The Bill Simmons Podcast
A Holiday Check-in on Anything and Everything With Chuck Klosterman
Wed, 27 Nov 2024
The Ringer's Bill Simmons is joined by Chuck Klosterman to discuss a myriad of topics, including the current state of college sports (3:45), lessons learned (or not) from the 2024 election (30:50), modern NBA superstardom, how the public's relationship with celebrity has evolved, the next generation of documentaries, thoughts from the Tyson-Paul fight (59:56), HBO's ‘The Sopranos,’ and more (2:08:56). Host: Bill Simmons Guest: Chuck Klosterman Producer: Kyle Crichton The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit www.rg-help.com to learn more about the resources and helplines available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the highlights of the current state of college sports?
Coming up, the longest podcast Chuck Close and I have ever done.
And it's next. Kennt ihr auch diesen einen Freund, der morgens einfach so ruckzuck aus dem Bett und danach aus dem Grinsen gar nicht mehr rauskommt? Der sogar noch vor dem ersten Kaffee unverschämt gut gelaunt ist und mit der Morgensonne um die Wette strahlt? Furchtbar. Ekelhaft.
Wie kann man nur so... Ausgeruht sein? Ganz einfach. Trainiere deinen Schlaf und werde auch du zum Morgenmenschen. Mit der Galaxy Watch 7 oder dem Galaxy Ring und der Samsung Health App.
We're also brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network. Put up a new Rewatchables on Monday night. We did Running Scared with Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines. One of the first great buddy cop movies. Also the end of Yacht Rock. Also a super fun movie to discuss. It was me and Chris Ryan. You can check that out on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts, plus the Ringer Movies YouTube channel.
We will have that as well. Speaking of YouTube channels, so the Bill Simmons YouTube channel, which I hope you have subscribed to. Do it for the holidays for me. We put all videos and clips from this podcast on that channel. I'm not going to do another podcast this week. I'm just warning you now. But I still want to do Million Dollar Picks. I think. I haven't dove into the slate yet.
Die, die, yeah, I used that correctly, great. I used to be a writer. So, what I'm gonna do is if I have million dollar picks this week, I'm going to do it on my YouTube channel. So, I haven't decided on Thanksgiving, I don't really like the Thanksgiving slate, but if I do anything with the Thanksgiving slate, it's going to be on the YouTube channel on Wednesday.
I'll put up a video there on the Bill Simmons YouTube channel. Am Freitag habe ich ein paar Millionen-Dollar-Picke, glaube ich, für die Woche 13, um es weiter zu machen. Ich habe es letztes Jahr noch nicht beendet. Ich bin immer noch stolz auf die Cardinals. Aber das ist der Plan für Millionen-Dollar-Picke, weil es diese Woche keine weiteren Podcasts gibt. Oh, und übrigens,
Wenn ihr auf die NFL betten wollt, schaut euch die Ringer-Spezials auf der NFL-Page von FanDuel Sportsbook an, weil wir alle unsere Lieblingsbetten auf das haben. Und ihr solltet auch die Ringer-Sunday-Pregame-Show auf Sonntag sehen, die auf YouTube und FanDuel TV ist, mit Sal und JJ und Raheem und House. Wir haben also viele Sachen besprochen. Der YouTube-Kanal von Bill Simmons.
Ich werde dort Millionen-Dollar-Picke haben. Vielleicht sogar zwei von ihnen. Eine letzte Sache. Wir wissen, dass Weihnachten am Dienstag ist. Wir wissen, dass wir drei Fußballspiele haben. Wir wissen, dass wir ein bisschen Familienzeit haben. Ein bisschen Essen. Ein paar Trinken. Ihr wisst, wie es gehen wird. Was ihr nicht erwartet hättet. Ihr wisst, dass Black Friday am Dienstag war.
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Chapter 2: What insights can we gain from the 2024 election?
But that's another reason why they did this, right? Because they wanted to protect against shit like that.
But now it's like, I think there is a sense maybe it's going to be 4 SCC Teams, 4 Big Ten Teams, Notre Dame, probably Boise State, and then one each from the ACC and the Big 12. Maybe the ACC will have two teams. Maybe it'll be like SMU and Clemson and Miami. Then it would have to be probably three SCC teams then. Which is, I don't know, maybe that was the goal all along.
Basically to have it mostly be the Big Ten and the SCC. Yeah, those are the two best conferences. But it, I... I'm really interested in this, but it does feel like a different experience watching these games. The games are still good. The games themselves, when it's happening, feels exactly the way it always did. But I know in my mind, it's not how it always was.
Like, you know, now it looks like kind of in perpetuity now. Notre Dame is always just going to have I can't even imagine what kind of commitment this is.
akademisch, Wink, Wink, aber auch einfach, sie müssen starten, sie haben Frühling-Praktik, richtig? Dann starten sie die aktuelle Praktik für die Saison, ich glaube, wie Ende Juni, irgendwo da, wie Anfang Juli. Und dann gehen sie den ganzen Weg durch für die nächste 6, 6 1⁄2 Monate. Meine Tochter spielt DIV 3. Sie spielt Fußball. Sie kommt im Mitte August. Die Saison geht.
Ob man die Playoffs macht oder nicht. Es endet im ersten Wochenende November. Und auch für das ist es schön, dass die Saison vorbei ist. Ich kann mich endlich auf die Schule konzentrieren. Wir können wieder rausgehen. Das war ein 2 1⁄2-Monats-Gewinn. Diese Fußballspieler gehen potenziell durch You know, at least January, but there's more even playoff games.
I just, to me, it almost feels like it should just be a pro sport anyway. I don't know how that's a college experience.
Yeah, I mean, here's one thing I don't know. Like, is there anybody who's on, say, Texas' roster or Ohio State's roster, anyone on the roster who's not getting paid? Like, are walk-ons even making money in some way? I don't know.
So you're talking about the backup quarterback can get paid and not even play?
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Chapter 3: How has modern NBA superstardom evolved?
That seemed like a completely reasonable thing. It seems very weird to have someone pay tuition to go to an institution, but you can't see the goddamn football team play unless... That makes no sense. And it seems like if you graduate from there and you've paid to go to college there, one of the benefits is for the rest of your life, you should be able to go to these games extremely cheaply.
And I think that not... Like now a university would hear this and they would be like, that's insane. Because like they would just think about the amount of revenue that they would lose. But think of the revenue over time. If you were essentially guaranteed that this will always be an essential thing in people's lives. Like, I think it would be good for society.
I think it'd be good for sports society. And I think it would be good for the schools over time.
You know, you know, what's interesting. We've had 50 years of movies. Die haben darüber gesprochen, wie dumm das ist. Was ist der Punkt von Studentenathleten? Warum können wir nicht um die Systeme umgehen? Denk an das One-on-One mit Henry Steele, mit dem Robbie Benson-Film.
Aber der große, der schnelle Break, als Gabe Kaplan... Einer meiner Lieblingssportfilme, das ist der politisch nicht korrekteste Sportfilm, wahrscheinlich von allen Zeiten. Es ist nicht alt genug. Aber Gabe Kaplan bekommt diesen Job und... Vegas und er ist einfach so, ich werde einfach das System aufbauen.
Ich werde ein paar Leute holen, die in der Schule nichts zu tun haben und wir werden einfach versuchen, die UNLV-Schule zu gewinnen, die er gewinnen muss. Das ist in den 70ern, als wir darüber nachgedacht haben, wie können wir das System aufbauen? Und es geht noch weiter und weiter. Jetzt frage ich mich, wie du es gesagt hast, wo es letztendlich geht.
Wie du gesagt hast, in fünf Jahren werden diese Konferenzen zusammengebunden werden. Es fühlt sich einfach so an, als wäre es eine 32-Team-Liga. None of those schools will be considered Div 1 NCA anymore. They just won't even be in the NCA. And the new Div 1 will be all the schools that are a little more academically serious, maybe, combined with a whole hodgepodge of other schools.
They'll have conferences. And then Div 2 will be Div 2 and Div 3 will be Div 3. And that's just how it'll be.
I don't know if the academic seriousness will be part of it. I think it will be like, it will be 32 or say 40 teams and it will just be the 40 teams who can get into it and they're all going to want it. Like they're all like, you know, it's like it does. It's not going to. I think that that the value of this is going to be so incredible.
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Chapter 4: What is the public's changing relationship with celebrity?
Obwohl es überall auf dem Land wäre, würde alles anders sein. Ich denke, dass sie wahrscheinlich mehr daran interessiert waren, die statische Bedrohung ihres Lebens zu reduzieren. Und jetzt ist es das Gegenteil, wo es so ist, dass die schwierigste Sache in meinem Leben ist, I'm afraid of life or whatever. Not that all kids are afraid of life. I'm not saying that.
But I do think that the amount that kids feel anxiety and are told they need to recognize that feeling makes going to college super complicated. I just I I I would guess you were more ready to go to college than your daughter is, despite the fact that you have all this relationship with her ongoing, you know, through technology.
I'm just guessing. There's been really good pieces written about this the last few years about why teenagers and kids have more anxiety than they used to. And one of the theories is that they're more self-aware über die Angst, als wenn wir... Im Allgemeinen sind Kinder mehr selbstbewusst, weil sie mehr lesen, mehr sehen.
Sie wissen über Therapie, sie wissen über all diese verschiedenen Dinge, die wir einfach nicht mehr haben. Unsere Generation war wie, ja, du bist auf deiner eigenen Seite, versuch es, Mann. Oh, es geht runter. Vielleicht solltest du mit deinem Freund darüber sprechen. Was werden wir tun?
Well, I mean, therapeutic language too has just moved into everyday language now. Like people using terms like triggering and all these things or like all this language is just sort of like My kids understood that at an age way before they understood things that I thought they should be knowing, you know, that they had just a real sort of like a like sophisticated understanding of these things.
And it probably like it. There's no question that kids are in a better position to deal with emotional and mental problems now. It's just that they seem to have many more emotional and mental problems. So it's like good that they can deal with them because they're just there all the time, you know.
Oder wir hatten, oder wie unsere Generationen und die vorherigen hatten, viel mehr Probleme, als wir realisierten, weil wir dumm und glücklich waren. Wir wussten nicht, was los war. Das hätte wirklich der Fall gewesen.
Aber wie viele Probleme in der Leben, ob du jung bist oder alt bist, sind tatsächlich temporär und nicht so bedeutend und werden nur auf ihrer eigenen Seite verschwinden. You say like you didn't know you had these problems. You still don't fucking know you had them, right? Because they just happened. They just moved on.
It's like, you know, it's like it's really, I think, tricky to tell someone going through this complicated phase in their life that they need to be aware of all the complications. I mean, it's like you have to look for them almost. And it's good in some ways. It is like this is maybe kind of moving off topic or whatever. But, you know, I had a
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Chapter 5: What are the key takeaways from the Tyson-Paul fight?
Now it kind of looks like maybe the opposite of this was the case, that people were saying they were going to vote for Harris because they didn't want to be maybe judged or have an issue with their friends who they thought were like it was actually they were saying the opposite of what this supposed sort of trend, you know, because hours before the election, you could go on social media and there were people saying things like, what if I told you this isn't going to be close at all?
thinking that it was going to be a blowout in the other direction. So no one really had any sense of these things.
I mean, I think that in this situation, it kind of felt as though... No, but wait, there's one thing on the Rogan point that I think people didn't want to see as it was happening, which was that there was young men basically 18 to 35 that were shifting a certain direction in all these different ways. And the Rogan thing was symbolic to it. It just felt like that was the demographic
den ich denke, dass die Demokraten wahrscheinlich darauf zählen, dass er nicht da war, wie sie dachten. Und es waren einfach viele Leute bereit für eine Veränderung. Ich dachte mir, das ist das Gegenteil von dem, was passiert ist, als wir beide 1992 in der Schule waren, richtig? Und es fühlte sich an, als gäbe es diesen republikanischen Strengehold auf dem Land.
Es waren zwölf Jahre lang ein republikanischer Präsident. Und Clinton hat sich irgendwie gezeigt, You know, a year before the election, he was became the hot young candidate and people kind of got swept up in it. And just in people our age are around in the college campuses. All of a sudden something shifted and you could say this was legitimate or maybe this is what we wanted to think.
But all of a sudden, like Bush, who was heading into his second term, the older Bush. Er fühlte sich wie ein altes Gebäude, das die Leute nicht mehr teilnehmen wollten. Und Clinton, über den er nichts wusste, war diese Stimme der Hoffnung. Und es war wie, oh, dieser Kerl. Und es wurde einfach ein Grundstück. And it felt to me that 2024 was a little like that.
In a weird way, it was a little like 2008 too, where it was just people rejecting whatever the infrastructure was. And that was the thing I don't think the Democrats really fully came to grips with, that they had become this infrastructure that a lot of people, especially young people, just didn't want to buy into anymore.
You know, 1992 is a particularly strange case, though, because, okay, so Bush is popular prior to the runner of the election and actually becomes sort of more popular again after he loses it. It's just this window of time. He became extraordinarily unpopular. The third-party candidate of, you know, of Perot getting like 19% of the vote that way.
Cause you know, it's not like, it's not like Clinton got a majority that time. Cause there were three candidates. I mean, that, that was a kind of a strange one. I mean, this is a strange one too, you know, but like, even the way we're talking about this, you said like, you know, these young men who are sort of moving in a different direction.
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Chapter 6: How has 'The Sopranos' influenced modern storytelling?
I mean, they're sort of, you know, they know 55% of the electorate is women. You know, 60% of people in college now are women. So if you're a college-age student and you're a guy in a class and like you see someone wearing a T-shirt that says the future is female, maybe you conclude, I guess it is. Seems that way to me too.
And they maybe just did not, they were like, we're just going to sort of check out in a sense. Not pay attention, but just we're not involved with the way culture is changing. And everything else in culture changed, sort of leaving them behind, maybe to some degree. And they were kind of like, well, I'll vote for Trump because he doesn't care either or whatever, however they thought.
I don't want to say, I don't, I don't, here again, I feel very reluctant to even give this opinion because I feel less confident about any of these things now. I really have a sense that what is really happening in people's lives is the chasm between that and the way American life is projected through mass media now is so vast that the projection is actually giving us confusion over the realities.
You know what I'm saying? Kind of it's like it's like so like what what we think the average American is like or what we think life is like or what we think people are thinking or how we think they feel about relationships or how they all of these things are no longer sort of looking at the reality and saying, well, OK, this is what's going on. Yeah, but you know what it's like?
Honestly, it's like what happens after a sports season abruptly ends. And like, let's say the Chiefs lose in Round 2 this year, right? And people are like, ah, the Chiefs, Mahomes, he's gonna win it. It's just that you gotta trust the infrastructure. Mahomes and Reid, they'll figure it out. And then let's say they lose by 20 in Round 2 and they can't score. And then the next day, what happens?
We're like, oh... Sie, die Chiefs, sie haben alt geworden, sie haben einen Reboot, sie sind nicht genug explosiv. Sie müssen wirklich, sie müssen Mahomes mehr Waffen geben. Und dann machen wir das ganze nächste zwei, drei Tage. Es wäre wie die Demokraten am Tag danach. Ich dachte, das war ein bisschen so. Es gab all diese Sachen. Das war nur da, dass jeder sehen konnte.
Und dann, als sie verloren haben, ist es so, ah, die Demokraten müssen herausfinden, wie sie sich selbst wiederentwickeln. Sie haben niemanden, sie haben niemanden, der inspiriert. Sie haben keine Botschaft, die das Land inspiriert. Sie haben keine Politiker, die Leute inspirieren.
Sie haben keine Führung, auch die Art und Weise, wie sie die Biden-Sache in den letzten zwei Jahren behandelt haben, wo er klar alt war. Und sie haben es nur geblieben. Sie haben es geblieben. Es ist so, wir brauchen ihn, wir brauchen ihn. Wir können Trump wieder mit ihm gewinnen. Vergesst einfach all diese anderen Zeichen. Auch Jon Stewart, als er zurückkam,
Whatever he did that first day was shown. He did that thing about how old Biden was. A bunch of people got mad at him about it. The same thing happened with Charlemagne a couple months ago. It was this elephant in the room that everybody was just like, don't look, don't look, don't look. Now you see him the last couple months and it's like, how did anyone not stop this? Where were people?
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Chapter 7: What are the trends in the next generation of documentaries?
In retrospect, it seems crazy, but everybody in the moment thought, oh yeah, this will work, this will work, this will work.
Well, it's hard to like who's in a position to tell the president to step down. That's that's one of the problems. It's like even if there's a bunch of people who think two years in, it's like it would be better to transition to something else. No one's in the he's the president. Right. So no one can really tell him.
It would be his wife and his son. And obviously they wanted to keep him as president. But it's that's the kind of thing where your family steps in and goes, hey, Dad. Start laying the legacy now to see who replaces you. Do one year, you can be one term, you can be a hero. But he's just trying to keep his job like everybody else.
Ist das realistisch, um jemanden zu vorstellen? Wahrscheinlich nicht. Ich meine, es wäre wie, was würdest du tun, wenn dein Sohn startete zu sagen, dass du retieren musstest? Würdest du sagen, ja, gute Frage. Er würde sagen, nein, ich weiß. Und er würde sagen, nein, ich weiß nicht, ich werde nicht retieren. Warum würde ich retieren? Ich bin tot. Ja, genau.
Ich habe zwei Tage ago einen tollen Gespräch gemacht. Ich hatte einen guten Podcast mit Chuck. Es scheint so zu sein, dass der kürzere Rundweg, wie ich dachte, Harris helfen würde, weil du all diese Enthusiasme hättest und es würde durchlaufen. Ich denke, dass eine der Dinge, die du erwähnt hast, ein echter Problem ist.
Und das ist der Art von Sache, die ich fühle, als wäre es mein eigener Fehler, dass ich ein bisschen überrascht war, was ist, dass der Tag nach der Wahl. Many democratic strategists are like, yeah, we shouldn't have done this thing. I don't know why we were saying that. They almost immediately admitted that they regretted this.
And what is probably true is that people sensed that lack of sincerity during the campaign. It's like, you don't really believe Ja.
Yeah, but even in the moment, like their whole strategy with Kamala was, they were basically treating her like she was a game manager quarterback in football, right? Like, just try to get us some first downs, don't say too much, let's try to protect... protect certain things with you. Like even the fact that she was doing like some carefully planned podcasts or show appearances, right?
Whereas Trump, who's insane, who would just be like, I'll do anything. I'll talk for four hours on whatever platform, I don't care. And she never found that middle ground. I still never felt like Even after those three and a half months, I never felt like I had a complete sense of everything she stood for and what her message was.
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