An NBA Mailbag, LeBron’s Next Move, and the Wild Paramount-WBD Merger With David Jacoby and Matt Belloni

The Bill Simmons podcast is brought to you by Fandall Sportsbook.

“We are also brought to you by the Ringer podcast network.”

We're on the rewatchables. It is officially CR month. That's right, Chris Ryan, and picked a bunch of movies. We did secario on Monday night. We did it live on Netflix.

We watch on Netflix, we watch on Spotify, wherever you're a podcast. We have Fargo, I mean, next Monday, and then the next one after that is going to be to live in die in LA, which we've been waiting to do forever, a classic. Then the fifth one is going to be LA confidential, and we're going to let everybody vote for the fourth one.

If you follow the rewatchables on Twitter, loves and choices for the fourth one, they're some pretty good.

We're in 12 movies, vote every day for one of the four, and then we'll make the finals

the fourth day between the three waves. So that's what we're doing. Coming up on this podcast, Dave Jakobi, my old friend from my Grandland days, my years, pandas. He is coming on to do a meal bag with me.

We have like two thirds of a meal bag, but some really, really fun basketball questions, some good nicknamed stuff as well. Then Matt Bellany, who you can hear on the town, we're going to talk about the Warner Brothers Paramount, Crazy Merger, and all the ramifications in the report will affect. So action pack podcast for you today, and take break, bring a project, and then my old

friend, Dave Jakobi. This episode is brought to you by Expedia. You got to love a good deal, whether that's a quarterback on a short, low risk contract, who competes like a top tier quarterback, like a Brock party once upon a time, or Expedia is bundle and save feature, which allows you to combine flights, hotels, and cars, and

“one package for impressive discounts, and not just that, but if you remember, you can book”

and item now, add select items later, and still enjoy bundled savings. For instance, if you're a football fan, you want to go to the championship, conference championship, the Super Bowl, wherever it is, and you don't know your team is going to be in all of something they're in. What do you got to do?

I got to get a hotel, I get a flight, I get a car, Expedia can do all three.

You never know when your team is going to be in a big game.

Use Expedia, now that is a winning strategy booked out with Expedia. Dave Jakob is here, and a Tuesday afternoon, you're the first person that doesn't like the chairs. I do not like the chairs. I don't like the way they look, especially the way they feel like the way they look.

I don't like the way they look. Sink into them too much, and I like a high top, that's been my posture will be better, let's put you pooch, and right now my knees and nipples are at the same plane. I want to see below nipples dating back to Jaylon and Jakobi when we had the first chairs, and I will make fun of you that you're an invertebrate with the camera angle.

Well, if there's someone who wrote a very serious email that was like, you've got serious problems. Who wrote that? It was your stranger. Yes.

If you're just listening to this bill has something that I had in like, on the 1992, what is that thing? It's like, yeah, we've got the bean bag underneath the, because I like to, we're about to do a mail bag. Okay.

I didn't want to have the mail bag. Too low on my lap, is then I'm doing this and coming up. So it's, it's added in a sense. It's a posture move. And plus later, my wife's going to bring me dinner and I'm just going to eat it.

It's like this. It's a posture move. So I did a whole thing about nicknames when Max Keller was here. Cut people pointed out some nicknames that I missed, including downtown Freddy Brown, like to apologize to him.

I'd like to also shout out downtown Julie Brown. Who stole from what? Who stole from what? What? What?

“Dick Watts, the Boston Strangler and Dr. Tony, Dr. Duncanstein, remember loving that as a kid?”

The microwave Vinnie Johnson, the mailman, the chief, white chocolate was a big mess. The glove, big country, AK47, and then currently Greek-free, time-lord, and slow-mo. I bring off this up because the whole point of the initial thing was, we're just not good at nicknames anymore. We're lazy, we do initials, we do acronyms, and we just don't put it in thought

into it. I've got to take on this. That's it. One thing about the sports media world that really bothers me is when athletes launch their brand or their logo, it's either their number or their initials.

No one has done this right since Kobe Bryant, who's like stole it from a sword on like kill bill.

Yeah, but like a couple of times.

Always just initials. It's just like, or like, VA seven or something, it's just like, why can't we be more creative than this? So, in Ron, from San Francisco, has a theory on this that we've got amazing. He blames Kevin Durant, tough year for Kevin Durant, and he says, Kevin Durant deserves

blame for rejecting a potential pantheon level nickname, the Slim Reaper, Slim Reaper, and instead asking people to call him the servant, which no one wanted to do. Players realized they could just reject nicknames that didn't fit their brand and now we have this vanilla corporate nicknames instead, just to thought. So, we put this on Kevin Durant's a lot.

Very fair, but Durant's a little was great. Slim Reaper was great, and then he's like, I'm the easy money sniper. Okay, easy money sniper was an all-time great nick name. We could have called him slim, we could have called him Reaper, and it also it visualizes it.

“Like, if slowmo is a great nick name, but you can't like see it, you know what I mean?”

But you could see him, they got the graphics of him in the hood and with the sickle and everything. So yeah, maybe it is Kevin Durant's fault. My thing with nicknames, like slick Watts is a good example. The nickname has to become how we say the person's name.

Like, we've had some nicknames over the years when it's like the nicknames over here. I even didn't really love the answer for Alan Averson, and he just, it was just these are com AI.

I don't know people like to push the answer, but he never personally called him the answer.

I always call him. It doesn't roll over. It doesn't roll off the tongue. Ultimately, where you want to be, is like, Clyde, the glad. Yes.

Nick. You know, short in your name. What are you doing? So anyway, Peter T had an idea. There was a lot of con-knipple suggestions, which people know, people know how to get

it in the mail bag. This brand con-knipple. That's key. You said he's something that questions, I was like, "Oh, these people are just dangerous."

Yeah, listen. Yeah. It's a human algorithm. Peter T said, he said, "Millbag nicknames submission. Con snow feels illegitimate son and Charlotte."

Like John Snowman. I remember him. He said, "It's a Duke fan in Colorado.

I love that your pot is now 25% yolk-ish and knipple-tuck."

I resent that, because I feel like it's 50% Boston talk, 25%-- I'm taking the over on the 50. OK. OK, here, now, let's get to the good stuff. There was a lot of stuff on Castle.

What do we do in here? This guy needs to nick them. I think people are great, right? Can I push back? Con is a unique name in itself.

And Castle is a great last name. But why do we need to upgrade these? Well, just wait. Jude from Westport said it had to be something Castle or medieval related.

He proposes the dungeon. He's locking someone down. He's sending them to the dungeon. Like, I'm not against it. You've been locked down to the dungeon.

Jacob, and a few people suggested this one. It's calm the mode. Because the mode is perimeter defense for a castle. I don't think you can't cross the mode. Oh, do you know what you haven't thought of?

Well, do you bring them off-night? Oh, for our-- Do you be a Mitchell? Yeah. That's a great nickname.

You don't like French nickname. My green yelling, nobody is crossing the mode. No, but he's great. A few people suggested this one.

“And I think it's the winner for stuff in Castle.”

Checkmate. Sure. You don't like it? No, I like it. I like it.

And checkmate! I don't know if it's for the game. I want to hear somebody test drive it. Con, a lot of people go in Defcon 3 or Defcon 7, which is his number. Not quite there.

Con, air doesn't really work. No. And then a couple people suggested 2K. 2K's good. 2K's not good.

2K's not bad. 2K's not bad. 2K had 35 last thing. That's not bad. It's good as you heard the last one.

Just one thing about the answer. It does the word answer doesn't roll off the tongue the same way that 2K does. Do you see 2K had 9/3 last night? It's pretty good. The question.

The bigger questions. Do you need a nickname if your name is Con, which is, so if we had a nickname, Zara, the nickname, Zara probably like, we're good. His name is Con. It stands out.

Yeah. And it'd be so hard.

“I mean, if you're going to do something with Con, could nipples?”

Name? Yeah. Nips is right there. Nipsy? Nipsy?

It's right there. We ended up in Resso. A bunch of people for Jalen Durran suggested bull Durran. Sure. Not bad.

Sure. This was the best one. I can't believe how good it is. More than one suggestion. So I don't want to give any credit.

Josh Giddie. Don't. Just don't. Just don't. Just don't.

Just don't. Just don't. Josh Giddie. The Giddler. The Giddler had a triple double.

That's right. He could have the old 90s poster with like he's dressed as the Riddler, but it's instead

I'm not sure.

Maybe like October, Josh Giddie deserved this nickname together, but like, it's too close

to something else. All right. So your favorite is 2K? Yes. Dan from Denman Island in Canada suggested he was one of the checkmate suggestions

for Castle. Where's Dan? Men Island. I don't mean to Canada. He wanted to, he suggested for a case on Wallace Twitch, because he has such fast Twitch

reflexes that we just start calling them twists. I don't think he needs a name. There's an exa, a motor cross, a mental militia guy named Twitch. Okay. He was great.

This is the best one. I don't think he has the right person for this, but it's one of the best names I've ever heard. He said for Jalen Brown to call him a jalapeno, because this is what my group of friends who have a basketball draft call him because of a type-up, but it also fits for

and he's on a heater. That's a better name for somebody you play pickup basketball with. It's like a friend one, we call him jalapeno, because he just gets hot in this game. You don't like jalapeno? A type-up?

“I don't, you know, any nickname you have to sort of like explain with more than one sentence”

that I'm out. Do you like jalapeno as a he check nickname though? Only for like one of my friends. Okay. Yeah.

So our best one is 2K. 2K. All right. So Alex Lyon's wrote in, "There's this guy, Robby of V-Lef, from a scene Lewis, the guy with the goggles, the 6th and 10th center, you've seen him comes basketball, he has three

nicknames, "Cream of Dool Jabar." I'm in. Steph Blurry and Milt Chamberlain, all of them, so maybe he'll say the "Cream of Dool Jabar" is it? "Cream of Dool Jabar."

Steph Blurry is pretty good too. Okay. Next question is from a D-Bob in New York, "Who do you think will be the top five players in the league? Five years from now."

So I'll be the 2013-31 season. He said it's a fun exercise.

You never would have predicted "Share" or "Wemby" top five, five years ago.

The top five players in 2021 were Janis, Yoke, Jim B. Curry, Luca, LeBron, and some order. To me in 2013-31, there's two locks in Luca, but anyway, he's basically like, "Who do you have?" This is harder than I thought it would be.

I thought I agree. This was harder than I thought it would be. One thing that I'm not going to allow is, "Ugo Gonzalez" being part of the conversation. "Do you see him last night?" It's interesting.

It's interesting. Yeah. But this was harder than I thought, because my question for you is, like, there's a couple of there's a bunch of 29-year-olds who will still be in their prime. But when I'm looking at some players, I'm like, Luca will be 32.

Well, can we do the chalk picks? Yeah, for just going chalk, it's Wemby and Luca SGA. Whoa. Luca and SGA are 32 years old. I'm just saying chalk.

Oh, David's best. David's best for five years from now. Safeest bets. Okay. And I would have Cooper Flag as my fifth chalk guy.

It would be 24 at that point. Everything we've seen, how much better he's gotten just in the last two years. Luca and SGA at 32, I started to think that there are others out there when you'll get you to be 36, you probably want to be playing. He's out.

Yeah. I wrote down, I had different categories, K, the Maxi. Yeah. There's a lot of 29-year-olds. K, Maxi, you're on my list as well.

An Edward, it's a B, he's in.

“Edward, Edward, so can we put Wemby and Ant and Bold?”

Yes. Absolutely. Can we put Cooper Flag and Bold or no? It'll be 24. Yes, you can.

I think there's no way he's not awesome in five years. There would have to be some sort of knock-on with Terrible game, but they've been having that conversation. Wemby's in. So Wemby and Flag.

Yes. I could offer you AJ DeBanza, Darren Peterson, DP, DNP, Chet, Amin Thompson, Jalen Johnson, Palo with the big resurgence. Anybody else? John Johnson is on my list.

I'm glad you didn't bring up Tatum. He's going to be too old. He'll be like 33. There's a little bit of... I get right and down, just for crying.

Yeah. But there's a little bit of me that's looking at Maxi, like, I don't know. Could we top five? Because you have to play defense, too. He'd have to be in the low 30s point-wise for like four straight years in a row.

Basically where Mitchell is now, you wouldn't even put Mitchell in the top five, right? No. So probably not. Is there a world in which Jalen Johnson becomes like an all-around jack-a-ball trades, nine assists, and like 25 points of night guy?

“The problem is you have to really win to be in this conversation.”

Yes.

His Duke season didn't go well, and he's never won anything with Atlanta.

So you're really projecting with this.

I don't think there's anybody else in the list that we're missing. So Wemby, it's interesting that you would put Cooper in bold, guaranteed, and not even mention Nipsy. I didn't want to put that on, too, okay? It's a lot.

It's a lot to ask if it's okay.

“I think Kage should be in there, though.”

K, it'll be high 20s at that point. Yes. In 20, 28, 29, so I think he would be my fourth pick, and I'm sorry, I think Luke is still going to be there. But you're 13, Luke, 32 years old.

He's already moves like I'm 30. 9 year old. Yeah, that's what I think about. Luke, you don't get to gain weight or bad, so Matthew relies on athleticism and diminishes over time.

Luke, doesn't do anything. So you wouldn't have SGA if he was still this good in five years. You're now talking about the best guard career anyone's had, other than Michael Jordan. It would be better than Jerry West. It would be better than every guard we've ever had.

I also think they're going to win a lot, too. That's why he might put me. He's borderline there. So two spots for K, Luke, SGA. I think it's hard.

This is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. Well, here's the other thing. There might be somebody, yeah, like we wouldn't have said Anthony Edwards in 2021. There's a number one pick. But we wouldn't have said Anthony Edwards will be one of the five best guys.

And both Edwards and K didn't have a kind of like Cooper Rook year. I'm going to say, Cade, shit. It's hard to leave out SGA, especially now that they're at the villains that we'd need in the NBA. I understand that on Sunday.

Explain to me why Cade won't be better at 29 in five years than SGA. The case would be really physical style, putting miles on in the next four or five years physically, might break down. Okay, there's big physical guards. It's almost like a big physical receiver or something would be the case.

I don't believe that. His team's going to be good. He's going to have to, he's going to have a bulldozer in the whole time.

They're going to bring in a second creator.

Yeah, they'll have something. Yad has bulldozer in a big, bulldozer. That's a great nickname. That's a great nickname. Beef stews.

It's a great nickname. I'm going to say, Cade, you know what? I'm going to say SGA. I don't, I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know about Luke at 32. I have video the other day, which I actually thought was kind of a big deal, and normally I'm like, don't over react to when guys get mad at each other in the bench. I could talk about that for hours.

Here, he was the key piece that I didn't think enough play.

“There was, I think it was Vanderbilt sitting down.”

Yes, it was Vanderbilt. And he was watching all the things. If you watch the video, he's watching them go. And he's like, it's a boring thing that Vanderbilted all year. He's watching, and he's watching, he's watching, J.J.

Walks away. It looks like Luke went out to put his arm out, but J.J. Walks away. And J.J. didn't seem put the arm out. As Luke was putting out, and Luke got mad and stood up.

And I think it was Vanderbilt. He was watching on the corner of his eye and stands up with Luke to block him from chasing J.J.J.J. on the sideline. If you watch everything he's doing, it's just stuff like we're at a bar at 2/3 of the morning in our buddy.

Yeah. It's like, oh, I'm going to go over there and we're just kind of watching in the time. It's like, oh, there he goes. Okay, get him out. That was the vibe.

I didn't think it was good. I don't think it was good at all. And the first person that it made me think of was Nico Harris.

And I've said this on the mismatch, but I've always felt like there's just more

to the story of what happened in Dallas. And I think that they hated each other. And he was like, guess what? You can be gone. I have that kind of power.

Yeah. I think it was personal. And I think it was vindictive.

“And I think that he hated seeing Luke every single day, and I think that Luke was disrespectful”

towards him and probably vice versa. This is all. I think clearly thought he was a dick. Exactly. Those things aren't reported.

I'm not reporting anything. But I think that that happened. I think there's a lot of incidents like this behind the scenes that we didn't see. There's two types of people. And I'm in the wrong camp with this.

Like my wife instantly, if something's happening, she knows. Like if, like when you have little kids and the kid is going down and walking towards crawling toward the pool or something, and there's the type of goes, oh, no, that's bad. And then you act, or there's the person who sees that and they're moving immediately, that was Jared Vanderbilt.

He saw it immediately.

I don't think I would have stood up for what the second person said, what are you?

I'm the one who would have, I would have sat there for the extra second, been like, this is bad and Luke will have walked by me before I realized that I should be stopping it. Because you're, I don't know if you're a compliment, you're an excellent room reader. But not, not working here. Not the instinctive.

This is going, this is bad. What are you? Which side are you?

I enjoy the conflict. I enjoy tension. I enjoy the just the weirdness of it all and like saying things that I probably can't take back and probably shouldn't say. The best version of this I've ever seen was our friend, J.L. and Rose.

There was one time, one of the NBA shows we're doing. And there was people are arguing, I was one of the people arguing. And we're walking off after the thing in J.L. and goes, turn your mic off, Bill. We didn't. We didn't.

We didn't. We didn't. We didn't. We didn't. We didn't.

You don't have to say it. I know you're going to say something that you can't regret. Turn your mic. And that microphone is going to broadcast to the truck. Shout out to him.

Yeah. All right. Next question. Gus from Texas. I saved this fire forever.

We're going to do a mail back together. He said, long time BS pot fan, thanks Gus. Long time fan of the challenge.

I always love when those two worlds collide, but it's been a minute.

If the NBA did a rival style season like the challenge, should your favorite pairings be, who would be the CT West team that would dominate, who would be the messiest, funny. So I sent this to you. I just want to tell Gus that I love him very much. It's a great question.

It's a two-man team. This is the rivals thing that we love. So would they have to be rivals? I spent more time answering this question this afternoon to myself than I did. And then I put into anything I've done professionally in ten years.

You are the right part. This is it. This is your vortex. I saw the things you care about. I've found the perfect pairing from the NBA to go to the challenge.

But what? Those rivals are just the best things. He said rivals, right? So I did think of sort of pairings that would be mismatched, we'll say, right? They're not real rivals.

Because they do a botae and beef stew. That's not going to work. Yeah. I mean, like Dylan Brooks and LeBron, that's not going to work. I was thinking, I was like, they did something like this.

“Do you remember the season that had like Sean Merrimon and CM Punk and like Lolo Jones?”

Yeah, that was. I remember the thing, I was like, this is a Lolo quit. Yeah. And then she came back in the other time.

But I'm never sitting there being like, this can't work.

But the athletes weren't as good at the challenges that you would think. Yeah. And of course, this first person that came to my mind with Johnny bananas, the goat of the challenges and like what makes him good at this and what makes him good at doing this is he's in great shape so you can run the final, right?

He's really good at room reading like we were talking about earlier and playing the social game and finding out who's aligned with who getting the right people out at the right times. So I was thinking of a strategist. So my first answer is going to be a team that I think would be successful.

So not Kevin Durant, not Kevin Durant, but my the fun answer is a team that I really want to see. I'll give you that next. I got I landed on teammates, they're not rivals, but it would be Kate and Ron Holland. Because Kate is very mature, very measured.

He's very intelligent and articulate. Kate and Ron Holland, this is where I ended up, and I've got a fun one though. Okay. The fun one is obviously.

“So why Ron Holland, though, over other people on the team?”

I think that. He said to get athlete. Yes. I think that his type of athleticism, he can climb up stuff. So he like, he'll be like, he'll be like, the puzzle guy.

Yes, exactly. That's because I've obviously, your mind goes to be steward with everyone. I think he might be just a little too like big for this. And I think that Ron Holland has a nice little level of crazy. And I think Kate will be sort of like the brains of the operation, Holland will be like

a little intimidating and like a little wild card for the being the bunk beds and Kate will be like, let's, let's bring over Dream on Green. We got a lot of fun. Yes. And my favorite pairing for this, and I used to coach, is Lamello Ball and Joe Masula.

Just imagine like Joe Masula, he's got a blindfold on in Lamello Ball's outside of the fence. It's to your right. It's to your right. And Joe Masula's just like, well, the fuck I'm out of the house.

He just rips the blindfold off and just chases after Lamello's just laughing and running around in circles. Like that pairing to me would be the one I would want to see the most. That's great. It would be perfect.

Joe Masula should be a challenge.

“I think this is, this would be an unbelievable vehicle for Dream on Green too.”

I think Dream on would be great. I think he'd be the most compelling character. He'd definitely get kicked out of at least if he did 10 seasons, he'd get kicked out of three of them. He'd complained about all kinds of stuff.

He'd probably get into TJ at least once or twice. I wouldn't mind to rant either. Well, you see with him with Tyler Hero and the Miami bench and like, yeah, I watched that starting five show.

Yeah, but to rant, they would just team up and get out in the first episode.

What would you do? Oh, that car Maria, nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody watching this does work talking back. We're talking to alternate language. Who would be the Laurel of this, the big boy?

Oh, I love Laurel so much. Yeah. Probably Steve Studger. Yeah, Steve Studger. Well, Dream on more of like, the Laurel's nasty is more of the Laurel's nasty.

Who would be the good guy?

Would be Gary, everybody looks like everybody loves Mark Long. Everybody loves Mark Long. How many times? That was fun. That was fun.

Thanks, goes. Sean from North Carolina. I wanted this question for you because you have kids. I only say you have a couple questions. You don't know a lot of this.

I know. So we used to live in a proper country. I would catch all sorts of classics on TV, including the slightly sanitized version of die-hearted TBS. Streaming services are great, but I wish they had a cable edit option that way I could

show my 10 year old kid Terminator Terminator 2 without it being inappropriate. Do you think Netflix should add this? A parent cut of different movies?

“Well, and would you show that you watch this with your kids?”

You have older kids and I was around when they were younger.

And I learned one thing that I've taken from the Simmons Household is just like, you

want to see Halloween and you're six years old? Cool. Here's a kitchen knife. I mean, it's just like, are like cursing in front of your kids. You were very like, we chose to move the fire, you know what I mean?

And I do that at my house as well. When it comes to content, like, I mean my son, he's 12, we watch a psychocular over the weekend. You know what I mean? Like horror movies, sex scenes, I'll be like, close your eyes, you know what I mean?

But he doesn't really do it. So that's the thing. You just know where the bad parts are and you cover, so I feel like we need the internet. Not necessary to do this. I agree.

And I also, I took a page from your book. Like let the kids watch whatever they're going to do it anyway. Yeah. It's fine. You can either like put your head in the sand and pretend like you're controlling

it or do it with them and just kind of put hands over there. One of my daughters gets super scared so she won't watch. Fine. Like you're watching Terminator with your kid and all of a sudden that guy's like, I came across time for you, Sarah, and you know they're about to get it on.

Like, you know what, we're in a fast forward this part. Yeah. I'll just tell you that it's going to get romantic here, we're not going to watch it together and you just move on. My kids will won't watch things from the 20th century.

I came across time for you, Sarah, one of the great pickup lines in the history of movies. Like, what woman's not at least making out with you after that? You came across time? I came across time for you, Sarah.

Thank you. This is from Alex and Delray Beach and I've gotten to see me a bunch of times from people about the O304 King, so you're familiar with them. Chris Weber's out for his tournacy on the postseason previous year. Pasia has his envy, reign of MVP season, one of the most random top foreign VPs ever.

A four mentioned white chocolate, right? They're 40, no, he's gone by then they might be. They're 43 and 15 through 58 games. Weber comes back and as Alex points out, the return was disastrous. Stay Aquavitch's efficiency plummeted.

The King's lost 10 of their final 16, thought of the four seed, bounced in round one. Now, Tatum is coming back, his history destined to repeat itself. So there is a doppelganger for this comeback that I forgot about. Bill, I thought we were going to talk about the Kings. Okay.

“And then it's very, and you're just like, was it a mistake to remember this Kings thing that?”

Not really. Yeah, I didn't really remember it either. Yeah. I remember the page of piece, but I remember Lake of series in like Diva, to like, they're kind of free.

Give us your quick, will Tatum scrub the Celtics take, and now you've done on the mismatch already. Yeah. No, adding good players to your team. And that's how it is.

It helps. Is it better than Bailey Schein? Yeah, Bailey Schein. It's way like 14 minutes, too. It's like, you know, adding good players to basketball teams doesn't screw them up.

Sorry. Say one thing in the weird documentary, they've made about as come back. Wait, you're watching another. No, this is the thing on Celtics Reddit. He said he didn't come back to be a role player.

It's like, it's fine. It's fine. Okay. One of my basketball philosophies is like, there's only one ball. I hate.

There's only one ball. Yeah. Share the ball. I guess what, if you score Iceport, Jason Tatum makes teams better. We'll be fine.

Yeah. Steve B writes, what if Steve Curtis not have a contract for next year, because Steph

is winding down, and Wemby is winding up, and he's replacing George Popovich to make a second

run in a dinosaur state.

“I just like going to call him George Popovich, I think Steve B too.”

Steve B. I was wondering, so let's say he leaves this year, and the wires are going to be added to playoffs. They're, I think they're going to shut up step down, and just my Spidey senses are like, he said, yeah, it's going to be like 10 more days.

There's only 30, nine days left in the season. What are they going to, even when he comes back, they already lost Jimmy Butler, they're not good to begin with. What are they going to play two playing games with Steph with a not 100% need? That team should go for a lottery pick.

KPs already got illnesses. Yeah, KPs not coming back, that's like, that's it as well. Is Horford going to carry you to the second place? Coral leaves. Curl leaves.

Thanks for everything. I'm going to take a year off. I'll do media. Hopefully, comes to the ringer. Then San Antonio who knows, and if anything ever happens on that team, then you wait for that

media for your your stock just rises, you see, that every time.

Right?

“So you don't think he's going to replace George pop of it?”

Oh, he's going to replace George pop of it because Mitch Johnson's doing a good job. That's the problem. It's like a problem. I think that's going to be available to him. Mitch Johnson wasn't supposed to be the head coach.

Dave's first. No. He buss him. Could you see a front office thing? Maybe.

Where it's like he's not on the bench, but he's just sort of like part of the... I can see, I honestly, my honest answer for this is I don't think he coaches again after this. The key, he did it since 1415, did 11 years. He set up his son to potentially be a coach down the road, he won four titles.

He won.

What haven't he been doing with the, he won 1, 2, 3, 5 with the bulls and spurs.

Yes. What nine titles? It's done. It's a wrap. Just to media.

He's going to be on the rewatchables. Yeah. Right. I love Tabs. Martin and New York rights.

Where does Elhorford rank on the, "I left my marriage for the stripper twice and to know what surprise it did at work out less?" You saved that one for me. You saved that one for me. He left his out the twice because he thought the title window was closed only to be

instantly proven wrong. 20 Gaves into the season and he did a twice. It is a tough beat for how.

I never understood the, I'm going to go chase the title with Golden State part.

What title would do you think he was chasing? You're in a conference with OKC.

“Well, what do you think's going to happen over there?”

Also, they need you because it's like post is sort of their other big at the time before they got KP. I'm back to the worst. I never really saw it this season for the Warriors. I thought they'd go over the 46 or whatever, but I didn't think that.

But what did everybody say last year after the added Jimmy Butler, if you look at the numbers, they were the best team in the history of the NBA. I was kind of like, yeah, they were like in a playoff game for like two months in a row to kind of like get in to the plan. The thing about NBA history, the older you get, the harder your chances to win the

NBA title. That's one of the things I've learned. And the only chance you have is if it's like a weird down year for the league where there's not a lot of stars and there's a couple bad drafts, some of the younger players that in pan out, then you can kind of sneak in, leagues not like that right now.

The leagues flutter. No. You're not winning it. I even look at Doran on Houston and Houston, you know, we'll see what happens with them. They've hung around.

They're going to be a three seed, but they're still going to have to rely on Doran. It for 10 straight weeks in the playoffs to win a title in his 37. Just think it's unrealistic. We saw in 22, remember, Tatum took a team in that net series. He was 33 net series.

There's four years older than that. Let's take a break and then I have some more mail back questions for you. The Bill Simmons podcast is brought to you by Fandwell. Fandwell's putting you in control right from tip off. That's right.

Get to choose your reward. Play it safe. Go for it. Whatever your style. You're in control.

Figure out some sort of bet for the Celtic Charlotte game. But I think it's a big close game.

“I think it's going to have a lot of points.”

I predict, my guy 2k, conknipple, some threes from him, but just in general, I think it's going to be a fast pace, a lot of points game. I'll figure out what my final play is. Check it out on my Twitter account. No matter how you play, Fandwell's giving you the power to choose your word on your game,

this NBA season. And to fandwell.com/bs to make your pick, get in the game and play it your way. Twenty-one-one plus select states are 18 plus DC, contact your Wyoming restrictions. Pi C terms at sportsbook.fandwell.com, game problem call 1-800-Gamebar call 888-789-777 or visit ccpg.org/chat Connecticut.

This episode is brought to you by Micklobe Ultra. What makes basketball so exciting? All the superior skill on the court. This has been the case in my whole life. The craziest thing, I mean, when he stuff he's doing every game, there's two, three

Wendy moments a game, you're like, I don't know if I've ever seen that. The number one thing for me is when he does the screen and roll, he's going to the basket, so many throws him an alley hoop and he just catches it and dunks it without jumping. It's an alley hoop, but it's not an hoop, it's just kind of an alley. And every time he does it, I'm like, I've definitely 100% ever seen that anymore.

It's a superior play, superior play is aren't just for the NBA, though, try Micklobe Ultra. The official beer partner of the NBA and a crisp refreshing, superior light beer. It's the beer Max Calerman, he just told me that, plus to give me your chance to win court side seats, custom merch and more Micklobe Ultra. Superior is worth playing for, enter now at micklobeouture.com/portside.

All right, more mailbag with Jacobi, Mercury P, I don't know if that's a nickname or a real name. I'm so glad you're here for this question. He's proposing to new end of the season of words.

I'm so glad you're here for this question. He's proposing to new end of the season of words.

The Marcus Morris Award, who is the first member of the team, is the first member of the team.

He's proposing to new end of the season of words. The Marcus Morris Award for worst best brother. Oh. So you're the best brother, but you're the worst part of all the best brothers. The worst best brother, and of all the best brothers of the combos, you're the worst one

of all the best. The ones who ball would win this year. Now that, no, we'll go into it. And but he also has the Seth Curry Award for best worst brother. So I have this so confused. Mercury P is guy from the world right there.

So there's really three categories. There's worst worst brother, which would be worse for others. The nurses. They would win these sad. They're nice guys.

Yeah. They would win the award for worst. Worst brother is for players. They're nice guys. But they're the worst players.

But they're the worst players. They're going for coffee with the, the, the, the, the cool part of the brothers. We did a draft. They were the big last. Yes.

Best worst brother.

“So of all the second best brothers, who is the best second best brother?”

That's got to be Oscar Thompson, right? Um, yeah, yeah, I'm trying to think. I'll give you the answer. I'm going to be Mo Wagner, Champenne, Aaron Hall Day. No, not a lot there.

Yeah, Champenne. Yeah, Champenne. I'm trying to, you know, Cam Christie. One of the Spencer's pick one. So yeah.

But here's where it gets interesting. The worst best brother. So the brother comes better brother. The better brother, who's the worst better brother? Oh, God.

So I'll give you five candidates. Okay. Keegan Murray and his brother, Chris. Max Christie and his brother, Cam. Caleb Martin, brother Cody.

Tias Jones, brother, Tray. Or Justin Champenne and his brother, Julian.

I think the answer is Tias Jones.

It's a little unfair because Jones and the Martin Twins are kind of on the other side of their peak. Do you know what I mean? The answer is the answer. We're going to need a word from the other side of the shows.

Probably Tias Jones. Wouldn't have been Tias Jones last year. Because the worst. Maybe it's just playing better. Yeah.

Interesting. Best worst best brother here the job it is.

“But do you know how many brothers are in the league right now?”

More than there's ever been in the past. It's 19 brother combos combos. Yeah, or 19 sets two brothers. Yeah. Wow.

That's wait. 19 combos. That's 38 people. There's a place among three holidays and three and into kupos.

We've 40 brothers. So if there's 50 and there's 500, it's like 10% of the league. Turns out DNA is important. Yeah. Matt T says, me and Nick Wright miss the most obvious coaches for the black versus

white all start game gimmick that next suggested. I'm not at liberty to speak on this idea. No. I'm like a phone. He said Larry Bird should coach the black team and magic Johnson should coach the

white team and the bridge generation divides and then you flip it with the coaches. All right. I really like that idea. - No, I didn't see, I'm gonna push back on this. - One of the scenarios,

'cause I've thought about this a lot too, it's not gonna work. I've played this, I've played this, I've played it. - I've played it, I've played it. - I've played it. - I've played it. - I've played it.

- Oh, I don't forget. - I don't forget. I was like, this is not gonna work, but one of my favorite hypothetical scenarios in this hypothetical game is the white team jumps out

to like a 10 point lead in the first three minutes.

Black team calls it time out. And in that huddled the discussion that Black team has, is just to be a fly on the wall, listen to that.

“I think if you have a Caucasian head coach,”

you don't get that same conversation. That's my concern there. And also the race where they would come along. - This is from William McGlinn and Sidney Australia. - No.

- He said he just watched K to go for a 27 and 17 and thought about how we got wave for no reason by the Sacramento Kings. He mentions how it's interesting that this has happened more than you think.

The calves wave, Isaiah Hartinstein. The Grizzlies wave, Stephen Jackson. Danny Green got wave by the calves picked up by the spurs. Alex Kruz took out wave by OKC, picked up by the lakers. And he asked what my favorite one of all those were.

And I think it's interesting. I think it's Stephen Jackson because they actually win the O3 title because it has Stephen Jackson played in the playoffs. - If you go back and let me say Danny Green got a bad bad.

Danny Green as well, 2013, but they don't win

- Remember game one game two?

“We have the 35 and 14 he had in the game six.”

That's just completely forgotten in history. The Danny Green was the best player on the 4th, and he was. - But I think it's Stephen Jackson because he actually swung the title. - Yes.

- If you go back and watch those games, he's like the number two guy in the spurs. - And he brings all the smoke. And he brought us a bunch of joy. He was very pivotal in the melee.

- He's also really fun to have around the office when I was at ESPN and LA. - We gave him his first media chance on the Grandland basketball. - He would, he had a real presence.

He had a real presence around the office. Like you knew when the elevated doors opened and stat came out. - Yeah, it is a good time. - Glenn Shefford says, I'm listening to the podcast with Kellerman,

crazy that you went from discussing nicknames and discussing Darren Peterson's tattoo Michael Myers. - And the bookie man is sitting right there

as an incredible nickname.

Do you like Darren Peterson more if his nickname was the bookie man? And we also haven't had a bookie man. - Bookie man is pretty good. - Because we had bookie.

- Yes. Bookie man is pretty good. - The bookie man is 45 last night. - And the book, there's been a research in the bookie man lore because of John Wick

and Bobby Yaga, so like it is time to come back. - He that's the nickname, Bobby Yaga. - Too hard to say. Bobby Yaga goes down, Bobby. - Bobby.

- Yeah, but Bookie man would be a really good nickname, but I don't, I think that person has to be scared. - Multiple readers were disappointed in me that I didn't stick up for Darren Peterson more when he has a Michael Myers tattoo.

And I think Bobby Yaga is having a buddy. - I know I do hit him, Michael Myers tattoo. - It's pretty strong statement. All right, Ryan and Chicago wants to know, what five events would you include

if there was a winner in Olympics pentathlon? - Distance speed skating, cross-country skiing and downhill skiing are the most obvious three. Would you round it out with ski jumping and lose? ski jumping, definitely.

I don't know about losing. - Jumping and lose. - But so yeah, distance speed skating,

“I think you have to do the fast speed skating too, right?”

- Yes, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. - Cross-country skiing would be the last event. downhill skiing, I think ski jumping's the fifth and I think we're good.

- ski jumping would be amazing.

- So what are we creating? - Exactly. The best five? - Some pentathlon. - Just a random pentathlon.

We're not going to do any figure skating. - You're skating. - I think 10, 10, 10, 10. - If you go in no hockey, no figure skating. - Okay, this is just like, so it's sort of like,

one athlete can do all of these things. - Yeah, 'cause when you think about the catthon, it's like jumping, running, endurance. - Little shot, putty, ear, ear, ear, ear, ear. - It's all these things, so for winter Olympics,

who would have to be skiing, skating, endurance, would have to be the five. - The jump would be good night. - I like a little jump. - The jump would be, so the jump's not fun anymore,

'cause everybody, there's no danger and everybody's good at it. But if you had these guys where it's like, "The jump is as weak as today." - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

- It's always hasn't trained much for the jump.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Okay, this is from Joshua Taber, College Station, Texas. If you had to bet your entire network on one current NBA part of Winnie, at least three championships over the next 10 years, who are you taking?

- Okay, it was a different proposal for each of us, 'cause the network part, but I had trouble with this.

“I think the only answer is Victor Wemme-Nialma.”

- I had SGA and then Wendy. - I thought about SGA, 'cause the okay C situation, just exactly, they're going to cycle in more young players so they'll stay under the cap. - To be an interesting fan-do feature

that they couldn't do because you'd have to realize over 10 years. - But I think SGA would be like a minus 150 favorite. - I think so too. And I wrote down in my notes, just institutional knowledge.

Just like, they've won a championship before the same front office. - Same for those next staff. You know, they're going to have to cycle through some roster spots, but they've got tons of picks,

sorburn, hope it's their last two first round picks. I don't even play. - You know, it's funny about sorburn. So the Cooper is in okay C, they had the pick swap. It's part of the Quattray last year.

Okay C gets Cooper's pick, they take sorburn. I think this is what happened. And then the Cooper Scott, number 30. And they took Neeter House. - Neeter House, I bought Stock Last Week.

Had a whole argument with my toll and my seats about it 'cause we went through the Minnesota game and I'm like, I really like this guy and he's like, no way. And I'm like, I'm buying the stock right now.

So tolerance by witness, he's good. He's young and runs jumps and I fucking like him. - If you like, they were like, Zubach, you had a great year for his last year. - Or they're not exactly working this year.

- They're really scary. - But we've got co-canon New Year highs. Are John Jake, the two-glimer Schmidt coming off the bench. He's good. He's good.

- Cooper, sir, reviewer. - Kind of interesting. If Garland can come back and actually look like the Garland

which we haven't seen in over a year. - Yeah, I know. - Like 'em though.

“- I understand why they did what they did.”

They're kind of interesting. - That trade was great. For everybody. - If you get somewhere of 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 pick, I've started to do work on this draft.

So they get the Pacers pick, if it's 5, 3, 9. Otherwise it gets pushed like six years. - Mm-hmm. - There's like fucking awesome scores in that range. Every guy from 5 to 9 is a guy who could average

like 25 points a game in the NBA at some point. Maybe. - There's just a 40 point game in college basketball, like every week. - These guys are like real every week.

- Eight cops my favorite out of all of 'em. Like eight cops gonna come in the league and immediately be a guy. - So anyway, I thought that was a good trade. So we have S.J. and Wemby, who would you put 30?

Or Hugo Gonzalez. (laughing) - I can't make a case for flag really. I think it's S.J. and Wemby. - Two hundred and say what you're gonna do.

- Think about it. - Three championships. - In 10 years, last guy had a win three titles. - What do you mean? - Last guy had a win three titles.

- Is your question mark at the end of that? - Yeah. - Oh, stuff curry? - Yeah. - It doesn't happen a lot.

- No. - If you're talking general, generally, generationally. (laughing) - I have no idea you're asking me a question. - Last guy had a win three titles.

It's like what? - Step one four, Duncan one five, Kobe one five. If you're just going in this century, three's like a lot, like bird only went three. - LeBron.

- LeBron one four. - Yeah. - Yeah. - It's hard. - But LeBron was in the O3 draft.

We're talking about the next 10 years. - Yeah. - Curry's the last modern guy who won three titles. Even Durant, only two. Clay Thompson had Zua, who'd book away?

There's second part to this question,

from Joshua Tabor and College Station, Texas. If you had to pick one current NBA star, whose legacy is most at risk of looking completely different in 10 years, either way better or way worse. Who is it in why?

I had a specific guy for it. - Okay, please. - No, you go. I want you to guess. - My problem with this question is all of my answers were negative.

- That's where my head went. - You know what I mean? All my answers were just like bad answers. Mine was Zion and John. - Oh, interesting.

I've already given up on those guys to me that would be a positive change. I think Zion, it could be like 10 years now,

“it could be like, do you remember that guy's on?”

What did I explain to me in the NBA? - I think Lucas, the answer to this. - Oh. Is that kind of the thing on the Sunday pod? Something that I noticed with Lucas MVP's,

how we only had a top three on a top four, or heard that? - And I wasn't doing that because-- - I'm intrigued. - But I wasn't doing it because I was like, he should have more, it's like,

'cause we do that with a bra and it's stupid. The only person who he, he definitively say, should have more MVP's than they won, is Michael Jordan. He should have three more MVP's. He should have won nine, I think he won six, whatever it was.

But the three that he didn't get, it's fucking stupid. - Yeah, when you go back, it's like-- - I can't believe he did win that year. Michael Jordan. - Yeah, also like, would you rather call it a little bit?

- The nine to seven one is one of the worst ones. But the 93 was ridiculous, one barking one. - Yeah. - And there was another one in like 89 or 90. But with Luca, this is next year's gonna be year nine.

- I'm intrigued by this bill. But what if he just turns out to be like, Dominique Wilkins, who made the finals once? And it's like statistically the most awesome,

and he's in, in, in, in, never without these grades.

And then it's like, it, one top three MVP, one top four MVP, only made the finals once. And that's just this kind of his career. - All right, counterpoint. - Counterpoint is the ceiling still high.

- Well, it's not that is, his style of play. We were just like 10 minutes ago talking about him in five years being one of the best players in the league. And I also think that what happened to him in this trade, however it happened, or whatever it really happened

behind the scenes, I have no idea what actually happened. But he ended up, he like teleported to the lakers. You know what I mean? And his team is not built for him. So we, we've saw what happened.

When Nico did a very good job building a team for Luca Donut. - Chronica stance. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He did a really good job.

And we were also bringing this guy, you know, over the P.J. Washington and Gaffer to whatever. If you did the lakers are not built for Luca

“to be successful, and I think that when the Bron is gone,”

they will build a team for Luca to be successful, and then he'll have some good years. - I see you're a glass have fallen that. - I am. - I think there's a Tatum,

Tatum coming off the Achilles in a possibly negative way.

Just like he made first team on BA a few times,

he is two top foreign BPs, but can he get back to where he was? Or was that the peak? - Or like Jalen Brown, sort of like stays in this number one spot and he sort of perpetually sort of goes into like a role. - Yeah, the guy I had was La Mela.

What if La Mela, what if Zach had some good stuff about him on my pots on a night? What if we are now at this awesome La Mela moment

And he's remembered as this really fun guy

who's not a place to be talking to and just like, "Oh man, remember we were right about La Mela, "he's awesome, you know I love La Mela so much." He brings me so much joy to watch. I'm so glad that you're now on this team.

We argued about La Mela before he was drafted. Do you remember that? - It took me years to warm up. - I was in on La Mela early and I said to something just match, every time he has the ball, he's just looking around,

he's like, what's the coolest that I can do with the basketball right now? - But all he wants to do is cool stuff. - As they've gotten better, he's pulled it back a little bit. He's become more of a winning player.

“I think then just I'm out here to have fun and make highlight.”

- Yes, and one La Mela thing. - With that said, he did drive the hummer across the garden into, or across the yellow lines into that car, and that was very concerning. - That was crazy. - That was crazy.

- I'm looking at my phone. 'Cause I saw it, and I was just like that makes no sense. It's not an intersection, he's not making a turn. - Wasn't great. - I would say that the judge will still scare me,

but I like where it's heading. - I know you're watching a lot of Hornets games. - I do. - And I do want to get your take on this. This weird substitution patterns

in the end of the fourth quarter with La Mela ball. - Well, I think they're trying to, it's 27 minutes a game. I think sometimes they'll put a more defense line up. - But it's not offense defense though.

- Say it was last year, that was one of the things where they just started benching within the games. They seemed very concerned about putting too many minutes on them and kind of like, it's like when you have kids, and you have a win with the kids,

and you're like, we're having a really fun time with the ball. Let's go. - Yeah, before somebody bad happens.

“- Of course, I just feel sometimes like,”

he'll be not in there with three minutes left, and I'm like, oh, I guess they're gonna finish without La Mela, and then with like two minutes left, they'll put them in. - Yeah, it's weird. - Corey Wallace writes,

"Just listen to the alien rewatchables. Bravo for pointing out how much cat suck in general." (laughing) I like to tell people that the bigger cats get the more likely they are to hunt you for sport.

The bigger dogs get, they still lick your face and want pets like all good boys do. Also, I could go on and on, cats should endorse, they cover, said shit with their paws, they want them to table some counters.

- What are we doing here? There needs to be more negative coverage of cats and media. This is wild.

First of all, I just wanna say,

Mela Rubin is very important to me, and I can't go anti-cat and be pro, it's pro Mela Rubin is I am, so that's put me in a bad way. - I was in the same spot,

even worried about doing this, you know, in general. (laughing) - It is a good point though, when you, especially if, is your Instagram algorithm ever send you cats, like cats like hitting dogs and the face and stuff.

- I did get that same clip, those AI clips that you got, where was like, oh, is the cat's fighting bear? - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - For the first 20 seconds, you're like, oh my god, cats can beat up bears,

and you're like, oh, this is just fake. - It is interesting point that the bigger cats get, the more they become predators, and the cats that we have as pets are just the mini version of those predators, but the first thing that came to mind was,

I think it was that Liam Neeson movie,

“when the wolves were the gray, I think it's called.”

- Yeah, yeah. - Do you remember the wolves? - So that would be the dogs. - Those are dogs, and they are pack hunters, and Liam Neeson was at the edge of his life

for two hours in the cold. - I remember, I was, this is in the 90s, I was dated in this girl and her family at a cat. We were standing in her house and I went down to get a water, and I heard this weird noise, and in the forever house,

the cat had a mouse trapped, and it was like, doing the Michael Madison and Reservoir dogs, like it's like I'm not gonna tell you yet. - Checking the middle. (laughing)

- Really enjoying it. The cat had a mouse there, and I was watching it. It was like, just torture in this mouse, before I finally took it that, I was like, "It's cat's a fucking psycho."

- I love how much you were enjoying it, like a voyeur. - I just didn't cut it, even though I was watching. - It was like, I was like, I was like, - I was like, "Return my dogs."

- It was like, "God, got you stuck in the corner." - Yeah, cats? - I don't know.

- I've never had a tough go with cats.

I had there's two cats. They were Siamese cats, but they were twins. So they were twins, but they were not conjoined. That makes sense. And they just sat in this closet in my parents' room,

and they hissed at you if you walked by, and I'm like, "What is the point of this?" - Yeah, that's not. - Like, what are we doing? - Stephen or Ohio wants to know,

he was reminiscing about the Ricky Davis year before the Brown came. Which would have been a great 30 for 30. By the way, with the way, they're picking 30 for 30 topics these days. - Might actually be a 30 for 30 for 30, you know.

- He averaged 20.6 points per game. It was the area of the fake triple double. And he said, "Yeah, I know you've talked about how easy "is for a lot of people to get to 20 points in a bad team." But he did want to know who is the worst player

"to ever averaged 20 points per game in a season." So I didn't tell you-- - I'm not pressing this one yet. - I'm not pressing this one yet. - I went on basketball reference.

- Okay.

to averaged 20 games.

“So it was like less people than I thought.”

And I had to do a lot of different stuff with the basketball reference. - I'm trying to think-- - So I went-- I tried to figure out like between 20 and 22 points a game,

seem like a good-- 'cause there were so many people I had to like, narrow down the sample size. And then they'd buy winch shares and PR. - Let me ask you a follow-up question.

- I'm going to give you something we're going to know. - Yeah. - We're in the middle of a scoring boom right now. But is this the scoring peak? Or was this a previous boom in a previous era

where it was like $1,5,560? - Yeah, that was the number. - Yeah, yeah. - So we're taking those people out of the pool. - So all I did was go back to the 19th of mergersies.

Covered up. I'll give you six players who averaged 20 points again. Mike James, 20.3, Ricky Davis, 20.6, Dana Barros, 20.6, made the all-star team down here. - Yeah.

- Never nervous, pervers Allison, 20.0, one year.

- Ha, Tony Campbell, two years that were out in the expansion Minnesota, Timberloves.

“But I think our answer at 20.3 points again.”

Jordan Pool. Jordan Pool average 20 points again. - Oh, counterpoint. On a certain night, Jordan Pool looks really good. - Well, the end of the other counter would be

he actually really helped that. - Oh, my final 10 then win a title. - Yeah, so maybe it's Mike James. - I'm kind of looking at never nervous purpose. - So what the other thing I was interesting about that,

it was the only time he ever averaged anything close to that. He was like one big year, but for the most part, he was between seven and 13. So maybe that's the answer, never nervous? - Yeah, that's my answer.

He doesn't exactly jump off the screen when you watch and play basketball. He's exactly jump, when you watch and play basketball, either. - Ricky ended up on the Celtics, which I know you remember.

- Of course. - Yeah, nice for you. Like, wow, this guy might be an on-be player. - Yes. And that's my pool, that's my pool report too.

- Yeah. - Is Jordan Pool at night. - On a certain night. - Yeah. - They're putting up 40.

“- All right, so there's two more great questions.”

- Okay, let's do it. - I'm gonna give you the second best one first. And then I'm really excited about the last one. This is from Jay and Charlotte. He heard the Hornet's deep dive that's echo and I did

and about Zach was joking about raising a divisional banner, wanting to know who had the saddest rafters in the American sports scene. So I just concentrate on basketball. As a Hornet season ticket owner,

he has to nominate, he calls it the Spectrum Center. Currently, the Hornets have three things hanging the rafters. Number six for Bill Russell, which everybody has. Number 13 for Bobby Phillips, who tragically died in a drag racing accident.

And the Charlotte Sting Jersey number 32 for Andrea Stinson, who averaged 12 points again in the WMBA.

They've never won their division made in Eastern Conference Finals,

or won a play-off series since the arena opened. The most famous basketball moment in the arena is a drunk eye in a purple shirt, tawning, Dwayne Wade, and hitting two threes in a game six to close out the game

when he had seven threes in the year, is there are sadder rafters in American sports. So I did the research on this, but-- - Okay. - I just wanted to present that shirt in the case for you.

- Sadder. - So it's Bill Russell, who didn't play for them, Bobby Phillips who tragically passed away in a WMBA player, and no division or conference title, anything. - I don't think you can get sadder than that.

- I'll present to you the Memphis Grizzlies. - No, no, any rafters either, Bill Russell, Zach Randolph, Tony Allen, it's still going with Charlotte. Minnesota, Bill Russell, and Malik Saley, who tragically passed away, and that's really it.

I don't think they have anything else. - They're going to do part of it. - They haven't done it yet, they won't do that. - Yeah, but they just didn't think just sort of like-- - Orlando only has Bill Russell in shack,

but they must have the 95 Eastern Conference title, whatever. And they made it no nine, so they're up to.

The answer is actually the LA Clippers.

Zero, anything. They've no retired numbers. - What? - And they've never won anything. They've never won a conference final, they've nothing.

- What about like a-- - It'll neverander something? - They've nothing. They put high school uniforms of California players. You know what I think?

I'm not kidding. They don't have a single retired number. - I'm trying to think. They didn't retire, Bob Macadoo's number, who won an MVP in the Buffalo Braves.

They didn't retire, basically name anybody, Chris Paul. Chris Paul maybe will be the first one, but they just he had this terrible experience with them. Blake Griffin, maybe you get to a point where you're-- - Yeah, Chris Paul Blake Griffin.

- I think you do that. That means pretty sad though. - Couldn't you at least retire Darius Miles and Quint Richardson together? - Just have--

(laughs) - That was a great year. - It was a really fun year, we enjoyed it. - Yeah, the Quint�ers have nothing. - That's so.

- So they are the most impressive. - I feel like just if we're just going with just rafters,

when he was like, nothing's even happened

in this arena notable. - Yeah.

“- In Charlotte, because I was thinking about the one thing”

would be LeBron staring at Michael Jordan before he dunks at a playoff game. That would be like the most notable thing that's happened in that arena in my memory. - Oh, now two K's can be raining three.

- Okay, let's put him in the rafter already. This is a little sort of a appetizer for the last email. John from Jersey City had an email for conspiracy bill. I thought I could turn you onto the latest NBA conspiracy and that's rigging the 2026 lottery.

- I'm a net season ticket holder. This is the upcoming lottery. When I got my ticket renewal price for next season, I was shocked. A raise price is 24% for the same seats next season.

Last year, they raised it 3%. The only rationale I can think of is the upchargers. These ticket holders have sat through the mess of the last two years, because they must know something the rest of us don't.

- I'll tell you this. Conspiracy bill did darken the room and smoke the pipe a little bit and thought about this one. Why would they raise ticket prices? 24% coming off a terrible season.

They don't have a single signature player, other than Michael Porter Jr. - Michael Porter Jr. - George Jome. - Yeah, George Demand. - What made them raise prices?

- But it's a large... - It's a sizable lease. - Yeah. - Conspiracy bill was intrigued.

“- Kyler Dickie, by the way, wanted to know...”

- I'm not buying that one though. The ring of the lottery. - Conspiracy bill got his people together. - Yeah, they talking to you. - Yeah, how do you think about it?

- Kyler Dickie is another sorbet. He said, "When you talk about crazy stories of the season, everyone's like Katie's burners. That was the craziest one. You're crazy that."

He points out, the trailblazers head coach got arrested by the FBI one game in the season. I'm not the historian of the game that you are,

but I've never seen a herd of it quite like this.

No one cares about Portland, so this is easily swept under the rug. The chance he actually messed with our players playing times in development and control outcomes, that he cut minutes, so player props of it under us.

Why is this not a huge deal to anyone else? I don't know. Why isn't this a huge deal? - I don't know. - Ramona just wrote a huge piece about him today

about how he had to sell his house and he had five billion dollar bail. This is a major gambling investigation, and he was in the poker. - A legend.

- Say, I know Chancy that well, but he was around he is pinned when I was there, and he is just like the most responsible measured person I've been around, and I worked with him too. I feel like the nicest guy.

- Yeah, like it's not like, some of the stuff you hear about like, believe me's the like, oh, that's a little weird. But like, Chancy was just like a sweetheart. - It's a good point.

This one kind of just went away. - Yeah, it's true. - It feels so long ago. And also the Katie Burger thing, like he made a Twitter account

and it was in like a group chat. You know what I mean? So he's not like, it's not even like public facing tweets. - Yeah. - So he made his group chat just violated his privacy.

- Somebody betrayed the chat. - Yeah. - That seems to be what happened. - Yeah. - Okay, last question.

Can a Manhattan beach? I can't wait for your reaction. I didn't send this to you.

“What if instead of signing with any one team for next season?”

LeBron makes his retirement tour an actual retirement tour by signing a one week contract with all 30 teams. Every team gets one LeBron home game where he starts and plays and they sell thousands

of limited or jerseys. New York finally gets next LeBron. Minnesota gets an ant LeBron team up. Miami gets heat reunion LeBron. We just keep going.

He's not gonna win the title in the matter where he goes. Why not generate news in every local market?

- Never happy great idea.

I couldn't pin holes in it. - There's also this thing hanging on where it's like, I have no idea where LeBron is gonna play next here. It's just like there's no sort of like natural. - I did this thing on the pot.

- Yeah, so I mean, so exact. - Dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude. - Well, 'cause I don't think Cleveland, I think Cleveland has a chance to win the title every year. It's done of a Mitchell's team and he's not gonna be cool.

It's at LeBron. Like it's his team, J.L. and Bronson and it's his team. And these guys don't want the LeBron retirement circus coming into their thing. They'd rather just win the title.

- Just be my guess. - If he goes to the Warriors per conspiracy bill, does that team a gym in gym team? - No, but it's like a curry in LeBron last for us. - That's for Zingus and Jimmy Butler off an injury.

And like, that team is not that good. - That's right, Curry goes to Charlotte and his career. So, I tried to think about could this 10-day thing work. And I actually think it could. - Okay, hold on.

We're going to Charlotte. That's gonna take shots away from Nips. - It's an older mentor. - It's a mentor. - Two failed to be charged.

- Two failed to be charged. - I'll be the best shooter. - You're paying him a lot more than that.

- Yeah, you're paying him a lot more than that.

“- You're paying him a lot more than that.”

- Yeah, you're paying him a lot more than that. - Yeah, you're paying him a lot more than that. - You're paying him a lot more than that. So, if it was 30, he'd have to play for 30 teams. It's 60 games total, right?

So, you play one home game, one road game, or two home games. - One road games. - Maybe just the home game. Maybe it's a two-game home stand.

Limited edition jerseys, T2 jerseys for everything. It's like a fucking cash cow. It would be, it would actually be kind of amazing. And the Celtics would be like, whoa, our LeBron game is coming up on March 4th.

- Oh, the tickets would go out of control. - If you'd like that could prove it. - That could prove it. - That could take its prices in Brooklyn. - 'Cause of the LeBron game next year.

Or is LeBron just going there next year? - Oh, or a virtual piece of the game. - A virtual gentleman. - Just said, that's it, that's the thing. So, if he played on every team, this would, first of all,

it would be an amazing, nobody's done it before. - The league just brought in two new partners and took billions of their dollars. - Yeah. - And this is a little gift they can give back.

“- How about this, LeBron's in the golf now?”

- Mm. - Plays in these different cities, two home games and you can sample the best courses in each city over the course of two days.

This will never happen, but it should happen.

- I thought it was an almost unassailable idea. I loved it. - Because, and then he ends up on the last team. - And that's the team that has a chance to win the title. You just kind of slide in and it's like,

"Oh, I had a really good time when I was on Minnesota in December." - Guarantees are ringing for LeBron. - Yeah. - I only played one game.

They won the title. - I didn't even think of that. - Yeah, that's a ring. - Yeah, everyone who played for the team gets a ring. - I mean, this is on the level

of you and House talking about a guy with a metal baseball bat playing for the results. This will never happen. But it isn't treating as one of those things where it's like, okay, this won't happen.

But if it did, what's the problem? - It would be cool if he started out with the shitty teams and then gradually got to, and then, okay, see, it was like, we'll do it. But it's gotta be in December.

- Yeah. - You don't wanna screw with our team too much. - 'Cause I was thinking about him on the jazz. And I was like, "I don't know if I'm even doing it "in for that one or like the wizards."

- I did think could there be a scenario where he only picks 12 teams. But then I think the other 18. There would be some damn base of it. Like, what the fuck?

And I do like the idea of him having the one game and like Memphis, just fucking weird. - And he's winning the wizards. - Yeah. But the thing is, is that city's on absolute fire.

It is like, it's like basically Taylor Swift's errors

to her, but basketball and LeBron is basically what it is. - Every game would be an event. I think Bronnie asks us to come. So it's two 10-day contracts. You have to give both guys.

- Every text read that I'm on would be which LeBron game are we going to? - Right. - The second the schedule is released. It would every text read that I'm on would be like,

so we don't want to be going. - He does nicks nets back the back. So he has nicks week and then nets week. He's in New York for two weeks. He's doing all the shows.

- Oh yeah. - This is amazing. - Yeah. - So cornered. - Yeah.

- Yeah. - It's a great idea. - This is a brilliant idea. - Dave Jakobi, you can hear him on the miss here and watch him on the miss batch with Bruno Chris Vernon.

How's Bruno handling another tanking season? - You know what? He's not handling it well. - Yeah.

“- But I think that we're doing everything”

we can to support him. - It's tough when you're whole, when you put your steak in the ground, "We are gonna tank!" - Yeah.

- We got triple-jane and John when they played together. - Yeah, exactly. - And yeah. - It's going, it's not going great. He's watching a lot of college basketball.

- Oh that's good. - Yeah. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Good to see you, my friend. - Now it's time for a special segment of the show.

It's called Value Mount Rushmore and it's brought to you by Domino's. I love Domino's. I'm gonna talk about real value. You know hypnobus just decisions in the game

that actually get you more than you pay for. Like how Domino's best deal ever gets you. Any pizza with any toppings for $9.99. What a steal. That's strap in, but I break down my top four value plays.

The cuppers just did this. My first one would be when the cuppers traded Zubats was making $20 million a year so they could start playing the rookie center more. Neeter has her who makes like $2 million a year.

What a deal. Neeter has her can be put up most of the stats that Zubats puts up. Great, I just saved $18 million. That was a good one.

Late round fantasy sleepers always awesome.

I was like to do running backs at the end of drafts because you just draft the back ups or rookies and just hope you strike oil with one of them futures. I like what they like looking for futures ahead for like the NBA and FLCs and NFL you always look

for the bad team that has a good schedule the next year and a new coach is a good one for the NBA, the team that starts to stack the lottery picks and they'll all set in.

like Charlotte this year, maybe they'll make a jump up. So that's a good one. And then fourth one, glue guys.

Always good when you're building a sports team

invest in those glue guys. The Celtics have a couple good ones. Jordan Walsh, Hugo Gonzalez, Hugo Gonzalez, sorry. Just people that they're not going to be max contract guys but you can throw them out and rely on them

over and over again for 20 minutes a game. Anyway, the highest tier move you can make for your wallet is Domino's best deal ever. Order any pizza with any toppings from the 99 99. I always do thin.

I like the, I like the free crest. I like it well done and I like the, I like the double pepperoni with extra cheeses, my favorite. Kit Domino's best deal ever today. Prices hiring some locations select this online only offer

from February 23 to the April 6th. Size availability varies by cross type max seven toppings, six for New York style and pan crust. Stuff crust extra excludes Excel and especially pizzas. Minimum purchase required for delivery prices,

participation delivery area and charges may vary. All right, my friend Matt Baloney is here. You can hear him three times a week on the town which you can also watch with his fancy video set up. It's a great podcast.

You can also read his newsletter. Part of the book newsletter world.

Very essential especially lately.

There's always stuff going on and just recently, one or brothers, which has been passed around like Yankees Christmas gifts since 2001. Seems to have finally found a home. Somebody won, finally one of the snow globe.

They wanted to keep it. And finally, I don't know if it's finally. We may be doing this all again in five years. Uh-oh. Okay, that the Paramount stock got downgraded to junk status.

So everything they're just saying they're dead was downgraded. Yes. All right, so I have so many ways to go here. I have, I don't think there's been enough talk about the merger name.

You've been joking about this on your pod 'cause they can do the acronym. They can do PWB. They can do Warner Mount which you've said a couple times. Yeah, that's my preference.

“Does the Paul brothers interest you at all, Paul brothers are Paul?”

Just calling it Paul with like a Paul print? I thought you were going to go peace guy. That's their current, their current monitor was Paramount's guy dance, they do peace guy, which Craig Horlbeck loves. So do you think Paramount just absorbs it

and then just stays Paramount? And that's like kind of their ultimate trump card? I think ultimately, perhaps that will be the route. The funny thing is the Warner Brothers is much larger. Yeah, Paramount.

So if you're really looking at the, you know, what the brand is and what to do moving forward, you call the whole company Warner's or Warner Brothers or Warner's Paramount. And then you keep the streaming service as HBO or HBO Max.

And just kind of fold Paramount into it. Well, none of us were ever happy with WBD Warner Brothers Discovery. It was just a complete mess and everything that's left it was just bizarre and crazy and including

his victory last week, which you excorried them for. And he could walk away with like $800 billion. It's it is unbelievable. The company lost two thirds of its value under his leadership.

“The only thing that raised the stock was the prospective”

of it being sold and he walked out. He has these, the world's fourth richest man who's got a son who happens to love Hollywood. It's the greatest thing in the world. And all the sudden, there's a bidding war

because Netflix is like, oh, we'll take that. We'll take HBO and Warner Brothers if it's for sale. And all of a sudden, you've got a bidding war. All you need is two bidders. And then next thing, you know, the stock goes from $7

to $31 a share at the sale. Unbelievable. And some people were buying it when it was like 18, 19. Hoping that we did get to the mid 20s. This, so I was really trying to think about this.

And I was thinking about real life and culture. Is this the most faith anyone has ever shown in their son? Well, I don't think anyone in the history of the world has had the wherewithal that Larry Ellison does. In terms of just sheer wealth.

I mean, I guess Elon has what, like, 10, 12 kids that will someday be old enough to have to deal with his money. But this is like in Game of Thrones, Queen Cersei's like, "Jaffrey, we're riding with you, baby." I mean, I know you're 17 and we know you're a social path,

“but I think you can handle the seven kingdoms.”

Yeah, we'll keep this in culture, but not in real life. We'll talk about John Jr. runs for president. Then we'll really see what's going on there. Well, the Bushes would be the other analogy, right? Yeah. Like senior Bush, like kind of grooming junior Bush,

but not in a situation where you basically incur $79 billion in debt,

plus the junk, which is now 3% on top of the $79 million.

And I got to be honest, I'm not smart enough

“really from a mass standpoint to understand it.”

Well, isn't there correlation in sports? Aren't there legendary sports? I mean, Dr. Bus, perfect example. Dr. Bus, you know, when his kids running rough shot over his empire, we just have to be a million examples of very savvy sports owners

who turn their entire kingdom over to their kids and all hell breaks loose. Here's the difference. So I did think about that and we see this in sports all the time,

and almost always it goes horribly, and the kids, you know,

they're basically their qualifications for the job is I'm related to my dad, and he's the rich guy who made all these things, they're not self-made, all this stuff. In this case, David Ellison has tried to put in the time for the last 10 to 12 years to try to figure out, like,

I want to be a content mogul. So it's a little different than in sports sometimes when somebody's like, OK, I'm going to fold shop. Here's my son. He's now the CEO and nobody in charge of all of our basketball moves.

You're like, oh, no. David Ellison really does seem like he's ready for the moment. I don't know if anybody else thinks he is, but it seems like he has a point of view and a style and a take on this, right?

Certainly, and he definitely put in the time. We can argue about how successful Skydance was because their biggest successes have been essentially putting up money and glamming onto original franchises at Paramount. Right?

You know, he had top gun. He's done mission impossible. He had the Terminator franchise and he did those movies to varying degrees of success. So he hasn't made a huge impact via Skydance,

but he's put a lot of money into movies and he's made a lot of TV shows. So in that sense, he has been kind of auditioning for this. But now he is in the absolute big league. I mean, he's gone in a year and change from being a guy with a semi-successful production company

to arguably the second or third most powerful person in Hollywood.

Yeah, because I'm trying, there's been so much glass half empty.

“I'm trying to think, OK, what is the glass half full side?”

What are his wins so far? He gets credit for the Tom Cruise relationship and top gun maverick, which he actually produced and made happen. And he gets credit for, I mean, mission impossible. These last couple of mission impossible's lost money.

So but they were kind of plagued by COVID charges and ended up being some of the most expensive movies of all time. Yeah. He has built the TV business is not bad. He actually, he's done Reacher.

He's done Gracie and Grace and Frankie, which lasted seven seasons on Netflix, which is kind of unheard of. So he has had wins in TV. He's a producer. Produced some producers, you know, some shows are hits.

Some movies are hits, some aren't. That's very different from what he is now. He is an owner operator of the two of the five legacy studios. And it's just, it's unbelievable how much power he's a mass. He has news now.

He's never had news before.

He's got sports. I mean, he's now the proprietor of the arguably the most lucrative NFL package, the ASC package on Sundays. He's got USC. He's got golf.

He's got March madness. Now he owns all of March madness. I mean, it's pretty unbelievable. Yes.

“So I wrote down all the stuff that they have now, the content empire, right?”

200 plus million subs. Now, I don't know how many of those are repetitive. I guess you find that out in the US in the US in the US and 10 adjusted to study where it's 7.5 million subs overlap in the US. I don't know about overseas.

Okay. But it's less overlap than with HBO and Netflix. There's a much bigger overlap there. HBO Paramount plus CBS. And any of that, I think I just discounted during this whole process.

Pluto. Yeah. They got Pluto. What am I saying? Pluto.

No. TNTTBS. They own 902 and no. That's a big thing for you. They're not going to know.

They have all the challenges. TNTTBS, Comedy Central Discovery, MTV, all those, which I guess can just run as go ships on cable for as long as we have cable. Yeah. There's a lot of things.

Yeah. There's obvious networks and they will just milk them for the ridiculousness money. And that's it. CNN and CBS News, which who knows that they're even getting to decide they

want to be in news. And if you're going to talk about ways to cut debt, if they don't care about news to begin with, that could be just a place that sadly they would just chop. They're going to chop. I don't think they're going to kill it.

Maybe CNN still throws off a lot of money from affiliate fees because it's a, you can't not carry CNN for like the five times a year that people tune in to watch some kind of breaking through this moment. Yeah. Like this weekend.

Exactly. But there are about 3,000 people that work at CNN.

So that is a, the perfect place to start cutting.

Yeah. Sadly. Of course, they have all this IP including DC Comics Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Looney Tunes, Game of Thrones, Top Gun, Mission Impossible, Star Trek, etc. And that's the biggest thing that shifted.

I would say this century with with the studios valuing that old IP more than ever and now we're moving into the AI era and it's even probably twice as bad as it was. If we look at what's going on with AI, and they're soon going to be anybody can create anything at any time. Right?

The idea is about to be flooded with AI-generated content.

“So in a sea where everything is possible, what isn't possible to recreate?”

And it's known intellectual property. You cannot recreate Batman with AI, unless it's licensed, which they may do, but they will own Batman. And you can do whatever you want with that, man. And I think that's honestly why Netflix was so interested in buying Warner Bros.

Because Netflix is increasingly taking on YouTube, they're doing podcasts, they're doing all these other things that eat up innings and eat up time on the service. And if they see AI coming in, they wanted all of that IP. In addition to the 100 years of movies in the library to put on the service. Right.

So like, friends, and stay on the Godfather. There's a world where you could just do your own Godfather sequel between Godfather 2 and Godfather 3 and Creed Ovo, they are, and it sounds insane and awful. But like, this weekend I saw a commercial where somebody used, was Airbnb, they used golden slumbers from the Beatles for a commercial.

And I'm like, that song's kind of sacred. This is now a commercial song, but we're just used to this now. All the songs we grew up with in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s are just commercial jingles now. But they're getting paid. Right.

That's the difference. You have to pay for that. But people will get paid for this Godfather kind of stuff. Really. It just feels weird.

But I guess. I mean, Disney just did a deal with open AI to hand over all their characters for do it yourself content. Right. And interestingly, in that deal, they did not give the voices and they did not give the actual

physical human likenesses of the characters that are humans. So if you have Luke Skywalker, it's the animated Luke Skywalker. It's not Mark Hamill. Right. And that's because of the guild, the union regulations, they don't let you do that.

You have to pay money for that. And Disney just said, OK, you can have Lightning McQueen and Yoda, but they're not going to sound like Lightning McQueen and Yoda because they, that's still intellectual property that's control. So the, and this is the Wild Wild West coming up where we don't know, you know, what

a fox just says, hey, the Simpsons go to town, just make sure you pay us and all of a sudden there's just stuff. Well, that's the Simpsons.

“Homer Simpsons is involved in this open AI deal, not Homer's voice because you have to”

get the voice separate from that, that, that, that image. But you're going to be able to do Homer Simpsons videos on open AI and Disney plus very soon. You also get the Paramount Library, the WB library and two giant studio lots. Um, here's the thing.

So 79 million, 79 billion in debt plus the 3% junk piece.

So that's even higher. Paramount only controls two things right now when they emerge these companies, which they'll take a year of assuming they merge, headcount and subscription prices, right? Other than that, they have no idea how this is going to go. But those are the two things that they can finagle the price however they want.

Like they could shop 60% of both companies and merge it into some small company. They could also raise the subscription price to some crazy number and do a little like what Disney and Hulu and Fox have tried to do, which has been really confusing. Like you can't, it's been really hard to get one of them. You kind of have to get all three in the depth of the people to the bundle.

Yeah. Which is what we're headed with this, right? And it'd be like 35 dollars a month and you get HB on Paramount and you get to watch

“football on CBS and that's what we're headed, right?”

What they are saying is that there will only be one app. It will not be a bundle. It won't be like the Disney Hulu ESPN situation. They are saying that these are going to be combined into one, they're calling it a super app. And that it will be something like, let's call it HBO Max and then you go open it and

then there's Paramount plus tile and there's an HBO tile and there's a CBS sports tile. Yeah. That kind of thing.

So we've never really seen a deal like this with somebody that is a really proud tech

person that cares about this stuff and is like, we are going to innovate and do all that. We have all these different ideas, like Netflix has a great name page. You have an Netflix, it knows what you like, it knows how to push things in front of you and they're the best at it. You go to other pages.

Like, peacock is just a black buyer.

It's like, you're not listening to the game. How do I, how do I do it? Can you guess? It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable.

It's unbelievable.

“You get to SNL and it shows you the last 10 minutes of the episode that you previously”

watched and I'm like, no, no, no, no, I never watched the last 10 minutes of SNL because

I turned it off after we did update. I want just show me the latest episode. What's the new one? What's the new traders? They just can't figure it out.

So subscription price will be one way to make the money back. I still don't know. Like I've heard, you've talked at different pods about how do you get this, this debt down all this stuff. And 79 billion is like a brain breaker.

That's basically the entire Western Conference of MBA teams. Yeah, honestly, they're going to have to cut a shit ton of costs. They're saying six billion that they're going to take out. It's going to be more than that. And they're saying that there's a lot of synergies and that they will probably move everybody

to one of the two physical lots and sell the other one.

That's a couple billion dollars there.

There's a lot of things they can do merging CBS news and CNN. There's things that are going to result in head count reductions, but also just like physical presence reduction and costs of office space and things like that. So you'll start to see those that come down. But the real risk here is that it can't come down enough.

And that this company just essentially becomes all about paying off debt and they're just cutting costs and reducing output and servicing the debt and it's they're not actually

“investing in making this a good, you know, productive company like you should be.”

Which is I can't remember the first time I came on your part and we talked about this this goes to the heart of how stupid these media mergers are. Yeah. I just don't understand them. They never work.

I don't I even when you look at Disney and Fox, like I don't know, with Disney run that back, if they if they could do that one over again, with thanks, but sort of order. Sure. Certain quarters of Disney would run that back. Rob Iger Bob Iger insists it's great.

And I don't think. Wasn't final. I listen. I go back and forth on this. I don't know if Disney is where it is today as one of the companies that you assume will

survive the streaming wars if it didn't acquire all the content engines from FX and from Hulu and from, you know, the Fox properties, putting the Simpsons on Disney plus I don't know about that. That is, that is above my pay grade. There's probably some McKinsey study locked in the vault with Walt Disney's head somewhere

just like this is what we got out of Fox, but they spent a lot of money and it caused a lot of debt issues for Disney and they're still kind of digging out of that. They got avatar though. They got they got a lot out of it, but it was a lot. Now, we have a better example in Warner Brothers Discovery because that was a transaction

that produced about $55 billion in debt and Zazloff and his team essentially spent the next three years trying to pay that down. And then that's where we had, you know, cutting the back girl movie and firing thousands of people and all these things that kind of, they took a hit to the brand and luckily for them, they found someone to come along and buy this company, but if they hadn't, it would

have been a downward spiral, I think. So would you say the best analogy for what Zazloff did here is he bought this house, he couldn't afford in a neighborhood that he liked, real new right away, basically, that he couldn't afford to keep the house and that this was going to go really badly unless somebody else was driving down the street and said, whoa, I really love that house and that was

his only out. That's basically what happened, right? The rich kid. Rich kid in school, he happened to be a friend and he just decided that he'd really like that and then on the other guy said, I'd also like it.

I don't want the rich kid to have it and then all of a sudden that's a bidding war. I mean, if you look at the initial projections for Warner Bros. Discovery, they said that they were going to have $14 billion a year in EBITDA, which is a metric for profits.

And it never even delivered in that first year.

That first year came in under their estimates and it's because the linear TV business, which is where these companies make most of their money still, the linear TV business is collapsing faster than people anticipated or that they let on. So they're like, oh, wait, we thought we were going to have $14 billion. Now we only have 12 this year and next year we have 10.

And finally, when they're selling this company in this past year, it's down to 8.5. And it just keeps melting melting melting and that's, it just throws the entire business trajectory off. They had to find a buyer.

“Who did know that the linear TV was going to die dramatically like we knew this 10 years ago?”

What do we do? But it's a matter of how fast it's not as high speed internet was here, it was a matter

I think one other thing with these mergers that never gets enough credit and I say this

“is somebody who's worked in a couple big companies, they're so destabilizing.”

And I don't think people, you wouldn't know unless you were working in a company of they got acquired or acquired somebody else, but from the moment it happens, it's hunger games. And you have a lot of departments all over the place and you have people looking over their shoulder and people looking for other jobs because they don't know if their jobs can exist.

And it's just this, this amount of tension, like if Spotify merged with somebody to mind, be terrified. I know what I'm dealing with now. I don't know what's what I'm dealing with another company. Right.

And if you look at these Warner Brothers and HBO people, they just, they have different bosses all the time and with different bosses come different objectives, different strategies. And in a creative business, it's really hard to operate from a position of uncertainty and change. You look at some of the most stable places like Universal, which is had the same ownership

for the past 15, 16 years. The film studio Universal was able to build up these franchises and build up the illumination business to have minions and super Mario and they had the relationship with Christopher Nolan. Yeah, you take a bet on Oppenheimer and then he's going to give you the Odyssey and all

of the sudden you've got the biggest filmmaker, they have the Spielberg relationship. All these things, it takes a lot and it takes a stable team to do. And when you are changing the rudder every couple of years, it's just a lot more difficult. Well, look at Amazon right now. Amazon's been trying to get, you know, all kinds of different things and every three months

to have another reward. That's amazing. I know. And they still haven't gotten what they want out of that entire purchase of GM, which is a freaking James Bond movie.

Right. They had to buy out, they had to buy out the broccoli family because they were essentially refused to make any movies for them because they hated them. Right. Um, I wanted to do some winners and losers.

Winner.

To first winner, we talked about him before, but David Ellison, who I got to say, I only heard

like at least decent things, I don't think he's not like a King Joffrey character where people are like, what a prick. Oh my god, the word is guy. Very nice guy. Everybody seems to like him.

I don't know if he should be running one of the biggest content, whatever, monoliths we've ever seen. But he at least seems like not like a zazzle off thing where he's in it to get some sort of payoff at the end. I don't think that's his intention.

No, he seems to be in it because he genuinely likes this business and wants to make good things. Now, we can argue about his taste. He's made a lot of movies that are not great. Right.

And he has much more commercial taste than say like his sister Megan Ellison, who is a great outdoor producer and financier movies until she ran out of money and her father basically said enough enough. But that's not a good finance here by the way. Who?

I would say, Megan Ellison, baby, wasn't a good finance here because the movie is just running. No, great taste. Yes. Great.

Some very good movies.

“I think her rewatchable number up against David Ellison's and I think she has more.”

That would be an interesting battle. All right. Winners and losers.

First of all, 79 billion in debt.

I just staggering. I'm giving that a winner. And just because I didn't even know that was possible. That sounds like fucking at a star wars. You made the debt a winner.

I think it's going to be a record. I think that's it. I think we've paid. I don't think I'm going to be this. I guess he's lenders like a poll and these these big lenders.

Number, sugar 69 is going to be this is like like Barry Bond sitting 73 homers. We're never talking. I'll make it in a winner. And much like that, we will come to question the how it all happened. Looser.

Everyone's scared of AI and what it might do to content. This is like your D day because this is now the first time somebody that has and Brian Phillips wrote about this for the ringer this week. Really with real insight and awareness and ability to use data surveillance. Name anything evil that that we're all afraid of.

TikTok. Don't forget. Yeah. David Ellison's father Larry is one of the investors in the US version of TikTok. And they still are talking about this like magical digital fairy dust that they're going

to sprinkle over the whole company and turn it into a big tech media powerhouse and not sure quite how that's going to happen. But I'm sure it'll be bad for the culture and our data and all these other things. Well, it's going to be AI is going to probably come in a bunch of different ways for content.

“I think for when you're talking about editing movies and producing movies and some of the”

stuff that has just jobs that have existed for 120 years, I'm sure that's part of their plan, right? We can put the costs here here here. We can just have instead of having 200 people on this movie, we could have 70. And that's throughout Hollywood, though.

Yes. I mean, there is a push right now that the thinking is these movies cannot continue to

But even in other sci-fi effects driven movies, they've got to bring the cost down. And AI is going to be a big part of that. All right. I have a controversial winner. People who make content because, yeah, all right, I'm going to land this plan.

You're going to be confused for most of the time. I think if Netflix got Warner Brothers, I think we would have moved into a dangerous place with content that I would compare to this. And I'm in an ALkeeper fantasy league where we can keep guys, we can keep 10 keepers, we've minor leagueers and all that.

And sometimes somebody will get a big lead and like July.

“And you have to decide, like, do I want to chase this guy or would it be stupid to chase”

this guy and make trades? You know what? I'm going to let him win the title. I have a better chance next year. I think Netflix's lead would have been especially like with the know how and the intelligence

they have. I actually think it could have turned into a situation where everybody else was like, yeah, we're just going to pick our spots. We can't compete with those guys. And I don't know if it would have been great for people who do movies, television shows,

and documentaries specifically, because who's been against them if everybody is just going to be careful because they can't beat Netflix? How did that take?

And obviously, if this merged company can get attacked together and become that third or fourth

big player alongside Netflix and Amazon and Disney, that creates an ultimately creating more robust market if there are four real players that can buy your project at any given time. And then God knows what Apple is doing there because Apple or fear a relatively famous person who looks good in a giant thumbnail.

Exactly. And they're going to overspend on whatever you want to do. Jennifer Lawrence, come on up. We've got an apple show for you. Pose.

Yeah. Yeah. I know. But you're at the bottom. And your husband's been murdered.

Go. The, that is essentially what Ellison has been arguing and what they're going to argue to regulators to approve this deal is that this was a necessary evil to get Hollywood modernized for the tech era and that these are globally scaled companies and Hollywood has

never faced globally scaled media companies before it's always been an oligopoly of only

these five or six studios can distribute movies worldwide.

“That's why frankly, that's why they stayed in existence for a hundred years.”

Now that's all gone with the internet and you have scaled television companies and they need to combine to chase that. And it's going to be painful in the short term. It's not no question taking these buyers out like when winners and HBO were competing against paramount and all the rest, it was just better for buyers.

But if this goes through, it will be painful. And then maybe this company can build up and become a real scaled player because I certainly not taking your best projects to paramount right now. Right. If you think about 2017, 2019, pre-COVID, there were just a lot of people that had money

and wanted to do stuff and were competing against each other and then that slowly died after COVID. Well, there was television. There was cable television still making original shows. Now that's all gone, cable television not making original shows, certainly not inscripted.

So it's just the streaming players and a little bit of broadcast TV and there, you know, it's just a lot less.

I decided to watch the Survivor Season for the first time in a while because it's probably

50. It was a three hour season premiere. It's CBS is basically like, guys, we got three hours. We have two police shows, two doctors shows, two fire shows. We have football.

We don't really have a lot going on. So we're just going to have this for May 11 tonight. Sorry. I guess what? I watched it.

Fast forward to throw all the commercials. And you know what? We're doing a shorter shoot, Jeff probes came on the town and was talking about how they do a shorter shoot on location now than they used to. And then the episodes are now often longer than they used to.

Right. And he's now. Hey, I don't know if he announced that on the podcast. Hey, I'm surprised me. He does not age.

“Um, anyway, that's why glass have full is that maybe this will lead to two heavy weights”

competing for projects constantly, which I'm not against. I might be wrong. Another one loser. Oh, I have a lot. I have lose.

Come on. Continue. Continue. Well, I have another winner, the NFL, because Cadel, who's just a genius with this stuff, puts that little thing in.

Like, hey, if there's a merger, we get to redo our deal. Yeah. So now, skydads in the NFL, you don't need to, you know, it's not hard to go out that they're going to be, have the hometown advantage. Yeah.

But nobody really has an advantage with Cadel. And whatever he wants to do to get more money, he's going to do it. So if he decides, like, I've decided we have Friday night football and we're going to use

good games on Friday night. CBS will be like, okay, fine. Yeah. All right. Not much you can do.

I've been slowly taking games away from those big packages. The one thing I would say is that I do think the NFL still needs broadcast. I don't think you're going to see them completely abandoned CBS. I don't like you. Go to Netflix or something like that.

They know their customer and the customer viewers still wants that broadcast experience. So I have seven, seven suitors for the NFL when this all opens up. You tell me absolutely have to have it. I'd love to have it or this is a luxury. Those are the three answers.

CBS Paramount.

“I feel like that's what we absolutely have to have it.”

Right? 100%. NBC. Yes. Agreed.

All right. We're two. They have the number one program in all of television. It's an anchor of their entire sales strategy and the Olympics are only every four years.

NBA so far has not performed as much as they wanted to. What do you talk about? Every game ever is the most watch game we've ever had. Yeah. They still forever.

Let's see next year when the big data is compared against the big data. But it's a little less to CBS, but I still think NFL's must have for NBC. Well, we agree. So that's two. Fox.

I think is must. Oh, there.

It's mission critical if what is Fox without NFL?

What are they? They have to have it. They've seen. They've seen both realities when they've had it and when they haven't had it. And they don't want to go back.

“No, that's what Bank of America analysts, they just downgraded Fox because of this whole”

prospect of the rights going up because there's, what are they going to do? They have to just eat it. ESPN. Yeah. I think there are have to.

We have four. I have to have it. We're four. I think there are. I think there are have to.

With all the plans that ESPN is making and how much time they have put NFL on ABC as well. Yeah. Like that was not supposed to be the case. And they've renegotiated those deals to put Monday and football and see on ABC a lot.

So I think it's a must have more on them in a second.

Amazon is our fifth suitor. I would put them in the need to have it, but it's not a game breaker. Yeah, I'm putting them in the middle category. I think it's a like to have. Now they love it and it's one of the only things that consistently works on Amazon.

They feel that they've made great strides and getting better games.

“The productions are better and they finally they've convinced that last cohort of people”

to watch when they first started and took the games from Fox, the ratings went down just because some people in this country didn't know where to find the game. So they forgot about it or whatever. Now they're bringing in more of those people and they've it's sort of a cornerstone of their offerings.

But like with anything with Amazon, it's it's it's a luxury. They're a sales platform. They want you to buy more toilet paper and all of this content is just in service of buying more toilet paper. And they need three or four things like the NFL to accomplish that.

I agree. I wouldn't say they're on the level of the first four, but they're one level below. And then the last two are Netflix and YouTube, which I would say are luxury. Need it, but you're not crying yourself to sleep if you don't get it. Exactly.

You'll be fine. And especially Netflix because they see the numbers and they have a big initiative to increase their advertising sales and the NFL can do that. But they're just not going to fall over themselves to steal away a full package of games unless it makes sense unless it's like bespoke.

The international games, I've always thought that they're going to eventually evolve into

one international game per week or for 12 of the 17 weeks or something like that. And they will carve out those games for a 9 a.m. or 8 a.m. game every week. And it will be on Netflix because it will be global. And if 12 international games, Netflix owns all 12. And by the way, some of those are already on NFL network.

They could just easily sell them to Netflix. Yes. Take the journey to the game. Take the air. Take from CBS or Fox, so be it.

Yeah. And by the way, the NFL tells CBS, hey, we're going to take these games. You want to fight? To be able to go. Take them.

Yeah. All right. So that's five. There are no other suitors, right? That's seven.

Well, where's Apple? Yeah. Where is Apple? Where's Apple? You tell me.

Are they in this?

Are they interested? Not wanted to dabble.

They have said that they like their F1 deal they just did.

They like their MLSD, although the MLS might have a word about that. But they have not wanted to just get a game or two here or there. And we'll see. The MLB did a whole Friday night baseball thing with them. I mean, who knows if that works?

There's just so many MLB games.

“But the other problem is how many people have Apple TV?”

I think is the scary question because I don't think it's a lot. It's not a lot. And they're now doing things about that. They're putting their selling through other things. They just did a deal with Roku to sell them.

Roku. They capitulated and they self-organized. I thought that. I thought that Roku thing was fascinating. It's because that's their main competitor.

Yeah.

It was a wave in the white flag, basically.

Absolutely. And they did it earlier with Amazon. They basically came out guns blazing saying we are Apple Incorporated. We are the platform that everybody has to have. Everyone's like, ah, not really when it comes to premium video.

And they basically raise the right white flag and say, OK, we'll sell, be a Amazon and will sell, be a Roku and hopefully we'll raise our numbers. I like Roku. One more winner here. Well, I have a couple more actually.

“Netflix, who look, I love the spin and you've been on it too about like, wow, this”

is all along. They were trying to push this deal and if they didn't get it, it still was great for them because they sat on, I don't think that's true. They spent a lot of time on this, nobody likes to spend a lot of time to not get something. But they didn't have your stock go down 30%.

Yeah.

But they did get $2.8 billion is a breakup fee, which they can just put toward those international

NFL games. You mentioned that. Other stuff. And the competitor has taken on almost $80 billion in debt to go after this deal. So they got them that.

They also, you know, the elixins wanted to buy this company for $19 a share in the fall. And it went up by what is that? 40%, just because Netflix was involved in $19 to $31. So that's a lot. It would be funny if the Mavericks had been able to use this strategy with the Luka trade.

The trade went through and then the other teams were like, you didn't get enough and then the Mavericks like, we didn't get enough. The deal is now we're accepting bid still and it was like the liquor. So like, wait. We had a deal.

What happened? Can you imagine if that were true in sports if you could accept a trade and then everybody could react and up the offer? Right. Because it all it would do is create a lane there for fan bases to go completely nuts when

a trade is made. And then the ownership would have to respond. Right. Well, that was why they'd ever wanted to leak it out. Luka.

Everyone in HBO probably because they could spin this all they want. We've been in this scenario before. Ironically, with HBO with AT&T, Marvin said, no, no, it's going to be great, everybody's going to work together. I'm going to go go last half empty on this.

We'll see.

“But you mentioned on your podcast, I've Casey Blois who's I think probably the most respected”

TV executive or one of them. He has contracts up next year. I think he saw what happened on Richard Puppler in the 2010s when Stanky and AT&T took over. And this is, I want to see how this plays out for me.

Listen, Casey has it in his contract that he reports to the CEO of the company. So if Paramount wants to honor that and have him report to David Ellison and not have to report to all the streaming executives that Ellison has hired, including a woman Cindy Holland who was at Netflix, so I don't think he and Casey would mix well together. Maybe that will work out, Ellison said straight up, HBO should stay HBO, do what they

do best, easier said than done. What happens if they're bidding on the same project? Exactly. What happens then? I mean, there have been examples of that.

Netflix famously has a culture where you can get a no from one division of the company and then you can get a yes from another. So they do have competing arms there within the same company. I don't know what would happen there if they had if that situation existed. I don't know if they'll have the resources to continue to do what they do.

The HBO process is really rigorous. They don't just put stuff on. They are not afraid to scrap a pilot and start over. We just we had Rachel Senate on the town with I love LA. They completely reshot that pilot.

Yeah. And most places would just say, just cut bait and be like, okay, busted pilot, we're done. The HBO famously with Game of Thrones and like they just they work it a lot longer and you can see in the product and I don't know if that's going to be allowed anymore.

Glass have full bill would say HBO is so different than Paramount from the audiences. They're going for that. Maybe this can work. It's definitely complimentary, you know, they have that CBS style audience on Paramount Plus.

They have a different cohort of people and maybe one plus one will be three here.

Maybe strong emphasis on the M in maybe. The winner, the sports piece of Paramount, which now has the NFL, the AFC side, MLB, NHL, Champions League, March Madness, the Masters, UFC, Zephoboxing, which they just launched. I mean, I'll throw the Zoom with loser, ESPN, who has Monday night football, college football, playoffs, college hoops, Wimbledon, U.S. Open, NBA, NBA, finals, hockey, wrestling paper

views. It's kind of even when you add all the Paramount stuff against CSPN and suddenly ESPN doesn't look worldwide, leaderish in the same way, right? And here's the interesting thing. It's in these deals where Paramount can start to deploy these sports across all of these

new cable networks that they own. So you're going to see UFC on TNT or maybe even HBO, and you're going to see them try to get the most out of these sports deals and keep the price of those cable networks

“as high as possible for as long as possible, because that's what they make their money.”

Yeah.

Winner, NBC Universal, just because they can position themselves as we're over here.

You don't like some of the politics of Paramount on that stuff, we're just trying to do good and stuff and be here and we have stability and come, I don't know if I agree on that one. I was trying. I was trying to lose her. Listen, remember they were in.

They made a bid on waters. It wasn't a very good bid and I think it was just to get the, you know, I'll look at their books, but NBC Universal doesn't have a global streaming product. They have peacock, which is only domestic. And in fact, their leadership just said today that they're not even trying to be global.

They're, they're good with domestic. That is not a long-term strategy. They need something. They need some kind of transformative deal, I think. If they want to be considered one of the global players here, otherwise, they're just going

to get left behind.

“Well, they have a very good movie studio, though.”

Great app, though. Peacock app. Oh, my God. It takes 20 minutes to find anything. I don't know.

I feel like they can still position themselves as like the underdog that could, I guess. And try to, try to align with some other people and be like, all these, everyone's spending so much money in this arms race and we're over here and we're disciplined and we have this business might work, who knows. Maybe they'll do a joint venture with Amazon to get global or something.

I don't know, but they have, they have, you know, they have NBC, they've got a lot of sports still. So it's not like they're, they've been bulking up on sports, they've got NBA and MLB. So it's not like they're not players. It's just the global streaming strategy piece is really tough.

But is it OK to just have a good business and not try to conquer the, conquer the universe? Look, it's Sony. Sony doesn't have any global streamer at all. Yeah. They don't have a general, they have crunchy role, but Sony didn't even try to enter the streaming

wars and they prefer the arms dealers strategy where they just sell their stuff to everybody else. And it seems to me working out well for them, they had K-pop demon hunters on Netflix, movies movie of all time, they have their movies now. They've got $7 billion to license their movies to Netflix.

Wow. Now it's a multi-year deal and it's global. But that's a pretty big vote of confidence in your studio to get Netflix to pay you $7

billion to get the first run on the new movies and to be able to air some of the old movies

as well.

“Like that's why these companies are worth what they are worth because they have a hundred”

year library of movies. I would rather be them than paramount with $89 billion of debt just for the record. Well, and then what's going to happen if Netflix goes after them? They're not officially for sale, Sony. But if you want a company that's at least semi-comparable to Warner Brothers as a studio,

not the streaming component, Sony is sitting right there. They're not for sale, they're owned by Japanese company, but who knows? Sony and NBC universal in that kind of level, I think it's okay. I think it's like in sports, so you don't have to be the Dodgers spending $700 billion in salary every year, you might be okay being in the NL Central and just being in that

wins and playing for appearances. That's good enough for you, then that's fine. I prefer the Dodgers. Luzer, everyone that works at Warner Brothers, this is just brutal. It's all.

And this is like in all time the set and the gut punch, they were kind of coming around to Netflix. Yeah. Netflix was saying the right things. We believe in theatrical now and this is going to be a vertical merger.

We're not going to fire everybody. We love what you do. We're going to sell to other platforms, then boom, within 48 hours. It's like yanked away from Netflix and all of a sudden, it's not only the elephants who have turned CBS into more like Fox News, which is what people at the Warner do not like.

thousands of people.

“Luzer movie theaters, because Ellison basically said, we're in new 30 movies over there.”

No, I don't believe that number at all.

That seems, seems aspirational. Let's just say that. Yeah, I don't believe that. I mean, Netflix tried to make 30 movies a year. And literally you watch some of those movies, they're not even finished.

Right. Like they were just pumping them out to get them out because they needed that engagement machine. And that, and to put 30 movies a year in theaters, you got to have a higher bar than just kind of some of the Netflix slot.

That's two studios though, so it's really 15 movies from each studio. It is, which is more than each of those studios produces currently. Fair. Winners as off, I hate making them a winner, but he's going to make a crazy amount of money. It's unbelievable.

This worked out for him.

“Bill, you're, you're going to say crazy.”

I'm going to say grotesque.

A guy should not make $800 million off of a financial transaction that causes thousands

of jobs to be lost. Like, what are we doing? I know it's all about the shareholders, and he delivered for the shareholders. And that's where his compensation was set. If the shareholders do well, he does well, but, but it feels, it feels like insane that

this guy who managed the company down, down, down. And then got lucky when someone wanted to buy it, could make that kind of money. It's almost like a plan out of succession. Absolutely. It's like a season three season four plot where they're like, well, buy it and we'll ruin

the company and then blah, blah, blah, blah. My last loser is the city of Los Angeles, because we're going to have a ton of people that that are, you know, that are going to lose their jobs out of all this, which is terrible. You have these two lots.

I'm still suspicious. They're going to keep both lots in the same kind of, who knows, I don't think they will. I think they'll sell one. The question is will they sell? Well, it's selling like two, Netflix Netflix has wanted the paramount lot.

So maybe Ellison will sell, this was Craig's idea on the town, by the way, it's brilliant. They should sell the paramount lot to Netflix, have them move in and then everybody at paramount Warner Bros goes to Warner Bros. Interesting. You, we found out on your pod the other day Craig loves the Saudis, we found that out.

He's right at five. He's big. Big Saudi fans. Yeah. They got to be winners here. The Saudis, if this deal goes through, we don't know what

the money configuration is, but it was announced a few months ago that the Saudis, the Qataris and the Abu Dhabians, they have funds that are in this deal. So all of a sudden, they're going to own a piece of CNN and CBS news and all of these outlets that are pretty powerful in terms of potential propaganda. Well, they already own the leakers, so nobody's seem to care about that.

But we're Los Angeles is now, this whole decade, COVID, the Hollywood just all held right to move over and over again, all the strikes, the fires, which, the lack of accountability, basically from everybody that runs the city and the state, which has just been disgusting to watch over and over again, the cover ups afterwards that people report about not even noticing.

I've never felt more uncertain about the future of the city, the city that you have Netflix

moving and in type building entire campus in New Jersey so they can get better tax credits and build a bunch of stuff there. And all these people bolting, these studios empty, no matter, you could go to sunset gower, you could go to all these places that used to be packed and they're just not anymore. Nobody has a plan for any of it.

The governor of the state is now running for a 2028 election instead of worrying about the state is in now and it's just the worst shape we've ever been in with all this stuff. And now on top of it, all these people are going to lose their jobs. I agree with you two a point. Okay.

I am from Southern California and I'm old enough to remember like the late 80s, early 90s with the riots and the gang wars and right where you literally, I was from Orange County, you literally would not go to LA, like it was, it was bad and this is not that, like LA is a pretty nice place to live. We both live here.

It's a great city to live in.

“But this is a existential moment for this particular industry that I think is a key driver”

of the economy. It's not the only driver. There's many, many different things about LA that make it what it is. But I think it's an underrated aspect of what makes LA, is this creative class of people that come here to work in the entertainment business and that needs a boost.

It needs some kind of incentive or, you know, maybe the city should declare both these lots to be landmarks that cannot be developed. So we don't get the paramount lot turned into condos so that when this industry does come back, whether it's a new version that is AI powered or creator driven or these studios

places can get filled with activity again.

I do think it will happen, it's just cyclical and we are in a very big down cycle right now. It's awful. I mean, they built this bridge in downtown LA that they lit up every night. They spent years and years building it and within a year, everybody stole the copper from

it and now it doesn't light up at night.

“And it was like, what was all the traffic for for five years?”

Like, I don't see a lot of planning and strategy with, I remember when I moved there in 2002, you know, you'd meet people and you meet people like your kids pre-k and stuff. What do you do? Oh, I'm a writer. I'm an entertainment lawyer.

Oh, I do props for movies and everybody seemed to work in the industry somehow. And the more that these jobs and these companies push that stuff, either they're pushing to leave LA and go somewhere else or the jobs are disappearing. I just think LA is going to lose a lot of what made it LA. It's just not the same city if that happens.

I agree. But I do think things are changing. Yeah. How many people do you know that work in the podcast business? True.

A lot now. A lot. A lot of that are here. How many people do you know that work in the creator business? Right.

There are full on agencies and production studios and YouTube has a huge presence here. These are things that we're not in LA 10 years ago. So the entire notion of the business is changing. There's no pilot season anymore, though they're doing some pilot season used to be a thing.

People would move here because there were a hundred pilots of TV shows that were made between January and March every year and it was like a boom town. That doesn't happen here. Two, by the way. It was like the NFL playoff.

See new happening. You could relax. Now we don't even have up front. I don't. Wasn't it?

“Wasn't that your idea to have a Pluto channel just for busted pilots?”

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think we could just do. Yeah. We could still do it.

There's a bit of them. And you'd see big actors who were on bad pilots before they became famous. I just did. We just did Fargo for rewatchables for next week. And one of the tidbits was that 80 Falco was in the Fargo TV series developed a year after

the movie. And if it would become a TV series, she's not Carmella Suprano. Amazing.

And it's like there's a million stories like that.

And now we barely make any TV pilots. But I know when you have like the New Jersey thing I thought was alarming, when Netflix feels like this is just better for us to do this than to stay here. That's one. But it's not.

Okay. But that the days of Netflix being building a production studio in LA, there's just not the land for that. They were, they got a swath of land there to essentially run rough shot on whatever they wanted to do.

They did the same thing.

“We could have given them city of industry.”

I still don't know what happens there. Just make sure than the whole place. You could. Yes, you could. But there's not the infrastructure.

There's not the infrastructure here. There should be. I agree that there should be incentives in place here. And I feel like this state is kind of getting its act together a little bit with some of these production incentives.

It's better than it used to be. But it's not competitive with these other places. They want it more. Yeah. And they're just, they're going to get it because there's been the acceptance that people

in LA will just like, they will be filled anyways. And they're not filled. These studios are not filled. It's crazy to watch what's happening. These places were packed all the time and they're just not well, one guy who really wanted

it David Ellison. He has a chance now. He can build a huge production studio in LA if he wants. And where's he going to get the money?

He's already at a 79 million plus 3% of that.

Yeah, Billion. Billion. Yeah. Well, that the other thing is they're involved perfectly with a bunch of the sports stuff too.

And these European teams, the NBA Europe League, there's all kinds of IP that can come from that. So it's a, it's a, it's a daunting job. I don't know if he's ready for it. He certainly doesn't have the life experience or the work experience to run anything like

that. But I also don't know if anyone does, I don't know who could have done this. You've talked about it. It's out of my era. Yeah.

We take it for granted these days that these CEOs and people who run Hollywood are in their 60s and 70s, but like in the 80s and 90s, the people running the studios were like 32 years old. Right. You know, Jeffrey Gatsiberg was reinventing the Disney animation group when he was in his

30s. He was in the 30s, but at Paramount, he was in his 20s. And like it used to be normal that you ran companies in your early 40s. Now it's less so what we did a good job, but now talking about Trump, I'm, I'm glad for both of us, Matt Boney, you have Monday, Wednesday, Friday every week and producer

Craig, we keep throwing under the bus and saying he loves the Saudis, but it's fine. We share him. We don't work with him. The heart wants with the heart wants and I am happy for Craig and he'll live very

If we were being held off a cliff like the kids in the good son at the end and Craig was

“holding onto us who does he like out, we're going to have to give him true so I would”

find out. Me, of course. I don't know. You take him everywhere, you take him to these parties. I do.

I do take him to parties.

“You take him to time because you live on the same side LA with him.”

That's true, but you made him a star, you gave him a fantasy football show, so you made him a good star. All right. Good to see you. Thanks for all the time.

Yes, thank you.

All right, that's it for the podcast.

Thanks to Jacobi. Thanks to Bellany. Thanks to Gahound and Wardo as well.

“I'm going to be back on this feed on Thursday.”

Don't forget about rewatchables. That's already up. Fargo, coming next week at CR Month, buckle up, hold onto your seats. Good times. I'll see you on Thursday.

Twenty-one plus in president's select states for Kansas and affiliates with Kansas Starkucino or 18 plus in president D.C. Kentucky Wyoming. Optin required rewards are not much trouble restrictions apply including bonus and token expiration, leg requirements and max wage or amount.

C terms it's sportsbook.fender.com. Game problem call 1-and-and-gamb or 1-800-my reset. Call 888-797777 or visit ccpg.org/chat and Connecticut or mdgamblinghelp.org. Call 800-327-5050 for 24/7 support mess chisits or call 877-8, hope and why or text hope and why in New York for Louisiana call 877-770-787-867.