A Radical NBA Idea, Wemby’s Musical Comp, Despising Duke, and Baseball’s ABS Revolution With Chuck Klosterman

15:38Bill Simmons:So it could be, you could basically do a monthly, right? So you could have six months where the highest point total of the month gets some sort of reward highest for the team, highest for the player. I always think whenever I hear these, like, cause they would do this when they were talking about what would be the rewards for the NBA cup and things like that. And people always forget, like if you're the players, if you're on the team and it's like, if, if, if you win the NBA cup, your team gets a bonus lottery pick, you get the 15th pick. Why would any player on the team care about that? They wouldn't, they would care about the incentives of money or some sort of like you get two extra home games the next year instead of on the road, things like that.

16:19Bill Simmons:They care about themselves, money, less traveling, less being with their family more, having more bi-weeks like so you'd have to cater it that way i think well yeah it could be like say let's say

16:30Chuck Klosterman:for whatever reason they wanted to make the nba cup really contested so they're like if you win the nba cup you get the number one pick that would actually de-incentivize the guys who currently care the most which is the guys at the end of the bench it's like i'm gonna lose my job if we get the number one pick right yeah i mean now those guys are like i could actually use that money

16:49Bill Simmons:like i could you know well one thing i was talking with somebody about that i haven't talked about on the podcast is why it's so much easier for football to have parity and, um, and just kind of have the, a team's fortunes flip in one year where in the NBA, it's really hard and people think it's because of the salary cap for the NFL, but it's really the schedule. The schedule is the big secret sauce of the NFL. And you saw it with the Patriots last year and Washington the year before, fourth place schedule, you're just playing the other worst teams. You're not on TV that much. You're not traveling that much.

17:25Bill Simmons:And you can flip it in a smaller sample size. We only have to play 17 games. And I'm wondering, like with the NBA, could part of this be, all right, well, how would they do that with the NBA? Well, you actually could. You could reward teams could have more home games the next year if they succeed. and they could have home games taken away the worse they do. So if you're like the Wizards and you're just tossing away the second half of the season, would the franchise be as excited to do that if that meant they had 37 home games next year instead of 41?

18:00Chuck Klosterman:So some teams would then have 44. You would just lose revenue. Or you could have like 44.

18:06Bill Simmons:Yeah, so some team could have 45 home games the next year.

18:10Chuck Klosterman:I mean, to the NFL's credit, I mean, They have been thinking about parody since the early 70s. Right. Since we've ever cared about the NFL. That big thing. It was, you know, at a time when I don't even think anyone was worried about it. Like, I don't think in 1974, there were a lot of people expressing despair that like there wasn't enough parody. But he knew that that was the central thing, that if you make a franchise feel like every eight to 10 years, they have a legitimate shot to win a championship, no matter what their ownership does. I mean, it has changed everything. um the smaller number of games probably is a factor too um in that you know a team can start six and oh or whatever and they suddenly feel like they're almost there you know even if they end up finishing yeah 500 or whatever and there's lots of reasons why this has happened i mean yeah it's just it is it is strange how like the nba often makes me mad in a way other sports do not you know i mean to make me the madest Because when we were young people, I remember often almost seeming to advocate for the NBA.

19:17Chuck Klosterman:It felt like the conventional wisdom was the NBA was bad. You only wanted to watch college. And I liked the NBA as a kid and stuff like that. But it's hard. I mean, it really made me disprove. Pro basketball is a young man's game with a young man mentality. Because it is so crazy to be, I'll see a game that I want to see, and I'll turn it on, and three of the guys aren't playing. and it doesn't seem that the guys who there care at all. And it's like, how do you motivate guys? Like, it's just not enough. Somehow being in the NBA and playing these games is not enough to motivate these guys. And I don't know what to do about it.

19:55Chuck Klosterman:It's just a weird thing. I mean, football has the other upside that you can't coast. Like, you will get hurt if you coast. But you can coast in basketball. You can coast in baseball. You know what I'm saying?

20:05Bill Simmons:I like your point about how that shifted with the NBA where, cause it's been making me mad basically ever since I had a column wet post-college. So like late nineties on just complaining about the NBA became like its own content vehicle, but in the eighties, and I'm slightly older than you, but you remember this too. The, the NBA was like this cool alternative. They were like dinosaur junior where it was like, you found people in your life that liked the NBA and you would like click with them and you would, you would be glass half full the whole time. You'd be explaining to people why this was a cool league and you really loved it.

20:42Bill Simmons:And I used to have a joke, even when I had my ESPN column and 020304, I would joke about how as one of the last 20 NBA fans. Right. And it was, and it was always about like, you people don't get it. This league is so much better than it gives credit for. And now it's the opposite. Everybody's just mad at the NBA at all times. Well, okay.

21:00Chuck Klosterman:So I would say outside of 1984 to 1989 or 90, what other periods has the NBA not been in crisis? They always are. There's always something happening.

21:15Bill Simmons:Yeah. I would say late, I would say late, the early nineties, when it was going the best, but we still had magic HIV and we had Jordan go play baseball as it was going the best.

21:26Chuck Klosterman:I also remember like sometimes in the nineties, you'd watch a playoff game and it would be 64 to 71 or something. And it was like, this is wrong.

21:34Bill Simmons:So, you know, and, and, uh, wait, think about that though. Cause we taught Zach and I talked about this on Sunday night when they changed the three point line. Yes. That was the first time you felt like the league was responding to criticisms about, um, but then if you go back, you could go back to 76, 77, 78, which we talked about a little on Sunday. and the big crisis back then was violence. And even before the Kermit Washington punch, if you go back the first merger season, there's all these fights and guys, and some of them are on YouTube, like Kermit Washington, Dex John Shoemate, stuff like that, where it's like fights.

22:10Bill Simmons:Kareem punched, I think, Tom Burleson, and he punched somebody else. Yeah, and he punched Ken Benson, broke his hand. Bob Loneer, I think, hit two guys. Detroit was getting all these fights and it was like, holy shit, we got to do something about this. so and then cocaine was in the 80s so really this has been 50 years of this it's always there's

22:28Chuck Klosterman:always something like i remember writing in the early 2000s i had watched a game between vince carter and alan iverson and it just seemed awful because it like like even though as much as i say i like one-man teams or whatever it was not the best application of that right i just it just it is sort of just set up in a way to be dramatic it's almost like and now they've almost used that as their calling card. Like this idea that you can follow the NBA without watching games. Right. And you know, that's, you don't really hear that said about other sports.

23:02Bill Simmons:Well, the NBA has become like our family member that's had a lot of issues over the years, but we still love them, but they make us crazy. And it's almost like the son in Parenthood, the Steve Martin movie. It's like, oh boy, the NBA is another harebrained scheme. It's when the games are good. Like sometimes in the playoffs,

23:19Chuck Klosterman:they're so good. Right. It's like, and it's so, you know, and it's like, why can't there like, it doesn't always have to be this good, but it should be able to be half of this. And sometimes it's not even close to half of it. I mean, it's like the intensity is just gone.

23:36Bill Simmons:Well, that's what's crazy about this year is you have these four guys who are having like these spectacular seasons, right? On top of Wemby, who we'll talk about in a second, who has just now emerged as this generational guy. And then you have all these big markets that have a chance to win the title or markets that haven't had a chance in a while. And you have OKC going for back to back. And there are a lot of good stories, even like the East playoffs. We have 10 teams. even if you play the 10 seed, like, are you crazy about playing the Miami Heat in a playoff series? Like, probably not. And yet, here we are talking about what we could fix for the first 50 minutes.

24:12Bill Simmons:I don't know what this is about the NBA that makes us always want to do this.

24:17Chuck Klosterman:I mean, it is, it's something about the nature of the game. Because like I say, it has never not been this way.

24:24Bill Simmons:Yeah.

24:24Chuck Klosterman:Like, it has never, you know, when you and I first started following this, the games were like, you know, the championship game being showed after the news or whatever on tape delay it was like that was its own kind of crisis right it can't become one it can't become a major sport people don't even care enough to watch it live then had that little window when everything seemed to change and it was the kind of emerged maybe over to baseball and all these things but i i bet if we went through all our old podcasts

24:50Bill Simmons:how many whatever number there is how many we complained about the league somehow number of

24:55Chuck Klosterman:times we're talking about problems with the NBA would come up. I wonder 25 times, but there are 25 examples of us having a conversation like this in the span of our relationship.

25:07Bill Simmons:Well, this was one of the things I wanted to talk about today. Cause I was talking on Sunday about this expansion thing, which has just been so weird from Adam with, with the basically saying, yeah, 20, 20, they're, they're leaking out. They're given the expectation. They're going going to be adding these two teams. And meanwhile, they don't have the votes for the teams yet from the 30 owners. And they don't know if anyone even has remotely the amount of money they're looking for. And I think one of the things that's bothered me about it and some other people is to push forward with expansion when you haven't fixed all this other stuff.

25:41Bill Simmons:When we have this tanking crisis and you also are putting out solutions that nobody seems to like, right? And also you have some markets in your league that I don't think are that stable, you know? And it, my question that I asked you that I want to talk about is, do you think Adam Silver's job is to run the NBA as a businessman, or he's supposed to care about the spirit of the league, raising the level of the league, making the league a better place for fans, which goes back to the old Stern argument we used to have was like, is Stern running this league for the owners? Or the players. And we knew with Stern, it's like, he's running it for the owners.

26:25Bill Simmons:Goodell, just all the way through has been, I'm running this for my 32 owners. Like even that right now they're doing, they're going to add the 18 game season with two bye weeks. You can already see they're laying the groundwork for it now. Yes. Nobody thinks this is a good idea. Not one person. We all like football and we'll put up with it, but nobody thinks this is going to make the game safer. This will make the product better, but they're going to do it because he works for the owners. Adam makes it seem like he cares about the spirit of the game and the players. Do you think he does?

26:58Chuck Klosterman:Well, I'm sure he does care, but he does work for the owners. It's maybe a, like, you know, like mountain Landis or whatever could be like, I'm doing this for baseball. I don't care what, how it affects, you know, it's like, but I, it's a kind of unrealistic thing now to, to imagine that, that a commissioner would feel like would, would be empowered enough to do that.

27:21Bill Simmons:I mean, would you want a commissioner that cares more about the state of the game or the state of the business? Because it seems like we always get the latter.

27:28Chuck Klosterman:Well, we would want it for the state of the game, but that's not like, I mean, that would be like if, you know, who would you rather have, you know, running target? Somebody who's concerned about how much money target makes or what will be the best consumer experience? We would all say the second category, but that's not how it is.

27:45Bill Simmons:Right. But shouldn't we admit that's not how it is with the NBA? Because I think the commissioners try to pretend they care. But what's interesting is baseball actually seems like they have cared about the sport and they have cared about the product and they have been able to make these fixes, which we'll talk about later. And the NBA is not.

28:02Chuck Klosterman:Although, I mean, yeah, but you, you think the baseball fixes were for the, I mean, well, they came out of necessity because it wasn't like, I don't see that as someone being like, what is, I think that from a traditional baseball perspective, that they probably kind of contradict that, but they're like, we got to have people watch this game. We got to have people care about these games. The NBA is, you know, has, has so kind of into the idea of like player empowerment and it's a player's league that they have to be much more vocal about acting as though this is for the benefit of the, of the guys on the floor.

28:41Chuck Klosterman:I guess I don't, I, I don't, I assume that, that, you know, adding two franchises, I mean, it just, it doesn't seem like that will help the product.

28:51Bill Simmons:Nobody thinks that's a good idea, except for people who live in Seattle and Vegas. And I want Seattle to have a team. I just don't think, I think there's a better way for that to happen.

29:02Chuck Klosterman:Why? You've always wanted Seattle to get the team back so much. Why is that? I mean, I'm not saying that they shouldn't have one,

29:07Bill Simmons:but why is this a good thing for you? Well, a couple of reasons. One is, I think it's a great sports city. I thought they really, really were great with the Sonics. I honestly felt like that was one of the seven or eight NBA fan bases. And they had real history in the 70s, 80s, 90s.

29:25Chuck Klosterman:And I felt like it was actually a basketball town where basketball was the most important sport. It really was.

29:30Bill Simmons:And they won a title. I think if you're taking a team away that won the title, you have to really have a good reason for it. And I thought the reasons they lost the team were outrageous. It basically came down to the Starbucks guy, Howard Schultz, not being able to build an arena and just being like, all right, fuck it. And just selling to this OKC group, pretending he didn't know they were going to move the team when of course they were. And then Stern, who's now no longer with us, really kind of wanting the team to move to prove a point to everybody else. Like if you don't build an arena, you're going to lose your team.

30:07Chuck Klosterman:I really like having a team in Oklahoma City, though.

30:10Bill Simmons:but that's fine you could have had both

30:12Chuck Klosterman:I think their geographic location has been a benefit to that franchise

30:15Bill Simmons:100 % and I think you could argue maybe Kansas City would be another team that could do really well and even if you look at a map like they did this when they were talking about the teams moving the conferences and it's like shit well how are we going to have 15 East teams and you look at the map and there's just wide pockets of the country that don't have an NBA team even near them and then clusters of these other teams but But the bigger picture for me is like just talking about expansion as a financial decision. And I think that the league looks at this thinking, well, look how much money we made from the media deal.

30:51Bill Simmons:We'll look at how much money we'll make when we sell expansion teams. And to them, that's the success. But for me, the success is, well, you have to have fans feel good about the league and the product and what they're watching. And they don't. So to me, that's a 50-50 thing. And they're only caring about the 50-50. The business side of the 50.

31:11Chuck Klosterman:I just thought of something crazy. Would this mitigate tanking? Uh-oh. What if they went back to a regional draft? So, like, if you were in the East, you could draft from the Big East or the ACC or the ancillary conferences around there. Like, the teams in the Midwest could draft from, like, the Big Ten and the MAC and stuff like that. Like, you know, like the Lakers and, and, and the Warriors, like they'd have to, you know, pick from like, you know, the teams in the West coast.

31:45Bill Simmons:But then you'd have owners, you'd have owners moving. Basically what happened with DeBanson BYU, you'd have owners taking high school kids and moving them into their region.

31:53Chuck Klosterman:Oh, well, well, but maybe we have, okay. We got a lot of corruption. If you're a high school basketball player, you can only play college in the state you're in or from a state that geographically touches the border of your state. So, so like we can, we can just enforce a regional aspect to basketball. It'd be tough for Minnesota. If a kid grows up in Nevada, he's got to like go to college at like UNLV or in California or something. And then he can only play on the West coast. You know, everybody be like LeBron then in Cleveland where his whole, you know, where his whole life is in one spot.

32:29Bill Simmons:I still thought the best idea I've come up with is having to like to limit mobility.

32:37Chuck Klosterman:I like to hurt the lives of these guys.

32:39Bill Simmons:My favorite idea that I've come up with that I think could actually work, but they would never have the balls to do it is having the lottery for the first, basically like you, you have your top five teams, whatever you figure out the lottery, the order, and then they all put in their name for who they would take first. And then the consensus first guy is like the number one pick is Cooper flag. And he just walks up to the podium. He's like, you're, these five teams could be your home. And now we're going to find out where Cooper flag wants to play. And we, we kind of shifted almost bachelor style to the player.

33:11Bill Simmons:I still feel like that idea could work.

33:14Chuck Klosterman:Or what if it was like the draft was over many days? So like the 30 day draft. Well, like, yeah. Like, so, so the first pick happens on the first day, let's say it's a wizard or whatever, and they pick whoever they take. Okay. That guy can go to that team or he has like 24 hours to negotiate with every other team with the salary going down incrementally. So if he goes to the second, you know, so like, so he would be, he would be picked by the only way to get his max money is by going with the team who picked him. Yeah. But he could go to any other team for a fraction eventually, you know, that could be ultimately very dangerous.

33:52Bill Simmons:That money thing. That's another thing I've always thought they should do. Like the longer you have the player on your team, like Steph Curry, you actually get tax and cap relief after a certain number of years so they could try to keep players in the same city more. I mean, this is another issue. The player empowerment, which has had mostly good benefits, I think, for the last 15 years. But the worst benefit has been these teams that, you know, once their guy decides they don't want to play for them, they're stuck making these pretty terrible trades. Like Utah's trade for Mitchell was actually, they got a lot of good stuff back, right?

34:28Bill Simmons:So on paper, you'd probably do that. But they also traded somebody who's one of the best 10 players in the league who hadn't even hit his prime yet, who was under contract for three years. And that's like exactly the kind of guy you'd want to build around for 15 years. And then you look at the flip side of Sacramento. Fox hates being in Sacramento. The team's a train wreck. I don't blame Fox at all. And then his agent, the ringer's Rich Paul, starts pushing him to make a trade and kind of steers him to San Antonio because he thinks that's the best thing for him. So he has every right to do that.

35:02Fox has every right to want to get traded, but there was only one suitor for Fox

35:08Bill Simmons:who's really good. And I don't think that's a good system either.

35:12Chuck Klosterman:I, you know, I mean, any, in almost any walk of life for any kind of employment, if you do things that improve the situation for the individual, it's going to hurt the collective. Right. I mean, it's going, you mean like in college basketball right now one thing that i've noticed is a lot of people saying oh you know we complain about you know nil money we complain about the portal but look how good these games are like college basketball in some ways seems like it's it's been you know playing a level that that is is kind of a new kind of apex for it yeah that's because all of the good players are at the same 16 to 25 schools right in the past there were a bunch of reasons dozens of reasons why an exceptional player could say end up at wichita state or end up at davidson or something like that and then yes yeah where did beasley play uh beasley went to kansas state yeah yeah kansas state that's never happening now oh well i mean it's still i mean kansas if you're in a if you're in a power conference it could still happen i guess but the main the more it's more for the mid-majors kind of it's like right if you got if you if you happen if you've got this great talent evaluator who finds the kid that other people don't realize is going to be great, there's still, it's just like, he's going to end up at Texas or Tennessee or something in a couple of years.

36:33Chuck Klosterman:Anyways, like they're, they'll just, they'll just ratchet up. We have the portal and you have unlimited money.

36:39Bill Simmons:I honestly don't mind it. I think this is where college sports should go, where we have 20 to 30 colleges in football and basketball that are almost operating like a pro league and they have different rules and then everybody else is an

36:53Chuck Klosterman:amateur athlete basically that's because you dramatically prefer the pro game to the college game in every i'm just i i still feel like amateur athletics should should still keep some sort of umbilical cord to the past and right now we don't have it well you should keep it or should like no

37:12Bill Simmons:i i like people going to college just to get it just to get a degree and be part of the campus and staying there for a few years and playing the sport because they're a big part of every, you know, just going to the school, having roommates for four years, living off campus. It's almost like that's not cool anymore. I know. You're saying you don't like what's going on now. You don't like the situation. I like what's going on for a certain select group of colleges, but not for all 300.

37:45Chuck Klosterman:Well, but the reason it's not happening to all 300 is because of those select colleges. I know. But that's the issue.

37:52Bill Simmons:I'd like to go back to just, we had two awesome conferences and then everything else was just like college sports again. I mean, I guess that's not happening.

38:01Chuck Klosterman:Yeah. Well, I mean, I know I kind of, I feel like in a sense that is what's going to happen. I think that when these super conferences break off from the NCAA and stuff like that, and then there'll be, you know, so then, but then it will just be like, there'll be the pros and then the semi-pros and then, so that, so you'll be, I mean, there won't be that much differentiation between the two. You know what I'm saying?

38:27Bill Simmons:There isn't now, like these guys, all right, these guys in the tournament right now who are allegedly freshmen.

38:33Chuck Klosterman:Okay.

38:34Bill Simmons:The moment their team gets knocked out, what do you think they, you think they're still going to class? You think they're still on campus? Like they're done. Yeah. Well, the whole farce of that, like we should just own that and make that like this is pro sports already. We pretend it's not, but it is. And I just think we should differentiate it better and go back to I know there's no way to do it because there's no czar of college sports. There's nobody who could be like, why is UCLA playing teams on the East Coast? This is the dumbest thing we've ever done. These kids are flying. You've cross country kids flying 3000 miles to do a meet when they're supposed to be taking classes.

39:10Bill Simmons:Like, how did we end up doing in this spot? It's nuts.

39:15Chuck Klosterman:Oh, well, yeah. I mean, that, I, it's so weird. We're like, even now, even thinking about like the academic consequences of this seems like just almost.

39:23Bill Simmons:Or football going until they're adding more playoff rounds. Football is going to go until February. So you're going to have a same schedule as the NFL. We got to take a break and I want to keep going on this. This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. What makes basketball so exciting? all the superior skill on the court. This has been the case my whole life. The craziest thing, I mean, Wemby, stuff he's doing every game, there's two, three Wemby moments a game where you're like, I don't know if I've ever seen that. The number one thing for me is when he does the screen and roll, he's going to the basket, somebody throws him an alley-oop and he just catches it and dunks it without jumping.

40:01Bill Simmons:It's an alley-oop, but it's not an oop. It's just kind of an alley. And every time he does it, I'm like, I've definitely 100 % never seen that anymore. It's a superior play. Superior plays aren't just for the NBA, though. Try Michelob Ultra, the official beer partner of the NBA. And a crisp, refreshing, superior light beer. It's the beer of Max Kellerman. He just told me that. Plus, they're giving you a chance to win courtside seats, custom merch, and more. Michelob Ultra, superior, is worth playing for. Enter now at Michelob Ultra.com slash courtside. Michelob Ultra courtside 25-26. No purchase necessary.

40:37Bill Simmons:open to U.S. Residents 21+. Begins on October 1st, 2025. Ends on June 30th, 2026. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at makelobaltra.com slash courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, and prizes and details. So you mentioned college basketball when we were heading into the last break. Duke UConn felt like just an old school, I remember where I watched it, kind of basketball ending. Everybody loved it. It was fun in social media. The memes and the videos were coming for two straight days. The camera angles, Bobby, Danny Hurley, just seeming like a maniac. Danny Hurley's wife, Bill Murray is somehow involved.

41:16Bill Simmons:It just kind of kept going and going and was awesome for all these different reasons. But the fundamental thing people seem to love was that something bad happened to Duke. And I really do think they might be the most hated anything that we have in sports right now. I know like people delighted that the Patriots sucked in the Superbowl. I know people hate the Yankees. I know there's people that hate the Lakers and the Celtics, but they also have their giant groups of people that love them too. Is Duke the most one-sided hate verse like right now that we have in pro or college sports? Well,

41:53Chuck Klosterman:it's an eternal thing. Like the players can change. The coaches can change. It doesn't people feel that hatred toward them still with these other, with any pro franchise or whatever, you know, once a team really fails for a while, you know, people, you know, the Patriots or whatever, it's like, if, if, if when they struggle, people be like, ah, kind of, they'll never forget with Duke, like the guys who hate Duke, those you hate them all the time.

42:17Bill Simmons:But what's weird is I was in college the last time people actually were kind of rooting for Duke, which was when they upset UNLV.

42:25Chuck Klosterman:Yes.

42:26Bill Simmons:And then within a year that flipped, I think Leitner had a big thing to do with it, which we did a 30 for 30 about once upon a time. but Leitner is like kind of the before and after his whole career. By the end of his career, people are like, I hate Duke. And it's just stayed that way.

42:41Chuck Klosterman:Even when they upset Vegas, I mean, Vegas was an incredibly cool team. So I felt like most people liked UNLV over Duke, even though they were the favorite. So it's not just that Duke is so often the favorite in these things.

42:56Bill Simmons:I feel like you're remembering that wrong a little bit. Because Vegas was like the, UNLV was the big bully. They were killing everybody. Like they were doing a lot of trash talking and there was a lot of like the older media was getting really upset about their behavior. Are these guys role models? And then upstart scrappy Duke did like the Hoosiers, Norman Dale trying to beat them. And then, but that flipped in a year.

43:20Chuck Klosterman:Yeah. But we were younger. I mean, cause my memory of this was that the two most popular teams from that period was the Vegas team and the Michigan Fab Five. Fab five, I think they were both kind of criticized in the same way. But then, you know, this kind of goes back. We were talking earlier how like we used to defend the NBA and now it kind of drives us crazy. Yeah, I think I have this kind of growing hypothesis that's like, but basketball is something that is made for a young mentality and that that the sort of the individual nature of only having five guys on the floor, the fact that their personalities are really present and all these things, it makes it desirable to the way you view the world when you're 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, that you kind of like, you want that sort of.

44:09But then when you become and you mature and become an adult, you see like the way things

44:15Chuck Klosterman:work in football as more rational and reasonable, maybe how things should be, and that you should sublimate yourself to some larger idea where basketball doesn't make that same requirement, particularly among teams like we're talking about, like the really entertaining teams.

44:31Bill Simmons:Wait, let's build this out because I think you're right. I think part of it is basketball, as I've always said, is the most naked sport, right? You're just, you got five guys on the court. You can watch them at all times. You can watch them on the bench. You can watch them when the action's not happening or when it's happening. You can see how they interact with other people. It's almost like a microcosm of being in somebody's office, you know, or being at somebody's Thanksgiving table. Like, look, what's happening with the Rockets lately? I have real thoughts on the Rockets, even though I've never been in their locker room and I've never talked to any of the players this year, but I watched them on TV and I'm like, those guys aren't connected.

45:13Bill Simmons:They don't like each other. I wonder if it's the KD burner scandal and no other sport works that way. Baseball is the only one that's as naked, but I think with baseball, we don't really see them interact other than celebrating after, you know, home runs or strikeouts. And in general, like they, it's kind of an individual sport. They're all in it for themselves, but collectively it just kind of makes sense. Basketball is not individual. And I think that's the difference. That's what hockey, we always know they're on the same page. They'll play with a broken anything, you know, they, they're going all out.

45:48Bill Simmons:There are honors at stake at all times. Like we don't worry about hockey players, but basketball players we talk about constantly well it's like basketball you said basketball not individual well it's not individual but it is but you still need your you still need your you need your teammates to succeed in basketball yeah right um you know it was interesting this

46:08Chuck Klosterman:year i went to i went to a blazers uh suns game and i was really startled by the sun's bench I could not I was shocked the guys were all locked in right and they were so engaged it's like it didn't really seem like a college team and it made me think like they could be better than I thought they were you know like

46:29Bill Simmons:there's a few teams like that where you can I love this is the kind of stuff I still love going to basketball games and it's the kind of stuff I look at you can learn a lot just from the behavior of teammates who aren't playing and what happens in the huddles and things like that that But I just don't think in baseball you would notice in the same way.

46:49Chuck Klosterman:Yeah, well, I mean, totally. I mean, it's the baseball is just like there's less there will be personalities, but less. I mean, like in the NBA, it's like having no personality is a kind of personality. Like Tim Duncan had a personality because he had no personality. For a long time, Kawhi Leonard had a personality by having no personality. Oh, yeah. When you say naked, that's actually a pretty fucking good description because it's like almost any persona you have becomes something to be understood through. Whereas in a lot of other situations, if you have no personality, you just sort of disappear into the shadows, you know?

47:29Chuck Klosterman:That's Darren Peterson. That doesn't happen in this. Yeah.

47:31Bill Simmons:People are worried about Darren Peterson, that he has no personality and he just seems you're the point guard. You're not enough of a leader and a connector, but his personality is basically Kawhi Leonard and it's worked really well for Kawhi Leonard. And I do think you can be that way. Like Boozer's been, I thought he was really interesting to watch the last few weeks. And, you know, they had this terrible loss, but I always felt like he was calm at all times. Even if you watch what happens after the most devastating, you know, steal, his brother does the steal, crazy 40 pointer. And all the Duke guys are frozen and he's like walking, he's trying to figure out, okay, and he starts walking toward the ball.

48:13Bill Simmons:He was the only one that was like thinking, oh, we still have a game. And I always thought like, that quality is going to serve him really well. And granted, I've never seen him in person. I'm just watching him on TV. But that's why we love basketball.

48:26Chuck Klosterman:I have no idea if he'll translate to the NBA. I was so fucking wrong about Cooper Flagg. I guess I'm just like, because my thing is like, I only watch the games. So when I would watch Duke last year and I'd be like, well, he's good, but he seems like the second best player on this team. So I was like, I just like that. He, I thought he's going to be a very, very, very good pro. Who's not going to be this sort of like, we'll probably never win an MVP. I now think he probably will.

48:51Bill Simmons:I really think that competitiveness, it's the thing that I always use, whether to try to decide who's going to be a great prospect.

48:59Chuck Klosterman:And you're probably right. But when you brought that up the first time, I was sort of like, I hear that about so many guys' competitiveness. I mean, that's like, it doesn't, it seems to me like a filler aphorism you use about somebody. But there's two kinds of competitiveness.

49:13Bill Simmons:There's like, oh, he's a competitive guy. There's certain guys that you can just tell minute to minute, quarter to quarter, half to half, whatever, really give a shit. And I don't know how you quantify it. You can't figure it out in the combine. I felt that way about Castle. Castle was my favorite guy two years ago, right? It was a bad draft. It wasn't like the hottest take ever. But I really liked how he carried himself, how hard he played. And I felt like he was in a weird situation on that UConn team because they were really good. They had players all over the place. There was probably more he could have done.

49:49Bill Simmons:So I think when you're projecting guys, you have to think like, all right, fundamentally, ultimately, is this guy a badass or not? Like I feel that way about Burry's on Arizona. I just think he's a badass. He's going to go in the league and I know he's going to succeed. And I wonder if sometimes it's that easy. I mean, quarterbacks, we're never going to figure out.

50:07Chuck Klosterman:Well, yeah, I was going to say, like, so Indiana's quarterback, what are you, using your kind of sort of like judging their personality? My stupid Bill, thanks.

50:16Bill Simmons:Well, one thing I like with him is he's apparently by all accounts, super smart. and I wonder with quarterbacks do we underrate that in some ways because think about like even the ones that like Favre's a bad example right Favre's like just pretty dumb gifted guy right Rodgers super smart Brady super smart Manning super smart like some of the best guys we've had over the last 30 years.

50:46Chuck Klosterman:But then Dan Marino not an intellectual I mean there's so many like

50:49Bill Simmons:No but Dan Marino was football smart though Like these guys that can remember like every play that they, you could bring up a play like week two, your third season, you're in San Diego and they're like, oh yeah, third quarter. Like there's something about their brain that's different. And it seems like Mendoza has that.

51:06Chuck Klosterman:I mean, it's an incredibly difficult job and it's a incredibly situational job. Whereas like, you know, like love the running back from Notre Dame, wherever he goes, he's going to be able to basically do what he does, you know? And some places like bigger holes and others, but like what he did in college and what he does in the NFL will be the same for quarterbacks. That is not the case. You're almost always going into a totally different thing. And they can also sort of, you know, you know, at the college level, you can kind of twist these offenses around where like a guy makes these same three reads every time.

51:38Chuck Klosterman:And if he can do that, I mean, I remember watching Kellen Moore at Boise state. I was like, there's no way this guy's not going to be a successful NFL quarterback. I've never seen him miss an open receiver, but that was because he was in a situation where he had a lot of open receivers running across the middle at all times.

51:53Bill Simmons:I talked to, I got to spend a lot of time with Peyton Manning last year at this conference we were at. And not to talk out of school, I don't think he would care of me talking about this. But I'm really fascinated when I talk to these guys, like when they see the other quarterbacks, what they see and don't see with either prospects or guys in the league. And if you talk to any of those guys, they always say like the number one thing is when you go to the line to be completely prepared in your brain for anything that's going to happen and then to be able instantaneously to realize everything that defense is doing.

52:28Bill Simmons:And all these guys are like, it doesn't matter how talented you are. If you don't have that quality in a split second to know everything that's going to happen, it doesn't matter how good of an athlete you are, right? And learning that and getting better at that, just I'm going to the line. I'm completely prepared. I know everything my offensive line has to do, my receivers, but I also know the seven things. And that was one of the reasons Drake may kind of sucked in the Superbowl. Seattle was basically doing two things over and over again. And he was too young. He wasn't ready for it. He couldn't, he couldn't unlock it.

53:01Bill Simmons:Um, but I just wonder, that goes back to the brain thing. Yeah.

53:04Chuck Klosterman:Like John Gruden used to have that show where he'd talk to the quarterbacks, you know, and that was always intriguing because what you were, what you were really watching when you watch that was like, how really, you know, straight, like how smart do they seem? when they describe these things.

53:17Bill Simmons:Right. But then if you don't have the athleticism, you end up being Steve Walsh.

53:21Chuck Klosterman:Or Josh Rosen.

53:23Bill Simmons:Or pick a guy. You still have to have the modicum of athleticism to get by.

53:29Chuck Klosterman:Yeah, because there's also guys who can explain the things they can't execute. Those are the guys who end up becoming quarterback coaches usually. Right, right, right. But like, Kelly Moore maybe being one of these people over there. It is such a... it's just unlike you because you'd ask one time it's like why are we still so bad at like deducing what quarterbacks to draft and select you know finding ty simpson right now yes now he's the

53:58Bill Simmons:polarizing guy like some people think he might go way higher it's a little like jackson dart last year and he's become the guy everybody's been talking about yet he's played 15 games in college

54:08Chuck Klosterman:it it is i mean it's such a demanding thing and i do think that it is like i use such situational i think it's unusually situational but there's yeah that there are probably um a lot of quarterbacks who could succeed in certain scenarios and almost none who could succeed in other scenarios i mean it's i i you know we'll we'll now someone like ryan leaf or whatever we almost put the totality of his bust on him right so that like all his problems really were him and you know and and and you know breaking the law ending all these things but it is interesting to wonder if he had gone somewhere else entirely and been around totally different people if he would have had a completely different career in life i mean i i don't think that's

54:57Bill Simmons:unthinkable you know i think that well look at mendoza he's going to vegas they have money to spend they have they hired a coach that is a very well regarded offensive coach kubiak seems like he's gonna be able to have some semblance of an offensive line coming out of the

55:15Chuck Klosterman:gate um but even if you look at him when he was at cal compared to indiana he was not the quarterback at cal he was in indiana that's that's the problem with this stuff well that's

55:26Bill Simmons:like blogger in illinois in a year goes from i'm not a top 100 guy to i might be the fifth pick in the NBA draft. Sometimes I do wonder with this stuff, like I've just watched it with my own kids and my daughter's like about to be 21 and my son's 18 and they've changed so much year to year and all of these different ways that it makes me think like this draft process is nuts. How would you, how do you, you're pegging these kids who are 19 and 20 and assuming when they're 23, they're going to be the same people. How do you know? You have no idea. But we do this in lots of things.

56:00Chuck Klosterman:We still find it impressive when some 40-year-old person, it turns out they went to Harvard or they went to Yale. Well, that meant they were an incredibly ambitious 16-year-old who was really smart at 16 and had parents kind of pushing them. That's how you get into those schools. It is not a reflection on anything about you as a person outside of what you were like as a teenager. And we kind of do that with tons of stuff. I mean, like, uh, with, uh, you know, with sports, it is, I mean, kind of a glaring situation because the careers are shorter. So what you are at 18 actually isn't that far removed from you at 28, but still a lot, still a lot though.

56:42Bill Simmons:Right. But in, I think in basketball, like I was thinking about Jaden Ivy this week, who's obviously going through a lot of stuff and seems like he's unraveled a little bit. This guy was a top five lottery pick. Yes. And I don't know if he was a sure thing because he was a, you know, he's a guard. It was a combo guard, but he was somebody, you know, an incredible athlete. People really thought he was, had a chance to be like, I don't know if at all NBA guard, but definitely an all-star. Goes to the worst possible Detroit situation, right? At one point they lose 20 plus games in a row. He's playing with Cade, who's better than him.

57:17Bill Simmons:So he's got to figure out how to play with him. Last year, right as it's about to happen for him, and he's really starting to play pretty well, breaks his leg. I was watching the game when it happened and now is in a tailspin and now is probably out of the league. And it's like, you think he's done.

57:33Chuck Klosterman:You don't think, like if I said,

57:35Bill Simmons:he's out of the league for now. I think he could come back a year or two years from now, maybe.

57:39Chuck Klosterman:Will he ever be an NBA starter again?

57:41Bill Simmons:That I don't know. Because he's lost a lot of, could he be an NBA rotation guy? Sure. We've seen,

57:46Chuck Klosterman:I mean, he was a rotation guy.

57:47Bill Simmons:We saw Ron or a test come back. I mean, anything's possible. But my point is, if you just played his career 30 times, this was probably the worst outcome. Going to the worst possible team, having the worst possible injury. And there's another outcome where he goes to the right kind of team with the right kind of infrastructure and is having a really good career now. So I don't know. This is the tough thing with the draft. I think very rarely with drafts, like Hashim Thabit's a good example. I hope he's not listening. It was just a terrible pick. It was terrible in the moment. I was writing about, he went second.

58:23Bill Simmons:And I think it was the draft that had, had, had a Curry and Rubio and maybe even James Harden. I think all three of those guys were in that draft. And the Grizzlies were like, we don't know what to do. We don't really need a guard. And they were just like, they took the beat and it was crazy when it happened. Um, that was like, oh, I know this is going to be a bust, but there's other ones. Like, how do you know with Michael Beasley? The guy was averaging, he was like one of only three or four guys ever to be like 25 and 10 in college. the stats were saying he might be an awesome pro he was just a little dubious off the court so you

58:57Chuck Klosterman:roll the dice and it didn't work had a career he played on but i mean he yes but yeah exactly yes it was not it was um it was not the career i'm sure he thought he was going to have coming i

59:10Bill Simmons:would go nuts if i worked at a team if i was like in a front off like a gm or if i was an owner and And I would spend all my time talking to people about this. I would be like obsessed with how do we figure this out? There's got to be some way to crack it. And I don't think there is.

59:25Chuck Klosterman:Well, but okay. So you, like you said about, you know, Ivy, like, okay, we play his career 30 times. Yeah. You think this might be the 30th outcome.

59:35Bill Simmons:Yeah, maybe like 29th. There might be one worse outcome.

59:39Chuck Klosterman:So let's say you did your career 30 times. So like, what outcome are you at?

59:44Bill Simmons:I did think about this once. Like, would I have like the, cause I was like basically a late bloomer professionally, but I was probably coming out of college. I probably would have been a first round pick because I'd had, I'd written my sports column for all four years and I had like a perspective.

1:00:02Chuck Klosterman:And then it got like the Omaha world. I don't know, whatever.

1:00:06Bill Simmons:I'm just trying to do a dumb analogy.

1:00:08Chuck Klosterman:Keep going. Keep going. I want to hear this.

1:00:09Bill Simmons:And then it's like, oh, I'm going to work at a newspaper and I'm going to be on the bench for whatever. and it didn't work out. And I basically had like, not quite jaded ivy, but...

1:00:19Chuck Klosterman:Well, that would have been, yeah, that would not have been the best outcome for you. To be drafted. Yes. I would say the original outcome... If you would have immediately got a newspaper job, even a column, coming straight... I think that would have been bad for me. ...college. Yeah. I don't think we'd be talking now. I don't think you'd have that house.

1:00:36Bill Simmons:But think about this. And so it's actually a 30-year anniversary of this because it was near the end of March, 96 where I left the Herald because I knew I was stuck there forever. And, you know, I'd probably made a couple of mistakes on my own, but I left and I didn't even have a plan. I was going to like freelance. So I'm 26 years old. I'm not working or writing for everybody. And eventually I have to start bartending. And I don't think I wrote anything for like 10 months. So my career was like over. And I'm sure there's some NBA, NFL, baseball. There must be, I can't even imagine how many people are like, God damn, like they're at this fork in the road and then they end up just doing something else.

1:01:20Bill Simmons:But then we're wondering, should I keep going?

1:01:22Chuck Klosterman:It's, you know, it's tough to admit this because you're like, you want to think anything that happens to you is because of merit or hard work. But the biggest factor is luck. Yeah. Like I graduated from college in 1994, if I had graduated in 93 or in 95, there is zero chance that I'm here right now talking to you. There's no chance. I think that if I had graduated in 93 or 95, I don't know if I would have ever written a book, but, but because I graduated in 94 and certain things were lined up that year, everything is different. And it's the same for these dudes. I mean, it just, um, well, it's not the same.

1:02:01Bill Simmons:I think Cooper flag is good no matter where he goes and what happens. Like there's certain guys that whatever happens, it's happening.

1:02:09Chuck Klosterman:But although, I mean, let's say, so you're saying that you think he could have gone to any franchise and it would not have happened.

1:02:19Bill Simmons:I would argue he's in the worst position possible this first year in Dallas. He goes to a team that the fan base is so scarred and upset about the trade that just happened that even as the new season is starting, They're still mad and booing the GM and chanting that he has to get fired. That's how you start. AD gets hurt right away. Kyrie decides he's not coming back. They trade it. Basically, 80s of some cost. They trade him. They decide to start tanking. I don't. None of that was good. He's playing out of position, trying to learn how to be a point guard when he's not a point guard.

1:02:53Chuck Klosterman:And what if he stays there? What if it's five years from now and the maps have never improved?

1:02:58Bill Simmons:Well, you could argue this it's all he's putting thick skin and scar tissue on himself for when they actually get good. I mean, we don't say that about Zion.

1:03:07Chuck Klosterman:We don't say like Zion's put on, you know, scar tissue.

1:03:11Bill Simmons:Zion has different issues, though. I mean, exactly.

1:03:13Chuck Klosterman:But I mean, but I'll tell you what, coming out of college, if we could somehow go back in time and someone said you can put money on Zion being great or flag, I would have put money on Zion. Well, I look at... I think most people would. Well, from a talent standpoint, yes.

1:03:30Bill Simmons:I would have been on flag because I thought the way Zion played made me nervous, even though I thought Zion was incredible. But all the in-the-air guys make me nervous.

1:03:39Chuck Klosterman:I'm sure you did stuff about Zion coming out of college. I'd be curious. I thought he was awesome. Yeah.

1:03:44Bill Simmons:But I thought I was all in on flag. I just thought... I actually didn't think he was going to be this good offensively. But when you talk about situations, it's funny. like the best situations that anyone entered the league in, um, of the guys from the last 12, 13 years are Tatum and Brown and Boston. And I wonder if it's one of the reasons Brown's been so he's gotten back. Like he's in year 10 now. He's going to make an all NBA team, but he goes to that first Celtics team and they were good. Remember they made, they made the Eastern finals his first year. He didn't even play that much. He was playing like 12, 13 minutes a game.

1:04:20Bill Simmons:He was a bench guy. He got to watch. It was almost like my home sitting on the sideline for a year. Better than Wemby's situation. No, Wemby doesn't count. Wemby's like... Well, I mean, I think he also got put in a perfect situation. It was pretty good. Duncan is probably the standard for this.

1:04:36Chuck Klosterman:Duncan joins a really good Spurs team.

1:04:38Bill Simmons:They tank for one year. He's next to David Robinson. He's got Popovich. That's about as good as it gets.

1:04:47Chuck Klosterman:As well as Womanyama's playing, I still feel like they're kind of bringing him along surprisingly slowly.

1:04:53Bill Simmons:I love it. I mean, I love that 29 minutes a game is the best.

1:04:56Chuck Klosterman:And I would be very... Wait, hold Wemby because we're going to take a break. My hope is that they get into the playoffs and they're like, we're going to unleash him now. He's playing 35 minutes a game and we're going to see what kind of numbers he puts up now. And like, you know, or I, I, I, cause it does seem as though they are still like, he's like a, he's like a horse and they're still not letting him run full speed. They just will not, they just, just little glimpses he'll gallop.

1:05:25Bill Simmons:That's it. I have thoughts on this. We have to take a quick break. So every Wednesday I look through the NBA slate. I try to find us a really fun parlay that we could all do together. And of course, we always do it on FanDuel. I love betting on the NBA on FanDuel. Easy to build by bet. I know I'm going to get my winnings instantly. So we are in the last two weeks of the season, which means we can throw together a lot of big favorites that are going against teams that are no longer trying to win and add them together with a team that we like. And I keep looking at that Atlanta-Orlando game. and Orlando's in something of a free fall coming off a 60-point loss.

1:06:04Bill Simmons:And Atlanta seems like the easy pick in that game. And yet I wonder, is this like a playoff game for Orlando? So that might be one I do or Boston-Miami if everyone in Boston is playing. It'll be one of those two. But the bet will be live in the FanDuel Sportsbook app Wednesday. Don't forget to use a profit boost token to increase your potential winnings before you place it. FanDuel, play your game. This episode is brought to you by Alexa Plus. Just say the word and the all new Alexa Plus will do more so you don't have to. Chat naturally about anything from scoring concert tickets to brainstorming your next travel destination.

1:06:39Bill Simmons:Alexa learns your style, anticipates what's next and makes it happen. And now Alexa Plus is free with Prime on your Amazon devices like Echo and Fire TV. Learn more at amazon.com slash Alexa Plus. This episode is brought to you by Domino's. Best deal ever. They wanted me to be a pizza GM. They wanted me to assemble my perfect pizza lineup. I could go up to seven toppings or I could do a five topping rotation. They wanted me to tie it in a basketball. Obviously, this is right at my wheelhouse. Number one topping, extra cheese well done. That's Jokic. It's just, you can throw it on any team, any situation.

1:07:15Bill Simmons:It's going to make the pizza better. Pepperoni is Wemby. Mushroom, SGA, you know, just does the job. You're not going to be telling your grandkids about it, but it's putting them 32 a night. And then ham and pineapple, I'm putting those two together. That's Kate Cunningham and J and, uh, and during the center, um, they kind of need each other. Same thing with the ham and pineapple. I don't want those things separately. I want them together. Well, here's the good news. I can get all of these for nine 99 with Domino's best deal ever. I could just throw all of those toppings on one pizza, any topping plus the pizza for nine 99 with Domino's best deal ever prices is higher in some locations.

1:07:54Bill Simmons:Select this online only offer from$2.23 until$4.6. Size availability varies by crust type. Maximum seven toppings, six for New York style and pan crust. Stuffed crust is extra, excludes XL and specialty pizzas. Minimum purchase required for delivery. Prices, participation, delivery area, and charges may vary. This episode is brought to you by The Home Depot. Spring is starting, so it's time to wake up your yard. And at The Home Depot, they've got everything you need to do it with low prices guaranteed. Mowing your lawn is a dream with top brand outdoor power tools like the Ryobi 40 volt mower with up to 50 minutes of runtime.

1:08:34Bill Simmons:You can add a pop of color with spring blooms and fresh plants and refresh your garden beds with earth grow mulch, five bags for just$10. Start your spring with low prices now through April 1st. Available at the Home Depot. Exclusions apply. See Home Depot dot com slash price match for details. So you're talking about Wemby and how they're kind of easing him along. I think there's a real reason for this. And I've noticed that I've seen him in person a couple of times. He's so tall and there's so much room for error when he lands or steps on things or he's up in the air that I think they've decided like during the regular season, the less time he's on the court, the more we're gaming the system our way.

1:09:19Bill Simmons:That's something bad. Now he's worked on it. I've talked about how he's worked on falling, you know, he's worked on, um, just being careful, like when to kind of jump in traffic, things like that. But he can't stop his body once it's up in the air. Cause he's so fucking tall. And that's how that's your worst case scenario is he's up and he lands and he's so big and he lands the wrong way and he bends the wrong way. and I just think I think what you said before the break was right like it's like a horse they're gonna unleash I think I don't think it'd be more than 34 minutes yeah at some point he's got to go

1:09:54Chuck Klosterman:for it like yeah it's like it's it is like you you you can't say it's like he's too fragile to ever use like at some point he's not fragile though he's been he's not he's been pretty durable yeah but with exercises or whatever because that was always the big fear with guys that heightens their you know hurt their feet or whatever I mean when Windhorst started writing

1:10:12Bill Simmons:about him a while ago and talking about all the wemby's basically i don't know like uh musical prodigies or what other artists whatever people would want to put in like somebody who realized early in life that they're going to be special and basically all these decisions that he made from almost being a pre-teenager on like all this stuff is going to happen to me i got to be ready he's like learning how to follow he trains his legs all the exercises he does learning how to speak english right? His English is the best, I think, of any foreign guy that's come in the league who's been a star because he was practicing it forever, knowing that at some point I'm going to be a superstar in America and I have to be bilingual.

1:10:56Bill Simmons:Calculating is the wrong word, but the way it was calculated was really smart.

1:11:02Chuck Klosterman:He's a little Taylor Swift-like. He made a decision at a very young age that like everything about my life is going to in some way be involved with success at this one singular deal. Right. Everything about me, even the things about my personality that have no relationship to basketball, they can't in any way contradict basketball. I can't get really into something that could somehow damage this. I can't, you know, I can't love pastries or whatever, whatever the case may be, whatever choice he's making. Right. These are, you know,

1:11:32Bill Simmons:wait, I really liked that Taylor Swift thing. That's a good one. I haven't heard that one before. I think that's a really good analogy. Somebody who had success early because he's overseas. People know who he is by the time he's 14, 15. And he's already competing.

1:11:46Chuck Klosterman:And he recognized his being successful. Yeah. It wasn't like he was not in the basement. He's on the main floor. Right. He's not working out in the basement.

1:11:53Bill Simmons:And also somebody who's been stared at because he's incredibly fucking tall. Somebody who's just been stared at differently every moment of his life, basically from age 13, 14 on. When did Taylor Swift hit?

1:12:06Chuck Klosterman:like 15 i mean yeah she was 14 15 she was meaningful i think she had records 13 but yeah i still i don't love how often wendy's on the perimeter i love it so much more when he's closer to the basket but i guess that's just how it is it's just crazy to i know but that's their

1:12:23Bill Simmons:chuck that's their super sauce i know they have this like hammer yeah this hammer that when it's like the biggest game of the season or it's a game seven or they're down three two in the road in a game six like they can start moving him closer to the basket the other team panics when he's within 10 feet if he's posting up like they they the defense is just completely changing every

1:12:45Chuck Klosterman:strategy they have once that happens i mean i i guess yeah i i still don't know like how complete his post-up game is like like how i mean he looks good when he does it but it's the regular season and sometimes he's you know i i would i would really be interested to see like what his bank

1:13:03Bill Simmons:vault of moves is well he's got he already has a little bit of that mbd i could just shoot a 20 footer over you and you can't block it he's got like a little jump hook and then he's got this hook with this little turnaround where he leans over the guy but he's usually like seven inches taller and the guy can't block it because when he's basically in his face he's got this little george gervin spin move the other way that finger roll move i've seen all those things but i want to

1:13:31Chuck Klosterman:like what, like it would be interesting. We've on like a turnaround. Just like, well, I don't know. I would just like to see what it looks like if there'd be a quarter of basketball where he's playing against a big dude and it's, he's on the block and they just keep going to him, going to him, going to him, going to him and see what it's like. Like, could this happen in a playoff?

1:13:48Bill Simmons:Have you seen him in person?

1:13:49Chuck Klosterman:Like, yeah. In person? No, I have not. I have not seen him in person.

1:13:53Bill Simmons:I would highly recommend to anyone who likes basketball. it's it's the must see in this sport right now and it's the the biggest must see we've had in a long time i don't really remember the last time curry was probably the last one where it's like you just got to go see this you got to go watch him warm up you got to go through the whole thing i know it's funny because we were doing all that face of the league stuff i forget when that was don't one of the dumbest conversations ever and it's still dumb but i think the overriding face of the week? Face of the league. Everybody's like, who's the face of the league?

1:14:26Bill Simmons:We're going to have a face of the league. Could Jason Tatum be the face? It was like, this is stupid. Why are we doing this? And my attitude at the time was, you know when you see it. You know when it's happening. And it's happened this year with Wemby. He's the number one attraction in the league. You can feel it in the games. People are going early to watch him warm up. Nobody leaves their seat when he's on the court. And he's the most compelling guy they have. And it happened in the span of six months. Hmm.

1:14:53Chuck Klosterman:Yeah, I guess. I guess the face of the league thing, that's just, that just seems to be like what they talked about when there was nothing else to talk about. Right. No, because sometimes they just have things that they got to fill space. And it's like, well, it's because no one can really even properly, like you say, properly describe what that means. You know, it's like, you know, when you see it, like pornography or whatever. but we we don't say that with like we weren't saying that about music in the late 80s with

1:15:21Bill Simmons:like alternative music can michael stipe be the face of the face of the league music does have

1:15:27Chuck Klosterman:its own version of that which is defining something as the biggest band in the world or the biggest artist in the world and it's right and artists and bands feel like they can sort of say that sometimes even if it only lasts like two months like yeah there's like there is like a counting crows i think a documentary or something was it yeah well no i don't think it's that one because this is an old earlier one where he was talking about going to japan and he's like you know we were like the beatles there we were like you know the biggest band in the world that's like well maybe you were that weekend or whatever yeah yeah yeah but yeah um you have any other

1:16:04Bill Simmons:Wemby thoughts? Cause I had a couple of other quick things for you.

1:16:06Chuck Klosterman:Well, I, I, uh, I, I think it is, I interesting that he's sort of like defenses half of the game. So he should be the MVP is like already sort of in a, in a way kind of very formally making his argument without like, it's not like he's got a lot of bravado. He's like trying to like logic it out. Um, and, uh, I, uh, I think now, you know, in 2026 or whatever, I think that argument he makes is better than it's been in a while you know i wouldn't have said that in the past that that you know it seemed that it seemed like offense was 80 of it and then you know but now it is different i mean it's like they're uh when the games get serious i the defense intensity is pretty pretty central you know it's like in a way that i remember but so what i mean i would all right who are you who are you gonna like i assume that shea is gonna win mvp right i think he is and that's i don't

1:17:02Bill Simmons:know who I'm voting for yet, but that's what I'm waiting for.

1:17:05Chuck Klosterman:It's tough to vote against. I mean, I watch him play. I feel like long stretches go before I see him miss a shot. I know he misses shots. I know what his field goal percentage is, but whenever I watch him, he seems to never be missing jump shots. They just seem to all go in.

1:17:19Bill Simmons:It's shocking when he misses. That thing you said about Wemby on defense, I was saying this to somebody the other day about because we never got to see Russell, but we read all the books about Russell and we saw the documentaries and clips of him and how everybody over and over again would be like, there was just nothing like this. He just blocked everything. Like he, he drove guys out of the league guys who had like, Oh, this is my little, my little, uh, sky hook that I have. And Russell would be like, I'm, you're just never making that against me ever. And the guy would just be done after that.

1:17:51Bill Simmons:Um, I've never seen a better defensive player than Wemby in person. Now I've seen defensively impactful things that like Jordan and Pippen together seeing that feel kind of feels in my, in my head, like what Wemby's like now, we're watching those guys together when they were aligned. I've never seen anything like that. And Wemby is like that for me too. I did see Manupo. I saw Mark Eaton. I saw some of these taller guys and how they can even go bare to a lesser degree. So it's not like we haven't seen versions of this, but this is the most impactful I've seen.

1:18:24Chuck Klosterman:You know who Larry Brown says is the best defender he's ever seen. Who? will chamberlain in 1985 really that he watched him play a games at ucla against magic and all these dudes yeah at one point he blocked seven consecutive shots from like all the you know at whatever age he was 40 whatever or something you know it's finally circled around for wilt

1:18:49Bill Simmons:where now all the all the bad stuff with the world experience kind of fades away over the years and now it's just like incredible to look at everything and then the story the positive stories last the

1:19:01Chuck Klosterman:stats last all that stuff i mean his his stature in my mind is rising i now think that prior to the merger and sort of when the nba changed in the late 70s i think chamberlain is the greatest

1:19:12Bill Simmons:basketball player we've we've been arguing about this since i've known you uh quick topic abs we could probably end on this oh you know a whole bunch of interesting you had some weird theory

1:19:23Chuck Klosterman:you wanted to throw to me?

1:19:24Bill Simmons:Yeah, but I didn't want to go longer than 90 because I wanted to save stuff for the next time. But we should do ABS, which has completely changed baseball in five days. It's changed the experience of watching it. I think it's made it better. It's something for everybody. Like my buddy Hench, who's a complete maniac, and I'm on multiple Boston threads with him. I think I'm on four threads with him. but is always like getting loves getting upset and riled up about stuff ABS is like his Venn diagram because there's always something to get upset about either the initial call can be the worst call and you're mad at the umpire that you can't believe you missed it the challenge that you got a strikeout and then the challenge happened and now the strikeout is gone for your team that's terrible the guy who does the challenge but he missed it the guy on your team like Roman Anthony had one you know he does this and it's like no you were actually wrong and now I've lost a challenge and it just brings all this stuff to it but what's interesting is how the fans react to it especially in the home games where it's like oh that's not a strike and they'll show it and it's like not a strikeout and the fans like cheer like a hit happened I think this has been a home run I love ABS

1:20:44Chuck Klosterman:well I my position on this is pretty clear I don't like the inflammation, the employing technology for officiating. I think it's dumb.

1:20:54Bill Simmons:Okay. Let's hear it. Let's hear the case. Did you like it for tennis? It made tennis better.

1:21:00Chuck Klosterman:I mean, tennis is kind of an interesting example. That's one I never think about. I, I just don't think we need to do it. I don't think it's necessary. I think that the, that, But, I mean, and this will also make no sense. It would almost be different if we went to complete technological officiating, that there were no umpires, there were no referees. We might be going there. Well, that's going to happen eventually. Somehow that, I guess, I would be a little more comfortable with because it would almost be like saying, like, well, okay, the sport is different now. The sport, there's no human element to the way the sport is sort of governed.

1:21:40Bill Simmons:But what's the good thing about having, like the Red Sox, one of the reasons they lost Saturday's game was there was this umpire, C.B. Buckner, who's just an all-time bad umpire. And I think he only got 88 % of the calls right. So one of every nine pitches, he just missed. And it's like, how is that better than just having an automatic strike zone where we just know each one is?

1:22:06Chuck Klosterman:I guess, I mean, it's just part of it. I would say that it's just part of it, that these games are played by people and they're governed by people. And in the same way, there's going to be errors in baseball. There's going to be errors in officiating and in umpiring. And it just, I...

1:22:26Bill Simmons:It's funny because I feel like I'm arguing against you, but I like 90 % agree with you. I'm just saying I like ABS, But I, I think this is not ruined basketball, but made basketball worse. Like this concert we're doing a stuff. Or, I mean, it, it, there, I mean, this is, it, it, so it's, I'm, I'm making an argument

1:22:50Chuck Klosterman:that even it feels weird to make, even though it's what I believe sort of, which is that But when I see the idea that it's a pitch, right? Yes, it can be the difference between an out and a walk. I realize that, but it's a pitch. And it's sort of that, so this is too complicated to just handle with us. We can't do this. We can't fucking watch a baseball and make a decision. and these games that ultimately, yes, money is on the line. People are gambling. These guys care a lot. They are exhibitions. These are social constructs. Do we really need to use cameras and lasers and all these things to understand whether or not it's two and two or the guy's out?

1:23:39Chuck Klosterman:It seems dumb to me. It's just, you know, we're like, I'd love to come up with some perfect analogy for it. But it's like, I mean, you know, well, this is not a perfect analogy, but it's something similar. It's like sometimes you hear people wonder why music from the 60s and 70s and 80s seems to just not go away. And that the music since then, for whatever reason, seems to be more disposable and it shouldn't be. It shouldn't, you know, if anything, it should be an improvement because they have that music kind of look back on and use. But I think part of it has to do with that when there was less ability in the studio to fix everything and make everything perfect and find ways to make the vocal ideal every single time.

1:24:35Chuck Klosterman:The things that we heard in music that were imperfect are actually the things that sort of humanized it and made us drawn to it. And now we're seeing this sort of this perfect version of music where every vocal is perfect, where every, you know, where they will just punch in the guitar or the keyboard or the drum or whatever it is until we have a perfectly sculpted thing. Something about that subconsciously we understand to be sterile and sort of distanced from us and not really human. And I think that now the reason it's not a perfect analogy is because one is art and one is sports. But and these are, you know, I think that things that we do that distance the sort of the visceral human element from sports probably make us feel less about it or care less about it.

1:25:24Chuck Klosterman:The outcome, yes, we more accurate. We will have a more sort of a precise understanding of who actually won this or who actually lost. But it's like, I think that it makes it less important and less meaningful and less real. So I mean, that's a kind of a, you know.

1:25:47Bill Simmons:This is, you're not the only one who feels this way. I think the difference is how do we avoid calamities and things that swing games versus how do we strive for 100 % accuracy? And I think the NBA is in this mess right now.

1:26:04Chuck Klosterman:The first thing to do is to remove the idea of the word calamity from what we just described. I know, but it's people care. How is it a calamity? Well, remember Mike Renfro? That was the last discussion we had. I know. No, it was really weird. This all starts with Mike Renfro. We had that discussion. I feel you walked away from that or we walked away from that with you sort of making the argument that like it would have been better if we could have used instant replay in that scenario. Yeah, because Houston could have beaten Pittsburgh. We would not be talking about it at all if that had been the case.

1:26:33Chuck Klosterman:If we had instant replay, you like bad things. Cause then they're more interesting. Well, sometimes yes. Sometimes things are meaningful because they were imperfect. And if you had ironed it out flat, we would, there is absolutely no way we would be talking about Mike Renfell this many years later. If they had been like, we checked it, it was a touchdown. Even if, even if Houston had won that game and beaten the Rams in the Superbowl, that would still be, we would not be something we would care about the way we do about the human problem that was the manifestation of a guy having to make a decision about something he saw in real time.

1:27:09Chuck Klosterman:That's what sports is. I know.

1:27:11Bill Simmons:And in the NBA, you're really feeling it because they only have its replay for some things. But then if there's like sometimes goaltending, they'll just miss and then they'll replay it after the commercial. Be like, whoa, they missed the goaltending on Kata. It's like, guess what? We all lived. It's fine.

1:27:28Chuck Klosterman:Well, yeah.

1:27:29Bill Simmons:And then it's like block charge. Let's look at this for four minutes. Like, I just can't believe how stupid some of this stuff is. It's okay if we called the block charge wrong.

1:27:39Chuck Klosterman:Let's keep the game moving. I mean, yes, we're doing this. We care about these sports. I know someone could listen to this and be like, well, they don't care about the outcome. Why are they watching these things? But it is crazy to me when you're watching a thrilling basketball game late in the game, a guy hits a jumper. They're now up one. Oh, we got to stop to see if it's 0.7 seconds on the clock or 0.4 seconds on the clock. Yes, I know if it's 0.2 seconds, you can't catch and shoot. There's all these reasons for it. But it kind of takes something that's just electrifying and be like, okay, now let's go do our taxes for 10 minutes and then we'll come back and make this decision.

1:28:16Chuck Klosterman:I don't think it has improved sports. I just, I don't think it, I don't think that these things have been a real, because then they still sometimes get things wrong and then they seem doubly uncomfortable. We actually did all, you know, we actually looked at the thing again and it didn't change anything.

1:28:37Bill Simmons:Well, it's funny because some of the people that hate all the advancement of technology are already predisposed to hate ABS, stuff like that.

1:28:45Chuck Klosterman:But I'll admit, I haven't watched any baseball yet this year. So maybe if I saw this, I like the fact that you say like that, you know, the player has to like hit his head and do it himself. And you got to do it immediately. I definitely think, I think it was actually, maybe Nick Wright had said this, had this idea that like in the NBA, when a player like twists his finger, like go check it, like that should be enough to trigger it. Cause so many of those guys are wrong. Right. I mean, those guys are wrong all the time.

1:29:14Bill Simmons:And then you lose, like you lose two points if you're wrong.

1:29:17Chuck Klosterman:You lose the challenge. Like, you know, like Luca will ask for something to be changed. It's an automatic loss. Yeah. Yeah, I like that. Luca, I mean, I'm sure you've talked about this before. It's demented. I can't imagine a guy whose game I should like more, who as a player, I hate. Luca is my least favorite player in the world. He complains on everything. He has a really terrible Clippers team. It was like that. They had Chris Paul. Oh, yeah. And Blake Griffin. They're mad about everything. He's worse than all of them.

1:29:51Bill Simmons:Yeah.

1:29:52Chuck Klosterman:He is worse than that entire team. And sadly, Joker's starting to become a little that way, too. He used to never complain. I see him more and more complain about it.

1:30:01Bill Simmons:That's because, well, Joker has reasons because he's just getting annihilated game after game. I think he's just fed up with it. It's his new strategy of guarding him, just beating the shit out of him.

1:30:11Chuck Klosterman:I guess it's weird. I believe he is right when he complains in a way which I never believe with Luka. Like, I never believe it, you know?

1:30:19Bill Simmons:So you're talking, because you tapped into something interesting talking about you like the human element of it's okay if we screw up some calls that's what human beings are like like sora just basically was a huge bust right i don't know if you followed that at all but open eye spends all this stuff on sora and when it's happening it's like look how amazing this is we'll be able to take all these characters and things you like and you could make videos out of them right away and everybody's going to love this. And it turns out it was just an incredible amount of money and a lot of time and energy and all this time that the company was spending to make this video product that people didn't even really like that much and weren't using that much.

1:31:00Bill Simmons:And they were like, cool. And didn't really want.

1:31:02Chuck Klosterman:Didn't really want.

1:31:03Bill Simmons:Which is the metaverse too. Zuckerberg spends tens of billions of dollars, whatever he spent, to try to create this alternate universe people could go into. And people were like, I'm good with the one I'm in. Thanks anyway, though.

1:31:17Chuck Klosterman:And it's just like, these are like steps, right? So like, they're creating this universe where we can live this other life. And people are like, well, that sounds kind of fucked up to begin with. And then if they even try it, if they go into it, they're like, well, I guess this is something. What's going to have to happen is they're going to have to keep failing and making these steps and failing, making these steps and failing until they come up with something that when people use it, they're like, oh, this, I've always wanted this as it turns out. You know, it's like that, that's how it's going to be.

1:31:43Chuck Klosterman:Like, Like, no one's going to want this stuff until they see something and they're like, oh, I guess I didn't realize that it was my dream to have this sort of experience. I mean, you know, I remember with all these things, the Funtivo came out and it was described to me. And I was like, when am I going to need to freeze television? Why would I ever need to stop television? Like, you know, it's like it seems so idiotic to me. and then all of a sudden at one point i used it in the way like and it was like this is actually what i needed and and now if i if i'm ever at a hotel and i can't freeze the tv then i'm angry about that this technology that i couldn't even envision 30 years ago i'm now upset about if i

1:32:26Bill Simmons:don't have it at all times i think the funniest one for all these that's impossible to explain to anybody under 30 years old is how we never knew the score of games we're watching like if you went into a bar or you walked into the living room and your dad was watching a game and there was just no score and no time. There was no context to any of it. And then occasionally they would just flash it.

1:32:48Chuck Klosterman:But you know what? That has inadvertently, I'm glad we have that, but it has inadvertently led to greater social isolation. And here is why. Because it used to be, if you walked into a bar and the game was on, you'd have something to talk about with the person right away that would never be seen as a weird question. You'd be like, what's the score here? And they would tell you. And then maybe you could tell if the guy wanted to talk, cause he'd be like, oh, it's 21, 14, but, um, Steve Barkowski's hurt or whatever. You know, you want to talk about this now? It's like, you have nothing to ask the person.

1:33:26Bill Simmons:you have nothing to speak that that was a big loss cigarettes was another one a huge loss cigarettes were an unbelievable social connector they never great long cancer million bad things

1:33:39Chuck Klosterman:uh you want to talk to somebody separate you ask her do you want to have a cigarette or whatever yeah you don't smoke that much maybe she only smokes you act like you do so you can go it was a it was i used to go to to like shows in fargo when i was first covering music there i didn't know any of the people in the scene. It was kind of weird to stand there. So I would just smoke cigarettes. It was something to do.

1:34:01Bill Simmons:Or the group outside having sex and you ask somebody for a light and you're off and going. So you lose that and you lose asking people for the score. I don't... And then plus people, more people on their phones now when they're in public, which we didn't have either. Drink less now. All these things like that.

1:34:19Chuck Klosterman:All these things that in a vacuum, you could be like, well, it might be good for society. But when you put them all together, it's just as people never talking to anyone about anything and never needing to, and then getting to this weird point where it feels like an imposition if they do. Like, and I'm not saying I'm totally different from this. I just find that I think I used to be much more open to random conversation than I am now. It happens so rarely that when someone just starts talking to me sometimes, I think they're crazy. Right. Like maybe this is an insane person. Yeah, but you must get recognized by some people.

1:34:55Chuck Klosterman:Oh, well, you can always tell that. You can always tell. You can usually tell if a person's coming to talk to you and they know who you are, as opposed to they're just talking to you because they're normal, right? It should be normal. It shouldn't be weird for someone to start talking to me in line at the grocery store. But then it happens to rarely now that you kind of think it's weird when it occurs. I don't know.

1:35:19Bill Simmons:Some people have that natural welcoming. My wife's like this. My wife is too. People just, yeah.

1:35:26Chuck Klosterman:Like if she sits on an airplane with a stranger, that stranger's going to talk.

1:35:30Bill Simmons:It's a 100 % four hour combo. Yeah. And other people just give off the, I'm probably going to just read this book. Welcome to We Kept the Receipts presented by Tax Act, where we look back at our predictions, figure out who deserves a victory lap. and who was completely off base. Tax Act helps you with actual receipts, like the kind that you can use for tax deductions or credits and the ones that help you get your maximum refund every tax season. So let's see. I'll give you one good one and one bad one that I had before the basketball season. I was really bullish on San Antonio being good. And I think their over was like basically 43 wins.

1:36:11Bill Simmons:I thought they would go over that. It was one of my locks. And I just thought this Wemby thing was going to happen faster than people realized. I did not think they were going to be a finals contender, but I did think they were going to be really good. So that was a good one. Conversely, I just assumed like everybody else that Phoenix was going to stink. It felt like a rebuilding, revamping year for them. And meanwhile, they're going to be like the seventh seed in the playoffs. So not only did I miss this one, but their owner taunted me on Twitter about it. So you win some, you lose some. We kept the receipts presented by TaxAct.

1:36:41Bill Simmons:This tax season, make your max refund the one prediction that actually pays off. Visit taxact.com to learn more. Conditions apply. See taxact.com for details. This episode is brought to you by TaxAct. Like an expert coach, TaxAct offers step-by-step guidance and guaranteed accuracy when filing taxes. Get tips along the way. add expert assist to talk to tax experts and let our experts do your taxes for you with expert full service. Tax Act helps you find the deductions and credits you deserve so you can get them over with. Visit taxact.com to learn more. Conditions apply. See taxact.com for details.

1:37:32Bill Simmons:for work built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create, and summarize so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more at microsoft.com slash m365 copilot. Last thing and then we'll go. This is a quick one. My son has been going backwards with music. my son loves music is he back to the 40s now no he he went he's been listening to classic rock okay and he was listening so he it i just i almost wish like there was videotape that i could have just sent you each time where he'd come over to me and be like dad velvet underground was pretty good um the other day he came by he's like i've listened to all four led zeppelin albums I think I liked three the most four second and just started going through Led Zeppelin and I was just thinking like did you tell him there was more than four?

1:38:32Bill Simmons:oh yeah he knew he had just gone the first four but I was thinking when I really loved music and got into it in the early 80s right and it was like my dad was listening to Bob Seger and Springsteen and a couple of these other ones and then the Simon and Garfunkel concert album and then from there it's like well I need my own And then you start listening and buying stuff. And we only really had like 15 years of, so this is 1982 for me. We only had like 15 years of albums to go back and check out. So I remember like Bad Company, Greatest Hits. I remember getting that. You're like, oh, greatest. Or like Steve Miller had the Greatest Hits one.

1:39:13Bill Simmons:And Elton John had a Greatest Hits. Like Greatest Hits were a good way. We didn't have Spotify back then. Good way to kind of learn the best of different bands. but then we had this incredible 80s for music and then the 90s were even better and we had all of our all this new music that we spent more time listening to but now if you're my son and it's 2026 he has 60 years of modern music to go back and listen to and i wonder if that's part of the reason there's less of a necessity to listen to new music than there used to be because you can just go backwards and has this also happened with movies uh absolutely that is the case i mean it's

1:39:55Chuck Klosterman:yeah i would that that um particularly since like uh because modern music modern rock and pop and hip-hop is still operating in the same kind of modality as the previous music it's quite difficult for it to surpass it yeah i mean they're making you know they're using the same instruments with the same sort of length of song is basically the same verse chorus verse is still sort of the same structure like it's like so you're you really are competing against the best of everything because it hasn't changed enough i mean that's why when they talk about the slow cancellation of the future this is part of it i mean it's like if the future continues to be retro reinterpretations of the past well it is it's you know it's pretty difficult for anything to be more interesting than the interesting thing it's trying to replicate you know yeah but you're but you are right if it was in the early 80s you know the the expectation was well you really only have to go back 20 years you know you're getting the beginning of the beatles in and you're getting all music going forward so it's like you know it was there was a lot of music there but it was possible now Now it's that much more difficult.

1:41:11Chuck Klosterman:Plus we've also sort of expanded the possibility of things that were once not seen as remotely canonical being things that you're supposed to know about. If you care about music, you know, like it was, there, there are many, it would have been very possible if say you really, like you were on the music in the early eighties, somebody to be like, well, there's some shit you don't got to worry about. You don't got to worry about ABBA. You don't got to listen to those records. well now if your son is really into pop music at any point you would be like you need to listen to these ava records too like i mean there was a whole bunch of things that almost anything that any kind of cultural tenacity now seems more important that that that it's important enough to revisit where there are many things you just even like talking about bad company or whatever like there was certainly a time in the 80s when i would if if we would have been hanging out and you would have listened wanted to listen to bad company i would be like what the fuck for like why would we listen to this?

1:42:06Chuck Klosterman:Now it doesn't seem that way. Now it seems like, well, there's some meaning. I feel like we just would have argued

1:42:10Bill Simmons:all the time.

1:42:13Chuck Klosterman:I don't,

1:42:13Bill Simmons:it's hard to imagine. I don't think we would have had, we would have been bonded on basketball and football. And I think musically, we just would have been completely different with everything other than Van Halen, who we both would have loved.

1:42:26Chuck Klosterman:Well, I mean, it depends what age we met. Maybe police.

1:42:29Bill Simmons:I don't know. There would have been a couple.

1:42:31Chuck Klosterman:I didn't like the police when I was, I mean, it depends if we were really young, if we were 13, I don't know. If we had been 18, it would have been like, do you like drinking? We're friends. Like that's all. I mean, I was very open to people when I was 18. Like if they wanted to party, that was all it took. You know, I had, I had, I had friends who had nothing in common with me at all, except you went to these places Friday night and Saturday night. And then sometimes Thursday and sometimes Wednesday, like that was all, that's all it took. That's all it took to be friends. You know, now I don't know how that, you know, it's a, you know, it's the

1:43:05Bill Simmons:best for that is restaurants, people who work in restaurants, you're thrown together almost like you're in like people in a prison, how like the people in Shawshank would become friends, just they had nothing in common. They're just like, Hey, you want to hang out in the yard restaurants? Because you're on the same schedule. And if like this guy also smoked Marlboro lights, you just became friends. That was all you needed that we both go to bed at four in the morning.

1:43:29Chuck Klosterman:and nobody wants to work in an office right if everybody has the option of working at home or going in the office everyone would say i want to be at home because then i can like i can do my laundry too and do the thing and yet i mean i'm sure i would have want my whole life if given the option of not going to the office i would have taken it and yet 90 of the people in my life who are important to me. I met in an office. I like, I'm so lucky that I was in, you know, the opposite spin and the office in Akron and the office in Fargo and the office of my college newspaper. Those, it's like, there's this kind of intangible loss to these things.

1:44:11Chuck Klosterman:So this kind of shifts we've made in society that again, like I said earlier, better for the individual, much better for the individual in that singular experience, much worse for society as a whole. These things that help, you know, it's like, like my, when the Walkman came out, you know, they were like, oh, the Walkman, you know, it's going to be terrible. It's going to be people walking around, listening to music in their own world. I remember that. Yeah. You know what? They were fucking right. That totally happened. That totally happened. When MTV was out, what were the critics saying? Oh, it's going to change, you know.

1:44:47Chuck Klosterman:They're going to be stupid. Yeah. It totally happened. All the criticisms of television from the 1950s, they did happen. Like all of these things that are seen as like, you're so out of touch. This new technology is great. Everything people are currently saying about AI is going to happen. Like maybe not to the full totality of we live in a dystopia, but all of the things that we think will probably be a manifestation of this socially, I think that will probably be true. Like that's just because it always seems that way, right? The people who overreact are the ones who are right later.

1:45:24Bill Simmons:I'm more optimistic about that. We just did, I won't say the movie, but we did a movie that was really big for next rewatchables. That was really big in the eighties. And we were talking about basically what you said before about when these things that would happened in the 80s, sometimes these movies you liked, you liked because they were always on. And you eventually talked yourself into them. And I made the comparison about in music when people listen to albums and we actually had more time to listen and talk about different albums. We also had less stuff to do. Eventually the seventh best song in the album would become your favorite song in the album and stuff like that, which is also what was happening with some music and TV shows in the eighties, but now everybody moves so fast from one thing to the next.

1:46:21Bill Simmons:I wonder if the same kind of devotion will be there for these different things. I think, I think about weird shit like that now.

1:46:28Chuck Klosterman:I mean, it is, I remember I wrote a thing for Grantland, which was about sort of the idea and the problem of nostalgia. And one of the points that I was sort of making, which I do think is true, is that part of the reason that we feel nostalgic for things from the past was not even necessarily because of our experience with it or what the thing was. It was the pure repetition of hearing a song over and over and over again or a movie or anything over and over and over again. And, you know, I, I, I think with music, it is unlikely that that will happen with video experiences. I don't know. Cause it does seem like I know it's with my kids, they still are very comfortable rewatching things that they like, that they'll just kind of, you know, my kids as well.

1:47:21Chuck Klosterman:Oh, I think there's a natural thing of it. I mean, I used to, there were many, many books that like novels that I read multiple times when I was young. I can't imagine that happening now, like me reading a new novel and then be like, I'm going to read it again in a year. It just doesn't seem like that happens. But when you're young, you're really like that. You know, I think you almost teaching yourself how to understand the thing, like it, like season on the brink. I read that book. I bet at least three times in high school. And I do think that a lot of the way I think and write about sports is really based on that text because I was like, well, this is how it's supposed to be done.

1:47:56Chuck Klosterman:This is the tempo, you know, and I'm not saying that's the greatest book ever written, but I loved it. And it was sort of the, it was like, you have to like the book animal farm. I read the book animal farm so many different times in my life. And I think that at some point you read these things enough that you kind of think like, well, okay, this is the structure. This is how it's supposed to be. This is how it's supposed to work.

1:48:20Bill Simmons:I'm glad you said that. Cause I've, I've probably mentioned this in the past couple of times, but when people ask like advice for writing like tips, what are your tips other than, and you just tell them like, just keep doing it every day. Like this is the number one thing. Never stop, keep going, keep pressing. But one of the things that I loved that I think really made me better was I had probably, I don't know, eight to 10 books that I would just read over and over again and kind of study what they did. And they were books where the writing style wasn't even really like my style in certain cases.

1:48:52Bill Simmons:Like my favorite book ever was Breaks of the Game, which I really made an effort to read every 12 to 15 months. just because it would kind of reset my brain. And my style was nothing like Albert Sam's style. And the style of that book was nothing like what I was writing. But I would get a lot out of it. And I don't really know why. It was the repetition of the choices that he made were really helpful to me. And I don't know. It's like putting on an album you've heard a hundred times and it would just make you think about stuff.

1:49:24Chuck Klosterman:hunter s thompson supposedly used to literally retype ernest hemingway stories really he would yeah because he wanted to he wanted to know how it felt to write like these short kind of crisp sentences like how it would be and he would so he would literally retype them on a manual typewriter now i've never done that but i understand that idea i under you know i like yeah i when i was a music critic so many records i reviewed you know having listened to twice or three times especially in newspapers sometimes it'd be like get the radio i don't think i know like i really don't understand any record until i've played it 500 times and when i mean understand it i mean not make a decision of whether or not i like it or if it's good or bad like or for me to really like being able like to have thoughts on it that are both meaningful and original you know it's like it's got to be, it's a lot.

1:50:23Chuck Klosterman:It's a lot of times before you really understand things. And, uh, everything about our culture is trying to stop people from doing that. They're like, you don't even have to read the thing anymore. You can just type this thing and it will give you a synopsis of everything that's been written about it. I mean, it is like, like we are moving in a direction where deep understanding of things is not just becoming rare, but like irrelevant, like stupid, Like, why would you, you know?

1:50:49Bill Simmons:There's more answers too. There's more ways to unearth things. Like even, I mentioned my son earlier getting into music, which is fun in its own right, because he just comes in with these takes knowing nothing. So like he thinks Smashing Pumpkins are just better than Nirvana, which is an interesting argument to have. But he just likes their songs more. And he doesn't understand why they weren't bigger than Nirvana coming out of the 90s. So I was explaining to him all different.

1:51:15Chuck Klosterman:I mean, that's real taste though. Like, like when, when, when somebody has an opinion like that, a young person's like, that is like, it's not found knowledge. They were not convinced to think this. Like my, my son one time was telling me that he was like, these late period George Harrison songs are as good as the Beatles. At first I was going to be like, what the fuck? But I was like, no, actually what he's, it was like, this is a good thought he's having.

1:51:41Bill Simmons:Yeah.

1:51:42Chuck Klosterman:You know, it's like, it's like he, it's an unsullied thought without any, without reading Like, you know, like, you know, when you like, you know, before you take mushrooms for the first time, they'll tell you, well, you'll be able to think anything you want. And in your mind, you're like, well, I can already think what I want, but you can't. There are things in ourselves that stop us from having certain ideas. So sometimes when a kid is listening to music like that or your son's listening to music like that, there's like this kind of enforced ceiling of collective knowledge does not exist. so he can actually think whatever he wants about it.

1:52:18Chuck Klosterman:A guy interviewed me once for a book and he was saying like, you know, he was much younger than me. And he was like, you know, it was really interesting because I went back and I love Nirvana and I loved Soundgarden and I loved Alice in Chains and I loved Stone Temple Pilots. I thought they were all great, but I guess Stone Temple Pilots is terrible. And I was like, no, actually you were right the first time. Like what you were actually just listening to the music. It was people like me who was listening to the music and also taking in all this other ancillary bullshit that was affecting the way I was understanding it.

1:52:50Chuck Klosterman:It's like you understand it for real.

1:52:53Bill Simmons:Yeah, my son, it's a good point. My son, he even found a Smashing Pumpkins song that I didn't know about somehow called The Boy. And it was one of his favorite ones. And he's like, do you know this one? And it wasn't on any of the albums. And I somehow missed it. I really liked that band. They had a lot of records.

1:53:10Chuck Klosterman:Yeah, yeah.

1:53:11Bill Simmons:So it was on like a re-release thing or whatever. And it was, he was right. It was like one of the best seven or eight special pumpkin songs that I've heard. Um, but I, I liked that he deep dove. And I think that's one thing I think the, from what I've noticed from my kids, they really like something, they go all in on it. And then it kind of goes to the next thing sometimes, but then other things stay. And that's, that gives me more hope that they'll circle back to the things that kind of resonated the most, which I would hope that's how it keeps going.

1:53:46Chuck Klosterman:I just... It makes me nervous. It makes me nervous. You're rightfully nervous.

1:53:53Bill Simmons:We'll end on that disappointing topic. Football, how'd your book do? Good? It seemed like it did really well.

1:54:02Chuck Klosterman:Relative to other books, it seems to be doing great. It's hard as hell to sell books now, especially not fiction ones, but yes. I was very pleased. I'd say of all of the books I have released the, this, uh, like, uh, release, however you look at it was probably been the most fun since the very first one in a lot of ways. Like it, it has went great. I think I did like 25 podcasts or something. It's unbelievable. It's just crazy how it is now, but that's just how, that's how it is.

1:54:32Bill Simmons:You know, you were like a borderline podcast whore. I was watching it from afar. I was like, wow, look at this guy.

1:54:37Chuck Klosterman:I just went on whatever. I mean, it was like, they kept saying, do you want it? They want you to be on this one. Will you be on it? And I'll be like, well, why not? Like it's because these, what also is shocking to me, maybe not shocking, just maybe predictably surprising. A podcast can be extraordinarily popular and yet completely unknown to every single person who doesn't actively listen to it. Like it is just wild. It was not like there's been nothing else like this. We're like, you know, you could be somebody like you didn't watch the TV show Dallas, but you knew Dallas was a popular TV show.

1:55:15Chuck Klosterman:You didn't like Nickelback, but you knew Nickelback was huge. There are all these podcasts with massive audiences that every single person I mentioned him to would be like, what? I've never heard of that. I've never heard of it. You know, and then we know it's in New York doing some of these and like you're kind of in Chinatown or like on that lower east side. And like every time you see like a dilapidated office building, you go in and it's all podcast studios. That's like, like how many podcasts are being put out there? It is just like, it's bizarre. It'd be like, I mean, it must've been like, you know, when they always say like, you know, at one point like the city of Chicago had like 152 daily newspapers or whatever.

1:55:55Chuck Klosterman:That's kind of what it's like now, where it's just like all these people being able to do this. you know, it's fine. There's no downside to it, but it's just strange.

1:56:06Bill Simmons:I think that's a good analogy though because like you think about whatever time that was in America when every city had seven newspapers, but if you lived in another city, you didn't know anything about the other seven newspapers in like Boston or Chicago. It's kind of what it's like. All right, Chuck Klosterman, great to see you as always. Thank you for the time. I will see you during the NBA playoffs.

1:56:25Chuck Klosterman:Okay.

1:56:26Bill Simmons:All right.

1:56:26Chuck Klosterman:Bye-bye.

1:56:28Bill Simmons:All right, that's it for the podcast. Thanks to Chuck. Thanks to Eduardo and Gahal. As always, don't forget, theringer.com slash events. Tickets go on sale for our We Watchables live show in San Francisco on April 8th. So on April 1st, 10 a.m. Go there, get tickets, and we'll see you in the Bay. I'm going to be back on this feed one more time on Thursday with one more podcast. See you then.

1:57:00Bill Simmons:I feel it's with them On the wayside On the first side of the road

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