malvasia bianca

I can’t remember exactly what prompted me to subscribe to The Bill Simmons Podcast. I listened to a few random episodes a few years back when Ben Thompson was a guest on the podcast; those were interesting enough, but they wouldn’t have been enough to get me to add it to my podcast player. If I had to guess, maybe it might have been around the 2022 NBA playoffs, or the start of the 2022–23 season: I was surprised how much I enjoyed those playoffs, so I started following the Warriors more around then? And I paid at least a bit of attention to the 49ers during the 2022–23 season, too, especially as Brock Purdy appeared.

So I probably subscribed around then, but I didn’t listen to every episode: I’d listen to the sections that talked about the Warriors or the 49ers; maybe I’d listen to other parts of those same episodes, occasionally I’d listen to episodes where the liner notes didn’t mention one of those teams, but not very often. Over the last year or so, though, that changed: I’d listen to more and more parts of the episodes that were talking about basketball, even if the Warriors weren’t featured, and I’d even listen to more football parts.

I still don’t think of myself as much of a sports person currently: it’s not surprising if I put on a Warriors game while cooking dinner, and if the other team is a good one, I’ll sometimes even watch basketball during a time when I’m normally playing video games? But I certainly care about video games (or half a dozen other things) more than sports. You can see that in my podcast subscriptions: The Bill Simmons Podcast is the only sports podcast that I listen to at all regularly, whereas there are three weekly video game podcasts and one monthly one that I listen to most of the episodes of.

The thing is, though, I’m realizing that I actually like The Bill Simmons podcast more than any of those video game podcasts. So what’s going on there?

Simmons’ personal characteristics are a big part of that, of course. He sounds like a very likeable guy, he knows an amazing amount about basketball and a quite good amount about football. And I think he must do a good job at paying attention to the people around him and what he wants the shape of the conversation to be like, because I think the conversations on the podcast are good, it’s not just him. So maybe it’s just that he’s exceptional; there aren’t a lot of other podcasters selling their business for two hundred million dollars, after all!

But I think the domain has something to do with it, too. The thing about video game podcasts is: it’s people talking about how they feel about games. Whereas, with sports podcasts, there’s a predictive component to the discussion. So, at the start of the season, Simmons and his cohosts go through the gambling money line for how many wins each team is predicted to make, and say which teams they think will outperform those lines and which will underperform; a month into the season, they’re comparing actual performance against both the public’s and their own expectations and trying to figure out which of those differences should cause them to update their beliefs and which ones are just the fluctuations of chance; and so forth.

So sports pushes back against your beliefs in ways that, I think, helps the conversation. Or at least in ways that can help the conversation: I’m actually super allergic to a lot of forms of sports talk shows. There are a lot of shows that are full of blowhards spouting off takes, who are missing exactly the sort of push-back from reality that Simmons welcomes. I heard an interview somewhere (Stratechery, maybe?) that gave an explanation for that behavior that made a lot of sense to me: the goal of most sports talk radio isn’t to come to greater understanding, it’s to come up with statements that your listeners care about, and that half of them will agree with and half of them will disagree with. That leads to lots of people talking and arguing about your show, which is good for your show; not at all what I’m interested in, though.

This sort of pushback from reality is also why, in many ways, I have a lot more respect for the sports section of newspapers than for the politics section of newspapers. If the sports columnists say too many ridiculous things, then they’ll (hopefully) end up looking stupid; whereas the politics columnists seem to frequently be motivated by ideology or by getting people arguing about them, without enough of a corrective coming from short-term real-world results. So politics columnists end up feeling to me more like the bad forms of sports talk radio than the sports columnists do; I’m actually not particularly sure why sports columnists avoid that result as well, admittedly; maybe the sorts of sports folks who want to be tested against reality gravitate more towards newspapers? But it is harder for politics columnists to get the same test.

I dunno; just a couple of days ago I was listening to an episode of Remap Radio where Austin Walker was guest hosting, and my first reaction was “wow, I really miss listening to that guy, he has a lot of thoughtful things to say”. So maybe I’m making too much of the domain differences: maybe it really is just that Bill Simmons is exceptional, and if I ran into a video game podcaster who was as personable / good at speaking and as knowledgeable and analytical as Simmons, then I’d like that podcast just as much.