The Bill Simmons Podcast - Jon Jones’s Last Stand, Wemby’s Ceiling, the Jokic Backlash, and UFOs With Ariel Helwani and Chuck Klosterman

Episode Date: March 3, 2023

The Ringer's Bill Simmons is joined by Ariel Helwani to discuss UFC 285, Jon Jones's first fight since 2020, the current state of the UFC, and more (3:07). Then Bill talks with author Chuck Klosterman about the warranted, and maybe even understated, hype around NBA draft prospect Victor Wembanyama, whether sports records are losing their luster, the NBA MVP debate, the state of college sports, UFOs, the supernatural, and much more! (24:37). Host: Bill Simmons Guests: Ariel Helwani and Chuck Klosterman Producer: Kyle Crichton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Um, so check that out. Listen to their podcast as well. We put up on the prestige TV podcast. We did a succession hall of fame episode that is already up. It was the, which side are you on episode six, season one, the first great succession episode. We are going to do that in the prestige pod every week leading to, uh, leading to March 28th when succession comes back. So there you go. Russillo is coming back on Sunday. So decided to get a little goofy for this podcast. We have Ariel Hawane

talking about Jon Jones and trying to put him in a perspective career-wise what's going to happen at the UFC event this Saturday. Who's the best athlete doppelganger for him in team sports and all kinds of stuff. That was

really fun. And then our old friend Chuck Klosterman, a podcast hall of famer for the BS podcast and for the old BS report. And he's back and we talked about a whole bunch of things. Victor Wimbanyama, ghosts, UFOs,

Ralph Sampson. We go all over the place. It's all next. First, our friends from Pearl Jam. Alright, there is a big, big, big UFC event this weekend. This is big. It's big. It's a big one. John Jones is back.

Yes. Three plus years, Aria Hawane. Since we've seen John Jones, he's had a litany of issues. First of all, did you think we'd ever see him again? I thought we would see him again. And by the way, great to be back. A little bit disappointed we're not starting with the hottest team in the NBA. You're New York Knicks six in a row.

No big deal. But that's okay. I know you don't want to bring that up, especially after the big win on Monday against the Celtics. Don't worry. We don't have to talk about it. It's okay. That's fine. It's totally okay.

Jon Jones was going to come back. He's too young. There was too much for him left to do. What else is he going to do? He's not going to become a broadcaster. He's not going to become a coach. So I thought he would come back. How about this?

The last time we saw Jon Jones fight, the last time we could say we're in the midst of a Jon Jones fight week was February of 2020 before the whole world changed, shut down. It's like a relic of a different lifetime. It is quite nice to see him back despite the fact that of course he's coming back as a heavyweight all this other stuff has happened it feels cozy it feels like comfort food having him back 26 and one with one no contest

and the one that he lost was a dq loss he's basically never lost never lost um youngest ufc champ ever i wrote all this down i did a lot of research for this one he has all the light heavyweight records you would want um and yet his legacy was starting to become this is sad how this is going right he basically has a whole decade of bad behavior failed drug tests arrests all kinds of things that threaten to overshadow. I'm trying to think what boxer, like what famous boxer, what athlete had a run like this where you're like the best in the world and yet you're your own worst enemy in basically every other part of your life. Well, the one that comes to mind is Mike Tyson, but it was obviously a little bit different because

he went to jail for an extended period of time. The comparison that I've always made as far as Jon Jones is concerned, and it's not a perfect one, but I think it's one that you would appreciate. To me, he was the closest thing that we ever had to Doc Gooden and Daryl Strawberry, two guys who had incredible God-given ability, but couldn't get out of their own way. Now, the difference is it always felt like Doc and Daryl never quite realized their potential. Jones was able to overcome all of those faults, vices, whatever you want to call them, and still be in many people's eyes, the greatest of all time, have these amazing, you know, streaks, runs, records, all that stuff. I remember talking to Jon Jones.

This is how far back it goes. He won the belt in 2011. On the day he won the belt in Newark, New Jersey, he took down a mugger. He was meditating at a park, took down a mugger. And we were like, holy smokes, youngest guy just beat Shogun. He's taking down a mugger in the morning. Like this guy is a gift from the promotional heavens, right? Like he is every promoter's dream. He seemed clean cut, son of a pastor, all that stuff. Shortly thereafter says, I'll never show up on TMZ. I'll never get in trouble. A month later, he's on TMZ for a bad thing. And then it all kind of goes downhill from there,

but still always won, always was able to rise to the occasion. In 2013, he's fighting Alexander Gustafson. He's walking out in Toronto before, in my opinion, the greatest UFC fight of all time, still to this day, and is telling himself, I can't believe I'm about to lose. I can't believe I didn't prepare. I can't believe earlier this week I drove outside of Toronto one hour to go party, quote unquote. And what does he do? He digs down deep. He wins. That was 10 years ago. That's how long he's been dealing with this stuff. Now, you talk about the last few performances. The last three were very lackluster. His fights against Tiago Santos, Anthony Smith, Dominic Reyes, the last one, which The last three were very lackluster. His fights against Thiago Santos, Anthony Smith,

Dominic Reyes, the last one which I thought he lost. All very lackluster. Everyone wants to give him the out. Everyone wants to say it's because he wasn't motivated, because he was bored. That's what he's saying. I raise my hand and say,

is that really it? Or was the rubber meeting the road? Was all the partying, was all that stuff catching up to him? And then Father Time catching up as well, and he was just kind of meeting his match. We're about to find out on Saturday. What's the truth? Cause the last three years he hasn't fought, but what has he been doing those last three years? Has he been partying? Has he been letting himself go? Is that why he's fighting at heavyweight? Cause he doesn't want to cut the extra weight. There's so many questions

that I can't wait to get the answer to on Saturday. Can you tell him fired up bill? It's a great one. I, you know great one. My buddy, Jeff Gallo, my best friend from high school, this is his guy. He sent me this whole text of all these different things. Because I told him I was talking to him, you got to ask him, is it bad if you left the New Mexico gym? But with the way you laid out that good and strawberry thing, I actually thought of another person that's a better example. It's Lawrence Taylor. Yeah, that's a great example. Because Lawrence Taylor, he leaves football.

He goes down as the best defensive player of all time anyway, despite the fact that he was his own worst enemy. And despite the fact that he probably left some career on the table, he still won the two Super Bowls. He's still, I don't care who's come next, he's still the best. And yet there's like a little tinge of sadness to it too because he left some stuff on

and maybe that's what's gonna happen with Jon Jones. That's a fantastic comparison. It really is. I kind of wish that I thought of it myself. I remember- We workshopped it. Yeah, no, it's good. It's good.

We went from Doc to New you know, New York guys. Well, I was there for Doc and I was living in Connecticut. I mean, I'm still him and Pedro are the only two pictures I've ever seen at that level ever. Incredible. Yeah. And we know about the stories of him not showing up to the parade and all that stuff. I remember talking to John Jones in 2018, and this was before the Alexander Gustafson

rematch, which in my opinion was his last great fight. And by the way, I don't know if a lot of your listeners even know this. I mean, every John Jones fight week is just filled with drama. They moved that event from Las Vegas to Inglewood, California mid-week, mid-fight week, because a test popped up that Nevada wasn't comfortable with. And so they went to like very strange stuff. They moved the event for him. Right. But in that fight, he looked great. And it was his last dominant win. The next three were the three that I just talked about Smith Santos and Dominic Reyes. But before that fight, he came to my studio when I was at ESPN and I said to him, look, you've

been on a nice little run here. No drama, no issues. Whenever they do the 30 for 30 on you, because I think you could do a great 30 for 30 or any kind of documentary on Jon Jones. Whenever they do it, are they going to say, yes, you were Lawrence Taylor, Doc Good, and Daryl Straub. Yes, you messed up time and again. You went to jail, hit and run all this stuff. But then you figured it out. And the last five or six years of your life or career were squeaky clean.

And you were able to realize all your potential. His response was, man, I don't know if I could stay out of trouble for that long. And I was like, damn, man, at least he's honest. At least he gets it. And guess what happened? First month of the pandemic gets in trouble. A year later, the night he gets inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame for that first Gustafson fight gets in trouble.

Now, it's been a bit of a nice run here as far as no trouble is concerned. But my question is, when GSP came back after a four-year layoff, we knew he was working out. We knew he was treating his body like a temple. Is Jon Jones doing that? And if he's not, his age at this point, mid to late 30s, it's all going to catch up and he's going to falter. My only resume with this stuff is all the boxing is, you know, I love boxing as do you. And we've seen the boxers in situations like this, the guys who, you know, burn the candle on both ends and it ends abruptly and fast in a bad way. Usually is how it goes. There's two things that I think are bad signs for him. One is that

the other is just the ring rust thing. And now, you know, we don't have ring rust in MMA. What do you call it? Octagon rust? Cage rust. Cage rust? Okay, cage rust. But this is like perennially one of the best betting spots you can have is the former awesome boxer with the big name

who just hasn't been fighting that much and maybe even has like the two, three years off, but his name, like Jon Jones' favorite, he's minus 166 on FanDuel, and we haven't seen him in three plus years. The bookies in the casinos, they love this situation because the guy he's fighting is good. Very good.

That's the other thing. It's not like this is like a tomato matchup or somebody who's got a name, but I think Cyril Ghosn, I've seen multiple fights with him where you're like, Jesus, this guy, you know, he even took the Ghosn,

like, I don't know. He took him five rounds. Well, here's the thing about Cyril Ghosn. He is very good. He's an incredible athlete, by the way. Like one thing about fighters, they suck at all other sports. Have you ever seen John Jones shoot a basketball? He shoots it like a two handed set shot. He has no idea what he's

doing. Right. Cyril Ghosn, when he was young, they actually thought he was going to be a pro basketball player in France. I call him the French Prince. I stole that from Frank Nilekina, who didn't deserve that nickname. And I gave it to Cyril Ghosn. He's also an incredible soccer player, too. He's just a great athlete. And so, you know, over time- Well, he'd have the ones where he'd go like leg kick strategy. Like, you know, he's pretty malleable, which is kind of what I would want against Jon Jones. He's great.

Here's the thing. Here are the two things that are working against him right now as far as the public is concerned. Number one, everyone's enamored with Jon. He's back. He's the GOAT, all this stuff. So people want to like fall in love with this story. Number two, you mentioned the Francis fight. And if I could steal a term from the

younger demographic out there, he sort of fumbled the bag that night in Anaheim last year. Why? Because number one, he was set up to be like the hit man for the UFC. The UFC wanted him to beat Francis in his last fight and, you know, get rid of him and take the belt. Didn't happen. But number two, he was up two rounds to none in that fight and then lost the last three rounds. And he lost the last three rounds to an older Francis Ngannou, to a Francis Ngannou who doesn't know how to wrestle, who has never used wrestling before in his UFC fights, to a Francis Ngannou who doesn't wrestle with a freaking torn ACL.

He had a torn ACL in that fight and still out wrestled surreal gun. He really, really stumbled in that one badly and he should have won that fight. Francis had to get surgery afterwards. The doctor told him before the fight on fight, we do not fight. This is going to be detrimental to your career. There was just too much hanging on it. He had to do it. So I think that people wonder, all right, how's he going to be in this big spot? I think he's learned a lot. He's come back since, by the way, he fought in Paris in his hometown and looked great back in September.

But, you know, this is a different beast. This is a pay-per-view main event once again against Jon Jones. I think he rises to the occasion and looks good. But there's a lot of people out there that think of the three options for Jon to come back to, it was Stipe Miocic, Francis Ngannou, Cyril Ghosn, that he's the worst

because he's the youngest, quickest, most athletic of the bunch. So we'll see what happens on Saturday. Well, he's also a heavyweight. And that's been another thing over the years in boxing. When the guy that keeps moving up weights in boxing, it's a lot easier. You're moving up, you know, nine, 10 pounds. And this going from light heavyweight to heavyweight is pretty substantial. And we've seen in boxing, sometimes you can go up one too many. So I worry about that one too. But then just to go back on all the shit that's happened to Jones, 2012 DUI, 2014 failed the drug test a month before he beat Cormier. Felony hit and run in 2015. Tested positive for banned substances after fights in 16 and 17.

And the 17 fight was against Cormier. That became a no contest. 2019 batter and a cocktail waitress, no contest, pleaded. 2020 aggravated DWI. And 2021 domestic violence incident. Nothing in 22 though. No.

So he's on a streak, but it's really rough when you like go through and you're like, man, this guy, and plus there's probably stuff that never came to light too. And you just think this guy, just to be around and be favored in a heavy, in a heavyweight, uh, UFC match in 2023, probably unlikely just if you look at the record, but I think that speaks to what a specimen he is, right? It's a little like the Lawrence Taylor thing,

where they would be like, that guy was fucking amazing. The guy would crawl out of some hotel room and he could play on a Sunday and he knew he hadn't slept for three days. Just to drive home

the point even more, if we are going to have a discussion on who's the greatest MMA fighter of all time and PD infractions aren't involved. Like there's no asterisk involved. He's number one and it's not really even close. Like his run early on, it was a murderer's row. Now, if we want to, you know, if we want to play the

game where the PD infraction eliminates you, then to me, GSP is number one. But if everyone is involved, everyone's available, it's Jon Jones. It's one of the greatest runs of all time. And it's funny because I think a lot of the new fans, the pandemic fans, the gambling era fans, the ESPN era fans

don't even know that Jon Jones. They aren't even aware of who that guy is. So they're all wondering like, OK, this sounds cool, but like, why are you guys so gaga over? It's because of what he did

to Lyoto Machida and Vitor Belfort and Shogun Hua and Quinton Jackson in 2011, 12, 13, 40. And even that DC fight, the first one in 2015, he took down the Olympian multiple times in that fight. And that was a coming out party for him because he took him down multiple times and they had such a bad rivalry. They hated each other. It was, in my opinion, still the greatest feud in UFC history. And afterwards, if you recall,

hit him with the DX, suck it. And at the post-fight press conference said, I hope he's crying somewhere right now. Like that was the first time that he finally embraced the inner heel that we got to see the true Jon Jones, which I thought was finally, like it was refreshing.

So now, you know, he's staying out of trouble to your point, but also to your point, what has he been doing? Where has he been training? How has he been taking care of himself? And how's he going to look and fight and feel with 20, 30 extra pounds on him come fight night, right? So what do we think, 25 extra pounds? At least. He was never a really big light heavyweight. He had to cut 20 or so pounds,

but everyone does. But he was never big, right? Even outside of the fights, he was never big. And so I worry how he fights with that extra weight. Sometimes it doesn't bode well. Cyril Gunn is a legit 260, 255 pounder, like legit. That to me is another question going. There's so many questions going into this fight and that's what makes it so great. I didn't tell you this tidbit I'm about to give you. My son loves Jon Jones. Now, keep in mind, has never seen a Jon Jones pay-per-view fight, has only started following and caring about MMA

through TikTok and YouTube the last couple years. And guess who's the guy, if my son's 15 and him and his friends, and they pass these clips back and forth and they're into the guy that just jumps off the TikTok screen of the YouTube screen. If you're going to anybody the last 30 years, it's John Jones. Wow. And he has this, just these different like moves that he does.

One of which was my son will do this thing where he pretends he's going to like, like tackle me. But then at the last second, does that turn the 180 elbow thing? Never lands it on me, obviously. But he's like, Jon Jones, unstoppable. I'm like, you've never watched a Jon Jones fight? What's going on? But he was like, that's the guy. Are you surprised to hear that? There's TikTok, YouTube stuff with him now? Extremely surprised.

I would think it's Conor McGregor, number one. I would think it's Israel Adesanya. I would think it's Habib. I think that Jon Jones, there's the danger element with him too, because you know, he's like not the greatest guy. Maybe that ties into it too. A little bit of a bad boy. Is your son going to watch on Saturday? Oh, we're absolutely 100% watching. Okay. I love that. That's happening. I think also part of his allure, you know, if you're a sports fan, you know about Chandler Jones, his brother, you know about Arthur Jones, like this family, two NFL stars, champions. He's the greatest MMA fighter of all time in many people's eyes. So I think that kind of helped him a little bit, but I have to say, like, I can't even think of a good answer here. I am shocked to hear that because I thought, and I sensed this a little bit, maybe I'm just talking to the wrong

people that there's a lot of new fans of this sport, like the post pandemic fans who just don't get what the fuss is. Like they've heard people like me talk about the DC rivalry and all this, but to them, it's about like, you know, Patty Pimblett and Conor McGregor and all these guys. And I don't know if they're going to see the John Jones that we saw eight, nine years ago. I don't know if that guy can ever come back, especially not as a heavyweight, but it's a very smart move on his part because if he loses to Cyril Gunn, the legacy at 205 doesn't get touched. That is always going to just remain there, pristine, untouched. He's kind of playing with House's money now. And if he wins, the debate is over.

Like he is the greatest. There's no doubt about it. Well, to be fair, my sample size was only LA prep school kids in the ninth grade. So I don't know. Maybe that's not around the world. But I thought it was interesting that he was the one. I thought the same thing as you. I thought it would have been McGregor

because McGregor's had more fun. But I think there's a technical aspect to some of the stuff he does that is pretty cool. Just in general, UFC, how are we feeling? Let me tell you something, man. Do they need this one? Do they need like a W here? Because it hasn't been a great last couple months.

Okay, so there's two answers there. Number one, what a great time to be hosting the Ringer MMA show. Shout out our preview for 285. Big preview pod. Yeah, is out right now. So go check it out. It's a great time because the next two months are incredible as far as UFC is concerned. We've got this pay-per-view on Saturday, UFC 285. Two weeks later, we have another pay-per-view, the trilogy, Leon Edwards versus Kamaru Usman in London. They never do pay-per-views in London. That's two weeks later? Two weeks later, March 18th. Incredible. Two weeks after that, or maybe it's three, April 8th, Israel Destinia versus Alex Pereira 2 going down, or maybe 4 if you want to count the kickboxing matches in Miami. That's April 8th. And then May 6th, we're getting the return of Henry Cejudo against Aljamain Sterling. That's a big bantamweight title fight. And there's a bunch

of fight nights. The best part about it, there's no apex cards. They're not fighting at that venue that I hate, that is soulless. It's a great stretch. So this is the beginning of an amazing run. And by the way, a couple of weeks ago in Perth was an incredible main event, Alex Volkanovsky and Issam Makhachev. So they're on a roll right now. As far as the W is concerned, you can make a case that Jon Jones is tougher to deal with. He's a headache. He's unreliable. He's given them a lot of heart attacks over the last decade or so. But because Francis Ngannou left and was stripped of the belt and he's the heavyweight champ, but now he's no longer the champ because he's no longer in the company.

And because he has a win over Cyril Gunn, if Cyril Gunn wins this fight, there's still the Francis Cloud hanging over the heavyweight division. If Jon Jones wins, you got the return of the king, the return of the superstar, but also he is not tied to Francis whatsoever.

So you could say, that's the guy, that's the main man, that's the man at heavyweight and light heavyweight. So it separates them more from Francis. By the way, I that's the man at heavyweight and light heavyweight so it separates them more from Francis by the way I'm setting the line at one and a half

for Francis Ngannou mentions on the pay-per-view on Saturday they are going to pretend that he doesn't exist I'm going with the under yeah they're going to pretend

he doesn't exist it's very pro wrestling I hate this stuff I wish they would be more honest the countdown show that just came out on Sunday

has no mention of him whatsoever they say that Cyril lost the fight in Anaheim they don't say against who they don't even show his face they would be more honest. The countdown show that just came out on Sunday has no mention of him whatsoever. They say that Surreal lost the fight in Anaheim. They don't say against who. They don't even show his face. He just lost a mystery opponent. It was just like, yes.

It was like a luchador. Yes. Yeah. Ridiculous. But if John wins, it's a clean break. If Surreal wins. So that to me,

when I think of W, is that a W? No, but John winning is big for them. And this is the beginning of a big stretch. So they're doing just fine. Slap league, maybe not? No, but John winning is big for them. And this is the beginning of a big stretch. So they're doing just fine. Slap League, maybe not as much,

but UFC doing just fine. Slap League. Is that even happening still? It's happening. Yes. The finale, and I guess I'm giving them a plug here, is airing on something called Rumble.

What the hell is Rumble? I had no idea it was even still going on. Rumble. Have you ever heard of Rumble? Is that a, what is that? It's like a social media platform. I've never even heard of them. Wow.

Man, that's probably where Jake Paul's going to end up with his boxing. I lost 100 hours on Jake Paul Saturday. Oh, no. I bet on the Jake Paul, on Sunday on the Jake Paul KO for, was like, I don't know, plus 220. Yeah, I was like, Tyson

Fury's brother? Get out of here. And Jake Paul really just has the one move. He ducks down and then he throws the overhand right? And once you figure that one out, there's not like a plan B really. So I think that might be it for him. You'll get another crack

in the rematch. They're going to try to do the rematch so you can try it again. Well, hopefully they'll have a better referee. All right, so big thing Saturday night. We'll find out our answer on Jon Jones once and for all.

Ringer MMA show. You're breaking down. What's the second best fight, by the way? I forgot to ask you. Oh, my God. Valentina Shevchenko against Alexa Grasso,

but also Bo Nickel, the pride of Penn State, making his official UFC debut. And there's a great fight between a guy named Shavkat Rahmanov going up against Jeff Neal. And one more, Jalen Turner versus Mateus Gamrou. This main card, trust me, basically the last 10 fights on this card, you want to watch. There's a good storyline attached to every single one of them. One of their better offerings in a very, very long time. Awesome. And then you'll have a ringer MMA pod right after that we're going to tape live on Twitter spaces.

And there you go. Arjo, great to see you as always. It's great to see you, Bill. Thank you for having me. This episode is brought to you by my old friend, Miller Lite. I've been a big fan of Miller Lite, man, since college days when I was allowed to have beer. I think nephew Kyle is a fan too. Miller Lite keeps it simple for us. Undebatable

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All right, I've taped this on Thursday morning. Trying something fancy with Chuck Klosterman. Think of, I don't remember when we did our first podcast, but I was on some rinky-dink machine calling you. I couldn't see you. Now I'm in the Spotify studio. I got lights on. You're on the Zoom TV. We've really come a long way in 2023. I'm excited to see you. It is. Those early podcasts, it was also almost like we thought we were doing something just almost idiotic, like who would possibly even want to be listening to this?

It was very liberating. Now there's much more pressure doing these things because it seems as though the impact is much greater than actually writing something. Well, even back then, it seemed like more people were listening than maybe we realized because it's not like ESPN was telling me anything. But it was almost like anecdotally finding out people were listening, then maybe we realized, because it's not like ESPN was telling me anything, but it was almost like anecdotally finding out people were listening to our conversations. It was like, really? You listened to that? That was my reaction for the first 18 months I had a podcast. Wow. I can't believe it. I remember celebrities, somebody like Seth Meyers being like,

yeah, I heard you and Jacko talking about the yankees and i'm like what you like i was just stunned that anyone listened to him that's it it was i mean it still seems to come up all the time if i'm at the airport if i'm at the dog park a lot of guys at the dog park listen to this podcast it's a great dog park podcast probably people right now like waiting for their dog to take a deuce well you have a long history of loving your dog. I do. It's possible that could be the defining work of your writing career. With that column you wrote about the dead dog.

It's certainly the most read thing I think I ever wrote. It's the one that still gets mentioned. Dog stuff always plays. So we have a bunch of stuff. We gave ourselves an hour to race through stuff. This is one of your favorite times of the year with March Madness coming. But you said you had two topics for me. You didn't tell me what they were. You're going to throw them at me and we're going to go. I want to surprise you. Okay. The first one. Okay. So now I've heard, tell me if

this is true. Do you like to gamble? You enjoy gambling. You enjoy some gambling. I want to make a wager with you, a public wager over the best chicken Parmesan meal in Los Angeles. Right. Let's do it. Okay. I want to create an over-under. You're going to set the number and I'll pick the over and the under.

Okay. Victor Wimbinyana. Wimbinyana? When he is a rookie next year in the NBA, assuming he plays, let's say for a minimum of 41 games, how many points a game will he average? So this is tough because sometimes rookies come in and they're worse than you think scoring wise. And then other times people come in like Paolo where it's like, oh, he's actually better as an NBA player than it's tough. He's averaging 22 points a game in that weird kind of league he's playing in now. But a lot of times for these guys coming over from Europe,

even like Luca or whatever, when you looked at his numbers in Europe, they were much lower than what he ended up becoming. It's hard to tell sometimes. Plus, he'll be maturing. He's going to get more shots. He's going to play a lot of minutes. I'm curious what you're going to place this at. I'm going to place this at 18 points a game. I'm taking the over. I think he's going to average 21 points a game as a rookie in the NBA. Like a 21-12 with four blocks, something like that?

Four blocks, maybe. Rebounding, it's harder to tell because of his frame. I'm not certain like that. Four blocks, maybe rebounding. It's harder to tell, you know, because of his frame. I can't, I'm not certain on that, but I do think he's going to score quite a bit immediately. So it sounds like you're fascinated by this guy. Well, I, it is, I mean, I am in a lot of ways. I mean, I, I, it's just, uh, uh, it is a new thing. Like there, there, there isn't, if you look at him just playing and you say you watched for four seconds, you're like, well, I'm watching Brad Sellers

or something. It doesn't seem like it can possibly work, but it clearly does. I mean, I just... Brad Sellers. Well, because he was like a seven-foot guy who shot threes and moved around like that. It is... I don't know.

It seems to be kind of the fruition of a lot of things that have changed about basketball. And they're all kind of coming together on this one guy. And it I I, you know, obviously that he could be a bust. Anyone could be a bust. Anyone could be a bust, but I don't think that's going to happen because the thing is, if he can comfortably shoot threes, well, there's absolutely no way to defend that part of his game. So at an absolute minimum, he can be a standing jump shooter from 27, 26, 25 feet and just, you know, pretty much shoot without a defender on him because there's

no one's going to be able to sort of, uh, I, I used to think that about Porzingis, like when he'd shoot those corner threes, I was like, this is the best shot in basketball because, you know, but I don't think that he has the skills of this guy. And I think that this guy is feasibly going to get better. So I think it's going to be pretty immediate how successful he's going to be as an offensive player. I watched him for an hour and I was like, this guy's going to be, if he can just stay healthy, will be a transcendent player

because he's going to get all the stuff around the rim just because of how tall he is. So you just add that part. Apparently, they're working on his feet. They're conditioning his feet, like making the muscles in his feet stronger because that is, of course, is the fear with a guy that size.

Right. His foot will get hurt. They've done a lot of good stuff with him physically because you go backwards. First of all, he has the drop step step already. It seems like he has the makings of a jump hook. He's got like kind of a stop and pop 17, 18 footer. The three point shooting, he doesn't, he takes them.

He doesn't, he's like 32, 33% to put that, but that'll come. But going backwards, like you and I are old enough to remember Samson. And Samson came in and this was very, this was 40 years ago, but when he was in college and there was that famous 1980 draft when Red Auerbach

was trying to get his rights and it ended up being he traded back and he got McHale and Parrish, so it all worked out. But the Samson thing, it was like, this guy's Kareem, but he thinks he's a guard. Yeah, and the thing at the time for Samson, he was always fighting coaches telling

him not to face the basket. Right. And he and he was actually a very like a very coachable player. But he listened to these guys. I mean, imagine if the skills that Sampson had had had been developed prior to going to Virginia, where he had spent all this time facing the basket, being rewarded for his ability to cross over and stuff like that. That's what's happening to this guy. This guy is... He wants to be a guard. Yes. And people want him to be a guard.

You talk about just drop stepping and all that stuff. I think he's going to play the majority of his career facing the basket. Well, I was just talking... I mentioned this on the pod the other day, but I was talking to a Knicks fan who was saying how some of the stuff Embiid does when he faces up is the stuff

like he was like, this was a guy who thinks Ewing was a better offensive player than he gets credit for now. And he was like, one of the things when Ewing was starting the whole time, he played a lot of big guys, a lot of traffic. There's no spacing at all. But Ewing's offensive game was actually like really, really great. But it was just the era he played, you didn't get to totally see it. He still averaged like 27, 28, 29 a game. But he was like, if you put him in this era where he could face up and he could beat people off the dribble,

he could whirl around, do the jump hook stuff. That's all this stuff Wemba Nyama is going to have. I think when I think about Samson, it's weird. He came and went, right? By 88, he was broken down. His knees were gone. But in the early 80s, he was as important as Ewing was. He certainly felt like the successor to Wilt and Kareem. And then he actually was successful as a basketball player, right?

The Rockets made the finals. They kicked the shit out of the Lakers. And the big reason was he was able to play face in the basket with Hakeem. So to me, that's the Wemba Nyama blueprint is like, we've kind of seen this before in other faces. I think the thing that we haven't seen though, is the idea that someone was actually pushed to do this as opposed to fighting the current of the game and always being, you know, like, like there, I remember there was an inside sports story about Ralph Sampson where it talked about like how in,

I think it was when he was playing with the warriors, maybe that like he took a three pointer dribbled between his legs and threw a behind the back pass on this game. And it was used as sort of an illustration of like, there's something wrong with this guy. Like he won't accept that he's just like a brilliant putback artist and he should just be down on the, you know. Right. Get down low. What are you doing? What are you doing 25 feet away? It kind of seemed true. I mean, it was sort of like, you know, but I think it would be just completely different if Ralph Sampson had been born in, you know, 2001 or whatever. Oh, we've talked about this before. There's certain guys that just miss their era completely. Absolutely.

He is definitely in the top five. If he just comes along 30 years later, it's a totally different animal. And Curry, the other way, Curry comes in in the late 70s. I don't know what happens to him, but but you know or maybe that like the early 70s it's a three-pointer it hasn't three points yet then he's basically pete maravich i mean maybe curry goes to the aba because then that would be and then they would say his skills wouldn't cross

over because the nba doesn't have the three-point line i mean like you know like the thing that like bob ryan was tweeting about zach edney the the guy from Purdue. He was like this seven foot guy from Purdue. If he can't play in the NBA, the NBA is just broken. What is interesting, though, is there has always been guys who couldn't play in the NBA just because of like how the game was structured. Like there were tons of guys in the 70s and 80s who were these great shooters who i think could have had real careers if they played now but they didn't have a chance like i i i mean this is like a weird example but someone like steve elford or something like he could have had a longer career in like a steve kerr type role uh despite the limitations he might have had physically but the fact that he was

a great jump shooter was not enough to justify keeping him on a team. I remember I had this guy, Michael Smith, who's longtime Clipper announcer, but he was, the Celtics took him over Tim Hardaway and he was a BYU guy. He was a little bit older and he was kind of that, he wasn't really a power forward. He wasn't really a small forward, couldn't really guard anybody, but he's a really good shooter. And when he came in the league, it just was kind of the wrong time for somebody like him, and he didn't make it.

If you put him now, he would have signed a five-year, $90 million contract like Duncan Robinson did. He would have just been like, here's what I do. I'm in the corner. I'm going to make 45% of my threes here, and you can hide me, and you can play different zones. But yeah, I, it's so funny to me. But on that, conversely, there's some guys that I think like to me, Durant. And now granted, it's a little different how we play basketball now than in the seventies, but I just think Durant works in any single era we have in basketball. It just doesn't matter. He's getting 30 points no matter what the rules are, you know. But he's getting 30 points totally differently if

he played in the past. There's no way a seven foot guy would have been allowed to play the way he plays. And because of his touch and his moves, they would just bolt him up a bit, I think. But there's no way he would have been as effective. Well, McAdoo was the, McAdoo was the first guy who kind of played like him where he was a center, but he was away from the basket. And I guess Cowens did that a little bit too, but yeah, we're going back to Wemba.

Yama. I actually think there's not enough hype about this because within the league, you're seeing like San Antonio is throwing away their season. Uh, we've had, I think four teams have thrown away their seasons. And then OKC,

I don't know what the deal is with Shea Gilgis Alexander, but I had him first team all NBA and now he's not playing. I don't know how hard he is, but OKC you could make a case like you just go on a little 10 game losing streak and they'll have 10% odds. I think all these people are seeing it the same way we saw it with LeBron

20 years ago, where it's like, this guy's actually a sure thing. Zion, as great as he was, there was still, he was a sure thing, but not, there was still like, ah, physically, I worry. Like he seems a little knock kneed. He's got hurt a couple of times in high school and college. Like, are we sure he's going to stay healthy? There was that piece kind of lingering. And I guess with Wim Benyam, it's just because of his size.

It's just his frame. I mean, the same thing with Chet. I mean, it's like he looked so great too, but he got hurt immediately, and there was suddenly this sense that's like, oh my God, his whole life's gonna be this way. But you know, talking about height, I'm glad you brought this up,

because this is the main thing I wanted to talk to you about before we kind of move on to the other thing. Now, you're maybe aware of this. I wasn't aware of this until recently. Do you realize that something that I kind of lived my whole life assuming would never happen is probably going to happen tonight?

What is it? Are you familiar with Antoine Davis? Antoine Davis is here. Have you ever heard of a college called Detroit Mercy in the horizon? I have. Yeah. He's going to break Pete Maravich's career scoring record tonight. What?

He's 25 points away. This is probably his last game because they're playing a team. They're playing Youngstown State, who's probably going to win. Now, there's all these caveats. Because of COVID, he played five years. Because of the three-point rule, which he takes a ton of because he's like 6'1", 170 or whatever. You know, guys have went back and watched Marevich's tape

and said that he actually would average like 44, 45 for his career. But this guy, who seems like a pretty good kid, is going to break this record. It's getting no attention at all. And, you know, of course I feel good about the guy succeeding, but in a way, I'm kind of bummed out. This made a very easy trivia question

impossible when this is over. Like, Antoine Davis is a pretty common name. It's going to be hard to remember. And it was also just something that I, I just, I just kind of thought that I would, you know, that's one thing that I knew when I started following basketball.

And I thought it would be something I would know, know when I died. It's like, who is the all time leading scorer in division one basketball? It's getting no attention at all. Well, the five years thing is a little, little sure. Sure. I mean, they would have said that though, in any, It's getting no attention at all. Well, the five years thing is a little sketchy.

Sure, sure. I mean, they would have said that, though, if it had been four years. I mean, the fact that he averaged 40 for three years, that does seem impossible. Although it does seem, I guess, theoretically plausible that someone could average more than that for a year and then go straight to the NBA. Like some guy, if there was an American Wim Boniana and he went to some mid-major, I think that it's not insane to imagine that someone could average in the 40s for one season.

Well, we saw that with the Dame Lillard 71 point game the other day. Yeah. The 90 points is starting to look more realistic for one of these guards. But doesn't it seem bizarre that you did not know this record was going to break? It reflects badly on college basketball. Like it really shows how different college basketball is in our society now. That a guy could break this record, record that existed before i believe before i was born i think that i think that maravich came into the league in 71 am i right is that right he was in the 1970 draft yeah yeah so okay so yeah so this is this predates my whole life that this record existed i never thought to me it was like Cy Young's win record

where I thought the changes of the sport have basically eliminated the possibility of this is going to happen. But if this guy scores 25 points tonight, he's going to be the all-time leading scorer in Division I basketball. He's kind of like, if you watch him play, he's a little bit like Rip Hamilton.

He's like, partially because I think his nose is broke right now and he's wearing a mask. Maybe that's why I he's a real he's like partially because i think his nose is broke right now and he's wearing a mask maybe that's why i think that but like he's like he's he's really cuts a lot he moves a lot he really is sort of fun to watch um but uh it's it's weird to me like i i shouldn't i should be happy for him and yet i find myself disenchanted that now i gotta like remember a new thing which is something I didn't think I'd have to do. Well, do you think our generation cared way more about records than maybe the under 25 people do? Cause I don't, I don't think the under 25 people care as much, even the LeBron

record, which was like, Oh, he's the new scoring champ. I don't think people knew what the actual record was. They just knew he was passing Kareem. But if you went to 20 people on the street and you were like, what's Kareem's record? They wouldn't know what it was. It's like 38 something. Well, the actual number was hard to remember because it's kind of a big number and kind of unwieldy.

I think the thing that you're talking about- But we knew Lou Gehrig's record. We knew that number. I don't know. We knew the Ty cobb hit number because there is now something of an adversarial relationship with history in the sense that a lot of people do not want to be conscious of things that predate their existence so whereas like you growing up would read old magazines and old books and you'd be reading about George Mike and, and that's like, what about last week?

Yeah. Well, sure, sure, sure. But like now you're looking at the internet. Now you're like, you know,

and the internet sort of creates this sense of a perpetual now where it is acceptable not to think about the past because the idea is like, well, you can always access that if you have to, if you have to know what happened 70 years ago, you can check. But there's almost no interest about players and accomplishments that predate someone's life. I think in the way that prior generations were sort of almost socialized to have. I would actually say it's worse than that. I've made a joke about this in my trade by com

about how the TikTok Twitter era has led to this whole weird basketball universe where they, they'll run like this two minute clip of white chocolate or Stefan Marbury

or, you know, the Charles Sprewell and they'll be like, white chocolate was a problem. And it'll be like, and it'll look like he's amazing in these two minutes same for vince carter vince carter now post career has been vaulted like almost on

like the t-mac kobe level just from the way his career's been treated because he's a good guy but yet we were there for vince carter and like you couldn't make the finals if vince carter was your best player like that there was just a huge difference. And I think he was, I know I was really critical of him when he played, he couldn't stay on the court. Like he, he quit on Toronto, all this stuff. And, but yet the historical evaluation through this Tik TOK Twitter lens has made these, these kind of sports center clip guys more important. Yeah. It's really weird. I don't know if there was criticism of, say, Connie Hawkins and David Thompson and those guys at the time.

I was too young to know. There was Spencer Haywood. Those guys took it. What I'm saying, Hawkins and Thompson specifically because they were just these outstanding dunkers. And that was like, I had a David Thompson poster or whatever. But Thompson won though.

Like he almost made the finals. He was a first team all NBA guy. Like he, I think he backed it up. I think would be the difference. What was the farthest that Vince Carter got

team wise? Vince Carter never got anywhere except that when he got traded to Orlando in 2010, they made the conference finals with,

against Boston because Boston beat Cleveland in round two. Nobody thought that was a finals team. That's similar to David Thompson then, though. But David Thompson was the best guy on a team that, for three straight years, easily could have won the title.

I don't think Vince ever got to that level, personally. I just think it's a remarkable thing that this has happened and it's not bigger news. I was driving my kids to school today and I was listening to all the little sports stations on the radio and

no mention of it. Not even like a passing like, did you know? This is interesting. It's like, you know. On the history thing, I'm reading this book that I think you'd like that just came out called Oscar Wars and it's about the history thing, I'm reading this book that I think you'd like that just came out called Oscar Wars. And it's about the history of the Oscars. And it's written by a guy, I think his name is Michael Shulman. And he went through and he went through 11 Oscars, like 11 Oscars over the last hundred years that like kind of changed movies for some reason or represented some sort of moment. And I feel like I'm well-read and I feel like I know a lot about sports and pop culture. And I realized as I was reading about it,

I knew nothing about movies from like the 1920s all the way through the 50s, like nothing. He's writing about this Olivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine sister feud. That was like a huge deal in 1938, 1940. And I'm like, I had no idea this happened. This sounds great. And it just made me think like,

I actually don't go backwards enough. I do it with basketball, but like some of this other stuff, I actually, I'm going to make a concerted effort to read more stuff like this. I referenced this a lot, but I thought it was real insightful. Like Ken Burns one time was talking about the Beatles and he was talking about the past. And he's like, you know, things that are 10 years old are almost still part of the culture.

Things that are 20 years old tend to still be remembered if they were big. 30 is a drop off, but not much. 40, they're still there. Big drop-off, 50, and just a disappearance when something becomes 60 years old. Now, he always uses the Beatles as the one thing that seems to contradict this, in that they're arguably more famous now

than they were in 1966 or whatever. But for the most part, it really is 50 years. That once you move beyond 50 years of anything, the collective understanding of it just evaporates. Or people talking about it. Yeah. And also movies are an especially kind of unique example because there was such a jump in the realism of film

starting in about 1967 or 68 that things prior to that seemed very old. Um, you know, even when they weren't that distant, that's what one of the chapters was about. It's about how easy rider and the graduate and like that whole wave of movies, there was like this 15 year stretch of movies that movies were just bad. It was like, just here's Elvis. He's in a movie.

And then all of a sudden this wave of directors came in in the late sixties and, and flipped it. But yeah, I think there's, you realize it kind of puts it in perspective because you realize somebody like Taylor Swift, who just seems incredibly famous and eternal right now, but 60 years from now, nobody's going to care, you know, cause you go backwards and it's like who is a bigger star than Clark Gable after Gone with the Wind you know

who is who is Rita Hayworth people like that they were the biggest stars in the world they were the Angelina Jolie's

of their time there's no Rita Hayworth Rita Hayworth the only way she lives on now is in Shawshank Redemption nobody else would even think about her you know

so I don't know it's just the whole thing, the way the movie business evolved over in the final chapter is that 2017 Oscars with the one Jimmy hosted when Moonlight, La La Land

and how that shifted. But just how the Oscars kind of reflected whatever was going on with cultures. And the Will Smith thing, which isn't even in the book, the Will Smith, Chris Rock thing was another way that it reflected it, right? Where it became this,

did you see this moment that just instantaneously was dissected? Every podcast was about it, all these pieces, and it was all we talked about for a week. And I don't know, kind of reflected what 2022 was like. I mean, part of the reason that

I don't care about the Academy Awards is for this reason. Doesn't it seem like that the only time the history of the Academy Awards matter is when they got things obviously wrong? Like Steven Spielberg not even getting nominated for Jaws. It seems like the only time it comes up is when people are going back. People thought X mattered, but actually Y is what still like informs it. So it is a weird thing. It's like the counter canon. It's like that the Oscars exist simply to show how people were wrong in the moment. You know, it's like, I like you, you,, you love the like the NBA MVP award.

That doesn't seem to be the case. When you look back over MVPs over time, it actually does seem to show who was at the top of the league. But when you look at like the Grammys or the Academy Awards or the Emmys over and over and over again, the only value it has is illustrating what people fucked up at the time. And that's why I never kind of, I just... I will say the Oscars has done, I'd say has a way higher

batting average than the Grammys. The Grammys has the worst batting average. And the Emmys is way up there for a bad batting average. But Oscars, I'd say it's probably like

batting 500. If you go through it. The Grammys are strange because until recently, they were like absolutely seen as an industry award. OK, so like one year, like Toto swept everything at the Grammys and then Rolling Stone wanted to put them on the cover and they wouldn't do it. They're like, I know you're just going to hammer us for this. But the fact of the matter is Toto winning all those Grammys made sense because within the industry, what those guys were doing was like, you know, they're the guys who are the session musicians on Michael Jackson's thriller. They're the guys who like were making things for like accessible pop. Like all, all the things that they were doing actually was extremely important

to the music industry it just didn't kind of cross over to people so that's why now now there's the sense that the grammys are supposed to be like for the audience or whatever and i don't know if it's working or not i guess it seems like they seems like people review the shows very positively and then nobody then we see the number that says that like the viewership went down by 180% or whatever. Yeah, because it doesn't seem like anyone under 25 is probably watching for the most part. Let's take a break because I want to talk more about award stuff. When you ride transit, please be safe.

Yeah, be safe. Because what you do, others will do too. Others will do it too. So don't take shortcuts across tracks. Don't do that. In fact, just don't walk on tracks at all. Not at all. Trains move quietly so you won't hear them coming.

You won't hear them coming. See, safe riding sets an example. Yeah, an example for me. Because safety is learned. It's learned. Okay, give it up. Give what up? Really?

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Redefine possible with business platinum. That's the powerful backing of American express terms and conditions apply. Visit amex.ca slash business platinum. You mentioned the, uh, the NBA MVP thing. Perkins had this video that I think he deleted where he was saying how I, I, the, the Y MVP thing, Perkins had this video that I think he deleted where he was saying how

the Jokic winning the MVP for the third straight time is now becoming some sort of weird narrative. And I think people seem to miss the point of the MVP, which is that it's a regular season award. We're just voting for

who was the most valuable player during the regular season. He kind of amplified that message this morning. I saw a clip this morning where he said since 1990 there's only been three MVPs who are not in the top ten in scoring

and it's Nowitzki, Steve Nash and Joker and what do they have in common? Which is a pretty kind of, you know, that's pretty rough. Well, it's also wrong.

I think Jokic has been in the top 10. Right. He was like fifth and 10th. Yeah. But then the other thing, my whole thing with this, and we did this when people were like, how is LeBron not won the MVP and since 2013.

And it's like, all right, let's go through the years. Like when he's talking about those Nowitzki Nash years, I didn't have a vote at that point, but it was impossible to even find the most valuable player. I voted for Kobe in 2006, or that was my vote in my column. In 2007, I don't even remember this.

I refused to vote. I voted for the fans because it was such a bad season. I gave my number one spot to the fans. So I was like, Nash probably should win, but that's where we were with the season, like a lack of talent, things like that. But for the most part, people get the NBA MVP right. The last polarizing one was Kawhi Leonard, Harden, and Westbrook in 2017. I voted for Harden. Westbrook won, but they're trying to now do the Westbrook triple-double thing equates to the Jokic thing.

And then it's like, are you guys watching basketball? Like Jokic, I tweeted this the other day, he's the least stat paddy player I've watched probably since Duncan and Nash. I don't think he cares. I don't even think he knows what his stats are. He seems legitimately disinterested in statistics and awards. Now, granted, now maybe that's, you know, maybe the people will say, like, I'm being naive when I say that.

But when you see a guy get asked these questions, sometimes you can tell when they have sort of considered, how do I respond to this to give the impression I don't care? Because, I mean, I, you know, I do this all the time if I'm interviewed and somebody asks me a question and I say, I don't care at all. Half the time I'm telling the truth. Half the time I'm actually lying. I do care, but I've really, I've really put it together and answer to make it seem like I don't, but he doesn't seem like that at all. He doesn't seem like he just like, I'm just, I'm kind of disinterested being it in front of this microphone, you know, and I just got to get this over with. He hates the All-Star game.

He doesn't even want to be in the court. Like, he's just like, get me out of here. Well, I can understand that. It's kind of embarrassing to be in that, but it's like, you know, now. I think he's going to win. I think he deserves to win. At times, I do it's all at times. I do feel as though there's just so many places now talking about pro

sports and pro basketball. Like there's more conversation about pro basketball by far than there is actual interest in the NBA that they've got to find these things to discuss. Yeah. And they're trying to somehow talk themselves into a two-man race for the MVP with Embiid. And meanwhile, Giannis has a better chance to win than Embiid at this point,

which I think people are going to realize like relatively soon. Yeah, and I think that like, I don't know, maybe you disagree with this. I kind of feel like there's the belief that, that Joker is the most skilled guy. Um, but if you had to take one player, you probably would take Giannis, which is kind of how it was with LeBron for a while. Yeah.

That was LeBron from 2014 to 2018. He was still the guy you wanted when it ultimately mattered, but he wasn't the regular season MVP. He didn't play enough. I mean, I guess it would feel sort of, somehow it would also feel wrong if one guy won seven MVPs in a row. Like they just won year after year after year after year. Like, you know, Kareem won six, right?

Yeah, Kareem won like six in 10 years, I think. Something like that. But there was, the same thing was happening. I mean, if he won six in 10 years, that means four other guys won it during a period when nobody would have taken any player except Jabbar. Jordan was the worst one. Jordan's the only one we can definitively say

he should have two more MVPs than he does. I've written about this over the years, but there is a for what. And now I think people are so fearful of backlash on Twitter or backlash on whatever that they didn't vote for the right person for all NBA or whatever that I think people put real thought into it. And Jokic is the favorite. He's been the most impactful guy. He plays the most out of any great guy.

And he has the biggest effect on his team. So I don't even know what its argument. It's weird. Sometimes I don't even know what its argument is. It's weird. Sometimes I think it's really dangerous when you're bringing race stuff into stuff that doesn't seem to have anything to do with race. I just personally, I don't get it.

Well, the thing is, now it will. That's always the complicated thing. Now that this has been brought up, now it actually will be part of the conversation. It doesn't matter if it's justified or unjustified. Once you sort of enter this idea into the discourse, then it's almost as though, well, if you ignore it, it seems like you're ignoring race. But someone has brought this up and that's a, you know, a, a, a, a, a form of a bias that you're, you're, you're choosing. So it's like now, even someone like you saying it shouldn't play a role. Now you have to factor this in when you talk about it with Priscilla, when you guys talk about these things, you have

to factor that in. Cause if you don't, it'll seem like you're consciously ignoring stuff. Like we're avoiding other people. Yes. Yes. The thing is, you know, out of the last, I would say, 20 years, 21st century, the worst MVP outcome, and I voted for him at the time in my column, was Kobe not winning in 06. Because he had the best case. He had the most impactful season. He had the most memorable season. He checked every box. The team didn't do that well. But I do think there was some residue from the trial and the assault in Colorado. And whatever happened or didn't happen, how it was perceived coming out of it.

And I do think it hurt his chances that year. But he was the best player. And in my column, that's who I picked. And it was the logical pick. But Nash won again. That's the only one where you can go back the last 20 years and be like, the right guy didn't win. And I thought Nash should have won the next year. I actually think Nash should have won in 05 and 07, but I think Kobe should have won in 06. Other than that, I can't remember like an egregious,

oh my God, what were we thinking? Like you've got, I went through it last night just cause I was curious. And I think I, I picked the same person who won the MVP, like 18 out of 22 times. Like I had Kevin Garnett in 08, that was the year Kobe won. Um, but for the most part, we usually get this right. So that's another thing we always argue about this and yet it's usually ends up being the right person. But also the thing is, because there's so much more argument about it, it's harder to be radically wrong. For example, let's say there's somebody who looks at ESPN.com every day, but doesn't follow basketball really at all. Doesn't watch any games, doesn't really care. They would still know the two or three names that you're supposed to use when talking about the best players so it kind of

boils these races down to three or four guys or two guys or sometimes just one guy whereas like in the past when you say like people weren't accountable i mean in some ways that was completely true that there would be somebody who could have who have a vote but doesn't follow the nba at all and just like you know votes for kareem every year because that's the one guy they know must be dominant like you know uh when you say that like you guys are you'll get hammered on twitter that is true although with this i also think it makes some guys go out of their way to be interesting when they vote oh like you know like there's a certain kind of person who's like i'll you know i mean there's still fucking crazy people who think any attention is good attention.

So they're like, I'll make this argument and then I'll be part of the conversation. And then you got to take me seriously because I made a bad argument. That's what I think is hilarious. Well, that's happening more and more at higher levels. All the time. Well, it's just in everything.

It's just sort of like, you've got to take me seriously because I'm saying something in public. Granted, it's just in everything. It's just sort of like, you've got to take me seriously because I'm saying something in public. Granted, it's insane, but the reason I'm saying it is because it's insane. Therefore, you must therefore believe other things I say or at least listen to them because this is kind of what I do.

It's really, especially when you can cut clips, it's really easy to just get attention for five, six hours all at once. The MVP thing, Jokic is the best player in the league from a regular season standpoint. Giannis is

the best player in the league. Sometimes that's hard to reconcile with the regular season. But the thing is, Jokic over the next four months, we might leave June and go, oh, now he's the best player in the league. We've seen this happen before and that's what's at stake.

They're going to be a number one seed. He has the right team. Home court advantage for them is going to be really good and really tough for opponents. It's all sitting there for him. I know you hate it when I bring this up because I brought this up before,

but I have a very specific view of the mvp because i see it as the most valuable player of the league okay this is why i was so adamant that westbrook won over harden that year because westbrook was the best thing for the league that year i would wake up every morning in new york and immediately check his stat line. I was more interested that, you know, so, so I always think it's not, you shouldn't factor in like what the guy's necessarily doing for his team, unless his success with that team is good for the league. And I think that because of sort of how this is played out, Joker is the best player for the league now,

if for no other reason that he's making this conversation more interesting than it really should be, because people have something against his lack of physicality. I got a, I saw a tweet of someone sort of being like, look, it's awesome. Jokic can't dunk because he was like standing out of the basket, trying to dunk, you know, and it was kind of charming. Um, but it was also like, ah, so the best player can't do this thing that we associate great players. It's like, like it's, it's good, I think, for, you know, the sport and the sport needs it now because it doesn't seem like people care that much about the games.

And there's a lot of parody right now. There's basically three good teams and four bad teams, a whole bunch of teams that seem pretty much interchangeable. And when that happens in football, it's great. It's great for the NFL when that's the case, but in basketball, it does not. But as we know, I actually think it's going to be really good for basketball this year, because we're going to see situations where teams are like a five or a six or a seven seed. They're actually really good teams. So I think it's going to be situations where teams are like a five or a six or a seven seed. They're actually really good teams. So I think it's going to be pretty bonkers when we actually get there. Just the season's been so grim.

What was the other big thing you wanted to bring up? So you brought up, you had Wimbanyama. What was your other big thing? You said you had two things. The thing about Antoine Davis, the guy from Mercy. What was the big thing you wanted to bring up? Well, I had a couple of them. We skipped the old balloons entirely.

We missed that. That was right in our wheelhouse of idiotic things to talk about. But as it turns out, they were just balloons. I did want to talk about UFOs because people, you know, they've come to expect us to dabble in the weird stuff. Do you think we're having more UFO sightings lately

because there's more UFO sightings or because cell phones are better? Well, so in that... Because we have way more cameras in 2022, 23 than we ever had before. And especially in like more rural places, right? Where like electronics are generally slow to trickle at the higher level, but now basically everybody has a cell phone and the ability to tape. So is that, have these UFO sightings been here all the time?

And now we just have more phones to capture them or is something happening? Well, the big thing is like like in Russia it seems like everybody has a dashboard cam and dashboard cams are how you really get it because if yeah if somebody if somebody sees something some kind of weird object in the sky and they capture it with their phone that means either it's been up there for them long enough to put it all together or it's just this crazy coincidence I mean the situation with the balloons is kind of understandable, which is that so this one balloon gets all this attention. And as a consequence, anybody who sees a balloon reports it immediately.

I mean, six months ago, if I had seen a big balloon in the sky, I would have told my wife and that would have been it. Yeah, I wouldn't have told anybody. I would fuck what I could, you know. But now I think anybody was like, I a balloon over lake michigan or whatever and they call all these things we use i have a friend who's a pilot and we were talking about this on a text thread and he we were like trying to figure out what was going on because you know there was that balloon the day of the super bowl okay there was the balloon over the great lakes in the super

bowl and um so one of my friends was sort of like what if this is aliens and i'm like well first of all if the aliens understand the world's culture enough to know the super bowl is a good time to attack it's over we're fucking done already like if they like that means they've been here for 25 years or whatever and they're like they're reporting back yes yes yeah so i like, so if it's an alien, forget it. Don't even worry about it. We're done. Um, but then what his thing was like, well, you know, we're now just in this weird point where people get confused and they get worried and they, and there's all this sort of chatter that we got to use like million dollar missiles to blow up a $1,200 balloon that probably had some promotional purpose or whatever.

So I think with the balloons, it was just that all of a sudden people started saying, I saw a balloon. I got to call 911. The actual UFO stuff, that just seems to be just piling up over time. And that the government, who spent a long time assuming it must be Russia, and then the Cold War ends and they're like we learn all this stuff about russia it's like their technology wasn't even as good as ours yeah what are we going to do about this and they just started kind of admitting it i um the admitting

part has been the most surprising thing because we grew up in this culture where they admitted nothing everything was secret. And that led to like movies, like Close Encounters, movies like E.T., shows like The X-Files, which became a real thing in the 90s and should probably come back. But it was always about the government's hiding stuff from us. And now recently, they're not really hiding stuff from us anymore. And it's like, yeah, here, this is another thing that happened. Well, yeah, well, they don't seem to be hiding that. They don't seem to be hiding information about, you know,

aircraft that they can't explain. I mean, has there actually been an uptick in the number of UFO sightings? Is that actually true? I definitely feel like it's more in the ether. Well, I mean, there's more information about everything. There's more in the ether. Well,

I mean, there's more information about everything. There's more. Right. So I, I don't know if there's, you know, um, uh,

cause, cause here's what we haven't had an uptick in. We haven't had an uptick in cases where people are like, I saw this craft. I have 40 minutes of missing time. I went under hypnosis. I was brought aboard the ship. They probed me.

They took all these tests. They gave me this information about like what society was going to do. Like Bert and Soap. Yeah. Remember Soap? The TV show Soap? Yeah. Bert got abducted by aliens.

We've talked about this before. I took a UFO class in college. Yeah. By a guy named John Salter, who was a big civil rights activist who then also claimed he had been abducted many times, uh, by, or multiple times by, by aliens and, or at least had these encounters. I still remember the most interesting fact he gave, you know, he was explaining that the aliens tend to focus on, uh, people with like the most open mind, people who are like the most sort of intellectually free.

So it's kind of a compliment to himself. But then he said one of the two of the things that happened after these encounter was one. He had never been able to grow a beard and he could now grow a thick, lush beard. And the but here's the more shocking one. Prior to his encounter, he had hated vegetables and ever since he has been ravenous for peas. Kyle loves this. Yeah. Well, but now he's, he's passed away now. He was a great guy. I had, I loved his class, but as you know, I kids, kids, as you know, I believe in this stuff, but my wife has a friend, her friend Meigs, who is self-described as a little witchy.

Not in a bad way, but she's just like, if she goes into somebody's house and there's like a history in the house, like her, she'll feel it. Like her, like her arms will get all tingly and she just not not in a bad way but this is just so like she can sense she can sense forces beyond the yeah well it's like like in amityville horror when the lady comes to the amityville horror house and she's just instantly is like this is bad something bad is there i do think people have that power like i don't think that's a crazy thing to think or say because we have too many documented examples of some people are just more aware of things. What would be the reason for that? I don't know.

I mean, because you say it's not a crazy thing. Well, it's a little crazy, but it could be true. Crazy things are sometimes true, but it is a little crazy to assume some people are just born with an ability to sense what other people can't sense. Although animals can do that. You know, it's like, you know, before, you know, you horses will like run in a circle in their pen before a tornado comes. They can sense changes in barometric pressure that we can't. Is it, would it be like that? Here's what I guess what I'm asking. Do you think this crazy ability, if true, is some outgrowth of science and natural things,

or is it actually mystical? Well, have you ever read stories about somebody has like a twin brother or brother and something bad happened to the sibling and they were in a completely different place but just immediately knew something bad had happened and then came to find out like they landed this happened to brett hart brett hart's brother died and brett hart was on a plane and he just knew something bad happened he'd know there was no wi-fi on the plane nothing they landed and, or maybe they even told him on the plane. That makes me, that's another one where if it's like, how do we know things that are people that are close to us, that something happened if we're not in the room

for when it happened. Well, okay. So if they're identical twins, they would literally share the same DNA. If they're fraternal twins, they would just be like brother and sister, or, you know, it would just be like any, um, so if they share, let's say the exact same DNA, that would mean that DNA can transmit experience over air. Wouldn't it? Right. So how, how could that be? I don't know. I just know we have a lot of documented stories, but like, but what would it be? Like, I'm not saying I obviously, I'm not saying like, answer this bill, you fucking hypocrite. It's like, what I'm saying is like, what, what, like, what could it be? Like, like if it's true that identical twins are able to sense things

in remote areas, what's a, what's a possibility that could make that happen? Would that sound, I mean, because to me, if you believe in that stuff, you're really moving in this direction that like pretty much full on belief in like a higher power, full on belief in intelligent design, that all of these things in life are not just chance, that there is really a logic to it. And I feel like when I push you in that direction, you're not like, I don't know. But on the superficial side,

you're always like, maybe. I think it's a combo. Of what? A combo of what? A combination of what? Sometimes there's stuff where chance is just chance, right? Like the NBA lottery is doing the lottery balls for Wimbledon.

And I don't think God is like, I have decided Wimbledon is going to be in Houston. I think it's just these balls that rattle around and then the combination comes up and then he'll go to Houston or he'll go to Oklahoma City.

And the whole destiny of, like think about the LeBron lottery that year, where if Memphis got number one, they got to keep the pick, right? And there's a famous shot of Jerry West having basically an aneurysm. What happens if LeBron goes to Memphis? What happens to the city of Memphis? What happens to the city of Cleveland?

There's all these other things. I just want to go back 90 seconds. You say you don't think God would be playing a role in role in this and i understand that this is a very common thing like you know sometimes like someone will see a player praying during the national anthem right and it will outrage a certain usually kind of a person who's an atheist who's like oh yeah like you think god really cares if the browns beat the ravens or whatever like you know but that overlooks the fact that if you were to believe in a full-on God, he cares about everything, or she cares about everything, or it cares about everything.

It's an all-powerful being. You would have interest in absolutely everything. It wouldn't be like God- Well, that's why they wouldn't be rooting for a team, because people on both teams conceivably would be praying to God. Well, couldn't necessarily be rooting for both teams, but if what you're kind of describing is an all-powerful God who kind of just like puts the world in motion and lets it go.

But I don't know. It's like we can't personify God in this way. If we're going to think about God, it's like God could be interested in absolutely everything and probably would have a vested interest in absolutely everything. I like how you created my argument for me and then debunked it. I don't know what to think about the God part,

but I do think there's stuff there with spirits and intuitions. Spirits? So now what are those? Well, I'm saying you go to a house. I think houses have histories. I don't think there a house. Okay. I think houses have histories. I don't think there's any question.

No question that houses have histories. Houses have histories. I do. I really genuinely believe this. Okay. Okay. Okay. Keep going.

Keep going. We have the house that we live in. We have our dog, Willie, who I think... We're not sure. Willie definitely might be seeing things that we can't see. Okay. This is good dog park material. Keep going.

Okay. So you sense your dog is... Willie sometimes will just be looking around, right? And a lot of times he hangs out in the stairwell. We have this stairwell that goes upstairs and you go upstairs, then it turns the other way. And a lot of times he hangs out in the stairwell and he just kind of looks up and around, right? So then we read this story, the neighborhood we live in, they had stories about

different houses and they had this story about the history of our house and two people died in our house and one committed suicide. And then we were like, is that, does Willie see the person that committed suicide in the house? And that's why, like, I don't know. I have no idea. But maybe I've seen too many horror movies. And maybe we shouldn't even keep this part of the podcast in the podcast. Well, no. I was like, Willie communicating with spirits from the past?

We don't know. Or is he just a dumb dog? So there was a period in the 90s when Trent Reznor was living in the house where the Manson murders occurred. Okay. He had, you know, and it was during the time he was like hanging out with Tori Amos a lot.

Yeah. So, you know, that's in LA. You're kind of a real estate guy now. Would you never live in the house where the Manson murders were committed? Let's say you could get that house. I wouldn't live in a, I wouldn't live in like a murderous house. I would not. In the fear that it might cause you to commit a murder? No, I've just, I'm pro happy ghosts. I'm scared of the ghosts that might be ghosts for reasons that they didn't

want. But why would, why would would say that the ghost of Sharon Tate be after you? I don't know, I just, I don't like the juju in the house. I wouldn't do it. See, I don't think it would bother. I think I would find it interesting to live in that house. Would you live in, like the OJ Nicole house, they knocked down.

Now, they knocked it down for a bunch of reasons, but one of the- The bungalow. So it's a bungalow. One of the reasons was people kept slowing down on traffic to go by it. Here's the case against ghosts. I think more people die in hospitals than probably every other place combined, right?

So then why aren't hospitals just loaded with ghosts? Well, I guess the idea Or are they? There's just too many ghosts. Well, are you working from the position that every person who dies becomes a ghost? Or only certain people become a ghost?

I don't know. Because I guess if I fucking had these ideas, what I would probably think is that a ghost is somebody who cannot get over the consequence of their death and wants to remain in our world. They didn't have, it's like Patrick Swayze in Ghost,

which I think is the most realistic ghost movie. He has unfinished business. He can't go to where he needs to go because he has unfinished business. But how does a ghost finish business? I mean, outside of the Patrick Swayze example, let's say the person commits suicide in your house. How'd they commit suicide?

Can I ask? That part, I don't know. Okay, so let's say the person commits suicide because they had some financial issues. It was going to humiliate them. Their spouse was cheating on them. Yeah, yeah. So they hang themselves in your house or whatever.

Right where Willie looks up. Yes, yes. So your dog is looking at the fucking ghost and he's like, this ghost has unfinished, like what would be the unfinished business? The ghost can't go back. I don't know what a ghost could do.

Maybe he's just stuck in the house. See, maybe I'm angering him by talking about this in the podcast and now they're going to start messing with us. I mean, it's possible. I guess like a very Catholic idea would be that if you commit suicide, you're not allowed into the afterlife.

You're stuck in a kind of purgatory. And the purgatory, I mean, in many, many ways. Or maybe if you get murdered, same thing. So you don't believe in ghosts, or you haven't decided? Well, I mean, I'm the kind of person who's like, I kind of believe in everything, but I really believe in nothing. In a sense that I'm open to the possibility of, yes, I just, whenever, whenever I'm really confronted with these things and, and as now, as I'm getting older, I, some of these things I think about more in a weird way, not so much the ghosts, but just the idea of like what happens at the end of all this and what is the meaning of all this. But I mean, the conventional description of a ghost, I guess I don't really believe it.

Because I feel like it would have to be something that would almost transcend our ability to imagine it. When you're about to die, is one of the last things you're going to think about that you were prominently mentioned on an OC episode? Your book? I still think that was one of the great name drops of any friend I have.

Might even be number one. I would say it was hot that year too. Well, yeah. The main thing that that taught me was how many people I know watch that show. Because I was at a diner with some woman and all of a sudden my phone kept, the text kept going off and I was trying to talk to her.

I did was avoid my phone or whatever, you know? And then I looked down and it was every person I knew who happened to watch the OC. So that was the most accurate understanding I've ever gotten of a television show. So I wonder if outer banks did that, like,

I guess the outer banks would be the equivalent of the OC now? Maybe? Netflix or Stranger Things is too big. Well, no. But like if that happened on Outer Banks, would people text you simultaneously or because they're binge watching it, it would just be steady stream of text?

Well, no, because it's, I think also it's, the idea of being mentioned on a television show used to have much more meaning than it does now. I mean, there's been other television shows that I've been mentioned in. I'm not trying to brag about this. I love it. It's a great brag. That show You're the Worst.

There was a guy who made a reference to me or whatever. It happens. I mean, I'm sure it's happened to you probably 10 times as many times as it's happened to me. But it doesn't mean as much now because. I was a Jeopardy answer once. That was a big, big thing. Well, my father-in-law was really excited about it. For how many dollars, though?

How many dollars was it for? That I don't remember. I mean, because that's the thing. That's what really matters. To be a $200 Jeopardy question, that means idiots know it. You want to be at the bottom. This is like the whole thing with the Antoine Davis, Pete Maravich thing. Now to me, the all time leading score in college basketball, that's a $200 or a $400 question under the category of college basketball records. But if it becomes Antoine Davis- And now it's a $1,000 question.

Detroit Mercy? Yeah, it's the fucking bottom of the thing. And I just, like, that's, I don't know. I'm happy for the guy. This is a really good way to think about life. Am I going to be a $100 question or a $1,000 question? Well, yes. And what is better?

Everyone wants to be the $1,000 question, but in truth, the $100 question means it's obvious. So you're just obviously famous, you know? Good time to take a break. Three, two, one, zero. The final seconds of the game separate true fans from the rest. The fans that are there for every victory, defeat, agony, and ecstasy.

And when the buzzer sounds, you deserve a Coke Zero Sugar. The one with irresistible taste and zero sugar. Win or lose, Coke Zero Sugar is the most refreshing way to end the game. Coke Zero Sugar. Best Coke ever. Learn more at Coca-Cola.ca. All right, coming back. I have a speed round for you. Speed round question number one.

How would you handle the NBA if you became Adam Silver's chief advisor tomorrow? It was like a 90-day contract. Wow. How would I handle it? Adam comes to you and he's like Chuck I've lost the steering wheel

I've lost control of the car And I can't figure out How to advance this league anymore Will you help me? I've kind of thrown into position That I haven't really prepared for So I'm just going to rip off something a guy named Mike Maythog recently was talking about.

He thinks that they need to move the schedule down to 72 games, but then expand the league by 10 teams because then the players will agree to keep going because it won't destroy the amount of money. And he feels that there's enough good players now to sustain that many teams. I'm on that bandwagon.

Well, my argument initially was like, that's fucking crazy. It's like, that's going to dilute the talent even more. It's going to become even more unwatchable. But the fact of the matter is the NBA seems pretty comfortable with the way it's going in that regard, that they kind of feel like we can be a major sports league where most people don't watch the games, even if they profess to calling it their favorite sport.

So the idea of expanding the league. Well, they are going to expand. They're expanding to Vegas and Seattle or wait until after this deal. Get Vegas and Seattle. Like, you know, finding the eight other towns can be a little tough. Eight is ridiculous.

I think you could add two, and I think that would make up for the lost revenue. I think that's the move. I mean, taking 10 games off, that's a huge amount of revenue lost, unless they just say, we really only care about TV money. But that'd be the first thing I'd bring up,

but it's not my idea. If you're going to add 10 teams, I would go to 60 at that point, and then you have relegation. If you're really doing this correctly,, I would go to 60 at that point. And then you have relegation. If you're really doing this correctly, I think that would be the move. But they would never do that. But two teams, it should be 72. 72 is the right number.

Next question. I just assume the worst with college sports at all times. I just assume the worst outcome, it's going to be handled the worst. It's going to be the worst situation. Nobody's in charge. It's just going to go badly. Has it always been that way?

And I'm just older and I realize that now or is have things gotten worse? You're a bigger college sports fan than I. Well, it's gotten a little bit worse. I mean, society has gotten worse. So it's like you say, take the guy in Alabama. Now you got the football player in Georgia. It seems like these are the primary stories we hear about.

But we always had guys like that. I mean, there were always really unseemly star athletes situations with bad things happening this i mean the thing with the guy from from alabama is i think in the fairly recent past the idea that like he wasn't charged with anything he just sort of you know was kind of involved with this other guy i think people would would care less but there there is more sort of, there's more moral policing without consequence than ever before. In other words, there's more people demanding that like people be, you know, forced to sit out 10 games or suspended for the year or like they must be held accountable. But it's not actually changing what's being, what's actually going on. It's just that it's everywhere. There isn't any sort of

off-the-court or off-the-field activity that people don't feel as though they got to weigh in on and sort of express an idea that sort of positions them as having the right kind of morals or the right kind of social standing. So is it worse now? I mean, I would guess that there were a lot of things that happened, say, like with Barry Switzer's Oklahoma Sooners. Oh, yeah. That they couldn't even put in that book. You know, I mean, there was like a book about that

where it's like guys had machine guns in their dorm room. And I bet like that, you know, or there was a book about the NC State Wolfpack, Personal Fowls. Do you remember that? I remember that, yeah. Armageddon or there was a book about the NC state wolf pack, personal fouls. Uh, do you remember that? I remember that. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Uh, no, not urban contain. Who was it? Guy with a G. Oh, Peter Goenbeck. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Um, uh, that book kind of has been discredited. Um, but yet in some ways, when you go back and read it, it actually seems like I have a sense that these rumors that this guy couldn't verify for real probably are pretty close to being true. So, I mean, I guess it's like, you know, we have so many illusions about college sports, about what it means that we also got to apply it to the sort of their social behavior. It's like, we want to sort of still imagine that college students aren't just the way they were when we were in college, but the way college students were in the 1950s. That's like, that's sort of the idea people have

of college. And I just, I don't know. I, I, as someone who loves college sports, I mean, we talk about things that have changed in my lifetime that bum me out in sports. And I'm not saying like when bias dying, I'm not saying, you know, I'm saying like things that just happen to these things in general, the thing that bothers me the most is instant replay. But the thing that bothers me second most is just the decline of college basketball over my life and how that was just something, oh God, I just, I think about watching the tournament in the 1980s

and just how great it was. And now it's like, Pete Maravich's record can be broken and nobody fucking cares. So, okay, so. Yeah, it's pretty rough. Well, especially like when you throw in the AAU piece of it too

and then the G League and there's just no coming back for college basketball. But it's still fun. I still enjoy watching Madness. But yeah, it's like the stuff we've talked about in the past. It's going to be an interesting tournament this year.

There's going to be a lot of teams, non-traditional powers, who are going to be very interesting to watch. I remember it's the 40-year anniversary of NC State. And like, I actually remember watching that as a kid. Yes. We watched and the games were on at all hours.

They didn't do it the way they do it now. But I actually remember that whole run. And it really mattered. Like college basketball, I feel like mattered the entire time as much as any other sport I followed. You could argue it was probably more popular than the NBA until Bird and Magic kind of started doing their thing. No, it was more popular than the NBA, I think, through most of the 80s. Yeah, the NBA caught up probably like eight. I think the 87 finals, the NBA caught up because MJ was coming in.

All right. Next question. Should we stop trying to save legacy cable networks like CNN and MTV and Showtime and Comedy Central and just admit that this era is over? Like I'm watching Chris Lick trying to save CNN and he's been every decision. He's like the worst sports jam of all time. So far, every decision he's made is wrong. And I guess the question is,

can, can those networks be saved? Like you look at MTV and it's ridiculous. There's for 22 hours a day. And then the challenge and every once in a while, there'll be a music video. I mean, isn't it?

I would, I, my, what I would assert is the thing like MTV, CNN, these things. The only thing that is valuable about those institutions is the name. And the thinking is like, we just got to keep these things alive because at some point we'll be able to sort of repurpose the idea of MTV for something else. Isn't that what we did with Sports Illustrated? Remember that run when Sports Illustrated was asking for

$300-400 million or whatever it was and was like, wait, what? Sports Illustrated is not Sports Illustrated anymore. I think this is probably more applicable to Rolling Stone. And Rolling Stone is another one. But here's the deal. It's very easy for me to imagine in some future where if you go to a tourist trap,

there's a bar called Rolling Stone and it's a rock-based bar or you find a sports bar called sports illustrated and they basically use the history of sports illustrated to decorate a place where you buy chicken wings like i think that these things will be moved into that sounds like an awful bar well sure but you know i'm not saying i'm not saying like, great. I'd say like this. That's what I imagine. So I didn't realize people were trying to save these things. I thought these things were just sort of like dying. Well, I think CNN people felt like it was being reinvented, but it just seems like it's being flown apart.

People will still turn to CNN. Yeah. Like say like when like the January 6th thing happened. Right. It's like, some people were following it on Twitter, but then people are like, what's happening on,

or just, like, the most recent shooting at Michigan State. Like, I did turn on CNN when that happened, or when the guy, you know, when the guy for the,

for the bills was like, like, I went to watch, yeah, I went to watch all the channels just to see how they were. I'm with you. I think CNN should be savable. I don't think the other ones have just morphed into different

ways we consume content. Like they just basically been replaced, but nobody's really replaced CNN yet. And then Fox News is like on the other side, like Fox News seems like

it hasn't really lost a lot of potency. I always think it's interesting that they have that show, The Gutfield Show. The Gutfield Show is the biggest late night show, if you actually look at the audience. Which I think is just, it's almost like you're Detroit Mercy guy.

What's the biggest audience right now, late night? I don't think people would be picking him. At one point, CNN was like coke and i think like fox news and msnbc was like can we be pepsi can one of us be pepsi yeah but now cnn is rc cola now it's third there because it's like people don't want they like they want bias they actively want something that something that kind of matches their bias. And CNN, I guess a lot of like conservatives feel it's left-leaning. Left-leaning people feel like, oh, it's not really that left-leaning. So it has no place, you know? CNN's move is probably to just get all the

people who've been disgraced the last 10 years and just make them the anchors of all the shows. I'm not sure. What would success for CNN mean? I don't know. I don't know. Their morning show should be that Good Morning America couple that hooked up and got fired. Those two people, just put them on.

Let's get some controversy. I follow a JFK assassination sub stack that has renewed my interest in the JFK assassination sub stack that has renewed my interest in the JFK assassination. And I actually have a theory that I'm feeling pretty good about. I haven't thrown this at you. This guy

who does it, I forget his name. I'm going to say it's like Jefferson Morley, something like that. Jefferson Morley was a reporter for the Washington alternative papers in the 80s and 90s. He worked for Spin. Morley, something like that. Jefferson Morley was a reporter for the Washington alternative papers in the 80s and 90s. He worked for Spin. His theory is,

they keep saying we're going to release the records. By the way, they were supposed to have released all the records at this point. It's 2022. They should all be out. Even Trump for some reason was afraid to release all the records. The reason the ones he, this guy went through and he made a pretty compelling case of like,

which ones have been kind of redacted or not released. And they're all related to the CIA. And it's all about, it's basically anything that hasn't come out yet is because the CIA doesn't want whatever it is to come out and i am more convinced than ever than that the cia killed jfk now i think that's where i've landed well okay so what i would say to this is that if if if there is a conspiracy i think the cia one is the strongest however i am now a oswald-acted-alone person.

In fact, there's a new book called The Oswalds by this guy, Paul Gregory, who was friends with Oswald, but also really with his wife, Marina, before the shooting for several years. Who's this guy, like 95, writing a book? Well, no, he's a historian. He's either an economist or historian. And so he's kind of been working, like publishing things in college. And all these friends of his kept saying, like, you've got to write about this. Because he was, he was trying to learn Russian.

And he wanted someone who he could speak Russian with kind of fluently. And Oswald's wife, particularly Marina, who was from Russia, like, you know, she,, that was kind of the person he used to speak with, you know, just work on his language. And, I mean, this is just one guy, but the details he gives about young Oswald seem extremely accurate. And it definitely makes it seem as though he was just an unhinged person who acted alone. Yeah, but the CIA definitely was involved with Oswald in all these different ways.

They- There's no question. Yeah. I think that there are probably, there's a lot of people like, I did a big story with two other guys once on the Kent State shootings. And it was very interesting to realize how many random college students had relationships with the FBI. Like, it would kind of been a cool job to be like a, like a narc during that time. Yeah. Party,

party with the hippies, listen to all the good music, live the good life. And then like, Oh, you just go have a natural life afterwards. But the, the thing where I was saying is like the fact that Oswald tried to

assassinate someone else before he tried to, you know, before he killed JFK. It just makes me think that this is a guy who just believed he was supposed to kill someone. He tried to kill a guy, a general. The guy's name was Walker, I think, in his home. All right, last one. Do you think the pandemic, the three years,

will eventually lead to good art no okay i think it'll have probably have the opposite effect because like i think that sometimes people will say like okay you look at the vietnam war or like you look at like oh say like the watergate the garbage strike in england when like all those punk bands were sort of emerging from that and all these things it's like the conditions punk bands were sort of emerging from that and all these things, it's like the conditions of the world sort of make the person think, uh, there's,

this is the problem. I need to address this problem. The thing with COVID was, it was a huge, massive disaster that was completely intangible. Like it's, it was just something that was being passing around if you didn't know someone who died or who had it it was just kind of going on and you were

just locked in your house and that doesn't really lead to like being creative i mean i think that they'll look back there was that oh who was that guy he made a special ben burnham or something yeah that was good and then there and there was was also the Fiona Apple record that came out during that. I think there will be these things that people will go back. Oh, you look at these things and you kind of will have a better way of understanding the mindset of the time. But like, I don't think that, you know, there were so many people who were stuck in their house for two years. There should be a glut of books that come out because people were just, you know, people didn't do them.

People didn't write those books. Like there should have been that, like, like this was the opportunity for every person who always said, I'd love to write a book. I just, who has the time? What am I? You know, it's like, this was the time to do it and it didn't seem to happen. So I don't think that there's anything that's going to come on. Instead, this was the time to do it and it didn't seem to happen. So I don't think that there's anything that's going to come on.

Instead, it was the time to catch up on Ozark. Yeah. And every show that you never totally wanted to watch. But I watch Yellowstone. I never would have watched Yellowstone normally. But I had a lot of those moments. Yes. So I think that it doesn't seem to me like it spurred anyone to do something new.

Because I was thinking, when we do rewatchables movies from older eras, it's so interesting sometimes when the movie reflects whatever was going on, right? Which was what movies used to do in all these different ways but a movie like the we did blow out a few months ago with travolta and that's kind of one of the that's a 70s movie that was really made in 1981 but it's still that that paranoia kind of type of movie like three days of the condor and those those types of things and yeah it's weird and now or the vietnam movies like even a movie like first blood which i thought was really good um but there were deer hunter on and on and apocalypse down it was all these movies that reconciled with how vietnam why we were there war in general and yet with the pandemic we haven't really seen anything yet and you're right i mean it's also you you know, it's strange. I don't know if you feel this way,

but like I was recently watching this documentary about the diamond industry, and it had to have been made relatively recently because there was a lot of footage from this where like people are wearing masks. And I find that when I see art now, and it's like, and there's like a heavy sort of pandemic,

like kind of like it informs that. I'm like, I don't want to fucking think about this again. I mean, it's the exact same way. I mean, so it's going to be really hard for someone to do a pandemic movie in the future that's going to make me be like, oh, great. I want to think about that again. I went to the eye doctor yesterday for someone to do a pandemic movie in the future that's going to make me be like oh great i want to cool about that yeah i went to the eye doctor yesterday and everyone had to wear a mask yeah my

son went to the end like yesterday we're still doing this yeah i mean people are still getting it though i mean i think i i i don't i'm always kind of hesitant to criticize people for doing it but it's like it i like i, my life is totally back now, but it's strange because you can look at statistics and they'll be like, well, it's weird that we're totally back, but okay. Yeah.

I mean, COVID would be a lot better than what Kyle gave me for 10 days. And October got banned from football for the rest of the year. He gave me some form of bronchitis that I don't even know where it came from. Might have been from outer space. How many times did you have COVID? Twice or three times?

I had it once. I had the Omicron right after. I thought you had it twice. Maybe I did have it twice. I can't even remember. I definitely had it once. I'm pretty sure you did. Yeah.

But then I had, whatever the bronchitis was last winter, I felt like was worse than COVID. I was dying. I couldn't get rid of it. But that's what happens when Kyle goes to the frolic room and I don't know what he did.

Yeah, I'll be interested to see what happens with the art. But I'm with you. When I see the masks in a movie, I get bummed out. Like, I don't want to go back. Let's move forward. Let's start thinking about this. Um, all right. That was fun. I think we hit everything. Yeah. Is this, is this running Thursday or Friday? This is

running late tonight. Okay. Well tomorrow, Friday I'm doing a book event in Hillsboro, Oregon. Oh, if any, if anyone's listening to this in the Portland area, that's the Barnes and noble there. It's weird to do a book event on a Friday night. I've never done one on a Friday before. This is a store that's new, but I'm going to see if anyone... It got canceled from last Friday because there was the blizzard here. We got like 11 inches of snow. Should we do a live podcast in Portland, me, you, and CR? That would be great. All right. We'll work on that. We want to start doing a couple more live pods. They've been really fun. It's fun to get out there. And you know

I love Portland. Any excuse. It's been a long time for me to come to Portland. Plus, who knows? Dame Lillard, I don't know. Maybe we could go to a Blazer game and it'll be the night he scores 100. I took my kid on his birthday to the game when he

scored 60. And I was like like, oh wow, it's amazing you saw 61 or whatever and then he scored 70 now so it's like, you know I really do think 100 is possible now like in a way that even I remember Shea Serrano and I talked about this a couple years ago and we were trying

and I tried to map out what the game would be but I think the key is the guy would have to have a huge first half I think you'd guy would have to have a huge first half. I think he'd have to have like 55 in the first half. And then the second half, if the guy has the ball all the time and he's just shooting threes like when Dame was hot the other night, it's really conceivable. It would be conceivable that he could get to 45 points

if he took 22 threes in the second half. Yeah, now it has entered the realm of being possible, which I never, like, it almost seemed like that. Yeah, it was inconceivable. Like, I don't think it'll happen. I mean, because it's, you know, like, watching Lillard score, like, 60-some points, man, it's like, that was, I think.

He was getting tired at the end. Did you see how tired he was by the end of the game? The thing was, wasn't that, according to the analytics guys, he was getting tired at the end. Did you see how tired he was by the end of the game? Wasn't that, according to the analytics guys, the most efficient game maybe in NBA history in terms of the number of shots he took or whatever? Yeah. And yet, it did seem like he had the ball constantly.

Or when you rewatch Kobe's game, it seems like he's shooting constantly. It's hard to imagine Eken out, you know, another 14 points or whatever, but it's like, we're at 16 points or whatever it is. It's weird.

I'd be more excited for a Jokic 25, 25, 25, which I think is conceivable. That could definitely happen. That's conceivable. I think that would be like a triple quarter. I guess we would call that.

Like could a triple, triple quarter happen with the Oak edge? I feel like it could. All right. Well, I'll, well, but first of all,

we should do this more often. It's my fault for never, never texting him and be like, Hey, we got to do a pod, but it was, it was great to talk to you and see you. And I'm glad we did it.

You bet, man. All right. That's it for the podcast. Thanks to Chuck Klosterman. Thanks to Aria Hawani. Thanks to Kyle Crane for producing as always. Thanks to Steve Cerruti.

I will see you on Sunday night, Sundays with Priscilla. It's back. You're getting us March, April, May, June, half of July.

Your Sundays are back. They're back in place. See you on Sunday night. On the wayside On the first side of the river I'm saying I don't have to ever