Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | August 2026

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**Sean Carroll** (1:01)
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the August 2026 Ask Me Anything edition of the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I know the news that is on everyone's mind, and it's certainly on mine. Maybe it's not on yours, but you think it's on mine, and you're correct. LeBron James, who is in the conversation for one of the best basketball players of all time, has agreed to join the Philadelphia 76ers, who are, by acclamation, the greatest basketball team of all time, and at least my personal favorites. So this is big news, and everyone wants to know, there's been several mentions in the AMA questions this month. You know, what do you think about LeBron joining the Sixers? And the answer is, I am thrilled. I think that this is amazing. I think he's basically a perfect fit for the team. I think the team is basically a perfect fit for him. LeBron, you know, is getting up there. He is dead-ass old. There's just no question about that. LeBron is pushing 42, I think he'll be this season. But he was super productive last year, playing at an all-star level, and no reason to think that he can't do that again this year. And there's been some moaning out there in the internet corners that I listen to for basketball news and gossip, that there's almost too many good players on the Sixers right now.
Literally, if all the players that they have, now they also have Jalen Brown, who they acquired in a trade from the Celtics, with Joel Embiid, Tyrese Maxey, Vijay Edgecombe, in pure talent terms, this is one of the best starting fives in the history of the NBA. Now, pure talent terms don't matter if they don't gel, if they get injured, if their styles get in the way, if there's personality conflicts, there's many things that could go wrong. But for the moment, I'm gonna choose to be optimistic. I think that what a lot of people miss is that LeBron, even though he has scored more points than any other NBA basketball player ever, takes some of his greatest joy from being a facilitator and a passer. When he joined the NBA, he said he wanted to be more like Magic Johnson than Michael Jordan. And that is exactly what the Sixers need. And he plays a position, which was by far the Sixers' weakest position. He'll have multiple great players to pass to on any one night. Any one of the starting five can score 30 points. Everyone can take turns, and I see no reason why everything won't be great. But I don't want to bore the people who are listening who are not basketball fans. I just want to say one little philosophical point about this. I was visiting Santa Fe Institute and talking to Jeffrey West, former Mindscape guest, and I didn't know this, but Jeffrey is a huge football fan in the sense of he's British. Soccer is what we would call it here in the United States. He was following very carefully England's journey in the World Cup this year, and he had very strong feelings for how they were actually playing better. No, they were playing worse than they were able to, but doing better than they should have just through luck and randomness, and then their luck ran out in the semifinals when they lost to Argentina. But anyway, so we were bonding about this because we both agreed, like people don't know how much of our lives are spent thinking and caring about sports. He's a fan of Tottenham Hotspur. I'm not very knowledgeable about football slash soccer, but I know nothing about Tottenham Hotspur. I know who they are, but I don't know any of their history or anything like that. But nevertheless, I could feel and appreciate all the motions that he was expressing in thinking about how his fandom expressed itself over the years. Look, Jeffrey is getting up there in years himself. We were talking about basketball a little bit. He says, I know nothing about basketball, but I do remember watching once and seeing this huge guy just dominating and being very impressed with him. And I was trying to guess. I'm like, was it Shaquille O'Neal? And he goes, oh no, before that. And then someone says, Wilt Chamberlain. Yes, that was it. So that was a while ago since Wilt retired in the early 70s. The point is that I didn't need to know details about Todd and Em Hotspur to get where Jeffrey was coming from any more than he needed to know details about the Philadelphia 76ers. And we agreed, you know, it's irrational. Maybe irrational is not the word. It's non-rational to love a sports franchise in this way. If you had been born in different circumstances, you would have loved some other sports franchise, and that's fine. But the irrationality or non-rationality is part of it, I think. This is the place I've come to in thinking about it. When people ask me how I feel about LeBron James joining the Sixers, it could be amazing, right? They could be one of the best NBA teams of all time, or it could all fall apart, as I've already said. But here's the thing. We don't know, none of us is Laplace's demon, right? What LeBron James joining the Philadelphia 76ers represents is hope. It's the prospect of something amazing happening. When you watch a TV show or watch a movie, you don't know what's going to happen, but someone does, someone made the movie, right? But when you watch a sporting event, you don't know what is going to happen out there, and that is part of the joy. I think a lot of modern sports fans sort of missed the point of the experience of trying to pretend that they're general managers and coaches rather than just rooting for their teams and hoping for the best. If your team plays in a league where there's only going to be one champion at the end of the year, most teams' fans are going to end up the season disappointed in some sense. But you're allowed to begin the season very optimistic, and that is how I choose to approach things. So LeBron represents hope to us, hope that the Sixers can finally get over the hump and win one, that Joelle Embiid's career will be vindicated.