Derek Thompson on the American Sports Plutocracy, the NBA’s 2016 Black Swan Event, and the WNBA’s Growing Pains

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons is joined by Derek Thompson to discuss the finances of sports and the developing story of Mark Walter's Lakers sale. Then, they discuss the 2016 NBA cap spike before ending with their WNBA theories. (0:00) Intro (2:10) American sports plutocracy and Mark Walter (42:28) 2016 NBA cap spike (01:05:39) WNBA growing pains Host: Bill Simmons Guest: Derek Thompson Producers: Chia Hao Tat and Eduardo Ocampo The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit https://fanduel.com/playwithaplan to learn more about the resources and helplines Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:06Bill Simmons?

  The Bill Simmons Podcast, brought to you by The Ringer Podcast Network, where we put up the re-speed on Monday includes maybe the hardest I've ever laughed during re-watchables. It was me and Sean Finnis and Chris Ryan. Great podcast. Another banger coming next week, Monday, Apollo 13. Yeah, it's been one of the more requested ones that we've had over the last few years. So Apollo 13, you have a few days to watch it. Go check it out. And then Monday, we'll have that. Next week, I'm all football next week, just so you know. The fantasy guys are coming on Tuesday, Danny, Danny and Craig.

• 0:46Bill Simmons?

  We're going to do the my guy fantasy thing. Cousin Sal, Thursday, we're doing, I think, NFC win total over-unders, which we've done every year since 1872. And then Sunday will be the other conference for over-unders. And I can't wait. I've been doing a lot of prep. I'm super excited. So we're doing one more evergreen-ish type of podcast today. Derek Thompson, who's fantastic, who hosts the Plain English Podcast for us. We wanted to talk about everything that's going on with the billionaires, Mark Walter, and just what's happening in professional sports right now. The Black Swan event of the 2016 NBA cap

• 1:27Bill Simmons?

  spike, and then the WNBA, the growth of the WNBA, and how fast it happened versus the discourse about the WNBA. But we had a lot of thoughts on this. This is a very fun podcast. I always love having Derek on. It's always great. So he's coming up next. We're gonna take a break, and then Pearl Jam. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. The holiday rush is coming, and you can get ahead of it with PayPal. Shop your favorite online stores with PayPal this season, like eBay for collectibles, Fanatics for team gear, Walmart for tech. Check out the flexibility to pay now or pay later and split your payments with Pay in Four with no interest, no late fees. Shop now with PayPal. Pay in Four subject to approval. Learn more at paypal.com/payinfour.

• 2:12Bill Simmons?

  PayPal, Inc., NMLS 910457. This episode is brought to you by 7Up. Okay, this one's a case for conspiracy, Bill. Let's bring them in. Ever notice lemon is everywhere, from lemon recipes to lemon-scented cleaning supplies? And when it comes to lemon lime sodas, why is lemon always first? There's a reason. A shadowy organization called the Alamonate has been padding the stats, keeping big lemon in the lead for decades. But let me tell you something, the sip is about to be flipped. 7Up is fighting back, swapping lemon lime for their new lime lemon soda. Now lime comes first. 7Up, flip the sip.

• 3:18Bill Simmons?

  All right, we're recording this on Thursday morning, Pacific time. Derek Thompson is here. It's been a while. It's my fault. I'm terrible at booking my own podcasts. But he hosts the Plain English Podcast for us. He also has an excellent newsletter that has been very active this year. There's a lot of shit going on in 2026. But it seemed like a good time for us to connect, because, and look, I'm starting football next week. Next week is all football, all NFL. This is my last kind of big picture, what the fuck is going on in sports and money and owners. And this has been one of the most interesting weeks we've ever had in Los Angeles. We have two NBA teams that are both in flux for different

• 3:58Bill Simmons?

  reasons. You wrote about this recently, about leagues and owners. I wanted to start there, because I thought you had some interesting takes. But as you watch this from afar, what are you seeing?

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Well, look, first off, it's a huge honor to be your big picture what the fuck guy. I should probably begin there. Second, I mean, I'm watching the Mark Walter story, and I am interested in it in so many ways. You had a great explanation the other day. Sam Koppelman talked a little bit about just how he seems, I don't want to be sued for defamation here, but Mark Walter certainly seems to have used people's life insurance payments to throw around money and illegally loan money to himself. And it's not like $1 or $2 billion worth of illegal or improperly marked loan payments. It looks like we're

• 4:50Speaker 01

  talking about $15 to $20, $21 billion. If you need to make up $15 to $20 billion in a matter of six months, you need to sell a lot of highly-priced assets. And so that's why he seems to be on a selling spree, selling the Lakers, selling Chelsea, selling anything he can sort of get his hands on. But I wanted to scope up and think more broadly about just how offended I was, at a base level, that this guy just sits on an asset, the Los Angeles Lakers, for 14 months, and it just appreciates by $2.5 billion under his

• 5:30Speaker 01

  butt. Like, he does nothing, and yet he comes away richer with this incredibly valuable asset. And as I was thinking about just like, why it made me so upset that rich folks got so much richer by buying and selling sports teams. It made me realize, sorry?

• 5:49Bill Simmons?

  By flipping a sports team, basically.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  By flipping sports teams, yeah. It made me realize that while I am not, like, virulently anti-billionaire, I do think that nothing makes me feel more like a socialist than when I think about how billionaires flip these assets. I mean, so here's my hot take here, which I try to explicate in this article, is that American law basically treats sports like socialism. We coddle professional sports. We create rules and laws that practically guarantee that team valuations can only go up in price. And then we allow rich people to buy these scarce assets, bully local governments to give them money, and then conspire openly

• 6:34Speaker 01

  to cap employee benefits, and we give them a tax break for all of this. Like, professional sports is not a free and fair market. It is, Bill, legal for you to open the 31st ice cream shop within a driving distance of you in Los Angeles. It is not legal for anybody to open the 31st NBA team, because the league is a cartel and it controls franchises. It creates artificial scarcity. I think that's good for fans, but it's certainly really good for owners. It is illegal for Microsoft and Google and Meta to get together and decide that, you know, just because Microsoft had the worst stock performance in 2025, they should get the first overall draft pick of like Stanford computer science grads in 2026. That's absurd. But in sports, it's completely standard practice. It is illegal

• 7:19Speaker 01

  for the airlines to get together and say, we're going to collude on prices, and then share the revenue that we make as an industry. That would clearly violate antitrust law. But professional sports teams come together to negotiate as a league for TV revenues, and they divvy it up between the teams. So behind the scenes, professional sports is basically a kind of socialism. They get all of these exemptions from antitrust law and labor law. And then how do the owners treat the use of these assets? They charge whatever they want for tickets. They try to drive up the value of these enterprises. They use the fact that teams are scarce to bully city governments, to subsidize their stadiums

• 8:03Speaker 01

  by saying, hey, there's only 30 of us. We can run to Portland, we can run to Oklahoma City, we can run back to Seattle if you don't give us the subsidy that we want. And then finally, the cherry on top of all of this, and sorry it's going on so long, but the cherry on top of all of this, the tax law allows team owners to amortize the price of a team over time, which essentially allows someone like Ballmer to pay a lower effective tax rate than the janitor sweeping up the bathrooms in the stadium that he owns. So my point is basically this, if the government is going to create the conditions for franchise valuations to only be able to go up, and then local governments are going to subsidize the stadiums that feed into these franchise values, it's just absurd to me that we don't

• 8:47Speaker 01

  like mildly socialize the other side of this. Like, why shouldn't the city of Los Angeles own a little bit of the Los Angeles Lakers? Why shouldn't governments, local state, be able to benefit a little bit more by the fact that they are the home of these assets that the law has conspired to only drive up in price? So basically, this is my rant. I think that we already treat sports like socialism, and maybe we should just go all the way and socialize a little bit more of sports.

• 9:16Bill Simmons?

  Well, people are making the same argument with big-tunt companies, right? That why doesn't, I don't know, California or the Bay Area or whatever, get a 2%? You did all of this here, we get a piece, we get a taste, we get to wet our beak, because you built your business here, which I actually agree with. And especially if the city was invested in some of these bigger companies as they're growing, and we're seeing it now with AI. If they're invested from the get-go, then, you know, everybody wins. But you made, so you, the piece you wrote recently, I'm going to summarize everything you just said, but these three bullet points that I think are really important, we'll go one at a time. Sports leagues are legal oligopolies. I said oligopolies?

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Oligopolies, yeah.

• 10:01Bill Simmons?

  Oligopolies. How about my speech dyslexia just kicking in, four minutes in, we're taping this. Oligopolies. Sports leagues are oligopolies. Legal oligopolies. Explain that.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like I said, you know, it is not legal for anybody to just decide that they want to create the 31st NBA team, right? Or, you know, the 33rd NFL team. Are there 32 NFL teams, or?

• 10:26Bill Simmons?

  32 NFL.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  32, yeah. You can't just start. You can't just start a new company in the NBA or the NFL. The same way it is legal.

• 10:35Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, we have, this is our number. We're in control of it. We can go down or up, and that's it. All right. Second one is how sports leagues can collude on salary structure and employment. What's interesting is, they've actually gotten in trouble a couple of times for colluding. The NFL got in trouble once, the NBA kind of got in trouble once, but about, you know, you would see with free agents. Baseball was the biggest one, whereas there was, I think it was 1987, when Andre Dawson was a free agent. And all of the owners were like, dude, salaries are getting too high. We got to figure this out. And nobody got good offers. And it was very clear they colluded, and they actually got in trouble

• 11:12Bill Simmons?

  for it. I would argue the salary cap, the second apron, is a really smart way to collude on salaries. And we've seen the ramifications of it, and the players union agreed to it. But

• 11:27Bill Simmons?

  I don't know if colludes the right word. It's the word you use, but I don't know if there's another word. What's the word?

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I mean, I think

• 11:35Bill Simmons?

  Coordinate?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Collude is is strong. Coordinate is weaker. But in any case, it is there. The fact of salary caps in sports, while potentially defensible on the merits of creating parity,

• 11:50Speaker 01

  are very unique to professional sports.

• 11:52Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Bill, what's the salary cap for corporate CEOs? What's the salary cap for Elon Musk? What's the salary cap for someone who works as an engineer at OpenAI or SpaceX? Right? Salary caps are unique to a cartel like professional sports. And I could absolutely make an argument for why salary caps and why this kind of coordination makes sports better. I'm not trying to argue that like the way to fix the NBA is to creep, is to make it possible for there to be like 90 teams, 200 teams. And so you have to do some kind of like promotion relegation system like you have in English soccer.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  It's that we have a set of rules that even if they make the product of sports better, also have the near inevitable outcome of only driving up the underlying asset of team valuations.

• 12:48Bill Simmons?

  Which is the only reason they do it.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Which essentially turns them into a mechanism for the already very rich to be able to sit down at like a blackjack table where all the cards they are dealt are kings and aces. And so even if, even if I love professional sports, for all the weirdnesses of these rules, let's be honest that like, we're creating a way for billionaires to get much, much richer, even if they do absolutely nothing. And I, and I do think that that is like a little morally outrageous. Yeah.

• 13:21Bill Simmons?

  I'm so used to it because it's been my whole life of salaries and salary caps and thresholds and all, that you don't really step outside and think about how crazy it is. Like, for instance, YouTube and Netflix right now are battling. Like, Lucas Shaw had a big story yesterday about how YouTube is now getting aggressive against Netflix. They're going to start paying creators more. And I was thinking like, imagine if we had like a creator salary cap? How mad everybody would be? It'd be like, here's the most you can make. And you have to, and all of the people who pay creators and podcasters and TV talent, whatever, this is the threshold. You can't make more than that. People would be like, what?

• 14:01Speaker 01

  What are you talking about?

• 14:02Bill Simmons?

  What do you mean? The threshold? Why is there a threshold? Yeah. But in sports, they do that. And then the third piece, which, you know, I've been complaining about forever, but you, you wrote, "Sports stadiums are legal ransom against American cities." We're seeing this now in Portland. Portland, a city that's been a little topsy-turvy over the last 15 years and somehow has to pony up for a new NBA arena because the guy, Tom, Tom Dundon, AKA El Chepo, is going to hold them hostage. And meanwhile, I know a bunch of people who either live in Portland or have gone to that arena a bunch of times. Everybody's like, the arena's fine. It's not, it's not like the roof's going to fall in. It's not, this is an arena that was built in the last 30 years. Yeah, you can make more revenue from it, but the arena's fine.

• 14:47Bill Simmons?

  We all like going there. It's built for basketball. It's pretty cool. We don't really need to blow it up and knock it down, but this is, this is the, the biggest leverage that these owners have over and over again is, well, I don't know what's going to happen if you don't do this. And then everybody panics because nobody wants to have that on their resume that they lost a team. Seattle is, has been, it's 20 years almost since Seattle left. And that has been the looming threat over all of these cities, or the Rams leaving St. Louis. It's just, well, you don't want to be like them. And it allows these people who are already rich to extort the cities. And it's just going to keep happening, I guess. What happens?

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Apparently, it's just going to keep happening. I mean, I can imagine someone listening to my opening rant, who's defensive of billionaire ownership of these teams, who says, look, Derek, like, the benefits that you're talking about, the antitrust exemptions that you're talking about, these are necessary to make American professional sports great, to create the parity that makes these leagues popular and beloved by local teams. If we took them away, the NBA would be unrecognizable. The NFL would be unrecognizable. They would be much less popular. And they are serving local populations who want to root for these teams over and over again and have some hope that, yeah, even if the Tennessee Titans suck for two years, they might get a draft pick that totally rejuvenates their franchise.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  But you would think in this scenario, then like, okay, well, at least, hopefully, the owners of these franchises don't use all these benefits to bully and ransom local governments to get tax breaks and financing for their stadiums by threatening to move their teams somewhere else.

• 16:31Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  But they do this all the time. It's like their favorite thing. It's like, it's one of your favorite things to criticize.

• 16:37Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  You know, use your own, build your own fucking stadiums, the way you put it on the, in the HBO advertisement. You've been singing this song for way longer than I have.

• 16:45Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  And so that, that's my point. They are, it's not just that the law creates what I call artificial scarcity. There's only 30 teams, either pay us or miss out because there's no 31st team who's moving back into Seattle if we move to Oklahoma City, for example.

• 17:00Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  They're using their, their, their artificial scarcity to pressure local governments to subsidize stadiums, despite the fact that economic evidence seems to suggest there's very little financial benefit that flows from those subsidies. So I, I just think you can't have it both ways. You can't have socialism behind the curtain and then free market capitalism in front of the curtain so that these billionaires can benefit from all of these exemptions to free market law in terms of how the teams are constructed, but can charge whatever they want to sit in the, in, in a, in a stadium seat, to charge whatever they want for television revenue, to buy and sell the teams in the open market. That, that is the imbalance that to me seems quite unethical.

• 17:47Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. And plus you get all the ego stuff out of it. You go from, nobody knows who the fuck you are to, oh, you're the guy who owns the Warriors. You're the guy who owns the Patriots. The Bill Simmons Podcast is brought to you by FanDuel. Before the football season begins, every team is undefeated. Everyone believes it could be their year. Also, you can wager on some of this stuff, too. With FanDuel, bet on everything. Bet on over/unders for win totals, division, conference. You can bet on teams against each other. Like, for instance, you could bet on the Cleveland Browns winning more games than the Atlanta Falcons and get plus 200 odds. Kind of fun. Then you get to root for the Browns with no quarterback. From who will win it all?

• 18:30Bill Simmons?

  The Super Bowl I'm talking about, or the conference, or the division, just to betting on season leaders, whatever you want. This is the time. This is, this is it. This is football future season. FanDuel has all the ways to bet on the season before it even begins. Get your football futures bets in right now on our friends at FanDuel. Visit FanDuel.com/BS to get started. 21-plus select states or 18-plus DC, Kentucky, Wyoming. Game probability 1-800-GAMBAR, call 888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org/chat in Connecticut. So 08, 09, 2010, when I had my Page Two column and I had my pocket, I really just did this in my column, but I became more and more fascinated and educated about the business

• 19:15Bill Simmons?

  of sports and especially in the NBA. And I, I wrote a bunch of pieces because you could feel this NBA lockout coming. And the people I was listening to, and I was getting more and more sources back then because my column had elevated, I wrote my basketball book. And I was hearing, yeah, this is going to be bad. Like, like, these teams don't make money. And, and we're headed toward like a great reckoning here. And what was happening in 09 and 2010? Like, there was 10, like eight to 10 NBA teams that were available for like, not that much money, if you remember, right? Like, Para got Memphis for nothing. The, the guys got the Sixers, didn't cost really anything. And nobody wanted to buy the New Orleans, which seems crazy now.

• 19:59Bill Simmons?

  This is less than 15 years ago where they couldn't sell the Pelicans. The league had to take it over. They could not find a 30th buyer. And I remember writing about, do they need to have contraction? Do we need, do we have too many teams? We can't support all these teams. And the mantra over and over again was, yeah, this is a losing business. It's a feeling business. And I was writing about it and I was like, the players don't understand, they're going to kill the goose. And I didn't understand it correctly. And after they did the lockout, somebody smart talked to me and said, you completely missed this. I can't believe you fell for their bullshit. And I was like, what do you mean? It's like, these teams don't lose money. Even if they lose money, you get to write off with all your taxes.

• 20:44Bill Simmons?

  You get so many different tax breaks. You get to amortize so many different things that even if you're losing money, you're not losing money. And they use this against the players and the union and they didn't understand it. And now it's going to be like, why, they, they were like, watch the values of these teams. And what happens? You go from the Warriors, I think were 450 in 2012 to now 450 million. Now it's 4.5 just to get in. Vegas, who they thought was going to be 7.5, Vegas will get 9 billion. They're going to get 9 billion. This is why Iger and Kushner audible to the Lakers. Because they were like, there's no way a Vegas expansion team is worth $9 billion. It's insane.

• 21:26Bill Simmons?

  It's like, I, I don't even think it's a top 35 TV market, but that's the price to get in now. So they pulled this huge rope-a-dope in 08, 09 and 2010, making it so, oh, I don't know, this league could, but meanwhile, they knew what they were doing the whole time. And now I think the interesting thing to me about this moment right now is people are on to it. People understand the tax breaks. They understand the value of these things and that, you know, it's like, so that's why I like, one of the reasons I want to have you on is I, I feel like we're at a real fork in the road right now where I don't know where this goes. I don't know how the franchises get, I don't know if we've hit peak value. There was a story yesterday about YouTube is going to do all of the local TV games.

• 22:09Bill Simmons?

  They're going to bundle them up almost like Sunday Ticket for NFL and they're going to get 1.2. But there's just more and more money coming to the league. And it's the first time, I'm like, I don't know what the ceiling is. Are we going to tap out? What is the ceiling?

• 22:23Speaker 01

  I'm not sure the ceiling exists. I think recognizing that the ceiling doesn't exist is what motivated Josh Kushner's call to Mark Walter to buy the Los Angeles Lakers. I mean, this was circled a little bit by Sam in your previous conversation, but Josh Kushner's a smart guy. You know, people have feelings about him because of his last name. This is a savvy investor who's grown his venture capital firm by a lot of money. But he understands that there's a huge difference between everything you can invest in and software and sports teams. Software is competitive. Software has national competition, OpenAI versus Anthropic versus Google versus Microsoft. It also has international competition.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  All the American companies, some of who make what are called closed models, are competing against these Chinese AI firms that make open weight models that are often much cheaper. And therefore, you have a lot of price competition in a field like artificial intelligence where Josh Kushner is super invested. He's thinking, how do I balance this portfolio? Where do I go to look for an industry that's the opposite of software? That's not competitive? That has artificial scarcity? Where the law literally says you're not allowed to make the next proverbial AI company? It's against the law to compete against all the AI companies that exist. You can't make the 37th. That's sports.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Sports has artificial scarcity. Sports has rules that say unless all the billionaires who own the NBA teams collectively decide to create more teams, you're not allowed to compete against the billionaires. It's a fantastic bet to place your money somewhere that's the opposite of computer land, which is hyper competitive. You want to put your money in sports, which is a closed system of zero competition from the outside market. And so it's hard for me to imagine a world where sports remains as central to that withering phenomenon of the American mainstream. Like monoculture is absolutely fading away.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Like, what is left? There's football, there's Taylor Swift, and there's like a movie that Christopher Nolan makes every few years. Like, that's what's left of the fraying monoculture. And so the ability to get purchase in a piece of that monoculture that, again, cannot be grown without the express permission of all the people who are already owners in it, that's a really, really fantastic business. And Josh Kushner knows what he's doing. And I think that's why he has been, for a while, so desperate to get into sports.

• 25:06Bill Simmons?

  Well, it's also interesting, based on top of everything you just said, the people that are trying to aggressively get into sports from the media side, right? There are all these streamers with a bunch of intel. There are Netflix and YouTube and Amazon, people who just seem like they have competitive advantages with how they can study the behavior of stuff. And they're seeing sports as this vehicle. Amazon looks at it as like, the more sports we have, eventually, there's going to be QR codes in every commercial and even during games. And people are just going to be on Amazon buying stuff. Or they're watching on their iPad, they're watching on Prime, and they like something, and all of a sudden, they're buying a lawnmower as they're watching like, you know, the third quarter of a Sparks game.

• 25:48Bill Simmons?

  And that's, so they've all figured out, Netflix has figured out the same thing, like, uh-oh, we're licensing all this content, we're making a bunch of stuff, but how do we get the consistent behavior of somebody coming here? What's going to make them not cancel us? Now you get NFL games. We have, they have like six, doesn't matter. If you like the NFL, you need Netflix. So where we were 15 years ago to now, what's interesting beyond the pro sports stuff is the college things in complete flux. And you talk about artificial scarcity, well, we have, you know, hundreds of colleges that play sports, but we only really have, what, 25 to 30 in football?

• 26:32Bill Simmons?

  Maybe in basketball, there's more because it's easier to have a competitive team in basketball. But football specifically, I wonder if that's the next place where real money is going to go? Now that we have NIL, now that we have colleges who are completely outside of their comfort zone for, holy shit, like, we have to pay these people now? You have the Dartmouth people unionizing. What is all the rich guy money going to move to colleges and try to give it some sort of, you know, financial cohesion crossed with the artificial scarcity? Couldn't that be the next step here?

• 27:05Speaker 01

  It could absolutely be the next step. I wonder if we're already seeing it, right? The NIL era has involved a lot of incredibly rich people, you know, paying in through Michigan, through Indiana, you know, bankrolling these teams that used to not pay their, their players at all, that are now paying their players with the money from folks who maybe sometimes are invested in professional sports, but other times might have just missed out on a professional sports acquisition or been, you know, maybe pushed out.

• 27:33Bill Simmons?

  It's an ego thing, though. You're like, I'm a huge Michigan booster and I'm rich. All right, fine, here's some money. Like, let's go get a quarterback. But ultimately, it's not a sustainable thing. It's a year-to-year ego purchase, like buying a car.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Right. And I think this is something that we see among rich people, that, you know, once you have more money than you can conceivably spend in your life, money's not what's valuable anymore. Like, it's status that's valuable. It's status that feels scarcer, that feels more tenuous, that might not exist five years from now. And so you think, like, how do I buy status? How do I make a long-term purchase that ensures that three, five, 10 years from now, I have the kind of status that I want tomorrow? Well, that's when you start thinking about, well, if I'm the owner of a sports team, if the thing that I own is synonymous with this college town, with this city, well, then

• 28:28Speaker 01

  that is, that's worth more to me than numbers that appear in a spreadsheet and like a Morgan Stanley Wealth Management page, right? Like, that is what's really, really valuable, knowing that I, that I've got these invisible keys to the city. So I can absolutely imagine it continuing to grow, not only in professional sports, but also in college, because, I mean, these, these universities are not only incredibly rich, but you, you have that local thing, you have that attachment to the college town or in many places to the, to the larger state or even the region, in the case of something like University of Alabama. And I think that that becomes, that feels more valuable than, than just holding your money in a spreadsheet in the sky.

• 29:09Bill Simmons?

  And there's a competition piece to it, too. Right? You, you have some successful business, you make a lot of money, you just become one of the rich guys that everybody hates, right? But you buy a team, now you have all these people on your side, and they're all, we're all rooting for the same thing. We're rooting to win and advance in the playoffs. And if it all happens, you're one of the reasons, because you did a good job owning the team. Look at Denver right now. Denver trades Peyton Watson yesterday.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:41Bill Simmons?

  They have the best offensive player, maybe since Will Chamberlain, who they've already won a title with, who they've really screwed up the last three years with. They had Peyton Watson, they drafted in the second round, right, for no money. And it's like the dream pick, where you've turned him into some sort of asset. You know he's good, he's an athletic wing, you know you need him. What happens? They trade him. They have this, this Jokic asset, he's 30 years old, they made the team weaker than it was last year. And they move, and, and it's like, well, we might get DeMar DeRozan. It's like, cool. If I'm a Nuggets fan, how am I explaining this to my son?

• 30:24Bill Simmons?

  Like, yeah, we have Joker, but we're worse than we were last year. So what's going to happen with their ownership is the Nuggets fans are going to fucking hate them. Like, we had this once-in-a-lifetime asset that we made, we won one title with, we should have won three, and now we're, now, I mean, it almost, to me, makes more sense to trade him at this point than to, to have him with a weakened roster when you're competing against San Antonio and Oklahoma City and the Knicks. Like, you, you basically just handcuffed him and handicapped him. So at this point, just give up, fucking trade him. But that's an example of the other side, where if you have the asset, you don't take care of it. Man, talk about vitriol, that's about as bad as it's going to get.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's high stakes, for sure. I mean, if you, if you mess up, you're on the front page of the local newspaper, you're on the front page of ESPN, they talk about you for hours and hours in First Take and throughout the day.

• 31:18Bill Simmons?

  They call you El Chepo.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  They make fun of you, they call you El Chepo. I mean, that's, that's the risk. But at the same time, you have the chance to become a hero in the next few years. And, I mean, it's a little bit of a, you know, cry-your-way-to-the-bank situation. Because if the owner of the Nuggets, if the owner of, you know, Mavericks, if they want to sell their team after potentially making a catastrophic decision, they're still going to make an unbelievable amount of money. Because there's some billionaire outside the door who's thinking, I can be the savior. I can be the savior that this city, that this city needs. And so even, even there, this is why I compared, like, being a professional sports owner to sitting down at a blackjack table where all the cards dealt are kings and aces.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  Even if you mess it up, even if you get Jokic and only win one champion with, championship with him over his entire career, even though he's basically got the passing of Magic Johnson and the scoring of, of Will Chamberlain or something like that, maybe Larry Bird, you still can sell the team for a 30, 50% premium. And, and that speaks to just how uncompetitive this space is.

• 32:29Bill Simmons?

  The Jokic thing is devastating. And, and we're also concurrently watching it with the last year's of Curry, where, and in their case, they actually spent money, they just made bad picks. Denver's afraid to go over the apron for him, and they're like, whoa, you go over the apron, and there's all these ramifications. Nobody cares. Your, your team, as we just saw with the Lakers, the prices are going up and up and up and up. It's funny, I was at a dinner last night, and they were asking me to explain the, the Mark Walter thing, because they knew I'd done a podcast on it, and like, can you just explain this just succinctly in a way we would understand? And I was like, I think this is a good way to explain it. I buy a house.

• 33:11Bill Simmons?

  I then form an LLC with somebody that's renting the house for me. I charge five times what the house, what the rent per month would be to live in the house. So let's say it's like, oh, I bought a house, it costs $5,000 a month to live here.

• 33:31Bill Simmons?

  You're paying 40,000 a month. Oh, I am? Okay. And then I I'm able to take that 40,000 price and be like, I'm getting 40,000 a month for my house. It's not worth this. People are like, it is? Yeah, I'm getting 40,000 a month. But I'm the one paying myself with the rent. I think that's kind of what Mark Walter did.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, you know, it's funny is I was actually thinking also last night, but not at a dinner party, just me, myself and my computer, about Bill Simmons metaphors for the Mark Walter scandal. And let me explain to you how I how I understand it. And then explain sort of how I was going to explain to your audience, like using you as a main character here. Of course, not assuming you're you're a piece of any kind of insurance fraud. So as I understand it, basically, like, you've got Mark Walter owning this conglomerate that has life insurance companies. And Delaware life Delaware insurance law has a rule called section 1305 that says

• 34:30Speaker 01

  that your investments cannot be too concentrated in one person's company. And you can't loan that money to yourself without marking it, without saying that you've done so. And there's a limit to how much you can loan yourself. And so this was the part that was explained to me by Andrew Garanto, who's a University of Texas legal economist.

• 34:51Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Walter has been telling all these people that 3% of his loans were in the so-called bucket of affiliated investments. That is to say, loans that come from his life insurance companies. When it was dug into, they realized it was actually more like 40%. So 40% of the loans that he is making to sports teams, to other parts of his companies are coming from this life insurance pool, this insurance float. And you think, how in the world did the regulators not see this? Like, there are insurance regulators. How did they not realize that this guy owns a life insurance company and is just taking the money and throwing it into everything else that he owns? The reporting that's been done by some people, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal,

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Katie Baker at the at the Ringer has done a nice job covering this. The mechanism is that the loans didn't go from the insurance companies straight to Walter's other ventures.

• 35:48Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, he was watching it.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Through a third-party entity. Exactly. So it's kind of like, so this, this is, this is the best I could do. It's kind of like, there's a rule that says that Bill Simmons cannot send his friend House any money that he makes from his successful sports gambling. Like, that's for some reason, like, the city of Los Angeles says that Bill Simmons like can't send the proceeds of his gambling to House, okay?

• 36:16Bill Simmons?

  Big proceeds. I'm doing really well right now. WNBA has been favorable.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  And House is like, that sucks because I hear that Simmons is way up in the last nine months, and I would like some steak money, right? Here's what you do. You send the money to your neighbor. And you call House and you tell House, hey, House, just walk by my neighbor's front door. Your money is in an envelope just by the door. So the regulator can't see you sending the money to House at all because you're giving it to a neighbor, right?

• 36:45Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  That seems to be what Walter did so successfully and also so allegedly fraudulently. He knew exactly what he was doing. He was taking the insurance float. He's taking the money that people are paying into their life insurance premiums, and he's sending it straight to all of his companies. But to confuse the regulators, he doesn't send it straight to the Dodgers. He leaves it on the front porch of his, the proverbial front porch of his neighbor's house so that they can't see where the money is coming from. That seems to be what's happening. And now that he's been caught out, he needs to replace $20 billion and he's selling everything he can touch.

• 37:21Bill Simmons?

  So like Madoff was just a Ponzi scheme, where he's just taking money, claiming he was investing it and just pure Ponzi scheming it. This is different because it's not a Ponzi scheme, but in a weird way it is because he just kept gaining wealth and being able to buy assets that he knew he could flip if he ever got into trouble.

• 37:44Bill Simmons?

  It definitely feels illegal to me. Like, I think he's going to jail. Like, if I had to bet, if there were FanDuel odds on this, I would say he goes to jail or pleas out or something would be like minus 200.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:58Bill Simmons?

  But it does feel like he cracked some weird code because he always knew if if the if the walls come in, I'll just flip one of my teams, right? Now, he would have initially flipped the Dodgers if if he hadn't bought the Lakers. But he was able to get the Lakers so he can flip them. And I'm sure there's he's flipping his Chelsea stake now. But it's almost like you buy a house with cash and like, oh, well, if worst case scenario, I'll just get a bunch of mortgages and take money back out of the house. But he's doing this with sports teams that people love. And that's that's where now if I'm a Dodger, I've been torturing Dodger fans in my life. They're like, they absolutely hate me.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  They can take it.

• 38:37Bill Simmons?

  I'm like, hey, where do you want me to mail the giant asterisk for your two back titles? You want you want to mail your home or your office? But they he bought two titles with these money. Like, this is why I feel like it's such a bigger story than the bomber story because it swung the competitiveness of the league. It swung two titles. It swung best players leaving teams and going to other teams. It's going to cause a lockout next year. And this is just in baseball, not to mention, you know, some of the other places. But I I I'm just, I'm dumbfounded. I know, like, journalism is not in the greatest spot these days and we have less people, you know, we have we have less money funding the kind of people who would look for, you know, how to find a story like this.

• 39:22Bill Simmons?

  But I'm amazed we all it's like we all kind of looked the other way, not realizing what was happening. It's like, oh, yeah. Oh, he must have a lot. It was almost like, he must have a lot of money. But nobody was like, huh, how does he have this much money? What's going on here? And I I just felt like, how did we not figure this out sooner?

• 39:45Speaker 01

  I want to take that thought and spin it forward into what's not quite a conspiracy theory, but is certainly as conspiracy adjacent as I get. There's one thing that you said that's not entirely accurate.

• 39:56Bill Simmons?

  Okay.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  We did know that he was using insurance money to buy the Dodgers. This is an article that I found published in 2012 by Andrew Ross Sorkin in the New York Times. Quote, "Using insurance money, which is typically supposed to be invested in simple, safe assets, to buy a baseball team, the ultimate toy for the ultra-rich, seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen," end quote. That is Andrew Ross Sorkin writing about Mark Walter buying the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2012. 14 years later, the Fed sees Walter's computer. Are we sure this isn't more common? If insurance regulators didn't see this,

• 40:43Speaker 01

  what else are they missing? Where else is private credit and private equity deep, deep, deep into the plumbing of the American economy? In an industry of massive significance to the US, our lives, even geopolitics? Private equity and private credit own major stakes in insurance companies and are behind tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in financial support for artificial intelligence. If regulators missed a $20 billion discrepancy at one company that was throwing around insurance money so blatantly

• 41:24Speaker 01

  it was reported on by literally the most famous financial journalist in America 12 years ago? Like, how much do you want to bet that the private equity flowing into some of these data centers and chips is tip-top and accurately classified? I do not want to take that bet. And I'm not accusing any private equity or private credit firm of doing anything illegal. I have no idea. I'm saying, if the state of insurance regulations

• 41:49Bill Simmons?

  Which we've had forever.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Is so decrepit that it can't see a fraud done by someone who basically put on a shirt in 2012 saying, I am buying the Los Angeles Dodgers with insurance money. Please don't investigate me for fraud. Where else could we see a little bit of slippage, a little bit of improperly classified insurance float being used to make loans and to finance other parts of the economy? This is not an accusation. This is not a claim. I'm just saying, like, let's be real here. It's probably not the case that Mark Walter is the only person in the entire planet who realized you can do this with insurance money to get much richer.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  So I do wonder whether this might be a kind of canary in the coal mine.

• 42:40Bill Simmons?

  Well, it's an every 20 years thing, right? We went through this with real estate in 2007 and the mortgages. And it was the same thing. It was like, how did we not see this?

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:51Bill Simmons?

  What were we doing? And then there was this moment. And that's why I think this this Mark Walter moment here, I do think is going to lead to, it's it's kind of the voila moment that this whole era didn't have. And now it does because this was like a major dude. And it was interesting, Sammy on the pod the other day, I thought had one of the best things he said on the pod was how his Guggenheim investments thing was basically like, it was this optical illusion with Guggenheim where he's not actually.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Oh, that part was unbelievable.

• 43:24Bill Simmons?

  Like, I had no idea. I assumed like he was like the grandson of Guggenheim or something. It's like, no, no, he's just grabbing the name. We're going to take a break and I want to talk WNBA with you.

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• 45:00Bill Simmons?

  So, we wanted to do one more thing, based on Rich Guy NBA stuff, that I had been thinking about a lot this summer, because it's the 10-year anniversary of a true black swan NBA event, the 2016 cap spike, which I don't think we could wrap our heads around in real time. And the legacy of it, there's a couple of different legacies. One is it led to Durant going to the Warriors, which swung the 2017 title, they won. 2018 title, they won. 2019, they made the finals. And then 2022, because they were able to do a sign and trade with Durant, get D'Angelo Russell back, that led to D'Angelo Russell being traded to Minnesota for Wiggins and a pick, and Wiggins ends up being the second-best guy in the '22 team

• 45:46Bill Simmons?

  that won the title. So, just that cap spike, now, would they have won a couple of titles, even if they didn't have it, and Harrison Barnes was instead of Durant? Maybe, who knows? But that cap spike swung all that stuff. It also swung things against the Cavaliers a little bit. LeBron ends up going to the Lakers, and that kind of swings that title, and it just has all these different ramifications on that end.

• 46:13Bill Simmons?

  The other thing that happens is the comedy, and that's what people remember. Some of the contracts, the Knicks signed Courtney Lee, Joakim Noah, and Lance Thomas for 147 million for four years, which was a ton of money at the time. Portland had Evan Turner, Alan Crabbe, Myers Leonard, and Festus Ezeli, which they signed basically for $200 billion.

• 46:48Bill Simmons?

  So, you had these teams that, what they thought with the cap spike, which they did wrong, was, oh, we're gonna have all this money coming in, but the teams will be prudent. They're not gonna shoot their wad. They'll know, like, don't spend this all at once, save it, roll it over, because the players' union's like, we're not staggering the cap stuff. Like, we're not doing that. That's not gonna be like, if the money's in there, the money's gotta be in there. So, they sign this new media deal. They get all this money, and none of the teams can behave themselves. And they do some of the dumbest things, and really, like, fucked up, like, I think one of the reasons Anthony Davis leaves New Orleans is, they lost guys, but ended up replacing them with Solomon Hill and Etwan Moore for

• 47:30Bill Simmons?

  four years and 82 million. And you go on and on, it's just, it leads to Brad Beal signing his first extension, which leads to the second extension. It leads to the Lakers, Clarkson, Deng, and Mozgov, four years, 188 billion combined, which leads to them bottoming out and finally getting LeBron, but also getting draft picks and being able to trade for AD. So, it had all these different things, and it really did become the NBA's black swan event. So, let's talk about that first, but then, I'm wondering, are we in the middle of potentially one now here with the second apron and Mark Walter? But go back to 2016 first.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  I think 2016 black swan event is an awesome subject. I've been doing some research on it for the last few days. I'm interested not only in the fact that it results in the Golden State Warriors dynasty being extended, and these absolutely hilarious contracts being handed out. I mean, Mozgov, four years, 64 million, like, just chef's kiss. There's also the response to, or the backlash to, the cap spike. In the 2017 CBA, right, you've got the invention of the supermax, and there's also some rules that are changed that loosen up the free agent market. And I was, and I was looking into that, and I had this theory,

• 48:52Speaker 01

  and I wonder how you think about this. Like, one of the ideas that you and I have batted back and forth over the last few years is that sports fandom has really changed in the last decade. As ratings have flatlined or declined, and as people watch TV a little bit less, but as commentary has grown and podcasting has grown, more people's relationship with sports becomes akin to what you and I call the Bravo sports fandom effect. People are more interested in the gossip than the encore play. And I have a theory that in a very real way, the 2016 cap spike, and the CBA changes that came out of it, was like a secret author, like a secret parent of this shift, like a father revealed years

• 49:31Speaker 01

  after by a DNA test on The Maury Show. So, the cap spike leads to supermax deal, loosened extension rules in 2017. And what happens in is, in the aftermath, you've got the free agency window extended, and stars and agents start to realize that you can negotiate extensions early and demand a trade whenever you want. So, when does Kyrie demand that trade from the Cavs? I think it's 2017. Kawhi, Anthony Davis.

• 50:02Bill Simmons?

  2018, yeah.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  James Harden.

• 50:05Bill Simmons?

  I call it pre-agency. It's not pre-agency, it's pre-agency.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  So, what I think a legacy of the 2016 cap spike and the reaction to it was, was that it created pre-agency. And pre-agency itself, I think, is an incredibly powerful phenomenon. It's like a sports media thing, because it's taken the free agent window, which we used to only be able to talk about for a few weeks a year, and it's spread it across the entire year. So, in February, there's like a tweet or a podcast comment that's like, so-and-so star is unhappy. And then in March, someone asks the star, hey, are you unhappy? And they give like, a little bit of a tepid response. And then in April through July, we come up with all sorts of trades that team could potentially do to

• 50:49Speaker 01

  move the star. The free agency calendar, becoming replaced by pre-agency as a gossip market, that changed basketball. It changed the way we talk about basketball. Like, if you go to ESPN or these podcasts, they love to spend so much of the year talking about potential star movement, because it's plausible. Because at any given moment now, stars can just demand a trade. And so, I would argue that even beyond the Warriors dynasty and the crazy deals that are handed out, and the invention of the supermax and the second apron, that a lot of this falls out of the 2016 cap spike. But maybe the most important

• 51:33Speaker 01

  change from the perspective of fans is that it changed the fans and the commentariates' relationship to basketball, because once player movement and gossip became evergreen, it changed the way we talk about the sport. It just made gossip a bigger part of the way we think about basketball. So, I think in a way, that's like a, like a secret legacy of the 2016 cap spike.

• 51:57Bill Simmons?

  It's weird, because we launched The Ringer a month before this black swan event, right?

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 52:03Bill Simmons?

  And, you know, podcasts are also taking, even though podcasts had been, I had my podcast since 2007, but there weren't a lot of them. I don't think they were determining dialogue about the sport really until the mid 2010s. There was more, we were certainly a part of it. And what's a better pot, like, I could have done it today. Instead of having you on, I easily could have done the should Joker ask for a Denver trade, right?

• 52:28Speaker 01

  I was just thinking that. I was like, don't, don't get ahead, Derek, but like, yes, it is of course plausible to Joker ask for a trade.

• 52:34Bill Simmons?

  By the way, you would have listened to it. We would have banged it out, would have laid out the last four years of Joker. Joker's under contract, but this is the pre-agency phenomenon. There was more ramifications with this, because I'm glad you brought up the pre-agency and how it combined with the discourse really changing. It also shifts the LeBron thing a little bit, because LeBron goes to Cleveland in '14. Another, it's not a black swan event, but it's like, it's whatever, it's a baby, it's a baby black swan event. Cleveland winning that 2014 lottery, and now having one more trade piece to go get

• 53:15Bill Simmons?

  somebody. And I think, I remember doing Countdown that night, and LeBron, it was a finals game, or an Eastern Finals game, and LeBron had like a weird first, first half, or, I forget what the timing was with the lottery, but he, they came out, and he was just kind of weird. I remember saying on TV, I think he was rattled by Cleveland getting the lot, and then people got mad at me. But it was like, he was clearly already thinking about Cleveland getting the lottery, winning the lottery, and then they win it. So, now it's like, holy shit, like, we could get Kevin Love with that pick. So, they do it, and he has this amazing setup in Cleveland, and the black swan event flips that, right? He has, they have all the contracts, they're spending a ton of money, Kyrie's there, Kevin Love's there, like, they're, they're gonna be battling Golden State, and then Golden

• 53:59Bill Simmons?

  State trumps it and gets Durant, and that ends up to him going to LA. It also sets up the Westbrook thing, where Durant leaves OKC, they have, this is the best young team, destined to win a title, but the cap spike allows Durant to go somewhere else to compete for a title. I think he probably stays if that doesn't happen. And then it also, Miami, they do a panic move with Hassan Whiteside. They're like, oh, we can't lose Hassan Whiteside, here's a ton of money. They spent 148 million over four years on Hassan Whiteside and Tyler Johnson.

• 54:36Bill Simmons?

  Three years later, they miraculously flipped the Whiteside contract to create space so they can do the sign and trade for Jimmy Butler, who then takes them to the 2000 and 2023 finals. So, and then Boston was able to get Al Horford, too, which allowed them to start their nucleus of their run had. But I think a lot of what's happened with the NBA the last few years is a response to how crazy 2016 was. And trying to basically, we've heard the word parity, right? In the NBA, this is the closest they're probably going to get to parity, because you still have dumb people running certain teams. You have

• 55:17Bill Simmons?

  owners that don't give a shit, whatever. But I think what really scared them was there was only like three or four teams that had a chance to win a title there for three years. And that's where they don't want to be, right? Now, we've moved toward, you're looking at the season this year, you can make a case for like nine or 10 teams. That's where they want to be. So Denver getting crippled with Joker, whether they had to trade Peyton Watts or not, I don't think they did. But Denver not having a super team, nobody basically having a super team is where they want to be, I think.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  The last seven, eight years, it's been what, eight years of different NBA champion?

• 55:53Bill Simmons?

  Eight in a row.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Is that, is eight in a row? One question that I remember talking about with some friends is like, whose championship in the last eight years is the most legacy altering? Like, if Jokic had never won a championship, if Giannis had never won a championship, if LeBron James never won a championship once in Los Angeles, if Curry never won a championship other than, you know, that crazy year when Iguodala won Finals MVP and then all the Durant years, like, it made me think like, I mean, you could also maybe even say the same about SGA. Oh, my God, SGA doesn't have a single championship?

• 56:33Bill Simmons?

  Kawhi.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  It makes me wonder, like, in this age of parity, with so many exceptional, historically good players who only have one championship.

• 56:43Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  They're all one championship away from having zero.

• 56:48Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  And I was thinking like, whose one is the most valuable? Like, whose one is the most like, load-bearing, legacy-bearing? If you took it away, we would, we would think about the sport or these, or this individual so differently. I think it's, I think it's probably Jokic, because I agree with you that he might be like, one of the 10 most talented NBA players of all time. And what on earth would we say about the Denver franchise? That they had one of the 10 most valuable players, or most talented players of all time, and never won a single championship? But I wonder what you think is like, the one championship that's like, holding up the most like, legacy weight?

• 57:30Bill Simmons?

  Well, there, I mean, this has been the recurring theme of the league, right? It completely changed Dirk's career. I look at the stuff I wrote about Dirk when I did my book versus then 2011 happens, and it's just a flip, right? And it's one of the best things about following the league. I would say it's Curry. Because I think without that, it's just a lot of yeah-buts with him. It's, it's like, oh, you can't compare him to Kobe. He only made, you know, three first-team All-BAs. And oh, that, well, that was a weird time in 15 and 16 when they like, you know, they lost in 16 in the finals. Oh, he only won those last two because Durant showed up. And they would have yeah-butted him to death.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Right. He only won the first because Love and Kyrie were out. He only won the second and third because Kevin Durant.

• 58:17Bill Simmons?

  MVP.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  That's interesting. Yeah.

• 58:19Bill Simmons?

  Couldn't stay healthy. You can't build a team around a guard. They would have yeah-butted him to death. And then 22, he just lays the smackdown, and it's just gone. All the discourse just disappears. Joker, I think we would have blamed the teams. Giannis statistically was so great, I just think it would have at least, he's at least Karl Malone, Charles Barkley area, right? Durant, weirdly, you know, if he doesn't go to Golden State and get those two.

• 58:53Bill Simmons?

  But I mean, he made one Finals in OKC in 2012. Let's say he goes to Washington during the cap spike, and just never gets back. We just remember him as this superior offensive forward and for all the Team USA stuff, but like, couldn't have built a team, couldn't build a championship team around him. But yeah, I would say Curry. Who would you say?

• 59:13Speaker 01

  I think I'd say Jokic. I love the case for Curry. I think, I think that's a, I think it's a great case. I agree with you that if not for the 2022 championship, if that was the year that, that the Warriors won the last, you would not, you would talk about it differently, right? He, did he, did he ever win a Finals MVP before that fourth championship?

• 59:34Bill Simmons?

  Durant, Durant won the two.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  It was Iguodala, Durant.

• 59:36Bill Simmons?

  By the way, he should have won in 15. That was top five dumbest, yeah.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  Right. I'm sort of, I'm then triliquizing the takes by people who aren't me, like in this world in which Curry didn't, didn't win in that year. But look, it would, I mean, if not but for that championship, we would talk about differently about all sorts of things. I mean, the Jays in Boston, we'd say, what did they ever accomplish? They got, they got close, they got close and close and close, and they never won a championship. I think, I think LeBron's, the last third of his career would be seen much more.

• 1:00:11Bill Simmons?

  Oh, the, if he doesn't get the bubble one, it was like, all right, yeah, he's had the greatest career of all time, but he hasn't won a title in the last 10 years. Yeah.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  I think you'd even say that Sam Presti. You'd say, God, like, how can someone so talented never win the big one?

• 1:00:24Bill Simmons?

  Maybe Sam Presti is the answer.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:00:27Bill Simmons?

  Where it's like, oh, so he's so good at putting together a team, never won a title.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  But it's interesting, because yeah, championships now are just so evenly distributed that like, if you don't, if you don't make it in your little window, like, your entire legacy is rewritten. I do think that's a really powerful part, part of, of modern basketball, and makes it super high stakes. So, you know, everything that I said earlier about how I think that the league is, is set up to only push up asset values, I think that's true. But in many cases, these rules are doing what they're intended to do, which is to spread the peanut butter of championship possibility quite thin across the entire league, so that you never quite know who's going to win year by year.

• 1:01:08Bill Simmons?

  There's one other thing with the, with the cap spike. It's like a hidden thing, and it might just be a theory. I don't know if I'm right, but I think I'm right. Golden State getting Durant puts them in this five-year run where they're just, they're in the finals every year. They're playing 100 games every year during a time when the sport is really starting to change. When it's becoming harder to play, there's more running, there's more tax on your body, you're chasing out shooters all over the place, you're, you're just, you're just moving more. Like, everybody agrees on this. The old guys, like, my friend Eddie Johnson, he's like, oh, we, we did, it's just not, like, we, we can watch the games

• 1:01:50Bill Simmons?

  now. It's just harder to play basketball now. And Durant allowed the Warriors to basically play from October to June for five straight years with huge miles on them. And what happened? Like, all of them broke down. Like, Durant was only there for three years, but then had in 16, OKC got to the brink and got to game seven of the conference finals, but he ends up breaking down. Klay Thompson is like the Blues Brothers car, making it to the middle of Chicago, and then all the tires fall down, and he gets hurt, literally in their last Finals game, right? Curry gets hurt the next year. And this is something, Steve Kerr, this is one of the reasons I think he's so passionate about a shorter schedule, is like,

• 1:02:33Bill Simmons?

  to do that five years in a row, like, it's impossible. Nobody, you can't, it's like, it's like playing eight seasons, if you think every play up. So I do think weirdly Durant going there, even though led to more titles for them, also led to the dynasty breaking down, because they didn't have that one year like the Celtics had, where they're like, oh, we lost in round one, time to reboot. But meanwhile, these guys are resting their bodies and, you know, able to whatever. These guys never got the rest. And I don't think we're ever going to see that again. So to talk about like parity in eight straight years in a row, I don't think we will ever see a team make five Finals again. I don't, you could give me Wemba, you could give OKC. I think the way basketball's played, I think it's impossible.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  If it happens, it's going to be Wemba or OKC.

• 1:03:19Bill Simmons?

  A true achievement, yeah.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  It's, yeah, it's, it's, the density of talent that the San Antonio Spurs have under 25 is just unbelievable. I mean, I think Sam Presti is the best general manager in, maybe in sports, certainly in the NBA. The team that he's built is extraordinary. Chet is not Wemba Yama.

• 1:03:38Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  But because of salary cap rules, Chet and Wemba Yama are going to make awfully similar salaries. And so, given a certain amount of money, do I want that money going toward Wemba Yama or Chet? It's not particularly close. And I think the gap between Wemba Yama and Chet is larger than the gap between sort of the guard set of the Thunder and the guard set of the Spurs. So as fantastic as Presti's job has been, I think the Spurs are set up to be an absolute juggernaut for the next decade.

• 1:04:11Bill Simmons?

  But they're relying on a seven foot five skinny guy.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. You, you went exactly where I was headed. We're in a weird period of athleticism and injury risk, where injury risk is rising, and also...

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  Player excellence at extraordinary durations is rising as well. So like you have at the same time, the phenomenon of more injuries and more Djokovic's, LeBron's, Tom Brady's, players who are GOAT status or near GOAT status in their sport, playing much, much longer than anyone has been able to play. And it seems to me that like as sports science and injury risk rises at the same time, we're going to see more like long tail phenomena. We're going to see more extraordinary athletes blow out early, but we're also going to

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  see more players like LeBron James or Novak Djokovic be able to extend their prime so much longer than they were able to in the 1980s, 1990s. Not only because of advanced sports science, but also because of much less advanced understandings like you probably shouldn't smoke a cigar after you win a basketball game every time. You probably shouldn't be drinking beer in the locker room to celebrate a 50-point night.

• 1:05:37Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, you should value sleep. You should, you should stretch, you should use a sauna, like all that. Yeah, there's 40 different things.

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  And so what makes forecasting something like the Spurs difficult is that on the one hand, it does seem like they have the potential, they have dynasty potential. And also because basketball is, just as you said, so much more, it's a more muscularly violent sport. It's more violent on your muscles and your tendons than it used to be with this sudden sprinting out to guard the three-point shot or this sudden collapsing, plus the running up and down the court, which the Spurs and the Thunder do so well, that the risk of catastrophic injury is rising too. So a very, very hard bet, but man, those two Western teams look so, so stocked for the future.

• 1:06:25Bill Simmons?

  It's the stop-start stuff that's the most dangerous that they have to figure out. They're doing a lot of studies in this now. I think if you look at a lot of the injuries, a lot of it is, oh, I didn't, oh, now I'm going, and it's that quick burst stuff, which by the way, is happening in my least favorite sport, pickleball. These people that don't work out that much and then they play pickleball and you're just lurching back and forth and it's like your body doesn't really want to do that. Just to put a cap on this, they, the 2015 cap was 63 million and then the 2016 cap was between 88 and 92 million. And that was why we had all of these different things happen.

• 1:07:09Bill Simmons?

  But I wonder like, you talk about being both injury prone and being able to play longer than ever, two things that are just incompatible with one another. I just feel like to play basketball like this with more smart people understanding how to put a team together, but then the variance of three pointers and how lucky you need to be for four straight rounds in the playoffs, I just think it's going to be harder than ever. It's going to be harder to stack teams. Second apron's made that impossible now. San Antonio is going to have a day of reckoning in three years. It's like Wemby took less. So look, he took a little less, but he still makes a lot of money and so will Dylan Harper

• 1:07:51Bill Simmons?

  and so will Castle and you know, it's, it's just going to be really hard to manage all that. We're seeing with OKC, OKC lost Dort, they lost Aaron Wiggins, they lost Isaiah Joe, and they're just kind of doing this with younger guys they have, hoping those guys will still be able to do it. One more break and then WNBA quick.

• 1:08:10Speaker 02

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• 1:09:06Bill Simmons?

  We were texting about the WNBA last week and you had a lot of theories. I've already talked about some of my theories and I'll piggyback on what you say, but you have the floor and then I'll go.

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  Well, where should I start? I think one issue with the WNBA is that, you know, I've heard you talk a lot about how the WNBA now is at a point where it has so much of what the league has wanted for decades. They have stars who are national celebrities. They have huge mainstream attention. They've got great basketball. And a point that I've heard you make, both on the show and as we were texting back and forth, is that somehow people are talking about basketball less than ever. The basketball itself, less than ever. And I was thinking to myself, you know, why aren't people talking about the gameplay,

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  the X's and O's of WNBA basketball? Why are people only interested in talking about the controversies or the most outrageous political statements made by the players? And you know, one theory that I think deserves to be taken seriously is that there's something wrong with the WNBA itself. And I don't want to rule that out. I don't want to rule out the fact that I think the commissioner leaves a lot to be desired. I think the WNBA is the subject of sexism and objectification that is of a piece with the fact that it is a women's sport as opposed to the NBA. But there's another theory that I wanted to workshop with you because it's related to something I've been thinking about for a while, which is that one thing that's happened is that the WNBA has become more like everything else in mainstream media.

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  And it reminds me of this theory that I've been working on about like sports and media and commentary and the internet. So I was talking to, brief aside, and this will absolutely come right back to the WNBA. I was talking to someone recently who works in broadcast news and we were talking about how, you know, as more journalists become independent podcasters and substackers, it's accelerating this long-term shift from people reporting on what happens in the world to people talking about other people's reporting, right? Fewer people talking about the thing itself and more journalists talking about the conversation around the thing.

• 1:11:19Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  And you, you referenced this earlier, right? Fewer people, I think from, from our conversation about private credit and private equity, fewer people digging out the truth about what's going on with all these billionaires and their businesses. And as I was talking to this broadcast journalist, I said, you know, maybe this is a ridiculous metaphor, but what comes to mind in a weird way is the 2007 housing crisis. Because in the 2000s, the US had a housing boom. Lots of people got these mortgages. Some of them shouldn't have gotten them. Banks realized that they could take the mortgages, including the crappy ones, and package them together to create a market called derivatives. They would buy and sell securities made up of mortgages that other people made, other people originated, and they would sell these more valuable securities. They were called derivatives.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  And that, I think, is what's happened to all of national media. We are selling derivatives. Fewer people are out there originating the news. Fewer people are reporting or even analyzing what's happening in the world directly. And more people are talking about other people talking. We're basically in the derivatives market of commentary. And this is partly driven by

• 1:12:29Bill Simmons?

  I like this.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  consumers. Like, what's more interesting, Bill? Is it, is it more interesting to ask whether Sophie Cunningham can play zone defense? Or is it more interesting to ask whether the people who like Sophie Cunningham are good or evil? Well, here is one way you can investigate that question. Do you know how many Fox News articles there were about Sophie Cunningham this Wednesday?

• 1:12:55Bill Simmons?

  This Wednesday?

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  There were six. There were six. On the previous day, there were three. And if you want to know what those stories are about, I can guarantee you, they were not about the X's and O's of zone defense. They included headlines like this, quote, "Sophie Cunningham supporters rally in Indiana while displaying what makes America great." Two days earlier, "Sophie Cunningham supporters rally in Chicago while protesters showcase what's wrong with America." Like, most people, most of the time, don't want to talk about the thing. We want to talk about people talking about the thing. And so that's my theory of media.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  And my, as it relates to the WNBA, like, I agree with you that WNBA commentary is unhealthy. And I certainly agree with the players who have an issue with their, or I certainly have space for the players who have an issue with their commissioner and want to change the league. But the unhealthiness of WNBA commentary is, I think, of a piece with the unhealthiness of all modern media. It's that the derivative market of sports commentary has become bigger than the market of direct sports commentary itself. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the WNBA, where it seems like the ratio of people who want to talk about Sophie Cunningham's politics is like 10,000,000 times larger than the share of people who want to talk about what they're actually seeing on the

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  court, talking about the WNBA as a sport rather than like some discourse token. So that is my theory.

• 1:14:28Bill Simmons?

  Or do black players hate Katelyn Clark?

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:14:31Bill Simmons?

  Boom. Send that into your editor, you got one.

• 1:14:38Bill Simmons?

  I have a lot of thoughts on this, obviously, and I've talked about some of them. But what you're describing is basically, think of it like a volleyball that gets batted back and forth over a net.

• 1:14:51Bill Simmons?

  Right? And we know, we know who's on each side just batting it back and forth. And they don't really care what the topic is. They just kind of move around to different things. So it's like, oh, are people arguing about trans athletes in high school? Whoop, throw the volleyball up. And then they just go at it for, you know, months. And somehow the WNBA got thrown into this. And this is what I've said on previous pods. They have desperately needed for the entire year, some sort of advocate who is a person in charge. Maybe it's a player. Maybe it's an owner. Maybe it's the lead broadcaster, the ESPN broadcaster. I don't know who it is. But somebody to just be like, what are we doing? You guys are talking about the wrong things.

• 1:15:35Bill Simmons?

  Here are all the things we should be celebrating and talking about. Like last night, Olivia Miles was fucking awesome again. She's a rookie. She's basically 1980 Magic Johnson. Really special. There's never been a guard quite like her, who has her change of pace stuff and her passing. She's the, somehow more fun to watch than Katelyn Clark, who I thought was previously the most fun college women's player I'd seen. And you have this awesome setup where you have, you know, all these teams have these different identities. Vegas has, has Wilson, who's the best player in the league. I'm not sure about their guards. You have Golden State, who's like this kind of like built out of an AI lab of they're just really good defensively. You don't really understand how they're doing it. Minnesota is the most talented team in the league.

• 1:16:20Bill Simmons?

  Indiana is the 2005 Suns. The way they play, they're up and down. The Liberty have, you know, some famous players that everybody knows. And they're headed toward these awesome playoffs. And yet everybody's just batting the volleyball around. On top of, they're going away to do the world championships in September during the 10 days right before NFL season kicks in.

• 1:16:43Bill Simmons?

  And just squandering this awesome opportunity to just have WNBA games when nothing else is going on except for college football. I don't care about the world championships. Just send the college players, whatever. Like they, they, they just, they have more unforced errors on top of the commissioner and on top of all the dialogue about it. And I've never seen a league that needs somebody to just be like, dude, we've never had players like this. You go back, like I was looking at the MVPs. There were always forwards and centers for the most part, right? And this was the league. This is why I didn't like it at all for the first 20 plus years. It was just people posting up and 10 footers. Like all due respect to Stewie, but this is, the way she plays was kind of the whole league.

• 1:17:27Bill Simmons?

  And now you have these magical guards all over the place. And, and you know, they, even recently, there was that high school player that that video was going around. But this high school player who was just getting to the basket and could do all these things that we didn't know female guards could do. And they're not celebrating the guards and they're not celebrating Olivia specifically. Katelyn's playing better because I think she finally has the weight of the world off her shoulders. But the, the discourse around the league should be like, holy shit. The Fever are averaging almost 90 points a game. Like this was a league that you'd take two games to score 90 points. You have all these guards, you have spacing, you have shooting. This league's good now. Nobody is talking about this. Nobody.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think, yeah, when, when listening to the player criticisms of the officials, excuse me, of the commissioner, I feel like there's like three categories. There's like, they want an advocate for the players who speaks back to the political discourse that emerges around the sport. There's all sorts of complaints, I think, very valid about the officiating, about the lack of consistency around the officiating.

• 1:18:36Bill Simmons?

  That's, I mean, that's college too. Like there's just not enough good officials, you know? And sadly, they have the, probably the worst ones.

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  But then there's, and there's also the commercial piece. I mean, ratings are getting harder to really pin down. But I was looking last night, four or five years ago, the typical NBA game had about four to five times higher ratings than the typical WNBA game. Now it's like a 20, 30% difference.

• 1:19:03Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, WNBA ratings have like doubled to tripled in the last few years. And I think one other really interesting thing about a sport like this, that experiences like a popularity surge, where it's not just that you have emerging debates about certain players and the relationship to each other, but you have entirely new populations entering the sphere of WNBA fandom.

• 1:19:32Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  That it creates a weird dynamic. And I was thinking like.

• 1:19:36Bill Simmons?

  Well, I could say, because the people that were there the whole time are kind of mad that they're newcomers.

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  Yes. And I, and I get that. I mean, I see like sort of concentric circles of WNBA fandom. I think the first circle has to be the one that you just said. There's a long time fan base, millions of people who've been going to the games and following the sport and watching it on TV, who know the players and have, you know, an encyclopedic, sometimes even, even Bill Simmons isk understanding of like who the greatest players were in the 90s versus 2000s versus today, right? Then there's the Katelyn Clark generation. That's the next concentric circle. And that's this huge surge in viewership over the last few years. And I call it the Katelyn Clark generation here, but I, I know it's, I know that it represents more than just her.

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  But it's also the case that the five most watched regular season games this century are the following. One, Fever at Chicago. Two, Fever versus Las Vegas. Three, Fever at New York. Four, Fever at Minnesota. Five, Fever at Chicago. All Indiana Fever, all Katelyn Clark, two of those games, should be said, are against Angel Reese. She's, she was compared to Steph Curry when she entered the league. I like the Steve Nash comparison more.

• 1:20:52Bill Simmons?

  Way more Steve Nash.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  From a commercial standpoint.

• 1:20:53Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:54Speaker 01

  She's really like Magic Johnson. She's a passing savant who's also a social phenomenon. And so you have this tension, I think, between circles one and two. But then you've got, and this is really where I think the shit hits the fan, you've got the third circle. And that's a circle I was referring to in my previous comment.

• 1:21:12Bill Simmons?

  The volleyball circle.

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  You've got, perfect. You've got the volleyball circle. People who treat what's happening in the WNBA as a, as a discourse hammer to knock other people over the head with, with posts on Instagram and Twitter and everything else. And, you know, that's where the Sophie Cunningham stuff comes in. And, you know, brief aside, like, I mean, Bill, can we just, can we spare a moment for Chuck Loschman? What a call. Like that guy predicted Sophie Cunningham's political career. Was it hours or minutes before?

• 1:21:46Bill Simmons?

  No, it was like three days before. Yeah.

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  Chuck Stradamis, that man needs like.

• 1:21:52Bill Simmons?

  It's an all-timer.

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  A, a new nickname for all time. That was incredible.

• 1:21:56Bill Simmons?

  I don't know if he put it out in the world and then it happened, or I don't know if she saw it and was like, yeah. Or it was just the all time coincidence, but it was an all-timer by him.

• 1:22:06Speaker 01

  Chuck Stradamis, man. Unbelievably impressive. But, but I do think, to, to wrap this up, I do think that those three groups don't get along well all the time on the internet, or maybe even sometimes we see in, in the, the physical world. And that's another interesting challenge that for the moment seems somewhat unique to the WNBA, because there is no other sport that is as prominent as a mainstream piece of entertainment that's also growing so quickly. Like the WNBA is like pickleball growth plus NBA viewership. And so like, there's something about the change that comes with that growth that I think is also giving the league issues.

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  And what they need, to your point, I, I agree with you.

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  They need a leader who is an advocate, who understands the commerce that is made possible by the growth of the league. And I think it's like a little bit combative, who's maybe not just a bureaucrat, but someone who's willing to be a David Stern type personality, an impresario.

• 1:23:12Bill Simmons?

  100% right.

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  Who's not afraid of the limelight.

• 1:23:14Bill Simmons?

  And, and not afraid to get into the volleyball court and bang some, bang some spikes every once in a while. Listen, we haven't had this happen in 40 plus years.

• 1:23:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:23:25Bill Simmons?

  You have the, the last time this really happened was the NBA. When you go from the NBA, tape the lane games, just the fourth most successful of the, of the four professional sports.

• 1:23:39Bill Simmons?

  The biggest stars were Dr. J and Kareem. Kareem had the goggles on, nobody could connect with them. And then you had people like David Thompson and the people in cities that you might've seen them on TV twice a year because the games weren't on enough. And then Bird and Magic show up. They get cable. All of a sudden, the games are on all the time. And then Michael shows up in 1984. And in a, basically a four year span, the league blows up and we have the slam dunk contest in 84. But four years is not a long time. But we go from this league's in trouble, people writing about it's too black, it's too violent, it'll never catch on, these guys are overpaid, all that.

• 1:24:20Bill Simmons?

  I wrote a whole chapter about this in my book, to by 1984, it's like, the NBA, it's cool. Wow, what happened here? This is great. And then we get Lakers Celtics in the 84 finals. And you have all these little events leading to it. It's kind of what just happened to WNBA. WNBA, three years ago, Golden State and Portland were going to be the two expansion teams. I think Golden State was at like 35 million or maybe something like that. Portland ended up being 50 million. The guy who was going to do the, the Portland team, he wanted to name them the Rip City Royalty. And for some reason, the NBA is like, you can't do that. Backs out. They don't have, they don't even have the money for the Portland team. And they couldn't even figure out, we want to expand.

• 1:25:05Bill Simmons?

  We can't even find a city. Right? This is, this is pre Caitlyn. This is three years ago. Now you fast forward it. And it's like now that, now they're going to over expand. They'll probably ruin that part, but the league, the franchises are seven times worth what they're worth. And you have real stars that people can point to. And yet, like Olivia Miles, I just looked this up as you were talking. She belongs to Adidas, no signature shoe. Like Olivia Miles is having like a Michael Jordan type of season and Bird and Magic would be Caitlyn and, and Asia Wilson. Right? And Olivia is like the one they should be getting behind. Nobody even knows who the fuck she is, other than people that watch the league. And my wife doesn't know who she is unless I'm watching the game. But they've done such a bad job of like, you need to know who this person is.

• 1:25:49Bill Simmons?

  Here are commercials here. Like, we're going to cram our best players down your throat. They're doing the opposite. And they're letting the discourse be what decides the league and how people talk about it, which to me is bad leadership. You have to take control of the, of the car. Like somebody else is driving your car and it's the discourse.

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I couldn't be more. I think, I wonder what American sport really succeeds along the criteria that you're describing. It really succeeds in terms of both creating national stars and creating a product that people really want to analyze as a product and not just talk about the discourse around it. Cause in an interesting way, I feel like football is best at the latter. Like people are interested in what happens in football and understanding like how offense changes and how defense changes. And God, like, how, how did they fix their running game? Oh, I see.

• 1:26:49Speaker 01

  How, like, how did the, the Rams revolutionize the passing game again with their, you know, tight end sets? But when it comes to, you know, creating national stars, I'm not sure the NFL is.

• 1:27:04Bill Simmons?

  Well, they don't want that.

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  Would you say, would you say they, they don't want that?

• 1:27:07Bill Simmons?

  It's just that they just want the quarterbacks. They don't, they don't want anybody else to, you know, they want every, that's why they have everybody keep their helmets on before they get off the field and all the, all the shit they do on that end. They want the players to be disposable. It's fucking rollerball. Right? It's like, oh, James Khan is getting too big for rollerball. We have to get rid of the rules and get rid of them. And the, and the nine quarterbacks are the stars, basically. But the franchises and the, the product is the star, which is what they want.

• 1:27:35Speaker 01

  So I guess here's my question for you, Bill. What league do you think is doing the best job minting new stars? And I say minting new stars because the NBA has stars.

• 1:27:44Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I would say the NBA. They, they, when the new guys come in, you feel it, you, you know who they are. They market them correctly. They have a whole system in place now. Right? We know like Cooper flag comes in, people have opinions on him. They know what he looks like. They know who he is. They've seen him a little bit in college. They get these guys every year. This should be the WNBA. I don't know how they fix it, but it's going to start with a new commissioner. But what you said about somebody who's an advocate, who's not afraid to David Stern a little bit, it's probably an ex-player would be my guess. I don't, I don't think it can be a faceless person.

• 1:28:27Bill Simmons?

  It's, it's probably an ex-player who's willing to mix it up. But the best thing that can happen to them is having an awesome playoffs, which they have the chance. If some of the matchups can align, like they, you know, they might have Minnesota versus Vegas in round two. And they might have Indiana versus, they might have Caitlyn versus Olivia Miles in the finals. If that happens, if they fuck that up, like that's like casual fans should care about that. And again, like, I couldn't stand the WNBA watching it for 20 plus years. I thought it was terrible. But it's, it's completely changed and it's, it's, it's fun to watch. But yeah, I think when you think about, this all happened so fast.

• 1:29:09Bill Simmons?

  It's like having a restaurant in your local neighborhood that all of a sudden becomes the best restaurant in America or considered that way. And people are descending on it and people want to eat there from 5:00 PM to 11:00 at night. And you're just like, we just have a major day and three waiters and three bus boy. What, oh shit, we're, we're sold out again tonight? Oh my God. And they're just not prepared.

• 1:29:33Speaker 01

  This is my point. I think that they are in part a victim of their own success. I, I want to be clear about in part because to say they're just a victim of their own success means that I think the commissioner's office has done everything right. That the officiating has been top notch, that their advocacy for players who are, you know, the subject of racist or sexist taunts or some political discourse has been perfect. I don't think any of that. But I do think that some of the problems the WNBA is facing is the unique result of being maybe the only sport in America at this level of popularity that is growing as fast as they are. And they're pulling in audiences that are incredibly different.

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  And sometimes like just genuinely don't seem to like each other. And yeah, that's, that's, that's a tough problem to solve and it probably needs, I like your idea of the commissioner being an ex-player because it needs someone who has authority, who has the trust of the players. But also someone who just like is not afraid to be their own representative, their own character as they're like an advocate of or emblem of the league. When they maybe go on to television, even go on to Fox news to represent the league and what it's all about. I think that's going to be, that's going to be a really important part of, of this job as the WNBA just becomes a much, much more visible part of the sports landscape.

• 1:30:55Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. And lean into the things that are good about, I don't, I don't think this is hard, but it's important because when you, when you, when things change this fast for anything, you've got to have some sort of plan for like, this has changed. Like the way people talk about it, even like, I think that the one criticism I would have with WNBA fans is let real sports fans argue about the league. The way we would argue about other sports. Right? Like, I think there's an actual MVP argument with Miles against Wilson. Wilson's a heavy favorite, like she's averaging 26 and 10. She's the best player in the league. But Olivia carried the links as a rookie when their best player was out. They have the best record by far.

• 1:31:38Bill Simmons?

  And if this was the NBA, we would have led three podcasts about this by now. Like, should Olivia Miles be the MVP? Oh no, she can't. You get Wilson and it turns into like a Jordan versus Karl Malone type of MVP thing, but we're not having those conversations. And then, uh, you know, they, there, there's still some criticism stuff that I think because social media is so unfair to some of the players, that it makes people ease up. You know, like Angel Reese on Sunday missed a game winning layup against, against the Fever. Right? And the moment it happened, you're thinking, oh my God, this is going to be on social media for three days because people love piling on her. But there's a thicker skin that needs to develop, that this is just part of what it's like now.

• 1:32:21Bill Simmons?

  You guys have way more fans and viewers and you're going to take shit too. And this is just how it's going to go. The shit they're taking now is not the right kind of shit. You want to take shit for players not performing well, like Wemby in the finals. Or somebody trying to, trying to bolt from a team after claiming that they were going to stay there and stuff like that. You don't want the political stuff not, not awesome. By the way, Sophie Cunningham, really good role player.

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you said earlier, you know, Caitlin Clark is.

• 1:32:51Bill Simmons?

  Three and D, like I like her off the bench, good energy. Like, I don't have, I haven't heard anyone say that.

• 1:32:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Great energy, a good role player. Caitlin Clark, as you said, has really had a fantastic last few months after a little bit of an inconsistent and pretty inefficient shooting performance for the first, you know, halfish of the year.

• 1:33:08Bill Simmons?

  And, and it's sad.

• 1:33:09Speaker 01

  How much of that is, how much of that is the, a little bit of attention coming off of her? I, I, I don't know, not in her head, but it's possible. I mean, you know, in a kind of, uh, this is an imperfect comparison, but in a kind of, you know, Draymond-ish way, there's sometimes when, you know, certain athletes need certain types of personalities to play with them in order to really explode. Like Steph was not Steph before Draymond was a part of that team. And Draymond took a lot of the attention and media energy maybe off of Steph. So he could focus on what he, what really made him great. It's possible that Caitlyn's sort of experiencing a little bit of that. I, I don't know that I would want to play for a team that was, uh, you know, getting six articles written about it, uh, on Fox news every, every single day. But you know, different athletes respond to different things.

• 1:33:52Speaker 01

  And I think that for, for Caitlyn in particular, clearly something has changed in the last, you know, seven to 10 weeks.

• 1:33:58Bill Simmons?

  The Steph thing is a good example because what was the book on Steph as his career started to ascend when he had the 2013, 14 with the Warriors? Be super physical against him.

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  He's delicate.

• 1:34:08Bill Simmons?

  Beat him up, knock him down.

• 1:34:11Bill Simmons?

  People do the same thing against Caitlyn and it's like, oh, it's a race war. Oh my God, what's going on here? It's like, they're trying to get in her head. They tried to do Olivia Miles too. The problem is nobody can hit her because she's moving out of the way. She's like fucking Barry Sanders. But anyway, um, all right, we covered, we hit everything I think we wanted to. We didn't hit YouTube versus Netflix. Maybe we'll save that for next time because that's a pretty interesting one to, to a brewing battle between the streamers. What do you have, uh, what do you have in the podcast this week?

• 1:34:42Speaker 01

  Uh, I play a podcast about, um, what's going on in the AI economy. Uh, talked to the CEO of Pangram, which is this company that, uh, tests writing to see if it's written by AI. And it's becoming this huge cultural phenomenon because when you test it on, say, LinkedIn posts, student essays about history, even some, uh, prominent politicians posting on Twitter or Substackers. It turns out that all sorts of famous people are using AI to do half or even all of their writing. And whereas it's very difficult for an ordinary individual sometimes to tell the difference between AI writing and human writing, unless it's really clear stuff like someone writing with a bunch of, you know, M dashes and always

• 1:35:26Speaker 01

  saying it's not X, it's Y. This is a software that has a really, really sophisticated algorithm for telling the difference between human and AI writing. And Bill, just the, the sheer amount of modern or future media that is going to be artificial because it is made with and made by AI is, is, is pretty nuts. And in some cases, pretty horrifying. Um, and, uh, yeah, uh, folks like, folks like Pangram are really important for helping sort of clean up the AI slop of the world.

• 1:35:54Bill Simmons?

  I gotta say, the M dash was a big loss for me. I was a big M dash guy.

• 1:35:59Speaker 01

  I love M dashes. I know.

• 1:36:00Bill Simmons?

  I probably was M dash heavy. If you go back and read my pieces. So now, now I read it's like, did I write through your M dash? It was like, no, this was part of my style. I'm a big M dash guy.

• 1:36:10Speaker 01

  I love it. You know, it's, it's, it's tough because I want to extend this forever on AI writing, but, um, some of the reasons why AI writes quote unquote like that is because during reinforcement learning with human feedback, you've got this AI that is tested on humans and it is trained toward whatever the humans want. And so if what humans really want is incredibly simple summaries of complex ideas from, from AI, then AI is going to like over summarize and oversimplify everything. And that's going to lead to things like, you know, an abundance of it's not X, it's Y, sort of negative parallelism summaries. Sometimes what AI is putting out there, um, is gross because it's artificial.

• 1:36:55Speaker 01

  Sometimes the more complicated reality is that it's gross because humans just like us voted on it in post-training. Um, but, uh, yeah, the, the, the world, the world's going to become a lot sloppier in the near future and it's, it's important to have janitors out there cleaning up the slop.

• 1:37:09Bill Simmons?

  And yet somehow this isn't the biggest fear with where AI goes because the, the security you did.

• 1:37:17Speaker 01

  Tip of the iceberg.

• 1:37:18Bill Simmons?

  The cybersecurity piece is the single scariest piece of.

• 1:37:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Everyone, everyone changed your passwords because.

• 1:37:23Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. You're a big, you're a big change your passwords guy right now.

• 1:37:27Speaker 01

  Not until this week. God, I found, I, I found that conversation to be like the most boring conversation you could possibly have with another individual is like someone comes up to you and says you ought to have better password security. But I've become convinced that that incredibly boring conversation is now met its moment. Um, the level of AI sophistication, uh, especially from open weight models, the next few years, um, that can do a really, really bad job in phishing attacks or hacking into mid-sized companies. I think it's worth everyone taking password security very seriously, unfortunately, because personally, I think nothing can be more boring.

• 1:38:00Bill Simmons?

  Derek Thompson. How long have you had Plain English with us? Four years now? Five? Four or five?

• 1:38:07Speaker 01

  Eighty-four years in the fall. Four years in November.

• 1:38:10Bill Simmons?

  Oh, man. You're doing a great job. I love working with you. Always, always fun to have you on. I have to go on yours. We gotta come up with some dumb reason.

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:18Bill Simmons?

  We had like a sports records one or I still want to do the LeBron thing, but so we, we gotta come up with some idea that I can guest on yours.

• 1:38:25Speaker 01

  All right. I'll do it.

• 1:38:26Bill Simmons?

  All right. Thank you so much.

• 1:38:27Speaker 01

  Thanks, man.

• 1:38:28Bill Simmons?

  All right. That's it for the podcast. Thanks to Derek. Thanks to Gahow and Eduardo as well. Don't forget to, uh, check out the speed rewatchables and prepare for Apollo 13 on Monday. I'm going to have a podcast for you on Sunday. Hopefully a lot of good stuff. Um, maybe some things will happen. James Harden, sorry, didn't get to talk about your three years for $97 million extension. Holy mackerel. I can't believe how much money you've made over the years. Congratulations. Uh, and, uh, enjoy the rest of the week. I will see you on Sunday.

• 1:39:00Bill Simmons?

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• 1:39:40Bill Simmons?

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