← The Dan Le Batard Show
The Dan Le Batard Show
Le Batard & Friends Presents: The Step Back - Lebron Inc. (feat. Pablo Torre)
00:37:03
The Step Back is back — and this time, it's personal. Or at least, it's financial.
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- [00:01]
Pablo Torre
What?
- [00:01]
Dan Le Batard
I'm tired of this man being celebrated for what this is.
- [00:05]
Amin El Hassan
The step back, steps back, puts up a three bang. LeBron James from downtown. The Cleveland Cavaliers select LeBron James.
- [00:16]
Pablo Torre
LeBron, what's your decision?
- [00:17]
LeBron James
I made a difficult decision, but I understood what my future was about. I believe our president is trying to divide us. My first response was, you bomb them.
- [00:25]
Dan Le Batard
Welcome to episode four.
- [00:27]
LeBron James
They got a bunch of old white men on teams and they got that slave mentality. LeBron, Inc. You know, hate in America, especially for African American, is living every day.
- [00:42]
Dan Le Batard
Okay, well, let's fast forward to when I think, looking back, he might have been on top of the world. Probably the most was after that 2016 championship. Cross Cleveland's long sports nightmares over. We've got LeBron crying on the court. We've got Cleveland. This is for you. What did we think of LeBron at that moment? Was he, after looking back at Steph Curry that way during that series, after blocked by James after that Game seven performance on the road, just about as a mythological figure as you could get.
- [01:18]
Kevin Arnovitz
It's always wonderful when you know that what you're watching is totally excellent. You are demanding more and more of it, and then it exceeds the expectations by giving you the storyline that made him golden forever. Because he won as an underdog. He went from famous to infamous, from popular to unpopular, and then took it back to popular with the whole narrative of writing his own story and coming home. I don't know how much better you could have done it than to be impossibly down in that series, to have Draymond Green going crazy all over the place and have a wrestling match at the top of the sport where LeBron James gets to win at as the underdog.
- [01:58]
Dan Le Batard
I mean, it was his idea, according to everything we've read, to go back to Cleveland. You can never go home again. Right. You have to take your opportunity. He proved people wrong. You can go home again. What was this for him now? Proving everybody else wrong, doing what he said he would do? It's almost the Kanye West. You can't tell me nothing right now.
- [02:18]
Amin El Hassan
Yeah. I mean, and it wasn't just that he won a championship in Cleveland. I think that would have been cool for. For sure. It's that championship in that way against that team, the team that won 73 games. It was a buzzsaw. Destroyed everybody in basketball. Was up 3:1 dominated series.
- [02:34]
Kevin Arnovitz
Best team I've ever seen. Better than the Jordan Bulls.
- [02:37]
Amin El Hassan
For me, it was one of perhaps my most replayed clips on the Dan Levittard show is me after game four saying all the reasons why this is ridiculous. Apparently ridiculous. Anyone thought that this could be competitive. And so if 2011 was his greatest failure to lose as that much of a favorite over the Dallas Mavericks, this was his greatest success. You could say that Valley was deeper than any valley Michael Jordan has been in, but that peak is higher than any peak that Michael Jordan had been either.
- [03:10]
Kevin Arnovitz
It's not even that. It's just his greatest success. Just if you reject my premise that he is big better at forgiveness than he is at basketball and going back to win that championship for the man who wrote that letter, what you might be able to say is that he is better at business and how it is you legacy build. If he made the conscious decision, if I win one in Cleveland, I will elevate to the Michael Jordan Kobe status. Whether I win four, five or six championships, I won't actually have to win six of them. I'll get in the greatest ever conversation because everyone will remember that. But I did it there in that way.
- [03:50]
Dan Le Batard
Real quick though, how was he was he embraced outside of Cleveland after this? Because this is like hugging on Goliath, isn't it?
- [03:58]
Amin El Hassan
Again, we talk mythology building. This is it, right? Like you beat them on their home court after they had a 31 lead. That's the thing that made people also do that extra algebra that Dan is talking about that this championship isn't worth x, it's worth 2x, right? It's worth enough to get you in the conversation with Michael and all the other greats. Even though your championship count isn't the same, even though your win loss percentage in the finals isn't the same. But this one we all recognize this thing is a little different than any of the titles that Magic or Bird or Michael won.
- [04:33]
Kevin Arnovitz
I think too. That's interesting to the storyline, right? We know how it is. The most ruthless of the champions become ruthless because Kobe and Michael had a thing that maybe Jayson Tatum has, maybe he doesn't. But the difference between what great players are is they're killers. LeBron doesn't get. He's a killer. I don't think he gets it for eternity, even though we know how great he is. But you do this and you wrap the whole thing in syrup. It doesn't have to just be, oh, he had to be an asshole to win. He won a lot of championships, but he's got one in the middle that makes me feel like gooey. It's not about I have to punch you in the face to win.
- [05:16]
Dan Le Batard
All right, guys, we're gonna step back into this time machine again. This is early 2017. Snapchat's all the rage. I never really got into it, but that year, Richard Jefferson was named Snapchatter of the year. Pretty wild.
- [05:30]
Kevin Arnovitz
Why Whomst?
- [05:32]
Dan Le Batard
That's a great question.
- [05:33]
Kevin Arnovitz
I don't think whomst is a word.
- [05:35]
Dan Le Batard
It's always whomst.
- [05:36]
Amin El Hassan
Always whomst.
- [05:36]
Dan Le Batard
And this guy was going viral. We know who this guy is.
- [05:39]
Amin El Hassan
Oh, yeah. Salt bae.
- [05:40]
Dan Le Batard
Salt BAE was going viral. Number one song, shape of youf by Ed Sheeran, which feels like it got released last year. Donald Trump got inaugurated. And, Dan, you were starting to go after espn on espn when the bosses sent a memo about the Muslim travel ban. You called Trump a, quote, dangerous kind of idiot. You called ESPN's policy weak. And we'll get into politics a lot the next episode. But, Dan, from your perspective, your memory, how was sports media kind of doing
- [06:10]
Kevin Arnovitz
generally at this time in 2016? 17. 17. So we're living the tail end, the blacklash to Barack Obama. Right in the early 2000s, when we were starting in sports radio down here, Miami is such an ethnic place that I feel we were having race conversations that would have been Kaepernick. Similar 10 years before Kaepernick, we were asking questions like, would Peyton Manning, as MVP of the league, be allowed to be an active Klansman? So there was an idea that the race conversation was being foisted uncomfortably upon America in front of everybody, and ESPN was trying to aggressively have more diverse voices. There was a lot of racial division around sports. We were coming out of whatever the Kaepernick age was, and it seemed like it was fomenting and being talked about in public more because LeBron and Dwayne were doing Trayvon Martin things, growing their voice from 2010 through 2017.
- [07:16]
Dan Le Batard
Before you answer that, I mean, I think the transition was. Now we're shifting to more players expressing their opinion, not just in players Tribune or podcasts, however else they can do that. You can speak out like Kaepernick in your own voice, and you still let others sort of write what you're doing. You still let others express the opinion. And so this was a bit of a different sort of time where you're standing up for yourself and speaking for yourself, not just hoping that other people get a message.
- [07:41]
Amin El Hassan
I think the big difference, Dan, you're right. These conversations have been happening all throughout. And it's not just you guys here in Miami. It's all over. It's people like Jemele Hill and Michael Smith. And Bomani, Jones, they'd all had conversations whenever it arose again, whenever it intersected into the world of sports.
- [08:01]
Kevin Arnovitz
The time you're talking about, though, that I hadn't considered what was happening is the intersection of writers tell the athlete's story. Whenever you talk about mythology and wherever you grab the emotion business with the storytelling because these people have to be human. The symbiotic relationship between how the story gets told on these athletes is the writer tells the story. If you remove that, if you make it so the athlete has all the voice and doesn't need the writer and the storytelling, you're gonna have more access than you've ever had on social media. You're gonna see more, but the athlete's also gonna be able to control their part of the story more and give you an antiseptic version that doesn't have all of the context that this whole shift at espn, like the fight that we're talking about at espn, it's. Espn chose to get into the journalism business even though it didn't have to. It's just sports. And the only social commentators that there are talking around sports, even though they hired us to do that, to extend the conversation. They're talking about the quote unquote woke stuff instead of the games, instead of what happened on that pick and roll. And it bothered people. And then Disney becomes woke just because they've got nine journalists who are socially minded doing journalism and opinion around LeBron.
- [09:18]
Dan Le Batard
And let's be honest, whenever a powerful black man is going to say something, it's to be that it's going to turn the conversation. Right. They're going to turn on him, even if he is just standing up for himself. So let's look at a couple of times where LeBron was merely standing up for himself against very established voices. And see what happened right there was going into the all star weekend of 2017. You guys remember his rant against Charles Barkley? He was reigning champ, 13 time All Star. He was in his 14th season, 32 years old, which is at least most people thought, the tail end of his prime. Little did they know. And he's already the eighth leading scorer of all time. He's about to pass Shaq, but he's frustrated. Do you remember this was after Kyrie left him?
- [09:56]
Kevin Arnovitz
Right.
- [09:56]
Dan Le Batard
So he's like, ah, this team's top heavy. We're not good enough. And doing everything that he does to be like passive LeBron.
- [10:01]
Amin El Hassan
Yeah.
- [10:01]
Dan Le Batard
And Charles Barkley sort of went off on him. He called LeBron's comments inappropriate and whiny. LeBron says Charles has to do that because it's good for the ratings, right? He's on TV, and then things got really good. LeBron said he's a hater of Charles Barkley. He said what makes what he says credible because he's on tv. I'm not going to let him disrespect my legacy like that. I never said I'm not a role model, which, infamously, Charles Barkley did. I never showed up All Star Weekend on Sunday because I was in Vegas all weekend partying. All I've done for my entire career is represent the NBA the right way. 14 years, never got in trouble. Respected the game. Print that. Screw Charles Barkley, end quote. Dan, you. You're friends with Barkley. How would you imagine? What did you think when you heard this? Him going after Charles Barkley, of all people?
- [10:52]
Kevin Arnovitz
It's kind of funny to think of a generation of greatness and how few people can go after Charles Barkley with the knowledge of, I'm better than you were. I'm better than you were at basketball, old man. Who are you to critique me? It's a changing of the generational guard and how things are talked about in that sport. But I'm also marveling about the fact that Charles Barkley, at a grandfather's age, still gets to be the bad boy that people side with. As LeBron goes after Charles Barkley, it's almost a fight no one can win, no matter how great you are. And it's staggering to see Charles Barkley have that stature in his 60s.
- [11:32]
Dan Le Batard
But, I mean, at this point in LeBron's career, isn't this just proof that he's a little too thin skinned? Like, he's on top of the world and he's letting Charles Barkley like a former colleague, you know what I mean? Like, there's so many other people in the media he could go after and probably has gone after for different reasons. But this just felt a little too thin skinned.
- [11:49]
Amin El Hassan
I think what it is is a little bit of, you're supposed to be one of us. Players are always very sensitive to things that other players say. They brush aside what the mortals say. You know, that LeBron has the coat that he loves from Teddy Roosevelt about the words of the critic and the man in the arena. And if you haven't stepped in the arena, why should I respect your opinion? But Charles Barkley is like, yeah, I'm in that arena. I'm in that arena.
- [12:11]
Kevin Arnovitz
Heavy.
- [12:11]
Amin El Hassan
I'm in the Naismith hall of Fame in Springfield. Google me. But what LeBron does at that moment is he doesn't do what Shaq does usually in these moments, which is, well, how many rings do you have? That's the Shaq move. LeBron's move is, wait a second. I have never gotten in trouble with the law. I show up, I do my job. You, on the other hand. And he's pointing out things that are irrefutable by Charles Barkley and his professionalism during his career. So he says, how can you question my professionalism and what's appropriate, inappropriate, when you had an entire career of inappropriate behavior? And I think that is both A, a very valid counter argument, and B, what you're detecting is the difference between how people feel about Charles, how people feel about LeBron, and Charles has a likability that allows him even when he logically been defeated. Yeah, but I still like Charles Moore. So we're gonna say you're thin skinned.
- [12:59]
Kevin Arnovitz
That part, though, the career as a bad boy, that includes the judge asking him, hey, Charles, do you have any regrets about throwing a man through a plate glass window? Yes. That we weren't on the second floor, that that would be the bad boy that LeBron is going after, but that he could also go after him this way. I mean, because this part is great. It really is. You gave Barclays credentials and said hall of Fame and everything. Yeah, but LeBron's one of the best two ever. When you say thin skinned, I mean, I too would get upset if I was better than everybody. And every criticism that came my way, even from people who are close to my peers, they're not actually my peers.
- [13:41]
Amin El Hassan
But see, I think that's my point in that you took the Shaq route right there. The Shaq route is I'm a better player than you, so you can't say anything to me what LeBron did. Which is why, in a logical sense, he wins the argument. I'm not even talking about how I play the game like the caliber of player I am. I'm talking about professionalism. Because that's what you're attacking. You're not attacking. Hey, you're shooting too many threes. You're saying me complaining about the makeup of our roster is inappropriate. Well, let's talk about people behaving inappropriately during their playing careers. And then he lists off.
- [14:13]
Kevin Arnovitz
He could have gone, I'm a better player. He went, I'm a better person.
- [14:17]
Amin El Hassan
I'm a more professional person. How dare you question my professionalism?
- [14:22]
Dan Le Batard
But he didn't elevate himself Above Charles Barkley because he punched down, he came down to the fight. This quote sounds exactly like one of his friends gassing him up the whole time. It's like, wait a second, you didn't say you're not a role model. You got these championships. You didn't throw somebody out. And he's like, yeah, you know what? You're right. I am going to say something about this. Screw Charles Barkley. When in reality he is five levels above Charles and should never have been punching down.
- [14:46]
Amin El Hassan
But as we talk about, like the elections, right? Like, it's the same thing. It's like sometimes everything logically you're saying says you should be the winner of this argument, but people just like the other guy for some reason. And we're like, why? Why is he so likable?
- [15:02]
Pablo Torre
He is.
- [15:02]
Kevin Arnovitz
But what he's saying, though, I mean, it's just a crazy sentence punching down on Charles Barkley. I do want to explore the idea of ego with you guys. If you were one of the best one or two ever and are a basketball historian, would you not think yourself above criticism? You're saying he's being thin skinned. And I'm thinking to myself, man, like, I understand why he would wander around saying, hey, do you guys understand the greatness in your presence? Because this is not. I don't have a peer here. I have to go chase ghosts to find a peer.
- [15:38]
Amin El Hassan
This is, this is how I'll rebut to you, right? Like, this is why I think this is likability and not thin skinnedness. Because who is the guy that the majority of people would say is the greatest player of all time, right? It's Michael Jordan who sat there in a documentary and looked dead in the camera and said, that's when I took things personally. It became a meme and a joke or whatever. But we never think of him as thin skinned. Why? Because he's likable. We like Michael Jordan. For whatever reason, we like him.
- [16:04]
Kevin Arnovitz
He's the most thin skinned, of course,
- [16:07]
Amin El Hassan
but his likability overcomes the thin skinness. Whereas LeBron's likability, at least in a tete a tete with Charles Barkley does not.
- [16:32]
Dan Le Batard
All right, he's the host of Pablo Torre finds out he's a former senior writer for ESPN the magazine where he wrote a 4,600 word feature called LeBron the Sequel. That's not that many words.
- [16:44]
Amin El Hassan
It's called an editor.
- [16:45]
Dan Le Batard
It's not that many words. Only 200 of those were dedicated to Harvard. So, you know, he's Learning he only
- [16:51]
Kevin Arnovitz
wrote five articles in his career. There were only five total. This was one of them.
- [16:56]
Amin El Hassan
Really?
- [16:56]
Kevin Arnovitz
Oh, my God. No one's ever had more of a shortcut.
- [17:01]
Pablo Torre
You guys know what 4600 words feels like? Like, to me right now, that feels insurmountable. The idea that I wrote five pieces of anything like that length is insane to me at this point in my life.
- [17:11]
Kevin Arnovitz
Shorter.
- [17:12]
Dan Le Batard
Tell us how really quickly, how you got this assignment, how you got LeBron's team to let you in that Vegas hotel room and then paint the picture of that hotel room for me real quick.
- [17:22]
Pablo Torre
So I didn't know this, but I guess if you're really rich and famous or LeBron James, you get access to a thing that I didn't know existed, which is a secret, even more exclusive high roller hotel behind MGM Grand. And it's literally mansions. It's called the Mansion. I walk in and on a couch napping is Chris Bosh. Draymond Green is hanging out in that room. It is, by the way, ces, the Consumer Electronics show, the giant tech summit in Vegas. That's when this is happening. Mav Carter is there with his feet kicked up on a table. Adam Mendelsohn, who is LeBron's PR political strategists at this point, honestly, he used to work for Schwarzenegger and others. It's just sort of like the brain trust. LeBron is not there, notably, because I think LeBron was probably playing a professional basketball game.
- [18:13]
Dan Le Batard
Yeah, this was in season.
- [18:13]
Pablo Torre
But the point is that there is this inner circle of people that are attached and helping run. In the case of Mav and Adam, what was at this point the most valuable athlete led business in all of sports and all of media. And that's the entree into an into. I almost said episode. It was, in a sense an episode, but a story about what it was that LeBron was building. Could I actually examine that? Seriously, was the assignment.
- [18:40]
Dan Le Batard
All right, well, here's some nuggets from your lead there. LeBron's got another game show in the works called the Wall. He's got Space Jam 2 in development. He is laying the groundwork for his I Promise school. And Blaze Pizza is becoming the fastest growing restaurant chain in America. And then, Pablo, comes the Phil Jackson of it all. Let's listen to this as a reminder.
- [19:01]
Pablo Torre
LeBron James says he's lost respect for Phil Jackson after the 11 time NBA
- [19:06]
Kevin Arnovitz
champion referred to LeBron's business partners as his posse. In an interview with ESPN's Jackie McMullen, Jackson described the discipline Pat Riley instilled
- [19:15]
Pablo Torre
in Miami, saying, quote, you can't hold up the whole team because you and your mom and your posse want to
- [19:20]
Kevin Arnovitz
spend an extra night in Cleveland.
- [19:23]
Dan Le Batard
Pablo, your lead kind of throws some shade at Phil Jackson there. Can you give me a contrast of the idea of the word posse and how it's supposed to be seen versus what you were actually in there in that hotel room with that group of people?
- [19:38]
Pablo Torre
Obviously, it's not even undertones at this point. That is language freighted with a certain racial distinction. Not a team of advisors, but a posse, I don't think I need to belabor that point. But in terms of the labor actually versus management part of this, now I sound like Dan LeBatard writing a column, doing a little wordplay, catching myself infected by Dan. What really the story is about is what is it like when young black men get together and decide we're gonna have a seat at the table and not only be clients, but owners, right? So LeBron's whole thing in business media being a useful stand in for the larger vision that he's always had. With Maverick Carter's help, with Rich Paul's help, his agent, of course, one of these posse members, as Bill Jackson has called him, was, we want to own equity in this stuff. And so I think the Space Jam thing, by the way, spoiler alert, Rotten Tomatoes. Not kind to Space Jam, to what that became. And that's, by the way, another key consideration we should talk about is, did this work after I published this piece in this way in February, I believe, 2017, a lot of the answers are pointing to no. But in terms of the equity of it, the power of it, Space Jam is a useful case study because when Michael Jordan was filming Space Jam, he was the face of Space Jam. Warner Brothers gave him an outdoor basketball court, right? The legendary pickup games during the summer. While everybody on the Dream Team, effectively, and others, those cameos were filming Space Jam, they gave him a court. LeBron wanted ownership, right? He wanted a company. He wanted eight figures of investment from Warner Brothers, and he got it. That's the big difference when it came to how did Michael Jordan operate versus how did LeBron operate and why. Posse, to them felt fundamentally not just offensive, but a total misestimation, an underestimation of what it is that they were doing.
- [21:28]
Amin El Hassan
Well, particularly Pablo, because by this point in 2017, this isn't just like the hanger ons. These guys had all created their own lanes in their respective fields. Rich Paul is an established agent who represents more than just LeBron James. Maverick Carter is an established voice in the media and entertainment space who is hobnobbing at these conventions and creating these business partnerships and deals and stuff like that. Spring Hill Entertainment. A lot of people would say, oh, you know, it's LeBron. LeBron's not doing any of that stuff. Like his name is on it. He's the name that opens the door. But all these deals, all these TV programs and movies and developments and treatments and selling it and making it and airing wasn't LeBron. It was Maverick Carter. It wasn't LeBron repping Ben Simmons or KCP or Anthony Davis. Anthony Davis.
- [22:26]
Dan Le Batard
It was him putting his trust in his friend.
- [22:28]
Amin El Hassan
Yeah, but it's not just that, but it's. They're actually doing the job. And so that's what equally makes the posse comment so offensive. It's not just, hey, cuz, it's a bunch of young black guys. You're calling them a posse. And that is a relic from a time earlier in the 90s where that was a term to describe all these hanger ons. It's that these guys are not hanger ons, they're businesses unto themselves.
- [22:51]
Kevin Arnovitz
You understand though, that calling them the posse really is the secondary offense. The first offense is. You really have to understand what these guys did. Michael Jordan at the end of his career was very much an employee. He was kicked out of the Washington facility and the sneaker companies ran his mythology. But he didn't own while he was playing like there. He had plenty of management and plenty of smart agents. They weren't this smart. They didn't go and like get this much money off of 10 years of when LeBron walks into a room in Hollywood, Amazon says, yes, you'd like 10 million. We like being around LeBron. No one's done it like that, Pablo. And you saw it right when they were starting it. It doesn't just underestimate this. It makes it so that people don't understand Phil Knight didn't do it better than these guys did because Michael Jordan got an ownership stake in Phil Knight. But Phil Knight was the boss. LeBron's the boss.
- [23:48]
Pablo Torre
Yeah, look, we talked in this story. I talked to a Harvard Business School professor who made a case study out of Maverick Carter. I talked to this guy, Paul Wachter, who is one of these high, high, high net worth financial advisors, these deal makers who says, I put Maverick Carter and LeBron James in a room with Warren fucking Buffett. And it goes great. So the question really is, once you get Past, I think what should be long past, which is these are some guys standing on a street corner still, in the case of Rich Paul, for instance, like selling jerseys out of his car, which is literally the origin story. How do you update that such that now you can have a conversation around. Well, the business that they entered in this case was media. And it's just a funny time capsule. One of the people I interviewed here was the CEO of Warner Brothers, this guy Kevin Sujahara. And he attests on the record, LeBron James isn't just a figurehead. I talk to LeBron about movies. We have conversations around media, around creative stuff. One problem, though, is that years later, Kevin Sujahara, due to a scandal that I won't even summarize here, you can look it up, is ousted as a CEO of Warner Brothers. And there is all of this turmoil, because one of the problems is, and this is a real conversation and a real nuance around what does it mean to have power and leverage? It's what do you do once you get it in terms of doing the job specific to that industry? And a lot of people in media have suffered this. The idea that LeBron is more than a human billboard is one thing to get past. And clearly he built a business that is more than just. LeBron is very famous. LeBron can get us meetings. It was more than just that. But then the question is, well, what did you make and how is it that you got people to watch? And anybody knows, certainly us, we know how hard it is to do that. Spring Hill, for instance, like 2023. Spoiler alert. Again. And not to jump ahead too far, but they lost about $30 million, I think they did not make money. They went all in on their business and it struggled because, of course, media as an industry is that hard. And so they ended up merging with another company, and that's where they are today. But the whole thing of was this a real business? Both things have to be considered as true, even if they might seem like they're suggesting something that Phil Jackson might want to say I told you so about.
- [26:04]
Dan Le Batard
Yeah, it's wildly interesting because in the midst of all this, LeBron is still a very public figure, is still sort of seeing what people think of him throughout. Right. Because in part of this little book club we've got going on here, we've been reading another book by Brian Windhorst called LeBron Inc. The making of a Billion Dollar Athlete. And this chapter called LA starts with real estate. It talks about how LeBron bought a Brentwood mansion in 2015 with the intention of living there as a Laker in 2018. What Brian doesn't write, though, is that before Game 1 of the 2017 Finals, someone spray painted the N word on his front gate. I want to play for you guys. LeBron's response to that act at Finals Media Day.
- [26:43]
LeBron James
You know, hate, you know, in America, especially for African American, is living every day. And even though that, you know, that it's concealed most of the time, even though people hide their faces and will say things about you when they see you, they smile on your face, it's alive every single day. And I think back to Emmett Till's mom, actually, it's kind of one of the first things I thought of. And the reason that she had an open casket is because she wanted to show the world what her son went through as far as a hate crime. And, you know, being black in America, so it's like it doesn't. No matter how much money you have, no matter how famous you are, no matter how many people admire you, you know, being black in America is tough. And we got a long way to go, you know, for us as a society and for us as African Americans, until we. Until we feel equal in America.
- [27:59]
Dan Le Batard
Amin, I want to ask you this and Pablo after, because when the Phil Jackson comment came out, you know, LeBron basically said, oh, it kind of sucks, whatever this. And this was also at the time of remember Daddy LeBron, right? This was a more thoughtful, well processed answer where he was speaking in bigger terms. How does this compare six months later after the Phil Jackson situation? And just where was he when you see this?
- [28:23]
Amin El Hassan
Well, I think the Phil Jackson thing, there are people who can explain it away, and there were people who explained it away. Phil Jackson didn't mean it like that. That posse is actually something from, like, from the old Westerns, right? We used to call groups. I'm like, that's not how he meant it. He meant it like in the NBA sense. We've used the term posse again in the NBA since at least the 90s to mean a very specific thing. But still, you have that counterargument with this. They spray painted the N word on his. On his front.
- [28:52]
Kevin Arnovitz
Like, there's no way.
- [28:53]
Amin El Hassan
Oh, well, LeBron's being sensitive again. It's. It's pretty clear this was racist people doing racist things. And that your affluence, your fame, even your popularity as LeBron James does not insulate you from the day to day racism of America. In many ways, he repurposed kind of like the old Malcolm X quote, which is what do you call a black man who has a PhD, owns a very successful business, and he's driving Mercedes Benz in a very expensive neighborhood. And the answer is. That's the answer. The idea is that there's no amount of success that makes you insulated or above the racist undertones of America. And so even LeBron James, the greatest player in the game and rich and powerful and all that, is not safe from having the N word spray painted on his house.
- [29:47]
Pablo Torre
But it is a yes and sort of a thing, though, right? Yes. What Amin says is absolutely correct. Yes. It's also true, though, that when you mentioned Malcolm X, I'm like, yeah. Also, LeBron James used to like walking into a locker room with the autobiography of Malcolm X sort of like cracked open to page one. Right. And there's also this part of LeBron that is part of his story. It's also the idea that when it comes to LeBron being a sympathetic narrator for the plight more broadly of America on a socioeconomic level, this is also part of the thing that fueled the pendulum swinging back and forth pre and then post 2020. All of it keeps on going in part because there is this yes and imperfection to LeBron in which real things are happening to him. But the question of whether he is sympathetic to you and the you here could be poor white person or whatever, me, Filipino journalist or anything, fill in the blank. The mileage varies on whether this is the perfect messenger for some of these ideas. Even if he is the perfect messenger because his life has encompassed his. All of these complications that require what you guys are doing, which is sit down conversations as opposed to here is the one take that we can clip and aggregate.
- [30:59]
Kevin Arnovitz
I don't mean to infantilize him, but I think all of us could say that whatever we were ages 25 to 40, the age that we saw LeBron in Miami go from 2010 to sort of changing the entirety of the sport. He may not have been a child when he arrived here. It's hard to even imagine him as one, but he wasn't terribly sophisticated in these manners publicly. And I do think I got to see that person grow into an adult voice from 25 to 40. He became little brother to Dwayne when he got here. Dwayne's been an activist for a minute here in his last years. And LeBron absolutely learned something here about how to feel these things and talk about them publicly over the experiences of those 15 years and into adulthood.
- [31:49]
Dan Le Batard
We're definitely going to get into the politics of LeBron and how he sort of stepped into it or was forced to step into it in different episodes. But a last thing for Pablo here. I did want to ask you whether or not you think that 25% for Space Jam 2 is justified on Rotten Tomatoes, whether or not you think the shop was any good. Does LeBron James sort of move the needle culturally in entertainment, or is that still to be deterred?
- [32:16]
Kevin Arnovitz
Pablo said no when he asked his own question, does he make good things? Pablo said no.
- [32:22]
Pablo Torre
There are some things that he's made that are compelling. The question is, can it be spun up into this larger enterprise that can compete, by the way, with a bunch of behemoths that are all struggling like. So the context, the thing that I am so proud of, that I put into this story, is the following passage. This is now me quoting myself. So forgive me for being maximum myself, but I just can't. In that way, LeBron and I are not so different.
- [32:49]
Dan Le Batard
Quote, hit it again.
- [32:51]
Pablo Torre
Hollywood, like Silicon Valley, ritualistically eats even its biggest stars. One industry analysis suggests that 98% of TV scripts bought by networks fail commercially. Only 35% of new shows last longer than a single season. Another study estimates that 80% of movies wind up unprofitable. That's a different fight, right? It's a really hard business. And LeBron discovered that he had to actually admit, on some level, corporate defeat. It doesn't mean that he wasn't a really good experiment for Warner Brothers to run. It's just that the opponents he faced in that world were bigger and badder than even him. And that is a lesson when it comes to what do you do with your celebrity and your athletic greatness that I think lots of athletes out there are also simultaneously realizing in terms of the scope of their personal ambition?
- [33:40]
Amin El Hassan
The thing also, I would argue is that in Hollywood, defeat is not defined by your shows didn't do well. It's, did you get shows done? They got stuff made that made it to air. That in and of itself is already the sperm, the proverbial sperm. One of millions. The what find, it finds its way to the egg to fertilize.
- [34:05]
Pablo Torre
What proverbs that?
- [34:06]
Kevin Arnovitz
Is that Leviticus? What? What?
- [34:08]
Pablo Torre
That has to be Leviticus.
- [34:10]
Kevin Arnovitz
What that?
- [34:11]
Pablo Torre
That would be Leviticus.
- [34:12]
Kevin Arnovitz
Proverbial sperm.
- [34:14]
Amin El Hassan
You know how, like, there's like, a million.
- [34:15]
Kevin Arnovitz
Famously, with the Virgin Mary, there was no proverbial sperm.
- [34:20]
Amin El Hassan
The miracle. The miracle of the book of the Mean.
- [34:23]
Pablo Torre
In. In Amin's defense, the book of Amin el Hassan, the pages are a little sticky. Hard to really.
- [34:29]
Amin El Hassan
I can't help it that you guys.
- [34:31]
Kevin Arnovitz
Are you reading you not the grossest thing in this segment.
- [34:35]
Dan Le Batard
You know what that is? His new nickname, Pablo, is the proverbial sperm. Goodbye, Pablo.
- [34:40]
Pablo Torre
Goodbye.
- [34:41]
Kevin Arnovitz
You had a joke. You had.
- [34:42]
Amin El Hassan
I didn't have a joke. I was making a point. I was making a point.
- [34:47]
Pablo Torre
The miracle of conception. Millions of sperm.
- [34:50]
Amin El Hassan
One makes it to the egg of fertilizers. He's fertilized multiple eggs. A lot of miscarriages are getting made out there. His actually come to term.
- [34:58]
Dan Le Batard
They're still running.
- [34:59]
Amin El Hassan
Yeah.
- [35:00]
Kevin Arnovitz
Leave all of this in there.