Mavericks Fans Revolt, ‘SNL 50’ Guesses, Oscars Watch, and Super Bowl Leftovers With Bryan Curtis and Matt Belloni

It's the Bill Simmons Podcast presented by FanDuel. The NBA season hitting full stride.
Don't miss your chance to win some money with America's number one sportsbook. I mean, post-trade deadline.
We had one of the craziest trade deadlines we've ever had in the history of the league. We have Fox on San Antonio, Luka on the Lakers, Kuzma on the Bucks, kidding.
The Cavs got better, so you have a chance to get all these new look teams and maybe just ride Luka and his point over in the Lakers to win as a parlay over and over again as he gets vengeance on the Mavericks. Bet on fun markets like live quarter player props and parlays.
Enjoy our new NBA player prop pages. The app is safe and secure and easy to use.
And when you win, you'll get paid instantly. So download the app today, Bet with FanDuel, an 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 and listen to the end of the episode for additional details.
Must be 21 plus and present in select states. Game problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER.
Visit rg-help.com. Hey, if you missed it, we launched a brand new podcast on the Ringer Podcast Network and Spotify.
It is called Good Hang with Amy Poehler. First episode is dropping fairly soon.
Within the next couple of days, you can follow it on Spotify. Video podcast too.
This episode is brought to you by Verbo, private vacation rentals. With Verbo, 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 Verbo, 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 Verbo. The Bill Simmons Podcast is brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network.
We put up a new rewatchables on Monday. We did the Blues Brothers in honor of SNL 50.
You can watch it on the Ringer Movies YouTube channel as well. You can watch a lot of the videos and clips from this podcast and the Bill Simmons YouTube channel.
This is a big episode for us because this is our first video episode of the Bill Simmons podcast on Spotify. Every episode from now on will be a video episode on Spotify.
You can put it on your phone. You can just listen to it.
You can pull your phone out. You can watch it.
You can go on your smart TV, your PS5, your Roku, your Apple TV, wherever you want to want to get it. Watch it on the Spotify app, whatever you want to do.
Knock yourself out. We are a video podcast from now on.
I've had this podcast since 2007. So year 18, it's basically now, I guess, a TV show, a very low budget TV show, as you can see with my hastily put together posters behind

me. This podcast, really fun episode.
Brian Curtis talking Super Bowl, Luka Trade, day 10,

still going. And then Matt Bellany talking SNL 50, the Oscars, Lively versus Baldoni,

most famous celebrity right now. A lot of good stuff.
It's all next. First,

we couldn't lose them on the video podcast. Our friends from Pearl Jam.

all right editor at large of the ringer brian curtis All right, editor-at-large of The Ringer, Brian Curtis is here.

We're recording on a Tuesday morning, action-packed.

A lot of Brian's interests are in play.

And we're going to talk about the Mavericks and one of the craziest NBA situations in a long time.

But we'll start quickly with the Super Bowl.

Hey, newsflash, the Cowboys

didn't win another Super Bowl.

It's been over three decades

since the last time. We did have the Eagles

win. We had the end of Mahomes.

We had a lot of takes. Sal and I

were doing stuff on Sunday night about

Mahomes getting kicked off Goat Island!

What was the

media reaction yesterday? What jumped out

to you? What did you enjoy? Well, I think we had a little bit of a Chiefs take crisis with the Super Bowl before the game. We did.
Did you see all the people trying to make the Chiefs into villains? Like the Pats, like the 90s Yankees. Yeah.
And they're not villains. They're just not.
They're not hated on that scale yet, I don't believe. And people try to people try to you know oh we're tired of them we're pissed off at taylor swift the refs are in their pocket and they were just trying to get us there that we all hated the chiefs and we're rooting against them but i don't actually believe that was the case i think we might be a little tired of them being good we might have been kind of annoyed at the way they won games this year but i I don't think they're hated at all.
And then my favorite, Bill, was you got to- Wait, hold on that, though. Who was the best? Who was central casting for best villain? Was it just Duke basketball in the 90s? Who was just the easiest to put right in there? Because even the Yankees, like, I hated the Yankees, but I was like, all right, Jeter, I kind of like he seems like a nice guy.
You know, there was it was more of the fan base than the team itself. Duke basketball seemed like that was the easiest one.
Duke was at the top of the scale. The Yankees said the thing where they were outspending everybody and kind of everybody thought they were ruining baseball.
So that's a good piece in there. Yeah.
Yeah. When you're ruining stuff, that's always a good one.
I'm trying to think who else. Like the Pats, because of the Spygate, I felt like that.
In the first three Super Bowls, people were like, all right, enough with these guys. But it was a little like the Chiefs thing.
But then when Spygate happened, then they became criminals, basically. And then it moved it to another level.
And then they had a hateable coach, which is another thing the Chiefs lacked. Like people don't hate Andy Reid.
No. They just don't.
Bell Belichick was hateable, probably still is hateable in his own way, even as he's tried to rehabilitate his image all year. But I think with the Chiefs, people are just like, eh, okay.
The Taylor Swift thing, a lot of Kelsey, a lot of both Kelsies. A lot of commercials.
They were moving a little bit toward the Trump side of stuff, which I think a couple people ruffled up. But for the most part, I don't know.
My biggest issue with them was they made it so unfun to talk about the Super Bowl, which we talked about on Sunday night, where it's just like, if you pick them, you kind of feel, you just say, Andy Reid's Mahomes. You had no other reason.
If you didn't pick them, you felt like an idiot. So it was, I think, the worst Super Bowl to talk about since I've been doing this.
I think so. But I, like you, talked myself into the Chiefs are going to win it.
It's going to be a close game. It was the first time I ever got slaughtered on a Super Bowl and didn't feel bad really at all.
I was like, what are you going to do? You can't go get some game. What was the other thing you were going to say about the villain thing? Well, I was just saying like, once the villain thing kind of didn't work out that you heard this amazing take on ESPN and elsewhere, people said, don't be tired of the Chiefs.
Appreciate greatness when it's in front of you. Yeah.
And I was like, what a counterintuitive take. You should appreciate a great football team.
Whoa. Whoa! Good tag.
Go, settle down, guys. What was it like as a TV viewer for the Brady Mahomes experience? Brady announcing the game where Mahomes' goat resume got knocked backwards by about four years.
So it was a little bit weird, right? First of all, Brady actually got to go to the meetings this week and apparently, I was told there was a scene in one of the meetings where he and Mahomes were just sitting off by themselves talking. Oh, and people in the meeting, Fox producer was like, look at that.
I mean, that's kind of awesome. These two dudes just talking football.
It was just one of those moments where you're like, whoa, goat plus goat. Well, almost goat talking to each other about football.
But then it gets to the game and Mahomes just sucks at the beginning of the game. He was terrible.
You nailed this on Sunday night. So Brady, I thought, never got to talk about Mahomes' greatness in an interesting way.
And at the same time, he kind of made a mistake because he didn't really kill Mahomes. He was talking about how good the Eagles' defense was.
Well, and that's where Romo or probably Romo, but I think Aikman would have been the best because Aikman just doesn't give a shit anymore. Aikman, I think, probably would have been the hardest on him, right? I think so.
But you know what? One thing you could tell with Brady this year, and this is kind of one of the most fascinating subplots of Brady announcer experiment, was you could tell what quarterbacks he liked and what quarterbacks he didn't and what quarterbacks he thought didn't measure up. Jalen Hurts, by the way, was in the second category.
Yeah. Every Jalen Hurts game, he would say, Jalen Hurts is better when he gets the ball out of his hands quickly.
Yep. And he would get mad when he held it too long and got sacked or had to run out and throw it out of bounds.
Brady would be exasperated. Which is a nice way of saying he's pretty limited, right? He can do certain things, but he can't do other things.
Well, what happens during the Super Bowl? Jalen Hurts kind of balls out. He plays better than Patrick Mahomes.
So you could feel Brady really processing that in real time. And he sort of got, well, he has a great instinct on when to leave the pocket because he was beating all those rushes and blitzes, right, by running.
And got himself there and he gave hertz's due i don't want to say he didn't do that but that was just funny to hear in real time yeah and it seems like after 48 hours the uh the second level analysis stuff is whoa the eagles actually like go the 2000 ravens and some of the other great super bowl teams let's where do they go where do they rank ahead of them and then it feels like people are kind of test driving some Mahomes stuff and even people in my life where it's like are we sure are we sure are we like just because they pulled out all these close games like why don't they have explosive plays anymore? The guy's about to hit 30. Could you say he peaked a couple years ago just as an explosive, awesome quarterback? There's always all these excuses around him.
Are we sure? Which I remember hit Brady in the late 2000s too. There was some are we sure stuff.
I don't think anyone feels really committed to anything. The biggest thing that shocked me, and I feel like I say this every year and it feels like it's even, it just speeds up by probably an hour every year.
But going back, we both loved like Sports Illustrated in the 80s. The Super Bowl would happen.
People would talk about it. It would be on SportsCenter for four straight days.
And then the Sports Illustrated will come out on Thursday with like the final statement of the game. And then that started to shrink as the internet came and it kept shrinking.
It kept shrinking. But even like when I was at ESPN, Sal and I used to do like Monday afternoon recaps of the Super Bowl.
Then that became Monday mornings. Then eventually we're just going immediately as fast as we could after the game.
And now it feels like the shelf life to discuss the Super Bowl is 18 18 hours. Is it, is it longer than that? Like, does anyone, even us leading the podcast with this today, I want to do it.
Cause I love talking about all the, all the ancillary stuff with you, but it's like, is it too late? Is it too late to talk about the Superbowl on a Tuesday morning? I totally agree. I watched the late sports center on Sunday night.
I think right before I listened to you. And at that moment, I was kind of like, am I done with the Super Bowl? Is this it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like we had a pod to do the next day, but I was like, have I consumed everything I'm going to consume about the Eagles beating the Chiefs?

And the answer is almost yes.

I think I had because I mean, here's the other part of that.

You just consume so much now.

I mean, you had to wait till Thursday with that SI thing to get all the details and,

you know, what was Vic Fangio like in the locker room afterwards? I mean, Sheil wrote that, you know, for us right away. Right.
So in a way it was just all kind of there for us and we don't really need to wait. And there's no like nobody's, nobody's parachuting in on like Monday at 3 PM with this amazing angle that nobody's thought of.
You kind of know what all the angles are going to be by, you know, 10 p.m. on Sunday night.
I think the one exception was remember that year Peter King went and hung out with Tom Brady and Giselle. Was it Montana up in the cabin like a week later? Right.
It feels so old school now. But like, yeah, we're withady and he's reflecting on the game and giving me like an hour that was that that even that i don't think he would do anymore i actually felt like the halftime show and the kendrick drake stuff and um how polarized in that show ended up being almost became more of a theme on monday at least in in on my text threads and stuff I was reading.
It was more interesting to read how people were receiving stuff, the hidden meanings behind some of the stuff Kendrick did on the halftime and Serena being in it. That one had these levels that kept getting revealed.
That used to be how the Super Bowl operated. Totally, because what play are we talking about in the Super Bowl? Nothing from the the second half yeah you know maybe that mahomes pick six which effectively ended the game in retrospect by the way you mentioned the mahomes takes i want to go there with you yeah because it feels like mahomes will work himself into a nobody believes in me news cycle because just enough doubt even if it's bullshit, just enough doubt also bill jalen hurts think about this what were people talking about sunday night monday morning the eagles defense this was a win for the eagles defense so jalen hurts both win the super bowl mvp and pull off the unprecedented double play of being a nobody believed in me guy.
Has that ever happened before? Probably Brady somewhere in the first three Super Bowls where it was all Belichick and all the defense and Brady was kind of the supporting character in a lot of ways. I think it would be the only other time I can remember that happening.
Kurtz was an awesome in that game. He was so good.
He was great. I mean, they basically put the game in his hands and dared him to beat them.
He did. With the Mahomes stuff, there's a couple fun wrinkles that could come out.
He could go the NBA player route. If this was LeBron in the Mahomes spot, we'd already be getting the leaks about he needs more help.
They didn't find him anyone this year. When Rasheed Rice went out, they could have done this, that, and the other thing.
They knew Kelsey was getting old. They've got to do more.
He took less money. They'd basically make him a victim.
Wait, I thought you were going to say he was secretly injured. When you said LeBron, I thought I had a secret injury.
That would be another one, too. Yeah had he had like a quad injury he couldn't push off his right foot yeah they would be they'd be doing all that stuff but it it kind of doesn't seem like Mahomes not only does he not do that stuff but he always seems at peace win or lose after the game right I we never see that stuff about oh this year Patrick Mahomes is different he's just just, he's pretty even-keeled, which I think you have to be

as a quarterback. The interesting thing to me, which we

talked about Sunday night, was I really do think

Kelsey was going to retire if they won.

And that Kelsey

will he or will he not retire

I think will be fun. But just

in general, it's really hard to keep

these windows open.

With NFL teams,

we went through it with the Patriots a few different

times. It all depends on the drafts.

People wrote some good pieces about they missed on their left tackle pick this year. Rasheed Rice, which would have been this awesome wide receiver pick for him.
You can just tilt it a little bit or all of a sudden, you're catchable. I think that was the thing that changed the most coming out of this season was like the Chiefs not only feel super catchable now, we don't have to do the thing where we just hand them the game when we're talking about it.
Now it's like football has opened up for analysis. So I'm excited for that.
From a Super Bowl standpoint, the Brady Fox thing at the end, $375 million, whatever it is. They certainly got a lot of ink and publicity and podcast content.
He was able to go on some of the Fox shows. He had a couple of decent moments in traditional podcast interview stuff.
I don't think from a game thing, I wouldn't even put him in the top eight game guys I heard. He's got this weird Vegas minority stake and he's allegedly hiring the coach and he's involved in their draft.
Is there a chance this is it? This is a one and done? I don't think so. I don't think he sees it like that.
That's from me poking around. I think he's into this.
First of all, the NFL doesn't care about the Vegas thing other than the. And by the way, let's see where we are in year two with the meetings, because I'm not convinced that my that wouldn't change in year two.
I think there's there's a there's potential for that to to be switched up by Goodell and everything after they've gone through that one year of this with him limited. Yeah.
If you're him, you're getting thirty seven point five5 million to work for six months, work hard for six

months, but work for six months.

The NFL has said, we don't care if you're a minority owner of the Raiders.

It doesn't matter.

I got to ask him on Super Bowl week what his role with the Raiders was, and he didn't tell

me, and he didn't provide any detail about that.

So I was like, okay, so he's not going to tell us, at least for now, about what he's

doing with the Raiders. Doesn't have to come clean about it.
I mean, seems like a pretty good deal to me. I have been told pretty explicitly, it's too much money.
There's no way he walks away. It's too much money.
And this is one thing I think people forget with the super duper famous celebrities. It's expensive to be a super duper famous celebrity because everywhere you go, you're paying for some private jet.
In his case, he got divorced. As much money as he's made, he still needs way more money to sustain the lifestyle he does.
And this is a $37.5 million check every year. He's not giving it up if he doesn't have to.
It's not that hard of a job. It's 22 weeks.
You study one game, you fly to the site. You have to keep in touch with the league a little bit, but not really.
The stunning thing to me is Belichick. This is not a midlife crisis because he's in his mid seventies, but even he was at Superbowl.
He was at a couple parties. He was walking around with his girlfriend.
We saw him at the Fanatics party on Saturday. It's just surreal.
This guy who was wearing this, you know, saggy hoodie on the sidelines who just could care less than anyone thought. Now he's in the Dunkin' Donuts commercial with the girlfriend.
And this girlfriend's five years older than my daughter. There was a lot of like, what the fuck is going on with this guy's stuff in New Orleans over the weekend? And he was wearing all the rings.
And wearing all the rings, which he never, it's the kind of thing he just never used to do. Just as if to remind the NFL, I won all these rings and you didn't hire me again.
Right. I'm really starting to wonder.
This is a working theory. I'm not done with it yet, but like 75 and up are just all bets off.
It's just like literally are all bets off. We're talking about owners.
Because in sports, as fans, we have to deal with so many old people. And we all have old people in our family.
You could see what happens as they hit their 70s, then their 80s. And the judgment just gets a little nuts.
And I just wonder with Belichick, I can't believe some of this. I really find it hard to believe he's coaching North Carolina too.
I get it. I understand why he did it.
He didn't want to deal with owners anymore. He just wants to be a coach, all that stuff.
But yet at the same time, he seems like the celebrity aspect of this has become really appealing to him, which I never in a million years would have guessed. It's interesting to watch that because Nick Saban's kind of done the same thing in the college level.
And there's another guy who you're like, why would he care about this? But you know what? You go on those podcasts, you go on the TV shows, go on the Manning cast, everybody butters you up. How many times did Bill Belichick get buttered up by media people when he was at the pats last he didn't want to never dealt with them and then he had this really strange relationship with his owner and just kind of kept his little it's just basically in a cave just you know going through film yeah it's like the espn car wash except it's you know not interviewing you it's just telling you how great you are time.
Really strange. It was the whole thing.
I thought that was the weirdest subplot of the weekend. Then the funny, other funny thing that I immediately thought of you.
We always call it the Friday news dump. What the Sixers did with the Joel Embiid information that they held and held and held and pushed out.
Oh my God.

Right after the Eagles won the Superbowl.

It was,

I don't even,

what do we call it?

This is a new level of news dump.

The Superbowl title.

We didn't want to bum out our city.

This was our only chance to put this out.

News dump.

What is this?

We clogged the toilet so much.

We,

the toilet wasn't fixable.

We just had to throw it away.

We had to put it on the curb.

Why is there yellow tape and a door locked in the guest bathroom? Don't go in there. That was so great.
Unprecedented. The best news dump I think ever.
I never, ever remember a team pulling that off better. This crazy Embiid article where it's like, yeah, I'm probably never going to be healthy again.
I may need surgery. shouldn't have played the olympics it turns out all that like it's like oh my god if they put that out on a tuesday it would have been like a 36 hour story and instead it just kind of came and went in 10 seconds totally even during super bowl week that would have been huge for a day it would have it would have distracted us all what's your what's your favorite news dump ever i think that might have been.
It's a really good one. You're going to have to give me a minute on that one, but that's a good one.
All right, answer that on PressBox on Thursday. Do your top five news dumps on the PressBox pod.
I remember last year when he had all the amazing political stories and American stories. There was this thing on Twitter.
It's like, if you have anything, now's the time. Send the press release press release just bring it out no no one will notice i remember when i was working on my hbo show and we were doing like the test shows and it was like three weeks before the show launched and the guy who hired me to do the show michael lombardo um and he was a huge advocate and like three weeks before it was like friday, like 3.15 in the afternoon.
And all of a sudden the stuff was out that he was out at HBO. And it was the only time I'd ever like really experienced the Friday news dump.
It was so like perfectly calculated to just kind of sneak into the weekend with it. I was like, oh, this is how you do it.
This is it. because there's any other day or moment, this would have been the biggest Hollywood story.
And they were like, this is happening right here. It still happens.
We're going to take a break and then we'll come back and we got to talk about this incredible Maverick situation. This episode is brought to you by Paramount+.
Your next family crime saga obsession is coming this March to Paramount+. Mobland, an explosive new series from the underworld of Guy Ritchie.
It stars Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, and Helen Mirren. Go inside the harrigan crime family who will stop at nothing to ensure they come out on top in a war that threatens to topple empires and destroy lives.
Don't miss new episodes of Mobland, now streaming on Paramount Plus. 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.
All right. So Curtis, you're from Texas.
You're a lifelong Cowboys fan. You're a lifelong Mavericks fan, maybe not as much, but a student of the Mavericks.
They've been in your life. It's been a rocky road.
There's been a lot of ups and downs. Everything peaked in 2011 with Dirk Nowitzki and probably winning the title, beating Wade and LeBron and Bosh.

And it got weird over the course of the decade.

They miraculously end up with Luka Doncic.

Cuban sells the team last year.

They just seem like if you're picking six franchises

you want to be for the next 10 years,

they would have been one of the six because they had Luka.

Out of nowhere, they trade them in the most shocking,

craziest trade in the history of the NBA.

And just when you think, all right, maybe this will settle down. It just hasn't.
It just keeps going up a level and up a level and up a level. What just your big picture watching this from afar, holy shit.
What is your take? I feel like quoting that notorious Darren Revell tweet. This is terrible for Dallas, but this is tremendous content because you recognize the pain.
And I have never seen Dallas people this emotionally gutted. So even like Cowboys, Super Bowl losses, nothing? Well, it's okay.
So maybe not gutted, but just angry. Like there have been a lot of angry Jerry moments over the last 30 years.
I was in middle school when they fired Tom Landry. I was in high school when Jimmy Johnson got axed by Jerry.
I remember those were just crazy citywide moments of like, what the hell just happened? But I've never seen the anger like I've seen over the last week and change just pissed off. I mean, like visiting even with Dallas sports radio guys.
And by the way monday was one of the last monday one of the all-time sports radio days in dallas history and probably american history when they were coming back and doing their shows oh and you know morning and through the afternoon first time you were getting your first time to talk about it and i was like you know even going up to them wow what a day huh and they just look like gutted i mean you know because everything changes you know this this guy you loved this person you were close to the fact that it was done by nico harrison and patrick dumont we'll probably get into here in a second yeah and the way it was done and for what they got i mean every piece of it is just absolutely infuriating and gutting. Well, and then this next level would happen at the home game yesterday where people are getting booed and they're removing fans, which we're not, not doing anything that bad.
They're just like being fans. Like they, like I've never seen people get pulled out of the arena for the stuff that they got pulled out of last night.
Have you? Yeah. Did you see the one guy, right? So they're doing Mavs karaoke.
Yeah. And they come in real close, like a close-up on him.
And he says, fire Nico. And then the camera goes, whoop.
Right. It was almost like he flashed, like he pulled it out out of a zipper.
And then they were just dumping fans, which is, that's the worst thing you could do. Like, it's not only did they do this crazy trade, but they don't seem to understand, like, how angry it's made people.
And they don't really seem that interested in quelling the anger. It's like they're just taking gasoline and pouring it on the fire.
You get escorted out of the arena for saying fire Nico, for saying fire the GM. Are they going to escort the sports writers out of press row who wrote the same thing i mean why why is that not a valid opinion well the other weird thing and this bit kind of speaks to the incompetence behind the trade how did they not anticipate any of this like they they're in dallas like nico harrison has been involved with the mavericks longer than the owner but he's there he sees how popular lu is.
You go to any Mavericks game, it's Luka jerseys everywhere. I mean, I would say it's a top four fans wearing the jersey of the best player NBA city.
It's just everywhere. And little kids everywhere, 77, just everywhere.
There was a couple when I was going to the finals, there was a couple of Dirks, a couple of a couple old school mav stuff but for the most part it's just luca it's like it's like a fucking luca army this was their guy they've had him since he was 18 they thought they're gonna have until he's 40 so to not anticipate that part of it is like man i i really think this makes us slightly better but my life is gonna suck for the rest of the time i live here Just that alone. And then you have Palenka on the other end going, yeah, we got to keep this quiet.
Nobody can find out because he knows the moment it leaks out, the Mavs fans are going to basically riot. I've never seen anything like this from a hubris slash lack of awareness.
dating back, unless you go back to like the 80s when the league was you know everyone was on cocaine and the league was fucking crazy and the teams are worth 12 million dollars and weird shit happened this is like out of the 80s yeah and how about Jason Kidd no post game presser last night wasn't that great which day everyone was saying this is like never happened before with any Ms team. We've never seen a coach just skip the presser.
We're taping this at 10 o'clock PT. We might find out today Davis is out for like two months.
Yeah, I mean that was also kind of a news dump in the Super Bowl too. Oh wait, AD is actually hurt.
I mean, the whole thing, I mean you say like he didn't anticipate it, but I feel like he did to some

extent because I feel like the secrecy was

driven by Palenka, as you say, so there were

no other offers, no other suitors.

But I think Harrison kept it quiet

too because he didn't want to face the backlash.

He knew it would get crushed.

So in the way, like you were kind of anticipating

of it, maybe not anticipating how big it

would be.

Right. Well, this has

I mean, the Patrick Dumont piece

of this as it's evolved

Thank you. of it, maybe not anticipating how big it would be.
Right. Well, this has...
I mean, the Patrick Dumont piece of this

as it's evolved.

I wrote down

the funniest outcomes of the Luka

trade so far. Here we go.

And it's a long list.

Everyone made this point.

A trade so bad, people thought Shams

got hacked. Let's just start there.

That's never happened before in the history of professional sports where we assumed the best reporter of a sport got hacked

palinka dressing like a fast and furious villain for the post-trade conference i loved just like

decked out like he like he was about to do a concert in new zealand with it like he like he

used to be in uh new kids in the block and now he's got a solo career. I love this one.
Everyone's still pretending that Jason kid, JJ Redick, LeBron, Rich Paul, and Anthony Davis didn't know about the trade. This is my favorite.
They're still doing it. It's like, this is like playhouse theater.
If people think Jason kididd didn't know about this trade, I got like a bridge to sell you. It's unbelievable that they're still pushing this.
AD, and we talked about this the day after the, on this pod, the day after the trade, like AD waived his trade kicker and gave up $5.9 million in like 40 minutes to make the trade work. There's no way he didn't know.
It's impossible. He has this huge house out here in LA.
He loved being on the Lakers. He had to have known.
All these people knew and they're still doing it all these days later. Well, it was so important.
We had to just keep it between the owners and Nico and Rob and that was all. It couldn't get out.
Why couldn't it get out? Why? Because you knew the Mavericks fans were going to fucking ride if it got out because it It was so fucking stupid. That's why I couldn't get out why couldn't it get out why because you knew the mavericks fans were gonna fucking ride if it got out because it was so fucking stupid that's why i couldn't get out totally they tried to square the circle at that nico press conference which was also one of the great moments in this whole thing where he said jkid didn't know but we were aligned on the vision right well that but then they said he didn't know to the 11th hour it's like you mean the 11th hour of a 24-hour day? Because there's no fucking way you traded Luka without telling Jason Kidd and talking him through it.
First of all, that's insane. If you're running a basketball team and you're not going to walk through all the mechanics of here's door A and here's door B.
And also, they were complaining about Luka behind the scenes for two years. There's no way Jason kid wasn't a huge part of this trade.

And by the way,

Jason kid,

not exactly the most standup dude over the years.

Like this is the guy who stabbed Brooklyn in the back so he could get the

Milwaukee job.

Like he's,

he's let the trail of bodies everywhere.

And they like the nets in 2007,

all of a sudden he got out of there.

Like this is not like Mr.

Loyal, awesome team employee guys. So I employee guy.
So give me a break on that. And then LeBron, the way he reacted to the trade after, if they really blindsided on this, there's no way that he reacts the way he did, which was like, oh yeah, we'll wait and see.
I just think everybody knew this was better. This was a better situation for LeBron.
It actually gave him a chance to win a title. It was better for AD to go to Dallas.
Anyway, that was one of my favorites. We mentioned Nico saying they kept the trade talks quiet because neither side wanted it to leak.
You mean you didn't want it to leak? Because the moment it got out, there's no way the fan base would let you do it. Patrick DeMont's interview over the weekend when he said Kobe was a culture builder.
Kobe's coach in 2005 wrote an entire book about how awful it was to coach Kobe. Oh yeah, and Shaq was the guy who was always in shape.
Shaq's work ethic, which was like the most famous thing about Shaq. In my book of basketball, the whole thing I wrote about Shaq was that Shaq could have graduated with a 4-0 and instead he graduated with a 3-7 and had a great time.
Like that was Shaq. Mark Cuban, a week late, doing the whole, I tried to stop it as soon as I found out, but it was too late because he probably was walking around for a week with everybody just crushing him on the trade.
And finally he had to like get some peace out to Mark Stein. Like, Hey, can you, can you put out that? I had nothing to do with this.
Like there's really no blood on my hands. Um, the Mavs trading Luca because he couldn't stay in shape and was always an injury risk.
But then they got Anthony Davis who got hurt in the first game. Like you can't make this up.
nickname is street clothes right this guy's better I liked who knows that Dave McBenhaman story yesterday when it was like LeBron's camp has noticed that Luka got what he wanted right away that was an amazing sentence and LeBron has been pushing for this stuff for years all, LeBron's played with, just in the last 14 years, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, Kyrie Irving, Kevin Love, Anthony Davis, and Luka Doncic. He plays on a Lakers team.
When they traded for AD, they traded two top two lottery picks, Brandon Ingram and Lonzo Ball. They pushed Julius Randle out, who was another lottery pick.
They traded the number four pick that became DeAndre Hunter. They put Josh Hart in the trade.
They put Mo Wagner in the trade. They traded two more swaps and picks, including the one that became Dyson Daniels.
And they have another pick this year. They gave away basically a decade of drafts combined with the two Westbrook trades.
How much can you do for this guy? So I almost don't believe that he couldn't have, there's no way he really feels like they're not doing enough for him. Anyway, that made me laugh.
And then all the Mavs stuff with just, hey, let's hold our heads high and thank Luca for seven years. And he brought us to the Western finals and the finals.
And this is great.

Maverick.

Good luck in LA.

No,

they did the opposite.

They just leak shit left and right.

He's a fat piece of shit.

Maybe he had a drinking problem.

His calves could explode.

Watch out for his Achilles.

There's so many fucking things that are leaking out.

It's disgusting.

It was.

And you know me,

I'm a student of the,

now they tell a story.

And just as soon as this trade came down,

we were all on the clock, right?

You guys even said it on the emergency podcast that night.

We're all on the clock.

Here we go.

But it never really came out

because there's really not a reason for this, right?

There's not a great answer.

There's always an answer with these things,

with these weird stories.

What happened?

What are the motives here?

And the answer is, it was Nico Harrison. He didn't have a good reason.
He just did it. He did this stupid, incredibly stupid thing.
Well, and then Dumont, the owner, or the guy who's running stuff. The more I talk to people and I keep looking for conspiracy theories or whatever, and it just seems like they just felt like they didn't like that he wasn't in shape and they thought he was kind of a dick.
And that just seems like that's why. They didn't want to give him $350 million.
This is the all-time new owner syndrome trade we've ever had. We've had so many great ones over the years where somebody takes over a team and within a couple months, they're like, here's my idea.
And it's usually a disaster. This is the worst one ever.
Yes, but usually you're paying too much for another star, right? That's the new owner syndrome. That's the Nets.
That's the Suns, right? You're going out like, let's go get an aging star and spend way too much capital. Go get that guy.
This is the opposite. It's the opposite, but the spirit is always the same same it's always somebody moving into the league who's either had some success somewhere else or inherited the success he had and they go in and within a year they think they're smarter than everybody else that's always the north star where they come in and they're like they're just trying to do a a zag, right? They're not like, I just want to come in.
I want to learn this business for three or four years. Trust the people that are in here.
I want to be a student of the game. There's a lot of stuff I don't know yet.
It's always more like the Ishbia thing where it's like, nope, everybody's doing this. So I'm going to do this.
Like Prokhorov was another classic in Brooklyn, right? He's just like, picks, what are those? Spend those. And then a year later, he's like, yeah, cut costs.
That was stupid. And then he just demolishes the nets for a decade.
But they all have to do it. Even Balmer, who I think was one of the better new owners.
But Balmer, he took over. And within a couple couple of years they had traded Blake Griffin.
Chris Paul was out like, and, and that was probably one of the more successful ones, but they all have to do it. You know, what really pisses me off about this is, and this is like, comes from a more personal place is that you and I, before we worked together, both worked with people in our lives who would make our lives hell.
And it wasn't that we had like, I care about journalism, you care about journalism intensely. We're just butting heads over the particular vision.
We would look at them and be like, you actually don't care that much. You just like having a job.
And when you don't have this job anymore, you're going to go off and do another job. And you're never going to think about this again.

And I'm going to think about this for the rest of my life, this moment.

Yeah.

Because I'm so pissed off.

That's Maverick fans to me.

Nico Harrison is going to do a couple more years of GM and then he's going to never do

this job again.

And he won't think about this as, oh, that was a great failure in my life.

He's like, oh, that was weird.

You know, a couple of weird years in my career.

Now I'm going to go work with my buddy Rob again.

And, you know, it just doesn't matter. And Patrick move it'll move it'll be out of texas patrick dumont will never think about this again and his i just guarantee it and that is what's just particularly galling about this whole deal to me well well and also that patrick dumont clearly was not a huge basketball fan probably into the last six or seven years just based on that one interview he gave.
There's wrinkles to this that I think tie into where basketball is kind of moving anyway. And I've noticed it with my friends' kids, especially kids, maybe my son's age and under, where they root for the player over the team.

I think video games have something to do with this.

I think all the player movement has stuff to do with this. I also just think

basketball's different. Guys jump around now

so it's easier to just grab a player than a

team. But it's definitely one of the

player empowerment LeBron generation.

This is one of the side

effects. It's like, I like Russell Westbrook.

Now he's on the Nuggets. So now I'm

a Nuggets fan.

This Luka thing,

Thank you. this is one of the side effects.
It's like, I like Russell Westbrook. Now he's on the Nuggets.
So now I'm a Nuggets fan. This Luka thing is the most interesting test case for this because I know of a few people who either it's them specifically, their kids or people they know who are like, my kid's a Laker fan now.
Like this is it. Like we've actually given up on the Mavericks.
He's just going to follow Luka to the Lakers. He's going to root for the Lakers from now on.
I don't remember a bigger version of this in any sport. When Brady went to the Bucs, the Pats fans, we rooted for him.
I rooted for him during the Super Bowl, but I was never like, I'm Bucks fan like we stayed the Pats fan this is actually like it feels like they've lost fans

over this which I don't remember happening

it's really fascinating because I'm like you

I have my teams that I've had to childhood

that never changed I never required like

a second NBA team or a second

like that bullshit get out of here with that

this is the one time I wouldn't blame anybody

for doing it I mean Dirk

sitting there blessing the whole

thing last night with you know

and Luca doing the Dirk trademark

I'm sorry. This is the one time I wouldn't blame anybody for doing it.
I mean, Dirk sitting there blessing the whole thing last night with, you know, and Luca doing the Dirk trademark shot.

Dirk, by the way, greatest player in Mavs history, who after he won a title, did a diners, drive-ins and dives tour.

I mean, staying in shape.

Remember that?

Yeah.

I mean, so I wouldn't blame anybody if you're just a Luca fan.

And now, even with all the changes you talk about,

with what the Mavericks did, why not?

Why wouldn't you just keep rooting for him

no matter where he's playing?

The other thing I was thinking about

just from a historical standpoint with this trade,

which speaks to the fact that they had a,

you know, a sports business executive

who doesn't seem like he was a true basketball fan, Nico.

Maybe he is, but it's just like his lack of understanding

of the history of this stuff was really notable.

And then Dumont, who clearly isn't a basketball fan.

But there's been so many great players

who hit kind of this weird inflection point

that Luka seemed to be in, right?

Where he's 25, he wasn't at his all-time peak yet. You could talk yourself into, yeah, maybe this is never going to happen.
And ironically, the Mavericks had one of those guys in Dirk Nowitzki. When they made the finals with him in 06, the MVP season in 07, and then they lose to the Warriors in round one.
And then around 08, it really seemed to go sideways. And he had some issues.
He got involved with a woman that became a thing where he had this bad relationship. And 08, 09, you really felt like Dirk was gettable and that the ship had sailed on him being an awesome player.
And they didn't trade with it. Cuban was like, I'm never trading this guy.
Cuban had a chance to trade him in 04 for Shaq. That was when Shaq became available.
It was like, the obvious trade was Dirk for Shaq. He's like, I'm not trading Dirk.
Dirk's our guy. And they just kept him.
But there's been other guys over the years when people, when teams have blinked, when they've had, you know, they were like, ah, should we trade him? Especially when you go back to the 70s and 80s. This is the first time in a while a team blinked.
Even Minnesota with KG, they never traded him. The Wizards did it with C-Web, but C-Web never had any real success.
Luka had real success. He made the finals last year, did the Western finals.
He was actually winning shit. So this is why, I think one of the many reasons, I was even going back, I was reading Houston and

Hakeem Olajuwon, because in

92 and 93, and you can read, there's a ton

of stuff about this. He almost got traded

to the Clippers.

He was being shopped around.

There was a Reggie Lewis possible trade at one point.

But they never traded him. They kept

him. So this happened before, but this is

the rare time where the team just blinked.

And it's so early to blink.

It's so early.

I mean, 29-year-old Luka, you know, maybe you never get back to the finals.

You got the Western Conference Finals one more time.

Right.

Then you trade him for seven first-round picks and some 22-year-old.

That's the only way it makes sense.

Yeah, and he has like two seasons in there where he plays like 45 games

and then you're starting to, you know, long-term conditioning, whatever. But this is way too early to even entertain that idea.
The other piece of this trade, which I'm happy to go on the record and people can clip this out and shove it in my face for the rest of my life. Aggregate this.
Aggregate this right now. I really think this is the greatest thing they ever could have done for him.

Professionally, career-wise, motivation-wise,

this is the all-time we did you a favor by doing this trade.

I already thought he was going to win a title someday.

To me, he was the natural pick of anyone under 27 for who was going to win.

All of the checkpoints that he's hit as a player.

But the one thing that was kind of missing was like,

Thank you. a natural pick of anyone under 27 for who is going to win.
All of the checkpoints that he's hit as a player. But the one thing that was kind of missing was like, guy's carrying too much weight.
Like he, you know, if you go back and you watch him rookie year, second year, he's just way skinnier and he's more explosive, right? He added all this weight because it made him harder to deal with. It made him more physical.
It added a post-up game. But now I wonder what between that, some of the stuff we're already reading about LeBron and him kind of Luca in awe watching LeBron's workout.
I mean, LeBron's like one of the most legendary workout guys ever. And Luca kind of maybe finally understanding this is maybe what it takes.
Usually this happens when somebody is on the U.S. Olympic team.
But Luka is Slovenian. Like he never was in that.
And you always have these stories like that. It's 92 had it, 2008 had it, where they're watching the best player and they're like, holy shit, that guy's getting up at 5.30 in the morning to work out.
Maybe I should start doing that. So anyway, I just feel like that's the frustrating thing for me as a Laker hater, that this is just clearly the greatest thing.
Plus, everyone comes to California and loses 20 pounds. It's the other thing.
So he's actually going to happen anyway. No, I agree.
And sometimes in psychology with players, it's like deceptively simple. We're talking about Mahomes, what he's going to think about all year.
Yeah. And every time there's a clip on ESPN, look at that.
Look at that. Brady fed off that his entire career.
So just imagine Luka. Read all those stories about being overweight.
Team didn't believe in me. They thought his Achilles was going to explode.
That was my new favorite one in the last week. Ah, his Achilles.
It's a ticking time bomb. Oh, okay.
Cool. Can you just, last thing, can you walk us through how this plays out in Dallas with your lifelong knowledge, appreciation, historical sense of things in Dallas, a trade that was being compared to the JFK assassination for its impact on the city.
How does it play out from an animosity, anger? Just what are the next four months look like? So here's what I would say. The Mavericks were created as a franchise in my lifetime.
Like they were, they were literally. Right.
1981. Yeah.
So, or 1980, sorry. To watch them, you had, other than that time they pushed the Lakers to seven games in the Western Conference Finals, until the Dirk era, they were just barely a franchise.
Barely a franchise. Barely rated on the Dallas sports consciousness.
Way behind the Rangers, you know, for second place, by the way. It felt like in the 90s, they were like an actual...
They were one of the NBA train wreck franchises. Absolutely.
I would say one of the three worst. People still said Clippers, but it was actually the Mavericks, except the Mavericks would just lose the draft lottery every year.
Remember that they gave that 76ers all-time wins record a ride a couple times. It was just unbelievably bad.
I remember when they traded Jason Kidd too. It totally made sense because it was like, of course they did.
They're fucking stupid. Of course they're going to trade him after two years.
Oh my God. Was that Sam Cassell? Yeah, whatever.
It was like, yeah, we're not sure these three guys can mesh together. So we're going to trade the best one of the three.
It was like, you guys are idiots. Totally.
And Cuban and Dirk made the Mavericks into a real franchise. Yeah.
And then there was another period of, you know, kind of weirdness there at the end where they kind of went, you know, they were declining with Dirk and then Luca made them again. Like no matter what you say, Luca's here.
There's a thing to talk about. There's a thing to pay attention to.
There's a reason to buy a ticket to a Mavericks game and be excited and get into the Mavericks. And now I just wonder where they slide on the sports consciousness.
And even talking to those radio hosts, the same thing. It's like, what's the Mavericks segment we do? What do we do? Do we do an AD segments every week? I don't think so.
I wouldn't. Let's say they get healthy and they're a playoff team this year.
Obviously, there'll be some interest. interest people being in, but I just think sliding.
You've seen this happen with Boston teams before where you just slide off the map for a while. How about the Pats? And in this case, it's not just because you're bad or potentially bad in a couple of years.
It's because people are pissed at you. Like they're angry with you.
They think you just screwed them over in a way they've never felt before. And I just think there's a lot of potential there for them just slide into the ocean for a while.
Well, I mean, imagine if Kyrie leaves, so he's, he can opt out. There's some free agency stuff with him potentially.
This could, this could be a house of cards pretty quickly. And then the Davis piece of it, if, you know, if, if he's just not healthy this year, like they have a real chance not to make the playoffs because the West is so good.
I was looking at the odds. I bet when I was in Louisiana over the weekend, I bet on Fandle, I bet on Golden State, at plus 155 to make the playoffs.
They're plus 102. Tomorrow they might be plus 170.
The West is like, depending on who wins two games in a row, there's 11 good teams plus San Antonio. There's eight playoff spots.
If you have Davis out for a month combined with Kyrie pulls something for a week, now all of a sudden you're sliding out of it. Fascinating stuff.
Who thought Dallas would be this crazy as a sports city without the Cowboys being involved?

I think that might have been the biggest shocker of all of it.

Oh, my God.

And I'll tell you, the words Brian Schottenheimer have not been uttered once on Dallas Sports Radio.

Or Jerry Jones possibly winning an Emmy for Landman.

There we go.

The most emotional TV cameo of the last five years. Who knew? Best thing he's done in 30 years by far.
Unbelievable stuff. Oh, I almost forgot to do this.
So I was saying to you last night when we were texting that this was the first NBA trade that I felt could be turned into a Ryan Murphy limited series on Netflix. Where, listen, not to compare this trade to the Menendez brothers and Ted Bundy and some of the other things they've done.
But why not? But it feels like you have characters, you have intrigue, you have the Dumonts coming in as the rich family screwing stuff up. You have Cuban as the old guy hanging on you have luca and his like whoever his entourage is and whatever they could ryan murphy that character up and make me like no no luca it's three in the morning you can't have popeyes uh you have lebron and and and rich paul and ad and the laker side and genie buss and jay moore somebody could Maybe Jay Moore plays himself.
Anyway, I asked you to just go nuts with this.

Yeah, so opening scene of our limited series. It's got to be this coffee shop meeting between Nico and Rob Palenka.
On January 7th, immortalized by a photo from some random weirdo in Dallas. And did you hear the guy taking the photo was a Lakers fan? So he recognizes Palenka, but he doesn't recognize Nico.
Oh. Which is a great detail.
So he snaps a photo. We see Bill, camera, push in.
He's texting a friend and he goes, I just found Rob Palenka having coffee with some guy. Opening credits.
Boom. Let's go.
Yeah. Theme song, hard cut.
cut. Here we go.
Ryan Murphy's Luca trade. And the only

drawback there is do we want Palenka to walk

away from the coffee meeting and pick up the phone and call

somebody and be like, you'll never believe this.

Right. You'll

never believe what I just heard. We got this

going on. Mark Cuban

flashback. Yeah.

Yelling at the refs, buying

the team, selling

the team. Oh, yeah.

Kobe flashback. So we

Thank you. and flashback.
Yeah. Yelling at the refs, buying the team, selling the team.
Oh, yeah. Kobe flashback so we can see Palenka and Nico meeting probably at Lakers games, right? Talking to each other.
So we're going back and forth like the last dance a little bit. Okay.
Yeah. Yeah.
This is a limited series, right? We got to have, not everything has flashbacks these days. Right.
I was playing with some casting here too.

You got to help me with this.

I mean, I'm just so sorry we lost Penny Marshall because Miriam Adelson, I mean,

that would have been the ultimate casting.

Maybe we can bring her back.

CGI now is amazing.

Maybe Penny Marshall's not, maybe it's not dead yet.

CGI Penny Marshall.

Do we want Josh Gad for Patrick Dumont?

I kind of like that a little bit.

Oh, that's really good.

I mean, you could also go Chris Pratt putting the weight back on after losing the weight and getting muscular the last 12 years. Now he's going back trying to win an Emmy.
Who do we like for Cuban? Cuban's like, it feels like Jeremy Strong in a zag. Nobody expecting Jeremy Strong here.

He's got the Cuban wing on.

He's super personable.

And you're like, whoa, Jeremy Strong is Cuban?

This is crazy.

Why are they doing this?

He could be Palenka too.

That's better.

Because what if he's reading The Alchemist's Wife?

No, Rob Lowe has to be Palenka.

What are you talking about?

Okay.

But they have to be quoting from things and doing...

Yeah, either one of those guys I could see actually. Who else could be Cuban? I had JK.
Ben Affleck. Could Ben Affleck be Cuban? I had JK Simmons with a wig.
And, and, and I was like, I was like, he's too old, but he's actually only four years older than Cuban. No, that's great.
I like that. Their faces look different, but we, we can work on that.
So J.K. Simmons, Nico Harrison could be 40 people.
Does anybody play Danny Ainge getting wind of this deal with 30 minutes to go? No, he plays himself. Okay, Danny.
We're going to cast Danny. Dirk was a tough one for me.
Dirk plays himself. Okay, Luca? Actually, you could also do the thing with Dirk where it's like a 6'4 actor with a bad Dirk wig and it's clearly not Dirk because that's one of the staples of these shows where the guy doesn't actually follow sports yeah somebody has to be completely ridiculous yeah that's probably Dirk Dirk's like 6'2 what do we do with Luca Luca's tough this is where you get into like the Aaron Hernandez show which I liked and the guy didn't really look like Aaron Hernandez, but by the end of the show, you kind of felt like he was Aaron Hernandez.
So you almost need somebody that's big and a little doughy, and that could be anybody. Maybe you're going with an unknown for that one.
Yeah, do we need a De Niro-style weight gain where we send them to Italy to eat pasta for three months so they can be Luca? Not too expensive in the budget the budget you have to pretend Italy you have to pretend it's like Palos Verde I like this is actually a good series yeah this is pretty good and it's I think the Dumont the the Adelson Dumont family I think features prominently in this yeah just like you really make Dumont like a villain and just a goofball who's like frantically trying to read up on NBA history. Like he's reading Halberstam breaks to the game.
Somebody told me to read this. I don't know who any of these people are.
It's just confused. Can we still get Bill Walton in a trade? Who's playing skin and who are the Mavs radio guys?

What are those guys? You're talking about Ben and Skin.

Ben and Skin. Who's playing Ben and Skin? Oh my God.
Those are great

roles. I would have so many ideas

for Maverick Sports Radio. I mean, there'd be so many.

This would be unbelievable. Could people play

me and Russillo and Mahoney

doing the reaction pod or are we playing ourselves?

Yeah, and Skip plays himself too. Don't forget

that because he would have some big takes on this.

Skip with some de-aging like the

Irishman because we go back into the mid-2000s when he's saying that you can't win a title with Dirk DeWitsky then it's like current Skip. Unbelievable.
Stephen A. actor or Stephen A.
as himself? He absolutely wants to play himself. What about Donald Faison as Nico Harrison? Interesting.
That would be good. This is great.
Ryan Murphy, get on it. Call us.
We're ready to do this. Brian Curtis, you can read him on theringer.com, a great website.
You can also listen to him. On the Press Box, an awesome podcast.
How many years for the Press Box? Eight? I think it's eight I forced you to do it. And I've never been more thankful.
No, you were receptive. I forced fantasy.
You were ready. Fantasy was forced.
Fantasy took like, he was debating it like it was the Luka Doncic trade for weeks before he actually pulled the trigger. He seems to have gotten the hang of it.
Yeah, he's doing all right. Curtis, thank you.
Thanks, Bill. 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 toowing Guide and Owner's Manual for additional information.
Always secure cargo. Alright, the one and only Matt Bellany is here.
You can read him on Puck. You can listen to The Town.
An awesome podcast. Some have credited him with Craig Horlbeck's rise as a media mogul.
I think we can split credit. I'd say Craig's moment really was his three-minute rant about risky business at the end of a rewatchables.
That was the moment. That was the moment he became a star.
That was when he knew someday he could marry into the Adelson family and maybe run the Mavs. Brian Curtis and I just talked about the the Luca trade and I was saying how the Ryan Murphy Luca trade miniseries on Netflix I would just watch and we had a whole bunch of casting stuff.
Is there anybody just without you knowing what we talked about, is there anybody that you feel like would have to be in that? Did you discuss James Corden? James Corden as Dumont? No, James Corden as Luca. That's not a thing? I'm a passive observer here, but it seems like Corden is born to play the role.
I mean, honestly, Ryan Murphy would probably do that because Ryan Murphy clearly doesn't follow sports, as we've seen from some of his other stuff. So he be like yeah we'll just cheat it and make him look like he's six foot eight well yeah that and Corden might have to lose a few pounds but or gain a few Luca might have to gain a few but maybe we uh we get Luca in one of his post beer drinking sessions what's your Ryan Murphy miniseries that he hasn't done yet that you can't believe he hasn't done yet? I mean, is there a murder he hasn't exploited yet? Is there a Simpson-Bruckheimer one that, like, do you feel like there's an 80s Hollywood one that's sitting there for him? But Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer never really feuded.
Don Simpson just sort of went off the rails, and they, actually, they did end up splitting, but I don't know. the Mike Obitz when he was the most powerful age in Hollywood and then yeah I don't know what's left if he does another Hollywood one I mean he could do the Harvey Weinstein story like Harvey barreling through Hollywood in the 90s and 2000s knowing what we know now about his downfall.
Maybe he could do that. The problem is with an idea like that is I don't know if I'd want to spend time.
I felt the same way about the Donald Sterling show. Ultimately, I just didn't want to spend six hours with Donald Sterling.
Even if the show is good there's there's like some limits i

have for i get that i mean you could do the the the comedic version although harvey you can't do comedy with like this new lakers show that genie bus made with mindy kaling uh netflix like they when i saw that they were that netflix was doing a genie bus show i just like win so i, oh no. But they went full comedy with it.
And that worked. I haven't watched it yet, but at least the trailer looks funny because it's just a total joke, the whole thing.
Yeah. SNL 50, one of the many reasons you're here.
Did you get the invite? It's Sunday. I got the music invite.
didn't get the the other one it's what 200 people

it's 300 people in 8h and it is turning out to be the toughest ticket i have ever seen in hollywood like i don't know that there's even any sports equivalent of how exclusive this is there are 300 seats. There are, I mean, hundreds of former cast members of the show, guest hosts, musical guests, executives that want in on this, friends of Lorne, Paul McCartney, all of them want musicians.
Right. There's no, there's no room.
The overflow room is going to be a tough ticket. So you have, like I, like I talked to John Hamm about it in the last week and he said he's in so there's a level of like there's a guest host level where it's like Hanks, Jon Hamm there's probably like 20, 25 of those and Hamm probably didn't tell you this but he's probably only in because he's hot right now he's after Landman, after Morning Show, after Fargo, he's a hot actor right now, so he's hot right now.
Like, he's after Landman, after Morning

Show, after Fargo, like,

he's a hot actor right now, so he's

in. But, like, there are probably some

frequent guest hosts from the

80s and 90s that are not

in because they are not cool

anymore. And then you have

50 seasons of Cass.

Some of them are dead. Some of

them are. But a lot of them are live from the 80s on and it's's like Eddie Murphy.
But then you get into like, is Piscopo one of the 300? I would think he has to be. You'd think so.
But remember at the 40th, there was a whole controversy over Victoria Jackson being in an overflow room. And she freaked out.
So like the cuts are going to be tough. They're doing it right now, actually.
I heard they're doing it today and tomorrow and oh really and then you have the uh the music stuff because there's people like paul simon and um yeah the friends of lauren but then also bands like if bono wants to be there like he was he had one of the best music performances i've ever had so he has to get in there so i don't know how they do it. Taylor and Travis, they got to be there.
I mean, you just go down the list of people that are either super famous and just nobody ever says no to them or they're friends of Lorne or they're important to the show. I can't even imagine.
I would not wish this on anybody to have to pick that room. Nobody has a plus one, I'm guessing.
Oh, hell no. No, there's not going to be an extraneous person in that room.
Maybe the CEO of Comcast. Maybe his wife comes.
Well, that's the other thing. You need the rich guy circles and you need the network circles.
You need NBC people. He's going, the CEO of Netflix, and he has nothing to do with the show.
He's just a fan, but he's powerful enough in Hollywood that he can get in. Well, they had to invite him because he could have basically destroyed SNL the last six years by doing Friday night SNL on Netflix and he loved the show and he didn't.
He's never doing that one. Ted loves comedy so much.

There's always the rumor that he will just decide

to do a Friday night or a Sunday night version

and just steal all the people from SNL.

I think he has too much respect for Lorne to do that,

but post Lorne, all bets are off.

I am positive that as long as Lorne is there,

he's never doing that because he loves the show

and he loves Lorne.

But the moment Lorne leaves,

I think Netflix just takes that entire corner. And NBC will walk right into it because once Lauren leaves, they will start cost cutting on the show because it's hugely expensive for what it is.
And Lauren has been able to beat them back, but they will start to cut costs and Ted will recognize it and he'll swoop in. So you, you think like just the 300 people in this place,

which is basically like having the NBA finals game seven in an arena that has

900 seats.

You think they've been playing in this for like six months and they started

out with a list of like 2000 names and levels.

And they started this after the 45th.

I mean the, the entire, this is the culmination of lauren's life work like they have been planning this comcast is giving this the whole symphony treatment where every aspect of the company tries to promote this thing they've been planning they set this whole you know three-day weekend thing with the music and then the documentary premieres and all this stuff around the live show. They've been building this thing up.
Like it's bigger than a sporting event for TV. And they have, they have, Lauren, I guarantee you has been thinking about every single person who will be in that room for more than a year.
And we do not think he's retiring after the year. I'm, I'm, I'm 99% sure he's not.
He has said he is not. He has said he's going to do the fade out thing where he slowly brings in people to help him with certain things.
But he is the ultimate decider. And push comes to shove.
He is in charge. We'll see.
How did you feel about the documentaries and all the stuff that they did to lead to this moment and i have some thoughts on what i mean to the culture too because i only knew about the cowbell sketch from columns that you wrote 20 years ago right which caused me to check it out um i thought they were generally good better than might be expected for promotional documentaries.

The one with the old footage of their auditions,

I thought that was super fun.

I hadn't seen a lot of that stuff.

The Cowbell one was my favorite just because it was amazing.

The season 11 one, it raised a lot of questions to me

that I don't think the documentary answered.

They did a whole documentary just on this lost season where everybody kind of got fired at the end. And it was a little bit like you felt like one of those docs where they're not telling me the whole story here.
That was the most frustrating one to me. Yeah.
Lorne, huge flex. Didn't even appear in any of the documentaries promoting his show.

They had to use archive footage of Lorne. Like he didn't sit for his own documentaries.
The season 11 one I was so excited for because that's such a crazy stretch of the show where basically he leaves after year five. Ebersole comes in.
The show is cratering and then Eddie Murphy saves it. they figure out a way to kind of keep Eddie Murphy,

even though he's filming all the stuff in the first half of the show. They dole out the sketches to save it in season nine.
And then season 10 becomes the all-star season with Billy Crystal, Martin Short, all those guys. And it's awesome.
Season 10 is one of the best seasons in the history of the show. But then all those guys leave and Lorne comes back and and Lauren tries to zag and hires all these young writers, young actors, new writing staff, whole thing, and just misses.
And I was like, they're doing a document. This sounds amazing.
But it didn't dive into the Lauren stuff. It didn't really dive into why he came back, like the failure of the new show, which he had tried to do, where he owned it.
He it he almost went bankrupt from the show right and basically took the job because he needed the money yeah and the dick ebersole thing where he was so mad that dick ebersole was being considered successful with the show and that's a really fun dynamic those two oh yeah i mean ebersole is still alive apparently he's not doing great but that mystery is will he show up at the 50th? He has to be there. He saved the show.
The show's dead. You know what? You would think so.
But I don't know how well he's doing these days. And I don't know what the state of that relationship with Lorne is.
I don't think they are closed. It may be a respect thing that he invites him.
But I don't know if he'll be there. the season 11 thing is amazing i actually didn't know about that that whole thing where they they ended the season on a cliffhanger of firing all the right and just kept and he pulls lovitz out lovitz is the only one that's the other funny thing is lovitz was the breakout star of that season which tells you about the season it's amazing and you can imagine they did that today it's just like so much happened on SNL in the eighties and nineties, where if it happened during the social media era, it would, it would be gigantic.
And it just kind of came and went at 10 to one in the morning. And maybe people talked about it the next day.
Maybe there was a newspaper article and then it was onto the next. I think, uh, when they did this for SNL 40 and we blew it.
it was my last year at Grantland and we blew it out. We had a whole week.
We did the March Madness bracket for people on the show. We did an awesome job.
You can go back and read it for people listening. We had like 20 pieces.
I wrote a piece right after the SNL 40 show, which was three hours. And I think the headline was like

bloated SNL 40 was actually kind of perfect because that's what the show was. But the 40 year mark was really cool because the show was still really good, really relevant and still really, really good at breaking stars.
And it just come off that awesome cast with Hayter and Sandberg and Sudeikis and Will Forte and Armisen and Kristen Wiig.

And you look back at that cast and you're like, holy shit. We didn't even realize in the moment how loaded these, all of them went on to do all these other things.
And the last 10 years, they just haven't had the same success with the cast. And I think that's what's different.
I look at these last 10 years and it's like, there's really no breakout stars that they've developed. Kate McKinnon was probably the last one and she's not somebody who can carry her own thing.
She's good as like being part of something. Um, but that's, what's changed in the last 10 years, I think.
Yeah. And I think that that coincides with the rise of Tik TOK and online comedy and things that have sort of put SNL in rear view.
Also, COVID didn't help. A live show like that, that depends on spontaneity.
Like those were rough years. They've also, the cast has gotten too big.
And I think Lauren would probably admit that. They just have too many people.
He lets them go off and do other things during the season now. Where like, if you look at someone like Bowen Yang, who they tried to make a star and didn't really work out like he was they had a show two weeks ago and he was in la on the thursday before the show announcing the oscar nominations and then he gets on a plane and he goes back to snl for the show on saturday night and then on sunday he was at sundance promoting a movie that he had did he had that he had done so like

is is bow and yang even part of that cast part of the whole snl ethos is that you're there all the time you're pitching you're writing you're you're you're coming up with bits i mean he was in and out of new york during that week doing his other projects and is sort of like kind of on the show right it's It's just, it's just a different thing now that then, then when you had these tight 10 person casts that had an identity to them. Now it's like sort of a revolving door.
Yeah. The only times they really did that over the course of the show, like Belushi was filming, he was filming 1941, I think in season four and flying back and forth.
Eddie Murphy was doing movies when he was there. You made exceptions for like the major stars.
It seems like they've, they've made a lot more exceptions in recent years. Yeah, Will Ferrell did a couple things, but like when Will Ferrell decided to be a movie star, he left SNL.
Adam Sandler left SNL. Like it was a, it was a pat, it was a thing.
Someone like Aidy Bryant, Aidy Bryant had a Hulu show that was greenlit aired and was

canceled all while she was on SNL.

Right.

Well, she had this whole side career going.

The thing you said about the cast, I, when I, I, you know, one of the great moments of,

of this podcast when I was at ESPN was I got to interview Lauren in his office, which was, you know, incredible career move for me. Um, not move career moment.
Uh, it was just like, I can't believe I'm doing this. I had so many questions asked him.
I got to talk to him for an hour 20. Did he offer you popcorn? I don't think he offered me popcorn.
Maybe he might, he might've, uh, but I talked to him about the cast thing. And I talked to him about my theory about how the cast was like a basketball team and you had to have the starting five and the four or five people up the bench.
But once you have 17 people, it's just too hard to get everyone involved. And he was explaining why he did it.
And the reasons actually made sense where he was like, some people aren't ready for the first year or the second year. It really takes until year three that you got to develop people behind them.
I think the thing they really fucked up in the last 10 years was using these celebrities for big parts. And I've said this before, not being able to break new stars with parts like Biden, Trump these these things.
If you go back to the history of the show, the cast members were always playing the people in the zeitgeist. And they shifted away from that and started giving those parts to these other people.
They even did it in 24. Like Maya Rudolph as Kamala Harris.
Like, why can't that be a cast member? You know? And I think that's what shifted. Alec Baldwin killed SNL.
Well, I think the theory of using people like Alec Baldwin, I think, was a huge mistake. No, it's a drug.
It's like heroin. It is.
It worked really well. People loved it.
Lauren got the zeitgeist back for these big, stunty moments. He started to get news articles out of who was playing who on SNL.
And we saw it during 2015, 2016 with the whole Trump White House and Melissa McCarthy coming in to play Sean Spicer, Matt Damon doing Kavanaugh, like all that stuff was so alluring to them that they kind of got addicted to it. And it was, it was like a drug.

They,

you,

you get a high off it,

but there's a definite downside.

And the downside is the show itself suffers.

And the people that are on there for four or five years,

you don't even know who they are.

Right.

And I remember right around when it started that Will Ferrell used to do

that Janet Reno dance party sketch.

And then Janet Reno probably wouldn't happen today. We're wouldn't happen today.
I think that sketch is canceled. But Janet Reno came on.
Right. If I remember.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was right in the early 2000s they started bringing the people there, parroting on.
The show was really, yeah, the show would go for it with celebrities. It was really mean-spirited in a way that I used to love and my friends all loved in the 90s.
You look back at some of those David Spade monologues, those would never happen today. The entire culture of celebrity has changed where if you do that stuff now, you have to expect that you will get blowback from those people.
And they court those celebrities so much now that they can't parody them. Like, who are the two most famous people in American culture right now? I think I've said this either on The Town or I forget where before, but Taylor and Travis.
SNL should be going after Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey relentlessly. Having fun with them but going after them.
Totally, I agree. Totally going after them.
But no, they don't because they want them to come on the show. How about Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni?

How is that not like a talk show where they hate each other

and they're next to each other?

I know, it's the thing that everybody in the culture is having.

But Blake is married to Ryan.

Ryan has a lot of friends.

They're in the Taylor Swift universe.

But that's what's happened.

That's the biggest thing that's happened in the show this century

over the last 20 years. And I remember when Tina Fey came on as Palin all those times, and then they brought Palin on.
And you talked about it. It's like a drug.
They get addicted to the crowd reaction. And then that became like, we're going to have fun with these celebrities, but we also need the celebrities.
I remember when Andy Samberg did that Mark Wahlberg sketch. Hey, how's your brother? How's your brother? And it was really funny.
And Mark Wahlberg got pissed and they ended up bringing him on the next week to kind of give Samberg shit. And it was like, this isn't the show.
The show was like kind of mean and ruthless sometimes with celebs. And now it seems like it courts the celebrities in a completely different way, which I just think is a product that Lauren being an older guy who just, just he's a celebrity himself, and that's how he sees it.
He's an establishment. The show was counterculture, and then it became the culture, and now it's sort of ripe for disruption, to be honest.
And you could argue that everything online and TikTok and everything has disrupted it, but it is ripe for something something on, you know, in living color sort of did it. You know, Lauren had a huge blind spot with diverse people, with black people in particular on the show.
And then in living color comes on taking Damon Wayans, who was on the show and famously was fired. They disrupted them in the 90s and had a thing going.
And I think that was the last time that someone directly took on SNL and won and not beat them, but had their own success. There is a version of SNL for today's audience that would work, I think.
And it's beyond something that's on TikTok. You could say that TikTok is SNL for today's audience, but there's something in a format, in an hour, hour and a half format that would work and SNL is just sitting there like a buffalo wandering the Serengeti.
I can't believe it hasn't happened yet. No, it's like if Netflix had done this two years ago on Friday nights, I think SNL would have been in real trouble.
They would have gotten the jump on them. The to beat SNL that nobody is like SNL just goes away from mid-May to late September and every four years you have these you have a political election that's the most fun part to parody and Netflix could have just launched a Friday night SNL show last May.
Yeah. And just crushed it for four months.
And by the time SNL came back, it would have it would have felt like a dinosaur. Yeah.
So like a summer summer stock or call it do it as a stunt in the summer. Yeah.
And then you don't even have to compete with SNL. And all of a sudden you've got the political conventions.
You've got all the campaign stuff to yourself. Yeah.
Well, this is an incredible run the fact that it's been on for 50 years and um my entire life and i remember all the pieces of it but um it is amazing there's nothing like there's nothing like it especially like the the music which i was really glad they did that music documentary even though i thought they missed a couple things that I was just stunned by. But I just, I was always, one of my favorite underrated things about the show was just catching all these acts at the greatest time of their career, right? As they're about to do this and they would just over and over again, get these people.
And then sometimes, you know, it would just go the other way. This was it.
That was the highlight. And then it was gone.
I can't wait to see what happens Sunday night. I mean, it's one of the last must-see 8 p.m.
network shows that's not sports or not an award show that we're probably ever going to have, right? Yeah, I know. It's amazing.
FanDuel line, who opens the show? Do they go music or sketch would be my first question. I think they will do a traditional cold open.
All right. So if they asked me, I would have the four or five best people in the history of show on stage together.
Oh, I do not think they will do that because I don't think they would either. Because all that does is beg the question of who is the best ever.
And that's a question that Lauren does. But a couple of them are dead, though.
So that makes it sad to say, but it's a little easier. But you take one person from each era.
You take Ackroyd. You take Eddie.
You take somebody from the Hartman era. Maybe it's Dana Carvey.
You have Will Ferrell. You have maybe Kristen Wiig.
Maybe. And it's like the five.
Sudeikis. Maybe Hayter.
No, but I'm saying you just, you have like five or six to start. I think they're going to go with celebrities though to start.
It'll be like Tom Hanks, Paul Simon, it'll be like the Five Timers Club basically, something like that

would be my guess. Maybe

here's an option, what if they

do an original sketch

with the surviving originals

from the 1975

cast? So

Chevy's still alive, Jane

Kirby's still alive. Dan

Lorraine Newman, Jane Curtin

and Garrett Morris. Yeah so there's five of still alive.
And I believe they'll all be there. Pretty risky there.
I mean, some of them are like in their late seventies. But that eliminates any political problems because you don't have to deal with people who think they were the best cast member ever.
You don't have to deal with the Eddie Murphy issue. You don't have to deal with any of these other things.
You just say, you know what? We're going to go with the five originals and then have something written for them. You know, Al Franken can write it, Donahoe, someone like that.
And then you start the show with the rest of it. I feel like he's going to take the easy way out and just start with like Paul Simon simon maybe like performing with paul mccartney and like don't start out with some song with some with like an awesome band and that kicks it off and then chevy chase chevy chase i think has to start the show like like officially be the one who like fall they do some pratfall that they'll tape ahead of time and then it kicks to the credits would be my guess.
Yeah, or here's another idea.

What about something with Keenan?

Dude's been on the show longer than anyone else.

Did it show for 28 years?

They could do a whole sketch around how long Keenan's been there.

We're going to take a break and then I want to talk to you

about some Hollywood stuff that's going on.

This episode is brought to you by Viore.

Look, I'm not a big let's hype up workout clothes guy, but Viore, I got to say, total game changer. Been wearing a lot.
If you see me power walking around Los Angeles, probably going to see me wearing some Viore. Sunday performance joggers that they have.
It's made with four-way performance stretch fabric. One of the most comfortable things you own.
You will wear them everywhere. I promise.
All you have to do is go to viore.com slash Simmons and you get 20% off your first purchase with viore. V-U-O-R-I.com

slash Simmons. Enjoy free shipping on all US orders over $75 plus free returns.
Exclusions

apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions.
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. Well, 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 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 Mint Mobile.
While you can always dream about winning big with the lotto, there's stuff you can do right now to get more money in your pocket. Who doesn't love more money? I remember in the late 90s, I had my own website.
I was making money from that. I was also bartending, I was waitering, I still was scrambling and I started writing for some wrestling magazines for a few months.
That's the thing. You got to keep the side hustles going.
You got to make extra money any way you can. Another great way to save money, switch your wireless carrier to Mint Mobile.
Premium wireless plan starting $15 a month. All their plans come with unlimited talk and text on the nation's largest 5G network.
You can even bring your own phone. If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you.
Shop plans at mintmobile.com slash bill. That's mintmobile.com slash bill.
Upfront payment of $45 for a three-month, five-gigabyte plan required, equivalent to $50 a month. New customer offer for first three months only, Then full price, plan options available, taxes and fees extra.
See Mint Mobile for details. All right, I love having Bellini on in mid-February because the Oscars is coming.
It's usually just a fun time in general for Hollywood. We have the Oscars in about two and a half weeks.
Conan O'Brien's hosting. The movies are weird.
Fantasy seems to be the only one who's happy with the movies. I just think Fantasy is happy with the movies every year.
And then we've had some really advanced level negging of different movies that has really hurt. Are you aware of what's going on here? Yeah, but I'm aware, but explain it to the audience.
It is sort of remarkable what is happening with the Oscars this year. The number one nominated film, 13 nominations for Amelia Perez, this Netflix movie about a transgender woman, drug lord who has an adventure in Mexico.
That movie has completely imploded over a Twitter scandal. So the favorite for best picture has basically been taken off the map for most of the nominations.
Zoe Saldana could still win. They could still win best song.
But this Twitter scandal involving Carla Sofia Gascon, who is the lead of the movie and just had some reprehensible old tweets that came up, has basically taken out the movie.

And it is a five movie race now for Best Picture.

And nobody knows what's going to win.

What do you think is going to win?

What are you hearing?

What's the press?

There is the indicators that we've seen so far that are pointing towards Anora, which would be a remarkable winner in its own right because it starts with about 45 minutes of hardcore sex. I don't see it.
With a bunch of nudity in it. It's this Cinderella story movie about a sex worker who dates this Russian, well, not dates, is paid to date this Russian kid.
She dates drunk Borat. Drunk Russian Borat.
Drunk Russian 22-year-old Borat. Yeah.
I don't see it winning. I don't think with people over 60 that first 45 minutes is going to work.
I would have thought that. It would definitely be the most explicit movie to ever win Best Picture.
By far. By far.
There's one X-rated movie, Midnight Cowboy, but that is pretty tame. Which shouldn't have been rated X.
By today's standards. Coming home gets pretty into it with the sex stuff.
And people forget, Brokeback Mountain did not actually win. Crash won that year.
Yeah, I didn't forget. It's one of the worst.
Yeah, Crash was amazing. The PGA, the Producers Guild, went for Enora.
And those are a lot of older people, mostly men, but it's a lot of older people that I wouldn't have thought would have gone for Enora. I thought they'd go with Wicked.
I thought they might go for A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan movie. The Directors Guild also went with Sean Baker for Enora.
I saw that. Those are the only two real indicators so far of groups that overlap with the oscar voters this next weekend we've got the saga no this weekend we've got the baftas um going on in london which has a lot of overlap there's a lot of um foreign voters so we'll see where they go and then the sag awards after that are the indicators but i think it's a five movie race between Anora, a complete unknown, wicked conclave, and...

Come on. And then, you know, you got it.
The brutalist has to be the brutalist has to be in there. I mean, brutalist is like was the favorite a couple of weeks ago.
But everybody I talk to, like it's just polarizing. It's three and a half hours.
A lot of people don't finish it when they start watching it on the portal. They say, oh, I've seen it, but they don't actually finish it.
The first half is better than the second half, but it's a real like Sinista movie. And those movies are not benefited by the preferential voting system that the Oscar has where you rank your choices.
And then when a movie is eliminated, that person's second, third, fourth, go get attributed to the other movies. So it's designed to build consensus among the voters.
And I think consensus will go, will benefit the more, the broader movies, like the complete unknown or wicked or something that is less polarizing. that's fantasy's theory for a complete unknown, which I don't think anyone thinks is a...
I do. I'm on the record on the town.
As the best film? It could be a shocker. It could be the shocker of Oscars.
Probably the biggest shocker in decades. Some people are on the record that it could win, but I don't think anybody thinks it was the best film of 2024.
What is the best film? I mean, come on now. This is all subjective.
Pretty traditional. I enjoyed it a lot.
I thought it was a delightful afternoon with the movies. I like the performances.
The performances were great. The music's great.
The movie's fine. You're watching, you're like, holy shit.
These are all Bob Dylan songs. These are all, this is great.
But I thought it was good. It's not like life changing.
It's just a pleasant time at the movies and that to me that's enough i think it's gonna win it's like 20 it's like 23 to 1 yeah because fantasy was explaining that preferential treatment thing to me last week and these movies are too polarizing that are in there and i just think the way the voting works everyone's gonna have complete unknown in the top five maybe it's four maybe's three a couple people would be like, I liked it the most it's my one, and it's just going to kind of rack up votes but it feels like I thought Coda, we all bet on Coda, which we talked about that just seems to Oscar to me that year because the year was so confusing and it was like, well everybody liked this movie Complete Unknown Complete Unknown kind of feels like... No, I get it.
But Complete Unknown just feels... People like Chalamet.
I could see winning. Anyway, this thing I'm looking at now, it's like 23 to 1.
Keep in mind, though, the Producers Guild uses preferential ballot and that one went to Anora. So it can benefit there.
So do you think Chalamet wins as we head toward it?

That is the biggest question.

It's Chalamet, Adrian Brody with Ray Fiennes from Conclave as the dark horse.

And I honestly, I do think Chalamet is going to win.

I think that what we saw last year with Emma Stone beating Lily Gladstone.

Emma Stone from Poor Things beating Lily Gladstone from Killers of the Flower Moon. I think that the voters, like, Hollywood is so desperate for young stars now.
Yeah. Like, when there is someone that you can rally behind, people will go for it.
Like, there's just, you know, Adrian Brody has an Oscar already. Ralph Fiennes, great actor, but is he the future of Hollywood? No.
I just feel like Chalamet, he has stumbled into this amazing career. He's both box office bankable and a good actor and likable and dates Kylie Jenner and is like a celebrity in the old school way.
Yeah. I just feel like he's got the package people want to endorse and it's the way to honor the movie.
And it would be the most fun speech. Oh, for sure.
He's very well. Are you kidding me? He'll thank his agent, his wife and be off.
You know, Chalamet, who knows what he'll do. the shocking thing to me is at least in the odds that i'm saying that demi moore is the favorite for the substance over mikey madison who i thought i just thought mikey madison was a lock i that was the best performance i saw all year yeah but but this is a career performance thing like i get aren't you shocked when i tell you that demi moore has never been nominated for an oscar doesn't that shock you? I thought for About Last Night she should have won.
Or Ghost? Whoopi wins? You didn't even blink. I was kidding about About Last Night.
I do love her in About Last Night. Be careful.
It's a great movie. Be careful.
Honestly, I haven't seen it in probably 20 years. Do you think the Amelia Perez lady would have won without the without all the stuff that happened probably not favorite or not to me more is a is a classic example of the academy rallying around someone who is uh it's not necessarily their best foot forward but it's about time and this person should have been nominated in the past and it's about longevity.
Like she stuck it out and she got a movie role that was worthy of her. Finally, she gave a great speech at the golden globes, which I think was very strategic talking about how she was not taken seriously and how she had to persevere.
The movie itself is about this desire to be young and to be relevant and to stay in the mix. She has the whole narrative around her.
And I honestly think a lot of Academy voters won't even watch the movie and will vote for her. I like the movie and I understand why they had to play the last half hour the way they did, but it was not a fun last half hour.
No, it's and honestly, most not most, I think a lot of people will turn it off. It's an excessive movie to say the least, but it was memorable.
Yeah. I would never watch it.
It's not going to be on the rewatchables, I'll tell you that much. And then we have Conan O'Brien.
That Mikey Madison, while she's amazing, I would absolutely vote for her. If she doesn't win, it's because she's too new.
She's not in Chalamet territory where she's a star and we want to endorse her. She'll have her chance.
It'll be the Austin Butler moment where he ended up losing to Brendan Fraser because Brendan Fraser had the narrative around him. He's a stalwart actor who's done good work, finally had a moment in a movie that mattered, and they gave him the Oscar.
It'll be the same thing if Mikey Madison loses to Demi Moore. It's tough when that was clearly the best performance of the year, other than maybe Chalamet.
For me, it was like the two performances that jumped out to me this year from everything I saw were those two. I'll be a little controversial here.
I thought Zoe Saldana in Amelia Perez was fantastic. Singing, dancing, playing that character.
She's the lead of the movie. They put her in supporting because they thought Carla Gascon would be the lead and they'd have a chance to get her an Oscar there.
But I think Zoe Saldana is amazing in that movie. Baldoni versus Lively.
Kendrick versus Drake. 2024 set up, 2025.
The year of the beef. We can talk about what other beefs we want, but this Justin Baldoni, Blake Lively thing is the kind of story that would happen in like the 80s and 90s and you'd read like a premier magazine

or Spy or Vanity Fair in 1994,

some giant feature about it.

And you'd just be like,

what the hell is happening?

I know.

And this story keeps going and going.

Yeah, in real time.

Now we're getting daily updates

and they're setting up websites

to attack each other.

I mean, it is...

The difference between the Kendrick and Drake beef and this Baldoni gate that I'm calling it, there's a winner in the Kendrick-Drake debate. Kendrick won.
Very clearly he won the beef. I don't think there's a winner in Baldoni Blake.
Just losers. They're both losers.
I think Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively misplayed their hand here. They thought that they were going to go after this guy and they were just going to shut him down with this New York Times piece and she was going to be able to get her reputation back because the stuff that came out during that press tour for It Ends With Us, it didn't hurt the movie.
The movie grossed $300 million. That's the whole joke of this.
It was a giant hit. They should have just walked away, gone their separate ways, and let it lie.
It was the biggest movie she'd had in eight years. Oh, brought her back.
She was super hot after that. She was doing shark movies in the mid-2010s.
She was. But she did take a hit on the branding side because of some of the videos and things that came out.
And they looked at that and they're like, this is bullshit. This guy is out there seeding the internet with negativity, they believe.
And they went after him to try to get her name back. I don't think that that worked.
I think that the long drawn out process here, keep in mind, Baldoni has a rich guy behind him, an investor in his company. Like a Peter Thiel gawker? Not a Peter Thiel style guy, but he's got, I forget his name, but he's got an investor in his company that is super wealthy and can afford to litigate against people like Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively.
He's got this lawyer, Brian Friedman, who is a attack dog, and his specialty is fighting for people's reputations as well as their legal rights. So he's not going to lie down here and just let them run over him.
They thought that they could go to the New York Times, get the Harvey Weinstein reporter to do this expose, and then he would bow down and probably settle and send, you know, give Blake Lively the rights to do a sequel to this movie, and he would go away. He's not going away.
And they have just been slinging mud at each other, and I don't think either of them is benefiting. Well, you, I mean, this is your background, even before you got into what you're doing now.
Yeah, I was a lawyer. I used to handle these cases.
There's real defamation potential here that the whole thing is you have to prove somebody had malicious intent with whatever they're doing. It can't be like, oh, I had this throwaway line on a podcast and then I shouldn't have said that.
Malicious intent is the key and it feels like there's malicious intent in this, which is what's so interesting. There has to be actual malice is the standard or reckless disregard for the truth.
And the other element is it's got to be false. If it's just unflattering, it doesn't matter.
It has to be false. And I think in many of these cases, the stuff that was resurfaced by Baldoni's team, allegedly, was old interviews of Blake Lively speaking in her own voice.
So that's not false. It may be unflattering.
And there's some other stuff that they say was false. But it's very unclear who would actually win if this case

ever does go to trial because the causation here, even if you're hiding, even if you're

hiring shady characters to see the internet with unflattering comments, is that actionable?

I was thinking more of the New York Times piece of it.

Oh, you mean what the New York Times published and whether that's defamation? Oh, that to me is a BS case. I don't believe that's real.
I don't think the New York Times would lose a defamation case for going with a story based on interviews with a subject and a legal proceeding that was actually filed. Okay.
Because it seemed like part of his case was they only took one side of this exchange they had all access to all this they only decided to print this and that that got into interesting territory just reading about i was like oh there's something maybe the case but but again the standard is whether the reporting was false right was it false you could argue that it it was slanted. You could argue that it may even be false.
Right. Was it false? You could argue that it was slanted.

You could argue that it may even be misleading

if you don't include the full context of something.

But does it rise to the level of defamation?

And should the New York Times have known

and did they purposely disregard certain facts

in order to create a portrait of this guy that was false or misleading?

I'm not.

I mean, during the discovery process, we will see what comes out.

But from the complaint itself, I'm not convinced that Valdoni has a case against the Times.

So you think this is basically a nuclear war where both sides just blew each other up and there's no winners, there's no losers, it's not even a zero-sum game. My advice to them both is settle now, go away for six months, and then come back.
Like, do some settlement agreement where they agree to never say each other's names again, they will never be in the same room, and can try to salvage their reputations afterward because... So Baldoni actually, by doing everything he's done, actually was able to get under equal playing field again because before this felt like he was going to end his career.
Depends on who you talk to. I think that his campaign has helped him after the New York Times piece.

Keep in mind, when that piece came out, his agency dropped him. He had a bunch of movies set up that went away.
Like that New York Times piece did actually hurt him a lot. So understandably, he returned fire.
the the the end result now though is that they are just machine gunning each other from 10 feet away, and they're killing each other. There's a Taylor Swift piece, too, that's kind of fun.
Oh, my God. I mean, do you believe that she's masterminding the whole thing? No, I don't.
I do think that she probably encouraged it from the beginning. Everything that she has done in her career has been to stand up for herself, go on the offensive, fight back.
Especially if there's a guy who's been mistreating her in the public, she's going to fight back. She probably said to Blake, fuck this guy.
Go after him. Well, I don't know if you know this, but Blake Lively has my wife and daughter's support because both of them have landed on.
I don't like that guy's face as the reason to side against Baldoni. So I did enjoy that the paparazzi happened to see him on vacation with his family and happened to photograph him shirtless in a like beefcake pose.
And those photos happened to be circulated about how he was spending time with his family on vacation. So that's the machinations going on here.
That's the really interesting thing is just the whole underground PR world with these crisis people are fighting for the essentially the share of mindsets of people online. And that to me is a new world in crisis PR that is pretty fascinating.
And something you've been writing about and talking about for the last couple of years, some PR people who are just absolute barracudas and some of them are involved here. Yeah.
The woman that the woman who repned him,

Steph Jones,

who also rep Tom Brady has a,

she is just the worst,

the worst.

She slimed me.

Like I,

I just,

the,

the level of depravity of some of these crisis PR people is,

is,

I mean,

you think it's a low and then they go lower.

What was the best crisis PR TV show ever?

A couple of people have taken swings at this.

Scandal. I mean, that was a lawyer,

but Scandal was good. They had...
Remember there was

the Courtney Cox one? That was the one

I was thinking of. She was like an

editor of an Us Weekly type, right?

Yeah.

And then Kendrick

Drake, is that over? Do people care anymore?

Is this going to be it or is there another level to this? I mean, Drake's got to fight back, right? He's got an album. I know, but it feels like it just keeps going and going.
Does Hollywood care? No. It's a music industry thing.
But I think that people in the music industry definitely care. Certainly Universal Music Group cares because they have both of them

on their label and they got sued by one of their own

artists for defamation.

Where do you stand

on... The NFL certainly cared.

They wouldn't let him say pedophile

on the Super Bowl. They also stuck up

for him though. I mean, I think there were some

lawsuits behind the scene that they

kind of aligned with Kendrick.

Maybe. I mean, it's pretty remarkable

that that Super Bowl performance

aired. Like, that is

it was a openly political

you know, a

diss track. I mean

that would have never

aired on the Super Bowl 10 years ago.

Or how about four years ago? Maybe even four

years ago. Yeah, I just feel like

the fact that his fans loved it. I think there were probably a lot of like older, like white people in America who like didn't get it or I could feel him in the Superdome.
Yeah, exactly. You could feel the energy.
Yeah. Donald Trump not rocking along to Kendrick said he was not.
But honestly, that's that's kind of great. I kind of love that that happened on the Super Bowl.
Speaking of Trump, Hollywood during the second Trump term versus the first Trump term, what are the differences you're seeing early on here? I think Hollywood is sort of in this weird place where people just don't know what's going on. The whole like vibe shift people talk about how the culture is changing and all these, you know, DEI is under attack and all the whole diversity movements under attack.
Like Hollywood people are, I think, a little more cautious to speak out against Trump than they were the first time around where the whole resistance movement and there was, you know, he barely won. And, you know, there was this, this feeling of, you know, this, this guy squeaked into the white house and who is he in the chaos now that Trump has been more normalized.
Um, I feel like Hollywood is kind of figuring out how to respond and you've got these big media companies that are like openly paying him off. I mean, that's what my question is.
There are more, is there more fear of him this time around with some of the decisions big companies are making? Cause it feels like there is. Totally.
I mean, this, this, this is a president that's like purely transactional. It's what are you doing for me? And Disney, which had this open lawsuit with Trump over the George Stephanopoulos claims on GMA, they just said, you know what? It's not worth dealing with it.
We're going to pay him $15 million, settle this. And if I'm Bob Iger, that's kind of an easy decision because the last thing you want with this president is to have a politicized brand.
Disney thrives on being a non-political brand, and it had been politicized by Trump and others. So just pay him off and he'll leave you alone.
We saw today Disney put out a revise on their DEI initiatives to change their diversity language to more like talent focused to kind of soften what they are doing in the diversity space. I think a lot of Hollywood companies are looking at Disney and what they're doing to see where they are going to go on this.
They don't want to get sued by the Justice Department because they are looking to make shows with diverse people of color voices. They want to avoid any problems like that.
And now we've got this Paramount sale. Paramount, the studio is for sale.
Actually, they have a deal that they're selling to David Ellison. And Trump is now threatening to hold that up based on the 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris on CBS, which he claims was biased.
So there's a whole, there's a whole like dealing with Trump issue now in Hollywood that I think people don't really know how to deal with. Yeah.
And what happens, like what happens if he goes to Disney and he's just take him off the air? I'm just going to cause incredible amounts of trouble the next four years. Or, or what if he goes through Paramount and says, Colbert's got to go for me to even think about doing this.
So all of this would be bad James Babydoll Dixon, by the way. It would be.
I look at everything through the lens of is this good or bad for Babydoll? But what happens if he makes that part of the thing? And would somebody stand up to him or would they be like, eh, all right? Something like that where if the president said, I want you to fire Stephen Colbert, something like that i think they would probably stand up against but it's the more new are you sure i'm not sure i'm not i'm not sure but it's like you think they pay 100 million a year for the show it gets out but it's like oh we were thinking about pushing my like they could spin it a certain way they could could, but Trump would probably brag about it.

And then who's next?

And then it's a purge.

Would you be surprised?

I would be surprised with that.

I think if you're running a media company, you have to think bigger picture than that.

And what's the implications for a move like that?

Something like what Sherry Redstone is dealing with right now at Paramount, where Trump has this $20 billion lawsuit against CBS News over the Kamala Harris interview. Everybody I have talked to in the legal world said it is a totally bullshit lawsuit, would never win.
But Trump is doubling down. He's screaming about it on social media.
So if you're Sherry Redstone and you can get rid of this by donating $20 million to the Trump presidential library, and it doesn't, and it takes away a threat to your $8 billion merger with Skydance that you want, I think that's an easy answer. You do that.
You pay them $20 million and you make that go away. That, that is the, that's more likely the kinds of stuff that's going to go on.
Do you think, uh, the horrific fires and everything we're going through here in Southern California is going to change it all the way Hollywood thinks about, um, it's Southern California thinks about Hollywood as a business, because I always felt like it was shifting that, like so many people are filming stuff outside of LA and California because the tax breaks are so much better in canada you go to freaking south africa you go to atlanta um and it always seemed like miss money and i wonder are they going to start thinking outside the box with stuff like that and maybe trying to bring people back i think they already are i mean there's this proposal in california to double the tax credits and that was a gavin Newsom thing that he put in place after the strikes. Because the production was already really hurting in the area.
Oh, yeah. And the strikes were awful.
And they had this, you know, go up to about 700 and something million in tax credits, which would be good, but wouldn't change the calculus for most productions. I mean, they're shooting reality shows outside of California now because the economics are so much better.
That Rob Lowe game show, the game show for people who can't read that aired after the Super Bowl, that thing shoots, I believe, in Ireland because it's just cheaper to go there and fly all those people there. And that's what I think the movement now within the industry is to try to use some of the momentum from the fires.
I hate to use that word momentum when you're talking about fire aftermath, but there is this recognition that if they want the industry to come back in LA, there's going to need to be investment. So I think that there will be a state investment.
I don't know about federal. I mean, you never know what Trump and them are going to do.
But statewide, yes. And then some of these companies, you know, imagine the goodwill if Disney or Universal, one of these said, you know what? Not only are we going to make five more movies in L.A., but we're going to build a sound stage in Altadena and it's going to employ 300 people and buy jobs that people don't have to go to Bulgaria for the summer to do their jobs in movies.
And I think there'd be a lot of goodwill around that. Ultimately, push comes to shove its money.
And if the economics makes sense, they'll do it. But there is momentum now to at least make the economics better.
That's what I'm really hoping for. And I, you know, most people aren't going to care about this, but I, we both know so many people who you're making content and you're traveling to these crazy places and you're away from your family for four or five months.
And it's just like, why are we doing it this way? Why aren't we filming as much that you watch those TVs, shows, movies from the seventies and eighties, and everything's in LA. And why, like, Why can't we get back to that? And this is not a new thing, but it has become more pronounced as the incentive to exit has gotten bigger.
You shoot in the UK, it's like a 40% rebate on everything, on star salaries. Star salaries are currently excluded in California, so you can't get a rebate on paying Tom Cruise $20 million.
But in the UK, you can get 40% of that back. And everybody I know is impacted.
Lucas Shaw, my Monday guy on the town, his fiance is in Chicago for a bunch of months because they're shooting a show she's producing and they got credits got credits to do it there i sat next to somebody at uh one of the dodger playoff games he's like yeah i'm about to go to south africa filming this bet show and i'm like is it like set in south africa it's like no no it's just cheaper to shoot there i'm like what you're you've seen multiple kids it's going away it's just they feel like they have that. Meanwhile, the only people that have figured out business in LA is the Dodgers.
I know. We have to end on that.
They've ruined baseball. They figured out how to make Japan the second revenue stream.
They now own Japan and California. And baseball is no longer fun.
You've ruined it completely. All revenue streams that are readily available to any Major League Baseball team should they choose to invest in their own team.
It's too late now. It's basically the Japan Dodgers is a wrap.
You just get everybody now. Listen, we'll see.
Best laid plans. By the midseason, we might have five pitchers on the end.
You feel good about this? You really feel good about rigging the system like this you feel like as long as you can sleep at night i get it i get it that other teams are upset about this but this is not a like they're not cheating these are the rules you can do what you want to do and you know now that football's over everybody in LA it's Mookie

Betts season for everybody in LA except one guy you this is what I would say if I rooted for the team that was ruining a professional sport in real time I would say hey these are the rules sorry I get it but we've won one championship we won the 2020 championship in you know sort of boobie prize fashion.

It doesn't guarantee anything.

And if the Dodgers want to pay that, they are making so much money by investing. Yes, they have a great local TV deal.
Yes, they have private equity owners that can structure these deals in a way that defers all this money and they can make that work. But this is not some system that is out of reach for most of these owners.
They are choosing not to invest. And if your owner chooses not to invest, scream at your owner.
Now, I'm not actually mad at the Dodgers. The Lakers are the team that makes me mad.
And if you're like the Clippers and you've really thought outside the box, you build this awesome arena, it started, there's finally signs of the end with the Lakers with LeBron hitting 40. And you just, they don't have any draft picks left.
Like they're just going to suck. They're not very, you know, especially well run.
It's like, here we go. We actually have a chance to maybe take this.
It's way more fun to go to a Clipper game. And then then in one dumb trade the lakers are back luca is going to be the guy now for the next 10 years and none of it matters and luca will be the biggest star in la in basketball do you think so i do i do and there's no way for the clippers to combat that like luca's you don't you don't subscribe to this whole theory that the nba is suffering because americans don't root for the foreign players like they do for the American players? Well, they're about to because Luka just went to their most important franchise.
Well, we're going to see a big test. This is it.
It's not even a test. He's going to be gigantically popular.
Do you think Luka can get to LeBron levels of fandom? I don't. It's an interesting question.
I think if it's going to happen, this is the team for it to happen. And if the trade can light the fire under him and make him truly great and he can win like three titles in a row and average 30 a game and be the best guy in the league, like yeah, that's going to happen.
We would have said it wasn't going to happen with LeBron. There was a whole LeBron versus Kobe thing in 08, 09, 2010.
He goes to Miami the first year. He sucks in the finals.
It seemed, it seemed like it wasn't going to happen for him. Like you just never know.
Luca has a calendar. I will defer to you on, you know, all things NBA, but I just have a hard time believing there's going to be appetite for Luca to star in a Space Jam sequel.
Yeah, but nobody saw the Space Jam sequel. It bummed.
Well, but he got it green-lit. He got it green-lit, and people were buying shows from him for a while.
Yeah, and that was that. Steph Curry has a production company, and people think he's a media personality.
I just don't know that the foreign players have as much cachet as the U.S. foreign players.
We've talked about this many times on the pod. We have not seen it happen yet.
I think if it doesn't happen in this case with a guy on the Lakers, you know, especially if he becomes really good, I still like anecdotally, just I'm sure you feel the same. Like all the LA fans are going bonkers.
Like they can't believe. So this will be the test case.
And I think this is the best possible guy for them to get. It's funny.
We're talking about the appeal of foreign players when who's the biggest star in LA right now? Shohei Otani. Right.
And like, no one seems to give a shit that he doesn't even speak English. I know.
He does, but not very much. And like my kid, you know, has three Otani jerseys, like the freakingicking bobblehead night.
That's going to be Luca. It was like the Beatles.
So let's, let's end on this. Any LA celebrity, athlete, actor, musician, actress, you name it, walks into a restaurant right now in February, 2025.
Who stops the restaurant the hardest? Oh, Taylor Swift. Okay.
So she's clear. Number one, clearly the number one, most famous celebrity in the world.
The most like you're, you're in mid bite and you're just like, Oh my God, it's Taylor Swift. So she's one.
So who's two, two is a tougher question. I mean, I think it's generational if it's for you and me, Leo.
Right? Right. So you're saying 25 and under, maybe it's Chalamet.
Chalamet, maybe. Or Zendaya.
I don't think it's Chalamet. Oh, Zendaya is a good one.
Yeah. Or maybe a music star.
Honestly, the music stars are just so much bigger. There's no football star.
I don't think Mahomes does it. No, Mahomes is boring.

And maybe someone like

Selena Gomez, for young people,

she's just so immensely

popular. And she means nothing

to me. And I don't even really

get her as an actress.

But for young people, she means

a ton. Same with

Zendaya. Beyond

that, it's just so generational now. Tom Cruise,

probably the biggest movie

movie star out there. It's so funny

that Taylor has this locked

up in a crazy, crazy

maybe nobody in the 21st century

has locked it up like this.

Can you think of anyone else?

No.

No. I'd say probably most

famous person in the world other than like the biancé or donald trump uh biancé second no i'm saying as number two maybe biancé is a huge star but biancé doesn't actually sell that many albums anymore um she's you know taylor was then had the number one album of last year and the number one tour and is the number one celebrity on paparazzi radar. I think she's just in another league.
The guy who's figured out the best version of a celebrity is Mookie Betts. He lives in LA, so there's a kajillion celebrities here.
He's not that big. He's like 5'9", 5'10".
Looks like a regular dude. He slides in.
He just goes to Laker games. He goes to like Clipper games.
He can just go anywhere and you kind of don't even really know it's Mookie Betts. He has it the best.
He can bowl a 300. Right.
He makes $300 million. He makes a $300 million contract and he just has a kick-ass house in the Valley and lives his life.
You know who's up there in a stop the restaurant party standpoint? I talked about this on Sunday night at a shack just because of the size and how recognizable he is. Yeah, the NBA guys obviously have a huge advantage.
Brady has it too. Brady's like 6'6".
So when he comes in, he's like 6 inches 9 inches taller than everybody. You just notice him.
You can also probably push him over. A light breeze would push him over these days.
Come on. Alright, Matt Bellany.
I know you're friends. Can you tell him to eat a sandwich, please? Not friends with Brady.
No, yeah. You just idolize him.
Well, did. Once upon a time.
Listen, if he played for my team, my team i would idolize him too matt belony you can listen to him on the town you can read him on the puck an excellent website um and then uh what else anything that's uh what else i don't know that's it yeah listen to the town Listen, read my puck newsletter called What I'm Hearing. That's it.
Someday, someday Craig Horlbeck will stop a restaurant. Someday.
He will be. It's going to happen soon.
It may be a TGA Fridays. Thanks, Belony.
Thank you. All right.
That's it for the podcast. Thanks to Brian Curtis and Matt Bellany.
Thanks to Saruti and Kyle and Gahau as well.

Don't forget, you can watch this

on the Bill Simmons YouTube channel.

You can also watch this on Spotify.

I hope you did because we're going video podcast

from now on on Spotify.

And new rewatchables we put up on Monday night,

the Blues Brothers.

If you missed it, I will have another podcast for you

on Thursday.

Enjoy the middle of the week. On the wayside On the blue side Never run

I don't have