The Bill Simmons Podcast - Live From NYC's Advertising Week With Malcolm Gladwell (Ep. 266)

Episode Date: September 29, 2017

HBO and The Ringer's Bill Simmons and author Malcolm Gladwell host a live podcast event for NYC's Advertising Week and discuss wide-ranging topics, including building a personal brand and the rise of tanking in professional sports. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We have so many, I can't even keep track. Go to the ringer.com's podcast page. You can find all of them there. Subscribe to all of them. Everything you'd ever want in a podcast. We probably have it. We probably have the right host. Don't forget about the ringer.com. Every Friday, my mailbag column again. Yeah. Every Friday. You're listening to this on a Friday. That means my column is up right now. You can see mailbag emails, see my picks. I'm in a little bit of a slump, but I'm going to snap out of that this week. TheRinger.com, go there. Go there for all of our stuff, including our big NBA preview that's going on right now. Let's get to the pot, but first, Pearl Jam. Ah, now we're down to 38 minutes.

This is like the shortest podcast I've ever had. That's Malcolm Gladwell. He has a podcast called Revisionist History that's insanely successful. We've done a lot of these. We've done some back and forth in print. We have done some podcasts. We're mixing it up today. We're playing a game. You want to explain the game? The game is each of us has written out 10 names, concepts, whatever, on pieces of little slips of paper. I wrote out 10 for Bill. Bill wrote out 10 for me.

We don't know what those names are. We're going to pluck them out, and we have to do a little riff on whatever the word on the piece of paper is. I wrote the names of 10 porn sites I had. I wasn't going to tell you until we were on there. I just wanted to see how you would react. Well, this isn't a way game for you because you're the guest, so you have to pick a name first. All right.

I hope this works. Rick Pitino. Oh, Rick Pitino, topical. Very topical. Rick, I think as of the end of today, will be an ex-coach. Yeah, I think he already is. I don't think there's a lot of bites. I will just say, since we're going to race through these, right, Bill? Yeah.

Very quickly, this is a classic. This is almost the perfect NCAA scandal where the scandal is not what is actually happening, what is alleged to have happened. The scandal is that what has happened is scandalous, if that makes sense. The only decent thing that has happened in amateur sports and in amateur intercollegiate sports in the last however many years is that athletes have managed to get paid. Yeah, to get bribed. To get bribed. I mean, this is, as far as I can tell, everything else about the NCAA is a scandal. This is fantastic. At last, talented people who are making enormous sums of money for their school are getting a cut of the action. And what is it that we're now

getting upset about? The only good thing that's happened in the NCAA since its charter. It's probably going to get worse, too, because we don't know how many shoe companies are involved. But this is one of those things, as a sports fan, you always knew who the college was that was the so-and-so adidas school or the nike school

yeah and obviously they were doing something but nobody could ever prove it and then the fbi is like we'll prove it and they just demolish like all these different programs and we have i mean they raided an nba agent yesterday the computer in his office because obviously some of these agents are paying the players too yeah so this could be the scandal that completely we've had two different things well we'll talk about cte i'm sure it's in one of these cups but two different things happened this week that could completely alter sports yeah the cte the revelations with that yeah i don't want to get ahead of myself all right i. I'm going to open a cup. Sam Hinckley. So Sam Hinckley, belated genius, I guess,

is that what we'd call him? He figured out this loophole, he worked for the Sixers, figured out this loophole in the draft system that just to be intentionally bad, which was the kind of loophole nobody was hoping anybody would exploit, and he did. And it worked, but he got fired, and now he's a hero in Philadelphia. And I'm still not positive.

Like, he would say, well, why am I a hero? I got fired. Like, what I did didn't work, actually, because the team's still bad, and like Joel Embiid, like they don't really have a guaranteed franchise player yet. But at the same time, it caused the NBA to kind of look at itself and be like, all right, teams are either going for the title, or they're going for the number one lottery pick, but nobody wants to be in between those two spots, and you're seeing it now, like you have the Warriors, and everybody is so afraid to compete with the Warriors,

that we've had complete chaos in our people. Obviously for the ringer it was fantastic because there was a new story every week. But it's just like watching somebody take a snow globe and just shake it. That's been the NBA season. My thing about hinky is hinkyism has now spread to the

NFL, right? Baseball first, then the NFL after. If hinkyism is the end of the gentleman's agreement in professional sports that everyone will try to be as good as they possibly can right yeah and what hinky said is actually no I don't want to be as good as I possibly can if I can't be the best then my my the the best thing I can be is the worst and this year i feel like in the nfl we've got what at least five or six teams that aren't even trying to be mediocre they're trying to be the worst that they could be seven or eight bad teams yeah um but can professional sports survive in when everyone is playing the hinky game

no i mean imagine if like you're launching your podcast imagine if this was your plan i'm gonna make my podcast terrible for four years. And then eventually it'll be good because I'll be able to afford more engineering. I don't even know why anyone would do that. It is a crazy... Years ago, we had done a back and forth where we were discussing the draft. And we talked about this notion that the fundamental idea behind the draft, which is that you reward teams for being bad,

is the worst idea in the world. And now we're finally, the chickens are coming home to roost. That's what happened. For 10 years, I was pushing for this tournament where all the lottery teams would have to play at the end of the season, single elimination, March Madness style, so then they couldn't fake injuries and do all the stuff they do to try to intentionally be bad,

and they haven't done it. And it's kind of crazy that they haven't tried to address like March and April. But on the other hand, I would argue basketball is probably in the best shape of all these sports just because, you know, how marketable the guys are. It's football that I think will suffer the greatest from hinkyism.

Because you literally have five games per Sunday now that are unwatchable. Like, why would, under what circumstances would anyone compel me to watch the Cleveland Browns playing the New York Jets? I like how you call it hinkyism. I think it's hinkyism. I think the man

has started a, he, it's like Marxism. I mean, he refred the way we think about the world. The funniest thing about it is the Sixers fans love him now. It was almost like Stockholm Syndrome sent in. They had four terrible seasons in a row and they're like, we loved it. It was great.

We got all these young guys that we love now and they've talked themselves into it. So it'd be like Jedi mind trick. It's like Napoleon. You know, he brings ruin to France. They exile him to where? Elbow, whatever it is.

And then remember, they bring him back and everyone's like, Napoleon, Napoleon. I think that's what's going to happen with Inky. He'll be back. He's almost better off

not coming back and then just having this one beautiful disaster that reshaped the league. And then he'd be like, I don't know. I don't want to come back. I don't want to blow up

your league again and just be a consultant. All right, I don't want to come back. I don't want to blow up your league again and just like be a consultant. All right, pick another one. Knicks fans. I mean, why would I even answer this? What is there to say? That masochism is alive and well, apparently, in the metropolitan area.

I actually think it is, as someone who lives in New York and has the option of being a Knicks fan that I have declined, I would say that I have a, I think I have a fundamental ethical problem with being a Knicks fan, which is if I am a Knicks fan, then I am implicitly supporting the

decision making of Knicks ownership and management. I'm essentially saying to Mr. Dolan that I think you do a good job. I'm voting with my dollars in support of what he's done. And that's wrong. I mean, it's more than wrong. That's outrageous.

He's the dumbest owner. Is he the dumbest in the history of sports? Well, what's weird is he's not that bad of an NHL owner. That's the part that, for the Knicks fans, is the most frustrating. It's like somebody who's a great parent with one kid and then just a disaster with the other kid. The bar is so low in NHL. Not to offend Jim Doan, but I do think there's a misconception. His problem is he delegates.

He hires terrible people and then delegates to them. He's not a meddler. He's not one of these owners who's like, here's delegates to them. He's not a meddler. He's not one of these owners who's like, here's what I think. Wait, wait. He's not like Jerry Jones. First of all,

yeah, he delegates. He delegated to Isaiah Thomas, one of the worst delegations. But that's my point. He would delegate to Bob the Doorman, who's now the new GM. It's like Phil Jackson.

Well, I hired him. I don't want to intervene. And Phil Jackson's eating tapioca in his seat. What was that great George Bush phrase, the, what was it, the soft bigotry of low expectations. To say that in defense of Jim Dolan, that he delegates to morons, is, that is the soft bigotry of low expectations. That's how-

I didn't say it was a good defense, but it is true. He fires bad people. I think for every bad decision that has been made by a Jim Dolan surrogate, we can also identify a bad decision that was made by Jim Dolan himself. True. So the fact, when you enter New York City through the dungeon that is Penn Station, you know that's Jim Dolan's fault, right? He refuses. No, he refuses to move until he moves Madison Square Garden, which he should have done 15 years ago. It is impossible to renovate Penn Station. So that disgusting hovel

that welcomes you to the greatest city on earth, the the fault of that lies at the feet of jim donald where he's like two blocks from here you know god knows what he's doing playing tetris or whatever the hell he does all day i think the weirdest thing that's happened to knicks fans is it's been so bad like like they were fondly remembering carmelo this week yeah it's like oh remember that 2013 team that lost in round two wow those were the days and it's like he had no first of all you had to gut your team to get him because he was so greedy he didn't want to wait to be a free agent and then he took an insane amount of money with a no trade clause in 2014 so he was immediately a declining asset because you couldn't get rid of him anywhere

you couldn't put a team around him and then the next fans were like oh man i'm gonna miss that guy in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king that's what this is about sports illustrated now you're trying to bait me with this maybe um i actually canceled my subscription this year let's move on to the next one. Chris Nowitzki. I actually asked you. I also have Chris Nowitzki in your pile. Chris Nowitzki, big winner. Big winner. How many people in the audience know who Chris Nowitzki is?

He's the guy. Not many. Not many, okay. He is the guy who has been almost single-handedly pushing the CTE case in pro football. With Boston University. Boston University and all those people. He's been systematically finding the brains of examining or getting people to examine the brains of deceased NFL players

for evidence of this degenerative brain condition caused by playing football and making this increasingly strong case that football's got a moral problem. And for what, 2006 to 2010, the NFL was like, no, we didn't, no, no, you're wrong. It doesn't cause concussions, you're wrong. And then gradually they were like, we're not saying anything anymore. And then it was legally, we can't say anything. Yeah. And then all of a sudden they're settling with players and it's getting worse and worse. It's not, I feel like this is one of these issues where there's a class of kind of moral issue in American life, which is, which has, it always has the same basic structure,

which is there's a gap, in retrospect, a bizarre and inexplicable gap between the identification of the problem by someone like a Chris Nowitzki, by the kind of pioneer, and the general acceptance of the problem by the public. Yeah. So people start to think that smoking is bad for you in the 50s,

and the country kind of wakes up to that in the 70s, 80s, 30 years. Like last week. Yeah. Yeah. Lead, I sort of feel like that in retrospect, we will look back on this era 25 years from now, and we will say that the way we dragged our feet on lead poisoning is more than scandalous. It is a moral stain. I mean, we know exactly what lead poisoning does. We know who it affects. We know that it is the easiest

thing to reverse. We know that it causes more social problems than almost anything else we can identify. And yet we are essentially doing almost nothing about it in this country. There's a case where we've known about lead for decades. What are we doing? We're doing nothing about it. This football thing has all of the hallmarks of that. It is just like basically we're killing off, systematically killing off people who play this game.

And there's one guy in Boston who's like waving his hands and saying wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute and their little stories run about him and what happens nothing happens well they just announced this week that the scientists that they work with at bu feel like they can diagnose ct in real time so they could take some linebacker who's 28 years old and do some tests and potentially find out if he's either more prone to it than most people or if he has the beginning stages of it. And if they master that test, it's so long football.

Or football becomes a completely different sport. If you can be like, hey, you're 10% there with CTE and you're this 25-year-old linebacker, what are you going to do? You're going to stop playing. So I don't know where this goes, but it goes nowhere good. I would keep going on that, but we've got to keep moving. 19-year-old Moses Malone.

I became obsessed with him when I was working on my basketball book because basketball out of any sport is right place, right time, wrong place, wrong time. Just this chain of events can happen and you can end up having the career that is not what you should have had. And Moses was a great example of that. He goes right from the high school, the NBA. First guy to do that. Or the ABA, I'm sorry. Yeah, first guy to do that. Kind of creates it uh goes from like Utah

to St. Louis and then all of a sudden the ABA merges with the NBA he gets this rap as like not being smart not being a hard worker he gets drafted the expansion draft by Portland who already had Bill Walton who was probably the best center in the league at the time they give up on him they trade him to Buffalo Buffalo doesn't know what to do with him they trade him ends up in Houston and becomes the 12th best player of all time. And it was like this four-year journey of, he was clearly unbelievable, and this is just what happens in the NBA. But I wrote a whole part in my book about his butt. He was the only person I've ever seen who would get these rebounds. He would, on his offensive rebounds, he would go on the baseline under the basket. Like,

he would literally go under the basket. And then he would just back up like a truck,, he would, on his offensive rebounds, he would go on the baseline under the basket. Like, he would literally go under the basket. And then he would just back up like a truck, and he would ram his butt into wherever the player was, and they would go flying backwards. And then he was right next to the rim, he would get the rebound. And I've always wondered why nobody else ever tried that, because it was like just genius. I've never seen another

player do it. Was his butt unusual in some way? No, it wasn't like a giant butt. He was just great at ramming it backwards. And these guys would go flying backwards anyway. But he's a really interesting reminder, though, of... So he's the guy who basically starts the whole

jumping from... the first to jump from high school to the pros. Right. The first 19-year-old to play professional sports and basketball. Yeah. And his career, though, is a reminder of if you're gonna if you're gonna play that game and it looks like the nba's might go back to um allowing players to go straight from high school to the they should i always thought there should be a committee that decided who was eligible to jump and i wanted to be the chairman of the committee nobody listening on that one but

i do think like if somebody ready, they're ready. LeBron was ready in 03. Just send him in. But when we say ready, this is an interesting thing. When we say ready, are we talking about emotional readiness or physical readiness? Emotionally, nobody's ready. Nobody's ready. This is exactly my point.

That if you're going to do that, you have to accept the fact that a player, we're constantly pretending in this day and age that someone who is 18 or 19 is a grown person. And what we're actually discovering more and more, I feel like all the time now, is that at 18 and 19, you're so completely different from who you will actually ultimately end up being that normal rules can't apply. So there's a whole really fascinating part of psychology looking at criminal defendants who are in their late teens and how the move towards treating them as adults is completely and utterly outrageous. You are not yourself at 18. You are, in fact, kind of insane at 18.

There's a reason we take 18-year-olds... 18 to 24, you're nuts, yeah. You're nuts. There's a reason we take 18 year olds you're nuts yeah you're nuts there's a reason we take 18 year olds and stick them in essentially uh uh uh the military well the military and colleges which are the the equivalent of closed institutions yeah that that limit their movements right i mean because you're nuts at that age right so now we want to take you take an 18 year old you want to give them 10 million dollars a year and fly them around you better have an infrastructure in place to deal with it well the best that the best follow-up to this is how many people do you

know who married the person they dated when they're 18 it's like 9 out of 10 break up maybe even 19 out of 20 it's because they change yeah you know I was dating somebody in college that I'm like wow I can't believe I dated her. She was very nice. But three years, it just doesn't make sense to me now. And that's LeBron James in the NBA, making mistakes and doing stuff. I actually think it's been amazing how he's handled himself day one. Am I up or are you up? Oh, you're up. You just did 19-year-old Moses Malone. That was great. Quick break to talk about SimpliSafe. I learned something shocking from an FBI report recently. What's the average property loss from just one home break-in? Over $2,300.

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SimpliSafe.com slash BS and get a special 10% discount. When you order today, if you want your security system immediately from SimpliSafe, visit your local Best Buy. You can get it there too. You'll have your home protected by tonight. Stay safe, my friends. Back to the podcast. LA Olympics, 2028. Why does anyone want the Olympics? First question, number one. Why am I... This is like... It is the nuts...

Have you seen those pictures from Rio about what happened to all those facilities? The Olympics are just about the worst idea imaginable. You build... Who's going to use a velodrome? First of all, the only reason we know about that word, velodrome, is that once every four years,

someone builds one... It says velodrome. ...at enormous expense, and it's never used again right right it's like becomes like a rave house or something and you're building by the way a velodrome is so for cyclists to cycle inside why would you want to cycle inside if you live in los angeles like the whole point of los angeles presumably is you can cycle outside can i make the counter argument for why la wants should have the olympics la is the only city that probably

could have it conceivably because the first for whatever reason they have all Olympics? LA is the only city that probably could have it conceivably because for whatever reason they have all the stadiums and the arenas. The thing that bankrupts all these cities is they have to build these giant Olympic stadiums and all these other, these small arenas and they have to build an Olympic village. LA has all of that. The Olympic village is UCLA.

I don't mean to sound like I'm on the Olympics committee but I'm with you that it's hard to believe anybody would want the Olympics, but if we're going to have it and you have all the buildings there, it would seem like if it doesn't work in LA, it's never going to work.

Like this would be the last Olympics. It is time. They have to like, they have to abandon this notion that you can do the entire Olympics in one place. I mean, why don't, I think they should award Olympics. That's a good point.

To states or countries. I mean, give the, if you give it to, if you're going to give it to, don't give it to Rio, give it to Brazil, right? And probably not that either. Not even that. No, not even that either. I mean, but you give it to California, you could give it to, that all starts to make sense. It is the concentration of all of these completely, these, I mean, 90% of the Olympics is something that, that happens in that way once every four years that's just not a good enough excuse to build you know all of this and the insanity of the of the security and the blah you know i had a really good time at the london olympics i think there's still a giant 80 000 foot stadium 80 000 seat stadium in east at london that they don't know what to do. I actually remember I ran

into you on the street in London when you were attending the Olympics. I was in London at the same time and I watched it very happily from my television at home. Yeah. I thought that was actually better. We'll see. I mean, the Winter Olympics is the bigger question because they now like Korea has one and

doesn't China have one? And they have to make the snow? That's when you know you're in trouble when you're making snow for the winter olympics Jamel Hill uh-oh um so I I obviously I was fascinated by this story I wrote a little little piece of background for the audience on Jamel Jamel Hill tweeted uh I'm gonna say two weeks ago yeah she hosts uh the six on sports center and had a whole bunch of tweets about Trump and called him a white supremacist. White supremacist.

And people reacted and then people waited to see if ESPN would suspend her. I was one of those people since I've been suspended a variety of times by ESPN. I got suspended for Twitter a couple times, things like that. And they didn't really do anything.

She basically checkmated them, which I thought was really interesting. But what I found fascinating about the whole thing, they couldn't do anything because here's a black woman talking about a president who's treated minorities a certain way. So what are you going to do? Be like, no, you can't have that opinion. So they kind of like half-assed and didn't really know what to do. And it was super awkward.

The thing that was amazing to me is they have this website called The Undefeated, which examines the intersection of sports, race, and culture. This is the ultimate intersection of those three things, right? This is a black woman who's on TV talking about the president and calling him a white supremacist. And they just didn't know what to do, and they ignored it. And to me, it's like you're either in or you're out.

If you're going to have that site, it has to deal with this. And belatedly, they had a couple pieces, and she actually wrote a piece, I think, that went up today, like two weeks later. But the whole thing made me think, like, if you're going to have that site, this is why you have it. Like right now, with the way the athletes are dealing with Trump, and even your own people and talent, and the shifting lanes of what is an opinion if you're on TV, should you even be able to, like when I worked there, you weren't allowed to say anything about politics. So I don't know. To me, that's why you

had to say it. What'd you think? Well, I'm always struck by, I feel like ESPN has kind of lost its way. And one of their problems is that they established a brand identity as young and edgy and sort of out there. But every time anyone who works for ESPN is either youthful, edgy, or out there, they freak out. Right. So it becomes pretty clear that they actually, they want to be edgy without ever being edgy.

And the second thing is that they don't understand in this case that what it means to be in the moment and present and relevant in today's society is to cross these lines. You can't, you know, look at what's happened in the NFL last weekend. You can no longer say that sports is over here and politics is over there and someone who's speaking on sports can't speak on politics. It's all the same now. Yes. You know, once you have a president who will tweet about whatever is on his mind at any given point in the day, then it's all open season.

I mean, how can you say that the president can tweet about sports and North Korea in the same burst and not say that someone who's a sports announcer can't occasionally wander over into the politics aisle? We found it at the ringer. Like, there's no way to stay in the middle anymore when it's bled into every aspect of everything that we cover and for us to not write about it i think would then why even have the site but by the way why hire jamelle hill unless you want her to be able to speak her mind but guess what i probably care about her opinion on donald trump more than any other person who works at espn like yeah let hear it. What do you think? What's it like to work every day and talk about sports and watch the stuff bleed in but not really

be able to use the platform the way you'd want to? This brings up this, I mean, we have to move on, but this brings up this larger thing of, I'm always amazed about corporations when they get large enough just become chicken shit. I mean, they just,

where are their balls? I mean, I feel like 20 years ago, they had an easier time with this, but they get so big and they get so conservative and they get so, they forget, you know, they're, they're in the entertainment business, right? And what are they trying to do? They're trying to stop their people who work for them from being interesting. When you, when you're, when you're confronted with that contradiction you have a problem right well it's an identity thing when you you want to cover sports and you want to show games and highlights but you also want to have a conscience and a little bit of a soul and hire people have opinions and keep people on their toes and there's going to to be these moments when there's going to be a conflict

between a couple different things. Then you have to decide what to do. Obviously what happened with me with Goodell was similar, right? Goodell was their biggest business partner, and I was criticizing him. And at some point you have to decide, is the opinion worth it or not? And a couple times they have decided it wasn't. Let's keep going. We have 12 minutes left somehow.

Amazon. Oh yeah. It's exciting. Well, what should I say about Amazon? Well they're clearly too big. Why is this hard? This is one of the things that amazes me. We go through this every 50, 60 years or so

where we belatedly notice our economy is being run by three companies. Yeah. And then whenever we break them up, we discover, wow, we broke them up and things got a lot better. You know, people forget one of the reasons we had a telecom revolution in this country is we broke up AT&T. Yeah.

And that was like, there is no one in retrospect who thinks it was a bad idea to break up AT&T. We could also go back if we want and round up, and round up historians and say, do we think in retrospect it was a good or a bad idea to break up Standard Oil in 19-whatever it was? And they'll all say, actually, probably a really good idea not to have the entire energy infrastructure of the United States run by one guy. Yeah. Right? So now we're approaching roughly the same situation with Mr. Bezos. Why is this hard? Break it up. I feel like he's going to have us kill him. Right. So now we're approaching roughly the same situation with Mr. Bezos. And why is this hard? Break it up.

I feel like he's going to have us kill him. Right. That's right. See up there? By the way, while we're at it, can we also break up Google and Facebook and Apple? I mean, these are just, it's preposterous. You can't have a major, a healthy, thriving, viable economy that's controlled by four companies that are all, by the way, headquartered within half a mile of each other, with the exception of Amazon. I mean,

it's just bananas. We're so in love with these guys, we've forgotten. It's a bad idea to have your economy in the grip of a small group like that that is it wrong that i was excited when amazon bought whole foods because they'd be cool they'd be will they deliver it to my house yes i like whole foods all right jelly bean bryant del curry ed mccaffrey archie manning etc what's that sports dads dads who are equipped by their son no the No, the rise of the multi-generational sports professional athlete. You know my theory on this. I think the athletic genes come from the mom.

Because if they came from the- Wait, no, where does that come from? I didn't say it was provable, it's my theory. All right, all right. Because if they came from the dad, all of the great athletes would have had unbelievable athlete kids, right? But I think it comes from the mom. I think the mom has the dominant athlete genes and is the one that passes it along.

And that's why, like, the Ken Griffey senior and junior is so rare. But this is, I'm obsessed with this topic. Like, I love when athletes date. I always, like always as soon as i hear like the latest one was uh sloan stevens and josie altidore and i was like oh my god oh what sport would that kid play and then yeah like when agassi dated uh graph and they got married i was like euphoric i was like this is we have now created the best tennis player we're ever gonna have yeah and the fucking kid's playing baseball.

I was so mad. He's going to be a baseball player. So I love this stuff. In the Eastern Bloc, I am almost certain that they did this deliberately. Because whenever you hear about this. Well, they definitely did it in China. Yao Ming's wife is like 6'6". Yeah, yeah, no, no. I think they got set up.

But when you talk, so when these guys come out of East, like these Latvians, and they're 6'9", and they, you know, can dribble like a point guard. And invariably, like in the fourth paragraph of their Wikipedia entry, you see, you know, so-and-so's, you know, Sarunas's father was 7'1", and Sarunas's mother was 6'11". And you think that happened by accident in 1977 in Czechoslovakia? No. There's a picture of them in their wedding with a gun to their head. Well, you know who's the, although your theory is completely bonkers.

It's not completely bonkers. In support of your completely ridiculous theory, McCaffrey, Christian McCaffrey, his dad is Ed McCaffrey, but... Yeah, he's the Ed McCaffrey. Who is his grandfather on his mom's side? Who is it? Dave Syme, former world record holder in 100 meters. Oh, there you go. The speed...

You just proved my theory. Christian McCaffrey's speed comes... His mom oriented, not father. There's a decathlete who's married to another, it's like Eaton. Oh, Ashley Eaton, the goat, with the greatest. Married the bronze medalist in the pentathlon. Yeah, that will.

I have my eye on that couple. There is an Ashley Eaton YouTube clip of him doing a stair workout. You ever seen this one? Oh, he's hopping the steps? Hopping the steps. It's like, it's so crazy. Yeah, that kid is, I mean, if you were on the bandwagon that he was the world's greatest athlete and nobody wanted to climb on with you, not one person. Well, I have,

I consider track athletes to be in a, yeah. I mean, we're going to keep going. Now we have eight. Wait, I just did Amazon. Oh, you did. Oh no, no, you did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's me. Jerry Jones. So the question came up backstage when Jerry Jones did his kind of weird kneeling action. I don't want to call it a kneel. I want to say it was a semi-kneel on Sunday with his players. Was he bullshitting, or did he actually express solidarity with...

He's clearly bullshitting. He's doing it because for an owner... Clearly. Yeah. I mean, oh good, so there's no... I thought you might... NFL owners are terrible to players. They're troglodytes. The really interesting question for me is if you rank

the professional sports owners in terms of how appalling and retrograde they are nfl last you mean nfl most retrograde and appalling oh yeah the worst whatever the worst is that's nfl i feel like because historically you know it was baseball owners now back in the day right baseball had the title it had the title in the nfl i think there was an influx of a particularly egregious kind of rich white guy into the nfl which now they've claimed they absolutely have the horrible title. The wild card in this is the NHL.

I feel like there are some, I feel like NHL owners might be the dumbest, and I say this as a Canadian, and that's so I have some cover for that. But the really interesting, so the Gantt, if you sort of were to chart this by kind of intelligence, open-mindedness, and a variety of other, imagine a whole series of personality variables, and you would chart all of the owners.

What's happened, the really interesting thing over the last 10 years is the dramatic divergence of basketball owners from other owners. The basketball is getting all of like the... They're getting all the smart tech guys who made their money in new ways.

It's almost like another species has taken over. And they all know each other, and it's like a big dick-swinging contest to see who's more connected. Meanwhile, the NFL owners are just like old white guys. Which suggests to me that if I had a couple billion and I had an opportunity to buy a franchise, I think you don't want to buy an NBA franchise

because it's really hard and complicated. Well, speak for yourself. No, no, no. I want to buy an NBA franchise. I know, for fun, for fun. Yeah. But if you wanted to succeed, the upside is in buying into one of the dumb leagues.

Like hockey? Hockey, yeah. I think you want to buy a hockey franchise. Well, they're all trying to buy MLS franchises, and the MLS is, which has had success in some cities, but they're making the fatal mistake that history has proven over again don't do, which is just keep expanding because you get the expansion fees, you get to split the expansion fees.

It's like Boston chicken, whatever. Right. Or like the ABA did it. What was the one in the AFL? If you go back, like any expansion league, this was the fatal mistake. The soccer league from 40 years ago was, this is why it went under. But they just can't resist the expansion fee. One more break to talk about propercloth.com. Every guy knows that it's hard to find a dress

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It's very strange. You know when I was talking like half an hour ago about the gap between how we know something, someone knows something, says it, waves their hand, nothing happens for 15 years?

That is... Bill Cosby is all about that. That stuff was out there for years. Nothing happens. Nobody wanted to believe it it was america's dad it's the it is the strangest thing and then the whole story i still cannot wrap my mind around the fact that who was the name what was the name of the comic who makes the joke about bill cosby hannibal burris hannibal burris it goes on youtube and somehow that's what suddenly wakes us up to... You know what's also a version of this? I'm obsessed with this thing.

It's a corollary to this, which is the Ray Rice thing. Ray Rice, I think about this all the time. The Ray Rice episode of last year, was it last year or two years? 2014. It's totally weird. So what happens is, it is reported that Ray Rice hit his girlfriend so hard that she fell unconscious, right? That, we know that.

He gets... Well, there's a video of her dragging her out of the elevator, right? We don't see the video yet, but we're told that there's been this serious domestic abuse incident involving Ray Rice. His team finds out about it.

They suspend him for whatever it was, two, three games. The NFL does for a couple of games. We know this. It's not hidden. It's published. It's in news reports. He admitted to the commissioner he did it. He does it, right?

There is no ambiguity about what he did. He hit his girlfriend. She passed out. Then, and we're all fine with that through whatever it is, four games, whatever. The video comes out and all of a sudden we're like, wait a minute, we're not fine with this. It's outrageous. Now, why is it, to me, that is an unbelievably damning statement about us. Why is it that if I tell you Ray Rice hit his girlfriend so hard, she fell unconscious and he's been suspended for four games

we're like alright and then I say okay I'm going to show you a video and you're like holy shit like what about what was it about the statement he hit his girlfriend so hard that she fell unconscious that you had a problem with and why are you somehow someone who cannot appreciate the moral gravity of something unless you see a video

well that was the Goodell thing because Ray Rice when he met with him in July, he admitted that he punched her. And then when Goodell, when he resuspended him, which I don't think has ever happened before, he was like, well, I didn't realize he punched her. And it's like, there's five witnesses in the room that Ray Rice, yeah, don't get me started.

But the video thing is, it's the strangest thing. 14-year-old Bill Simmons. So what year are we, 1983? Would have been a disbelief that I got to write anything about sports and people read it and I got paid for it. You could have told me I was making $8 an hour. I'd have been like, oh my God, this is amazing. But I want to know about, 14-year-old Bill Simmons is doing what?

Is he, how insane a sports fan were you? His room is, oh, I have this picture of my room. It's pathetic. It's just covered in sports stuff. There's not a girl to be seen. I was just obsessed with sports. I was an only child. And it was just sports. Boston sports.

Everything. I remember the 84 Olympics. I think I might have seen every minute of the 84 Olympics because it was in LA. I might have just watched all of it. I think I just ran the table on it. It was all sports. I love sports. Yeah.

Did 14-year-old Bill Simmons do any schoolwork outside of? Yeah. He liked to write short stories and do all kinds of stuff. Really? Yeah, I just love sports. You know what this reminds me of? Yeah. First of all, A, I would love to see those short stories.

I have a couple good ones. Well, there was one I wrote about this kid who ran away from home because his dad was hitting him called The Chase, and they brought my dad in. They thought I was trying to tell him. My dad's like the nicest guy ever. They're like, so we're a little worried. This reminds me, years ago when I was at the Washington Post,

I was assigned to do a story on Tupac. Yeah. Why they would have chosen me for this story is another matter entirely. But somehow I got the Tupac assignment. And of course, Tupac's not going to talk to me. So I thought, oh, okay. So I'll go and I'll talk to people who knew Tupac when he was young. So I don't know how, but I tracked down Tupac's not going to talk to me. So I thought, oh, okay. So I'll go and I'll talk to people who knew Tupac when he was young.

So I don't know how, but I tracked down Tupac's English teacher in like eighth grade. And she said, oh, I still have copies of Tupac's poetry. I was like, Tupac wrote poetry in eighth grade? She says, yeah, yeah, yeah. So she sent me copies of the poems. And literally they are. So Tupac at that, he was still alive then. And he was like Mr. Gangster Hard Tats.

His poetry is all about like clouds and kittens and like fluffy pillows. And like, it was like, it was so unbelievable. And actually it made me love Tupac so much. Because I realized like, I mean, part of me was like, is he just, is this whole gangster thing an act that he's been putting on? But maybe it isn't. No, he was like two people. That was the fascinating thing about him. He was the thug that he would play up.

But then there was this other guy who was, like, incredibly perceptive and really cared about the state of African-American people in the 90s and how women were treated and all this stuff. And then he, this other person treated women terribly. He was a massive contradiction. Wasn't his father a Black Panther? A kind of committed Geronimo? Yeah, the mother of one of them was. Yeah, one of his parents. I think we're out of time. Get one last one.

Let's just keep going. Let's get one last shot. Maybe we get pulled off the stage. Let's keep going. Let's see. Let's wait for him to kick us off the stage. I don't know if I like this. Go to the next one. I'm just going to pick. You just want to get the runner question. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to go for the runner question. Is there one in there? Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Here we are. Elihu Kipchoge. Oh, no. What's this say? Oh, yeah. Elihu Kipchoge. No one knows who Elihu Kipchoge is, except for runners. I didn't know who he Kipchoge is, except for runners. I didn't know who he was. He just won the Berlin Marathon.

He was the guy who was in the Nike breaking two. He was the guy that Nike tried to get to break two hours. In the marathon. They rigged it so that he was drafting off people all the time. Basically, he's the greatest marathoner who ever lived, but that's not why he's of interest to me. He's one of the most marathoner who ever lived, but that's not why he's of interest to me. He's one of the most beautiful runners who ever lived. And I would like everyone to go on YouTube and type in Kipchoge, K-I-P-C-H-O-G-E, and watch the way he runs.

And if that doesn't turn you into a running fan. What do you mean, like the efficiency of it? It's just gorgeous. There is something, this is a guy who can run. So we used to have something called the Kipchoge number. A Kipchoge number is when Kipchoge's running the marathon, how long, so he's running 26 miles, how long can you keep up with him?

So my Kipchoge number is probably 1,200 meters, and I'm a pretty good runner. I'm also ancient. Most people who aren't runners, their Kipchoge number is probably 20 meters you have to run so he is running he is running 26 miles so quickly that you could only keep up with him for about 20 meters do you understand how extraordinary that is and when you see him run it's he's so elegant and it's so beautiful it's just just like, I got up at 3 a.m.

to watch the Berlin Marathon last weekend, along with maybe 25 other people around the world. And I just sat there with my jaw open just watching this guy for two hours. Because it's just, it's so breathtakingly beautiful. My dad used to live in the Boston Marathon. He lived on the same street of the 14th mile, I think it was.

And I used to bring my friends back from college. Like, we got to go to the marathon and watch these guys run by. And they're like, it'll be fun. We'll get to drink and eat. We'll be like, okay. So we would go. And you're kind of waiting and you're waiting.

And usually when you wait for something that long, it's going to be lame or it's not going to live up to the hype. And then that first wave comes and it's like. Yeah. And watching how fast those, everybody would have the same reaction like oh my god yeah this is that's the most one of the most incredible things i've ever seen you know this this is because they're sprinting but they're not their

bodies aren't moving but they're flying this is why you know it's a short answer to the question of why is watching a sports event live so crucial for the future of that sport? Yes. Because until you see it live, you never understand that particular fact. So you're always, so when you watch basketball on TV, only on TV, as many people sadly, many sports fans, basketballers will never watch a live basketball game. If you never watch a live basketball game, you're fooled into thinking that the players are normal sized. Right. And when you're there...

You think like Steve Nash is a midget and meanwhile he's like 6'3". Yeah, you think he's like... He's huge. I remember I had watched tennis for years on TV and then I went

and someone got me tickets courtside at US Open and I saw Rafa Nadal and I was like, holy shit, he's enormous. Enormous. He could play tight end in the NFL. He's the widest dude.

He's like this wide. I thought he was just a kind of regular muscly. No, he's a tank. I saw Serena at Wimbledon in 2012 when it was for the Olympics and it was the same thing. Serena on TV whatever she's great

but when you see her in person you're just like oh my god yeah she is like she was just incredible the way she moved the power she had I think this is basketball's best advantage going forward of all the sports not that I'm a little biased but um it's it's great on TV the widescreen has really helped because you can see more of the court, the HD, the close-ups, the fact that they don't wear helmets, just the fact that the guys are so famous and recognizable. And they have most of the marketable

American athletes now. But in person, it matches that TV experience. And you see like, I still remember young LeBron. If you saw LeBron like 07, 08, 09, and just watching him get a steal from mid-ccourt and he'd be like two steps dunk and Giannis is like that now Giannis is just just riveting in person because he's he's almost seven feet his arms are like going this way his legs are going this way and yet when he runs everything is moving together and he's got these giant hands

that can do whatever. And he's better in person. And there's certain guys that are just like, you have to go see these guys if they're in town. Yeah, yeah. You know, I had a version of that with, and I've forgotten her name. Who's the actress in Fatal Attraction?

Glenn Close. Glenn Close. I briefly sublet an apartment in a building in the village. And she had the penthouse. And I would sometimes run into apartment in a building in the village, and she had the penthouse. And I would sometimes run into her in the elevator. And first of all, she's like five feet tall. And secondly, she is so astonishingly beautiful in person. Wow.

I have never been silenced in someone's presence before. It's like, oh my God, you're beautiful. I mean, she's now, I don't know how old she is now, in her 60s, I'm sure. But just like, we're getting kicked off. Oh, that's God, you're beautiful. Like, I mean, she's now, I don't know how old she is now in her 60s, I'm sure. But just like, we're getting kicked off. Oh, that's it? We're done. But let me just finish by going close.

Because if you ever run into her, you're going to have the same thing that's going to happen to you, which is just like, it's just that kind of, holy shit, that's why you're a star. Yeah. Right? Just like struck dumb. I wrote about this in my book. David Robinson was like that. When he would walk out, everybody was just transfixed by him. The seven foot guys,

handsome. And he was just like chiseled and just was like the perfect looking athlete. And we were all like, my God, look at that guy. How are we, how are we the member of his species? He's magnificent, magnificent athlete. Um, this was a good one to end on. So Revisionist History, season two is out. It's an awesome podcast and incredibly successful. Mine is the Bill Simmons podcast, which we do three times a week. You can hear this. I think we're going to run it on Friday.

Thank you for doing this. Thank you to Midroll for having us. Thanks so much to SeatGeek for $20 off your first SeatGeek purchase on NFL tickets. Use promo code BSNFL. Thanks to TheRinger.com. Don't forget my column is up as we speak, along with a whole bunch of NBA stuff and all kinds of other goodies. Go to TheRinger.com, Ringer Podcast Network. We put up somewhere between 17 and 20 podcasts this week. Go subscribe, check out, see what we talked about.

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