The Bill Simmons Podcast

Audiences have spoken. Project Hail Mary is an aweinspiring masterpiece.

Did you see Project Hail Mary?

It was the biggest movie of the year? No. No, I'll wait for it to come on cable. It's on Amazon right now.

I have a book that's just called rock. It's a fictional history of rock music. It's fictional, but it starts in 1967 with the premise that the velvet underground's first record is released and immediately becomes 25 times more popular than the Beatles and the stones, and it completely alters all of the culture over the next many years and then ends in 2002 where 9/11 has been blamed on the strokes.

the Michael Lewis book and the way that the film kind of elevated its status among kind of mainstream non-hardcore sports fans.

The Devil Wears Prada. Perfect movie from beginning to end for what it was trying to do.

like the book, like Among the Thugs

One thing about books, you said this earlier, cause you mentioned Among the Thugs, which I knew immediately what he meant. Cause I have it and I read it. I didn't know anything about early nineties, hooligan soccer fans in the UK, right? Neither did you when you read that book. So it was like, it brought me into this whole world that I would have known nothing about otherwise. And it's that by the way, an excellent, excellent sports book.

We already have an idea for an episode ... The Odyssey comes out in July.

In my basketball book I had the Pantheon and it was the top level where I listed the best players.

Seth Wickersham has a book that came out a few months ago called American Kings which is basically a deep dive on the quarterback position.

The coolest thing was just how much of themselves they saw in the book even in moments where I wasn't writing about them.

It's called American Kings.

We can measure everything with radar guns and analytics, but none of these can measure guts and nuts. Guts and nuts can't be measured. There's no analytics for guts and nuts, according to Clint Hurdle.

Don't take the heart out of the player. Don't take the heart out of the game. Let it be. Clint Hurdle.

Multitasking makes me multi-mediocre. That's another Clint Hurdle.

They never care how much you know until they know how much you care. Clint Hurdle.

And then you decided, I'm going to write an entire book about my complicated relationship with Football. Yes. That's exactly what has happened, Bill. I've been thinking about this stuff for 40 years now, consciously for about 20 years, and I finally did it. There have been a bunch of books where I've talked about sports, but this is the first time I was like, okay, this is what it's about. This is the book.

The basic premise of the book is you think Football is not going to exist in the way that it does now in 50 years; it probably won't completely disappear but will radically recede and will not be the center of the world as it is now.

One of the chapters in the book is about goats in Football - I argued that the true "goat" should be someone who created the ground, like Jim Thorpe, rather than the more recent, recencybiased choices.

The book is called Football. When does it come out? It comes out. I guess today's the 12th, the 19th... If you order it on Amazon it'll probably arrive before then because the books are already done.

It comes out next week. I like the title. I really enjoyed the book. Obviously I enjoy everything you do, but I really had a good time reading it.

I read this book called Masters of the Game. Okay. By Sam Smith and Phil Jackson.

They go through 75 players and it's basically a back and forth. Almost like how we did that Dwight Howard thing. It's a back and forth of their conversation with each player, but each one kind of can basically zag into this different conversation.

It's one of the strangest books I've ever read. I don't understand if they had a proofreader or an editor or anything. There's certain guys where they don't even talk about the guy. And at the same time, I got like 20 things out of it, reading it.

I'm about two thirds of the way through the new Larry Bird book Heartland.

I mean, it's just, it's all so far. It's all his childhood growing up and his dad and his family situation. I did not know as much about how long he was actually at IU before he left and what the reasons were. They talk about the bars people would go to, the atmosphere around those early Indiana state games, and a lot of good stuff in there.

By the way, on Apple books, this book is $2. So you could just read it, download it and zoom through it on your iPad and have a really good time.

When I got Bill James' Historical Baseball Abstract, Volume 2 as a bar mitzvah present, it taught me comparative analysis, really, in a new way.

the Ewing Theory? I think the Ewing Theory is a concept that explains how a team can fall apart after losing a franchise player, and we were using it to describe the Spurs and OKC dynamics.

I remembered doing this at the time, I... the book Scorecasting when we were at Atlanta really good.

there's a book that I had read many years prior to this called the world's most dangerous places. It's written by a guy named Robert Pelton Young. It's essentially a travel guide for war correspondents about every single place where there's a war going on in the world, and it's at times very cynical, at times laughoutloud funny, and at times very thoughtful.

The book is called. I did not die in prison. It is out. It's out on hardcover right now, June 23rd.

so a couple of weeks ago, um, I read this book. It's a book called Stoner. You're familiar with this novel. No, my whole life, people have told me to read this book and I assumed it was because the guy must be stoned all the time. That's not what it is. It's just about the story of this guy. It starts in like, you know, early 1900s and kind of goes through his life and it's a really quiet novel.

now I'm reading a book called Butcher's Crossing by the same author, similar kind of tone in some ways, but the way it reminded me of how you're reading these books, you know, everything about the way that guy's hair sits on his face, the way he walks into a room, all of these things, and it is, it's really deliberate.

I was completely baffled when this was initially thrown at me. I have a book that's just called tall tales by Terry Pluto. It's a really good sports book.