The Bill Simmons Podcast - Lakers In Trouble, Wemby vs. Young Tiger, and the Shiv Roy Celtics With Joe House and Dave Jacoby. Plus, AI’s Rapid Ascent With Derek Thompson.

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

The Ringer's Bill Simmons is joined by Joe House and David Jacoby to discuss the Nuggets' Game 2 victory over the Lakers to bring the series to 2-0 (1:29), the Celtics losing Game 1 at home to the Heat, the next move for the 76ers, the hyperbole surrounding top NBA prospect Victor Wembanyama, and more (29:32). Then, Bill talks with Derek Thompson about AI's fast-paced integration into our lives, as well as the good, fun, and scary possibilities for the future (1:06:39). Host: Bill Simmons Guests: Joe House, David Jacoby, and Derek Thompson Producer: Kyle Crichton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Coming up, Nuggets-Lakers game two, the white guy, American championship belt, and AI. Yeah, that's next. This episode is brought to you by Prime Video. You know me, I can't go a day without sports. I really can't. And now Monday nights are all about hockey. That's right. There's a new exclusive home for streaming Monday night NHL hockey, and it's on Prime.

All season long, watch Prime Monday Night Hockey deliver unreal plays, the biggest goals, can't miss moments. Matthews, McDavid, Crosby, the NHL's best. They're all on Prime. Prime Monday Night Hockey. It's on Monday. It's on Prime.

It's the Bill Simmons Podcast presented by FanDuel. Football is in full action. FanDuel's highest rated sports book is the best place to bet it all. We've been doing pretty well on million dollar picks this year. I love the first month of the season because you have to go into the season thinking, I think Pittsburgh's going to be good. I think the Chargers are going to be good. I think Seattle's going to be good. And then trying to back what you think in those first few weeks and then zag the other way. If you were wrong, you could bet on new and fun markets on FanDuel,

like to catch your pass, same game parlays, highest scoring game across the Sunday slate, offensive TDs, the next drive. They have so much stuff. It's crazy. The app is safe and secure and easy to use. And when you win, you'll get paid instantly. Plus look out for FanDuel squares this season. Here's what you have to do out for FanDuel Squares this season. Here's what you have to do. Visit fanduel.com slash BS to download America's number one sports book. The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit rg-help.com to learn more about the resources and helplines available.

And listen to the end of the episode for additional details. You must be 21 plus and present in select states. Gambling problem, call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit rg-help.com. We're also brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network, where you can find a new episode of The Rewatchables from Monday night. We did Trading Places on Sunday night. Right after succession ends, we have a podcast on the Prestige TV feed. Meet Joanna Robinson, Sean Fantasy, breaking down episode nine. I'm just telling you folks right now, this is a top six all-time succession episode.

So there you go. Right after succession ends, you can find that podcast. Coming up on this podcast, me and David Jacoby and Joe House are gonna be talking about game two, Nuggets-Lakers, as well as round three in general, and then a whole bunch of side NBA tangents. And then after that, Derek Thompson from our Plain English podcast. We're going to talk about AI because in the last six months, we talked about AI near the end of

2022. And in the last six months, everything has gone haywire. We're going to explain all the ways this has become the year of AI and possibly the decade of AI. It's all next. First, our're taping this. It is 821 Pacific time. I have two East Coasters, Dave Jacoby, Joe House. We just watched Game 2 Lakers Nuggets. Jacoby, I'm going to start with one of the most amazing things anyone's ever said on a podcast.

I can't believe the Lakers didn't let Austin Reeves cook down the stretch and kept going to that LeBron guy. I was thinking the same thing. LeBron is obviously gassed. He's pulling up from 27 feet every time he touches the ball, which is an obvious old guy tired move. I've done it a million times myself. Austin Reeves is just dancing, Euro-stepping

around everybody. Let Austin cook. Let him cook. They're going to AD Corner 3s and old tired LeBron. There's Austin Reeves. around everybody. Let Austin cook. Let him cook. AD corner threes and old Tyra LeBron. You think Austin Reeves goes to the locker room after the game and says to LeBron, LeBron, I was right

there the whole game. Use me. I'm him. I don't think he says that. Okay. I think he's happy. He's happy to be there. Well, he's going to be happy to make a ton of money.

So today became the Jamal Murray game. In the third quarter, all of a sudden, we had a rock fight on our hands. And then Jamal Murray put up 23 in the fourth. Jacoby's making a face. I agree with the face. I'm not going to tell my grandkids about the Murray game, but he did have the big fourth quarter as the Lakers cratered in the other direction. It was a 20 to five run in the fourth quarter at some point. It started out though with the Lakers felt like they had control of the game. And Jacoby, you mentioned it. LeBron had a couple

of these weird pull-up threes and it kind of shifted the momentum. Denver was doing this thing where they were just riding Murray and Jokic and it just seemed like they were like, we're going to beat these guys in the ground. And it felt like the Lakers could have had them. And it was a rare lapse of judgment from LeBron, I got to say. Not only did LeBron take like tired old guy threes,

there were obvious tired old guys threes, but there was one where he faked a flop from yokich fell into the stands had a vodka tonic like poured on his face ice cubes and all had a towel offered to him sat there for about four and a half minutes just to sort of build a little bit of energy for the next possession gets gets the inbound on the next possession, slowly walks it up, doesn't call a play. No one sets a screen on or off the ball, and he just pulls up and bricks his fourth three in a row. It was just the quintessential, I'm too tired to get to the rim.

That looks like work. Maybe I'll make this three. It's a 15% proposal. I'll look good if it goes in and i'm gonna look bad if it doesn't but at least i won't have to expend my energy fellas this was the altitude game this is what happens when you can't breathe like it's it's not enough time they both played over 40 minutes anthony davis and lebron and steven A in his infinite observational wisdom said that he thought that both those guys would have subpar games coming in here shouts to Stephen A because those minutes are

like maybe not double minutes maybe maybe so for LeBron maybe like one and a half times how impactful playing 40 plus minutes at altitude and then coming back with only one day's rest. All of those threes that LeBron shot, those misses, they were close misses. But I think that's what happens in that rarefied air. Although I do want to say one thing. You're not going to be telling your grandkids about Jamal Murray, but we just got done spending several days on our knees in front of Devin Booker. I mean, this is Jamal Murray reminding us of the version of him from the bubble. He's shooting

right at 50% from the field, I think. And he was the difference maker in a game that Denver really had to have at home, I would say. Yeah, he was three for 15 at one point in this game and he finished 11 for 24. So he made eight of his last nine shots, including five threes. I'm glad you brought up the altitude thing because I was researching the history of the Denver Nuggets, which is pretty grim. It's like they don't kind of get enough credit for not having an awesome history. They've had some fun players, but for the most part, they made the ABA finals in 1976. They lost to Dr. J and the Nets. That's the last time they ever made the finals. They've never made the NBA finals ever. Conference finals, they made it in 75 and 76 in the ABA. And then in the NBA, 1978, 1985,

2009, 2020 in the bubble. And the reason I bring this up, we haven't seen them in a situation like this in the playoffs, literally in almost 15 years, where just seeing them play two games in a row in three days at the level that you have to play these conference playoff games, that game one was grueling. It was fast paced. And then two days later, they got to come back. I thought everybody except Reeves, if you're going best guys on both teams, Jacob's, everybody on both teams look dead by six minutes left in the fourth quarter. It was like, no, like Murray was, I had his hands on his knees leaning over, like he was going to keel over. So out of the altitude thing, I, I, I didn't factor that in enough i don't feel like

was the altitude the pace the minutes the the first quarter and the fourth quarter were just like completely different humans completely different game completely different sport it was just like the pace in the first quarter up and down they're running like people are getting to lane jumping jumping twice to get a rebound and put it back in the fourth quarter it was just like every single you see the calculations in their head being like, how can I execute this basketball action using the least amount of energy possible? How can I expend the least amount of calories possible to accomplish what I need to for the team to accomplish this goal? And at the end of the day, it really looked like the Lakers, especially LeBron, were more tired than the Nuggets. And I think that does have something to do with the altitude.

42 minutes for Jokic, 43 for Murray, 40 for LeBron, 41 for Davis, who was four for 15, four turnovers. I watch a lot of Nuggets, especially because it's a West Coast team. And the reason I thought that they were going to make the finals and once Milwaukee got out, that they were the favorite for me was I love the shots they got. I love the decisions, basically everything running through Jokic and just all the offense they got. They never kind of, they never have those like funky quarters or anything like that. Everything is just smooth and they're always able to get back in it. They're always able to not have like the other team have the

13-1 run or anything like that. The offense they had in the fourth quarter house was pretty choppy. I mean, Jokic kind of didn't want to shoot in the last four minutes, I think, because he was just dead. But if Murray had made those shots, it really didn't seem like there was a plan B,

right? It was a plan B, right? It was a high degree of difficulty offensive performance by the Nuggets in the fourth quarter. Now, you mentioned having watched this Nuggets team throughout the season, and it did fit kind of what they have done, the way they've won games at home, where they get going, the crowd gets going, there is a comfort level, and they do have that advantage of playing at the end and altitude.

I think this was possibly the worst I've seen Jokic, definitely at home, I don't know, definitely since the regular season, right? Those regular season games when they were mailing it in. So I agree with you, and he had a 23-17-12. And I 100% agree with you. It wasn't good. Yeah, well, for him, it was probably a C-. For other human beings, it was an A.

But for him, it was like, I thought he was passing up stuff around the paint and really seemed like he was looking for the handoff more. He just honestly seemed tired to me. He had five turnovers too. He had a couple crunch time turnovers. Porter hit a couple big threes. I think big picture, the thing that worries me if I'm Denver is that the Aaron Gordon piece of this, in the season,

I know, in the season, they really figured out how to use him as like a rim runner, offensive rebounder. Teams had to guard him and see what they respected. The Lakers have no respect for him at all. He is the, as Jalen would say, the open for a reason guy. He's open by five feet. And I don't know what the Nuggets do with that because they need him on defense.

But he's like the guy you're playing pickup with that kind of doesn't know where to go and i don't know how they fixed that jacobs well early on when they started the game they ran some murray yokich pick and rolls and ad kind of like really like pressured murray and switched out and i was like oh they're kind of leaving yokich naked but they weren't because lebron would just leave ag and sort of and then get Jokic if he used the pocket pass. And I was kind of surprised just how much they disrespected Aaron Gordon as an offensive threat and how little the Nuggets used that to their advantage. And how little he took it personally. Yes. That's the point.

And you made a good point earlier, Bill, Rare, when you said that Jokic was passive in the fourth quarter. Like, there was one possession he had an open 15-foot shot, which he shoots, like, I don't know, 97% from, and he up-faked it, and LeBron didn't close out, and then he took it because he had to. And there's a couple times where I'm just so used to him, like, backing down and doing a slow turnaround and up-faking

and then getting the shot. But, like, sort of didn't decided that he didn't want to use any of those weapons it was really confusing and back to the AG thing like I think Michael Malone needs to kind of like make that a point of emphasis at the start of game three to get him some easy buckets and get him involved like I expect that to happen probably has to shoot a three two I mean big picture house this Probably has to shoot a 3-2. I mean, big picture, House, this is a pretty devastating loss for the Lakers. I know it's only game two, but they had a 10-point lead

in the second half here. Jokic wasn't playing that great. Murray was 3-for-15. Gordon was lost. Porter wasn't doing much. The Nuggets just weren't playing well, and I thought that it hit the point where the Lakers kind of had to steal it. I think it's going to be really hard

for them to win in Denver, especially as the series goes along with the amount of miles they're going to need from LeBron and Davis. You know, they always have the random dude. Today it was Rui. Rui had 21, 30 points. House, you have the floor.

You watched this guy for three years. You took a big dump on him after the trade and he's become the fourth best laker well this is precisely the point right he is a guy who has some skills that is perfectly fine coming off the bench and being the fourth or fifth best player on a team now Now I would not have, have pegged him for this level of impact in the playoffs, but he didn't play very much when he was in Washington, right? He never played. I think the most games he played now, there were two seasons interrupted with the COVID situation, But I think the most percentage-wise games he played was near

80% maybe. He never stayed on the court. And he stayed out half of a season. After the Tokyo Olympics, he didn't come back for training camp. And then the team gave him an excused absence and he showed up in January

of the 21-22 season. Jacoby, House is being diplomatic. He couldn't stand Rui and the Wizards. He absolutely couldn't stand him. I've heard it before from Joe House. I know. What are you doing? House, just admit that this is incredibly infuriating to you.

Who are you, House? You're never going to see Rui Hachimura at a party and have to apologize. Just admit it. He's let you down. It's going to be fine, House. He could have done this. He could have done this on the Wizards.

Be the real house. Look, I don't want diplomatic house. I didn't draft him. The dumb ass Wizards drafted him. They shouldn't have drafted him where they drafted him. He was not a top 10 player. He's a. Can I say a rude point?

Go ahead. You know, I noticed this because I went to two of the Warriors games last week in person. I kind of like him. Like, he's big. He's got this. He can shoot threes. He's just physical. It's actually hard for me to believe he didn't have more success on House's Garbage Wizards team.

But he's one of those guys that when you're, he's one of those in-person guys where you go man why isn't this guy better yeah can i make a really point one really point i love from tonight was when he used he had the halftime interview like with lisa on the way to the tunnel he clearly had like never been in that position before he's like wait how's this work like i do an interview like here on the court like how's this i don't know he's like needed help he was like oh so so she's part of the television broadcast. And I talked to her because he's never been pulled aside to have a post or mid-game interview on the court before

in his entire career until today. Well, we have a more important Laker question than whatever the hell is going on with Rui. To me, this gets added to LeBron's legacy that he was able to turn Rui Hachimura into a very solid playoff guy. I think we have a new champion of the American White Guy Championship belt, which Tyler Hero had last. No, no, no. Hold on.

Austin Reeves and Tyler Hero are both American white guys, but they are very different points on the spectrum. You know what I mean? They're very different points on the spectrum. Listen, Jacoby, you can do semantics all you want. All I know is Tyler Hero is not playing in the playoffs. Austin Reeves is the third best guy in the Lakers. Hit the point today where I'm like,

why don't they just run pick and rolls with him and AD and put LeBron in the corner? And I think they would score every time. I think it's a strategy because they want to keep him. Like, I think that like, if we run too much stuff for Austin Reeves,

yeah, exactly. They're sabotaging Austin Reeves performance. And did you see the Wichita state Austin Reeves during the broadcast today when he didn't have the floppy hair? I was like, Ooh, that's an extra five points a game right there.

That Austin Reeves hair is going to get you a couple more buckets a game. House, here are the candidates for the White Guy Championship belt. American only. The foreigners are ruled out. I got it. Hero is last year's champ and really had the title all season. He averaged like 22 a game.

Kevin Herter, Walker Kessler. It's pretty slim pickings, guys. I think it's Reeves. Hero basically gave up the title. He got hurt. It's not Reeves' fault. Reeves is the only one playing right now.

Hero has Kevin Love there to mentor him and to pull him aside. You know what I mean? We have peaks and we have valleys as American white guys in this league. So I feel good about Hero long term. But right now, Reeves is wearing the belt. Love's like, I've had that belt for five years. I know what it means. Yes.

I know. I know. There's a real responsibility that comes with it. I've carried that weight before. Yeah. Yeah. So House, your team that never has cap space and you've just fired your GM. I never officially

congratulated you on the podcast. Do you have a new GM or no? No, no, no. We're in the market. Just looking around. New football owners. Bob Myers would be great. I would take Bob Myers. Overpay Bob Myers. So you don't have cap space, but if you did have cap space,

what do you think Reeves is worth? Because the Lakers can only go to like 50.8 million or something. And somebody else can come in and offer them up to, I think 98.7 million, which the Lakers could match, but it would really fuck with them in a whole bunch of different ways. But there's all these teams with cap space. Like for instance, like, like the Spurs. The Spurs have all this cap space, right? They got

Wemby coming in, and they have some good swing men. And I'm like, why wouldn't we get Austin Reeves? You know, if you're them. There's a couple teams that have cap space, but I was looking at them. I was looking at the Magic is another team. The Magic has cap space. They have two really good forwards.

Magic have too many white guys already. Not American. Not American. No, but that's not. I like the idea of Reeves with this purse. Yeah, I think there's a certain logic to that. For sure. He's early enough in his career.

The thing with him that's super apparent and why we you know love this performance by him incredible iq and incredible hoops iq going alongside with the bronze hoops iq his instincts i mean what we saw from him working his way to the free throw line you know relentlessly at the end of the regular season and into the first um the beginning of the playoffs you can't teach that that's that. He's got that dog in him. That's what I'm going to say about that, Jacobs. There's some Jeff Hornacek in there. He's about two inches taller. I mean, he looks like him.

Hornacek was an awesome player. I mean, him and KJ made the conference finals. He was the centerpiece of a Charles Barkley trade the year Charles Barkley goes to Phoenix and wins the MVP. There's a piece of that. Gordon Hayward, I know I'm sticking to the white guy comparison thing. I don't mean to do that.

The Hornacek, he really reminds me of Hornacek though. He even has that bad hairdo that Hornacek does. It is the hair. That's right. He's got four inches on Hornacek and he does a lot more things. But he's got that crafty, gets into the paint, bounces off dudes.

The Lakers are going to keep him. They have to. You can't have LeBron and Davis and not keep Reeves. But I think he's become like a $20 million a year guy. And a guy that I think as the series goes along, they're going to have to use him against Denver's guards. I think he's actually the key to the series for them. I noticed when he was out of the game. I was looking at the the key to the series for them.

I noticed when he was out of the game. I was looking at the floor and I was like, oh, they have to spell Austin Reeves for three minutes. That's where we are with the Austin Reeves experience right now. It's a good sort of example of where the Lakers are when you have LeBron and AD and a bunch of dudes. You're looking

for one to flash up like Rui Ochoa-Moro. Let's take a break. I have a couple more Laker Nuggets thing, and then we got to talk about the Celtics collapse in game one. Right now, all FanDuel customers get a no sweat, same game parlay every weekend when you bet the NBA playoffs. That's right. Just place a three plus leg, same game parlay,

or same game parlay plus on any NBA playoff game. You'll get bonus bets back if you don't win. I'm going to announce on my Twitter feed, we're going to do something for game three of the Lakers Nuggets series. Now that the Nuggets are up 2-0, there might actually be some Denver values. So we'll talk about that.

I'll put the tweet up. Maybe FanDuel will even boost it for us. Let's see. Let's see if they do it. FanDuel has great promotions every day on a safe and secure app that pays you instantly when you win. There's no better place to bet

all the playoff action than America's number one sports book. Visit FanDuel.com slash BS, getting no sweat, same game parlay every weekend of the NBA playoffs. That is FanDuel.com slash BS. FanDuel, the official sports betting partner of the NBA. You must be 21 plus in select states.

First online real money wager, only $10 deposit required. Refund issued as non-retributable bonus bets that expire in 14 days. Restrictions apply. See full terms at Fando.com slash sportsbook. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit Fando.com slash RG in Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Tennessee, or Virginia. 1-800-NEXTSTEP or text NEXTSTEP

to 53342 in Arizona. 888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org slash chat in Connecticut. 809 with it in Indiana. 800-522-4700 or visit ksgamblinghelp.com in Kansas. 877-770-STOP in Louisiana, 800-327-5050, or visit mahelpline.org

slash problemgambling in Massachusetts. Visit mdgamblinghelp.org in Maryland, 877-8-HOPE-NY or text HOPE-NY in New York, 800-522-4700 Wyoming, or 1800gamber.net in West Virginia. This episode is brought to you by Movember. The mustache is back with a vengeance. Look at Travis Kelsey. Before he rocked that Super Bowl ring, he rocked that super soup strainer. Grow a mustache for Movember. You'll do great things too. You won't win the Super Bowl, but your fundraising will support mental health, suicide prevention, and prostate and testicular cancer research. And if you don't want to grow a mustache,

you can still walk or run 60 kilometers, host an event, or set your own goal and mow your own way. Do great things this November. Sign up now. Just search Movember. House, let's say the Lakers lose this series to the Nuggets. Year 20 for LeBron.

Is this the closest he's ever going to get? Or is the next phase going to be him hopping on a better team as the widely veteran ring chasing? I think his best opportunity will be with this team. If they run a version of this team back,

maybe there's another piece or two that they can add. But, I mean, this team is awfully close. Like, the difference tonight was him and AD. And, you know, Davis shot four from 15, and LeBron was nine for 19, which isn't horrendous, but he was 0 for 6, which isn't horrendous, but he was over six from three. And that's what, what really killed him.

But that's been all season. Yeah. Yeah. What? Taking open threes teams. Yeah. His three point shooting. It just hasn't been,

you know what it used to be. I think this is his best chance. Just the way that the league, the conference was so weird this year. You look at both sides, like the Lakers playing to make the finals, they were playing a team, same for the Heat. It's just, I don't know, it's a weird year. And sometimes you just have your moment and if you don't grab it, that's it. I think they're going to have trouble keeping some of these free agents because they have some minimum guys that they grabbed that I think could probably could probably,

uh, could jump around. Jacob's. What do you think? Is this, is this LeBron's last best chance? I disagree just because you have to remember before they brought in houses,

favorite player, Rui, Atchamora, like what that team was, you know what I mean? Don't forget like what this team was in like November, December, like it was disgusting.

And it wasn't just health either it was the roster it was gross they were in they were 12th in the west and you know some good moves at the deadline and before the deadline and now here they are semi-competing to go to the nba finals so i would never put it past lebron to be able to make the championship lemonade out of the lemons that he's given, whether that's with the Lakers or without, because there's another two or three more years. So I just, I would just never put it past LeBron to take a lower salary and go somewhere else, or to add the right pieces to this team and maybe get some injury luck and make another run. I don't

think this is his last run because if you look at his production in numbers and you add some low management, I think he's got a Tom Brady-esque three more years in him. Wow, three more years. House, let's say they lose in five to Denver and Embiid asks for a trade.

And Embiid, Davis as the principals. They're about the same age. I'm just asking. You're so good at this. Who has a longer meeting about the trade? Does Philly say that's not enough for Embiid? Do the Lakers say, no, why do we want Embiid here?

Davis fits in better. How does this play out? You already know the answer. It's so good though. I mean, Jacoby's right. right you really are there's a reason you're the podfather thank you um i agree with mike lombardi joel and beat is a loser and lebron knows that he's a loser so why would he want a loser to come from the east coast he can't even get the mvp of the league can't get his team to the conference finals, why would he trade? Anthony Davis has a ring.

He won a ring with LeBron. I don't think LeBron would tolerate that, Bill Simmons. So you think the Lakers would say no to that trade? Yes, I do. What do you think, Jacobs? Oh, God. It's a great one, right? It's really good.

By the way, I put that in the oven i put it i preheated the oven to 350 yes and i cooked it all day like it was like it was like a sweet potato you cooked dinner during breakfast like you were having eggs while you were making dinner and it came out really nicely beautiful smells i'm like oh that's trade starting to smell really good but what do you like what do you like about it i i like it because it's completely implausible and will never happen but it's worth discussing and if i'm the lakers i make that trade i make the trade just just for availability reasons i can't believe i'm taking joel mb's availability over anthony davis's but i think i have right to do so over the last couple seasons.

Joel Embiid can do things that obviously Anthony Davis cannot. After turning Rui Hachimora's career around, Embiid is the logical next target. At least LeBron would be used to disappearing acts because if we say that Davis is every other Davis,

Joel Embiid missed the second half of both game six and game seven. So at least LeBron is used to that. Yeah, that's a tough, that Philly situation. So they basically, the word that's going around is that on Monday, they basically said they were going to keep their coach. And then something happened on the hearted front. And by Tuesday, all of a sudden they were going to keep their coach. And then something happened on the Harden front. And by Tuesday, all of a sudden,

they're getting rid of the coach. It feels like they're picking Harden basically over the prioritizing keeping Harden over all of their scenarios, which I think is insane. I think Darryl's going to... This is like his Achilles heel, this Harden infatuation.

It really is. No. I agree with you. Anyone who watched that series is like his Achilles heel, this Harden infatuation. It really is. No. I agree with you. Anyone who watched that series is like, oh, I see what the answer is. Fire Doc, one. Don't keep Harden, two. Right? That's what I took away from that series. But I don't think Embiid wanted them to fire Doc, though.

You saw Daryl said that Embiid was shocked. Right? That was the word that he used. Embiid wanted them to fire Doc, though. You saw Daryl said that Embiid was shocked, right? That was the word that he used. Embiid was shocked. And when I saw that, I was like, I don't believe that for a second. That is not 100% true. Oh, you think he was protecting Embiid? Yes.

I do not believe that Joel Embiid was shocked to find out that his head coach was fired. I don't think he found out on Twitter. You know what I mean? I think he was counseled. And I think that Daryl is doing a solid for his best player in MVP. Oh, interesting. I also don't

think so. There's no way that that franchise made a decision. Their next year planning and the year after planning based on keeping James Harden. There's no chance that that's the case. I think there's a very good chance,

and I think they're really worried about losing him. And I think that was one of the reasons they did the coach thing when they did. And who they hire as the next coach will be another indication. Because if they hire D'Antoni... No. They're basically...

You can't say can't, because I think it's in play. And if they do that, Harden will be like, oh, that sounds great. I'll have the ball all the time, and I think it's in play. And if they do that, Harden will be like, oh, that sounds great. I'll have the ball all the time and I won't have to play defense. Maybe I'll come back.

You see Harden's quote where he wants to play, where he can compete and we can have his basketball freedom? Did you see that quote? It was like, I want to be able to play freely and have my basketball freedom. That translates to Mike D'Antoni, come back and let me do whatever the F I want because that's exactly what mike d'antoni did he had the freedom to just be completely terrified in the seventh game yeah that was he

looked pretty free as he was doing that i exercised that right i want to start a new podcast called i've had it when each episode is just about an athlete where I'm like, I'm completely out. I've had it. I'm out. It's like today's episode is James Harden. I don't, I'm not even talking about him anymore. I'm out. I've had it.

And then the next episode, then the next one's Matt Ryan. 45 seconds. Like, Oh, Matt Ryan might come back and play football this year. I'm out. I don't want to hear it.

I've had it. Just keep going. Uh, let's talk about the great podcast. Thank you. Let's talk about. This is a great podcast. Thank you. Let's talk about my stupid team. So we gave up 46 points in the third quarter. And my dad calls him second row Joe because last year he was in the second row.

He wasn't even on the bench. It's a great name. Second row Joe wasn't calling timeouts. That's going to catch on. Shout out to Dr. Bill. Yeah. I feel bad bringing it up but and you know it was just

it was the nightmare I can't say any of it surprised me the Celtics you were on text threads with me with Raheem and JJ and I was saying I can't believe the Heat are getting eight and a half points I don't understand this I don't feel like the Celtics have a home court advantage the game starting at 840 eastern time the crowd is always fucking weird for those games.

And the one thing I noticed, and I don't know if the Heat did this intentionally or not, but they create like this chaos in the first half, right? It's just chaos. It's got, they push the pace, they're taking crazy threes and the game kind of just loses the steering wheel. And then the second half they calm down, but the other teams discombobulated and I could feel it happening as they were doing it. I was like, no, no, we're going to know that they're doing this. And then of course the second half happens. Tatum is just out to lunch over by the side, not getting the ball. Jalen Brown has the ball all the time. And Butler's doing, this is what they've shown us in these playoffs. They go into other people's gyms and win game one.

It was like plus 325 or something crazy like that. It's like, I've seen this a couple times now with teams that I think are, you know, comparable enough to the Celtics. And the thing, you know, Dream, Raheem Palmer's done the research about teams coming off of a game seven and into game one, and the straight up against the spread percentages are crazy against the teams coming in within that kind of situation. What made anybody think that the Celtics team would handle their business

and, you know, close out 13-point lead. Miami says, we got you right where we want you. And that's when Jimmy Butler gets cooking, and that's what they did. Well, especially you go against the Sixers who rolled over, and you go to this really tough team that's doing all the little stuff. Jacobs, where do you stand on the whole Jimmy Butler phenomenon? He's recited a whole thing in his pot today about how jimmy butler is the highest approval rating right now i uh it's either him or yokage i would

have in the finals for that but you've you've loved jimmy butler forever i've loved jimmy butler forever but mainly because he's like such a dick and i think that he's kind of like the coolest kid in high school that you're a little bit scared of. You know what I mean? He's like the coolest kid in your class. But like you're kind of cool, but like you don't really mess with Jimmy Butler. Like he's kind of like a bully, but doesn't carry himself like that. He's just got this mystique about him.

And like if you ask any, and I don't, but if you ask anybody playing in the NBA, like what do you think about Jimmy Butler? No one's going to be like, yeah, but. Like he has the approval rating is through the roof. And I think a lot of it has to do with his history we all know what happened at his various stops and in Miami I think a lot of their success is one of the reasons that I like how shout to you bet the money line on the heat is something happens between the second quarter and the third quarter I don't know if you're familiar with this bill I don't know how many of these games you've watched time and just go you leave you leave the court and then you go into the locker room and the coaches get together and they strategize that would be joe mazula and his friends and then eric spolstra gets together

with his friends and they strategize and guess what happens in the third quarter like that's kind of what i was banking on it's like i, I know Jimmy Butler's going to be Jimmy Butler, but I also know that Missoula's going to be Missoula and Spolstra's going to be Spolstra. And that is honestly why I think that the Celtics are in real trouble. Like, as a Celtics diehard, they are the more talented team. They have better basketball players. And I would say the same thing for the Knicks. Like, what is your concern level right now after game one?

I'm not that concerned yet. I still think they have more talent, and I always thought this series was going to be a long series. I was saying yesterday, I thought the Celtics were either going to sweep or lose game one, which sounds insane, but House was on the text. I felt like

there was a world where the Heat just, once we saw them against a really talented team, like, oh, they don't have enough. It's just like Butler and Bam and that's it. Or it would be what happened last night. And the Butler piece of it, he just has so much confidence against the Celts.

It's like very big, big brother, little brother-y. The Tatum thing was, I was in the car today and our old friend Coward, who you worked with once upon a time, Jacoby, he was doing this whole big picture Tatum versus Butler thing and Butler comes through and Tatum doesn't and I'm like,

I'm not ready to go. Tatum's 25. The dude's been a work in progress. He's come through a couple times in big stages on big games. I think there's a consistency kind of step on the neck quality that maybe he doesn't have yet. But for the most part, I'm pretty happy. Coward was comparing with Josh Allen and he was saying, we do the same thing with Josh Allen. Josh Allen is

regular season star, but in the playoffs, what am I getting? And I'm like, I don't know. Josh Allen led them down the field. They scored and all they had to do was stop the Chiefs for 13 seconds. They beat the Chiefs in a playoff game. Josh Allen's pretty good. So I feel like early in any playoff series, when there's only a couple series left and everybody has to do these big grandiose, what does this mean? I don't know. I could see Tatum having like 45 tomorrow night. The thing that worries me more is the coaching. Like Pritchard's out there. I was like, all right, that's fun. We played a three guard lineup. I'm not mad that they did that, but Miami was like, oh cool. You got Pritchard out there. Let's try to get them in a switch against Butler.

And after the first half, I was thinking we'll never see Pritchard again now. Like that, like they can't ever do that again. Like that was a fun that was fun. That was like fucking you know, dropping Alka-Seltzer in the bathtub and seeing what happens, but you're not doing it a second time. And then they do it again for like six minutes. And Miami's like, cool.

Awesome. Peyton Pritchard's out here. Thank you. So it's stuff like that that I'm like, man, that when you get to this level, it really comes down to you either have to have the best guy on the court and it's not close or you have to have some sort of collective hoops IQ thing that I don't house.

You've been calling them the Charmin Celtics all year. I don't know if they have that last piece. I'm ready to kind of move off of that. They are soft, but it's the difference between Imei and Jomaz, like second row Joe. And I think it's just a ready-for-the-job thing. Now, the more that we spend time with these Celtics, it isn't that they are physically soft,

although in the regular season, a couple of those games that they were, but you know, they're, they're just missing an institutional backbone. There is some element in terms of the decision making the best lineup for the Celtics last night was with Brogdon. You can't play the two bigs against Miami. Joe Mazz trotted them out there. Itgdon. You can't play the two bigs against Miami. Joe Mazz trotted them out there. It became apparent that you can't play the two bigs against Miami. They were probably out there a little bit too long, but the best lineup was with Brogdon.

So let's give them the opportunity in game two to make that adjustment. And the other thing is with Miami, you're always at the risk of their shooting variance. They come in and shoot the lights out. You're probably going to lose. If they make all those threes, it's not something they did in the regular season. They've collectively gotten better in the postseason

as a shooting team, which is pretty rare. But all those guys, this is why Jimmy Butler, as a throwback, tough guy, what he means to Vincent and Struis and Kyle Lowry's role can't be understated, the contribution to this thing. So they're built for it, but when they miss, they lose. So I talked to my dad for a while this morning because he was at the game. One of the highlights was he called Bam Adebayo Adebiko, which I really enjoyed. He said Adebiko had a pretty good game. Then he said...

Adebiko? They played seven game series last year. He said he liked when the bald white guy was out there for miami he thought he thought that he was unplayable that was fun but um but we were talking about the big lineup because i don't know if you remember this it was only a month ago it feels like a hundred months ago but the hawks killed the heat in that play in game. Right. And they had, they kind of overpowered them with size, right? They had 63 rebounds in that game. They had Capella had 21 rebounds. Um, and they just kind of, they didn't even shoot that well. They shot 10 for 41 from three and they won by 11. It was, they won because they overpowered the Heat. There was a version of this series in my head

where I was like, Jacobes, they're just gonna, they have too much size, they're gonna overpower them. But Grant Williams was a part of that. And I don't know if they've just given up on Grant or what, but my guess is if they're gonna try to come back into this series, it's defense and rebounding and maybe not the gimmicky three-guard lineups. Oh, if you don't know they've given up on Grant,

I'm pretty sure they've given up on Grant. I mean, if you thought there was too much Peyton Pritchard, I don't expect to see too much Grant. But I think one of the knocks on the Heat are besides from the fact that they have nine undrafted people and their talent isn't exactly matching up to anyone, any of their opponents through all three rounds thus far, is there's Bam. And what other bigs do they really have?

I mean, Kevin Love can rebound, but he's not rim protecting at all. Like, they just don't have a second big to spell Bam. It just doesn't happen. No, their rim protecting is Kyle Lowry pretending he's going to take a charge and psyching guys out. It's his ESP charge routine. That's their rib protection. Can I talk about Kyle Lowry for a second, Bill? Yeah, do your Kyle Lowry thing.

I find him to be the most infuriating person to root against. Like, if you're rooting against Kyle Lowry, this is not a knock on him. I just hate watching him play basketball against a team I want to win. Because he plays the refs. He falls over. If you're a big and you've got Kyle Lowry on you, you're going to turn around and dunk. He'll slap the ball out of the big's hands before he gets them above his waist, and it'll bounce off the big's ankle and go out of bounds, and he gets it.

And if the other team goes on a 6-0 run, somehow, someway, Kyle Lowry will either get fouled by flopping or hit a three. He's just absolutely infuriating to root against, and I dislike him respectfully. You basketball hate him. I basketball hate him, but

deep down, you can't hate someone unless you love them. You don't hate strangers. You hate the people that you really know, and I hate Kyle Lowry because I also love him. You don't hate strangers. You hate the people that you really know. And I hate Kyle Lowry because I also love him. This is a good game where if somebody makes a shot, it just makes you mad that they made the shot, not that the

other team scored. And you're personally offended that he made a couple moon shots yesterday and was like, oh, fuck you! He's just screaming at the TV. Fuck this guy! Yeah, he is annoying. Also, it seemed like, he was just screaming at the TV. Fuck this guy! Yeah, he is annoying. Also, it seemed like his career was over

four months ago, House. I'm sure he was available on the deadline for his song. It's like the 10th time we thought his career was over. His career was over 10 years ago then he reinvented himself. It's an amazing career, Kyle Lowry.

Potential Hall of Famer, Kyle Lowry. Can we bring in Conspiracy Bill for a second? Oh. Oh, I'd love to talk to Conspiracy Bill. Do you send him the Zoom link? I send him the Zoom link. Later, Patriotic Bill is going to join the podcast with Derek Thompson, so that was

really fun, too. Patriotic Bill. Get those making votes. Conspiracy Bill. The Conspiracy bill. Um, the, uh, conspiracy bill wonders, you know,

in hockey, because Gary Bettman's a moron. You end up with like Florida, Carolina, right? You, you, you don't have Connor McDavid make the third round of the NHL playoffs.

And you don't have the Bruins going for the greatest regular season ever because they just kind of let the players decide the games. Basketball, we have some tricks. We have some ways to not to rig the series but maybe massage them in certain directions.

House, Conspiracy Bill wonders if Miami-Denver is really where the league wants to land here for finals with some of the other alternatives. Some of the other alternatives? It's easily the worst case scenario, right? They could play up the Jimmy Butler story. Cool. They play up Jokic.

Oh, check out this guy. But for the most part, I would think they would want either the Lakers or the Celtics in here. So is conspiracy Bill right to be a little suspicious that these results that we're heading toward don't seem like they add up? Oh, I think we're headed in a direction that the league probably would prefer. We'll know for sure when we see game three in Los Angeles. And I bet tomorrow night, the Friday night game with the Celtics and the Heat, I have a sneaking suspicion we'll end up 1-1.

Feels like a good chance we'll end up 1-1 in that series. Celtics-Denver would be a nice, sexy series, Jacobs. I always like to use sexy on a sports podcast. I know it's one of your favorite words. Obviously, you know the sexiest would be the championship of championships to see who can get to 18 first, Lakers-Celtics. It's still on the board. Wait, you're still counting the five Minnesota ones? Yes, I am. Those are championships. 17-17. That happened in Minnesota? So it would be the championships to see who would have the most championships.

Oh, you're still counting the ones in the Boston Garden, not the TD Garden? Like, what are we doing? Who cares? They're literally in the exact same place. What are you talking about? It's like 10 yards over. Hey, how do you think OKC is going to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the Seattle 1979 NBA title? You think they're going to have a party?

When they were going to break with retired Nuggets on the broadcast, I was like, oh, this is kind of a bleak history for this franchise. Yeah, the Nuggets, like, who do they even have courtside house? Like, they didn't even cut. When they had the Knicks, it was like, hey, there's Bernard King. Oh, Latrell Sprewell. Patrick Ewing. The Nuggets, they got to get Kiki Vandeway and Alex English.

I need to see David Thompson. Carmelo, could he straddle the fence and pretend he was an ex-Knick and an ex-Nugget in the same playoffs? We can't have this conversation. The Washington Wizards celebrated that this was the 25th year of them becoming the Wizards. They brought back Antoine Jameson

and Caron Butler and they brought back Antoine Jameson and Caron Butler and Gilbert Arenas to do a big three. Yes, they came out on the courts. They did the court in Wizards.

You know, the old school Wizards colors and stuff. Yes, so that's fine. You can try it out all you want with the Denver stuff. The Wizards celebrated Karam Butler and Antoine Jameson and Gilbert Arenas,

who couldn't beat LeBron James in the second round and did celebrate of the 25th year, uh, anniversary of becoming the worst, uh, mascot in all of professional sports. And then they brought out Ernie Grunfeld and he took a $12 roast beef sandwich and paid $28 for it.

In honor of the Andre Blatch contract. Threw it away. House, who's your GM going to be? You want to throw your hat in the ring? Bob Myers. That's the answer. Can we get Bob? Can he be like DC? Now he's moving in the

DC power circles? There's stuff here in Washington. I think the bay area job yeah that's not a great job i don't like it uh jacoby we never got your mad ishbia thoughts pro con still figuring it out what what's going on on that front well a couple things number one um i think isaiah thomas wasn't discussed enough during that incident like isaiah th Thomas was right there. Isaiah Thomas, armpit the entire time you know and i feel like yokich probably has a couple more of those like tricep scratches because of isaiah thomas yeah and um i also think that maybe isaiah thomas was um counseled when it came to the firing

of um monty williams and um you know i think that isaiah thomas holds a little a little sway a little influence over our friend Matt Ishbia. And every time I look at him, I'm like, he really did play for Michigan State. He was the scrappy walk-on guy. Well, we'll know how much Isaiah influence there is if Eddie Curry gets hired as the next Suns head coach. So I'm watching that very carefully. Nate Robinson is the assistant coach. Eddie Curry, the coaching staffs, Eddie Curry, Z-Bo, Nate Robinson, the assistant coach. Eddie Curry, the coaching staff, Eddie Curry, Zeebo,

Nate Robinson, Ronaldo Blackman, Jerome James, Don't forget Jerome. Moskov. Incredible run. What an advisor. I like Isaiah,

but, come on. But I do think, I do think that, that stuff's going on with that team. I think they're going to get a little splash. I don't think it's a Bob Myers destination. That was one of the rumors,

but I'll be interested to see where Bob Myers goes because it does seem like he's leaving. And then I don't know if you followed all the warriors quotes where basically everybody. And now that the seasons are was like, yeah, the Draymond punching pool thing was a big deal. Kind of fucked up our season.

Even Draymond was like, yeah, I kind of fucked up our season. He literallyaymond was like, yeah, it kind of fucked up our season. He literally said it himself. Steve Kerr said it. He had a press conference. He said it three times. I wonder how that plays out. Jacoby, what are your

Wemba Yama thoughts before we go? Okay. I have one thought. He's 7'5". He hits threes. He was called the best prospect in nba history on the lottery telecast which i i'll give you a couple two brief thoughts one um i was a pa on the 2001 sb awards and my job was to cut the nomination packages for the, uh, breakthrough athletes. And one of which was LeBron James. So I had to go to Bristol and watch every single play of

televised LeBron basketball. And I'd seen highlights, but I remember exactly where I was watching these games and I was fucking flabbergasted. I was, it's, it wasn't the athleticism or the scoring or the dunking or the shooting. It was the passing and every pass was no look. Every pass was in the perfect spot. It was the, the feel for the game was unlike anything I've ever seen. And I remember that moment feeling like, holy shit, I think I'm looking at the best prospect I've ever seen in my life. And at that point, there weren't that many. And I will, I do not, what I've seen from Wemba and Yama, I haven't had the same intimate like footage experience has not matched what I've ever seen in my life. And at that point, there weren't that many. And I do not, what I've seen from Wemba Nyama, I haven't had the same intimate footage experience, has not matched what I've seen from LeBron James. Fair. So I would not agree that he's the best prospect of all time.

He is great. He's going to be great. I get that. We've all heard that. We've all seen it. Here's my sneaky loser of the draft. I believe when that card was flipped over and it was the Spurs who would then get Victor Wimbanyama, this franchise altering for decades, literally decades will alter the franchise for the Spurs, was a rejoiceful moment. You saw the executive lost his mind.

I feel like there's a part of Greg Popovich that had a big glass of wine that was like, oh, fuck. Oh shit. I have to work for like another four years. You know what I mean? I can't leave now. He was the loser.

I feel like he was the biggest loser of the draft. He was just like, God damn it. I thought I was going to do this for like one more year. And there's right off in the sunset and enjoy the rest of my life. But now I feel obligated to shepherd this man's career. Right. This prodigy dropped in my lap and

he's probably has people in his life who are like hey man joe biden's like 80 and he's running the country like you can stay like six more years you just win one more title with wimby there were also people in his life they're like man i can't wait till we get greg back in the golf foursome and you know we're gonna we're gonna have so much time with greg like his wife's like yeah we'll get a second home and Boca. This is going to be awesome. He literally just extended his career at least two years beyond what he wanted it to be. I really feel like he was 70% happy and 30% like, oh, shit.

This means a lot more work for me. He had his vacation planned of going to all the World War II battle sites over the course of nine months. Yeah. House, you take this stuff as personally as I do. When they start saying he is the best prospect in the history of the league and maybe even the best sports prospect ever, I just have to pour some settle down juice for everybody.

I just don't know how you can put him against some of the other people we've seen, like some of the prodigies. Well, if you're going to say best sports prospect ever, like Tiger Woods. Tiger, pull your fucking schlong out and hit these people in the face because there couldn't have been ever a better prospect

than Tiger Woods of any sport. Tiger Woods is on the Mike Douglas show and he was four making 20 foot putts. He was winning every team tournament ever. He won three straight amateurs. He was the all-time short thing that ever came in and then immediately fucking kicked everyone's ass

for eight years. How is he not the best sports prospect? It's an absurd thing. I was, of course, outraged. I was of course outraged I was especially well I don't want to go down this path take a shot at Woj I will ride fucking shotgun on that

that was bullshit what a fucking crazy thing to say let me back up my guy Woj I talked to two executives on what basis it's absurd it's a preposterous thing to say. He's selling a show. It's a television show.

He definitely should say. That's the whole point of ESPN shows these days. That's what it is. Say stupid shit and get it cut out on a video. Yeah. Great. That's a TV show. 10 out of 10.

Because that was the dumbest fucking thing of the week, for sure. The thing is, he seven foot five and tall guys get injured more often than somebody like LeBron. One of the things LeBron was such a short thing. He was like just athletically everything. He was such a safe bet. Right. Whereas like a seven foot five guy. I don't know.

We've seen somebody like Ralph Sampson came in the league. He looked great. And one thing happens and then all of a sudden the trajectory gets messed up. I don't know. We've seen somebody like Ralph Sampson came in the league. He looked great. And one thing happens and then all of a sudden the trajectory gets messed up. I don't know. I mean, look. Yeah. I just hate being in the position of like having to indirectly take

shots at Wemby who doesn't deserve it. He's incredible. We're not taking shots. I know. He's the best prospect in 20 years, but that's fine. That's all we have to say. That's all. The thing with Wemby, when I saw him rebound the three and dunk it, which I've never seen anyone even try to do before. Have you ever seen that, Jacoby?

There's a Dominique Wilkins clip where it's a 17-footer where he misses it and dunks it. I was at the game. It's the only one I've ever seen. Yeah, it was at the foul line. It's the only one I've ever seen like that. But that's from 17 feet. But they didn't shoot threes back then, though.

Maybe he could have done it if they did shoot from there yeah woj said he he there are executives who think he will be the best player in the league by his third year this is not true it's so dumb that's not true that's not true it's a tv show the machinations with the producers in the control room, when he says that, are fist-pumping the air like Pauly D at the shore in the middle of July. It's just the way television works. You say crazy things. People talk about it. It's just kind of how it works.

He's not the best prospect in basketball. Lou Alcindor won all the NYCc championships went to ucla won all the college championships it was an unstoppable force that changed the rules for him like he's probably the best prospect in the history of basketball i'm going with luau cinder here yeah by the way if if we have lebron and luau cinder who became kareem and you say wemby is on the level of those guys for what the buzz is about him from scouts, I'll accept that. Not on the level.

I'm not going to put anyone over LeBron and Kareem. I'm saying underneath them. Yeah, I'm saying underneath them. I remember House and I, that first year on League Pass, where we were kind of tired of the LeBron hype. And I remember, I think I wrote an ESPN magazine piece about it

probably halfway through the year because we were watching him going, God damn, this guy's good. Like, holy shit, this guy's good right away. Like when you think like Kobe came into the league out of high school and what that take, it took him like a year and a half to even start to resemble Kobe and KG, all these people that came in and LeBron, that kind of immediately made sense as an impactful basketball player. I just find it hard to believe Wim Benyam is going to be better than that. We'll see, I guess.

But it's such a fun kind of wrinkle to have this guy come into this league when we have already so many great stars. Now we have this Spurs team that none of us thought about last year. Now you add this guy,

we're not losing. It's like the, the, if like all the superstars are like a nightclub, we're not losing anyone from the nightclub, but we're adding this guy and scoop might be really good too. So I don't know. Um,

yeah, I was trying to think if I had been on the set, how I would have responded to that. But I think I would have had to have been like, that's the craziest thing I've ever heard. You wrote the book of basketball, Bill. I know you. I've seen you do television.

You would have pushed back immediately and it would have made a good show. I would have been in the control room fist bumping again. I saw LeBron. Now we got a debate. Now the ratings are going up. LeBron was such a good prospect that we showed his games on ESPN, which was completely unheard of. Never in a million years were they ever going to show high school games on cable. And that's completely unheard of. Never in a million years

were they ever going to show high school games on cable. And that's how good he... And then it's been borne out. He's still fucking playing 20 years later. Any last words before we go? House, anything else

sticking in your craw? I will say I was super excited that the Washington football franchise seems like it might have a new owner. But the events of the past... Yeah, well, except for the events of the past week don't exactly... that the Washington football franchise seems like it might have a new owner. Oh, congrats. Yeah, well, except for the events of the past week don't exactly... haven't been engendering confidence.

I haven't been getting... Now I have to get up close and personal with how the Philadelphia 76ers have been run the past 15 years, and it's not giving me a sports boner. Let me just leave it at that. But at least you got rid of Snyder. Well, great. That's

a quarter chub, but I want a winner. I want a winner. I want a winner. I want my football team to be a winner. And I don't know. I'm I don't like what happened this past week in Philadelphia. I'll just leave it at that. Jacoby, you want to give us the

succession siblings as the four remaining NBA teams before we go? Yes, there are four remaining NBA teams vying for the top spot. There are four remaining Roy siblings vying for the top spot, and I've matched them. And I will go through this. I would like you guys just very briefly, just let me know how I've done.

I'm open to constructive criticism, and I'm also very sensitive. Keep that in mind. I have the Celtics. They make the most sense. They're consistent, somewhat liberal, and they're reliable and a little insane. They're Shiv. I'm going with Shiv for the Celtics. Okay. I'm going with the Lakers.

Pedigree, experience, brand name, forward facing. They're the star. That's Kendall Roy. Okay. I'm going with the Heat. The most likable. Connor Roy. Don't really have a chance to run things, but you like having them around. They're not going to win. We kind of know they're not going to win, but we love them. It's Connor Roy. Don't really have a chance to run things, but you like having them around. They're not going to win.

We kind of know they're not going to win, but we love them. It's Connor. Like, Connor's not going to end up running the company, but we kind of, like, love him and we love to see him. That's how I feel about Jimmy Butler and the Heat. Exactly. Exactly. And I have the Nuggets. They're strong.

They stick to their convictions. They're powerful and the number one reason I have the nuggets as Rome Roy is because Jamal Murray like Roman has publicly shared video and pictures of his genitalia

so I mean that's obviously obviously the nuggets from Roman I feel strongly about that one. I would not be walked off that, but the other ones I'm open for criticism. Uh, I like that.

That's, that's solid. I like that Miami heat is Connor Roy. Yeah. They're not going to win, but we love them. They, they're,

they're at 1% in Kentucky right now. Feeling good. Booming in Alaska. But I had, Bill knows I had a hard time with this because i despise these kids i think that the show was ruined when they killed uh logan and i have a hard time you know uh participating in the march of the dipshits the the only one that i'll quibble with um kendall Roy is the ultimate self-saboteur. Like, I can't say anything nice about any of these kids.

The attributes that you tried to doubt were wonderful, Jacoby, as such a glass-half-full way of going about it. But to me, Kendall Roy is the bed-shitting addict who raps at his father's birthday party and, you know, has the chance at doing great things but then self sabotages so the celtics of course so the celtics of course good point you knew where i was going just for everyone listening to this bill is like sad he's straight faced he's not smiling he's not frowning he's just kind of like flat faced because he realizes that his team which is down one game to the heat in the eastern

conference finals is the kendall roy of the playoffs see i would have gone roman roy for the celtics because the genitalia part though come on well the genitalia part yeah you did trump me on that but come on how do you think you got that how do you think you got the nickname furry murray or jamal Furry? Sorry. Well, because the Roman Roy part, like Jerry was E-bay Adoka. I could have gotten you there. And, you know, not quite ready for the moment. Every time you think it's going to happen, all of a sudden he acts impulsive and erratic,

which is kind of like the Celtics jacking up threes at the wrong time. So I don't know. Honestly, you could have talked me into is kind of like the Celtics jacking up threes at the wrong time. Honestly, you could have talked me into Andy Roy's sibling for the Celtic. I would have gone for all of them. They're all kind of miserable and going to lose. Yeah, that series is going to go seven. I said to when we were all texting yesterday, House, I was saying

I thought the road team had a chance to cover every game in the Celtic seed series. I don't think home court advantage matters. I think the series will have no more. I'm a reason Miami is going to have games where they just don't make anything. And it's hot in Miami. What about the fact that it's hot in Miami? The climate is warm.

What happens with Julius Randall? Oh, he's I have a I have a counter take on Randall. Keep him. Just give me let me get let me get a 40-second Knicks corner here, okay? Yeah. My most insightful future Knicks roster move comes from my nine-year-old son, Quincy, which knows nothing about the Knicks and or basketball.

But I was talking with friend of the podcast, Ben Dietrich, about the Knicks and potential moves they would make. And I was saying, like, you basically just have to get rid of Randall. Quincy overhears this and says, I would trade Jalen Brunson. And I was like, wait a second. Now, I would not trade Jalen Brunson if I were the Knicks. But he has a good instinct. He has a good instinct.

He's like, don't trade Randall now when his value is at its lowest. So I want to keep Julius Randle until his value raises. You feature Julius Randle next season, knowing that he's not going to be there for the playoff push. RJ, gone. Julius Randle needs to come back to get a proper return for him because right now you're not going to get much so me and quincy collaborated to say i think that's interesting about selling high on one guy

versus selling low can can i give you a julius randall take house let me hear it we need face coaches some people just have weird faces when they play sports, right? Randall has a face that when things aren't going well, you really see it on his face, especially in the HD era with the closeups. And it's like, he has whatever the basketball player equivalent of resting bitch faces. He's got that just like pouty, weird look on his face. So either you work with him in the off season, not on like, you know, like a jump hook or anything like that. You just work on expressions, managing your expressions,

seeming happy. Like you're on, like when I did the countdown show, I had to learn how to not tap my hands on the desk because I would just have this nervous energy. But then you realize, oh, you have to seem perfectly still when you do TV. You can't really move. You got to be like this. You can't nod.

You pick up on these tricks. Brief nods. I'm a big nodder. Brief nods. Occasional nodder, but you can't do the steady nodding as someone else talking. No, draws to attention.

Randall, you work all summer on his faces. Other option, you grow the James Harden beard, so I can't see your face at all. Can't see the face. I'm just Conrad and beard hair. It's really his eyes are the big problem. He needs a lot of eye work with the face doctor. I actually heard this.

So maybe he got a beard and goggles or maybe like the Jalen Brown mask? I heard Julius Randall had an exit interview with the body language doctor and the body language doctor called out sick that day because he did not want to discuss it. That's just something I heard. That's just something I heard.

Is that true? What if the Knicks said, hey, you know that thing Jalen Brown is wearing to protect his broken orbital bone? We just want you to wear that all season. I think he just likes it. Is he really protected? Did he not wear it like four games ago? He's got some superstition with it because he took it off a couple games ago

and then he got hit in the face again. So now it's like I'm never taking this off. I think i think he likes it all right i kept you guys up too late house jacoby great to see you as always house we got the pga who am i betting on should i make a bet right now i mean there are three um live guys in the top 10 including bryson dechambeau uh we'll see what happens the first round's not quite over yet. There's another guy ahead of him. I have a take. I am live betting as soon as the first round is over Rory McIlroy, who finished one over par,

but the way that he grabbed the round, he started off terribly. He was three over through the front nine, but he shot two under on the back and it really looked like something started to click so i think the odds are going to be insane i'm live betting roy roy mcelroy before the start of the second round tomorrow she go we don't listen to that i really i really think he found something i really do i don't the only way i enjoy professional

golf is i live bet hole by hole just based on nothing. You know what I mean? It really locks me in. I'm just like, oh, is he going to get par? I'm like, yeah. $40 he is. You know how James Harden is Daryl Moore's Achilles heel? That's Roy McIlroy for Joe House.

Maybe so. Maybe so. I don't even know how much money you've lost on him. There's no way they keep James Harden. They can't keep James Harden. No, they're going to keep him. He loves him. All right, Jacoby House, great to see you.

Thanks for staying up with me. Y'all afraid of ghosts? How about ghost peppers? It's the moment you've been waiting for. The ghost pepper sandwich is back at Popeye's. A buttermilk-battered chicken breast served on a brioche bun with barrel-cured pickles. And here's the best part.

It's topped with a sauce made from ghost peppers and ancho chilies. If that doesn't send a chill of anticipation down your spine, nothing will. Get your ghost pepper sandwich today at Popeyes before it ghosts you for another year. I got chicken from Popeyes. 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.. Because safety is learned. It's learned. Okay, give it up. Give what up? Really? Really, really. This message is brought to you by Metrolinks. All right, Derek Thompson is here.

He writes for The Atlantic. He hosts an awesome podcast for us called Plain English. And we had been texting and talking about AI, a topic that he has covered on his podcast multiple times, a relatively new genre, vertical, whatever you want to call it. I was going to wait until after the NBA playoffs so we could do like a big ass AI episode, you and I.

And we can't wait any longer. This is happening so fast. It is anecdotally in so many different conversations I'm having with different people, oh, what's this? To, wait, you're not on email? And then all of a sudden it felt like everything shifted in 1996 and 97. It feels like this is happening right now in May, 2023. Something is happening. Something is different. And this is the dominant topic. Your thoughts? I want to hear all of the gossip morsels that you have for me from music and sports and all of these domains. But I think it's really useful to start with like a brief bit of history here. I think it was like one year ago that you and I had a conversation about the next era

of tech, because as you noted, tech seemed to be kind of exhausted with itself, right? Crypto was in the toilet. Metaverse was like in some whatever septic tank below the toilet. Social media, which was supposed to be the future. All these companies were struggling in their own way. Meta had had an awful year. Snap, TikTok is flirting with getting banned. In streaming, Netflix had lured the entire entertainment industry into what they said

was this green pasture of digital streaming. Everyone follows them out of the green pasture and the Netflix is like, oh, nevermind. Actually, it's sinking sand. Enjoy being fucked. And everyone's like, okay, where does tech go from here? Where is the green light? And I said AI, not because I had some crystal ball in my hands, but because I was like, nothing else seems to be growing. But there's this technology, again, this is the middle of last year, this technology called GPT-3 that was incredibly impressive. And some people are playing around with this large language model and it's producing these weird and incredibly normally human, intelligent seeming paragraphs and prompts. And I thought, you know, this is neat. We'll see where this goes. In the fall after we spoke,

the engineers at that company, OpenAI, decided they wanted to basically offer a new skin, a new interface to allow the public to play around with this tool that had mostly just been the domain of nerds. This thing was not supposed to break the internet, Bill. OpenAI did not expect ChatGPT to blow up the world. Microsoft, which was in business with OpenAI,

did not expect it to blow up the world. Other people in the industry that were working with large language models at Meta, at Google, the smartest AI people in the world, they didn't think ChatGPT was going to be anything either. And they were all wrong. Everyone was wrong. ChatGPT launches on November 30th last year. Bill, November 30th, that was week 12 of the NFL season. It was 20 games into the current NBA season. The Lakers were seven and 12. Long story short, first 100 days, ChapGPT gets 100 million users. It's the fastest growing consumer application in history. And I tell that brief history and emphasize the recency of this technology,

because when something is growing this fast, and when a trend is basically exponential like this, it is essential to make predictions. You have to try to guess where this thing is going to go, because you don't know where it's going to be in the next week, and it could change your business in six months. But at the same time, whenever something is growing this quickly, it is so hard for those predictions to be accurate. I can't remember the last thing that has affected basically every single thing I care about. Business, sports, culture.

Everyone I work with, my kids. This is even like anecdotally with my kids, just how this has taken over where this is now it's like, do I do this? If I feel like other kids are doing this, you're almost like a mid nineties baseball player. I have to take steroids because everyone else is taking steroids. And I just went against somebody who threw 98 miles an hour. There's no way to regulate it. There's no way to police it. And I don't even know where to start, but let's start here. When this happened with the internet in the mid nineties, there was this one side of like, holy shit, this is so cool. I can't believe we can do this, this, this, this, this. And it just immediately started interacting with our lives in all these different ways. Then there was the safety scary part of it.

And the conversations I've been in the last couple of weeks, the safety scary part is the part now people are going, well, wait a second. This is going too fast. What if this happens? What if this happens? What if this happens? Two examples. One, if they can replicate my voice and AI person just trying to cause harm calls my son, but it's not me and says, come meet me at this location. And my son's like, yeah, my car broke down. Come get me. And my son goes there and whatever. So you have all of that stuff, all the terrible ways that can go. And then the other side is just being able to lift somebody's voice, being able to basically recreate somebody, to steal music, which has already been happening, to create music in the

sounds of people, to create visual stuff, actors that could look like... There's all these things and we know how this goes. Nobody's going to be able to regulate this forever. Now, when this happened with the internet in the mid nineties, we all panicked. We freaked out. Oh my God, I'll never put my credit card online. Most of it turned out fine. There was still some really bad stuff, right? And that took a while and then we're still kind of unpacking the bad stuff, but we were kind of a little too panicky about it. Is there a reason to be even more panicky about this AI stuff, in your opinion? These are really, really good questions. Okay, so the way that I try to force myself to talk about this subject is that I try to stay out of the

future tense until I have to jump into it. Because it's so easy to say, oh, this kind of thing is going to be possible, it's going to happen. You know, this kind of thing is going to be possible and it's going to happen. But you want to remind yourself, wait, what's happening right now? How are people using this technology right now? What are the news headlines of the day, not the predictions people are making in the future? So I wrote this article for The Atlantic that I sort of cheekily called, AI is a waste of time. And what I meant by that isn't that AI is just a waste of time. It's that when I reflect on my own use of chat GPT, and when I reflect my own use of mid journey, which is a text to image AI prompt, you know, you can say, you know, I want to see Derek in the

style of, you know, Van Gogh on Mars with a cowboy hat, it can make some really incredible photorealistic images. When I reflected on how I'm using these technologies, I thought I'm actually not using them to be more productive all the time. I'm using them to waste time, to sort of test the technology, to sort of see what it can do. And so as productivity enhancing

as all this technology might eventually be for many different industries, right now, I think it's probably productivity sapping for a lot of industries because people are just playing around with it to see where it goes. Now, maybe that'll flip. Maybe the games people are playing now will be the work that people do of the future. But right now, I think a lot of people are just testing this thing to see what is possible. And it's important to say before we predict that this is going to change everything, which, by the way, I think is possible. We don't have a number one hit TV show written by AI. We don't have a number one song written by AI. We

don't have an epidemic of Bill Simmons style media celebrities having their voices stolen by AI arsons and spammed to place bogus calls to their families to create scenarios that become catastrophic. That kind of stuff isn't happening yet. Of course, it doesn't mean it can't happen in the future, but it's not happening yet. So you want to look at everything that's happening now and say, how are people actually using this? Fundamentally, I see in a lot of cases, yes, computer programmers are doing it to accelerate their work. Yes, people in Hollywood are using it to see if they can write stories. But a lot of people are still in the mode of just plaguing with this.

Now, let's go to the future. How could this be used in the future? Well, let's stick to music. And we can go back to the spam thing because that is freaky and plausible. But in music, I'm very interested in the legal debates that are happening right now in terms of how these kind of mix and match technologies can be used by consumers. I think what you're going to see is the recording music industry saying, we're going to try to sue AI companies on two fronts.

We're going to try to sue to keep you from using our music to train your algorithms. And we're going to try to keep you from selling music, from making a bunch of money because you just wrote your own song and plugged in the voice of Drake or plugged in the voice of Bad Bunny. So there's going to be a lot of really interesting legal problems with the way AI is used in music. But in the short term, I do think a lot of people are going to use this to kind of just play around. Just last quick thing, Grimes, the musician who was previously married to Elon Musk, came out with an app that allows her fans to make music and then dub in her voice in the music that they make. And she said, if you guys release this and make money from it, there's going to be a royalty sharing agreement

that we have. So I make a little bit and you make a little bit. Maybe we get a huge Grimes hit, but I wonder whether, again, a lot of people are just going to use this to kind of F around, you know, to like send like a message to their friend, but in the voice of Grimes to just kind of be funny. So a lot of things are happening here. And I do think that the legal challenges that this is going to pose to the music industry are going to be utterly fascinating. Well, it reminds me a little of when rap started to take off in the 80s, when they just, it was like a free-for-all for sampling old

songs. And it wasn't really governed, and it kind of was, but it's like, you're going to pay, but nobody was even thinking that way, because it was such an early version of the form. And then eventually, there was this, wait a second. And we had that wait a second moment.

We have that with all these different things. Like the writer's strike right now, which is happening. And AI was one of the things that got thrown in. And I don't see any way, like zero that the studios would go, oh yeah, well, Ben, forget it. We'll get rid of AI because let's face it,

the studios, you know, they're, they're going to be thinking about profits and they're going to be thinking about repeatability and sustainability. They're not giving up on that yet when they don't know what the technology is. And I think that's depending on how hard the writers fight for that, that's going to be a real sticking point. But when you think about it, and I think this is both scary to me, but also makes sense to me. All right. Like Law and Order or the Chicago Fire Show, or I don't know, pick any generic sitcom. There's a formula to all of those. You go on Netflix and it's like, oh, there's a new, there's something wrong with the house movie. Oh, there's a formula to all of those. Like you go on Netflix and it's like, oh, there's a new, there's something wrong with the house movie. Oh, there's a couple, they're moving in.

Oh, look how cute their kid is. Wait, what's wrong with the attic? AI is going to just be able to take like 300 horror movies that have something wrong with the house, right? And AI will be able to write a script and basically create their own version of that. So now I don't need a writer. For same thing for the Dick Wolf universe. Dick Wolf might already be AI. He might not even really exist. script and basically create their own version of that. So now I don't need a writer. Same thing

for the Dick Wolf unit. Dick Wolf might already be AI. He might not even really exist. He might have been replaced 10 years ago, but it'll just be the same procedural with the same beats. So I think for just starting with art, I think all of a sudden there's these huge stakes already. And if I'm at any of these big companies, what do companies always do? They always try to replace human labor with computers. We saw it happen with phone operators when I was a kid. Like this is kind of where their mind drifts. Oh, I can just get rid of humans and have machines do this. I think this is conceivable. It is absolutely conceivable. This is where I don't think you need too much of an imagination to see that this is basically here. And if it's not literally here, it's going to happen tomorrow. Like the strikers right now want, as I understand it, a guarantee that the studios aren't going to cut them out of royalty payments by crediting AI tools like ChatGPT when they come up with storylines but there is just no way that a studio producer or a netflix executive isn't going to

play around with chat gpt and come upon a story whereby legally they should retain the credit for that story like well especially if they own the show like if they own law and order it's basically they're using the ai instead of the writer i don't know what the what rights writers have this is like one of the writer. I don't know what the, what writes the writers have. This is like one of the 95 fascinating things about AI right now. It really is. So I, I was playing around with this. I have GPT-4, which is the advanced version of chat GPT.

And, um, you know, it's really freaking weird. I asked it to essentially write me, uh, an episode of Chicago fire. Maybe that's just like the most GPT-able television show. And I just said, quote, write me a story outline for a one hour TV show in the mode of Dick Wolf about a team of firefighters taking on a blaze that injures one of their own. The plot should include a mystery about who started the fire, two love developments and two twists, the second of which should come at the end of the episode and set up a shocking season finale. Now, look, I don't think that the story outline that I got is A+, but it's not B-.

It's like A-B+. It was a really interesting treatment for 56 minutes of television. And I could absolutely imagine just like giving that printout to a team of writers and saying, this is the new episode. But that's the key to this, that they could create the template for whatever the episode is, hand it to the writers, and the AI almost becomes the head writer. Hey, guys, knock yourself out with this. And that's not even the end of the process, Bill.

So there's this idea that some people talk about called sandwiching in writing with AI. And sandwiching means that I prompt AI. I ask a question like, I want to write an article about what 20th century technology, artificial intelligence is like. Give me five examples. It comes back with nuclear weapons, penicillin, a bunch of other stuff, the internet. Then after that, I can take the material and craft an article, right? There are AI apps now that can help people with the second half of that. There's an AI app called Pickaxe, which allows screenwriters essentially to get around writer's block so that they throw in some basic features of a story they

want to tell. And Pickaxe suggests various plot lines that they can put into a story. Okay, that's pretty good. But now here's- So like Jesse Armstrong doing succession is like, all right, Logan Roy's funeral. Shit, I don't know what to do with the eulogy scene. And just kind of basically feeds all of it to AI. And AI is like, what if you do this? Yeah, right.

I've got a story that is like basically loosely based on the Murdoch empire and King Lear. And I've got a son who's basically Hamlet and I've got a little dipshit called Roman and I've got Shiv. Here's the plot lines of how we got to the end of the series. Give me seven ways the story can end.

When you learn how to play with it in an advanced way, you can give it more than that. You can say, of those seven ways that this season can end, give me three that are obvious, give me two that are slightly less obvious, and give me two or three more that are really mind-bendy and weird.

And you can take all these and then mix and mash them together and write essentially the treatment of the last two episodes of Succession. But again, it's one step further. Again, on the sandwiching side, once you've written that script, you can still plug writing into ChatGPT and say, tell me what you think of this. If I write an essay that's kind of complicated, that's making

a bunch of different points, and I don't know that I'm getting the point across, I can take that essay, put it into ChatGPT and say, what point do you think I'm making, computer? And it can tell me, here's what I think your thesis is. And if I think that's wrong, I can go back and say, oh, I have not been clear enough in my writing. So not only can you use chat GBT in this case, like a research assistant or like a brainstorming assistant, you can also use it like an editor. And that raises all sorts of questions for writers like me. I mean, exactly like me. The Atlantic just published its AI policy a few days ago. It raises a lot of really important ethical questions. AI policy? thing to research it? Or is it kind of like a person where if I took a paragraph from a book,

that's clearly a copyright infringement of the book. That's not honestly fully human. There's so many messy questions when the future of artistic and creative work becomes more chimerical. It's not merely human. It's like human plus monster. That's a very, very strange future to be entering. Yeah. So I have a friend who's in a company that invests in different businesses. And he said a lot of the businesses right now, the small startup stuff are all AI-based, right? And he was telling me, and this is when I ended up calling you a day later because I was like, what's going on with this stuff? He was like, yeah, in like three, four years, there'll be some bot of you that listens to

all the podcasts you've done, is able to absorb all of it. Maybe they even look at all the writing you've done. They create some sort of bot version of you. And then somebody after a Celtic game could be like, I'm going to talk to the Bill Simmons bot and see what he thought of the game. And by the way, the bot would probably be exactly where I was after game one against Miami, where I'd be like, oh my God, our coach is fucking serious. Why didn't we call time out in the third quarter? I'm pretty sure the bot would hit all the beats I would hit with my dad

when we talked the next day. But when he said that, and then I'm thinking, all right, well, that actually makes somewhat, would people rather interact with the bot or listen to my podcast? Do I have control over the bot? And then, you know, cause we've had this in movies and TVs. You can't just use Al Pacino's voice for a Mazda commercial, right? Right. Al Pacino will sue you. So it just feels like there's going to be all this ethical legal stuff that will be basically the next 10 years. But the history of this stuff is you can get away with what you can get away with before the rules come in. They can't get away with it anymore. It takes forever to make these rules. Do we trust the Supreme Court to come up with a great strategy for this? I certainly don't.

Yeah, I'm not a legal expert. So I agree that the legal questions are incredibly thorny and fascinating, but I'm going to put a pin in that for a second. I want to return to the idea of chat BS, essentially turning you and your voice into AI. I see no reason why something like BS bot for other media-facing celebrities won't be a thing. I mean, it already is a thing for Grimes, the musician, right? She's the first out of the box saying, use my voice. I don't care. Put it in your songs. Let's take music together. We'll share the royalties. Go have fun. Other people are going to do this. And it raises interesting questions of, okay, where is this most useful? So, you know, you do work like you have ad reads. Do you have to do all the ad reads? If you sign off on the Bill Simmons bot reading the SimpliSafe ad,

well, then maybe that's legal. Well, I love SimpliSafe. I would always want a human touch with SimpliSafe. Don't come for SimpliSafe. I'm glad you brought this up because I don't think Spotify is going to get mad at me for this. We're developing that stuff and there is going to be mad at me for this. We're developing that stuff.

And there is going to be a way to use my voice for the ads. You have to obviously give the approval for the voice, but it opens up from an advertising standpoint, all of these different great possibilities for, you could have localized, let's say we did a thing with like a ticket resale or something like that. You could geo target that for each city.

The more interesting thing for me with that is, could you take my podcast, like me and House and Jacoby talking about Game 2 Lakers Nuggets, which will be right before this part of the podcast. Could they take that and make AI Spanish version of it? Could they put it in French? Could the AI people,

could they take the translations and just quickly take our voices and just make a podcast in 35 languages that reacts to the game? To me, that doesn't, this is what's so crazy about AI. That actually seems realistic to me. dystopian either. Like if you and House and Jacoby have all signed contracts to Spotify, essentially saying, I allow my voice to be AI manipulated exclusively for, and House is a lawyer, he'll be able to recite this better than I can, but exclusively for local market translations and for no other purpose. I don't think that's a bad thing. I think that's a wonderful thing. There might be people in the Czech Republic who want to listen to your podcast or vaguely aware, who like the Celtics and would listen to a show like this, except for the language barrier. I think that's a really, really interesting application of it.

If I get hit by a bus, people are like, man, I really miss Bill's podcast. It's like, no, he's back. He's now a bot. A zombie Bill now recording on the zombie heat. Yeah, the zombie Bill Simmons podcast. We'd probably get sponsors for it. Presented by Vandal Sportsbook. There's actually, Bill, this is interesting. So the economist Tyler Cowen, who has a really interesting podcast, did a chat GPT interview with the philosopher and author Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver's Travels, who, spoiler alert, is extremely dead. But he asked him all these questions.

And because, again, this is a pre-trained technology. It's pre-trained on a corpus of literature. And so if you're a dead author who's published a ton of writings, well, the technology is going to be really good at pattern matching and predicting what you're going to say in response to various questions. And so Tyler is talking to a, I think, British or Scottish or Irish, I don't remember exactly where Jonathan Swift was born, actor reading chat GPT scripts that are responding to questions the way that this dead author might have responded to questions. I mean, that is actually exactly the kind of zombie relationship that you're describing, except it's zombie Jonathan Swift. You could, I think, imagine all sorts of ways that we could essentially bring back.

This is creepy in a way, but we could have bizarrely verisimilar conversations with dead intellectuals asking them about how they would respond to issues of the day. And that is this process of zombification that you're talking about. It's not their voice, but maybe 50 years from now when we have a ton of recordings of certain people's voices, we'll be able to do that too. I don't know if that's good or creepy or a fascinating research project or

unbelievably unethical. Like it might in a weird way be all four at the same time, but there's just no question. It is so, so interesting. Let's take a break and a couple more things on everything we're talking about. At Wealthsimple, we're built for whatever you're building. Built for Jane, who wants to break into the housing market. We're built for Ted, who's obsessed with what's happening in the global markets. And built for Celine, who just wants to retire and explore the world's flea markets. So take a moment and think about what you're building for. We've got the financial tools to help make it happen.

Wealthsimple. Built for possibilities. Visit wealthsimple.com slash possibilities. 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.

Just quickly on the art side of things and the zombie part of it. So let's say David Chase wanted to bring back the Sopranos and we had the technology. James Gandolfini passed away, I don't know, 12, 13 years ago. And he has the technology plus all the AI voice stuff where it could be like, I can basically make old Tony Soprano. I can make Tony Soprano didn't die. Now we're 16 years later, 17 years later, 18 years later. He's an old mobster in New Jersey. And here's his life.

And I can have an actor playing him. I can do face stuff to make it really seem like it's Gandolfini. And I can have the voice saying all the lines. I don't think David Chase would do this, but my point is I do think in 10 years we will be able to do stuff like this and some people are going to do it. It's too creepy for me to imagine it being a hit, but it's also the word that came to my mind is cool. And I'm not sure that cool is the perfect word for it, but I'll run with it anyway. It's cool enough that you know this is a technology that people are going to use. And in all sorts of situations, that would replace all sorts of memes in my imagination, right? People would talk to each other and make Sopranos fanfic media using this technology for an audience of-

Like moving memes. Yeah, right. Exactly. It would be for an audience of like five though, not an audience of 5 million. And that's where I think, you know, if to the extent that I'm like working on a couple of sort of like, you know, big picture ideas about like, where are we going with AI? What does it mean? And like the grand sweep of like, you know, the last 100 years of media. And I was having a conversation recently with someone where they said, you know, the 20th century was really an era of mass production. And for a long time, we've been headed for an era of narrow casting. So if you think of the 20th century as like mass production plus broadcast, that is the shows like Cheers are made to be watched by 50 million people and they're broadcast 50 million people. Okay. In the early 21st century, we moved to mass production plus narrow cast. So you have art and entertainment that is made for tens of millions of people, but Facebook feeds and Twitter feeds and Instagram feeds and TikTok feeds are all specific. They're

all narrow cast for you. So you're getting an individualized slice of mass production. What might happen in the future is that you get individual production plus narrow cast, if that makes sense. So ChatGPT writes just for you. If you prompt ChatGPT to write a Dick Wolf episode and I prompt it to write a Dick Wolf episode, we will get two different Dick Wolf episodes. But how far does that personalization process go? Could you imagine AI songs written just for you? I like this Taylor Swift song, but do it in the style of you too. Could you imagine video games that change in response to individualized user requests so that in effect, no one is playing the exact same game? That I think is the really

spooky, weird promise of AI that we already understand that we live in a world of fragmentation, right? You used to have alter like Uncle Walter Cronkite, and now everyone gets their news from their own podcast and newsletter. How far can AI take that where people can individuate their consumption of media so much that everyone is consuming their own personalized thing on their own narrow cast? That's where I think it gets really weird and interesting. I asked somebody in the music industry, just give me two AI points. And here were the two. And this is a person who knows things. He said, authenticity always wins, regardless of how this AI thing comes out. And that's an interesting point just in general, that humans are always going to want the humans to win with this stuff, right? So even with art and any of this kind of stuff,

I'm always going to want the song that was made by a real human over the song that was made by a robot. Because then all that does is tell us deep down in our souls that we're all kind of just on a hamster wheel and there's nothing special about any of us. We can just be replicated by it so i feel like the human part of it um and also like from actually being able to perform which is where like in the music industry most of the money is really coming now from concerts like

this taylor swift tour that's going on right now you can't have an ai concert so that so there's one there's a piece of that, that's just never going to change. The other thing he said, this is a positive one. Like think of, cause everyone's going to go to the negatives. Like we just did for half hours. I think of the positives, like how's this going to change healthcare? What if there is an AI healthcare app that I can just put in my symptoms and it just immediately figures out exactly what I need and gets the medicine. And, um, you know, we're all like Google doctors these days, but what if AI can really diagnose, Hey, I've noticed these nine things are going on with you right now. And

that could be this. It's a little like with the stupid watches that we talked about the last time you were on that. My wife was going crazy that she only got a 74 sleep, but maybe AI will figure out a better way for us to take care of ourselves. So that's a positive, Derek. Those are two really good examples. Let me try to hit them one by one. So the first thing you said that I absolutely agree with

is that people like people. Taylor Swift fans are not fans of the sound of Taylor Swift's music, no matter where it comes from. They are super fans for her. They love her. They have parasocial relationships with her. And I see no evidence. As I said at the top, there is no number one AI TV show. There is no number one AI musician. If that changes, I'm ready to change my hypothesis that people love people. But art is about this relationship between human fans and human artists, because it's not just about the product. Yeah, AI can write stuff, but people are fans of people. So that's number one. Number two, I'm really glad that you brought up the science medicine part,

because I've had a lot of really interesting conversation with scientists and doctors about how this technology is being used. And I think the best way to think about it is sort of short term, medium term, long term. So short term is being used in a lot of prosaic ways, like so much of being a scientist these days. It's like writing a bibliography and writing like a lit review of some paper that you want to be published in Nature Journal. That takes days sometimes. Now you can do it in minutes possibly. And that's really fantastic. That'll change time

and hopefully that'll improve science. Medium term, Bill, you nailed it. It's diagnostics. You know, we already live in a world where if you have a stomach ache and your foot is swollen and you can't see out of your right eye, by the time you go to your doctor,

you're going to use your one good eye to Google all those symptoms and come in with a theory. This is what I think I have. You know, I think it's gout and he says it's not gout. And then you have a fight about whether or not it's gout. They're going to have better diagnostic tools. You can so easily imagine that a human doctor plus a high quality diagnostic large language

model or a high quality diagnostic AI is going to be a richer diagnostic experience. The long-term possibilities are what really, really thrill me. Let me try to do this quickly because it's a little bit complicated, but I think it's so interesting. If you think about like what ChatGPT does, ChatGPT maps words in a multidimensional space

to understand the relationship between every word that exists so that when you prompt it, it can build a kind of map of meaning from all of those words that you understand to be a correct answer. And that is amazing that it can do this. But sometimes I think like, all right, chat GPT is fluent in the language of English, the language of English, but there are other quote unquote languages that exist that humans might not be fluent in yet. So for example, if you think about like the human body, our cells are talking to each other. Our mRNA is talking to our proteins. Our T cells are talking to diseases.

We just don't know what the F they're saying. But biology, anatomy is a language. It's just a language that we humans are not fluent in yet. But two years ago, there was a project at Deep Mind called AlphaFold, which cracked the mystery of protein folding, you could say essentially, and this is not too metaphorical, that it cracked the language of proteins. And if our bodies essentially are a language that we aren't fluent in, that AI can understand the same way it understands English, that it might be able to have all sorts of breakthroughs

about cancer and polygenic disease that we aren't even close to cracking. And that's really like the long-term, faraway, utopian hope is that we are building a kind of intelligence that will let us go so much further in answering the most important questions of human lifespans and medicine. And I am mildly optimistic that on a long enough time horizon, 10, 15 years, we're going to see miraculous stuff come down the pike from our artificial intelligent understanding of our bodies. Yeah. It made me think of, you did a great podcast a few months ago about dieting

and the concept of how have we not cracked the code on dieting? There's all these different diets. Why hasn't one of them won? Where's the one that's just, this is the way to do it. Like in basketball where they're like, take more three pointers. Everybody's like, yeah, you should take, and then just, but dieting's not like that. And the answer, which I think you, I forget the guest, who was the guest? Oh, we had two guests, but yeah, we had a guest from Harvard endocrinologist. And then we had, I had some writers on as well to talk about sort of like meta-analyses. And, you know, one of the upshots about, sorry, go ahead. I was going to say one of the guests, but the basic conclusion was there is no answer.

Every person's different. And the diet is what works for you. It doesn't mean it's going to work for my wife. It doesn't mean it's going to work for my son. Every body's different. Everything hits something differently. And it makes me think with AI, if AI can figure out a way to basically what each person, what they like, what they don't like, what affects them. Because like yesterday, my son went and got bagels. He's like, you want a bagel? I never eat bagels.

I'm like, you know what? I fucking want a bagel today. Give me a toasted onion bagel with cream cheese. I had it. I was in a coma for like two and a half hours. I was like barely functional. I was like, why did I have this bagel? But clearly if I eat a bagel with cream cheese

in the middle of the day, I'm just going to suck for until three in the afternoon. My body knows this. If you had a, like basically your AI manager and it takes in all the input and I eat every day and I'm like, this made me feel good. I had this, I felt terrible. Oh, I had truffles yesterday. That was a disaster. And then AI basically scripts out what I should eat every day. Maybe I'm leading a better life. I mean, so back to your point of like how some of this stuff might be a lot better. I do think that's going to happen. I think it's going to happen too. And, you know, I want to reserve the possibility. I think we

spent a lot of time on the downsides and obviously there's lots of ways that AI could go wrong, but just another vote for optimism here. You could imagine the combination of wearables and AI being really powerful. Because if you've got an Apple Watch or you've got some next generation Apple Watch and you eat a bagel in this AI inflected future, and the Apple Watch has some way of measuring the fact that you are incredibly lethargic, or maybe you just tap two buttons to indicate extreme lethargy on your phone, then maybe it remembers your history a little bit better. And it is, it is informing you as you go about your life, little things that might make you happier. So I, I know someone working on a stealth project that

is, um, I think he would describe it as her, uh, the technology from the movie her, but with the romance lobotomized out of it. So it can't fall in love with you, but it is still a personal assistant in your ear that can follow you around and talk to you if you want to be talked to by it. And I think that having a kind of extraneous intelligence, essentially remember all sorts of things for you that you wouldn't otherwise remember. You're a busy guy. You've got all these jobs. You might not remember, like if I have the bagel at 11 a.m., I'm going to be lethargic until 2 p.m. But if some extraneous intelligence is remembering that for you, I think that could really, really help. I think it'd help a lot of people because

there's just so much going on. It's nice to have another macro brain always running alongside you. Well, I was thinking it would have helped Joe Mazzulla during game one of the Heat series. We're like, Joe, they can't miss a shot. Call timeout. Your team needs three minutes to think about this. And so in sports though, couldn't you see this kind of changing? Like we've already seen in sports, we had all this, the data revolution changed the way we played basically every sport in some ways for the worst. In baseball, I actually think they've had to make these new rules just to undo some of the damage.

And I wonder now with AI, could you do this in football? Could you have AI script out? They always say Kyle Shannon, he scripted out his first 15 plays. Maybe AI scripts out like 80 and they script out every scenario. Like you're down 10 to Joe Burrow. It's the third quarter. Here are the six plays you should run so you could have a long drive. I think all that stuff's coming too. I don't think that's crazy. With Joe Mazzulla, he needs the equivalent of Apple Watch's reminder to stand just like every hour it buzzes your wrist and says, maybe you should stand. Right. Exactly.

Yeah. Your team is down 17 points this quarter. Like maybe you should call your time out. When it comes to sports, the reason I am a little bit less optimistic is that I wrote this piece about what I call the dark side of Moneyball, which is that lots of entertainment industries, as they get smarter, their products get quote unquote dumber or at least less interesting. So as baseball got smarter, you had an increase in strikeouts, an increase in walks, an increase in singles. You had an increase in all the, excuse me, and home runs. You had an increase in all the three true outcomes and there were fewer base runners essentially than ever. In basketball, I think you've seen, I think it's

fair to say that although I've loved the playoffs, you've seen a homogenization of styles. There's a huge broad understanding that three points is worth more than two points and teams should shoot more threes. You could argue you've seen the same in Hollywood. Look at the top 10 movies of every year this century. It is all movies with numbers in them. Gardens of the Galaxy 3, adaptations, sequels, and reboots. You look at music. Songs tend to stay at the top of the music charts for longer than they used to, and people are listening to older songs more than they used to. You could argue that music is getting more repetitive than it was. So in all these industries that have theoretically become a little bit more boring or less diverse, it's not happening because the industries are

getting dumber. It's happening precisely because they're getting smarter. And I would be a little bit worried that AI would make the homogenization of strategies in sports a little bit worse if everyone's essentially drawing from the same large language model to decide, should I pass in the situation? Should I run? Should I go for fourth down? It might lead to everyone essentially doing the equivalent of, you know, taking a three, 40% of the game. Was that a speech for Daryl Murray to maybe mix it up with the Sixers?

It felt veiled. It felt like you were calling him out a tiny bit. It is not veiled at all. I think, you know, Daryl said that he's in favor. I don't know how sincere this is, but he's in favor of making the three-point line worth 2.5 points in order to change his strategy. Right. Even he is saying the finite strategies that people like me are pursuing are leading to an infinite strategy that's making the game a little bit more homogenous and boring.

And maybe one way to, if you want to fix it, don't tell me Daryl to fix it, fix the rule. And then, you know, then the slow nerds of the world will change their strategies based on the new rule. Not hard to figure out. The last piece we didn't talk about was the safety security piece. Everybody's mind when they hear about AI goes to, well, what happens when AI overrides something and all of a sudden people are bombing each other and we all die? That I do not have answers on, Derek Thompson. I don't know.

There's certainly been the plot of a lot of movies over the years, including War Games, which came out 40 years ago. But that one I'm a little more dubious on. And that seems like that's going to have to involve coordination between countries and world leaders and things that generally the world hasn't been great at these days. So how does that play out? Thank you for the alley-oop. This was the last episode of Plain English. It's called The Future of War is Here. And we talked to the CEO of Endural, which is the company that makes probably more drones

and sells more drones to the US government than any other. And I talked to my friend, Ross Anderson, a writer in The Atlantic about his recent work on AI. I'd summarize it very quickly this way. I'm not against using AI to replace troops, but we should not use AI to replace generals. I don't want AI making decisions about who to invade. I don't want AI making decisions about command and control of nuclear weapons, but I'm not against a future where fewer of our soldiers are in the field. And I'm not against a future where we outline the borders

of certain nervous countries like Ukraine with drones that make it less likely that a Russia invades. I think there are ways to use AI responsibly to reduce the likelihood of war rather than merely increase the likelihood of some kind of atomic catastrophe. But that said, and you mentioned this, this has to be done so carefully. And like nuclear weapons, this is not something where if the US comes up with its own rules,

then our rules work for the entire world. No, China is going to have its own rules and Russia is going to develop its own chat GPTs. And so is Pakistan and Brazil. All these countries are going to eventually have these tools. And we need something like a Montreal Protocol or United Nations to bring countries together, even if they're geopolitical adversaries, and say, can we find some way that we reduce the likelihood of automated apocalypse? Do you think fake me and fake you are talking in 10 years about how AI is doing in 2033?

I think we are, but I don't think anyone's listening. That's the thing that's really hard to overcome is that making a little, making a chat bill that you tell a joke to your friend, if you both listen to the Simmons podcast for years and years, that's funny. That's an audience of two. Making robot, making zombie bill for an audience of 2 million, that's so much harder and very unlikely because people listen to you because they want to know what you actually think, not what a robot that plausibly sounds

and plausibly thinks like you thinks. You know, I was thinking, I was trying to think how would AI help me the most just week to week, right? What one thing would help the most? And I was thinking it would help the most with the rewatchables prep because the rewatchables, it's basically a script. I have all these categories. So I'll do all the research and I'll put the stuff in different categories. Then I'll watch the movie and I'll put different observations in there. And technically, AI could figure out exactly what the script is. They could examine the movie, put the things in and just lay it out for me and save me three to four hours of work even before I watch the movie. The problem is the podcast wouldn't be as good because I wouldn't be coming up with these different ideas and thoughts as I'm doing the research. And, oh, I see this and I'm like, oh, that makes me think of this. I don't see how AI is ever going to replicate that. And maybe it could lay out a kind of a basic script of, oh, here are all the half-ass internet research we do on that. For the most part, it still needs my brain to kind of be the chef. And I'm sure you're in the same thing

with some of the pieces you're working on. You could have AI basically lay the foundation, but then you're not thinking about it as you're writing about it, and it's just not going to be as good. I totally agree. I found it most useful at two things. And the first, I can't think of its relevance to the rewatchables. It's pretty good at coming up with history stories. stories from basketball history that show that undrafted or overlooked players can be incredibly important in NBA finals. Give me seven examples of a poorly evaluated player in the draft

becoming a hero in the NBA finals. In my experience, it's pretty good at doing that. And you can obviously see how that could be useful when you're writing a book and you're making a point about this idea that sometimes it's random Jason Terrys that end up swinging a series, right? J.J. Bureas. The other way I found it's really useful is if you have a theory and you put in a chat GPT

and you can say, tell me I'm wrong. Give me reasons why this is wrong. So you could say, give me I'm wrong. Give me reasons why this is wrong. So you could say, give me reasons why I'm wrong in assuming that it's good to call a timeout when your team is on the back end of a 20 to two run. Tell me why I'm wrong in saying that every movie with Leo might be made a little bit better with Matt Damon. Like, tell me why certain theories of mine about entertainment and sports and history and technology, tell me why I'm wrong. I found it's actually really useful at doing that. And there again, you're not using it to write. You're using it to test the quality of your theory. And maybe you'll build on it. Maybe you'll

say, oh, maybe I can incorporate a little bit of this into my work. But it's allowing you to do the thing that good writers should already be doing anyway. But it's frankly very hard when you're crafting a piece, which is constantly imagining this shadow ledger of arguments that is screaming at your article and telling you why every single thing you're saying is wrong. This sort of tell me why I'm wrong, magical daemon that you can have like sitting alongside you as you're writing, I found to be pretty useful. Jesus, sounds better than pot. different places, put basically the history of the stock market into AI and have AI spit back the ebbs and flows of like, oh, this has now happened for nine months. That means that this is getting too good.

That means we can expect some sort of bad thing to all of a sudden this will happen. And just because regardless of what's happening in society, the stock market does have a certain rhythm to it. Could AI learn that rhythm? Theoretically, yes. And I have no doubt that wealth managers and investors and iBanks all over the world are going to try to build their own models. But I think of this as like, you know, trading is an equilibrium. There's a buyer for every seller and a seller for every buyer. And if all the institutions are going to essentially build their own language

models that are looking at the same data, that are looking at the exact same history of the SP500 to make predictions about the next six months of the SP500, then it might all just wash out. I've seen no evidence that AI is so much better at prediction in the long run. In a weird way, what makes AI special is the very opposite of prediction. They're not brilliant at mixing and matching things that happen in the future. There's no data from the future. They're brilliant at mixing and matching the data from the past. That's one of the reasons actually why they're so good at pastiche that's old fashioned. If you say, write me this weird story in the style of the King James Bible or in the style of Shakespeare, because those things are so old and there's so much data on them on the

internet, they're fantastic at that. There's no data from the future. So it's not clear to me that this very technology would be so good at anticipating things that haven't happened. So to wrap up, the only things we know for sure is that this is an incredible way for students in high school and college to cheat. Like we just, this is like, this is it. This is the glory days of cheating. I don't think it's ever been a better time to cheat. If you're a student, I don't even know how you police it. If you're, I don't know, like if you're a professor, how would you, they must have some sort of devices, right? That can like check the rhythms of it at least. Yeah. They have tools

as I understand it. But Ian Bogus just wrote a piece about this for the Atlantic. The upshot of his piece was professors are screwed right now. Like this is the Napster era of cheating. Like for those like blessed, whatever, like two and a half years, right? Where you could basically listen to any song you wanted for free. It was just, you could just download it like that. And there was no way anyone was going to, um, interfere. That is what it is right now for writing essays, especially essays about established history, established mathematics, established physics, writing essays. I think about the future. It might be a little bit harder again, because there's no information for the LLMs to gather

about the future. But as I understand it, cheating is rampant. And also, you know, college professor letters of recommendation cheating might be rampant too. You know, the college professors might say, you know what, if none of my students are going to write authentic essays, I'm not going to write authentic letters of recommendation. And they could, of course, automate those as well. So I can imagine a lot of cheating and cheating equivalent essaying in high school and college. And the solution there is as obvious as it is inevitable. You have to test people in class. You have to have them write in class

and you have to do oral examinations as well because if you send somebody home with a free technology that will 100% write that essay in a B-plus style, you simply can't say, all right, everyone just go home and put the essay question in a box and get a B-plus from me. I definitely would have used it. Yeah, and then the last thing to remember is just Netflix. This is going to be horror movies, rom-coms, high school teen comedies, you know,

benevolent ones where somebody's in love with somebody else. The person doesn't realize it until the 20 minute mark left in the movie. Like we're just going to see a steady wave of, of just blueprint movies that will never end. Just different stars. And it might be one of these cases where the introduction of AI to screenwriting, and I say this cynically, but not because I hate screenwriters, just because I'm aware

of what so much of movies and television is, we might not notice it. We might realize years after the fact that all of these movies- Netflix might have been doing it for five years. That all these movies

that we've been watching while we had dinner or just sort of, you know, looked at our phones, that the stories were inflected by AI and we didn't miss a beat because they retraced what audiences already wanted. Audiences already wanted a kind of efficient predictability that AI has turned out to be excellent at.

Well, I talked to Spotify a week ago because Kyle had his bachelor party and it was 50-50. He came back alive. So I was like, so if Kyle doesn't come back, can chat Kyle be the producer? They're like, we're not ready yet.

It's like six months away. So down the road, we might be able to replace him. All right. You can read Derek in the Atlantic and you can listen to his awesome podcast, Plain English. You were in the forefront of all.

You did at least like five AI episodes, I think at this point. So I feel like you've been on this, but now this feels like it's going to be the summer of AI. So we had to do it now. Thanks for popping on. I appreciate it. Thank you, Bill.

That's it for the podcast. Thanks to Dave Jacobi and Joe House. Thanks to Derek Thompson. Thanks to Kyle Crane for producing. Thanks to Steve Cerruti as well. Enjoy the weekend. Go Celtics. I will see you on the way so I never say I don't have feelings with them. On the wayside, on the way so I never say I don't have feelings with them.