The Bill Simmons Podcast - Malcolm Gladwell on the NBA Carousel, Billionaire Owners, and Multipurpose Golf Courses (Ep. 228)

Episode Date: June 20, 2017

HBO and The Ringer's Bill Simmons is joined by Malcolm Gladwell to discuss the ridiculous rate of offseason story lines in the NBA (5:00), LeBron James's right to act in his own self-interest (13:00), dealing with juggernauts in the NBA (23:00), billionaire owners' spending habits (33:00), Tiger Woods's painkiller problem (36:00), trimming the NBA schedule (44:00), Tom Brady's concussions (53:00), solving the public-use problem for golf courses (1:02:00), and the Bill Maher controversy (1:06:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Nick Cage the king of good bad movies I wanted to disagree with it but I think he might be right I think there is a case to be made for Keanu Reeves but I think Keanu the fact that he's actually made good movies over the last 15 years might disqualify him.

But read that, check that out. Good Bad Movies Week. It's really fun. And also, obviously, the NBA draft. Our NBA draft guide is spectacular. We have NBA content constantly. It's like a broken water faucet, just shooting NBA content out.

This podcast, I think we're going to do four this week. The people want it. We did one yesterday with, we broke down the Boston Philly trade with Kevin O'Connor and Chris Ryan and Mark Titus and my dad who came in about as hot as he's ever come in on the podcast. Spent 90 minutes breaking that trade down. I gave my verdict at the end. So if you missed that, check that out. Today, we're going to talk to Malcolm Gladwell. I think we're going to do one tomorrow too. And then Friday. So four pods this week for your listening pleasure. And, uh, Oh, and that also, I'm also a cousin Sal's against all odds. Cause we're going to be breaking down NBA draft odds. Cause you can bet on the NBA draft, which is incredible. But, uh But if you haven't subscribed to that one, it's Against All Odds with Cousin Sal.

We're putting that one up tonight. So I'm with you all week. Here I am. Five, six hours of podcast content for you. Still not even half as much as what Adam Carolla is doing. I found out this weekend that Adam Carolla now is adding another podcast. He has like 14 podcasts. I think he's doing like 17, 18, 20 hours of radio a week podcast style. So I feel

even doing six, I feel completely inferior and probably better to spend six hours with me than 20 hours with Carolla. I've driven from Vegas with Corolla and that took four hours and that was a long drive and he talked the whole time. But anyway, four BS podcasts this week and then Against All Odds with Cousin Sal. We will have every possible NBA

draft take you've ever wanted to hear. We're also on Thursday night. We're doing a bunch of videos as well. Tate, are you doing T-Dub this week? Friday. Friday. Tate and Titus are doing T-Dub this week? Friday. Friday. All right. Tate and Titus are doing T-Dub on the Ringer U podcast on Friday. So if you want to hear them. Titus approaches it from the fan's perspective.

Doesn't care about the fortunes of the team or any of that stuff. All right. Malcolm Gladwell coming up right now. First Pearl Jam. All right. Malcolm Gladwell on the line. He just launched season two of his Revisionist History podcast, which we'll actually, let's just talk about it now.

You did 10 again? I did 10. First one aired every Thursday for the next 10 weeks. Episode two airs on Thursday. Episode one I took on golf. Yeah. I was very excited about that. Let's hold that because i want to talk about that because i i have a lot of thoughts on why which rich white people play golf let's talk about

basketball first because this is every year we say this is the craziest week in the nba off season we've ever had but this is particularly crazy because since last Friday, just shit's been happening constantly. And it just never ends. Like, right, we're taping this right now, 10 o'clock a.m. Pacific time, Tuesday morning. And five minutes before I went to call you, all this poor Zingas Nick stuff broke. What? That they might trade him. Yeah, that just happened.

This is how fast it's moving these days. Oh my goodness. The Celtics are in. Celtics are interested. They're making a run. I have never seen anything like this. And basketball has finally mastered what it took Roger Goodell and Paul Tagliabue and all those guys so long to do is it's turned itself into an 11-month sport.

All the seeds were planted starting with the decision in 2010. And then each year it got more and more fun. And now it's like, people are more excited for the off season than the finals. The finals were fun, but people, people love this stuff more. You guys have not, I've been looking on the ringer. You run as many basketball stories now in the offseason as you were during the season. Yeah. It's crazy. And we don't know if we're running enough.

I mean, we're probably light. We should probably have more. People want to read it. I mean, I'm doing four podcasts this week. People love this stuff. And so I have some theories. I'm interested in your thoughts on this. One of my theories is that I just think people care about NBA players.

So you have like, you have baseball, like Mike Trout's hurt right now. And he's the best player in baseball and he might be the best player ever. Who the hell knows? He's way up there. I had, I turned on Fox the other day

and he was being interviewed in the dugout because he's hurt. And it took me like three seconds to realize it was Mike Trout. And I'm thinking like, you know, whether it's damien lillard jimmy butler all these guys they're so famous and everybody has strong opinions on them and now it's this league where you have like almost like 40 to 45 guys that whether you're a casual fan, whatever, you just know and you care about. Do you ever remember anything like this? No, I think it's, and added to that,

this is a special year because the draft does seem insanely deep. And once, you know, when the draft is deep, if the draft has twice as many potentially great players as normal, it doubles the amount of, I mean, it's not even doubling. It's exponentially increasing the number of scenarios on draft day, leading up to draft day. So it's like the conversation is now, like you need to have like a,

you need Watson to keep track of all the possibilities for this week. It's crazy. Yeah. It is probably the best top 10 of a draft we've had since the late 90s where you know we were talking about yesterday in the podcast where you you you might end up getting the best player in the draft with the eighth pick you just don't know like there's definitely a top four but nobody would also rule out the other things but then you have you know the the player empowerment which

really started in the in the 70s i think it's the decision the impact the decision's been a little overblown because like kareem decided he wanted to play for the lakers in 1975 and they had to trade him there like this has been going on wilt changed teams twice he decided he wanted to leave and go somewhere else than it happened so it's not lebron didn't create this but i think what what what's different about now is how fast we can get information yeah that the game of it now the fact that i i have to look at my twitter feed at 11 o'clock at night to make sure nothing happened that i didn't miss anything that's what's different and so the decision coincided with that but but I don't think it changed it. What do you think?

Well, what's interesting is the parallel with what's going on in politics, that what you're seeing with the Trump administration is because everything leaks, you're getting a totally different perspective on how politics works and how the White House works. So we now see decision-making in real time. And what we see now is, I think I'm going to do this. No, I'm not. I'm going to do this. No, that's a bad idea. I'm going to talk to this person. A generation ago, you never saw that run up. All you saw was the final decision. So you had an appearance of coherence and statesmanship and everything seemed very deliberate. It's just because you weren't in on all the confusion that leads up to the decision. Now, in the NBA, you have the equivalent of leaking, right?

Everything's leaked. If Danny Ainge has a thought bubble at seven in the morning shaving, we know about it by 7.30. I mean, it's incredible. So it's like, once you're going to expose all of the steps that lead up to a decision, then you've multiplied the kind of excitement for, I mean, in the political realm, you've multiplied the amount of time we spend about politics. And in the basketball realm, you've multiplied the kind of the fun for the fan. That's, I never, I never saw the parallel, but you're 100% right.

The way people follow politics these days is no different than NBA fans this week, where they're just checking to make sure nothing happened. Now, in this case, like the future of the country and possibly the world is at stake all the time. And it's like, oh, no, Trump's mad at North Korea. Oh, my God, I got to keep checking to make sure, you know, this didn't happen. But yeah, it's the same beast. And I wonder, do you worry about this constant flux of information and half tidbits and half truths and rumors and this might be happening and hear this and now this? And is it going to make all of us dumber? Is it too much information?

I don't know if it makes us dumber because you'll tune out. We'll tune out. I mean, we're experiencing this for the first time. It may well be we'll get tired of it. And the next time there's a deep draft and a million playoff scenarios and what have you, we're just not going to consume it in the same way. Same thing with, I think we're going to get Trump fatigue.

And maybe the next president comes along, we're just going to want someone who's really boring. And people will try and leak stuff and the press won't even jump at it. They're like, who cares? But now, you know, we've never been in a situation where we know what TV shows the president is watching at night and like how he's responding and what he's TiVo-ing. In fact, he TiVos, by the way. So fantastic.

Yeah, TiVo. I liked it. He literally TiVos. I mean, it's like my mom doesn't TiVo, just so we're clear. My 86-year-old mom does not TiVo. She has moved on from that particular technology. Wow. I remember buying the TiVo lifetime subscription,

and I think I had to cancel the credit card to stop paying for it. But yeah, a long time ago. But no, I mean mean i just don't know whether we're gonna be this it's just novel now i think i don't i think the sports thing is gonna stay as passionate and maybe even gain steam each year but the trump fatigue you're already seeing it like sean spicer gave a press briefing where he didn't allow video or audio yeah you know that that's like that's insane nixon wouldn't have done that and people it just is starting to bounce off people now you know yeah you have a press briefing that nobody's allowed to record it in any way i don't know what is that

nixon would have rejected that by the way how do you stop someone from recording are they taking away their phones i mean the, the whole thing just, it's like, there aren't a million ways to record these days. I don't know. I don't understand. All right, so LeBron James. Yeah. I don't, I've never seen so many different opinions

of the same person for, ranging from how smart he actually is, whether he has a master plan, whether there was real thought put into this in a really substantial way, or if he kind of flies by the seat of his pants. I don't know what to make of it. But starting in 2010, he switches teams. He goes to Miami. At the time, everybody was appalled and horrified and just people didn't do that. You didn't play with your enemy. Now I think we've almost been softened to the whole concept. But goes back to Cleveland in 2014

and it's all about I'm coming home, back to Cleveland in 2014. And it's all about, I'm coming home back to finish what I started that. I mean so much to the people of Ohio. I'm going to do all these great things for everybody here. Now there's momentum that he might be leaving again and he might be going to LA. He wants to be a businessman. He wants to be a billionaire. He wants to own a team.

What do you make of all this? Well, it's not, it's a good deal. Again, let's put it in broader perspective. The exact same thing has been happening with employment patterns in the general economy over the last generation. You know, our parents had one job with one company for their entire lives. The current, you know, millennials do not. They move around, right? That's the, that kind of labor force or inter-organization mobility is one of the signature features of the modern economy.

Why would we expect basketball players to be any different? I mean, LeBron's just doing what everyone else is doing. And he's acting in his own self-interest as he should. And going back to Cleveland was an absolutely brilliant, it was brilliant on so many different respects. It changes our understanding and appreciation of him. But I don't think anyone, does anyone expect him to finish his career there? Why would he?

You know, he should go and i kind of have i kind of half expected it to be honest it never dawned on me that he might jump ship again until recently because i felt like it seemed like he was so consumed with his legacy and what things meant that maybe that legacy was like, he went to Miami for four years. It was almost like going to college. He graduated, then he came back to Cleveland. Now you throw the Lakers into it. And now it's just this, it's not a nomadic career,

but it's definitely a career that has different stages, right? Where it's like he was there, then he went there, then he went there, and then he went there. It's four moves. Here's the thing that I'm sure even he is surprised by, and that is, under the normal expectation, you would have expected his career to end in Cleveland because he's got a huge number of minutes in him. He's in his early 30s. He's going to ride into the sunset. But he's LeBron, and he's not riding into the sunset. He just had as good a playoff series as any player in the history of the game.

It's clear he maybe can play for another five years, right? So the fact that his career is probably a third longer than we would have expected when he started playing means that all of these expectations we have about where he's supposed to end his career don't work. You know, even he may have thought, I'm done in Cleveland because I'm going to retire at 34. He's not retiring at 34, right? He could still be maybe the best player in the game two seasons from now.

Is there any reason to believe that? I wonder. Well, so our generation is like the guys were loyal. You played your whole time with the team as you said like i grew up with yaz on the red sox for 23 years by the end he's just this guy the old grizzled guy who's pissed off he never won the world series he's smoking at his locker after games and you know runs runs the lap around fenway park and that's that's what we grew up with. But I wonder if LeBron in 2010 and how Cleveland turned on him and burned his jerseys and they ripped the big sign in the building down and all the heat he took. And now you look at all these other guys that have moved since, including Durant and OKC

and how the fans were so mad at him and all that stuff. I wonder if the guys after that, the younger guys watching this, it's, it's almost like they've gotten their, their master's degree on loyalty in sports. Yeah. And they realize like the moment, the moment you're not on all these people love you,

they wear your jerseys, all that stuff. The moment it turns, they're out, they hate you. And it's like, why, why are you devoting your whole life to playing for this one team that stuff the moment it turns they're out they hate you and it's like why why are you devoting your whole life to playing for this one team when the moment the relationship flips they're going to turn on you so screw it i'm in it for myself and i wonder if that's been a pivotal

change this decade i don't know what do you think well i would say i'd say something slightly different which is that there's a second understanding of, see, it was always the case that every fan had two ways of appreciating basketball. You have your team that you root for, and then you have a generalized appreciation of the game. So, you know, maybe you're an Indiana fan, but you watch the Warriors last season and you'd like, how can you not love watching them, right? So you have that kind of double. And I think what's happened historically through basketball,

the appreciation you had for your own team was paramount. That was the big deal. And then you had a kind of, and the love of basketball thing was secondary. I think that maybe is flipping. And so if LeBron moves to LA and puts together a team that's capable of challenging the Warriors, maybe that's okay in an era where our desire to see great basketball

is greater than our desire, than our kind of loyalties to our home team. Yeah. I talk to... I'm certainly in that... I mean, I would rather see... Do I want to see LeBron put together a super team to challenge the Warriors? Absolutely.

I mean, I would... And if he managed to pull that off, my estimation of him would grow, would double. I mean, I just think that'd be fantastic. Well, you're smarter than me, so you'll know what the best analogy for this is. I do feel like the Warriors and everything that happened this season and how invincible they looked has thrown the NBA into flux.

Yeah. And I don't know what a parallel would be to this in business or politics or whatever, but they, they were so good in that finals and here's the, here's LeBron and the calves. LeBron's still in his prime. Kyrie's the best offensive guard, not just in the league right now,

but maybe all time for his ability to just get any shot he wants. Kevin Love is still a top 25 guy. Thompson's a good rebounder. They have bench guys who have played well in big games. They have a good coach. And the Warriors wax them. And it literally threw the NBA into flux. You have the Celtics who have this lottery pick and cap space

and all these different ways to immediately become a finals contender. And they're kind of straddling the line. And they don't know what to do. And they're like, should we go all in now, or should we wait until somebody gets hurt on the Warriors, basically? And then you have LeBron, who has this awesome roster, and he's already looking ahead to the next roster. And he's on a team with Kyrie Irving, Kevin Love, and Tristan Thompson.

So everything that's happening right now, it just seems like it's almost like somebody took the NBA like it was a snow globe and shook it. Yeah, yeah. And now it's just chaos. So what would be, where does that happen in other realms of life? Well, you know, Amazon is just about to do that to the grocery business. I don't know if that's a particularly useful analogy. No, that's perfect.

You're right. Amazon is doing that to the grocery business. You're right. Amazon is doing that to the grocery business. You're right. I mean, when Amazon bought Whole Foods, the stocks of every other major supermarket chain just declined catastrophically, right? I mean, they're like, what? It's the same thing. It's like, uh-oh, we suddenly, we're in this incredibly complicated business where there was this reasonable parity. And all of a sudden, a very, very, very, very big player has come in. And there's just no, if you're Kroger, what chance do you have of competing against Amazon if Amazon makes an aggressive move into this, or as is what they're doing, making an aggressive move into this market? Sort of similar. I mean, it's very, I'm agnostic. If someone else like LeBron or the Celts does not put together a credible challenge to the Warriors in the next couple of years, it's going to have really serious consequences for the game. game short-term consequences but you're already at aren't you i mean you you know infinitely more

about basketball than me but we're already getting to a situation where there there's really only only a small number of games on any given night during the season are consequential even at the beginning of the season right yeah there's there's just is there is there any reason to watch a Magic Pelicans game in November unless you're a diehard fan of the Magic of the Pelicans? Sort of not. Well, so the basketball junkies would watch all that stuff.

You know, the ratings were really good for the finals. That's been, the red herring of this whole thing is that people like dominant teams. MJ in 96, 97, 98, even though the product wasn't that good at the time and it was too low scoring and the talent pool was as shallow as it had been in a long time, his Bulls jazz games,

those finals were huge ratings because people love dominance. I think the problem for the nba the finals is fine you know five games but if you really love the nba i don't know how you don't watch those games and aren't just blown away by the talent on the floor i i tweeted that it was like watching an all-star game where the guys tried you know and i really think i said this to durant when we did the podcast last week i really felt like the two teams brought the best out of each other yeah like the calves brought the best out of durant that's the best he's ever played that was i thought the best i've

ever seen curry play and that was probably the best kairi and lebron have played offensively you know and that that those are all good things the problem for the nba is those first three rounds where you have golden stages, sweeping teams and winning by 20 a game. And that's, I think where it hurts them a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. During, during your signature, the whole season is building up to this signature window in the spring where you're getting a disproportionate share of your revenues,

where you're generating fan interest. And basically one half of the draw is a joke. Yeah, it was problematic. I had somebody email me. They counted it. I'm sorry, I can't remember the reader, but he said there I think were 79 playoff games this year, and 16 of them were really fun to watch.

Wow. Out of 79, so it's like like 20 that was a little appalling but here's what i take solace in and i would urge everyone to remember this the nba has been at this point so many times over the years where we've looked at a team and we're like oh my god nobody's going to beat them oh oh what what do we do? That's happened. It happened multiple times in the 80s. I think with the 86 Celtics, they lost the Lambias pick,

so there was more than a little bad luck in that scenario. But after the 86 finals, people were like, what are we going to do? How do we beat this team? They're bigger than everybody. They have Larry Bird. They have the number two pick coming. This is impossible. And we've seen this happen year after you know not year after year but two three times a decade yeah shack and penny looked invincible shack and

kobe in the 2000s when they won in 2001 and they went 15 to win the playoffs all of us were like the decade screwed it's over what do we do so you know the forces of the nba that make it so compelling include injury luck which hits everybody uh egos the salary cap um guys just not getting along like there's a lot of things that could happen and this is so i would i would urge everybody not to write the decade off yet the The other thing that's different in this environment is when you have billionaires owning teams, the luxury tax ceases to matter as much. So there's no reason. So Steve Ballmer, who is worth, what is he worth? $35 billion, whatever. I don't know. 20 billion. There's really no reason if he wanted to make a run and assemble an extremely good team and pay an egregious luxury tax,

he totally could. There's no reason not to, right? I mean, he wouldn't even miss the cash. So that's when you, so you effectively, the luxury tax in certain tax for certain teams is really meaningless at this point, which means that there is a mechanism in place for other people to create very expensive super teams. I'm actually surprised. Bomber. I mean, Bomber, what's he hanging on to his cash for? He's really into basketball. He really wants to win. Even if he went over the luxury tax by a factor of 10, he could still not even dent his fortune.

He doesn't even notice the cash. If he's got $40 billion, he's generating, you know, conservatively $2 billion a year, right? Just by sitting at home. Yeah. Why not spend a couple, you know, a tiny, tiny slice of that on assembling the greatest team you possibly can and screw the luxury tax? I have some thoughts on this. Hold on, we're going to take a quick break.

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about the brooklyn nets trade in 2013 with the celtics that basically shaped this next decade for the celtics all these ladder picks they. And it's this trade that because certain narratives take hold and then they go and they kind of spiral into one direction or the other, then a new narrative takes place. And at the time when they made that trade, this was the absolute apocalyptic worst case scenario for how it was going to turn out. Right. So they make this trade in the summer of 2013 they already had darren williams who at that time was still considered one of the best point guards they had joe johnson who is an overpaid but very effective

all-star two guard they had brooke lopez who was a very good low post center and they were adding kevin garnett and paul pierce dumping gerald wall Wallace's contract because that had been a bad move and they gave up three first round picks and then on top of that this little pick swap that nobody noticed that was a throw in at the last second so when they did this first of all the going rate to get rid of a terrible contract

was two first round picks because I think Golden State had just done that with when they had gotten rid of Richard Jefferson and Andres Biedrans. So people looked at it and said, wow, the Celtics just basically blew up their team. The best two players they had in the team in the last 20 years. Paul Pierce, the best longtime Celtic they had had really since Larry Bird. And they just said, fuck it and got and got rid of

it and pressed the reset button and they did it with a team that was already a contender the Nets and that was spending a shitload of money yeah and so and I was on TV when it happened and at the time we only had the information that um there were three first round picks the pick swap thing wasn't in the mix yet. We didn't know if the picks were unprotected and I just felt like, wow, they just gave away Pearson Garnett for and they took Gerald Wallace's contract and they got

these three picks that what's going to happen with them? The Nets pro-craft spending $150 million a year on his team. This is ridiculous. Now what they didn't count on and what this daily news piece did is such a great thing about breaking out was that the nets the next year they made the playoffs didn't go as well as planned darren williams was terrible

and prokhorov just changed his mind yeah and he said we're spending too much money screw this so the nets do this 180 now they're trying to not go over the luxury tax. And that leads to where the Celtics are now, where they're just cherry picking these picks because Prokhorov doesn't care anymore. He doesn't care about the team. He just doesn't want them to pay the luxury tax. So my point is, when you have rich, rich, rich, rich billionaires

who buy an NBA team and then change their mind on a moment's notice on why they either wanted the team or what they're spending or all that. That adds even more flux. The Nets in 2013 were going to be this crazy, crazy spender. Not a lot different than Paul Allen in 1999 through 2003, the Trailblazers, remember? Yeah. That was the most expensive roster. And then all rich people were like, screw this. I don't want to spend this money anymore we're changing our strategy well it's like that's great but

you've already given away your first round picks and done all this stuff so i wonder like the more rich people that we have in there if we're going to see wild swings one way or the other like you're right balmer might look at this and go i'm moving into a new arena in five years we have a chance to steal some lakers real estate. I want to spend more money. Yeah. Or you might look at it and go, I can't compete with the Lakers.

Let's scale back. Like, who knows? These guys are billionaires. They change their mind every two years. What's hilarious though is when a billionaire decides, these guys decide, you know what?

I can't pay that extra 30 million or whatever on the luxury tax. It's so hilarious because of course they, you know, it's it, for them to be worried about 30 million is, is ludicrous. It's like, it's like, it's like a normal person being worried about a hundred dollars. You know, it's a hundred dollars, not nothing, but I mean, you wouldn't change your life for a hundred dollars to save a hundred dollars. You'd be like, Oh, well, you know, whatever. These guys, they pretend that this matters.

It always cracks me up. It's almost as if they wake up one morning and they forget they've got $30 billion in the bank. And they're still like 18 and in college. Here's how this was explained to me five years ago during the NBA lockout, or five and a half years ago, whenever that was, by somebody who was very close to the proceedings, I was like, why does, why do these owners care?

You remember at the time it was a big thing about the rev share split 50, 50, and the owners are really trying to screw the players and they had the hammer because they all have money in the players. And once they start missing paychecks, it's a disaster. So I asked, why do these owners care if they lose $2 million in a season? They own this asset that they bought. The NBA franchise values don't go down. If anything, they're going to go up.

Now we're moving toward this era with internet streaming. Who the hell knows? These are great investments. Why would they care if it's like, oh, I lost a million bucks this year. I lost two million. Why are they so desperate to swing it so they don't have any losses?

And the person explained to me, because these are rich people who are super competitive and it bothers them if they invest in anything or own anything and they get this sheet of paper at the end of the year and it says you've lost $1.4 million. It just bothers them. That's the reason they're rich because they can't accept that piece of paper. They want to flip it. And it makes sense, right?

Like Ballmer looks at this and goes, I'm worth $30 billion. It bothers me that the Clippers lost $12 last year and we've got to add a round two. I have to fix this. I want to make money and be competitive. But even that's your... You know, a lot of these guys, if they were purely rational,

I'm sure from a tax perspective, could use the losses on their teams and the losses are very useful to them. Right. So it's like, it's not even economically rational. It's just their ego saying, I- Yeah, it's 100%. But we've talked about this for years.

You own an NBA team because of ego. Like somebody was telling me at the finals, they were like, wow, the Warriors, Lakeup. He bought that team for 450 with his group. Now it's probably worth three billion and i and i said it's actually worth five because there's no way he sells this team if the number doesn't have a five in front of it and even then he probably doesn't sell it because you know these warriors games especially in the playoffs and especially in the finals it's a huge dick swinging contest yeah and if you're the owner of the warriors and you're surrounded by all these other billionaires

and hey there's the guy that owns sale force and hey there's eddie q from apple and you have all these all these rich dudes and powerful dudes in this court but you own the team and you own the arena you have the biggest dick in the in the arena so he's not selling what you can't put a price on that he He already has money. What money are you going to offer him? What's he going to do with it? If I gave you $5 billion after taxes right now, would you turn around and offer it and go to Joe Lacob and say,

can I buy the team? Is that your Revisionist History Season 2 money? I'll take it. Yeah, no, I would love... One of my dumb uh nba rich guy dreams would be if some rich guy just openly and publicly said i just want to own the warriors i know i'm completely overpaying i know it's ridiculous but today i offered joe lakob five billion dollars for the warriors i would love to see how joe lakob reacted to this because i don't think he would sell i really don't he loves it he loves sitting courtside and owning the warriors

i don't think you can put a price on it yeah that would be hilarious all right so we have some other stuff on our agenda all right i'm looking at the list uh brady do we do we even want to talk about the fact that tiger woods is basically has been addicted to painkillers from some time it seems like that the bottom line is clearly his back is in a lot uh worse shape than than we realized and he's in a lot of pain and like a lot of people who are in a lot of pain, it's super easy to get hooked on these painkillers. I thought that it was really important for him when he got in that traffic stop for him to say this wasn't alcohol. That was really, really important. His life is hard right now, but it's not hard because, you know, he has some addiction, some drinking problem that he hasn't ever...

No, he's going through something that a lot of people in this country go through. The intersection of chronic pain and the drugs we use to treat them, which is, you know, that is a whole... That is one complicated, difficult thing. He just deserves our sympathy. He really does. i 100 agree this is nine years yeah that it seems like he's been in pain and i wonder like that's a long road i wonder how this plays out for him i don't know does he you know kirk also had a back operation and that was so painful that he couldn't even coach his team in the final. You know, imagine all the things that would have to happen to keep Steve Kerr from being on the sideline during the NBA playoffs with one of the greatest teams in history, the NBA.

That's how much pain he was in. I mean, and some distance. When did he have his surgery? Some time ago. It wasn't recent, right? Oh, yeah. He had it almost two years ago. I mean, backs.

His thing is like, they can't even figure out how to stop the pain with Steve Kerr. Yeah. It's like, there are no drugs that make him feel better. It's just this constant spinal fluid leak that they can't figure out how to stop. And they said this week that he's going to spend the summer traveling around just trying to figure out if there's some sort of miracle cure to make him feel better. I think he felt better enough to coach those last couple games, but he's still not happy.

And it does seem like the reason I brought up Tiger is it seems like his body has been just a physical train wreck since 2008. Yeah. And, and I don't remember a more high profile case of painkiller addiction with an athlete. Like remember Brett Favre had it for a year and it was a big deal. It's like, Oh, Brett Favre. Wow.

He's addicted to painkillers. I'm sure this is happening way more than we realize, right? Yeah. Well, you know what this leads me to? I had this really... I went running with Henry Abbott, one of your old ESPN colleagues from way back. And Henry made this really interesting point

about how he thinks they... And you've made the same argument, but he was even more radical. He was like, they play way too many games in the NBA. And because the physical toll, we're not getting the, we don't have a proper understanding of the physical toll it's taking on these people's bodies. They're starting to play earlier. They're playing competitive basketball for many more hours, much earlier in their lives. And then when they make the pros, they're starting to play earlier they're playing competitive basketball for many more hours much earlier in their lives and then when they make the pros they're playing at a higher level for longer and that's not sustainable and you can't and this is not just basketball

across the realm of elite sports we set our expectation of how many times someone should play in a season at a time when the games or the sports were just not as demanding. And when people weren't starting when they were five years old, you can't, you just, you can't play as many basketball games in 2017 as you played in 1970.

I mean, it's preposterous and you can't, you shouldn't be adding games to the football season. You should be subtracting games from the football season. It's just not. And what we're seeing with Kerr and Tiger is just, it's a function of that. These guys played very difficult sports at a high level for a long time. And they hit a wall, right? That's, and you can't. And it's not just that, it's the conditioning

slash workouts that you have to do to stay at that level, that's what sunk Tiger. Yeah. Like his knees started going because he put too much muscle on his body and that led to his back, you know, and then it just, your body's like a building. It just starts to break down.

Yeah. You know, there's been some exceptions to this, but for the most part, it does seem like you look at somebody like Dwight Howard, who's just built differently than some of the guys that we grew up watching, and he started having back problems in the prime of his career, and it kept going.

Like the Celtics-Lakers 30-for-30 was on. They kept running it over the weekend. And when you watch watch it you're just struck by the bodies yeah the by you know the by just skinny guys running around wearing converses you know and now it's like everybody's built like a wide receiver or a tight end and they're wearing perfect equipment and they're playing as hard as possible on both ends. I'm with you. I thought it was fascinating when LeBron in the playoffs, when he had rest, how great he was. And I remember talking to my friend Hershey about it.

And we were both like, rested LeBron is the scariest player of all time. It's like LeBron with five days rest is the most terrifying force the nba has ever had and what would happen if they went to a premier league schedule where they just played twice a week and we always got rested lebron and every game mattered they would never do it because it's too much money but but is it bill i don't this this is so henry was talking about this and he convinced me it's not too much money because now we've moved from a situation where the owners were getting a majority of their revenue from the gate to a situation where it's national TV money

that's being driven by a small number of competitive games. That's where their money lies now. They could cut, they're not gonna, it'll make a marginal difference in their bottom line, but you can cut 20 games out of the season and it is not economically the end of the world because all because the the cable would really hurt them they one of the reasons that the values has bumped up is because of the local cable deals a lot of these teams have especially if they own a piece of the network and these networks because

live sports is one of the only things where the ratings hasn't really dropped that much, they all want content. That's why baseball, a sport that everybody's been trying to write off for years and years, is booming economically because of all the local deals, right? So I think they could cut 12 games. I think they'd go to 70. I don't know if they could go lower than that.

Well, I mean, you can go as low as you want, right? You, the question is how, how much do you value the health of your players and the kind of integrity of the sport versus how much money do you want to make? That's the calculation. I don't see, if you're seeing a team on the road on the second day of a back-to-back, why, how can you in good conscience charge money for that? That's not real basketball, right? And those are the situations where everyone gets hurt. If Derek Rose is destroyed, he's an incredibly thrilling player. We basically are robbed of, what, probably five seasons of peak Derek Rose. Why? Because he was overused. There was a really interesting argument about Przingis this season with the Knicks,

saying the Knicks were a young player of that kind of height. You cannot play him as many minutes as they were playing him. And, you know, that's a really, really important point. You know, Przingis, those seven footers are vulnerable, right? We know that time and time again. And when they get overplayed, think about what we lost. How many years of peak Bill Walton? How many years of, I mean, you could just go down the list.

We never saw Greg Oden. We knew that could go on. I don't know. I'm not convinced the kind of cost-benefit ratio is worked out properly when it comes to basketball well the other thing is more practice time would be would be fun too you mentioned like the four and five nights and the three and four nights stuff like that i i'm amazed that they still allow that to happen you know in the league they call it a schedule loss yeah so it's like you just look at the schedule and you're like wow we're on the road for seven games in 10 days and the seventh game is the fourth game in five nights like cross that off we're probably not winning they know they know three weeks ahead of time so if you could get rid

of those but then you could also give everybody more time to practice because that's another thing you'll read like in the stories about you know like the celtics are playing well like oh what are the reasons and brad's team is like well we had a little break there we're able to get a couple practices and it's like yeah it seems important that nba teams should practice yeah sometimes they won't practice for a month because they won't have time because they're either traveling or they're home and the and the coach is trying to trying to take it easy on them. My dream scenario, I mean, I think 70 is as realistic as we could get. Maybe 72. My dream

scenario would be 60. And for the playoffs, I would go best of five in the first round and the second round. And I would make it so that the home court advantage,

to take away some of the randomness, the home court advantage, the top two seeds for the five games are at home. Yeah. So if you're going to beat them in round one or two, you're going to have to win on their court. You're going to have to win at least twice on their court probably. This is the yogurt problem. Yogurt, whole milk yogurt tastes amazing. But rather than eat a small amount of amazing yogurt, people take all of the fat out of it so it tastes like crap and eat a lot more of it. Why do people do this? This doesn't made any sense to me it's like why i it's really even hard to find

whole milk yogurt in the supermarket everyone's buying the zero percent fat yogurt which tastes like shit so they can eat a lot of it right like it's just bananas i i have a one of my can i plug my podcast one of my podcast episodes is about fries but when mcdonald's changed why mcdonald's changed the recipe for french fries in the 90s and it's the same problem they tasted really good and we used to eat a small amount of them and then they made them taste like cardboard and they gave us supersized fries it's like why did who thought that was a good idea it's like the craziest thinking that says that the volume is all that matters in the appreciation of something. And we should be thinking the opposite. Yeah, jumbo.

Yeah, jumbo. So you're saying the NBA right now is giving us the jumbo NBA schedule. Yeah, jumbo NBA, which I don't want. I want the full fat, small amount that tastes fantastic. The other thing they're thinking about, they're missing is the marginal. So I'm a good example of a marginal basketball fan. So I watch a very limited number of games. I don't have a team that I follow and watch every home game, right?

So a good question for the NBA is how do I get Malcolm to watch more games? Malcolm will watch more games if games are occasions and the quality of play improves. But when I accidentally tune into a game and it's the second night of on the road, whatever, schedule loss, it just makes me think, why would I want to watch basketball? Why would I do this with my evening? Yeah, well, I've noticed,

so they changed the finals a little bit. It used to be 2-3-2, and the three games were always sunday tuesday thursday yeah right the so it's two it was usually like uh tuesday thursday two day break fly to the other team sunday tuesday thursday and then it would end game six sunday game seven tuesday something like that so they flipped it and they made two two one one one and they put more rest in it and i think it was one of the reasons that the the finals were so yeah we're at such a high level it's because they almost always had three days

off like the the the between game four and game five was three days and between game two and game three i think was three days and you know that just that really helps those guys because they're going so hard in those games and it's so hard to play basketball now you gotta you can't you have to run at everybody everybody's wide open from 25 three feet about to make a three you gotta you're sprinting constantly you're doing these short short sprints. It's got to be the best exercise. There are no fat basketball players. People, one last point on this. People who, fans sometimes misunderstand

the nature of elite performance. So if you use track runners as an example, elite track runners will run hard maybe twice a week. Um, probably 20% of workouts are at something close to max. Most of the work you do as an elite runner is you're effectively jogging. 80% of it. The, if you go to Kenyan, you train with the Kenyans five days a week, they're running at a pace that recreational runners could join them.

Two days a week, they're blowing the doors off. And that's because the human body can only perform at a high level for a very limited amount of time in any sort of given window. And we've just thrown that insight out the door in contemporary sports. And it's crazy. By the way.

My wife is obsessed with this new running app that it's called like 3-2-1. And it tells you what to do for every second. So it's like you run, you jog, then you walk, then you run hard, then you walk. And you just do it that way so your body's never used to what's going on. She thinks it's going to revolutionize the world. It's interval training, essentially, or what they used to call fartlek. Yeah. Yeah.

But now it's interval training, but with an app playing music the whole time, and you're just kind of following the app like it's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and your head's been... Your wife is always on the cutting edge. She always, especially with running apps, she's always way ahead of there hold on we're gonna take a quick break quick break to talk about zip recruiter the key to winning the nba is building a strong roster right well great gms know that having the right players come from scouting in all the right places same goes for finding great talent in your business are you hiring do you know where to post your job to find the best candidates? Posting your job in one place isn't enough anymore.

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That is Sonos.com, S-O-N-O-S.com. Back to my man, Malcolm Gladwell. All right, we're back. By the way, just as a passing topic, Lolo Jones was on my favorite show, The Challenge, where they have the reality stars who do all these high-demand challenge events against each other.

It's on MTV. So Lolo Jones is on it, and she's just demolishing everybody. And Lolo Jones was like, couldn't even, she hit the ninth hurdle in the Olympics that one time. But, you know, we've seen a lot of good track and field athletes. And she's like LeBron James in this thing. And it made me think, like, imagine being Lolo Jones.

And you didn't even win a gold medal. And you're still like one of the best female athletes that Americaica's probably produced in the in the last 15 years right like how many lolo jones are out there who are just going to themselves man like one thing this could happen in that and there can't be that many right i don't i mean i don't know there's a there's a there is a bottomless well of athletic ability. I always feel like we're only ever scraping the surface. Like you've, you know, like you, the minute you encourage any, any sport gets any kind of traction among young people, you see a talent, you see a completely unexpected talent surge.

So, you know, I suspect there's a whole lot of Lolo Joneses. I wonder if e- esports will have that because I've been fascinated by esports and how the shelf lives of the great players is, everything's compressed. They peak from age 19 to 22. By the time they're 23, they're on the tail end. They're like LeBron five years from now.

All right, a couple more quick things for us to hit. Yeah. You were obsessed with this brady and uh and giselle this revelation that giselle said in passing in the cbs interview that that brady had gotten a concussion in the super bowl not just that bill bill concussions she it was she said with the. I went back and watched the tape. Concussions. She made it sound like he has them all the time. And at this point, first of all, am I terribly surprised? Not particularly. But I don't understand, first of all, why that wasn't a bigger news story. First of all, because if he had a concussion last season, it was never listed on the injury report.

Secondly, if he had a concussion last season, he didn't take a week off, did he? He played the next week, which is sort of surprising. But third, why isn't there a stronger drumbeat for him to retire? The issue, people say, well, you know, his arm is still as good as it was or his overall conditioning

it's not about the conditioning of his body below the neck the question about him retiring is all about the condition of his brain and if he's getting concussions at the age of 40 concussions and playing the next week there are so many

danger signs I do not want to see Tom Brady at 55 drooling into a cup. But that is a real possibility if he continues to do this. And the very thing that makes him such a great player is the very thing that makes it impossible for him to stop, right? He cannot be the one. He's not going to say, I'm done. The Patriots have got to sit down with him and say, this is bananas, right?

You've just had one of the greatest seasons ever. You should stop. We have a replacement for you. Go out on a high note. I'm editing all of this out of the podcast. How dare you say Tom Brady should retire? We need Tom Brady. Now, who knows how many concussions he's had

because you got to go back to when he's playing high school, right? I mean, he's gone back. You're talking 25 years of football, and he's playing quarterback, and he's been ripped a bunch of times. I've talked to people about this most people none of them nobody who plays sports or who are close to people who play sports want to go on the record in any way shape or form on this because it's so controversial it's such a hot topic right now but um the consensus seems to be that these guys will just not say anything if it's a big game.

The competitiveness just overrides everything else. So Brady got a concussion in the Super Bowl, and he goes over and does the screening thing. He knows how to kind of fake the signs. Yeah. He tells them he's fine, and he goes back in. Yeah. And he's making that choice. When you have a situation, which we've had a couple times in the past,

where the quarterback gets up and wobbles and almost falls over and looks like a drunk person, he shouldn't be allowed back in the game. But we've seen, as recently, Tate, what was that game with the quarterback last year? Was that the Miami quarterback? Tannehill? Or Matt Moore? Matt Moore. Went back in.

And there was a Cam Newton thing too. Remember where he was knocked silly? Yeah. And these guys want to stay in. They don't want to come out. And so we're entering this weird time where the athletes now have the information. So we can't say this is like pre-2010 where it's like the NFL is lying about the effects of concussion and long-term damage, all that stuff.

And they're intentionally discounting studies about it and all the stuff that they did. Now we know concussions aren't great for you. We know it's not good to have repeated concussions. We know every time you get a concussion, it takes longer to recover. We have stories all the time now, like the story Sports Illustrated just did about the 72 Dolphins and Nick Bunakati

and some of the guys on that team and the fact that it takes them 10 minutes to get dressed. All of these things are now in the public, and Brady has this information. And if he gets buzzed and he decides to play, and none of the doctors and spotters can really spot the signs, at that point, what do you do? What can we do? No, what you can do. So here, the central, um, neurological fact that drives a lot of this is,

is as follows, that your risk of CTE is a linear function of the number of hits you take to the head. Um, so there, the longer you play, the greater your risk. It's as simple as that. This is why there's such a strong push to get rid of tackle football before the age of, before your kind of teenage years, because you're adding hits and you're just increasing your long-term risk of injury. Why do that when there's no, when the stakes are zero? You know, if you're playing pop one or football. But so with Brady, when you're playing until you're 40, you every year you play, you are just demonstrably increasing your risk of of traumatic, chronic brain injury in the year in your 40s and 50s. So I think as a general rule, you should just say people shouldn't play football past the age of 35. I mean, I mean, 35. That just I just lost two Super Bowls. Yes, you did. Yes, you did. Even that is too generous. This is not a game. This is a game that can be played safely. I don't think it can ever be played safely, but it can be played reasonably safely

only for a limited number of years. And until, by the way, there may be a point where we get a better handle on why it is some players develop CT and others don't. And that may allow us to say that this player can play safely for longer. But until we have that understanding, I just think we're messing with people's lives and it's just,

it's not, um, I don't know. I, I, I, I feel complicit when I watch a Patriots game and I see Brady get hit in thinking, am I, I'm enjoying this game and this guy could well be, you know, impaired in 10 years, right? How are we going to feel when that happens? And why? Because we all were cheering him on with this decision to play past well into his late 30s. It's just, it's not right. It absolutely is not right. You asked me why the Brady thing wasn't a bigger story.

I think there's concussion story fatigue as weird as that sounds like you mentioned trump fatigue earlier i think this was a big story for a couple years and now people are used to it it the last time it felt like a really really genuinely big deal was with cam newton last september when he got clearly got concussed and they didn't do anything about it and and then it just went into the 24-7 cycle and that that was almost more about is cam newton being officiated differently that there was like a sub story to the story and it just kind of kept going and going but yeah i uh that was you know like you

did what'd you do the panel last month with our friend chris newinsky yes talking about um concussions and stuff and he is now pivoted a little bit and i want to have him on this summer because this is you know obviously such an important topic but he's now pivoted to i probably can't convince tom brady to hang it up but i can at least convince everybody that youth football should be gone. Yeah. At the very least that is attainable and we could all band together and figure out how to not let anybody play tackle football before they turn 15.

Yeah. I think he's right. I think it's attainable. Don't you? Yeah. I think that, well, that's a,

yeah, that's, that is a much, it's more attainable. Put it that way. I mean, you're going to have a lot of resistance in places like Texas to gettingede from the United States because they're already halfway there. They're on the bottom and they have their own flag

and it feels like its own country anyway. So it's very close to becoming like Canada of the South. I think if we had youth football restrictions, that would be the straw that broke the camel's back. That would be it. They'd be like, we're out. We're out. We're starting our own country. We're walking we're not gonna be the football yeah we're done

we're building our own fence to box out everybody above us and around us but uh i i god um i was gonna say you i but you're you gotta weigh in on brady here you're the Pats fan. This is your team. Should he walk away? I think he got a concussion in the Denver playoff game the year earlier before that one, too. I think he's had two years in a row, I think he's had concussions. Yeah, that we know about. Because the Denver game, he got slammed on one play

and was just not the same afterwards. It took a lot of punishment the whole game, but missed some throws that he normally makes. Even on the two-point conversion, just didn't see Gronk. I think at some point, I don't know the exact point, but I think he got hit. The Super Bowl is much easier to figure out when he got hit. He got knocked backwards and slammed his head on the uh yeah on the turf and you just knew right away um but no i i i think he should have retired to be honest i i don't think it's our right to tell people when they should go because obviously everybody's got to come to their own conclusion on that whether you're an athlete

or a writer i think musicians there probably should be after age whether you're an athlete or a writer. I think musicians, there probably should be, after age 60, you're just not allowed to play in front of anyone anymore. Yeah. But, Mick Jagger should lead the way here. Mick Jagger should meet with Tom Hazen. Let's get together.

Let's both retire. Just for the sake of our own dignity. There's this big, there's this big concert at Dodger Stadium right now. And the headliners are the Eagles, who do not have Glenn Frey anymore, and Fleetwood Mac, who don't have Christine McVie. And everybody's in their 70s, and this is a two-day concert at Dodger Stadium, apparently. But with Brady, though, I think if you're talking about long-term health, brain health,

all the things that go into it, that would have been the perfect way to go out. There are replacements right there. He leaves the team in good hands. But how do you tell somebody it's time? How does he walk away from the money? How does he walk away from the limelight, the attention, the competitiveness, all that stuff?

If Belichick had sat down with him and said, I think you're done. You can still play, but you're risking your health. I don't think Belichick had that conversation with him. I think if he did, if Kraft and Belichick sat down with him and said, for your own sake, you need to quit. That's a different story. No great player has ever walked away from their, from one of their best games ever. Nobody's ever like the way he played in that Superbowl was about as well as he's ever played and it was one of the great performances ever by a football player it's it would be just so unorthodox for somebody to say like i'm good like jordan did it kind of in 98 yeah he wasn't that wasn't the

height of his powers but it was a great last moment to walk out on and then the lockout happens and he caught his finger and the bulls were breaking up and he had this and he couldn't walk away he came back ali came back all these guys come back they they almost have to know that they suck before or that not that they suck but that they they're just not at the same level and then that's when they pack it in they almost have to get knocked out so to speak as a boxing thing but i just feel like brady's got to get knocked out not not figuratively like that the with a concussion but he's got to it's a c he's got to suck in a playoff game yeah yeah there has he has to have

his his peyton manning last season peyton manning's last season kind of season almost because i think peyton manning would have played forever he wanted to come back he's trying to remember he's trying to go with the rams and uh a couple other teams he didn't want to leave just insanity um all right let's talk about why people and why they love golf not without stepping on uh your new podcast too much well i was the my podcast is it turned it starts out with that but it um ultimately what I was interested in is resolving this puzzle of when I come to LA and I drive through LA and I see all of these massive, gorgeous, private golf courses and I can never figure out how they exist. How do you have 300 acres in Beverly Hills as a private golf course? Aren't the taxes on that unbelievable? So that was what prompted the podcast. But it led to a kind of broader thing about how golf is a crazy

game. It's insanity. It's a game that you need at least 200 acres and you can't have more than like 70 people playing at any one time. And you have to spend millions of dollars keeping it totally pristine. And it's a, it's a sport you would have dreamt up in medieval times when you had like slaves who could work the course, right? It just doesn't make any sense. And the only reason golf continues to exist in its private form is it's just massively subsidized by all of us. I only talked about one subsidy on my podcast. There's all kinds. I won't even go into it. It's insanely complicated. But the tax games that are available to golf course developers are so outrageous that we are all basically subsidizing these things.

I'm like, you know, I'm a runner. Runners always have this incredible love-hate relationship with golf because we see a golf course and we think, that looks like a great thing to run on. And I'm like, the very least they should do is, is open these courses up for, for people to run and walk and play Frisbee on them like four days a week. That's the, that's interesting. That's what that was also in my podcast.

That was my solution for the LA problem. And that is the problem with Brentwood country club or LA country club or whatever. Isn't just that they are massively subsidized by the taxpayers of Los Angeles. LA problem. And that is the problem with Brentwood Country Club or LA Country Club or whatever isn't just that they're massively subsidized by the taxpayers of Los Angeles. It's that they have a barbed wire fence around it. Why? It's a park. If you want to take a subsidy from the public, you should let the public take a walk in your park, play golf during the day and weekends and evenings are for the tax paying public. That strikes me as a very good, as a nice compromise, right? It's amazing to me, though, that people in LA, a place with no parks, people put up with this. Or I was in,

I was similar, I was in Atlanta. And I was, it was a big park in Atlanta, and there's a big park in Atlanta that's got a huge golf course and then a tiny little park for everyone else attached to it. And I was like, why do people put up with this? There are hundreds of people in this little cramped space trying to get some exercise. And then there's this massive, gorgeous golf course with like 25 people on it. That's five times the size. It's just insanity why the golf's got a gun to the head of the american public i don't know why we put up with it and it's even crazier if like if you live here and the lack of space for anything yeah so you know my daughter plays soccer and she's been on this team for a long time. And the coach, we were on this club and, you know, the boys clubs, the boys teams always

get the preferential treatment, but there's no fields, right? So if there's fields, if you have a field, if you have access to a field, the boys always get the better, you know, the better times, the better days, all that stuff. So we ended up, we started our own club. That's like a girls only club and we got access to a field and that was great but it was it was so complicated and the the thing that all of us were staggered by was that there there was just no place for any for kids to run around yeah and then you look at it and as you said there's like, what, 15 golf courses here? Yeah. But we have maybe, I don't know, 10 places that a tax subsidy from the taxpayers of Los Angeles

that's probably worth $50 million a year. That's outrageous. So do you think rich people, because rich people like playing golf, that's what those are the people pushing this through and taking care of the golf courses? That's what the podcast is all about. I tell the story of how it happened,

that rich people hijacked the system in Los Angeles. But it's not just Los Angeles. It's like, but totally right. It's everywhere. It's everywhere. And you think about it, you have, you know, exercise for young people is, if you had to make a list of things that would make this country better, that's got to be in the top 10 it's a crucially important i would say top three tops right and you have a system you have to drive how far do you how long i mean you have to drive halfway across town to get to the half the games that your daughter plays it's ridiculous it's like well you so you also have so when when here they have this place called pan pacific park yeah which is right in the middle it's near the Grove. It's in the heart of LA, Hollywood.

It's this big park. It's this big gray park. And somehow that park houses all of these different little league baseball games ranging from age five all the way through age 12. All these soccer games. You go there on a Saturday and there's 15 soccer games going on at once everybody's jammed on these fields next to each other almost looks like a bowling alley yeah and it's because there are no parks anywhere yeah and we all the parents here know where all the parks are there's only a

couple of them but yeah it's crazy and meanwhile as you said there's a golf course that's you drive by it uh and it's 200 pretty much completely empty 250 acres in the and there's eight there's i think eight private golf courses in or nine private golf courses in la county it's just unbelievable anyway that's all on all and there's more on revisions history revisions history you did it you did season two i just forgave you for not doing it for the ringer but you just had you had a better friendship with with jacob i just said can trumpet just for better friends with them the uh we never talked about um it's a big tent we never talked about uh bill maher oh yes you want to do that quickly and then we'll then we'll leave yes all right um Your thoughts on the Bill Maher N-word controversy, because I was equally as fascinated with it as you were.

I am. And I'm sort of I am sick of N-word controversies. It's if you want to talk about what the racial problem in this country is, the racial problem in this country has to do with structural inequality and ways in which the system is rigged against people of color. That's the problem. It's about power. Right. The problem is not that liberals in West L.A. occasionally misuse the N-word. Like, no one thinks that Bill Maher is some crazy racist. I don't particularly like Bill Maher, but, you know, the last thing he is is a racist. So he used that word inappropriately. Like, get over it.

That is not what the there are a hundred more serious problems to do with race in this country. And when we when we make this mistake of going nuts over these little slips of the tongue, what we've done is we have trivialized the entire race conversation. We've made it all the more difficult to talk about the stuff that really matters. I'll tell you what matters, is black teenage kids getting shot by cops.

That strikes me as something we should get outraged about. You know, some guy who lives in Brentwood, you know, who says the word, the N-word inadvertently. I'm sorry, you know, as someone who is part black, I wasn't personally injured by that. I have recovered from the Bill Maher N-word, right? And so have other black people in this country. Like, it's just so, the conversations we have about race are so surreal and so completely beside the point anyway that's my yeah yeah i mean

the one good thing came out of it i thought i thought ice cube in a very short amount of time described why that word shouldn't be used in the best way I'd ever heard it. And I have it here. I'm going to just read it quickly. He said, he's basically like, white people aren't allowed to use that word

in your services thesis. And then he was like, it's a word that has been used against us. It's like a knife. You can use it as a weapon or you can use it as a tool. It's when you use it as a weapon against us by white people and we're not going to let that happen again because it's not cool that's our word and you can't have it back yeah i was like there you go no that's that's succinctly described why that word should not be used in passing by somebody on their HBO show who's white.

Yeah, totally agree. But at the same time, I agree with every point you said, though. The amount of time and energy spent for four days trying to figure out, well, what do we do? It's like, yeah, it's a conversation that is the appetizer for what the actual conversation yeah yeah the lengths we will go in this country to distract ourselves from confronting real issues around race never cease to amaze me that's the to me the lesson of that whole little tempest in a

teapot well i i think it's a conversation that's going to keep happening yeah and i don't know where it goes i don't know how it plays out but i think with everything that's going on politically in this country it's it's uh anyway now i'm bummed out i was i was in a great mood this whole podcast now now i'm now i feel empty you do go back to your gladwell yes are you are you working on another book, by the way? What's going on with you? I have just started a new book, which I will do until I have to do season three of my podcast. But yeah, I'm back in book mode for a couple months.

Wow. You reactivated it. I have reactivated it. You're back in the basement with Alfred the butler. You should put it on your bat seat, write another book. Unbelievable. I'm trying to be a two-sport star. Podcasts and books.

That's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to be Bo Jackson here. Malcolm Godwell, as always, a pleasure. Hopefully by the time people listen to this, the Porzingis will be in the Celtics, and I'll be taping another podcast. Thank you. Okay, Bill.

Bye-bye. All right, that's it for the show. Thanks so much to Hotel Tonight. That's the app that helps you find amazing hotel deals at the last minute up to seven days in advance, perfect for a spontaneous getaway or indulging in a little staycation. Booking on Hotel Tonight gives you the freedom and flexibility to play things by ear while knowing you'll score a great price

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Read all of our stuff there. Check out the NBA Draft Guide. And don't forget I'm on Cousin Sal's Against All Odds podcast to talk about NBA draft props. One of my favorites. It'll be good. Cousin Sal, subscribe to that one now. And we will be back on Wednesday with the third BS podcast of the week. We're going to do four this week.

NBA. Gotta love it. On the wayside I'm a person Never lost it I don't have To ever forget