This isn’t in the Constitution, but it’s certainly there in the subtext: If the president of the United States tells you to do something, you kinda have to do it. There are exceptions, naturally. He can’t make you do anything extralegal, or root for the White Sox. (Ew.) But let’s say the president gives you a task. And not an unreasonable task, either. Something you’ve actually already said you’d do and just haven’t, for whatever reason. Then the leader of the free world comes along and says do it. You have to do it, right?

So it’s Monday, October 5, the Map Room of the White House. Bill Simmons, five days into his post-ESPN career, newly signed by HBO but still technically a free agent as a writer, has just spent the past hour interviewing President Obama for the cover of GQ’s 2015 Men of the Year issue. The hard part (for Bill) is now over, and the hard part (for Obama) is about to begin. (The photo shoot. The president hates them. Sorry, POTUS.) Right now we’re sort of in between, so Simmons and Obama are shooting the shit, and they immediately go to the Venn-diagram intersection of their two brains: basketball.

They talk about LeBron versus Jordan, the consequences of competitive cruelty, the Bulls’ hopes this season, the recent visit to the White House by Duke’s title-winning basketball team. The president’s tone has shifted now that the formal interview is over. His measured cadence gets faster and more jocular. He turns into a guy talking sports. And like most guys do in situations like this, he starts giving Bill shit. Or, actually, he resumes giving Bill shit. Specifically, Obama razzes Bill for not publishing a word in, like, months. The first thing out of Obama’s mouth as he entered the Map Room, before his right foot even crossed the threshold, was a good-natured grumble about Bill’s absence from Grantland, the late, great website Simmons founded at ESPN. Now Obama’s coming back to it, in a way that—you be the judge—kinda sounds like a command from the commander in chief:

"You're good on TV, but you're better as a writer. Get working on those columns. And when are you gonna update that basketball book?” Obama is referring to Simmons’s 2009 best seller about the NBA, The Book of Basketball, which Simmons has long promised to update. "Come on, man,” Obama says. "I got a lot of assignments for you.”

So thanks for the great work, Bill, but now it’s your move. The president does not like to be kept waiting.