they would with the NBA, right? The NBA, I, I don't know why that is.

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  Well, okay. I, I have a theory on this. I guess, okay. So again, I, last podcast I did this. So I'm, we're working on this book and this is something that's going to be a part of this book and I don't want to talk too much about it, but.

• 1:23:38Bill Simmons?

  Okay.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  Football has.

• 1:23:41Bill Simmons?

  Wait, did we do this last podcast?

• 1:23:44Speaker 01

  Well, no, I, I was talking about why football works so well on television. These are all part of the same book. This book is about kind of the socio-cultural meaning of football in a very broad sense. One of the things that I write about in this book is that this kind of paradoxical advantage that I think football has, because I'm going to say something that's going to sound real bad and real negative, but actually works to football's benefit, which is that football is a dehumanizing enterprise. Football dehumanizes the people on the field. We can't really see their faces. Uh, their colors are, the colors of a football uniform matter more than any other sport. Like you, it's very easy to watch a college football game. If like Tulane is playing the LSU or something,

• 1:24:27Speaker 01

  just the matchup of those colors is enough to sustain it aesthetically. We don't even have to think of the guys. Um, you know, it's the, the, it's, it's a, it's a completely controlled, uh, sport with like such a hierarchy. You know, the plays coming from a guy in the box down to the coach on the sideline, who's then putting it into the quarterback, Then you're laying it, nothing is happening by accident. There is like that famous, you know, the famous Dave Hickey essay, the heresy of zone defense. Are you familiar with this? Yeah. Basically, this, this, this art critic wrote this great essay about basketball. And his whole thing was that all the rules and all the nature of basketball should be pushed toward freedom. Because that's what we think we want from sports, right? We think we want to see the players be free, have unlimited agency.

• 1:25:11Speaker 01

  And if in a conversation, that's how it works. So when we're talking about superstars, it's great to talk about the NBA because we see these guys. We really know these guys, we feel like they do. But football's success comes from the fact that it's not dependent on the people. It is dependent on the actual game. What people love about football is not the things around it. But what is literally happening between the, you know, the sidelines and the end zones? What's going on there? That is what matters. So basketball is the exact opposite, right? What people seem to care about now is everything else around it. Everything around basketball seems more meaningful than the actual sport. We talk about basketball as much in August as we do in the season. Right.

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  You know, it's like, it's almost like the, the games have taken on this strange, like almost perfunctory role. Where they're only there for all this other stuff. And because of it, it becomes completely based on the quality of the celebrities involved. So when LeBron was at his apex, when Curry was doing great, Kobe you mentioned, it was like, you know, it was like, ah, we're seeing these guys, these people, we're seeing these people, these humans doing this and they're awesome at it. But now those guys are still playing, right? Like Durant's still in the league, Giannis is still in the league. They're not what they used to be. We're familiar with them as celebrities. We're not as interested in them and their success because it's like the game is like, like they, they've sort of worn out.

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  Their, uh, the, the, the juice they had as a new person. They're not new people to us now. They're just familiar people who aren't as good as they once were. So, I mean, I really think that, that, that there are many reasons that football matters so much to the culture. And I think this is one of the weird ones, which is that in a sense, what we want from a sport is not what we say.

• 1:27:05Bill Simmons?

  Interesting. Yeah, I was thinking, I have a, I have a thought of, of a, what you said on the basketball piece in a second. Um, but the football piece, the most interesting piece I would add to what you said about football. They changed the rule where you couldn't take your helmet off on the field.

• 1:27:25Bill Simmons?

  Right? And that was something guys really started doing because it was the one way you would know what they looked like. And they would do it after a, after a third down sack, after a big catch, anything. They would pull things down and their helmet would off and they'd be like, here's me, here's my face. And the NFL is like, fuck that. You're not, not only you're not doing that, we'll call a penalty even after you've caught like a hail Mary with three seconds left and you got so excited, your helmet came off. Like, you're never doing that until you get to the sidelines. And it, it feels like along the lines of what you were saying, like, they really wanted to make the NFL the product and not the players. I still feel like they need six, seven players to market.

• 1:28:04Bill Simmons?

  They're always gonna need Mahomes, Allen, um, Burrow, Dak Prescott, maybe Drake May, but they're always gonna need their seven dudes. Um, the quarterbacks that are there for 15, 16 years that we have a history with, but other than that, they don't need anything.

• 1:28:20Speaker 01

  The, the quarterback now, that position has become so outsized compared to the rest. It's almost like a different entity. It's almost like every team has two teams, the team and the quarterback. You know, um, uh, you, you, did you throw Drake May in there on purpose? Is that what you said?

• 1:28:33Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I've been, I've been trying to shoehorn him into all the great QB conversations. I have a lot of Drake May stock. He's my guy.

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  I, uh, I, I mean, I, I, what was, what was interesting about football is because it's so, it's so restricted, but even with him with restrictions, you still get a form of, of originality, like uniforms in the NFL. You gotta like, wear a certain kind of socks and stuff like that. And occasionally like, who was that running back a few years back? He, like, he wore legal socks. I think he was playing for the, at Washington at the time. May have been a running back from Denver who went over to Washington. I can't remember. But there was like, there was, there was discussion about this guy. Socks, right?

• 1:29:15Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  Like his, that, that was enough because there's so many obstructions. There's so many rules that it's kind of like if you send your kid to a private school and they all got to wear uniforms. And then one kid's is like, you know what I'm going to wear though? I'm going to wear this like, I don't know, the sublime pin on my uniform. And it's like, oh wow. He's like, he, he finds a way to break the rules with any.

• 1:29:34Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:29:35Speaker 01

  Like, yeah, i- i- in, in the NBA, in, in a sense, it's like the guys have more freedom. It's actually in a sense harder for them to be individuals because everyone is sort of starts from the default setting of being their own person. You know, it's like in football, you gotta kind of break out of it.

• 1:29:53Bill Simmons?

  Wait, hold on, we gotta, we gotta take a break because I want to talk about the basketball piece of this.

• 1:30:00Bill Simmons?

  Hey, you know what I've been enjoying? The NBA cup. I like the courts. I like how hard they're playing. I even like when the game seems like it's over, but everybody's trying until the bitter end. You know what makes the NBA cup even better? A ringer profit boost token on FanDuel. FanDuel actually listened to me. I told them, let's have fun with the NBA cup. Let's do some profit boost. So we created the 30 on 30 ringer profit boost token. Boost any 30 point scorer or 30 on 30 special bet on this Friday's NBA cup slate. So obviously I'm taping this on Tuesday. I'm going to tweet out my picks on Friday. And first, first week I, I went one for three, hit Edwards.

• 1:30:40Bill Simmons?

  Second week went two for five and my long shot hit Cam Johnson 12 to one. So we'll see if we can keep the momentum up. I already noticed Charlotte's playing New York during, uh, during NBA cup day. So LaMelo is red hot by now. Maybe he'll be one of them. Anyway, hope you like the ringer profit boost. We'll be doing it each Friday during the NBA cup. Just look for 30 on 30 in the FanDuel Sportsbook app. This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Excitement is in the air. That's right. It's the start of NBA season. I can't wait to get together with friends, share some Michelob Ultras and watch Tip Off. Plus, as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting you closer to the action with experiences that make you feel like you're courtside to actual courtside.

• 1:31:24Bill Simmons?

  Tickets. Enter now for a chance to win at mickelobulcher.com/courtside. Mickleobulcher Courtside 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Opening US residents 21 plus. Begins on October 1st, 2026. Ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at mickelobulcher.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes and details. One question I didn't ask you just quick. Is Katelyn Clark a bigger under 30 star than any under 30 star in the NBA?

• 1:31:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:31:55Bill Simmons?

  I think she is too.

• 1:31:56Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:31:56Bill Simmons?

  Okay.

• 1:31:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:57Bill Simmons?

  I don't even think that's a debate.

• 1:31:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. It and it is like, you know, uh, uh, her, her, her stardom in a way is, is a like it is, it has changed many conversations about sports. I feel like especially women's sports. And, uh, uh,

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  I, I'm interested to how long it will last. And I'm also interested to see if, if she is just like one of one, or if now moving forward.

• 1:32:32Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:32:33Speaker 01

  Forty percent of the time, the most popular basketball player in the country is a woman. Like if the, if the girl from UConn comes out and she sort of plays a similar role. And I don't know. Yeah.

• 1:32:43Bill Simmons?

  I mean, shit, I was excited that UCLA beat South Carolina in a November women's college basketball game. I didn't, I literally did not care about women's college basketball 10 years ago in any way, shape or form. So I think some things have moved toward just the quality of play is more fun to watch. But she seems to be some sort of catalyst that is just, it's like before and after. Now we're in the after. I'll be interested to see if it trickles to other, uh, other women's sports in the same way. I think it really might be a phenomenon of her. And like the question to me is like, if she was a tennis player. Would this have happened?

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

  I don't know. I mean, I think part of it has to do with it's it's real difficult now for a guy to become famous in basketball at the collegiate level, but it still seems very plausible for a woman to do that.

• 1:33:34Bill Simmons?

  Well, this is everyone's made this point and it's super important, but you have this history with these women's players in college for three years, you know, where you're watching them and you start, you can maybe attach yourselves to one of them or you just kind of have a sense of their game. So when they come in the WNBA, you know what they can do. All right, off this basketball thing, as you mentioned about there's, I think it's a really interesting point about the NBA that I've been thinking about a lot. And I've test driven it a couple of times on pods, but about the lack of mystery with NBA stars. Like, do we have too much access, too much information, too much everything day to day?

• 1:34:14Bill Simmons?

  Social media, the pods, like are the fact that there's no mystery left with any of them? And I was trying to think like what celebrities, there's two separate ways I want to go, but I'll go this way first. There's not a lot of celebrities anymore who have mystery to them. I was thinking how Leo is one of the only ones that I really don't know that much about. Like De Niro was able to cultivate this. There's been some musical artists, obviously, like we've always wondered what the fuck was going on with Bob Dylan. I think Kendrick Lamar has done a really good job of, we don't know that much about him, even though we basically know, we know through his music and his lyrics. And I wonder with NBA players,

• 1:34:56Bill Simmons?

  because I was thinking about the, it's a 30 year history of follow it, follow a team or a player behind the scenes through a documentary or a docu-series, right? Because Hoop Dreams came out 30 years ago this fall. I remember, I'll just list a couple and then we can talk about this as a theme. There was a Pat Summit Tennessee HBO documentary in 1998. I think it was called like the Cinderella season. It was like just a year behind the scenes with Tennessee's women's team. And it was amazing. It was like, oh my God, I can't believe they're showing this. And you said all of this access of, at that point, all we're doing is watching a team on TV. You just like now all of a sudden I'm watching in the locker room. I'm watching them cry after games. It was incredible.

• 1:35:39Bill Simmons?

  Hard Knocks in 2001, that Ravens series where all of a sudden we're with Brian Billick and Ray Lewis and we're watching them practice and cut guys. That was amazing. There was a couple MTV Cribs episodes with athletes. I remember they did a Steve Francis one that I love that I remember writing about at the time where he went to buy like a Ferrari. There was an incredible Zach Randolph one. So you got a little insight there. There was an awesome show that by the way, is not on YouTube, which I can't believe that that show, The Life on ESPN. They followed the Clippers for like six games and Quentin Richardson and Darius Miles. And it was like, here's what these guys' lives are like. I was like, this is the most interesting thing I've ever watched. Then it started to shift. We had that Barry Bonds.

• 1:36:24Bill Simmons?

  What was that called Bonds on Bonds, whatever it is, that 2006 show where it was like, it took a lot of criticism because it was like, no, this isn't authentic. We're not getting, this isn't journalism. It turned into a big debate at ESPN. It says, should we have shown this or not? Kobe doing work, the Spike Lee thing that he did in 09. It was like, what is this?

• 1:36:44Bill Simmons?

  And then 30 for 30, that's when 30 for 30 really took off and the HBO docs were still full swing. And we had a lot of these looking back documentaries. Like we didn't do any follow the team documentaries at all in, uh, in the first two volumes. But we did do the Steve Nash finish line thing that we did for Grantland where we followed him during the season. And I remember, and you can go back there, pretty interesting actually about he's near the end of his career. Trying to hang on and we're just documenting him. And we started, instead of making a documentary, we said, the crucial tweak was,

• 1:37:19Bill Simmons?

  let's run these episodes in real time. So people can watch them during the season as Nash is playing. This will be cool. Nobody's done this before, which nobody had. And it was really cool. I was really proud of the finish line. But that eventually led to, there was more and more stuff like that because the videos got better. Internet video got better, YouTube, there's all these different ways to, to do real time stuff, leading to the first season of that F1 series, Drive to Survive, which completely invigorated and changed the sport, made it appeal to people in America. And I think that was like four or five years ago. And I wonder if we're at the finish line of all this stuff now. Because that starting five show on Netflix, people didn't care. I wonder if we just have too much access to everybody.

• 1:38:04Bill Simmons?

  And I know personally, like I see this stuff now advertised or whatever. And I'm just like, I'm probably not going to watch that. Whereas like 20 years ago, it would have been like, oh my God, we're in Anthony Edwards' house with his friends? Like I'll pay whatever the price is for this. So are we at the end?

• 1:38:21Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, okay, I have a few responses.

• 1:38:24Bill Simmons?

  I figured you would.

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. First person you mentioned was DiCaprio. He's kind of a special case, right? Because he is the only superstar like that, who was both the last vestige of the old Hollywood system and the beginning sort of of the fan-driven, uh, kind of techno-centric fandom. He was the first guy to, he'll be probably the only person who will experience both of those things. Where he was in some ways after Titanic, he was famous in the way John Wayne had been famous. But then he was the beginning of people who are famous in this new way. Where like, um, it's, uh, like, I guess, you know, the, however you want to look at it. Okay. As for these other things you're talking about, everything you're saying is, is kind of true.

• 1:39:08Speaker 01

  And I think, you know, you mentioned that like the first, that Ravens Hard Knocks and all these things, and how that really did seem crazy. Like really, like I remember really watching that. Well, these are, regardless of the subject, whether it's, you know, F1 racing, football, sports, whatever. What are these things? These things are ultimately art, right? Now what kills art?

• 1:39:29Speaker 01

  What's the thing that most often kills art?

• 1:39:32Bill Simmons?

  The lack of authenticity?

• 1:39:34Speaker 01

  Self-awareness. When art becomes too ingrained with its own sort of existence, when it becomes to understand what it is, it starts to fall apart. This is what happened with Hard Knocks now. Like Hard Knocks is never interesting anymore because we know exactly what it's going to be, as does every involved person. They know that if they act a certain way, the response will be this. A coach knows that if he comes across as a little bit clinical, he will be displayed as hyperclinical. If he comes across kind of like, like the Lions coach did, like an old school gritty guy, you know, Dan Campbell then becomes this different kind of character. The F1 racing show worked because it was sort of like, this is a new thing.

• 1:40:17Speaker 01

  People never thought like, I never followed this. You know, people in the United States never followed this. The people on that show, I haven't even watched it, but I know enough about it to know that like, it was something that like, like the first season of The Real World or whatever, where people are doing this for the first time. They have no idea what these interviews are actually going to look like, once they're on TV.

• 1:40:37Bill Simmons?

  It's a great point.

• 1:40:38Speaker 01

  Now, everyone knows this, okay?

• 1:40:39Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:40Speaker 01

  You know, like, so celebrities have completely taken control of their messaging through social media. They don't need now to go through the traditional sources. And as a consequence, what do we have? A lot of banal information about these people. If you let people control how they are perceived, and you let them control what their public facing entity is, of course, it's not going to be interesting, or it's going to be, seem so fake, that no one's going to have any like, interest in it whatsoever. I mean, the thing about the, like, the idea that like, okay, so like Taylor Swift now, or she never has to give interviews, right? She can just control all that herself. Well, now, so that means that there's absolutely no possibility that she's ever going to have to address something she doesn't want to address.

• 1:41:24Speaker 01

  You know, and that, and that is where a lot of this tension comes from, right? It comes from the small sort of moments where somebody has to answer a question that they would prefer not to be in public, right? And that's just, that's not going to happen anymore. So as we've sort of, all of these things you've mentioned, I don't, I don't think you're sick of them. You're just comfortable with them. Like you know what you're supposed to see and something has to be outside of that for it to be good. I mean, like in that, in those Netflix shows, like the one about the quarterbacks or whatever, like, you know, occasionally there'd be a small, interesting moment. Like Kirk Cousins has a little secret room in his house where he keeps all his stuff. And he has like in the, his backyard, he has this huge fire pit, like the biggest fire pit I've ever seen.

• 1:42:08Speaker 01

  He had nothing, no, neither of those things mean anything about football. It was just like, oh, this is something I didn't expect to see. In most of the things you're describing, we now see what we expect.

• 1:42:18Bill Simmons?

  And it's the inauthentic version of what we're seeing. That's the other thing. So, and I've made this point before, but it's, it's something that, think how many autobiographies we read over the years. Right? Some of those autobiographies, they're being spun by the person who wrote them. Like my favorite, which you love too, is the Wilt Chamberlain autobiography, the one, the Wilt, uh, man above or whatever, the picture of him. It's like one of the most fun books you're going to read about sports because Wilt's not self-aware as he's writing the book. So it's his take on stuff and he really believes it. And it's, it's kind of crazy half the time, but it's also like real access in his life.

• 1:42:58Bill Simmons?

  Real access in how he thought about stuff. And you leave the book going, I can see why he was so frustrated and to play with. I could see why he was traded three times. Right? Whereas Bill Russell, like you read second wind and it's like, holy shit. Like this is one of the most thoughtful people we had in the, in the 1960s and early seventies about everything that was going on in America. I always feel like you can get value out of autobiographies and I want to feel that way about some of these, follow the people around, follow the players around, and I just don't. And I, I find myself not watching them anymore, like at all. I don't watch any of them.

• 1:43:34Speaker 01

  Well, it's true. You know, I saw that there's this, this Ted Turner documentary that's coming. It's a documentary series about Ted Turner, which I was kind of interested in, until I found out he has complete control over it. It's like, I, I, I have, I have, uh, why would I, like a Wikipedia entry would be better in some ways. Because at least it would be somebody who is just sort of giving the information without sort of, I mean, it is, it's not that these things are immediately terrible because the person is involved. That's, I don't want to say that, but I mean, you know, it, it's,

• 1:44:05Speaker 01

  It has become, this has become seemingly like a common move now for people late in their career.

• 1:44:11Bill Simmons?

  You make money and it's your, it's basically the video version of an autobiography. That was one of the things, when we did the Vince McMahon thing, you know, I just don't want to be involved in stuff like that. So it wasn't, it was like, hey, we trust you guys, make, make the best possible doc.

• 1:44:28Speaker 01

  How, how did you ultimately feel about that? I thought it was really good to be honest, but I didn't know any of that stuff in terms of like anything post like 1999. Like I, I didn't know anything that had gone in wrestling in that world since then. But what like, how did you feel about having worked on it all those years?

• 1:44:46Bill Simmons?

  I mean, I was pumped with how it came out because it just seemed like it was going to die three different times. And the story kept changing and it's so hard to work on something like that when you feel like you're headed toward whatever you thought was going to be the version of it. And then you have to flip it and change it again and not know what was coming next, not knowing if Netflix was going to pull out. So it was a roller coaster, but you know, you're trying to, when you're trying to make something like that, I think that's different than what we're talking about. Cause we're trying to make a document, a real documentary about somebody that they participated in and did an interview with, but didn't have creative control over. And trying to capture like, what, what was this? What was this career? What was this impact?

• 1:45:30Bill Simmons?

  Was this guy a shrewd businessman? Was he a bad person? Like you're trying to juggle all of these things, but you're also trying to do it for the widest possible audience, right? So it's just different goals. I think the stuff we're talking about with this is like, if any athlete or musician releases a big documentary about themselves that they're executive producers of, or that their production company did, we should regard it the same way we would regard somebody just writing, releasing autobiography. But I don't know if we're there yet culturally. I still feel like people don't understand the difference between documentaries and, you know, basically self-produced hagiographies.

• 1:46:12Speaker 01

  Well, cause sometimes they look the same. I mean, that's

• 1:46:14Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:46:14Speaker 01

  That is the problem.

• 1:46:15Bill Simmons?

  It's a trick.

• 1:46:15Speaker 01

  It's like, it's like the modality of it makes it look the same. I mean, this, this is the same way with like when say broadcast news became very partisan, right? It still looks the way news used to look. It's still somebody sitting in front of a desk, giving you information. There's a screen behind them showing kind of illustrate, you know, images that illustrate their point. It looks formally the way news looked when Walter Cronkite worked, but it's not, right?

• 1:46:40Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:46:41Speaker 01

  These documentaries look the way, you know, um, you know, I, I, I, I'm trying to think of like, like a, an older documentary that looks the same as the ones now, but we know it was different because this is the times. I guess the, the assumption of what it would be, well, you said like, you know, you know, spinning an autobiography. I mean, I guess every autobiography is kind of a spin job, right? It's like you're, you know, it's rare that somebody would write a memoir.

• 1:47:06Bill Simmons?

  Well, how many times does somebody say, write a biography of me? Here are the car keys. You can interview all the people in my life and, and however it turns out, it turns out. It, it used to happen a lot. It doesn't happen as much anymore because.

• 1:47:18Speaker 01

  That, that happened with the Jan Winter biography.

• 1:47:21Bill Simmons?

  Right. And think about how that played out.

• 1:47:22Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. I, I mean, that's, that, that might be the last time someone like does that, you know? Um, uh, and it wasn't even that it was just like incredibly unfair, which is kind of unfair. And, but the guy had a perspective, the writer, like Joe Hagan wrote the book and he's like, I have ideas about this too. I'm putting them in there.

• 1:47:39Bill Simmons?

  Right. Well, but there's another piece of this where if all of the celebrities we have, for the most part, there's a couple of exceptions, but they're super available all over the place, right? In the old days, it was, there was an infrastructure with celebrities of, you released a movie. Who's that? Like, think of like Kathleen Turner in 1981. She becomes famous and it's like, well, who is this? And there would be. Maybe a giant Rolling Stone profile about her. She'd go on Letterman. Maybe she'd go on Carson. Other than that, you didn't really know anything about her. And now there's this whole infrastructure in place. So like, you haven't seen Anora yet, but Mikey Madison's like unbelievable in that movie. Mikey Madison's been around, you know, she became famous. Social media happened, right? She's social media president. She's done podcasts.

• 1:48:24Bill Simmons?

  I felt like I, not only did I know who she was, but I'd seen her and stuff and had a feel for who she was. There wasn't the same kind of mystique because she'd been around and she'd been around in a 21st century way. And I felt, you almost feel like you know somebody, absolutely you don't. But I feel like if that Anora comes out in 1982, it'd be like, holy shit. Who is this actress? And you just wouldn't really have any way to find out anything about her. Other than these little tiny pieces. It's just so different.

• 1:48:54Speaker 01

  It's strange. I think the promotion probably hurts them, you know? Like you say, like, you know, like I, I, how the idea of being an actor is that you're like, you're, you're completely, you know, becoming someone who isn't you. So it's to your advantage if we don't know who you are. But that's like, I, I, I don't know if that's really a possible thing anymore.

• 1:49:20Bill Simmons?

  By the way, now that I'm looking at this, I'm not sure Mikey Madison's on Instagram. So maybe, maybe there's, maybe she's more mysterious than I thought. Um, but.

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

  But like you, even like you and I are talking right now and it seems like we're just, you know, I think both of us feel like we're just having like, you know, a free flowing conversation.

• 1:49:38Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:39Speaker 01

  And that we're both just sort of talking off the top of the dome or whatever. But we do, I guess, have creative control, right? If I accidentally said something extremely provocative and dangerous, we would take it out or could take it out if we wanted to.

• 1:49:51Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:49:52Speaker 01

  So is this, is this unreal? Like, you know, or like, like, or like.

• 1:49:56Bill Simmons?

  That's why I like doing the Sunday nights with Sal, because it's like, we're just live on YouTube. Here we go. There's no safety net at all.

• 1:50:03Speaker 01

  Oh, so you do this live? You do them complete, like it's going out like radio?

• 1:50:07Bill Simmons?

  We do them on YouTube. Yeah. We record the whole podcast as it's happening. And I think it's fun.

• 1:50:11Speaker 01

  And then it stays on YouTube? So if something was troubling, it would still be there? I didn't, I didn't know you were doing that.

• 1:50:17Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:19Speaker 01

  It's a strange deal. Like, okay, you've had, you know, I'm guessing dozens, maybe hundreds of profiles written about you in your life. How many, what percentage of them would you say had something wrong in the story? Something, something that was either not really what you meant.

• 1:50:37Bill Simmons?

  When you're written about, I don't think you're ever going to be happy with how it came out. It's just, it's just a fact, but I also, I mean, I haven't done, I don't think I've done an interview in like, like that in probably the entire 2020s. You know, I think what you realize is if you don't need to do them, it's, you'd rather just kind of not do them. I mean, yeah, I remember you wrote that, what was the one you wrote, the Tom Brady one?

• 1:50:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:01Bill Simmons?

  Which you've had, you've had a few that were great and great for you. And I'm not sure it was great for the person you were writing about.

• 1:51:09Speaker 01

  Sure, that's true, but what I, what I, what, what I'm saying more like is, okay, so like I asked you this question, I could have asked myself this because I've had profiles written about me too. And I would say if somebody asked me what percentage of those stories had something wrong in them, I would say probably it feels like a hundred percent, right? Feels like a hundred percent to me, that there's always been something in there that was either, that, that was like, if, if nothing else, uh, like a misinterpretation of what I meant. Like they used a quote of mine, they quoted me accurately, but that wasn't really what I meant. So I think to myself then, so let's say I had control over that profile. Let's say that the writer had to send me the piece and I got to fix these.

• 1:51:46Bill Simmons?

  You had to send them edits?

• 1:51:47Speaker 01

  Yes. I will say like, you know, cause sometimes, you know, and younger writers will do that sometimes. But I think to myself, it's like, so would that, that would better reflect what I actually meant. If someone is reading this story, um, you would think that what they would want from it is to know if they're reading about me or they want to know about me. If they're reading about you, they want to know about you. So they would actually would think want the most accurate depiction of how that person feels. But yet we would not, we don't take that as seriously, right? Like if it turned out, if, if you had a profile of someone and at the bottom of the story, it said that the subject was given this story beforehand and allowed to fact check and make changes to quotes and stuff like that.

• 1:52:28Speaker 01

  We'd be like, oh, it's all, it doesn't, it means nothing, even though that actually would be what the, how the person wants to be understood.

• 1:52:34Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:35Speaker 01

  And that should be the goal. So it's, so it is, it is a complicated deal. It's like, we trust.

• 1:52:42Speaker 01

  Documentaries more if the person doesn't have control and the documentary filmmaker is kind of adversarial with them. Because we don't trust the subject, but somehow we're supposed to trust the filmmaker. Like, why, why do we trust the filmmaker's perception on this? Why, why are they the person who can kind of be the arbiter of reality? And it's the person who we're watching should, should have absolutely no say in this. Or should, or should be sort of forced to be themselves and then live with the result. I, I don't know. I mean, these are like, you know, like.

• 1:53:13Bill Simmons?

  Well, you know what's interesting about this? If you, if you're actually making a real documentary, that's not, you know, hagiography or like a self-produced thing or whatever, you do have a responsibility. This becomes a document, right? And you're shaping people's perceptions of the people that are in it, right? So I just went through this with the Celtics documentary we did, which is like nine parts. It covers 75 years. You're actually in it. And what happened with The Last Dance was really informative for how we were thinking about the Celtics thing, because in that case, like Jason Hare is my friend, like he played it perfectly. He had the iPad with Jordan. There was some real Jordan, Isaiah tension and, you know, dysfunction between those

• 1:53:58Bill Simmons?

  guys. You have the iPad. So, but the two biggest losers, I think, coming out of the documentary were Isaiah and Pippen. And the Pippen thing, I don't even know if he watched the whole thing, because when you get to episode, the last episode, when, uh, when he basically helped save the 1998 finals, he's like a hero and he's playing hurt. He's on a shitty contract. He's carrying himself like, but Pippen latched on to what happened when he asked out of the Knicks game, which he just didn't want to hear that that was part of his legacy. I thought all that stuff was fair, keeping that in. I think what you can do though, if it's in the wrong hands is shift certain things against people or for people, if you're trying to create heroes and villains.

• 1:54:39Bill Simmons?

  And I do think like some documentary people think about what's going to be cut out and put on Twitter. Oh, I got this awesome soundbite. And what it does is, especially if you're making a document, sometimes you really have to be careful, including stuff that might not be true that somebody's saying, right? As the years pass, like think about the Klosterman family vacation and you got like your 80-year-old uncle and he just says some, has some crazy memory from 40 years ago. It's just not true. And it's like, no, that's not what happened, Uncle Al. It's actually this like, that's can't be in the documentary. This is still a document, whether he said it or not, whether it's good TV. That doesn't mean it should be in. And I do feel like we're even losing that, but that I worry

• 1:55:21Bill Simmons?

  about like this next wave of documentary directors. I've obviously made a bunch of them. Like gearing stuff toward what might play on Twitter or what may play on Tik Tok is, is I think, you know, you're incentivizing the wrong things.

• 1:55:37Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, this is kind of far afield, but like, you know, talking about media type, media type stuff or whatever. It's like, who would have thought that it would have been terrible for like newspapers like the Times and the Washington Post to be less dependent on advertising and more based on subscribers. Like, everybody would have thought in the, in the 1990s, we just said like, what if we didn't have to worry about whether or not Ford advertises with our newspaper? What if we could just give people what they want? You know, we thought that would be better. And now that's kind of what it is. And it's so much worse because now the, the reader is not, is kind of seen as a, like a customer, you know? So we're going to give them

• 1:56:21Speaker 01

  what they want. You see this with headlines all the time. It's like, I will see the headline to a story and I will think to myself, it's like, that can't be what the story is about. And 95% of the time, I'm right. That the headline was so much more provocative and bombastic than what the actual information is. But what do they need? They need me to sort of engage with it.

• 1:56:43Speaker 01

  The thing about The Last Dance, I was gonna say, it's like, also, it's like, I have a theory of what really bothered Pippin about that more than anything else. Cause the, all the other stuff, the stuff about him pulling himself out of that game, he probably expected that to be there. He's dealt with that before.

• 1:56:59Bill Simmons?

  I love Pippin. When I wrote about him in my book, I wrote a whole probably page about that game because I thought it really unfairly shaped his legacy as a player. It was the first thing people pointed to. So for it not to be in the documentary in a real way would have been disingenuous.

• 1:57:14Speaker 01

  But I mean, and this might be a projection, but if I'm Pippin, you know what part of that documentary would have drove me insane?

• 1:57:23Speaker 01

  The time when Jordan says, you know, you gotta say it. Pippen was the best player I played with. He was my best teammate. If I'm Scottie Pippen, I'm like, yes, obviously, yes. Why are you like, like,

• 1:57:35Bill Simmons?

  Right, why does that need a qualifier?

• 1:57:37Speaker 01

  Yes, like, why would you have to mention that as if there is anyone out there who doesn't think that? That's the kind of thing when you're in a personal relationship with someone that really bothers you. Right? Like, it was like, he's good. Jordan is giving him a compliment. Jordan would probably say like, I couldn't give a bigger compliment. You know, but in this case, it's not right. Because everyone in the world thinks that is the case already. And for Jordan to mention it, it almost implies like it's up for debate. When like Bird would say his best teammate, his favorite teammate was Dennis Johnson. That was always like, oh, more than McHale, huh? That you're interesting, you know? It's like, I can see it, but you know, it does. It's a real compliment, right? Because he's saying something that the world doesn't necessarily assume to be true.

• 1:58:21Speaker 01

  When Jordan says Pippen was his best teammate and the best player he played with. And it's something that prior to Jordan even saying that, it wouldn't have even been a question. Nobody was ever debating who Jordan's best teammate was. Or did Jordan play with any good players? That question is never brought up, right? Like Pippen's one of the 50 best players of all time, or 75 now, or whatever the fucking list is. But I remember thinking, if I was him and I heard that, I would have lost my mind. Right? You know? Yeah, you know?

• 1:58:50Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, because to me, it's like, I, you know, I've said a million times, Jordan's the best player I've ever seen. And he's always going to be number one for me. Somebody would really have to take it. But Pippen to me is such a big piece of the like, still watching them together, especially as they got a little older. When Jordan came back, that was one of the great sports fan thrills of my life. Seeing those two guys play basketball together. They were so in sync and they were so great as a combo. And I've only really seen that a couple of times on a basketball court. The way those guys kind of coexisted and made each other better. I can't even think of anybody in the NBA now who does that. Like I watched the Celtics as a team.

• 1:59:31Bill Simmons?

  Show flashes of it and I, I almost feel like they, they're not like Brown and Tatum. It almost needs like two more years to cultivate, but those guys really have this chemistry now of when, when to know, all right, you take this one. All right, I'll take this and there's no ego left with them. It feels like Mitchell and Garland are starting to develop that a little bit in Cleveland, but you know, when you see it, um, whereas like you watch Minnesota and it's like, oh shit, this Randall Edwards thing. Yikes. Like they're, they need to figure this out.

• 2:00:01Speaker 01

  Do you feel like the NBA has to make some real changes for the product? I feel that way.

• 2:00:07Bill Simmons?

  I've been thinking about it a lot about whether there should be a cap on threes, whether you just get 43s in a game and that's it.

• 2:00:14Speaker 01

  But I, I don't.

• 2:00:15Bill Simmons?

  It's a crazy idea, but I'm, I'm also like, if they did this, I might, I might think it's fine. Or just second quarter, nobody threes or twos.

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  Well, no, it would have to be a situation. What you're saying is like, one of the things on the clock is like the number 40 and every time someone shoots a three, it counts down because then some teams need to save some for the end or whatever. But I, uh, I, I don't, I don't, I don't like, that's it. That's kind of a, it's just too, it's too weird for me.

• 2:00:43Bill Simmons?

  It feels too radical, but like I, like Celtics, Clippers last night and the Celtics killed the Clippers.

• 2:00:51Bill Simmons?

  Somebody texted me the first half shot chart. And it was just, it was all threes around the arc and then stuff in the paint. And I think there was like one shot, you know, from 12 feet. And I'm like, what are we doing?

• 2:01:06Speaker 01

  I mean, I.

• 2:01:07Bill Simmons?

  Like people have been theorizing, this is one reason the NBA ratings are down. I don't think, I think Derek Thompson nailed it when it's six, nine months ago, when he was saying how it's really easy to follow the NBA in a crazy, passionate way without actually watching the games. Or just watching fourth quarters or pieces of game, or I, I think that's the biggest issue with the league. There's too many games.

• 2:01:28Speaker 01

  I mean, he's a smart guy, but there's a flaw in that thinking though.

• 2:01:30Bill Simmons?

  What is it?

• 2:01:31Speaker 01

  The flaw in that thinking is when you make something easier to follow, that typically does not decrease the amount of people want to see it for real. I mean, it's totally easy to follow the NFL without watching the games. You can do it in the exact same way, but that has actually.

• 2:01:45Bill Simmons?

  But the NFL is two things.

• 2:01:48Bill Simmons?

  The NFL is gambling and fantasy. The NBA doesn't have either of those things in the same way.

• 2:01:52Speaker 01

  Well, I play fantasy basketball and it's driving me crazy because everyone's hurt all the time. That's a huge issue.

• 2:01:57Bill Simmons?

  I gave up.

• 2:01:58Speaker 01

  I mean, it's like, I can't.

• 2:01:59Bill Simmons?

  You can't do it.

• 2:02:01Speaker 01

  It's just got like, I don't know, it was almost, it almost seemed better with load management. I mean, I just, I mean, I don't even know what it's like, my suspicion is because, you know, because NBA teams just don't practice anymore. That, and when they, you know, it's all sort of like individual training sessions for these guys, you know, to get ready for the year. That, that, that when they start playing games, they all get hurt. I mean, I, I got a fantasy team where it's like 14 guys are on the team. I, I can't put, I, I like, I have like seven guys hurt or eight guys hurt. I can't figure out what to do.

• 2:02:30Bill Simmons?

  Right. There's too many games and basketball's harder to play. I'm going to die on that hill. I firmly believe there's more running and it's just harder on your bodies, even the equipment. I've talked about this, but even the equipment's better. It's the, the, no practice thing is.

• 2:02:45Speaker 01

  But there's no, it can't.

• 2:02:46Bill Simmons?

  Anytime you, if you talk.

• 2:02:49Bill Simmons?

  What?

• 2:02:49Speaker 01

  It can't be harder than football. It's not, it's not physically more demanding than football.

• 2:02:52Bill Simmons?

  Oh no, I'm saying just basketball compared to basketball in the past, even though the, the shoes are better, all the stuff that, the, all the stuff we've always talked about. But like, the no practice thing is such a big thing with coaches. You can, I remember when Doc, Doc got the Milwaukee job. Obviously I'm friends with Doc, just talking and he took that job, they were playing and they, they just hadn't had a chance to practice for weeks and weeks and weeks. And he was saying, just to me, like, um, I just, people don't understand how hard it is to not practice. You don't understand like how damaging that is when you have this schedule piece where it's like three, four weeks in a row. You just know you're not going to practice because it's not even the, the top eight guys are fine. It's everyone else on the roster. They just atrophy.

• 2:03:37Bill Simmons?

  This is one of the crazy things about Bronny being, you know, in the NBA now and just not playing and he doesn't play in the, he's only playing G League home games, but he doesn't play for the Lakers. Like, what's the point of him being in the league? I don't understand it.

• 2:03:49Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, that, that ended up looking, I mean.

• 2:03:52Bill Simmons?

  It's, it's terrible.

• 2:03:53Speaker 01

  That, that, I, I, in a sense, I feel like if we're talking about like, you know, LeBron's career has been, you know, remarkably absent of major missteps. Really for a long time, it was just the decision. But in some ways, this one was almost worse to me.

• 2:04:09Bill Simmons?

  Why?

• 2:04:09Speaker 01

  Because, because there was nothing like.

• 2:04:13Speaker 01

  So, so the goal was to have this sort of meaningful moment where a father and son played on the court at the same time. And it ended up having no meaning at all. Like none. It, it, the, the entire thing seemed like a construct. There seemed to be nothing natural about it. The fact that he's already in the G League and may never be in the NBA again, or whatever. It's like, what, well, so what good would this do? Like what, like it was bad for Bronny, for sure. I mean, it's gonna, eh, damaged the way he is perceived. It's made him be perceived worse than he is. Um, it, it, it's not as though we look at LeBron now and be like, well, that's like one more, you know, thing that he accomplished. I, I think the opposite is true. I, um, maybe even he feels this way now. I don't know.

• 2:04:58Speaker 01

  But, um.

• 2:04:59Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I don't, I didn't, I didn't understand it as it was happening because the high school resume didn't match what people were really saying. Like even like Jared McCain was here in LA and he was, I tweeted, I was tweeting about it during the draft. Jared McCain is unbelievable. He was unbelievable in LA. He was the best guard here for three years. His team's always won. He was fucking awesome. He went to Duke. You could see it the second half of the year. He was awesome there. And he was just clearly going to be really good. Um, it just felt like Bronny should have been in college for like at least three years, just trying to get better and trying to conquer that level before you go to the next one.

• 2:05:36Speaker 01

  Sure. But when you say like, I didn't understand it. It's like, you did understand it. The thing is, you feel like you, no, you feel like you shouldn't understand it, right? Well, that's, this is a, this is, I'll, I'll try to be not too far on this, but I feel like this is something that I see a lot when people are talking about the news in any sense. They're saying they don't understand something and they do understand it, but we feel like we shouldn't. Like for some reason, the idea of a kid playing with his father, even though he isn't warranted, that we should be like, that makes no sense. You know, it makes complete sense. We all know why it happened. I mean, it was like, I, I thought of this when, you know, this, this Tyson Paul fight, you know? I, I, yeah, like, leading up to that fight, I started getting tons of texts from people asking if

• 2:06:20Speaker 01

  I was gonna watch it, or what's, we thought of it, whatever. To the point where I suddenly realized, almost every guy I know was gonna watch this. Like, I don't know what the final numbers on that thing was. They had to have been massive, right? Now.

• 2:06:34Speaker 01

  So there was all these ideas like, maybe, you know, maybe Tyson will just come out and just knock him out with one punch. Maybe Tyson's too old. Maybe he'll get hurt real bad. Like, there was all these different ideas of what it might be, you know? And then, as it turns out, it was exactly what the most predictable outcome would be. Like, a pretty uninteresting, not very physical fight that feels like it might have been rigged, even though it probably wasn't. It wasn't dramatic at all. Now, it was probably good for boxing, right? Because the undercards were pretty good fights. People watched these fights.

• 2:07:07Bill Simmons?

  The women's fight was one of the greatest women's fights ever, yeah.

• 2:07:10Speaker 01

  Yes. People, you know, so it probably was good for the sport, but in another sense, it was just like, it was just like a, a, a, like a domino effect of, of, of just sort of made up events, all kind of falling in a row in the way that in the most predictable fashion. I don't know. It's very strange. It was like, it seemed strangely symbolic to me, you know? It was like, the fact that like, so Tyson sort of represents the past. He sort of represents our generation, right? Like, he was like a kind of a Gen X figure, I guess, in some ways, you know? And then he'd had this, this life where, life of crime

• 2:07:52Speaker 01

  and these terrible acts, and, but then he comes back, and, and he's fighting this guy, he's fighting this guy who sort of represents almost like a caricature of young people now, or the young adult person now, you know? That his entire life is based around his ability to sort of generate celebrity on his own through social media and all these things. And then, everyone's rooting against the guy, right? It seemed like everyone was rooting for Tyson, despite Tyson's life. Like, people were like, were on his side, sort of. So it's like, this person who represents...

• 2:08:27Speaker 01

  The way the world is now, the way sports works now, the way media works now, nobody wanted that guy to win. And it seemed like almost it was people saying like, we want Tyson to win this fight. Because it will mean that the world's not really going in this direction. That if Tyson wins, that if Tyson wins this fight, it sort of says the way things have changed is not good in any way. Like, not only do we not like this Jake Paul character, but we don't like what he really represents about how sports works now. We don't like how the way entertainment works. And if he gets knocked out, it'll show that it was all this sort of like fragile fake thing. And when he fights a real person,

• 2:09:10Speaker 01

  a guy who's actually a real fighter, when he actually gets punched for the first time, he's going to collapse and this house of cards is going to collapse. But that's not what happened. It was the most predictable outcome. It was just a slow, laborious fight, where a guy who's too old to be out there, was able to sort of manage being with a guy whose main goal seemed to make sure that the event finished. So it felt like people couldn't say they got financially ripped off. And it's just, you know, like, like, like Paul bows to Tyson at one point in the fight. So he was like, we're honoring you in this. Like, that's not a fight. You know, that's not boxing or whatever, you know? But yeah, we're not surprised. Like, like, it is exactly what we thought it would be.

• 2:09:52Bill Simmons?

  Well, you know, it speaks to what we talked about earlier with the election. After, as, even as the fight was midway through the fight, people were like, I knew it. I knew this was gonna suck. Oh, my God. And it's like, well, before the fight, Tyson was plus 170 to win, right? Jake Paul was a two to one favorite. Everybody claimed they knew after the fact it was going to be this terrible. But a lot of people thought Tyson was gonna win. And then, once we started to see the results of the fight, we're like, oh, yeah, of course, the guy's 58. He's, you know, it admitted long time, used all kinds of drugs, has led a really hard life, got knocked out multiple times when he boxed.

• 2:10:33Bill Simmons?

  Had some sort of health event in, in June that seemed really bad. It was like, what made anyone, including me, think that there was even a slim chance this would happen? It was because it's what people wanted to happen. They wanted it to be the Rocky Balboa movie.

• 2:10:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I, I think that there was also this sense that when the first bell rang, like maybe Tyson's going to come out and charge him and he's going to hit him one time.

• 2:10:56Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:56Speaker 01

  Suddenly going to become obvious. But what became obvious was that, oh, you're actually going to go through with all this. This is not really, it's not what it's going to be. You know, um, it's weird. It was like, I don't know. I don't know if I can even say it was a disappointment because how can I be disappointed if I'm admitting that's what I knew was going to happen?

• 2:11:16Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. I wrote a piece, first year I was at page two, I wrote a piece about how it was over for Tyson after he got knocked out by Lettuce Lewis. Whole thing. I was like, this is it. This is like literally 2002. I didn't move to LA yet. I don't think, um, we could either end the podcast or we could take a break and talk about The Sopranos. It's up to you.

• 2:11:33Speaker 01

  I'll talk about The Sopranos. Sure.

• 2:11:34Bill Simmons?

  All right. We'll take one more break.

• 2:11:39Bill Simmons?

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• 2:13:09Bill Simmons?

  All right, we're gonna end with The Sopranos. I've been rewatching it yet again, and you texted me how you've been watching it as well. And we haven't talked about this, other than that just, you know that about me, I know that about you. But you really wanted to talk about it. I kind of really want to talk about it, too. I'm gonna shit if it's for the same reason, so you go.

• 2:13:28Speaker 01

  Well, okay, so I'll just quickly get into how this happened. So for a variety of reasons, I ended up watching the last episode of Mad Men, the series finale of Mad Men. And that was very surprising to me, because of course, I remembered what happened to Don. Do you remember what happened to any of the other characters, to most of the other characters?

• 2:13:51Bill Simmons?

  I haven't seen that. I've been saving that for a rewatch, too. I don't remember one other thing that happened, other than the ending.

• 2:13:56Speaker 01

  Okay, like, did you remember that Peggy ended up with Stan? I totally remember. Do you remember that, like Roger apparently moves to France? It's like, you know, Pete Campbell moves to Wichita? All these things I had forgotten. It blew my mind, all these things I didn't remember about this show, which I, you know, which I really, like, I watch really closely, whatever. So then I was like, I wonder if the same thing would happen if I watched the last episode of The Sopranos. So I watched the last episode of The Sopranos again, because I also had watched that documentary that they, that was really good.

• 2:14:29Bill Simmons?

  That's what got me back into it.

• 2:14:29Speaker 01

  I really liked it.

• 2:14:30Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:31Speaker 01

  You know, and it was, I watched the last episode, and it was not what I remembered, because again, I only remembered the very end of it, you know? But it was good. So I ended up watching a few more episodes from that last season. And then I decided, like, this is so enriching to me. I'm gonna go back and, like, rewatch the third season. And...

• 2:14:51Speaker 01

  One thing it does is it really shows me how much, much television was just better during this period. Like that was just really, and it's not to blame anybody making television now. It's that this was like a collection of things that were happening in the culture that it was, it's like the, the, the depth of every character is incredible.

• 2:15:10Bill Simmons?

  Well, season three, season three is also the most violent of all the seasons too. And Chase is really going for a lot. I think season three is really, really great, but he's going for a lot of themes in that one too.

• 2:15:21Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And, and you know, you know, but also like, uh, not, not in obvious ways, like all the stuff with the racehorse. It's kinda interesting. Um, Carmelo and Furio being together. That's kinda.

• 2:15:35Bill Simmons?

  Well, that's season four though. Season three is the, uh, season three is when Ralphie kills the, the, uh, the dancer.

• 2:15:43Speaker 01

  Maybe I'm already, maybe, yes, maybe.

• 2:15:45Bill Simmons?

  Doctor Melfi rape, rape scene. Like there, there's, it's pretty violent.

• 2:15:49Speaker 01

  I guess I'm in season four now. I guess I must've started with three and I'm moving four because I'm just hitting forward. Maybe I'm getting, you know? Um, uh, so I guess I'm in the middle, but I'm just saying that those, that these, the, the, the storylines for these characters, it's just so, it's really funny. All the stuff with Christopher is real great. He's such a, you know, Christopher is such a likable character despite sort of how his life plays out.

• 2:16:14Bill Simmons?

  He's such a likable fuck up.

• 2:16:16Speaker 01

  Well, it's not just that. He's like, he seems like he's trying, like he's really trying, you know?

• 2:16:23Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 2:16:23Speaker 01

  Uh, like he wants to make these things work. He wants to make everyone happy in a way. He is in some degree selfish, but it's like, um, it, it is, what was, what did you want to say about it? Because it's like, I, I just, I, I have really enjoyed this experience. If you watch it again and, well, okay, go ahead. Here you go. Yeah.

• 2:16:44Bill Simmons?

  I think, so I rewatched it like two years ago, probably rewatched it five years before that. So I think this is like either my fourth or fifth rewatch.

• 2:16:53Bill Simmons?

  And I think it's one of the great pieces of art that we've produced this, this last, I don't know, 25, 30 years, there's no question. Um, and one of the reasons I think that is when I watch it, I pick up new stuff every time. And it's almost like reading like the best books you've ever read or your favorite books when you're a kid or a teenager where you're just like, I'm just going to read this book again. This book is so good. I want to dive back in. I want to study how this author like turned phrases and turned sentences and how they did this character. Maybe I'll notice something different this time. That was what we grew up doing. You would, you'd have 10, 12, 15 books you loved and you would read them, I don't know how many times. I can see it with some of the books I have in my library. And The Sopranos,

• 2:17:36Bill Simmons?

  to me, I pick up stuff every time. I think it was so much more sophisticated and well thought out than maybe I appreciated the first and second times I watched it. All the characters, all the stuff as you get older, that Chase is trying to say about family, about mortality, about who do you trust in your life? Is all this shit worth it? Like, there's just themes that I, I wouldn't have picked up the first time I watched it from 1999 to 2007. Cause in the moment, you're think, you're just invested in the characters. You're trying to figure who's going to die, which Chase really turns the audience on a couple of times. Like Chase doesn't like that people gravitated to the violence of the show in the moment. So he made, season

• 2:18:18Bill Simmons?

  three becomes intentionally violent. Like he's really trying to fuck with the audience. Um, but I, I think the characters and what he created, it's all been discussed a million times, but I still feel like it's more interesting than any new show I could watch.

• 2:18:33Speaker 01

  Well, you know, watching him in a row is interesting too, because I now, uh, I recognize how watching it a week apart altered my experience with it in the sense that like, okay, when, when the series was ending, especially right when it got over, there was all those people writing about The Sopranos and they were like, you know, Why did people relate to Tony Soprano? He's like an obviously terrible person. He's like, he's like completely transgressive, awful person. And when you watch them all in a row, like when we, like when I'm kind of like, kind of, I guess, binging them or whatever I'm just writing, you really do see that, right?

• 2:19:10Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:10Speaker 01

  But when you're watching them a week apart, it didn't feel that way. Because in every episode, maybe he would do something bad, but he would also do one thing that was charming. And then somehow like he, he would have, he would say something to Milfy, or he'd say something to his kids, or he'd just do something that was likeable. And it sort of balanced it out. But when you watch them all in a row, you really see what kind of a diabolical person he is and like how, how like, how just completely like bottom line person he is. But what also is weird is that even though that I'm, I'm watching this again, and I'm, I'm maybe more clearly seeing that this character is just really, you know, just like, like a bad dude.

• 2:19:53Speaker 01

  In some ways I relate to this, even though, I mean, I, I don't know how I can even say I can relate to a gang. I mean, you know, but sort of his sense of, um, like the things he questions about his own life, like you mentioned, uh, maybe it's just because I'm older now, but I, there, there are certain things, moments in that show when I'm like, I, I know how that is. I know how he feels right now. Like, I know what that is like. And then, and that's something I do not remember from the first time I watched, you know?

• 2:20:22Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, the, the Tony piece. I think the reason we were all attracted to him as a character was he's completely authentic and he's always on brand at all times. Like he's so well-written and so well-sketched out, but all the decisions he's making in real time, you believe in a hundred percent, whether they're good or bad. It's like, oh yeah, like when he goes, he's in the Mercedes dealership. After he sees what's her face, the Annabelle Sierra character, when he's with her in therapy, the first time they meet, they're just in the waiting office. It's like, oh, no, this is going to be bad for Tony. And then it's like, he shows up at the Mercedes dealership because of course he does. And you just know it's going to end badly. Every

• 2:21:07Bill Simmons?

  piece of how they cultivate his character over the course from season one to season seven, like adds up when you watch it. I don't, I don't think of, I can't think of another show, like even shows like Lost, like Breaking Bad had moments where it kind of went sideways. People were complaining about certain things in the, in The Sopranos. I, I can't really complain about anything. I don't love the Ralphie character in season three and season four, the Joey Pants character. I don't, I don't feel like Chase ever solved that character completely. But when he gets to Buscemi in season five, playing the other Tony, like he, like, he had everything and that, that character was well sketched out, beautifully acted, but also like really made sense against Tony. And it was like this

• 2:21:51Bill Simmons?

  alternate version of where Tony's life could have gone. It's, you know, so I just, I think of all the stuff he had to do with the show where you're having, I don't know, 15 main characters, four characters you really have to care about, but then this whole other, like there's another 50 on the show and all of them make sense and they interconnect together. I, I honestly don't know how they did it. This is one of the rare, this is the only TV show where I'm like, I don't understand how they pulled this off.

• 2:22:22Speaker 01

  There's just many things about it that are just sort of, it is incredible. Like, okay, so like Tony, in order for this to work and for him to have this position and be in the position he's in, he's always kind of got to be the smartest person in the room. Okay. And he usually is, particularly if it's any situation where he's dealing with the business of being. An organized crime leader.

• 2:22:49Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:49Speaker 01

  But he's often wrong about other aspects of life. But he can't, it's hard for him, like, it's like he's the smartest person in the world in the room. And then sometimes he's not, but like, he can't, he can't accept that innocence. He's got to believe he still is. I mean,

• 2:23:06Bill Simmons?

  Right, rational confidence.

• 2:23:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, not, not, but for him, it would be rational confidence, right? Because in, in situations where he's got to deal with the life or death, money or nothing situations. He's really good. He's a good negotiator and all that stuff. It's the things that are, um, like, less, you know, like, like, trying to under, like, he, he has a really intense theory of mind, but like, a weird kind of sense of empathy.

• 2:23:35Bill Simmons?

  Well, so the last season, there's two episodes. Well, actually, the, the end of the season before, after he gets shot, which is like, if you're watching in real time, when it's like, week after week, Tony's recovering. It was like a long month on that show. I don't think that's like, the first part of that season is not fondly remembered. But it's super important because it leads to that episode when, uh, when he's coming back, he's healthy, but he's not a hundred percent healthy. And physically, he's diminished, right? And the two big episodes of the physically diminished Tony are the episode, he's got that big, strong driver, the guy that drives around, the young guy, he's ripped, he looks like Vin Diesel.

• 2:24:19Bill Simmons?

  And he kind, Tony can kind of sense that his crew feels like he's physically vulnerable. So he starts to fight with that guy and beats him up, right? Cause he has to kind of prove to his crew that he can still be the guy, he can be the physical. So then the other one is the, the Bobby Bakula fight.

• 2:24:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:24:37Bill Simmons?

  Bobby Bakula, he's super drunk. Bobby Bakula beats him in the fight.

• 2:24:42Bill Simmons?

  And he can't let it go. He's gotta, he's gotta make Bobby do the one thing Bobby never did, which is just to kill somebody for the family because he has to win that one thing over him. And what you realize is when we say Tony's a bad guy, it's, it's like, oh yeah, cause he killed people who's a mobster. It's like, he's actually way worse than that because he's all about, how can I win over the other people in my life? How can I, how can I tilt this against them? How can I always stay in power? How can I fuck with them? That's, that's what drives him ultimately.

• 2:25:11Speaker 01

  When he fights Bobby up by the lake and all that stuff, you know, his crew is not around. It's really just his wife and his sister. Like he's talking to like Carmel, he's like, you know, that if I was younger, you know, it's like, it's like she doesn't care at all. She's like, I wish this wouldn't have happened. Like, why are you trying to convince me you won this fight? You shouldn't be fighting your friend. You know, this like, we would invite this out here. Um, but it's, it's, it's, it's like his, his not, his own self-knowledge that like, the other fight is because he's trying to prove it to his crew and this one he's trying to prove it to himself. Like, I'm still this person. Yeah.

• 2:25:47Bill Simmons?

  Same episode, another example why he's a bad person. So Janice is happy, right? His sister, who he kinda has this love, hate, mostly hate relationship with, but she found Bobby, nice guy. They have this lake house. Things are going well and they're at dinner.

• 2:26:02Bill Simmons?

  And she seems a little too happy. And he's just like, I gotta undermine this. And that's when he starts making the jokes about how he used to blow guys under the boardwalk.

• 2:26:10Speaker 01

  They're playing, they're playing Monopoly.

• 2:26:12Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. And he's just like, I, you know what? She's, she's feeling herself. I have to bring her back down. And he just figures out a way to do it. But that's what he does. This like, he's really mean. Like that remember when conversation with Paulie Walnuts, where he's just like, remember when's the worst form of conversation? Gets up and leaves. And Paulie Walnuts is a pretty loyal guy to him who treats like shit half the time. But everyone around him, he just can't, he has to treat them like shit as a way to have something over them. Which is why when you re-watch the show, there's so many examples of how he does it. And he's way better at it in the second half of the series than the first half. First half, he's still, he's still feeling himself out. He just, he's not sure if he's gonna be the mob boss yet. But by

• 2:26:56Bill Simmons?

  the time we get to season three, he's like a monster.

• 2:26:59Speaker 01

  I mean, like what you said is it's, it's a very key point because he often mentions how he doesn't like people reminiscing about the past. He hates nostalgia, right? And the reason he hates nostalgia is because he feels that talking about the past means the past is over and he thinks the past should still be the present. The way things were when he was growing up, seeing other people, you know, like the what, you know, that like, that's how it should still be. So he doesn't want people to reminisce because that distances it from the possibility that that's how still the world, the world's still that way, you know? And I mean, like, that is a, that's like the kind of idea you can get in a novel. It is very difficult to reflect that through dialogue on a television

• 2:27:40Speaker 01

  show. And they do a lot of things like that. Like they have a lot of like the, I guess the word they always use now is the interiority. They're able to sort of get inside these people's very complex feelings about life without showing a lot of it. Polly and like his relationship with his mom, for example. Like that shows us something, you know, his, his, like his desire to make his mom happy because he sort of thinks that like, like that he doesn't have a family. So he's got to do this. He's got to do this for his mom, you know? Um, or, or just like how to like, like navigating Meadows' relationships and stuff for Tony. It's sort of, it's like these, these are things that like, don't, they're

• 2:28:25Speaker 01

  not just plot points. Like they're not, because a lot of times, a lot of things don't happen. It was like Carmela Furio thing. Like nothing really happens between them, but there is a lot of pathos in that relationship from both sides. And like, just, she is so good as an actress of illustrating the feeling of desperate hopelessness.

• 2:28:45Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:45Speaker 01

  That like, there's just nothing I can do that this is how my life is. And I do all these things I want, and they seem simple. They seem like simple things I want, but I know I can't have them. So I gotta convince myself it's okay. And then every once in a while, it's not, and she just cracks, you know?

• 2:29:01Bill Simmons?

  Well, that, and that's the other thing with rewatches, because you're watching these all in a row at a much faster pace. And Carmela is one of the great female TV characters ever. Um, the, the way he builds her from season one, what she is, but she's basically like, it's a time where the scotch for Tony, like she's busting his balls the whole, the whole first season. And doesn't seem that happy to be married to him, but she's happy with the life that she has, but doesn't seem like she likes him that much. Then as it evolves, and you start, she starts having that moment where it's like,

• 2:29:36Bill Simmons?

  What, what is my life? My kid, I spent 15 years like trying to raise these two kids. Now my daughter hates me. My son's in his room all the time. I have this husband. This is like this, he's going fucking his gomars all over the place. Um, what do I have? And then every once in a while, he brings me home this necklace. Like, is there something else out here? And that's what season three and season four is about. Cause it's Furio just coming over and being in the doorway for three minutes is like the most exciting moment of her day. Her daughter doesn't respect her. And then how that evolves over the whole course of the series is, I mean, the Whitecaps episode is the famous episode and that's like one of the great, great combo

• 2:30:16Bill Simmons?

  acting thing. That's another thing with the show is the acting of, of Edie Falco as Carmella and then Gennaro Fini as Soprano. It's, it has to be two of the best 10 TV performances ever. I mean, maybe even top five, six or seven. Like Gennaro Fini, you watch this, he's so incredible as an actor. I really feel like it's one of the great achievements that I've seen.

• 2:30:39Speaker 01

  Well, it's, and it's just like the perfect role for him. Like, I mean, I like, it's not, not to say that he's not a great actor, but it's like, it just, that, that is one situation where, you know, when you watch that documentary and they show some of the other people who tried out for these parts, it, it, it seems like it, this is, it only could have worked one way. It had to be this way. Like he was the only guy who could have done this and who would have done like this effectively, you know? And, um, uh, it's a, I, it, it, you know, I remember, remember writing for Grantland or whatever, like talking about this Mad Men, uh, Breaking Bad and The Wire. And I, at the time, you know, it was like, I kind of concluded that maybe The Wire was actually, or no,

• 2:31:19Speaker 01

  that, that Breaking Bad was the best of these, you know? Um, and, you know, it actually kind of ties back to the thing we were talking about, like the NBA and TikTok and stuff like that. Like in the moment of these things happening, you can kind of have a feeling, but then as time passes. It changes and the only people who really care are the ones who decide. And I do think maybe the decision is going to be that actually of those four shows, it really was The Sopranos. That was the best one. All the other ones in some way are like a version of what that show did.

• 2:31:51Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I agree with that.

• 2:31:52Speaker 01

  You know?

• 2:31:53Bill Simmons?

  I think The Wire has the best case because of what it was about. And I think it's aged really well. Van Lathan, I talk about this a lot about, because he, I think he's in the Sopranos camp. Just for like, what's gonna have the longest tail? I feel like The Sopranos is a show that's 50 years from now is still gonna hit the same way because of the themes that it's about. It's, it became timeless in a really unusual way. Like you think about the first couple of years of the show, there's, you know, there, there's the cell phones they're using and, you know, the eight, there's later on, like AJ's on the internet a lot and Tony's like, what the fuck is he doing? He's just watching a video on the internet and laughing. I like, he's like complete disdain for him. And that's basically, you know, what society is now.

• 2:32:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, but I, the thing is you can make cases for all four of the shows. That's what, like they're all, they, it's not, it doesn't detract from any of them to say this. I just, it does like, and, and you know, this kind of story does seem to hold up. I mean, it's like Goodfellas holds up pretty well. Godfather holds up very well. It's like, for some reason, this particular thing, like the Italian organized crime world.

• 2:33:03Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:03Speaker 01

  Uh, I, I, it has a, it's, it's, it's.

• 2:33:07Bill Simmons?

  Well, there, there's one other piece, which is why I think all those things have in common is that some of the shit's super funny.

• 2:33:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:33:15Bill Simmons?

  Like Paulie Walnuts, as the show goes along, Paulie Walnuts, really starting with the Pine Barrens episode, is one of the funniest characters for me of, of like, I would put him against like shows, like Seinfeld characters. Like he's so fucking good and so funny and like his faces and, uh, I just, I, he just makes me laugh. And I think a lot of the people on this show are just like genuinely funny.

• 2:33:41Speaker 01

  Like when Christopher gets out of rehab and Tony's asking him like, have you went through all the 12 steps? And he's like, well, not the last one where I kind of, you know, apologized to everyone, make amends. And Tony's like, I don't know if you should do that, you know? And he's like, oh, I agree. So, you know, in some cases, you know, I'll send flowers. In some cases, cash. And it's like, it's like, it's not even like set up to be funny, but it's just hilarious that somebody would be like, oh, I've had my heroin addiction has really screwed up these people's lives, but let's not delve too much in them. I'm just gonna give them an envelope of like 20 grand or whatever. I don't know. He's just, his delivery of those lines is so, it's so perfect.

• 2:34:19Bill Simmons?

  The intervention episode, the five minute intervention, which was like coming on the heels of what we would have in the eighties and nineties with shows, like every show would have an intervention episode. Right? Like the, probably the best one was Party of Five when they intervened with Bailey, Bailey's alcoholism. Really, really good stuff, but obviously a TV show. And Chase, Chase is just like, I'm fucking taking this nine other levels. And that becomes one of the funniest five minute sequences in the history of the show. It's just the humor mixed with the fact that these characters are all kind of awful and how they navigated it. Even the episode when Annabelle Sierra's character, when Paul, when Tony sends the guy to basically threaten her and be like, you're.

• 2:35:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes.

• 2:35:05Bill Simmons?

  You've said the sentence you should never say in our world, which is, I'm gonna tell your wife, like, not only are you not gonna tell your wife, he's, and he's like, you're gonna leave this man alone, or something horrible is gonna happen. And he's like, it won't be cinematic, right? And scares the shit out of her and we never see her character again. But that last, the last scene of the episode is him bringing groceries back to his family. This guy just was like the most violent, sociopathic, scary dude. And then it's like, hey, did you remember to bring the milk home? Yeah, yeah. And he's coming back with his groceries. And I think that's why people like this world, because it's like the worst impulses people have, but also things that we care about. Family, friendship, loyalty, you know, these things that are like enduring themes.

• 2:35:49Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:35:51Bill Simmons?

  Gandolfini though, I, to me, it's number one. I don't, I can't think of a better performance on a TV show. I'm sure other people would argue, but I, I can't imagine anyone else in the world. And I think he's the biggest reason this show works.

• 2:36:07Speaker 01

  It's probably true, you know, but I also wonder if I had rewatched a different show, if I might feel differently. That's how it feels to me right now, too. You know, it's like the recent, you know, it feels that way.

• 2:36:18Bill Simmons?

  All right, we did it. We made nephew Kyle's week because he loves nothing more than than good Sopranos talk. Chuck Klosterman, that was one of our longest pods we've ever had. I really had a good time though. It was good talking to you.

• 2:36:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was good seeing you. Have a good Thanksgiving.

• 2:36:32Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, have a good Thanksgiving.

• 2:36:33Speaker 01

  Are you a big Thanksgiving guy?

• 2:36:34Bill Simmons?

  I love Thanksgiving. I love the football. I love the food. It's, people say like, it's my favorite holiday. It might be my favorite day, especially now when your kids come home and you get to have your whole family together. Like when your kids get older, it's like the best.

• 2:36:49Speaker 01

  It's my, it's my favorite holiday, too. I feel like for the best holiday, you have to say Christmas in the same way like you have to say like, you know, the Beatles or Citizen Kane or like Christmas needs to be the biggest holiday.

• 2:37:01Bill Simmons?

  Some people go Christmas Eve.

• 2:37:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:37:03Bill Simmons?

  Leading into Christmas.

• 2:37:04Speaker 01

  But I think everyone likes Thanksgiving the most.

• 2:37:07Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. All right. Good to see you. Happy holidays.

• 2:37:10Speaker 01

  Bye bye.

• 2:37:12Bill Simmons?

  All right. That's it for the podcast. Thanks to Chuck Klosterman. Thanks to Sarudy and Kyle and Gahal. Don't forget, you can watch all of the, this entire podcast will be in the Bill Simmons YouTube channel and my million dollar pics. If I do them this week, I promise to do something fun, but it will only be on the Bill Simmons YouTube channel because I will not have another podcast the rest of the week. I'm going to hang out with my kids and my fam and we got Thanksgiving coming and, and I can't wait. I love Thanksgiving and I hope you have an awesome, awesome holiday. Safe travels. I will see you in this podcast on Sunday and I'll see you on the Bill Simmons YouTube channel at some point over the week. Enjoy Thanksgiving.

• 2:38:19Bill Simmons?

  Must be 21 plus and present in select states for Kansas and affiliation with Kansas Star Casino. Or 18 plus and present in 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 gambling helpline MA.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. This episode is brought to you by Searchlight Pictures Wild Horse 9. John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, I like those guys, star in the sharp-witted comedy thriller

• 2:39:02Bill Simmons?

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• 2:39:40Speaker 03

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