YouSaid · the spoken record

Bill Simmons

lines on the record: 128
first: 2023-02-13
most recent: 2023-02-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, just put it on the plaque. If I'm taking somebody to a museum, I want them to learn as much about the history of a sport as they could possibly learn and to not have Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens in there is insane. And there should just be a room where it's like, hey, then we had these guys.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think to just be like, oh, you were lucky. Like, what does that mean? I worked my ass off for every single thing that happened. I don't understand how luck factors into that. For the most part, I think when people talk about luck, it almost feels like it's kind of like a loser attitude where it's like, oh, that was lucky. It's like, I don't feel like there's a lot of luck with this stuff. Opportunity can be luck, but you still have to nail the opportunity and you still have to put real thought into it and you still have to give a shit. And the thing I've learned over everything is the people that give a shit are the ones that succeed.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's a third factor that's the most important. I always try to challenge myself really starting in 2006 when 2006 started, I was like, I don't want to leave 2006 in the exact same position I was in in 2005. And I think I've stuck to that really for 16 years now where every single year I wanted to look back at the end of the year and be like, oh, this is the year this happened. Especially with content and creativity, if you're just running it back every year, that's not sustainable. And eventually people are going to pass you and you're going to be on the outside looking in. So I think once I realized that, that helped me the most. I think some of it was hard work and talent. And then the luck piece.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't know. I go back and forth on that because At one time, I thought this would be it. And then how long am I going to work this hard, you know? And then just managing, we have 150 people, you know, like we had 50 at Grantlin. I think the thing I'm battling with is in my head I had always thought it was over after two years from now, but I still love what I'm doing and I still actually feel like I'm getting better at the podcast still. And, like, why would I leave? Question for me is always going to be can I win where I'm at? And then also did we take this as far as it can go?”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I have two years left. And I am committed because Want Spotify to win the same way I wanted ESPN to win one spot at a time. There's a lot of the same Limitations and issues in a different way. I think ESPN was. Way more political and way more sinister. Spotify is not sinister, but it's also a big company that has a lot of opposing objectives. And I think. See how it goes for the next two years with them, but I still feel like they're the dominant music platform and they have a huge audience.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you made the key point. It evolved this way for the right reasons, right? But at the same time, there's been some collateral damage with it, where I think office culture is much different, especially post-pandemic with not having the same kind of office culture for the stuff that at least we like to do is pretty damaging, you know, because Creatively, we had podcasts that developed just from the Ringer office those first couple years where like I remember hearing this guy Danny Hyphet's just arguing about sports with somebody else Football, he was like an intern at that point. But I was like, this guy's good I wonder what he'd be like on a podcast. And you're just going to lose all those moments The spitbawing is what gets hurt. You can't do it on Zoom. You can't.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the same time, every generation has its challenges, right? And I think to me, Twitter causes a lot of the stuff because people can just run to Twitter I always wonder if we just didn't have Twitter, would some of this stuff be easier? But who knows?”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it's just, I think. You see over and over again where some disgruntled employee leave a company and then they light it on fire basically. I think it has made it a little more formal than it used to be. Definitely talk to less people than I used to.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the climate's a little bit different now. I think it's much harder to manage in the last four years than it probably was in the 10 years before.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My goal the whole time was always like if I could It would suck to get hit by a bus, by the way. So even like when we talk to Spotify, so much of the conversations were about, what about you? Well, what if you leave? We just felt like we were in the middle and we were in control of our own destiny, but ultimately what was that destiny going to be? We never hired a banker. I didn't necessarily want to sell, but I was really intrigued by Spotify. And I was like, these guys are going to be the future of audio if they already aren't now. And maybe this is a place that could supercharge us. But we didn't, we never shopped around. People didn't know we were for sale. Was like Spotify, or we're not doing anything.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And started to feel like we were like a mid major in the NCA tournament. We could be really successful. We could go 27 and 5 and win our league, but then we would go to the tournament and we would get our asses kicked by the big boys. And I thought the business that we had the first three years was still too dependent on me.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I love not having a bus. I didn't want to be in another big company. And then they bought Gimlet and they bought Gimlet for like $200 million. And we were like, wow, Gimlet makes like $10 million a year. They just got $200 million. Like, what the hell? Like, we were way more profitable than them. So that got our wheels turning a little bit, but I still didn't want to sell and started it, we lost out on a couple people.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it started. They had approached us like maybe the start of 2019, something like that, or late 2018, because we were doing a couple of podcasts with them. And I didn't realize they were sizing us up to possibly buy us because I'm stupid, but they came back with us four times. And one of the times they came, this lady named Sheila came, who I thought was just part of the Spotify creative team or whatever. God forbid, I was smart enough to Google her. And it was their acquisitions lady. And all I had to do, if we had just Googled her, we would have been like, oh shit, they might be trying to buy us. We were pretty naive about that. But I didn't want to be bought. I didn't want to be owned by anybody. I didn't want to work for anybody. I loved what we were doing.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe I'm a psycho, but I like all that stuff Think the thing I learned at Grantlin is the delegation part. And you have to trust your inner circle and believe in your inner circle completely. At Grantline, I didn't totally have the inner circle. The ringer, we did. You know, ultimately, I think the hardest thing for me was at ESPN, I was the boss, but I wasn't, right? ESPN was the boss. So I was, it felt like I was way more one of the gang, even though I wasn't. At the ringer, I was the boss. I was the one that ultimately was deciding all the money stuff. And that dynamic gets a little bit different. And it kind of makes you lean toward trusting less people. But I still feel like I think we had a lot of good relationships with our talent. But yeah, I think it's fucking hard.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I actually disagree. I like the business side. I think the surprising thing for me with the ringer was how much I like the business stuff. And part of it was because when we got to the ringer, my goal, you know, I think you need stuff that drives you. But I was really like, I want to come back to haunt ESPN with this. I want to build this into a business that will make them”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They just go out, they work with different brands, and it's like, hey, Bill's podcast has three mid roles. They go find it. They take a cut of. The price, and that's it”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so that was one of the big decisions Do we build our own website? Just medium was basically the website host. So we were there for a year, but we knew we had to get off, and then Jim Bank off, he ran Vox and he really wanted us to do the Ring of Vox. So this was kind of a half-ass way of doing that, where we got to kind of be on Vox. They got to participate in the profit stuff.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I knew that I could pay for stuff with the podcast. And I had, you know, I had money from the HBO deal. I had made a lot of money at ESPN. And I was just like, I'm betting on myself. And then the website we felt like we could make money on, too, maybe not as much as you would have made in 2009, but at least enough to be. Tiny bit profitable.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so was HBO put in 5 million bucks as part of, they didn't want me to do the ringer. Wanted me to the TV show, and that's it. And I was like, You don't understand. I'm doing the ringer and I have to do the ringer. And it almost stalled the deal. So their perspective was well, if you're going to do this, we want to have like a small piece of it. And we evaluated it at, I don't know, some bogus number, I think it was 50 million or 100 million. And they put in 5 million and they got 10% of it.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Bill Gurley, who's a great guy, he said something to us at one point. He was like, when we invest, we expect to make like 10 times what we put in, right? And do you think the ringer can be ESPN? And all of us kind of looked at each other, and then we talked about it after, and we were like, We're not sure we want to be ESPN. We want to be a place that finds talent and pushes talent up a level, and we want to do great sports content and great culture content. But do we want to be like Yahoo? Like, no.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it wasn't expensive. And then the big thing for me is did we want VC money or not? And they were just these extra people you had to have in your life. And they had money and they had expertise, but they also had expectations. And for us, like we met with Benchmark, who I thought was really smart.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And on the way through, we developed a lot of stars and a lot of people that we elevated. So I'm really proud of that part.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were too established. Yeah. So we, and we found a lot of talent, like even like we had the Podse of America guys, that podcast started with us in 2016.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not all of it, but a lot of it because we were a couple years ahead of people on the podcast front. And by the time the competitors came”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we just tried to figure out what we want to do, how are we going to be different from Grantlin? Everyone's going to pair this to Grantlin. How is it going to be different? Do we want to get? What talent do we like? How do we do podcasts? We did the first five months from my house. It was my podcast and it was the watch with Chris and Andy. And they would just come over. They would just get into my house. They knew the code. They would go in the back. They would record. Everyone was over all the time in my house. My kids just got used to it. My dogs got used to it. And I think quickly we realized the podcast piece of it was the meal ticket just because.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I had four people and it was four people that I worked great with at Grantland. And that was the big thing I learned at Grantland was like the team part of it is so important. So with the Ringer, we had four people that I felt really good about. Sean was our number two at Grantland and he was ready to run Grantland by like year three. And just editorially, he got it. So that was fantasy. Chris Ryan was like a really good ideas guy for sports and culture, and we're great with all of us. Mallory was like the best young editor we had. It just like indefatigable work ethic. And then Julia Lippmann was young, but like a go-getter and just like a problem solver. And really from November on, we rented this house in this kind of crappy part of Hollywood”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do we do a website? Who's going to host it for us? Do we build it ourselves? We spend $5 million on a website that we knew in 2015, website behavior and websites were shifting into something else. We didn't know what that was yet. People's attention spans were getting shorter. So we knew the ringer had to be different than Grantlin. We couldn't have 7,000, 8,000 word pieces anymore. How do we do SEO with Google?”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Beast is a great word. It's the single hardest thing I've ever had to do. I never really want to do it again. I can't possibly describe how hard it was. I think I blacked out a couple times during it. You're making decisions on every single conceivable thing and you're missing some stuff too. Like even with the ringer I don't even think we had HR for the first year and a half, which is absolutely insane to me now. But you're just trying to survive. You're basically like you're Tom Hanks and Castaway. You've built your little raft and your goal is to just get over that first wave and you get out there. And then you're like, holy shit, now what? And you're just thinking like, all right, health insurance. How do we do that? Office. How do we do that? Oh, we need desks. How do we do that? Oh my God. Who's going to be our accountant?”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, there was definitely, I mean, there were two things. One, when I left ESPN, everybody's like, you can't leave the nest. ESPN is the reason you succeeded. Can't You're going to fall apart. And then the second thing was stuff built around, you know, like one person at the forefront, like businesses. There was not a lot of big track record at the time. So when the HBO showed, I think a lot of people, there were some pieces. I saw a couple of them that were really nasty, like, oh, now it's over. And I was like, this is definitely not over. Like I will. I knew we had some good ringer stuff. And I also knew, like, I'm going to figure out some different way to make an impact.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say 20 shows that didn't work. Especially sports driven talk shows there's really no record of them working the last 15 years. I was like, I'm going to change that. And it was stupid.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Couple reasons. I never 100% figured out what it was because it was basically an interview show, which I wanted it to be an interview show. I had so much success with my podcast with the long form interviews. I was like, this should be a TV show What I didn't count on was that it's just more fun to listen to a podcast. You can list it on your own time. You don't have to watch it. So, I never cracked the code, and I was so bummed out about it, and I really felt like, how did I fuck this up? Like it had been my first big failure in a while. And part of it was I'm not a comedian. I think to have a show like that, you have to have some sort of comic background in some way. But really, the talk show is kind of, it's this era of like eight, nine years where it's kind of dead from a TV standpoint, right? And my show ended up being one of.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so there were two separate things going on. One is I knew I wanted to do the Ringer as a company. And I had the four people from Grantland that eventually we all decided to work together that would help me build the website. And I knew I was going to make real money for my podcast that would be able to help pay for anything. But I was trying to figure out the TV side of it and the thought was like, could I get heavily involved with HBO Sports? And could I create an interview show for them and went down that path? And I think the mistake looking back was I was so mad at how the ESPN thing ended that I just tried to do everything all at once and it was both things suffered. I think, you know, I definitely wouldn't. Wouldn't do it that way again”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was when they just leaked to the New York Times that they weren't going to renew my contract, which at that point, I knew I wasn't coming back. They knew I wasn't coming back, but we could have handled it, I think, on both sides with some dignity. And they just didn't. And it was just like, this sucks. I can't even go into the office and say goodbye to everybody I worked with.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the way it went down was terrible. There was this other thing that happened the day before they announced that they weren't renewing my contract where I went on Dan Patrick's show. They asked some question about Gaddell. Dan Patrick did, and I made a joke about, I'm not sure he has, what's the phrase? The particular fortitude, whatever. Everybody's like hyper sensitive to any sort of Mi versus Giddell that they could put in the headlines. So people write the news story. Skipper saw one of the news clips, and he got mad. And then I got mad that he got mad. They had been planning to have me on the NBA draft again because it had done really well. And I emailed them, I was like, hey, you know, I'm so pretty. I've decided I'm not doing the draft.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just sell us to somebody else But they honestly thought that they could just take it over and it would be fine. But that's what you think.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Six months, and the culture became so bad so quickly that people started to leave and then you could just see the writing and the wall. But like the stuff that we built for them, the writers that we had, we had nine of the 10 biggest podcasts that they had. We had this whole YouTube digital culture. We had a huge video library for them. We were in the middle of all the places you need to be.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, look, it was the amount of people and it was the types of people, like famous investors and people. And I was like, holy shit. Like. And we talk my agent talk to Skipper, and we were transparent about like, hey, Bill has a chance to start his own thing. Like, there's no question he could go out and do that. Is there a way for me to stay? Maybe Grantland, we go 50 50 on Grantland going forward where he gets a stake in that and so on and so on. And we did talk about that a little bit, but there are so many people trying to undermine me and Skipper at that point that it just wasn't going to happen. They had a whole plan for Grantlin. They brought in Chris Connolly to be the editor who wasn't really involved with Grantlin. And I don't feel like Grantlin should have been done in six months”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. Really upset. Like, we, when I finally went back to work, we had a meeting and we had all of our staff in there and Dave Jacoby, who I was really close to, who ran audio and video for us. He basically had to talk for me because I couldn't talk. I was so upset. So that was the shittiest part. But then the flip side of that was just all these people that came out like, hey, if you're ready to get out of there, like here I am.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, if you're going to start something new, can we talk? Or, hey, I work for here. We'll take you tomorrow. So it was weird. On the one hand, it was the worst professional experience of my career. And really, really devastating to just like I felt so bad for the Grantlin people because I had like 50 people underneath me. Now all of a sudden everything's in flux and I have to figure out how to manage that and handle that”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I get suspended. And one really interesting thing happens that I wasn't prepared for everybody is reaching out with some sort of business idea or, hey, when you leave. And I'm hearing from like. Rich guy circles and people I didn't even know.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was stupid. It was a mistake on my part, but I think that thing that really got me was that I got suspended without pay for the first two weeks. And I already felt like I was underpaid for them and I was killing it for them. And it was kind of irreparable after that. I think everybody kind of knew where it was going. But I was really loyal to everybody at Grantlin and what we had created. And I didn't want it to affect Grantlin. So I was. Publicly, I was just trying to make it seem like everything was fine. I'm still doing my job It was just getting unsustainable.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't even think that's what got me in the most trouble. It was that I stupidly dared ESPN to like, and if you think I'm wrong, you know.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was the basketball show that's before and after the games I was doing 30 for 30 with Connor and John Dahl, and it was like that. I look back and that was like insane. Why was I working like that?”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we had ESP in the magazine that I left and we had ESPN.com that could kind of control whether they sent us promotion or not. And they always considered us as an adversary. So it started to feel like we weren't on the same team. You know, I look back, I was definitely doing too many things. I think when you're doing too many things, you just feel like you're on a hamster wheel and you're mad at everybody half the time. And for me, I was like, I was running Grantland. I was right in my calm. I was doing my podcast. I was on NBA countdown.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think Skipper felt that way. I think my big mistake tactically. Was ESPN is a huge company, and most of it's set on the East Coast. And I think the success we were having over on the West Coast, we didn't want to deal with anybody else. We were just doing our thing.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're worried that we break even? Like, we're doing great, and we should be making more money than we did. So I was always like, what is that criticism?”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, but that was a criticism we took. And it's like, wait a second, we're a startup inside a company that makes billions and billions of dollars. We're bringing in an incredible amount of talent where in the forefront of all these things that they should care about going forward, like podcasts, like streaming video.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I felt like we were winning. We were the dominant sports platform, and that show that day I was watching, it was first take, it was Richard Sherman they brought on Debate skip Bayless, who was one of the hosts. And it was just as really vicious segment. They went at it in a nasty way. And it was content that I thought like was beneath us.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we had, it was easily six, seven, eight million dollars worth of advertising we could have gotten from the pods at that time. So I was getting really frustrated because You have to grow. You have to, like, we didn't have a social media editor. We were missing all these things. And I could just see the finish line. I just knew we were headed toward a bad place. And it was getting more and more frustrating.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Grantlin broke even, but we should have made more money. We had nine of the top 10 podcasts at ESPN during a time when podcasts were starting to make real money and they didn't know how to monetize it.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT