An NBA All-Star Fix, Kendrick Vs. Drake, and the 'SNL' 50th Anniversary Show With Van Lathan and James Andrew Miller

It's the Bill Simmons Podcast presented by FanDuel. The NBA season hitting full stride.
Don't foul out on your chance to win with America's number one sportsbook. Bet on fun markets like live quarter player props and partless.
Plus, enjoy our new NBA player prop pages. Your one-stop shop for player props that include FanDuel's exclusive performance trends.
Tracking the last five games for top markets. They even do that.
The app is safe, secure, and easy to use. When you win, you'll get paid instantly.
So download the app today. Bet with FanDuel, official partner of the NBA.
The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit rg-help.com to learn more about the resources and helplines available.
Listen to the end of this episode for additional details. Must be 21 plus and President's Select State.
Scam problem, call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit rg-help.com. Coming up, we're going to try to fix NBA All-Star Weekend plus hockey, SNL 50, HBO, lots more next.
This episode is brought to you by Intuit TurboTax. Taxes was waiting and wondering and worrying.
It's almost like how in the old days of fantasy football, we used to have to tally the scores on a Monday and then the commissioner would just mail them out to everybody and you'd wait three days to see if you won. Those were the old ways of doing it.
Now Taxes is matching with a TurboTax live full service expert who gives your taxes their undivided attention. They can file your taxes as soon as today.
And while they do, you get real-time updates on their progress, meaning you can get back to what's important, the game. Now this is taxes into a TurboTax.
Get an expert now on TurboTax.com. We're also brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network.
I have a new rewatchable that's coming for you on Monday night. We did Wayne's World in honor of SNL 50.
A little bit later, Jim Miller is going to be coming on to talk about the big three plus hour SNL 50 show and our biggest takeaways. Also having Van Lathan on at the beginning of this podcast to talk about NBA All-Star Weekend.
And can we save this thing? Is this just the sunk cost at this point? Plus, we have some other stuff we're going to cover. We're also brought to you by FanDuel Sportsbook.
You know, I didn't do great at my Super Bowl bets. And, you know, I got seduced like a lot of other people with the Pat Mahomes thing.
So I'm trying to make it up to you guys. We have the seasons coming back after this all-star break.
I basically forced FanDuel to come up with a playoff prop for me. And this is what we did.
We are going to do Minnesota, Detroit, and Golden State to make the playoffs. Parlay plus 160 are the current odds.
FanDuel is going to boost this for us because they're our friends. They're going to add a 30% ringer profit boost token on all to make the playoffs and to make the play-in futures.
So you can take that little Minnesota Detroit Golden State thing, which I love. It's basically going to come down to Golden State and I believe in Golden State.
I'm with you, Draymond. One of the rare times I'm with Draymond.
So you can bet that plus 208 and it's going to be available basically from when you hear this podcast all the way until the Lakers Hornets game on Wednesday night. Fando with a ringer future specials tab that you can find really easily.
It's going to include that parlay and some other eligible selections. So claim the PBT and the carousel, apply it to my boost or other futures bets that you like.
All right, we're going to bring in Van Lathan in one second. Pearl Jam's coming up.

I don't know if you knew this, but during the SNL 50, the music show on Friday night,

Eddie Vedder came out and he sang Tom Petty, The Waiting, which was great. And then launched into Corduroy, which is the theme for this podcast.
Thank you, Eddie. Here's Pearl Jam.
all right i made van lathan come over we're gonna talk about nba all your new favorite sport, hockey. Yes.
You're a true patriot now. Yeah.
Yeah, the hockey got me. It was a great watch.
It was very intense competition on Saturday night. It was the three fights in nine seconds got you? The three fights got me.
I missed the first two fights. Me too.
I started getting emails after the second fight. Right.
And then I turned it on for the third fight. But then I watched two groups of players playing at the highest level who absolutely wanted to embarrass each other.
In an exhibition that meant nothing, that nobody even knew what it was. No one cared.
No one cared. No one cared in terms of outside of the world of hockey, but they cared.
And the people in Montreal cared. Did you hear how quiet it got the last five minutes of that game? Yep.
They were super quiet. They were despondent.
When they, I learned some stuff. Now, what is it called now? When a power play happens, okay? The power play.
And then after the power, when they, when they. When they become it's even when they become even sides when they become even sides what is that called killing the penalty they've killed the penalty successfully they've successfully killed the penalty yeah i heard this term when they've successfully killed the penalty the excitement from the crowd because they didn't give up any goals during the power play.
I was on edge the whole time.

I'm watching the power play tick down,

and I'm like, oh, my God, are we going to score?

You're getting roped in.

I can feel it.

I got roped in.

It's good.

Well, we're taping this before all the Monday games.

The Thursday final is going to be in Boston,

USA against somebody, hopefully Canada,

because I can't wait to see USA versus Canada in Boston.

It'll be awesome.

But that's not why you're here.

You're here for a few reasons.

We're going to try to fix NBA All-Star Weekend and decide whether it could even be fixed. Is it a sunk cost? You have a theory about...
Well, do your exploration theory. Okay, so certain things culturally expire.
Game shows. Game shows.
For example, when I was growing up, Gilligan's Island and all of these shows from the 60s and the 70s were still in reruns, but they were still in reruns prominently. I still knew all of these characters.
I still was aware of all of this stuff. And then one day, it just gets to a point, nobody cares about Gilligan's Island anymore.
Nobody cares about Three's Company anymore. These shows just evaporate.
Cheers is like this and yet Seinfeld lives on and Friends lives on but then like Family Ties didn't. So you just kind of never know when it's going to happen.
There's like a bunch of buffer years there. Seinfeld and Friends made it to DVD.
And because they made it to DVD, like a DVD release that everybody was like, oh my God, it's coming out on DVD. And they lived a little bit long in syndication on TBS and stuff.
They're these kids' version, and this sounds really, really bad, of Gilligan's Island, of these older shows. I 100% agree.
So this is an old TV show. To a kid now, it's Friends.
It's Seinfeld. That's an old TV show.
But yeah, so things just, they go, and they never announce when they're leaving. They never tell you, oh my God, this is the last year that this is going to be relevant.
So it can happen. And the question is, could it happen to the NBA won't ever culturally expire? Has it happened already to All-Star weekend? To the All-Star game.
Has it happened to All-Star weekend? Has that culturally expired? So a lot of it has to do with how being a sports fan has changed from the late 70s to the early 2000s to now, right? When I was a kid, the All-Star game was amazing because it was like George Gervin, David Thompson,

people like that were never on television.

So to have like some of my favorite Celtics in a game

with people like Walter Davis,

it was like, I never got to see those guys play.

It really mattered.

That peaked in 87.

Best All-Star game we've ever had.

You remember that, right?

Orlando Blackman made the free throws

with time expired to send it to overtime. I have no recollection.
It's the best all-star game by far. I guarantee if you watched it, you'd have a great time.
Okay, cool. Goes into overtime.
Tom Chambers becomes James Worthy during the game. Magic's just feeding him.
Bird's in it. Jordan's in it.
Everybody's in it. It's amazing.
And I think the last good all-star game was 2001. Because I did a running diary of the 03 All-Star game, which was Jordan's last one.
It went into overtime. And if you just look at the basketball reference, it's like, oh, that must have been a good game.
It wasn't. Right.
01 was the last one. I think what's changed.
So I remember I got league pass in 2000 because I got a direct TV dish. I got to see all these guys constantly.
Social media comes in, the internet comes in, and it's just not special in the same way to see all these guys on a court. So they have, that's problem number one.
Is there anything you want to add to that? So funny, as much as we have in common, like the different lives that we've lost. In 2000, I remember hiring somebody from the neighborhood so that I could steal cable and you and you and you know you were getting the the the direct tv mine was more illegal because I lived in an apartment I wasn't supposed to have a direct tv dish and I had to lie and pretend I owned the house to get direct tv because it was like literally illegal to have it if you just rented the cable guy literally knocked on our door and was like hey I didn't take it off again again.
Don't have him come back. I'm going to have somebody come out here.
So, yeah, here's the thing. The last All-Star game might have been 2003.
Okay, I can understand that. That was MJ's last game.
He wasn't good in it. It went into overtime.
It wasn't a great game. But was that MJ Kobe? Kobe has a red jersey on and him and MJ are going back and forth.
Yeah, it had a couple moments. However, the weekend endured for a little while longer because there were still such memorable moments from the weekend.
There was Blake Griffin jumping over to... Well, that was 10 years later.
Yeah, that was the last one. And then there was one of the greatest spectacles we've ever seen from the All-Star Game, the Aaron Gordon, Zach Levine dunk contest.
We're still having moments where there's still signs of life. It's still kicking.
But it hasn't had a pulse now in a while. There hasn't been anything to make you go as a matter of fact, the only thing I can think of was Steph Curry versus Sabrina.
The shootout that they had and they didn't do that this year. Mack McClung is fun, but I don't care about Mack McClung.
They might as well pull somebody from the stands. He's not an actual NBA player.
He's like in the G League. So at that point, just go get people from YouTube and have them dunk.
It's not like Mack McClung's playing NBA minutes. I don't know.
You go against your own, huh? Interesting. Well, it was a big weekend for the Whites.
It was a gigantic weekend for the Whites. Three point, dunk, hockey.
You became a dunk hockey but you became a hockey fan yes huge snl 50 one of the whitest tv events yeah they tried to they tried to make fun of it we know the truth though um but so look there's just no this used to be something to where you saw all these celebrities and all of these people there not because it was a corporate thing which is kind of how it feels now right kind of right right now it feels like every time you see somebody famous they're at the meta party or the the pringles event or the whatever it seemed like before that they just wanted to be there because it was the biggest party of the year or one of them yeah super Bowl weekend and other things like that notwithstanding but now it it all feels forced none of it feels like fun none of it feels grounded in basketball culture in any actual way i actually went on twitter and i asked what killed all-star weekend yeah and the variety of answers it was so wide but they were also all plausible which tells me that the nba has not just one problem with all-star weekend but several there's a player uh culture problem as far as how they view the all-star game there's a well they don't want to get embarrassed they don't want to get embarrassed they don't want to end up on twitter reddit youtube you it, because they got dunked on because they missed the three, anything.

Endless highlight feed type of situation, right?

There's a top-down NBA problem, some people were saying, with Adam Silver.

There's the way we ingest culture.

The enabler, Adam Silver?

The enabler, Adam Silver.

So there's all of these different issues that's going on with the All-Star game.

Well, the three-pointers are the other big thing.

Three-pointer.

And not one clear way to fix it.

Not one clear way to say, hey, this will bring the magic back to the weekend.

It's a into the worst. So the game itself has turned into just a terrible pickup game with no defense.
Now that's the way it used to be for two and a half, three quarters. But the great thing about the all-star game was it would settle into being an awesome game.
And it was always a nice little snapshot of who mattered that season. You'd see the five guys on each side, East versus West.
You'd have a feel for like, all right, these are the guys now. This is it.
Everybody else got to play. Now who are 10 guys that really matter? Once they started messing with the teams and doing...
The thing they did this weekend. And I flagged it from the beginning,

the rising,

the four teams. And one of them's the rising star.

That's just stupidity.

Yeah,

it really is.

It's like,

nobody wants to see Zach Eady and Steve and Stefan Castle,

all these dudes who I like,

but we don't see them on Sunday night.

This is like,

this is where you promote the biggest stars you have.

There's nothing fun about watching these guys who have been barely in the league

against like Steph Curry.

They're trying to make the All-Stars play.

And they figure if they put the young guys out there

that they won't win.

It backfired. LeBron didn't play.

LeBron's like, I'm good.

Yeah.

Do you think it's weird he just decided not to play

five hours before the game?

It's incredibly weird.

It's just a rare loss for him

because there's no way you're not taking a loss and taking shit for that. So why? Everybody wants to see him.
Yeah, he's the biggest star in the league. We don't have too many more all-star games to enjoy him.
So everybody wants to see him. Everybody just wants to see him out there.
It's an odd thing. So, you know, as I tried to make myself watch it, like I didn't try to make myself well you love basketball we should say i love basketball so i'm going to watch nba players doing cool stuff where the audience there just wasn't nba players doing cool stuff that's what the all-star game is about it's about nba players doing cool stuff even the dunk contest you have mac mcclung doing cool stuff he's kind of not an nba player though so it's it's still not nba players doing cool stuff i yeah the closest is castle who is probably like the third or fourth best spur and the spurs have a they're five games under 500 he's a rookie and he was by far the biggest star in the slam dunk contest.
That's not good. He should have won maybe.
He's pretty good. He was pretty good.
But so, you know, it's just, it's tough, man. Like there was a clip going around of the Thompson brother from up there in, in, in Detroit flying.
Did you see this clip? Well, I mean, those guys are the best athletes probably in the league right now. He flew from the restricted area and dunked the ball.
It looked almost super human. And I'm like, that kind of energy and stuff is what you see at the dunk contest.
It used to be one or two stars and then two or three, oh my God, this guy's a crazy athlete guy. And that mix of guys was enough to make that night electric.
And it's just gone. Now we're hoping that they don't fail.
And it just doesn't feel the same anymore. Can I give you a dunk idea? I just thought of this as you were talking.
What about dunk battle? Okay, what's this? It's just one guy challenges another guy at All-Star Saturday. And it's just one-on-one so like the thompson twins are like dunk contest two of us let's go and the dunk contest is just like four one-on-one just for pride battles like yannis is like you know what i'm tired of tired of this one banyama shit let's go dunk contest right now.
You versus me. I would love it.
My thing

is I would wonder whether or not these guys

could take the loss. You know what I'd go

back to? Do you remember when

LeBron was adamant

about hiding the video

of getting poked on at his

camp when the Crawford kid

I don't remember that story. Which Crawford

kid was it? Oh, it was

Jordan Crawford? It was Jordan Crawford.

I vaguely remember it.

So, oh my God.

So Jordan Crawford dunks on LeBron at his camp.

And they hit the video.

They like, they deep shadow protocol.

Midnight boys, pew, pew.

They deep shadow protocol the video.

Wow.

And I just remember at that time thinking, this has been made into such a big deal. Getting dunked on is something that happens.
Anyone can dunk on anybody. You get caught from behind, you get lobbed, backdoor, whatever.
But to me, that vision of yourself as a player and yourself as an entity is the same reason why these guys can't let their hair down a little bit and have fun in an all-star game because at an all-star game for it to be fun somebody has to kind of lose it's it's competition it's fun right somebody's gonna lose a three-point contest remember alan iverson goes out there and has one of the worst performances in the three-point contest that we've ever seen he laughs about it right he goes maybe i should have practiced a little bit more now with the with what you're gonna take on twitter and how these guys are looked at nobody wants to be that guy that's ai that's one of the greatest ever who went out there and wasn't a three-point shooter and ended up with 10 and laughed he laughed about it. So I just think they take themselves a little bit too seriously.
We take ourselves as fans a little bit too seriously as well. Well, it's a pastime to complain about All-Star Weekend.
It's been 20 years of it. This was especially bad, though, because it was so over-the-top, overproduced.
I just want to see basketball. I don't need to see, I don't need games to stop for a half hour.
We don't need to honor the TNT guys forever. We don't need all these different, we don't need like a slam dunk.
Let's remember Vince Carter in 2001, whatever that was. And we got to do that for 10 minutes.
And then he comes out and has to talk to the crowd. I don't know who that's for.
It's not for you and I, but it's also not for, you know, teenagers. It's not for eight year olds.
I honestly don't know. People just want to see three pointers and dunks and a good game.
Just go back to that. Can I ask you this? Is it possible that the basketball nerds have a hand in having ruined the all-star game as well? what way so with the with the with the three-pointers or something else you and i talk a lot about the differing style of basketball that we like yeah i like seeing a motherfucker get dunked on yeah okay i think i don't not like that i get it i think the league misses a blake griffin i think the league misses a deandre jordan at his height i think the league misses a Blake Griffin.
I think the league misses a DeAndre Jordan at his height. I think the league misses some good old power basketball to get people up out of their seats.
You know what I mean? I think the fact that we don't have as much of that anymore doesn't really translate to the All-Star game being good. Because what the All-Star game then looks like is a regular season NBA game where they're shooting so many threes.
But when you have the best player, best players on earth, all on the same court, you kind of don't want to see them do that. What you want to see them do is kind of dominate each other.
You want to see them get into each other. You want to see all the different styles of basketball that they play clash the old all-star game was fun because you it would be in a situation where you had the best players and everybody would have that little one-on-one thing it would be like okay this guy's gonna go against this guy the KG is gonna go against Tim Duncan then Karl Malone is gonna go against Charles Barkley you're gonna get all of that stuff but that's not how they play the game anymore anyway.
So you're really not going to get that in the All-Star game. That was one of the most famous All-Star games ever was 1977, the year after the merger and Dr.
J's first NBA All-Star game. And that was when he, I can't remember if he dunked on Kareem or Bill Walton.
It was one of them. And it was one of his most famous dunks, but he like Tomahawk threw it down and he was just awesome in the game in general.
It really meant something. And it was cool to have all these guys in one game.
And that faded out by the time Jordan retired the first time. To me, there's two issues.
One is the competitiveness and two is the style. And I think you can pick, you can fix both.
And I'm going to have a fix for you that I'm going to throw right after this break. This episode is brought to you by Nissan.
If you're planning on an adventurous 2025, you're going to need a car that can keep up with you and conquer anything in your path. The Nissan Armada Pro 4X is that car with a twin-turbo V6 engine ready to propel your adventures up to 8,500 pounds of towing capacity to haul all your favorite toys and space for eight passengers, this unshakable fortress will chew up and spit out anything you throw at it.
Learn more at the all new 2025 Nissan Armada at nissanusa.com. Towing capacity varies by configuration.
See Nissan towing guide and owner's manual for additional information. Always secure cargo.
This episode is brought to you by Vrbo Private Vacation Rentals. With Vrbo, you always get the whole house so you and your fellow fans can cheer on your team in peace.
What's worse than watching a game with somebody who's not rooting for the same team you're rooting for? Nothing. But that's why if you book a vacation house with Vrbo, you know all the people in your house.
They'll be friends. They'll be family.
Ideally, they'll be the ones who also root for my teams. Plan a winning vacation.
Make it a Vrbo. All right, Van, it's time.
We're fixing the all-star game. And this is the best I've ever felt about a fix.
Oh, wow. And I actually really feel like I have it.
Saturday, slam dunk, and then the first All-Star game, and then Sunday, three-pointer in the second All-Star game. I'm going to explain.
We need the All-Star week and have coherence again. It needs to be East versus West.
Okay. We also need stakes.
And the whole thing about, well, home court advantage for the finals should go to which conference wins. You can't really do that when you have all these guys who could give a shit about like, Trey Young's not, just wait, I have a fix.
Trey Young's not going to care if the East wins because he's not going to be in the finals. So if you make home court the prize, you go to a 40-minute game, go FIBA rules so it moves faster and feels different.
And you have eight-man teams from the East and the West. So we pick 24 All-Stars total, but only 16 of them play in the big game on Sunday with the home court advantage at stakes.
Here's the catch. Only players from top five seeds can be in the all-star game.
Oh. So everyone who's in the Sunday game is actually going to care about home court advantage.
So I have it seven on each side plus an eighth person who's a commissioner pick. So eight versus, but we start everything at 7 p.m.
We have the three-pointer, three-point contest first round of it, first half of the game, three-point contest at halftime, and then the second half of the game. And here's what the teams would be.
So we would have so the West. These are all top five seeds.
Jokic, Jaron Jackson, LeBron, SGA, and Harden as the starters. Jalen Williams and Shangoon coming off the bench and Curry as your exemption pick.
So it's eight. East, Tatum, Towns, Giannis, Brunson, Mitchell, Mobley, and Jalen Brown.
And then the exemption pick would be Cade Cunningham okay and we're just fucking going for it whoever wins gets home court advantage everybody who's in that game is actually going to care right because this is like we might get a game seven at home if we win this certainly so then you have then you move to the other thing the Saturday game you take the remaining all-stars there's a Wemby Wemby, Siakam, Trae Young, Garland, Dame,

Anthony Edwards, AD, and Hero.

And you have them play the eight best

future guys. Castle, the Thompsons,

the first, second year guys.

They play those guys. $2 million

prize, $250K per person

if you win. 8v8, same thing,

40-minute games. And you have the slam

dunk after it. So that game is the Sunday game

or the Saturday? That's the Saturday game. Okay.
So that Saturday game, slam dunk, that Saturday, Sunday is three-point, and then this home court advantage finals game with all the top five, all the best players in the league with actual stakes. So I like it.
So here's the deal. You still have the Rising Stars game.
Do you have the Rising Stars game? I don't have the Rising Stars game anymore. I have the eight best Rising Stars

against the eight remaining All-Stars who

weren't top five seeds. So then we would have

to change how we picked the All-Star game a little bit.

So we'd have to have at least seven

from the top five seeds

to be in this game. What happens when you get

a vet in

the

constellation against the Rising Stars game

who doesn't want to be there? Then guess what? You don't get to fucking play in the all-star game anymore that's the other thing with this that's my next wrinkle what you're gonna have is what you're gonna have my next wrinkle oh the game's not good enough for you don't fucking come next year you're not eligible that's it like let's adam silver the enabler let's start let's start hitting people with a ruler let's go okay so the lakers are the five seed this year, right? Yeah, so they make it. But in the past, you might be looking at a situation where you had a team with LeBron who was in the play-in.
LeBron, you're playing on Saturday night or next year. He's not going to want to play.
Okay, or next year you're not in the game. This is it.
Once you diss us with this weekend, you're out. You don't get to play for home court advantage after that.
Let's put real pressure on these dudes. It's like this is an honor and a privilege to be in this game.
How much leverage do you feel like the league has to do that? I'm asking. Seriously.
Well, this is an Adam Silver question. Okay.
Because Stern would have been able to do it. Adam wants to be everybody's buddy.
That's the difference. So again, I'm going to read you the teams.
Okay, go for it. East.
Tatum, Towns, Giannis, Brunson, Mitchell, Mobley, Jalen Brown, and then Cade Cunningham is the exemption pick. Versus Jokic, Jaron Jackson, LeBron, SGA, Harden, Jalen Williams, and Shingun.
Curry is the pick. 8v8.
40-minute games. Three subs, that's it.
Everyone's playing. We're fucking going.
Home court advantage for the finals at stake. I'm watching that.
I'm watching it too. In your revamped all-star game, is Victor Wimby-Yaman not? He's playing on Saturday in this one.
But it's like, guess what, Victor? Still a privilege to be here. Go whoop on all these future stars.
And by the way, next year, get a top five seed so you can be in the Sunday game. Right.
Because then it would lead to some top five seed jockeying. It's like, oh shit, there's a week to go until they pick the all-star.
We got to get in there. Well, it would also lead to something that I think the all-star weekend needs is stakes and hierarchy.
Because if you're a top five type of guy, right, and you're playing in that game, not only are you an all-star, but you're almost like a more all-star-y all-star because you're playing on a team that's competitive. You've grabbed a carrot, which is I play for a top five team, so I am in our biggest profile game.
Here's the other thing I forgot to mention. This is what they lose with the stupid, oh, guys from different teams.
And you have Jalen Brunson playing against Towns. I like when teammates are on an all-star team together.
Like this team I laid out, Tatum and Brown get to play together. Mobley and Mitchell get to play together.
And then Brunson and Towns gets to play together. And that's like an advantage in a game like this, right? You have SGA and Jalen Williams get to play together.
Those guys are playing harder because they're incentivized because they- Yeah, and it's like, hey, it's crunch time, man. We're the two seed.
This could be like a game seven in the finals, but everybody who'd be in that game, including LeBron on

the Lakers, has at least a

puncher's chance to play in the finals, and then

you go down to the runner-up

dudes like, Wemby, sorry.

You're not a top five seed yet.

You don't get to be in the Sunday game.

Work your way up there, buddy. I get it.

So these are the only two things

that are going to stop the

idea from really shining. Number one

is the NBA is going to want to promote guys like Wimby, whether he's on a winning team or not. Saturday night.
Huge audience right after the slam dunk. Right.
And number two, I guarantee you, you get pushed back from a surly vet, from a Steph, from a like that who's happens to play on the team that's not contending right now 250 grand you your team wins you get 250k so that's your carrot and then your stick is you can't play in the game next year you would really be that draconian about i would i think they have to be that but do you think it's that it's that important? It's not like you're taking money from these dudes. You're just saying like, look, man, you didn't give a shit about this weekend, so we don't want to have you back.
It's a privilege to be here. You're representing the league.
We're trying to build new fans. We're trying...
Because the other thing with this, if I did that Sunday thing, I would start that at 7 o'clock. Right? I want kids to watch it.
I want kids to be up at 10 o'clock. You want some little...
So you're 7 o'clock Eastern? 7 o'clock Eastern. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I want kids to watch it. The way they started last night, you had kids, it was almost 11 o'clock at night.
There's some stupid thing. They're playing to 40.
It's just like, what are we doing? How important to the NBA is All-Star Weekend in your estimation? I can't tell because I know they make a lot of money from it. It's a corporate event.
That's what they do. I mean, if it were up to me, it would be two nights.
That's it. I think it's too many nights.
I think this break is, like right now, there's no sports. We're taping this on a Monday.
If this hockey thing wasn't happening, there'd be nothing happening right now other than college basketball and people put out mock drafts. Spring training.
Spring training's coming back. Spring training's coming back.
Yeah. I saw the new Red Sox double play combo.
I got a little excited about it. We got Bregman.
Yeah. No, I think they need to some sort of juice or really seriously think about not doing it anymore.
Those would be my two options at this point. Because here's the thing, it's bad for the league.
It's bad to have a bad weekend where every type of fan you have is like, that sucked. I didn't like it.
It's particularly bad this year where everyone was talking about the death of the NBA, the whole ratings discussion, the conversation over the product on the court. It was particularly bad this year for them to have a dud of an all-star weekend.
They needed to have a good all-star weekend. Well, and then you have Draymond too on the announcing team just killing it.
Yeah, but that's part of it, right? That's part of the criticism. Part of the criticism is about guys like Draymond who are in those positions who criticize the product of the league you hear a lot of people talking about the inside the nba guys and all of that i don't know how real that is i i do know that i i personally enjoy not being baby i want to hear what people that are that invested into basketball culture actually think about basketball so it doesn't bother me yeah i can see how draymond shitting on that idea to have the younger guys on sunday night how that puts a preconceived notion in people's mind that those guys shouldn't be there on sunday night well but so two things one he was right and i give him credit for saying it yeah two you don't want somebody who's on tv when it it's this thing you're trying to push and so do your fans just shitting on it.
Which I think is a real problem for them because football doesn't let football people do that. When the football guys are out there, everything is very like, let's go to so-and-so who talked to Pat Mahomes and it's like this glowy, glossy light set.
Mahomes says nothing for three minutes. They throw it back and Gronk's talking about what a great guy he is and it's just how they do football.
But I don't know. I kind of like it.
I don't want to see critical shit when I'm about to watch a game. What about something that our friend Charlamagne Tha God said that the game is just suffering from it being too close to the Super Bowl, it being too close to so many other gigantic...
I was at the Super Bowl in New Orleans that there is no possible way that I was going to be able to make myself get up and go to an all-star game with all those events. Right, four days later? Four days later.
You would go if it was a good event. You would go if it was like East versus West with finals home court at stake and people actually giving a shit.
I've been at all-star games when people gave a shit. And maybe it was just for a fourth quarter and it's fucking cool.
It was one of my favorite things. But what about the idea that as the NFL season kind of stretches out a little bit that they have to as the nfl season kind of uh stretches out a little bit that that they have to figure out how a way to kind of move their game away from the super bowl a little bit or else it's in the halo and the glow of the super bowl and the grammys i mean the oscars the real week to do it is that that dead week between conference championship games and super bowl yeah where they could maybe do it then but that's also a good week for basketball because that's the one week people kind of drift toward watching games night after night after night.
The question to me is like, do they care? And they claim they do. It also feels like who's deciding this? Because whoever decided the structure of this last weekend, I don't understand it.
It's not like an entertainment person. It's not somebody who can look at basketball objectively.
So who is it? Is it like the owners? Like who? I wonder who's spearheading this. Well, when you look at the things that they try to do, to me, it always looks like they're trying to appease the players, which I get it.
They're a league that is run, essentially, by their players. The players have a lot of power in the NBA.
They're the face of the league. The league pushes them in a way that a lot of other leagues don't push their players.
But it seems as if they're afraid to make the players step out of their comfort zones because at this point, forget about everything else in the Allstar game forget about the game forget about all this stuff if we just hone in on the dunk contest the dunk contest used to be such an electric event like even more so than the game for me such an electric until and then 20 years ago it started a shift and then they would have a couple good ones, but people forget the bad ones. But even if you get...
This is another thing. If there's a decade span and you get three good dunk contest events...
You go one out of every three. One out of every three.
Okay. Like, we can actually...
That's a win for you. Okay.
That's a win. Like, the the years that Nate Robinson won they weren't spectacular but people they were memorable and then if you get something that you can actually they were I mean because I remember leaving the stadium for a couple of those being like never again I'm never going again right so I'm saying is Dwight Howard but Dwight Howard that was great stuff though was it? yeah you weren't into it?

I don't like watching

centers dunk in the dunk contest

oh but he was some kind of

different type of

freakish situation

he jumped

should Wemby be in the dunk contest?

like how tall do we go?

Wemby

but Wemby wasn't gonna be able

to get to the point

Dwight was still short enough

to where he could take flight

remember the Superman dunk?

he threw the ball in there

it's crazy

it's nuts

have I told you my

nobody should be allowed

to use props

in the dunk contest

rule?

I feel like I'm gonna hear it now

Thank you. man, dunk.
You threw the ball in there. It's crazy.
It's nuts. Have I told you my nobody should be allowed to use props in the dunk contest rule? I feel like I'm going to hear it now.
Well, just like, what the fuck is a car doing on the court? And also, we've already seen it. Like, come on.
But, I mean, in a lot of dunk contests, people jump. Is a human a prop? Could you not jump over a person? I think that's about it.
But I think the human has to be facing you like they're a defender right just make it look at least a little like basketball so what I'm saying is something as and look there's even cultural conversations around the dunk contest like I can watch on Instagram right now like Jordan Clingon and one foot God and the rest of these dudes that I that i watch on the internet dunk yeah and do dunks that are so fucking filthy bring them on saturday now that's an interesting thing to me i always what's the difference between them and mac mcclellan he doesn't fucking play i know but my thing is i would make the nba guys dunk against them i would say hey the n, if you want to, there's guys out there and all they're doing is dunking. All these guys are doing is dunking.
They're just dunking, right? But there's a guy, he's like a seventh grade teacher or something like that. He's like a DJ Clark or something, I think for his name.
All they do is dunk. I would make, I would have a dunk contest with those guys and then make the NBA guys dunk against them.
Because when the white boy, Jordan, or whatever his name is, gets out there and starts shining on Saturday night, they're not going to want to be embarrassed. I will put some stakes on it.
I either want real stars or just find me the best dunkers, three-point shooters, whatever. I think they made a huge mistake not putting a couple of wmba players in the three-point contest too i just think i think people like the wmba like caitlin should have been in the three-point contest just period and i would have had an escue like i would have had at least two wmba players and i would have made the three-point contest longer and i think it would have been more interesting.
They own the WNBA. It's not like

it would be like this crazy...

It's basically

like what NBC used to do in the 90s

where they'd be like, now the Friends stars

are going on ER.

They do those crossover shows.

Just fucking bring Caitlin. Why can't

she be at All-Star Weekend?

She's the biggest under-30 star

in either sport. In basketball,

I think

that's kind of an Obama-era idea.

I don into it. She's the biggest under-30 star in either sport.
In basketball,

I think that's kind of an Obama-era idea.

I don't think people are

going to be down for that now. That's going to start a

real, real, real,

real dialogue.

I know where you're going. Right.

Counter,

are you turning the channel? That's what we have

to go back to with all this stuff

is are you turning the channel? It's like

Andre Jackson from the Bucks is dunking Thank you. counter are you turning the channel that's what we have to go back to with all this stuff

is are you turning the channel

it's like

Andre Jackson from the Bucks

is dunking

I'm pretty sure I can go get a T

yeah

right now

and maybe come back for

Mac McClung

trying to jump over at Kia

but if it's like

three point contest

and Tyler Hero just went

and now here comes

Caitlin Clark

I'm fucking watching

I'm not turning the channel for that

so as much as we're talking about it, is it just over? I don't think it's over. I think there's real fixes.
Is it just over? Because if it wasn't over, this is like it's kind of like the married couple that goes to... They're in counseling for 20 years.
Yeah. They broke up, got back together, got an apartment.
And now they're trying BDSM. You know what I mean? To kind of figure out their relationship.
When really what they need is to go out and be back on the party. Yeah.
So you think the All-Star Weekend's at BDSM stage. I think some of this stuff is really getting into having key parties.
This is why I'm telling Adam Silver's got to dress up like a dominatrix and make these motherfuckers play hard again. I mean, seriously.
I don't think it's that dire because I think if you have stakes and you have stars, you can still win with a basketball sporting event. And here, to bring it full circle to the hockey, we just watched all these Canadian USA dudes really give a shit.
It wasn't just the three fights. That game was really, that was like a game seven.
It was physical. McAvoy had that awesome check on McDavid.
Nobody hits McDavid like that. They were flying.
They really cared. So you can't tell me that these guys in the NBA, you can't pull that out.
So I get what you're saying. We know it's there.
You got to pull it out. I know.
Wow. Wow.
They're playing for something in that. I don't mind your idea.
I don't mind your idea because it would be interesting for me. This is the thing.
A lot of these things that we're talking about, they make the game interesting for me. And that's important for you.
That's important. Well, I would really care if the Celtics had a chance to get home court in the finals because they won this all-star game.
Now I'm watching that with Celtics friends. What are you doing to make it interesting for them? For the players.
Well, home court matters. Home court matters for the top five seeds.
That's a real thing. And then for everybody else, money.
Throw money at it. Throw some money at it.
It worked for NBA Cup. They threw money at NBA Cup.
And the guys that played kind of gave a shit about it. Yeah, they wanted to get out there and play.
I mean, look, think about

it, man. If you win

$250,000,

I mean, that's

one night

at Onyx for James Harden.

I mean, that's

a Tuesday at Onyx

for Harden. It's great.

It's a big win for him. So look,

I remember

baseball in the

past. I remember them, if I'm correct, they went to doing home field advantage for the All-Star game for a while.
Now, they stopped after a while, though, didn't they? But it had the problem that we're trying to fix with this. You have guys in the game who don't care because they're not going to make the World Series.
Right. So what do they care about where a game seven of the World Series is? In this case, if you had all the top five seeds, they're going to care.
Let's take one more break and we'll get to talk about Raph Beats. Okay, cool.
This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn. During the season, every baseball team plays 162 games.
It's a true test of endurance. It's not enough to have a hot month or two.
You need sustained dominance throughout. While the same is true for your small business, it's not enough to have a great Q2 or even a great year.
You want year over year growth that starts with better hires that'll be there for the long haul. To find those hires, use LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has strong hiring data and insights that you won't find anywhere else to help pair you with the best candidates from unique skills and interests to the connections you have in common. based on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has strong hiring data and insights that you won't find anywhere else to help pair you with the best candidates from unique skills and interests to the connections you have

in common. Based on LinkedIn data, 72% of small businesses say that LinkedIn helps them find

high quality talent. LinkedIn also lets you go beyond people who are actively applying in a

given week. 171 million LinkedIn members aren't actively seeking jobs, but they are open to new opportunities.
That's a big pool to miss out on if you're not hiring with LinkedIn. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn.
Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash Simmons. That's linkedin.com slash Simmons to post your job for free.
Terms and conditions apply. This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra.
Michelob Ultra, a superior light beer in the ultimate trophy, win or lose. You're bound to enjoy the ride with a good beer in hand.
Michelob Ultra, crisp, refreshing, only 95 calories, a superior light beer. No matter the game, sport, or season, superior is worth playing for.
So sign up for Ultra Quartzside at michelobultra.com

slash Quartzside, and you can enjoy some of these games with nice beer in your hand. Enjoy responsibly.
Copyright 2025 Anheuser-Busch Michelob Ultra. Registered light beer.
St. Louis, Missouri.
Must be 21 plus to order alcohol. Alcohol available only in select markets.
Kendrick versus

Drink

Day markets. Kendrick versus Drake day two 80.
I don't know. It's like the arena hostage crisis day three 10 still going.
Kendrick's having like, this is like driven Kendrick to like a plus plus levels. He's just dominating coming off Superbowl show.
Drake still seems like he's interested in continuing the beef. He's like keeps coming out of his corner.
The trainer's like, no, no, no, I'm going to throw the towels. One more round, one more round.
Is this the last rap beef ever for you? No, no. The last huge one.
No. So this is just going to keep happening.
Yeah. Okay.
There'll always be one. There's just not enough room on the mountaintop for everyone.
There'll always be one. The moment that rap beats in, there's no more hip hop.
So we need, it's fundamentally, we need this in the deal. Fundamentally, you have to have it.
Fundamentally, you have to have, like, I hope everybody's paying attention right now to, like, what Kanye West is doing. Kanye West, West like made it like he had all of these philosophical reasons for uh hating Drake uh during that whole time back in the day when me and Kanye were you know uh going back and forth or whatever when we went back to both teams he actually emailed Kanye and then he emailed me back and he went through this whole rant.
And in the middle of the rant,

he just mentioned Drake for no reason.

This is 2018.

He's missing Drake for no reason.

It's like,

cause the radio was playing Drake.

Drake ain't talking about nothing.

I was like,

this guy must really not like Drake.

But really the reality of it was that the only reason why he had a problem

with Drake is because Drake was on top.

It's because Drake was threatening him.

And now you see Kanye.

That's why most rap beats happen.

Yeah.

Kanye's sniffing around a little bit and he's acting like he wants it with

Thank you. It's because Drake was threatening him.
And now you see Kanye. That's why most rap beats happen.
Yeah. Kanye's sniffing around a little bit.
And he's acting like he wants it with Kendrick now. So there's always going to be that one.
That's like, he's like the crazy guy in the street. He's just yelling outside somebody's window.
But there's always going to be this competitive thing in hip hop, just like there is in sports to where some guy's going to want to take with some other guy. Well, the reason I asked why is this going to be the last big one is because drake lost it so decidedly i wonder if it becomes like nba all-star weekend where it becomes not worth it the risk reward thing is almost too great because drake would be this casually everyone look back at other people think he's just gonna he'll go away for four months come back and be fine well the problem is that you're never going to, the rap beef, you don't have as much control over, right? Because somebody can decide that they're going to diss you for any reason.
And once they do, you almost got to say something. So that's- Well, if you're on equal footing.
If you're on equal footing. Yeah.
Sometimes if you're not on equal footing, sometimes you can let it slide. Some guys don't choose to let it slide.
slide with this one it's particularly interesting because i'm starting to think that this rap beef is going to do irreparable harm to hip hop okay explain this is tearing rap apart like it's one thing to if you have if you take any of the other beats right if you take Jay-Z and Nas if you take Big and Pac if you take

well they Big and Pac both died yeah but not

because of no rap beef that was over some shit

tied together somehow

yeah it was like

messing around but that was really over some other

shit y'all can go to VladTV.com

if y'all wanna

he got the whole scoop over there

but this has become such a flag planting by each side that the seriousness of the allegations and there's always been serious allegations and like you know some hyperbole and all of this stuff but right now it like says something about you if you're a drake fan it says something about you if you're a kendrick fan and it's like it's this weird hip-hop version of the democrats and the republicans and the division that we see politically and culturally like in america like in music. And that just means that everybody can't party together.
And you have Kendrick who's actually saying it's time to let the party die. And then you got the girls that's going, well, we still want to shake our asses.
Is it okay if we shake our ass? And then we don't really know if it's okay. Is it okay if we don't care about some of the social causes and issues that Kendrick cares about? And I personally don't, I think you should care, but there's always been a part of hip hop that was just about the fun.
This is casting people in such distinct roles and it's so vicious. Maybe I'm getting older.
I could be getting older, but this one is so particularly vicious with the fans going at it and really trying to sabotage each other that it feels like it's time for everybody to take their foot off the gas a little bit.

Just relax.

The internet in full bloom we've never had for one of these, the way we have the internet and the shape it's in in 2025.

Particularly this post-Elon, every no-holds-barred version of Twitter. No yeah every no hold barred internet in every respect right because even you can go as personal as you want you can do ai stuff now there's all these different ways you can make the other side look bad right and so like right now it's getting to the point to where okay so drake dropped it came out it was very successful for them wasn't my favorite music in the world Friday? The one that just came out.
Sexy songs for you, Drake and P&D. Wasn't my favorite music in the world.
However, you could listen to that and tell that somebody going to like it. And it doesn't mean that you have, it doesn't make you a bad person or it doesn't make you an asshole if you like drake and it doesn't make you righteous if you like kendrick like they're they're both two entertainers that that represent and do different things and while i probably gravitate a little bit more towards but not don't probably i gravitateitate a little bit more towards what Kendrick does.

Yeah.

I think he's a very important,

very important artist

with really something to say

and really represents something.

I like a lot of Drake records

and I've always liked Drake

and I've always liked listening to him.

So I just think

it's being taken a little too far now.

A little too far now.

Take your foot off the gas a little bit.

My son Ben Simmons,

not the Clippers Ben Simmons,

he says it's over.

Drake's dad, nobody cares.

That's his 17-year-old LA

take. I'll be honest with you.

Drake

was beaten in this as

decisively as I've seen any rapper ever beaten

in any of these. Was it like a

Foreman Frazier?

Wasn't a Foreman

Frazier because that joint was two rounds.

But I would

say it was Pacquiao Marquez four? See, it's not Mayweather Gotti because Mayweather Gotti was Ali Cleveland Williams? Oh, hell no. If you guys ever want to see a killing machine, go watch Ali versus Cleveland Williams and Ali.
No, you know what it could be? It could be a Hagler-Hearns. I'll tell you why.
It's longer than three rounds, though. Longer than three rounds.
A short fight. With a lot of action.
However, at the end of it, Hagler brutalized Tommy. Greatest, one of the greatest boxing photos ever.
Hagler like this with his hands up and in the back you can see Hearns being carried back to his corner. Yeah.
Fucking classic. Yeah, Hagler brutalized.
At the end of it, it was clear. They both went crazy but it was clear, very clear and decisive who the tougher motherfucker that man was.
Do you give Massachusetts credit for Hagler or no? I thought, oh, well, yeah, Broxton, right? Broxton. Half hour from Boston.
35 minutes. So is that Boston? Oh, yeah.
Oh, that's why he was so mad. Because he grew up black in Boston, so he had to beat the...
Why did I open myself up for that? Why did I do that? That's why he was so pissed off. That's why he was beating people up like that.
That's why he had to do it. That was the hardest fight for me because Sugar Ray was my guy but Hager was basically a Boston team.
So I picked Sugar Ray because Sugar Ray was my favorite from like the 76 Olympics on. Sugar Ray won the fight.
He won the fight. I thought he did.
It's one of the great arguments, so. He eked it out.
There's other people who are like passionately convinced Hagler won and they get really mad if you bring it up. I just think he was sloppy and wasn't landing and he was off balance the whole fight.
I didn't think he fought a good fight. This is going to sound so crazy and people wonder about these obsessions I've had.
I've watched two different broadcasts of the fight. I've watched the broadcast.
I'm not surprised to see me blinking. I've watched the fight with the sound off as well.
Oh, sound off is important because the crowd was really behind Leonard. And the announcers too.
He made a couple tactical mistakes, but I was doing all of that stuff for a podcast. But he made a couple tactical mistakes.
He came out I think Hagler came out orthodox in his softball. He tried to box with Leonard a little bit.
He made some mistakes in the fight. I do think that had there been a rematch, that Hagler would have fucking destroyed Leonard.
Well, he went to Italy. There was no rematch.
Hagler wasn't the same after the M was kind of, he had a lot of boxing miles on him at that point, wasn't the same going into the Mugabe fight either, early 80's Hagler against that version of Leonard he knocks him out yeah, I mean once again this is Leonard at middleweight Leonard had come up from 47 but he was smart, he planned out he would steal like the last 20 seconds of rounds like He really figured out how to win a scorecard against Marvin Agler. Anyway, but look, I get it.
Drake lost the rap beef. It's over.
You lost decidedly. What do you do after you've decidedly lost the biggest rap beef at least in the the last 10 years, right? Oh, this might be the biggest rap beef.
Last 12 years? It's certainly the biggest rap beef of 12 years. 21st century? I could make an argument.
And look, you'd have to get 9th Wonder. You'd have to get Sway.
You'd have to get Ebro Charlemagne, all of those guys that live live and breathe hip hop I can make an argument this is the biggest rap beef ever I can make an argument this is the biggest one ever yeah it's tied to the generations too much though it's almost like arguing about different eras of basketball because Biggie Tup was like the the whole art form was still evolving as that was happening you know and it was it was so tied into like this incredibly influential decade i get it and i i was there for that one too and here we're we're already set music is music is what it is everybody's figured out their versions of it so it's like it's almost amazing that it got point. I didn't think it was possible.
But that's what makes it different to me. So Big and Pot come out and remember, there was also some personal stuff that was going on in that beef.
Oh yeah. There's some here too, but not quite as much.
This seems to be different to me because it's almost more akin to Jay and Nas because this is the culmination of an entire generation of hip-hop work. You have two guys that come out roughly around the same time.
Drake beats Kendrick by two or three years as far as on the national scene. And then for a decade, a decade plus, they dance around each other.
They poke at each other. There's disses on records.
There's references on records. There's interviews.
There's all of this stuff.

But these two guys, along with Cole, are recognized as the two biggest stars of their era.

These are the two biggest guys in their era.

And then they essentially fight or spar or battle for the kingdom of that era. They battle to decide whose music and who's more influential, who matters more.
And there's so much behind it. You're talking 10 years of work.
You're talking two different outlooks on hip hop. Like two completely perfect foils, even down to the fact that one guy represents this long legacy of hip hop that comes from Southern California, from Compton.
Think about all of the Compton artists. Post-OJLA.
All of that stuff that stuff right and then you have one guy who is an upstart

coming from with a

new style of hip hop

Degrassi High Zone Drake

Degrassi all of that stuff but still has roots

in Memphis right

it's almost like it was

and I don't want to overstate it

it wasn't just a hip hop battle

it was a cultural

litmus test in a way

which is another reason why I think people are taking it

Thank you. was and i don't want to overstate it it wasn't just a hip-hop battle it was a cultural litmus test in a way which is another reason why i think people are taking it so so seriously

it was like a battle to to of what the truth of hip-hop and hip-hop culture is so it was very

very very high stakes and the song that won was obviously a song that accused drake of a lot of

things but the one thing that accused drake of more than anything was not being a part of hip-hop and so it just ended up being incredibly high leverage in a way that I don't think that I thought it was going to be so I can make an argument that like this because of those reasons that this is the most consequential one that I can well the other, the other way to help your argument is the best song that came out of this whole beef becomes one of the best songs of the decade. Yeah.
At least most famous, most influential, will be most discussed 20 years from now. And people are like, the 2020s, what were the big songs? It'll be one of the first ones mentioned.
All the other rap beef songs, none of them hit the heights that this did. I mean, this is basically, I'm not going to say Michael Jackson thriller territory, but like that one level.
Well, it was going to be difficult for, first off, fuck your bitch in a click you claim to really, really go pop. So it was going to be difficult for that to really, really go pop.
But I would say that culturally,

hit him up was being played in the club.

Like, this is different.

This is a number one record.

They weren't playing hit him up at the Super Bowl.

They weren't going to play hit him up at the Super Bowl.

It's like, yeah, it's halftime at Chargers Niners.

Here comes hit him up.

Here comes Pac.

Oh, he's got a lot of red on.

But they weren't going to play that.

But this one, it went everywhere. And that was also, once again, it was kind of Kendrick saying, not that he hadn't had hit records, it was Kendrick saying, I can make a hit record that dances on your grave.
You know him for making the people dance. I can have those same people dancing on your grave.
And he did that. It's a tough one.
I don't know how Drake bounces back from it. It's also, there's a talent issue too.
is successful and great. And he did that.
It's a tough one. I don't know how Drake bounces back from it.
It's also there's a talent issue too. As successful and great as Drake's, some of his stuff has been, Kendrick's just levitating at a slightly different level.
Whether you, how much you like his music, whatever, like he's the best artist that this genre has produced in the last 12 years. Drake is insanely talented.
Kendrick takes himself. Kendrick is- Kendrick's a one-on-one.
He'll never be recreated. He makes more important music.
I think the music that he makes is probably a higher difficulty. I don't want to take anything away from Drake's talent, but he's insanely talented.
Kendrick, you can't make that many great hits without being talented. Dot is something that we ain't never seen.
And we knew this. It's almost like he didn't want to, he's something that we ain't never seen before.
To me. To me.
And a lot of people would feel that way about other artists, about Drake. Kendrick's ability to communicate, but also to be relatable.
All of that stuff. He's just different to me.
You think Drake, because Kendrick's short. I think Drake really missed a...
I think his disresponse could have just been an entire short song. He's talked about the fact that he's short, though.
But he didn't really go after it. I think that's his one move left, and it'll probably be clumsy and not work well.
He should have sampled short people. Just a whole short song, just mocking Kendrick for being short.
It's like his one move left and it'll probably be clumsy and not work well. He should have sampled short people.
Just a whole short song. Just like just mocking Kendrick for being short.
It's like his only move left now. The problem is, is that you'll do that.
But the reality is like. Then you look thin skinned.
No, it's an extra thing with Kendrick. Because Kendrick on one of these records, Kendrick says, it might be on Dodger Blue.
He says, have you ever ran a fade that ran three more back to back if not then shut the fuck up and keep it wrapped and that's basically he's saying like if you want to fight we can fight you know what I'm saying you want to fight like we could fight too you the thing is with how how psychotic he's we've seen that he is you just don't know the level that he won't go to so it's like best thing to do is just to rap about it. Just rap.
Well, Kendrick's going on tour. Going on tour.
And this will just keep going and going. It's time to let it go.
Kendrick doesn't want to... Kendrick's not letting it go.
He doesn't want to make the mistake of orienting his career around Trent. No.
One, get back to pushing the culture forward like you always have.

You've done the victory lap.

There's no bigger victory lap

than the Super Bowl.

Get back to doing the same.

All right, so you're Drake's

Tom Hagen.

You're his conciliar.

He hires you for a week.

What are your two pieces

of advice for Drake?

Okay, two pieces of advice.

First of all, Tom Hagen,

not a wartime conciliar.

Well, how about this?

Maybe he was.

They just didn't give him

the chance.

They just decided he wasn't. Maybe Sonny was just a terrible terrible.
Let me tell you what, my Kraut McFriend. She was the best.
And I've had him all over the place. Now you get your ass out of here.
He doesn't get that movie. What would I tell Drake to do? Number one, the first thing I would say is just remember that you're Drake.
Remember that you are literally the artist of the decades of the 2010s. So number one, it's going to be okay.
Take a breath, go to Booby Trap, chill out for a second. And also remember why people love you.
They don't love you because you are the most devastating battle rapper of all time. They don't love you because of that.
You already occurred out of one battle. They love you because you make hits.
So come back with some fire. Chill and come back with some fire.
And I'd say something else. I said this on Higher Learning and Rachel disagreed and the entire audience disagreed.
Oh, I can't wait. If I were Drake, if this is possible with Jay-Z running things, right, because I know they don't have the best relationship, if I were Drake, I would do the Super Bowl next year.
Interesting. Yep.
If I were Drake, I know it seems like he's coming behind Kendrick, but let me tell you what, if Drake does the Super Bowl next year, let me tell you what could happen. Number one, he can do something.
He can answer the Lil Wayne question because Lil Wayne wants to do the Super Bowl. Lil Wayne and Drake could do a whole set at the Super Bowl.
Then Drake looks like for the entire South, which likes Drake anyway. So now it's almost like politics.
You're trying to win the South. Now it looks like Drake is the one who, it looks like Kendrick took the Super Bowl stage away from Wayne and Drake is the one who gave Wayne his due.
You can do the young money thing. Drake could do a whole Super Bowl, whereas Kendrick did a Super Bowl that was very dedicated to his audience and didn't have some of the hits that he knew before.
Drake could do a whole Super Bowl of just hits. It could be just hits.
If people are talking about they love hits, Drake could do such a low stakes Super Bowl. I'm talking about Nice for What, Hotline Bling, Miss Me.
I'm talking about so many joints. I'm talking about all the joints.
And it could be hip-hop because he could have Gunna and Lil Baby out there if those guys will be on the same stage. He could have Thug out there.
He could have literally a Super Bowl full of hits and pop records. And people would like it.
And he could leave reasserting. But that's 11 months from now.
I know. For that 11 months, you gotta...
You do the Will Smith? You chill. You're just gone? You chill.
I mean, he already dropped the album, so he's probably gonna... He's on tour tour Ben Simmons thinks he's dead he said it's done nobody cares about Drake anymore Ben Simmons quote my 17 year old son who knows everything that could be true I don't think it's true a lot of people care less than they did but even his back catalog even his back catalog is enough that Drake will never be out of the public I like your idea of him attacking different parts of the country correctly almost like he's running for an election.
He's like, alright where's Kendrick Week? I can get him in the south can I get him in the northeast like just start picking different pockets culminating in the Super Bowl show also I'll just say this

Drake

his

his support was cratering a little bit

before this because Drake

had in my opinion

made some really weird moves like

the decision to kind of support

Tory Lanez and dismay the stallion

where when black women

had been the ones that had been supporting

Drake and like

even when other black men

Thank you. support Tory Lanez and dismayed the stallion where when black women had been the ones that had been supporting Drake and and like even when other black men would be like ah Drake too soft I like the way it was black women that held Drake down and really like really kept him at the superstar level and I just remember when he made the decision to make light of men getting shot and to outwardly support tory like that a lot of women were like what is he doing like what's the deal and so a lot of the insulation that he would have had from getting his ass lit up like he did was gone for a lot of different reasons right for a lot of the he he had decided for some reason before all of this started to go heal a little bit.

And I... Yeah, but it's almost like wrestling.
I always feel like pop artists, different musician, different genres. You got like an eight to 12 year shelf life.
Yeah. And then you got to start figuring out next acts.
Like you think about even like somebody like Hulk Hogan, right. Comes in, hits big in the 84 range.
And by the time we get to like when he turned in WCW, yeah, that was like 11, 12 year mark because it was like his character had run its course the way he was doing it. He's got to flip it.
Now I'm going to dark my beard and become Hollywood Hogan. Think about how many musicians have been able to even hit musicians, make big hits, have to last longer than 10 years it's not a lot comedic by the way another one is funny actors like comedians like comedians in movies churning out like funny stuff that we care about it's like eight to ten years but those comedians then they have to audible then they start make a drama now you go now all of a sudden like a streamer show.
Right. Like you got to start.
And I think it's really tough to stay relevant in music for that long because eventually the new kids that are listening to it are going to determine who's hot. Yeah.
And they don't want to root for like, they don't want to like their dad's music. That's true.
They want their own music. But once again, another reason why it was smart that Kendra did it, the timing.
Drake was at kind of a little low, a lower point. He's still making hit records, CLB for All the Dogs, all those things still sold really well.
And he hit them when he was down a little bit. So we'll see.
But everybody, it's okay to like Kendrick and Drake. It's okay.
Van Lathan just trying to heal America. Hey, it's okay to put on Not Like Us, Didn't Listen to Family Matters.
It's okay to Van Lathan, just trying to heal America. It's okay to put on Not Like Us,

then listen to Family Matters.

It's okay to listen to Push-Ups

and Euphoria.

I listened to Non-Stop This Morning

when I was walking the dog. It's okay,

you guys. You guys can like both guys.
It's okay.

It's all right. And if you have your

Kanye playlist, maybe roll the windows up

as you're jamming along to it right now.

Some of the records are going to get played. I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. Some of the records are going to get played.
It's tough. He's got a lot of great, huh? The Gaza, the Gaza, it's tough.
It would have been nice like six years ago if he just moved to Australia and just started raising cattle and just moved to a different point in his career. Yeah.
You know what? I don't want to talk about it. It's an antisemite.
I don't want to piss anybody off. It's rough.
Yeah. It's not great.
Not great. It meant a lot to my family over the years.
Yeah. Not awesome.
Not a great turn of events of events it's just like it's just weird

you can't

you can't

but then

you're not cranking it

at a July 4th party

yeah it's all of the lights

hey I got seven Kanye songs

in a row here for everybody

what about all of the lights though

what about street lights

what about

that's the thing

that's why you roll the windows up

roll them up

Van Lathan

good to see you

we're doing rewatchables

Van's gonna be on rewatchables

on Monday

and then Higher Learning

and Ringer Versus Thank you. roll them out van lathan good to see you uh we're doing rewatchables van's gonna be on rewatchables on monday and then uh higher learning and ringer verse as well thanks this episode is brought to you by max the emmy award-winning series hacks returns this april the new season follows deborah vance making a move from her vegas residency to hollywood showbiz tensions rise as deborah and ava try to get their late night show off the ground and make history while doing it.
Starring Gene Smart and Hannah Einbinder. Hacks season four is streaming Thursday, April 10th, exclusively on Max.
Don't forget to check out the official Hacks podcast on Spotify. All right.
We couldn't let SNL 50 go by without an appearance from our friend Jim Miller, who has been on here many times. He wrote the oral history of SNL.
He is an even bigger SNL student than I think I am, which I don't even know how that's possible. But we just had a three and a half hour Sunday night show last night that featured almost everybody ever who's been involved with the show who's still alive.
What was your biggest takeaway from last night? Well, listen, I think it was pretty good. I loved Adam Sandler.
Eddie doing tracing work, and I could watch all day, particularly given Eddie's tortured history with SNL. It was just great to see him back.
You know, the world's a difficult

place when things work out between people and there's not contention and people forget about

things. You know, Bill Murray saying something nice about Chevy Chase.
It's time. It's all good.

I miss Bill Hader. You know, wish he had been there.
Tina continues to be terrific. But there

was enough good stuff going on that made you feel like it was, it was worthwhile. I think one of the coolest Sandler, I thought kind of, I don't know if anyone wins a three and a half hour SNL episode with that many people in it, but Sandler's thing was great.
And it was when you saw him, it was like, is this going to be funny? Is it going to be poignant? It's going to be both? But he really nailed it. And then for me, the highlight was just seeing Eddie Murphy and Will Ferrell on a sketch together.
Because I think those to me are the goats. Those are the two best people in the history of the show.
And by the way, with Adam, let's not forget that Jack Nicholson introduced him. Jack hasn't been seen in, I mean, unless you're in certain parties or whatever.
That's a big deal. And it was wonderful for that to happen.
But, you know, Eddie Murphy being on the NH is just incredible still. I mean, he saved, you and I have discussed this before, but Eddie saved the franchise.
Yeah. Without a doubt.
I don't think if that 19-year-old Eddie Murphy hadn't come along when he did, we're not talking about SNL 50. Oh, there's no question.
And not only that, but I think he was the only person who was probably overqualified to be in the show. Like, hey, he ascended out of it.
It was like he was like moonlighting on the show almost by the end, where I don't know if that phenomenon has ever been recaptured. Well, I will say though, Kristen Wiig, I said, I told her, she gets big, big, I don't know.
I mean, she came on after Bridesmaids. She stayed on the cast after Bridesmaids.
That's pretty impressive. Yeah, you're right.
Yeah. A couple of people have done that, I guess.
And Kristen got one of the great send-offs of all time. Do you remember that? Yeah.
Mick Jagger singing to her and her dancing with Lauren. Not everybody gets that kind of send-off.
So the big people missing, Hater, and we don't know why they didn't come, but Hater and Aykroyd I think were the two that jumped out to me the hardest. Colin Quinn.
Yeah, but I think Hater would have been involved in multiple sketches because you'd think like, Molly Shannon was in multiple sketches. they were using different people and how, how great Hater was as a glue guy.
I just think he would have been all over the place. So he would have been all over it.
Fred Armisen was in a lot. Um, you know, I, I think, look, I don't, I don't know.
I didn't talk to Bill and ask him exactly why the awkward thing was a little suspicious because at one point he said, it depends on

who asks me and what they want of me.

And it seemed like there was a bill of particulars attached.

And as Lauren has said many times to people, we don't negotiate with terrorists.

So maybe he was unwilling.

Right.

And then Dana Carvey was the other one that I was surprised by because he's been on the

show this year and he had said he was looking forward to being on it. So I'm not sure what happened with that, but I think he would have been involved.

Without a doubt. Without a doubt.
Particularly given, I mean, Martin Short was visible, very visible. And I think Dana would have had a lot to do.
so do you feel like part of it was

SNL 40 felt like the original version

of this and the 50th is

you know

they're basically rerunning a lot of the stuff they did in SNL 40 with 10 years of newer cast members, only a couple of whom have come even 20% as close to hitting the heights as some of these other people. You know, you may be onto something.
Look, I was there at the 25th, and that was outrageous because nothing like that had been done. Remember, last night, they did not have a dress rehearsal.
So this is the equivalent of Lorne and the writers flying blind because one of the great luxuries, right? You go in eight o'clock, you throw everything against the wall, you see what sticks, you can figure out what belongs in the show, what doesn't. And also more importantly, sometimes the order, right? I mean, you get a real sense of it.
I mean, occasionally they'll screw up and put Wayne's world at 10 of one the first time it aired, but, but they had no dress rehearsal. And I think maybe it wasn't that it was derivative build, but that it, because they had done the 40th the way they did it, it was like, there was some muscle memory.
Like we can do this. We'll have, we'll still have the monologue.
We still need a big music act. We still need a big closing music act.
And then of course, it's the emotional arc that you just referred to with, with Adam, right? Which is, you're going to have uproarious sketches, then you want some poignancy, then you want some memory. I thought one of the great things about Adam also was that they snuck in a memoriam in there too.
It wasn't just like a capital M Oscars or Emmy memoriam.

You saw Jan Hooks, you saw Phil, you saw the people that- Norm MacDonald. Unfortunately, couldn't be, of course, Norm.
Yeah, I mean, that couldn't be there. So that was an elegant way of doing it.
And they did that in the 25th in terms of recognizing people who had passed. And so I think that they, I'm not saying they used the same playbook, but it certainly felt like, you know, there was that DNA of 40th anniversary there.
Yeah. There was some stuff that didn't surprise me.
Like you knew Paul Simon was going to lead the show. That was just the way it's going to go.
Paul and Paul. Yeah.
Open and close with two of Lauren's best friends. Yeah.
But Paul was like, you know, he was, he hosted the second show, which was basically, it turned out to be a Simon and Garfunkel reunion. Um, the sketches were shoved to the side.
And I think Lauren was so worried after that first show to what would even be in the second show. He, he geared it towards Simon and then Simon became, you know, this guy that's been on over and over and over again.
And now, you know, it's pretty striking how old he looked and how old McCartney looked. And you'd be like, that makes sense because this show's been up for 50 years.
Yeah, exactly. But you bring up a good point about the second show.
You know, I feel this way about The Sopranos. And there's actually, somebody should really do, it would be a really cool article.
You get the first show and you're spending so much time thinking about the first show, right? And then all of a sudden it's like, oh shit, we got a second show. And like the Sopranos didn't find its way until episode five.
Yeah. Saturday Night Live, you know, really, I mean, two, three, and four, good stuff and everything, but you still didn't understand the DNA.
It wasn't, the broth wasn't fully simmered. And I think that particularly when you don't get an order, like nowadays on streaming services, you get an order, go do eight.
So you're thinking about that. A lot of times when you're just doing one by one, you need to get them on their feet before you can really learn things.
And so Paul signed in on episode two. If people go back and watch it, man, it's an experiment.
It's like, let's call my friend Paul. Let's see how we can stitch together 90 minutes.
Yeah, and it was basically a musical show with a couple of sketches in it. That second episode thing, I've thought about that a lot because when you're creating a show, especially if it's a drama, you're spending a year plus on the pilot, right? And you're getting notes from all these people and you're going back and then finally you cast it and you're casting these people who have never played the characters before.
And it could be a year long process. You make it.
And now all of a sudden you have to make eight more episodes, nine more episodes, and you're doing that as fast as it took to do the entire process for the pilot. So it is something that I always think about when I watch new shows.

Well, it's an incredible thing because also in the first episode, you're

establishing the characters. So you're

trying so hard to introduce

the character that you're spending

all that time on that. That's why

The Sopranos, not to get off track from SNL,

but The Sopranos, the biggest

fight David Chase ever had with HBO

was, in episode five, was were they going to watch Tony kill somebody? And Chase is like, dude, this is what the guy does. He's not a hallmark salesman.
He kills people. We got to show it.
And it hadn't really been thought of before that because it hadn't come up. And so I think particularly for SNL, episode two, episode three, episode four, it's a cocktail, right? And like getting down, like how much of Albert Brooks, how much of a movie, how many commercial parodies are we going to have? How much time are we going to do two musical acts or just one? You know, how much time does that leave for everything else? And then, of course, what is Weekend Update going to be? Because Weekend Update had this huge advantage, right? Chevy was the only one who said his real name.
I'm Chevy Chaser or not. He got all that time by himself.
Other cast members were a little resentful of that, trying to cut back on that. So it takes a couple shows to iron out those arguments.
Yeah, and it probably wasn't until the prior episode that the show really knew where it was going and what it was, which was the 11th episode of the first season, right? There was a couple other good ones until then, but about midway through that season, the show became the show. But they ran the first episode on Saturday night in the 11.30 spot.
Yeah, that was great. Carlin does three different monologues.
The Muppets are on there. That show's all over the place.
They have no idea what it is yet. Well, part of it also is though Carlin was stoned out of his mind.
You can see it. He was unavailable at certain points throughout the show.
The other thing that is worth mentioning is, like Chevy, 15 minutes before the first show, said to one of the producers, hey, what do you think I should do after this? Because he was convinced it was going to be a failure. Right.
And Lauren kept on, Lauren's, I mean, Lauren is Lauren. I mean, he's telling everybody, oh no, this is, we're going to, it's a hit.
We're going to be a hit. We're going to be a hit.
Even before the ratings suggested it, even before anybody had written about it. But by the fifth time when Gilda is walking down Avenue of the Americas and starts getting stopped by people like, oh my gosh, you're so great and whatever.
And she's like, what? Yeah. The show changes when people know it's a hit.
Right. Even though SNL wasn't going to pander to people and it wasn't going to try and become a hit, they were just going to do what they thought was cool.
And it caught on. And so that also has, I think, a real impact on the trajectory of the show.
Because then all of a sudden you're like, well, we don't really care whether somebody thinks this is going to work or not. We're going to think, we're going to have Beethoven at a piano playing something.

Belushi, go ahead, do it. And we think it's cool.
I mean, there's no time to like, I mean,

they address this, but there's no time to really test that out. So that became a real powerful

force. Yeah.
And the amount of people that watched the show as it was happening in the 70s versus

how it's consumed now, which says so much to do about the choices we have now and just how we consume entertainment. Like in 1978, if you didn't see the show live, it wasn't on again until they ran the reruns in the summer.
That was it. You missed it.
And you just heard word of mouth. Oh my God, they had the sketch last night.
Now it's like you can miss the show. And if there's something amazing in it, there's a big moment.
You just watch it the next day on YouTube. Miss the show? Most people watch clips.
Most people get YouTube clips or they've customized it somehow on X or something else. But I think a lot more people obviously are watching it during the week than are sitting down in their Barker lounger at 1135.

Yeah, the surprise of I'm watching this, I don't know what's going to happen.

That's just shifted into something completely different.

But what's weird is the show, at least from an audience standpoint, in 2025 is still big.

I think it's like probably the biggest non-sports week-to-week property that exists.

Well, it's the highest rated non-sports entertainment show on linear television. Yeah, which is nuts.
Incredible. And that's why you get to spend nearly $100 million a season doing it.
Well, we'll see how long that lasts. Some stuff from the show that jumped out to me.
So Meryl Streep, who'd never been on the show, never hosted, and how many times do you think they asked her? A lot. Weird that she never did it.
She seems pretty fun. She lives in New York City or she lives in Connecticut, I think.
I'm just surprised she never did it. They asked Tom Cruise a lot.
He never did it. That makes more sense to me.
Because of dyslexia and the cue cards? No, because he's Tom Cruise. He's weird.
I don't know what to make of Tom Cruise. Going any direction with Tom Cruise, I don't know.
He's a big movie star. He's a big movie star.
He's more likely to jump a motorcycle over some mountain than he would be to host a live sketch show where anything could happen. Actually, you know what? That would be a great question if I get him in an interview again.
I think what would be more terrifying for you, going over like the Grand Canyon in a motorcycle or hosting Saturday Night Live? And he might say the latter. Oh, I think he would definitely say the latter.
So he never did it. Meryl Streep never did it.
And then the other one who never did it was Jack Nicholson, who was partying with all these people in the 70s especially. You know, he's in the Belushi books.
Like he's... Early and often, man.
So by the way, so is De Niro, who was there last night too. De Niro finally broke and hosted.
But I think Nicholson and Streep are the two biggest stars that never hosted the show, right? Two most famous actors other than Cruise. Other than Cruise.
Yeah. That's it.
Those are the three. Yeah.
De Niro did a couple of walk-ons from time to time and then eventually hosted. Well, he did the Joe Pesci show.
Yeah, that was the best one.

When Jim Brewer was... Jim Brewer, probably his best thing

when he was doing the Pesci things.

So anyway, I love seeing Meryl Streep with Kate McKinnon,

even though that alien encounter sketch,

which is great,

but it's the same sketch every time.

They're just rerunning all the beats.

I know, but that's when you know...

The Meryl Streep ad was fun.

Yeah, the ad was fun.

And Kate is one of the few people

that can pull that off. Even though you know it's coming, it's still fun to watch.
And she's just trying to make everybody else laugh. So we had that.
We had Black Jeopardy with Eddie Murphy playing Tracy Morgan next to Tracy Morgan, which was, that was the first time I really laughed in the first, I don't know, 30 minutes where I was like, oh my God, they're doing this. I mean, it was super exciting.
It wasn't just Eddie coming on and doing Eddie or doing something. He was actually impersonating Tracy.
Yeah. He was standing right next to him.
It was so good. That was a rough add-on with Tom Hanks.
But I will say the Black Jeopardy sketch that Tom Hanks did do back then was legendary. It just was really

hard last night after

Eddie. No, you didn't need anything else with Eddie.

That was tough.

By the way, Eddie was good doing that.

Eddie was good.

Eddie was one of the big winners last night. They tried the

Lawrence Welk thing with

Scarlett Johansson and Kim Kardashian

and Gasteyer, Kristen Wiig.

That's the same sketch every time. The Q&A from the audience was captivating, especially with the nice TV, nice widescreen, because every time they cut to somebody in the audience, you could watch, you could see everybody who was in a specific section.
I wasn't even really listening to the Q&A. I was like, wait a second.
Oh, there's there's that. And there's that person.
And I almost feel like that's, they intentionally do that, right? So we could just see who's there. That was the whole purpose of it.
They did that in the 40th as well. Yeah.
You get to show off the wares, you know? I mean, like, because unless people are watching the red carpet or whatever, a lot of those people like Jerry and Larry, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David were in the audience, obviously, but weren't in the show. So it's a great way to show them off.
And not only that, but Tina and Amy are really the only two people that could handle that because you got to riff on it. You got to tease that.
I mean, it's much harder than it looks. Really smart way to get a bunch of people involved in the show.
I got to say the most surprising person, I don't know why Kevin Costner was there because he's never hosted the show. It just felt like they needed a star.
And he seems like he's pretty available in general, like he was at UFC last month. But Letterman being there was shocking to me.
That was somebody that's never hosted the show and I never felt like had a real connection to it in any way, maybe he did and i'm missing something i hate to say it but it's like driving a porsche 40 miles an hour because why point out to us that dave is here not use him and then not use him for anything i mean i i just i kept on waiting for him to to do something or say something from his seat even or whatever and it wasn't anything so i mean I guess I don't know it was weird Julia too I mean Julia is Julia Louis-Dreyfus even though she had a hard time when she was an SNL cast member she could have done anything she's fearless and she's terrific. I was surprised by that I was surprised Bill Murray ranked the weekend update people and

started with Colin Quinn 10th, who wasn't there. That just felt like a direct shot.
But it actually felt like old school Bill Murray, like his pace and his timing was really good, I thought. Well, I thought it was brilliant that he did this black anchorage first, got Che out of the way.
And then what it wound up really doing was

just being a real dig to Colin Jost, who didn't make any of the spots. So I think the Colin Quinn thing at the beginning was just to make Colin Jost think that he was going to be on the list because it was Colin and then he waited a bit.
I mean, Bill Murray's timing is fantastic. And he was Friday night at Radio Center Music Hall.
He was awesome as well.

So we had Mulaney's New York Tribute, which was like this big giant movie that moved through the eras of New York that I actually thought was really well-written and interesting. I'm not positive it 100% worked, but I liked it.
They ran back, Don't Look Back in Anger,

one of the great pieces of content

that shows ever produced.

Thank God.

And from start to finish,

they didn't just run a minute of it,

they actually ran it, which I thought mattered.

Really, I mean, the irony, of course,

that Belushi wound up dying first,

but also when he mentioned Gilda,

I mean, the whole thing is just perfect. It's one of, I think it's one of my favorite SNL moments of 50 years.
No question. I was watching with my wife and my wife didn't totally understand why they, she's not a big SNL like student.
So she was like- And you guys got married. Well, she was like, why did they run that? That was weird.
And I was like, well, here's the backstory. Like they ran that, Belushi lives in the, and he was actually the one that died first.
And she was like, oh, like, I think she was like half paying attention. But that's what I meant though, in terms of like the rhythm also.
Lauren, I think, pays more attention to that than he talks about. And when you have something boisterous or something supposed to be really broad and loud, and then you come to something like that, it's a really interesting symphony that he's conducting there.
So we had the stagehand. We had the In Memoriam thing, I thought, was probably my favorite part of the show.
When they did the In Memoriam of all the times they've crossed the line, I'm like, are they going to show Uncle Roy? They got to show Uncle Roy. And then Uncle Roy, the most indefensible sketch probably in the history of the show, but it was the 70s and shit happens.
The lecherous babysitter trying to creep on Gilda Radner. But they went through all of it and I loved it because it's like, you know what? Comedy changes.
The definition of what's funny and what isn't funny changes. It's not, you can't go back retroactively and litigate it.
This was stuff that ran. And not only that, but it's incredibly shrewd because for all of you thinking that we're going to hide from it and you can go and write about it and take us the task for it.
Oh, we're going to own it. We'll own it right now.
Here you go. And with perfect context.
I thought it was the shrewdest part of the entire show. And then Debbie Downer, which I think has belatedly become one of the most famous sketches in the history of the show.
It was funny when it happened, but I think as the years have passed, it's one of the go-to ones people mention. I think there are Debbie Downer societies.
There are people that literally talk about it about themselves. They talk about it in therapy.
There's a whole big online presence. So I was wondering whether or not Rachel and Will were going to do the lover sketch.
And Will was going to start cracking somebody up underneath the hot tub, which would have been terrific. But that also was logistically difficult.
I would have, if they had asked me, I would have had Neil Diamond Storytellers with James Brown and just brought Eddie and Will together and just had them do. I just think that would have gotten the biggest wow from me out of basically anything they could have done if they had just done those two together.
Yeah. I think the one thing that might have worked against that is that requires another level of knowledge on the show just because it's not in the zeitgeist as prominently as some of these other ones or more as recently.
By the way, how about Sabrina? But that doesn't help the Lawrence Welk sketch. I mean, Lawrence Welk isn't in there.
That's the thing. If you're going to do Lawrence Welk, I would have rather, yeah, anyway, what were you going to say? But how about Sabrina Carpenter's line to Paul Simon about my parents? That one line, I think it shocked the audience and it set the tone for the whole night because you're going to see a bunch of people in their 70s and 80s.
So there's some Lawrence stuff with this. There's five years where he's not on the show.
And Ebersole is running the show. And that's been fraught.
And Gene Dominion initially, she gets fired. Ebersole takes over.
You've written about this a ton. It's been talked about a ton.
It's always been a little icy with the two of them, but credit dating back to 75. It was notable to me that Eddie was really the only person from that five-year run that was prominently involved in anything.
There was no Piscopo at all. Julie Dreyfuss was in the Q&A and that's it.
It was a show that just kind of pretended those five years didn't... Billy Crystal wasn't anything.
Martin Short was in it, but Martin Short has become kind of an honorary host slash cast member along the lines of Steve Martin. But he was a big part of that season 10 cast.

But for the most part,

he pretends that doesn't happen those five years.

And Billy Crystal was in the audience.

Right.

Never went to him.

Could have been used.

Could have been used.

Not used at all for anything.

Without a doubt.

I mean, listen,

given what happened to Billy on the very first SNL,

where he and his manager stormed out because he wasn't going to get enough time, that's a complicated history, Billy Crystal and SNL. All the way through 50.
The cast after, Carvey, not there. Hartman, not with us, sadly.
Same with Jan Hooks. And Myers was really the only one.
They went to L Lovitz pretty briefly but the show was a little geared toward those last basically last 30 years the other notable thing to me the last 10 years of cast members Pete Davidson Bo and Yang they got attention Marcelo got in on one of those sketches because I think out of anyone on the new cast he he seems to be the one they think they might have struck oil on a little bit. But other than that, that show was not a big win for the current cast, which I think was different from SNL 40 when the current cast was a little more involved.
Well, one of the things you and I have talked about before is that over recent years, you don't have a lot of reoccurring sketches, reoccurring characters that you can draw back on. And so that's when it really comes to haunt you because you can't all of a sudden, it's not like the cheerleaders were from the past 10 years, so you throw them up.
Or I guess we could go back to the Californians, but you can't do the Californians without Hader. Right.
So, you know, they were in a box. But I think that's part of what was going on.
Look, Davidson, maybe you'll argue with me on this, but Davidson isn't there because of what he did on SNL. He's there because he became a cultural force with his, you know, many popular...
Right, with his He basically became a Weekend Update guy, you know? He was never like, let's build all the sketches around him like he would with Will Ferrell or somebody like that. I think the show's in a weird place.
If you ever get a moment, Pete's first show appearance was on Update and he crushed. He did a great, and so you think, whoa, wait a second.
And then, you know, it just, it didn't, it didn't happen. I mean, I'm not saying he's not successful, but we know, most people know Pete Davidson because of the incredible runway of beautiful popular women he dated rather than what he did on the show.
And a couple movies too. So the Lorne piece of this, I'm assuming there's not going to be an SNL 60 with Lorne Michaels.
That would be insane. People always thought...
Well, he could show up for it. He could show up for it.
No, but he's not going to be producing. Last night, he was sitting in an aisle seat like three, four rows up.
So he wasn't producing it. He actually seemed like he was an audience member for it.
I'm sure he decided every sketch and who was going to be there and who was going to sit where, but it felt like he was a little more detached than he was probably at S&P. Friday night, too.
Friday night, he had a great seat at radio city yeah he sat there the

whole time i mean look they had last night they had they had everybody come in they had um we're

some of the top notch the varsity was in the writer's room yes they went over that and and

and lauren was very very very involved and i think he geared it so he could actually god forbid not

be under the bleachers sit in a seat and enjoy it right so what happens now to lauren

Thank you. involved.
And I think he geared it so he could actually, God forbid, not be under the bleachers, sit in a seat and enjoy it. Right.
So what happens now to Lauren? What's your prediction? I think he's going to stay. I think he's going to stay.
I mean, whether or not there's an emeritus attached to him or not. I mean, but right now he's already cut back on his schedule.
So he's not in every single day and night like he used to be. And I think that what you'll probably see is more people.
It will be interesting to see though. I mean, like obviously if Tina or Seth comes back to the show, Lauren's a Meredith, right? And Lauren is by definition going to be saying, I'm handing over the reins.
But without that, it'll be interesting to see what happens next season. Originally, he had said he'd like to make it to 50 and then walk away, but I don't think he said, I don't think I'm done.
I don't think I'm done. Were you surprised, A, Chevy Chase not featured in anything? Was that because of physical health or something else? I think it falls under the rubric of something else.
Okay. That's it.
That's all you got. Well, Friday night, Jimmy Fallon did something very nice, which was, it may have been a commercial break or something, but he leaned down and he said, ladies and gentlemen, I haven't watched the air copy yet, so maybe it was on air.
Ladies and gentlemen, Chevy Chase. And Chevy stood up and took a big bow and was expecting a big hand.
And I don't want to diss him, but it wasn't huge. And I think that the powers that be were aware of that and felt like maybe that wouldn't happen if he was part of the show.
Interesting. Well, he certainly has burned some bridges over the years, I think.
He napalmed them. I think it's safe to say.
Yeah. So that one was weird.
And then the Conan O'Brien, not involved last night. Is that still going to the, when he took the Tonight Show and didn't include Lorne and his version of Tonight Show, which people have always said that was one of the reasons Leno was able to kind of double cross him and try to get the show back because he wasn't protected by Lauren.
I don't know. Where does that stand? I don't think Conan would be that petty.
In fact, I'd like to give him a get out of jail free card in the sense that two weeks from last night, he's hosting the Oscars. And it's just like, I can't, I don't know.
I mean, very few people would be going to be hosting the Oscars and then rehearsing a sketch. I'm not talking about Conan B.
Petty. I'm talking about, is there still like some Lauren pettiness with that whole thing? Because I had always thought there was.
No? No. Okay.
No. You know, I think Lauren is at the point now where he's like really too powerful, too rich, too everything.
Like there's very few, like who's he petty with? I he petty with? That's true. It's a victory lap.
He's declared victory. If you're petty, that means that you're in the trenches fighting with somebody and there's no one that's going to fight with Lauren.
Unless it's like Shara or Madonna, who's got even one name to mention? He's going to be in a, I don't know, with Conan? No, I don't think so. Do you agree with the David Stern theory with Lauren that I think we've talked about before about the moment you give up this job, you give up this power and influence that's just never gonna be the same and that's one of the reasons you keep it for as long as you can? Everyone's returning your call the moment you call them.
I always thought that theory said more about David talking to himself than him giving advice to others. He was so crestfallen.
I mean, you must've seen him when Adam took over, he was like, he was just a man without an island. And I think Lauren, look, Lauren is always going to have agency and the keys to 8H, no matter what, even if he retires, he can go back there and do whatever he wants.
And he's got a million other projects. So I don't think Lauren's going to, I don't think people are going to stop calling Lauren.
The cast may stop worrying about whether he loves them or not, but that's about it. Amazing relationship.
All right. so your final grade sounds like it was like an A-.
I think so. Okay.
It's good to see, you know, I mean, look, whatever, again, I miss Bill Hader, and certainly, I mean, every time you have one of these shows, I mean, the idea that Belushi, Gilda, Phil, and now Norm, and Jan Hooks, I mean, you can go on the list. It really, it really makes it because they died too young.
I mean, and Chris Farley, I mean, how ironic is it that Belushi was Chris Farley's hero? He tried on his clothes when he got to the show and then he winds up dying at 33, the same age that John was when he died. I mean, there's just, it's just, you know, all the sadness surrounding the show is really sad.
Before we go, any predictions for the second half of the decade for ESPN, another place you wrote a book about? Well, we'll see what happens this fall, right? I mean, that's one of the big chapters in ESPN's life, going direct to consumer.

And let's see how far, how much they piss off the cable operators.

What are they going to charge?

I mean, that's a wild calculation.

I mean, Jimmy's done his job.

He made nice with the NFL. They got the NBA.
Maybe they'll improve the NBA shoulder programming. But I know you're dubious about that.
Well, they've had it for the last, I don't know, two plus decades. But how's it going to be different with this contract? It's going to be the same crap.
It's always a work in progress. I feel like it's just getting louder and dumber, the coverage around it.
Yeah, but this is going to be different now. Direct to consumer.
And look, when I wrote that book, it was 100 million homes. Now it's, what, 67? And you times that, times $8 a month.
You're talking about real money. If you're Disney, you can't buy Pixar.
You can't buy Marvel. You can't do any of that with the current financial equation.
So it's going to be really interesting to see what happens in the fall when they decide to price that out and see how many people follow them. How do you feel from people working there, happy to be working there standpoint in 2025? Because you always have a good vibe of workplace happiness.
I think most of the people I talked to, you know, Freud had one of his definitions of maturity is the ability to handle ambiguity. Yeah.
So I think there are a lot of people becoming mature or else they're drinking themselves silly on the weekends because it used to be, you know this, I mean, particularly because ESPN's in Bristol, Connecticut, you got to move your ass up to central Connecticut. You put your kids in school.
Everybody's there for 25, 30 years. I mean, if you're at CBS Sports and you don't like it or you get recruited to NBC, you're just going across town.
So a lot of people out there for 25, 30 years,

it wasn't, those jobs aren't as safe as they used to be.

And a lot of people were having a very difficult time,

particularly since some real legends were laid off,

you know, during these layoffs.

So I think there's a level of insecurity,

a palpable level of insecurity, Bill,

that's never been there before.

That's what I'm hearing as well. HBO, another place that you wrote a book about.
New series coming out March 3rd, Celtic City, nine parts Celtics docuseries. It's really good.
But wait, how are you feeling about HBO these days in the Time Warner empire? I think there's a branding issue with the whole universe that really hurt HBO. This idea that, I mean, like those three letters are worth just as much in terms of currency and pedigree than any three level letters there are in the ecosystem.
And they dialed back on it. And I I think Blois has done the Lord's work.
He is, without a doubt, one of the best creative executives in the business today. I wish they had more money.
I wish they... I mean, I know that they could have done unbelievable things if they had more money, which wasn't always the case.
But I think that they... has really lost a lot of its halo, not because it's turning out shit, but because it's gotten messed up in this whole Discovery+, HBO+, Max, and this, and that.
It was HBO Go, then it was... I mean, it's a lot to go through for a brand.
And even though they have some great people working there, I think they deserve better. Yeah, I think with the Max app, it just shouldn't be that hard to find the best shows HBO's ever done or the new shows.
You feel like you're wading through all these different choices. And sometimes somebody's going on there like, I just want to watch Sex and the City's a i feel like there's a lot of politics involved with that with that home page i mean look at netflix it's it's almost like darwinian it's survival of the fittest but it's because you got that algorithm and like don't mess around with it man we know what we're doing but with max it's like subjective it's like wait a second like and there's this whole big thing with Entourage, where's that? I mean, deep six too.
And you can't find this, you can't find that. It's really complicated on that Max homepage.
Well, the best way to fight off any sort of weirdness is to just keep putting out good stuff, which it seems like they had to push a lot of stuff to 2025.

And it seems like they are going to have a bunch of good content this year.

And the question will be,

how can they push it in the Max app the best possible way?

Yeah.

Good luck with the Celtics, man.

That's awesome.

Thanks.

It was a lot of time.

Anything else you're working on before we go?

Got a secret project you want to tell us about now? Just writing, writing, writing. What are you writing? Yeah.
Stuff? Things? Yeah. Just stuff.
Yeah. I'm writing stuff.
New project? A couple of new ones. Yeah.
Oh. All right.
Mysterious Jim Miller. Thanks for your SNOW 50 recap.
Good to see you as always. Hey, thanks for having me, man.

All right.

Thanks to Van Lathan and Jim Miller.

Thanks to Kyle and Saruti and Gahal.

As always, you can watch clips and videos from this on the Bill Simmons YouTube channel.

You can also watch this as a video podcast on Spotify.

I hope you did.

We will be coming back on Thursday, actually, after the big Austin live show.

We're going to run that on this feed.

It's going to be good, I promise.

And don't forget, new rewatchable is coming Monday night, Wayne's World.

So I will see you on Thursday. I don't have feelings with them On the wayside I'm a bruised son

Never one said

I don't have feelings with them