The Bill Simmons Podcast - A Crazy NBA Month With Zach Lowe, Plus Taylor Sheridan on Building a TV Empire and the Problems With Hollywood

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons and Zach Lowe go LIVE on Netflix to give their thoughts on the latest Jaylen Brown trade rumors before breaking down the Hornets trades, possible LeBron landing spots, and much more. Then, Taylor Sheridan joins the pod to talk about his new book, ‘How to Survive in Prison,’ before diving into his beginnings in screenwriting, how he works differently from others, and the success of his films and television shows. (0:00) Intro (1:15) Jaylen Brown trade rumors (34:29) LaMelo Ball traded to the Wolves (54:23) Miles Bridges to the Suns and other trade news (01:26:40) Taylor Sheridan on his new book, screenwriting, and more! Host: Bill Simmons Guests: Zach Lowe and Taylor Sheridan Producers: Chia Hao Tat, Eduardo Ocampo, and Chris Wohlers Brought to you by PayPal. Learn more at paypal.com As the Official Beer Sponsor of the FIFA World Cup 26, Michelob ULTRA away $1million in FIFA World Cup tickets and prizes. https://www.michelobultra.com/superioraccess/FIFAWORLDCUP26 MICHELOB ULTRA® FIFA® WORLD CUP 26TM SUPERIOR ACCESS. No Purchase Necessary. Open to US residents 21+. Begins on 12/1/25 and ends on 7/31/26. Multiple entry periods. Visit https://www.michelobultra.com/superioraccess/FIFAWORLDCUP26 for free entry, entry deadlines, and Official Rules. Message and data rates may apply. Void where prohibited. The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit https://fanduel.com/playwithaplan to learn more about the resources and helplines Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of the Bill Simmons podcast is presented by PayPal. You know a clutch move when you see one, a no look pass, a buzzer beater, big steel. Well, imagine if your wallet could pull off moves like that. That, my friends, is PayPal. Right now you can find offers from hundreds of brands like Sony, all birds, and Viator, and save offers before you check out. Earn unlimited rewards. Plus, you can add those rewards on top of credit card points.

Now that is clutch. Download the PayPal app today. save those offers, start scoring rewards. Terms and exclusions apply. See PayPal.com slash rewards terms, credit card points subject to issuers, terms, and conditions. Bill Simmons podcast live on Netflix here on Sunday. We have Zach Lowe right now. He's in a great mood.

We have Taylor Sheridan, creator of Yellowstone and a bunch of awesome shows coming in the second half of the pod. Zach is coming off an incredible. victorious day in Philadelphia, where he celebrated a World Cup win with a bunch of tall Croatians. Very tall. I was worried you were getting crushed

in a group hug at some bar last night. But you made it. You're here. I made it home. I may have gotten crushed. There may have been a lot of group hugs. Croatians know how to party, and we move on to the round of 32. We're going to be underdogs. But it's fine.

Look, I'm glad if this is it, I got to see Luca Modrich summon one last great game, start to finish, and that was amazing. And you're 2-0 in the World Cup this year in person. Yeah, that's been pointed out to be by multiple people associated with the Croatian football team that I, like, now you have to go to every game now. I might need to go to Toronto. It's being pushed on me that I might need to.

And just, I'm just putting out there, Mets play Blue Jays the day before in Toronto. I could do a double, just skip NBA free agency all together and just goes to be a sports fan. we're going to try to rip through NBA stuff in 75 minutes, which includes Jalen Brown. I have not given any take yet on the Lamello trade to Minnesota. You did a whole podcast about it. We're going to talk Charlotte Phoenix a little bit. We're going to talk about what happened to LeBron, and we're going to talk about craziest prediction for the week. You have podcasts coming at least tomorrow and probably Wednesday, maybe two, maybe three.

I'm going to have at least one more on Thursday. So that is the schedule. Jalen Brown, not traded yet. information and misinformation flying around. I don't know if he has lost trade value because teams know they want to trade him or because of his contract or whatever. I thought it would be resolved a little bit quicker. He was in France.

A little pissy about some advanced metrics tweets. He got mad at Bobby Marks for passing along, something he heard from a front office. He's been doing panels. The word on the street on Jalen in France. And I know multiple people who were either in his vicinity or whatever is that he was acting like he's done in Boston and that this is it. And I don't think he's very happy with this. Do you think Boston mishandled this in any way? First of all, you have sources on the ground across France.

Like at whatever region, the Bordeaux region, oh, it was canned. He was on sports panels there. I don't think he's really too happy about the last couple weeks. What would the mishandling have been? Tell me what the mishandling would. Because they won a, let's not for, let's lead with the thing. They won the championship with Jalen Brown and Jason. I'm just talking about this offseason.

So from literally final buzzer of game seven until right now, what is the case that Boston has mishand, not is it not trading him already? Is it even getting into the honest bidding to begin with? Because you can't not have that get out. And even, and it's only, and once it gets out to, you're interested in Janus, who is better than Jalen Brown, older but better, and addresses it, okay, fine, we can litigate that if you want. Once that gets out, there's no other realistic path for this to happen. Like, you don't, it doesn't have to be reported anymore that the

Celtics are offering Jalen Brown. There's no other offer. That's it. It has to be Jalen Brown. It's just math. And so you let everyone else put the logic together. So what should they, should they, I think your only alternative is you just answered your own question. Okay, just trade them right away or don't or don't get involved with Yanis. Those are the two things. No, here's the issue. And I've been, I think the Celtics have done a great job this decade. I've rarely disagreed with anything they've done.

They get into this Janus thing and they make a real offer for him, right? And this is, I think, two weeks before he gets traded. They're anticipating that because of past dealings with Milwaukee and because of how the league works, that this won't get out. This is going to stay between us. Well, here, there's a couple different things that happen this time around. That's a terrible assumption. Well, okay.

But new owner, we have Jimmy Haslam in there now. He wasn't really in there. When the Drew Holiday stuff was happening a couple years ago, he wasn't in there yet. You also have Milwaukee not knowing whether they wanted to keep Jaylen Brown or not. So obviously, they're going to be stealth canvassing his value in a couple different places. And that's how this shit gets out. It's the third team that always spoils this because they're delighted to tell people, oh my God, they checked with us and whatever.

So I think the mistake the Celtics made, if you're going to do this, you're going to go down the road and actually put Jalen on the table, which they did. And they only made one offer, which I've said multiple times, the offer for the Jalen, the picks, anything else was a lie.

Hugo was never on the table. They never beeped up their offer the last weekend, nothing. But if you're going to do this, I think you just have to put Jalen on the block at that point. Because once he's out there, you have to anticipate how he's going to react to it. This guy already feels like he's the Jan Brady of the Brady bunch on this team, right? He already feels like he's the little brother.

He already feels like it's Tatum's team, not his. A lot of the stuff that he was saying during and after the season, even the quote about he was the most proud of the season versus any other season. I actually understand his point on that, even though I don't think he should have said it that way. Everyone counted them out. Everyone, the over under was 41 and a half. He was the only reliable score and offensive weapon on the team.

They went 56 and 23 the last 7-9 games. They were second and offensive rating. And I think he feels disrespected. So you put him in one trade. Now you have to trade them. And now that there's blood in the water and teams know they have to trade him, you're going to get shittier offers. So I would have just done it all at once.

So, yeah, I'm trying to figure out what you think they should have done. Because I thought what you were going to say when you started, what I thought you were going to say was once you put him in for Janus, you then just have to make the honest trade, which means swallow Shireman and Gonzalez or whatever it is. But you're not saying that. You just think, you're saying just open it up and do it immediately.

But haven't they opened it up? Isn't that what's happening right now? They did it now, but they did it now that he's upset about how the process planned out, and now that teams know they have to trade him, it's a little different than being like, hey, we're pursuing Janus with Jalen, but we're also open for offers right now. And I just feel like it's a better market

if teams feel like, oh shit, Jalen's going to be on the table. I'm competing against the possibility that he's going to get traded to Milwaukee for Janus. Now I don't know who they're competing with. And I also feel like having actually watched the Celtic games last year, and like most of the people who are online just doing analytics and on off shit and stuff like that. Like, as you know, and I've said this many times, I really value the reliability of a durable star who over and over again has to carry this burden. that night after night, he's got to be the best player.

He's got to match against the other team's best player. And it's like, oh, the on-off was not great when he was. Well, the Celtics had an awesome bench, right? That was one of the best assets of the team. When their bench came in, their bench was better than just about every other bench in the league. And that's going to skew those stats a little bit. What you can't capture and go back and look at his game log going against Detroit, San Antonio, OKC, pick one of the best teams, the Knicks.

Pick one of the best teams in the league last year. he was their only guy that I knew was going to show up in the game. I didn't know if Derek White, Peyton Pritchard's, you know, as good as he is, he's trick-or-treat. Sometimes he just doesn't have it. All these bench guys,

Cata, it was basically just Jalen. So I think weirdly he's become underrated and I don't really understand it. I mean, a lot of it has to do, my brain is just can't do the analytics thing. I can't do it.

I don't want to do it. So let's just park that over here. A lot of it is just the contract, right? And I think, like, this is the difference between the, this is one of, this ties into why the Hornets traded La Mello Ball now when he's on his second contract and not when they've potentially signed him to the third one that can get much bigger. I don't think it would get much bigger in Lamello's case, but with Jalen, because he made all NBA and they won the championship and all that, it's now at a point where it's like 60, 65, like these are just hard deals to trade for someone who's not one of the, I don't know. want to get into where to rank him, but he's not a top five player in like a no brainer with a bullet top five. But he's one of the top 15. He sure is. And yeah, I mean, he was last year. I, we would have to sit down and do it. But he was in my top 15 on the last ringer 100 we did

coming off last season. It's just, it's, it's a hard trade to make. And it's if you don't get Janus, now you're staring at is there a deal out there that we can sell our fan base and we can sell the current players on the team that like, hey, wait, we traded him for what? Like, does that not make us worse this season? Like, y'all, it's cool that we cleaned up to cap sheet and got a couple of picks, but like, what's the headliner that we got that helps us now? And they threw away last season. So you're throwing away a second season in row, basically, a chance to contend after you've

won the 24th title. I just feel like they must have known that, listen, you and I both talk to a million people about Tatum and Jaylen and do they get along? do they not get along? Is it, are they good, like, work relationship but not friends? Like, you could go into it a million different ways. It's the people around them that always cause the problems, I think, for the most part. I'm sure those two guys are fine together, but the circles around the people are the ones that start half this shit.

I do think it's notable that Jalen didn't really say a lot about Tatum during the season. It was not about, you never heard like, I can't wait to get my brother back. There was none of that stuff. And then after the season, and especially the last three weeks, where's Tatum? He hasn't said anything. He hasn't said anything in the soft season. Jalen said at one point Tatum was coming on his Twitch or whatever. He hasn't come on.

How about the last couple weeks about the guy who could actually squash this is the alleged leader of the team, the franchise Tatum, who could come in and say, I don't want them to trade Jaylon. We won the title together two years ago. I can't control the front office, but I want to try to win more titles with them, or that's my guy, nothing. It's been dead silence,

which makes me think that the team has felt at some point either during the season or right after that this is a wrap and that Jalen just wants his own team. And Tatum probably wants them to have his own team, and that's probably the answer, right? I mean, having your own team being like, have we not reached a point where,

I guess there's just no, what does the star do? this is a great question for you. That has gotten the closest to being actual equal peers. Like not 1A, 1B, but like 1A, 1A, is it Shaq and Kobe? Like, what's the one that transformed from Pipp and Jordan to some? Because I look at these guys and I'm like, why can't they both average 27 points a game? Like, why does it, like, is that not on the table?

Does it have to be someone's team? Someone's always going to be considered better, right? A better all-around player or whatever. But in terms of whose team it is, who controls the ball, like, I don't know. When Tatum came back last year, obviously he's easing into it. But I didn't feel like there was any sort of, oh, wow, things have changed so dramatically for Jaylon Brown. You felt in the playoffs.

In some games you did. The pace slowed and it just had felt a little more Tate of thing. To answer your question, I honestly have to go back to the 60s with Eldred and Jerry, I think. I think that's the last time where it's like, I don't even know who's better between these two. And Shaq and Kobe were there a little bit. But Shaq always had that trump card of like in a playoff series. If there wasn't a team that could guard Shaq, he just ran a mock.

I mean, his three final stats were at a whole other level than Kobe. I mean, Steph Durant, but those, that team just existed on a plane of, of its own, you know, the one was there. But that's a good one, though, because I think Steph is a better guy all time than Durant. But I do feel like Durant was the best guy in those two teams. Now, part of it was because Steph took that took a real step back and really let Durant. can't kind of be more of the guy on those teams. But that's a good one, though.

And by the way, how long did those guys last together three years? It's true. And I think that's a good parallel to this because I think the reason, I'm always going to think this in Durant, no matter how many panels he goes on with Rich Climmon in different countries talking about the future of sports and entertainment and business, I'm always going to feel this way.

I think he thought after he went head to Ted with LeBron and beat him in the 2017 title that he was going to get his flowers and is just due as one of the great guys, not only this century, but maybe the best guy in the league. And it didn't happen. And it was like, no, you join Steph's team. That's why he won. And I think it got to the point where he's like, I can't win here. I have to leave. I wonder if Jalen's at that point a little bit too, where he's like, we won a title. I'm finals MVP. I'm conference finals MVP. I carried our team last year. And now the moment Tatum gets back, they're like, thanks, Jalen. We're going to trade you for Janus now.

And I think he wants to leave. I don't think he feels like he was respected in the right way. Now, there's a million things you and I don't know about, is there behind the scene stuff? Are there signals that he sent? Did Jalen tell him go explore a deal for us? But the reality is he's 29 years old. He did his best season ever last year. He's played 2,600 minutes in 10 years, 26,000 minutes in 10 years, almost 5,000 playoff minutes.

The guy's really fucking good. Like even if you're going like, you know, he's 142 playoff games. I think he's 20 a game in the playoffs. And if you're going like 125 games and up, it's a list of like 15 guys and all of them are awesome. And I just can't believe some of the trades that I think people seem to think what he's worth. It's like Portland won't give up Donovan clinging. They won't.

For Jalen Brown, that's going to be a deal breaker for you? So, Zat, I've never seen anything like this, and I don't know how it plays out. I think it's more likely he ends up coming back to the team. I mean, someone has to play center for the Blazers, right? If they trade for Jalen Brown, you need to have a functional center on your team. Let me make a couple of parallels. And I don't think any of these are good parallels. People just today, when talking about the challenge of trading a player, making as much money

is Jalen Brown, who's a very good player, but again, not a, he's a, he's on the MVP ballot every year kind of player. Anthony Davis was thrown out, Trey Young was thrown out. I rejected both of those out of hand. I'm like, he's younger than Anthony Davis, a million times more durable. He's much bigger than Trey Young, and he's a two-way player and he's in his prime. I reject them. The best one I heard was Carl Anthony Towns, who the wolves felt like, we have, we're like,

this contract is really hard to move, and we're in a. financial prison with the apron and all the other guys we have. This is the most palatable deal we have. On paper, it's like really not that sexy. It's Julius Randall, Die Manchenzo, and one first round pick. It's going to land like a little bit of a bomb with our fans. And it could go badly and it has gone badly. But they felt like they kind of had to do it. And it's the best one they could do. And I thought that was a very good parallel to this situation just in terms of where the player is or was in the hierarchy. I think Jalen's last season was better than any season Towns has had start to finish. But just generally where there... But here's the difference.

Could Towns have ever gone 56 and 26 with the two through 15 that Jalen had last year? No, I think there's any way. I don't think so. No, I don't think so. I just think Jalen should get more credit for the season last year. And I don't understand like he was 29 a game, played all the time. And he's a ball hand. It's just weird to see him being like, I don't know if he's, how good is he? I don't know about that contract. It's like, well, he's one of the 15 best guys in the league, and all of those guys have max contracts. So why wouldn't he have a max? What's he going to be playing for 35 million a year? I get it. I get it. And it's going to be, that's why all those parallels to me are either wildly wrong or slightly imperfect like the town's one. But I think the Celtics are going to have a choice,

a very difficult choice, unless something changes between now and whenever, between taking an offer for Jalen Brown that is going to be, let's say, not super well received by the fan base, maybe. I'm not saying it's going to be bash or it's going to be poorly received, but it's not going to be like the bonanza package that you would expect trading a player of this caliber. Or trying like hell to put the toothpaste back in the tube and just say, hey, you know what? We're going to figure it out. You guys have played all well together for many, many years. That's Missoula.

I mean, this is like, this is why Missoula behind the scenes is one of the most respected beloved coaches. Like this is a guy that during the 2024 Olympics, when Tatum, his playing time was getting yanked around and he wasn't put like, this little flu to France to make sure he was, like, this is a guy who has been attuned with those dudes the whole time. I'm sure he's talking to Jalen all the time. And if anybody could just get those two dudes in a room and just be like, look, man, let's work this out. Like we still have it. We can still be the best team in the east. Like forget about all the shit that happened in the past. The problem is, I don't know if Jalen is just, reached a point of no return.

Because the difference here is that they've won the title. So it can't be one of those things like, I don't have a ring yet. He already has the ring. He already has the respect from last year. Now he wants the respect from the team in the city. And I think deep down, he probably knows, like, that's going to be always going to be Tatum's town and not mine. That's just the way it is.

Can I throw a what if at you? Yeah. What does this look like if Tatum never gets hurt, but they lose to New York anyway in the second round? the year that he got hurt. And like, how does the next calendar year play out? Because, like, it's still, quote, unquote, Tatum's team more than Jalen's team. But it's, they're both still healthy and play.

Like, I just would be interested to see how that plays out because Tatum's injury is what has changed this dynamic. I mean, that's obvious. But I just don't, like, do we end up in this same place anyway or not? I don't know the answer to that. Well, if we were one of Jalen Browns, every NBA star has funkies around them, right? Who's just like, you're great. Let's go to dinner.

Oh, the checks are you better pay. If we were two of Jaila Brown's fronkeys, wouldn't we be like, why are you the one being traded? Why wouldn't Tatum be traded? He's coming off a major injury. His contract's as big as yours. You just carried the team to 56. Like, you're just planning that stuff in his head constantly, right? I mean, I would.

Why you? Why not Tatum? Why just you? I would like, I feel like I would be a more valuable member of a friend group than that. I would be a more reasonable member of the friend group. But I did. This is why I asked you devil's advocate two weeks ago or last week, whenever we said this, I said, if I'm Jalen Brown, I'm looking around being like, why is it just assumed that if we have to break up, I'm the one that goes?

Like, this guy just is coming off an Achilles injury. Now, I say that I think Jason Tatum is a better all-around basketball player than Jalen Brown. I think that's largely that's been proven out. So I get why if the Celtics are making a choice, it is Tatum. But if I also get Jalen Brown being like, what else do I have to do? Like, what else do you need me to do to be of worth of us? He's there. He's there right now.

He's like, you guys were going to tank last season. We were building our way to a top three seed. And you traded Zimans for the corpse of Vucevich to save more money. And then you threw J.T. back in there. You played him too many minutes and he couldn't even play in game seven. Like there's no blood on my hands for anything that happened last season. When you talked about what trade would the Celtics fan base accept, an example of one they wouldn't if it was Zach Levine's expiring

and a boatload of Kings picks. Like three first, two swaps, whatever. That's not flying. Same for Brooklyn. If it was Porter's expiring and a bunch of Brooklyn pick swaps, that's not flying either. New Orleans, which I think maybe you would have said a month ago, Murphy with Zion, and maybe even a pick, I think that price is dropped now. And I think Poole has to be in it as an expiring. I think that's Murphy and Poole and maybe two firsts. And I don't even know if New Orleans says yes to that. Because New Orleans is like, well, what are we going to do? We're not going to win the title with Jalen.

You don't think New Orleans would say yes to Trey Murphy, Jordan Poole, who is Jordan Poole is just 34 million. of expiring money. And two unprotected picks, which seems like a pretty fair trade. No one in the league seems to know if New Orleans is like open for business. If they're just like if they're out if they're out for the holiday weekend already like with anyone there? Well, here's the Portland trade too. So these last three are the ones that I was centered on.

That New Orleans one for Portland, I think Drew has to be in the trade. I don't want Jeremy Grant. Can't put Jeremy Grant's contract for two years. can't be in that trade. It's the same contract as Drew Holiday. It's the exact same contract, basically. I'd much rather have Drew Holiday, who's already been in Boston. I don't disagree with you, but I don't, I think, I mean, Jeremy Grant's availability has been

an issue. He actually shot it pretty well last year. I don't think he's just sort of like dead money by any means. Well, how about this? Drew Holiday, Kamara, and Picks for Jalen. That's a trade I can talk myself into from a basketball standpoint. How many, how many picks? Three really good guards.

I don't know. it's look i mean that how many picks is kamara worth at least two but two and a half but that's the kind of trade where you are going to be met with the talk radio or whatever backlash of like we just traded a finals MVP for who's the headliner the 36 37 year old guard who we already had on the team once and he's fine he's good and like tomani who like yeah tamani what like the boss the the boston casual fans have no idea who that is and like, okay, some picks. Like, that's what we got for Jalen Brown.

And I don't, like, I don't think you're off base pitching that is like the structure of a trade that makes some sense for both teams. I don't know if Portland loves the Obdia Jalen Brown fit personally. But it would be, I'll tell you this, it would be a bitch to play against. A lot of downhill force. Whoa. This is the trade. We've been texting about this this week.

And there's a lot of, a lot of smoke. billowing around Denver in general. Some I believe, some I don't believe. Murray and Cam Johnson for Jalen and Hauser, which would save Denver $10 million this year. The Celtics could take Cam Johnson in their trade exception. Murray is 50 million this year, 54 and 57. So he's about 8 million behind Jalen in each of those years.

But same amount of years. Same amount of years, but I'm shaving off 7, 8 million. I'm adding Cam Johnson who I can either keep or spin in a trade. And I am getting somebody who I still think is one of the best 25 players in the league back for Jalen. And I think I'm on Boston. I'm signing up for that trade. If I'm Denver, I'm at least having a six-hour meeting. And it's a reconstruction of a team because you're going to remove the Murray-yokage pick and roll.

But you could run a lot of that offense through Joker. You re-sign Peyton Watson with the extra money. You have him more involved offensively. And you could argue that that team's better. It's bigger. It's deeper. You have Yokeage and Gordon and Jalen as your front line. You're just, you have more flexibility.

And you have somebody who can really step in if Gordon gets hurt, which he gets hurt every year. And now you're not getting destroyed if that happens. And you're under the tax. And you can get Watson. That trade makes a ton of sense to me, Zach. It's a very, it's a good trade. It's a well, well done Picasso trade.

Boston gets a little smaller, I think, depending on whether Cam Johnson, you know, sticks around the team. They get a little, although they played with only one of the Jays almost all of last year anyway. It's a good trade. I mean, Jamal Murray addresses a need for Boston. Well, it allows them to go, allows them to go three guards at the same time. which is something they could only really do last year when Simons was on the team and then couldn't. And also, like, the reason they got into this Janus thing in general was because they felt like

Hugo and Shireman and maybe even Hauser, Walsh, like they just felt like they could patch the minutes together that Jalen had with worse stats, but at least like two-way stuff. And then Tatum would take some of the offensive slack. But really, they wanted to unleash Hugo, which is why he was untouchable in that trade. So they would cover the wings. They would still need a center. But it's an interesting team. And honestly, I think Murray's a great bet.

I thought he had too much of a burden on the Nuggets. It was basically Hammer Yokic doing everything. And he's in the West. And I thought he was really good last year. And I thought he wore down as March, April, we got into the playoffs. Seltz could put him on a 30-minute game timeline with weight and pritchard. And I just feel like they could manage his minutes better. Here's my obstacle if I'm Denver.

is I have no Christian Brown is now my only proven rotation playoff level guard on the whole team out of anyone. Now I can do maybe bring back Bruce Brown on the minimum, whatever. It sounds like Tim Hardaway Jr. is going to have some suitors. It may be out of their price range. Jalen Pickett is the only point guard on the team, like the only one. And that makes me a little bit nervous. Wouldn't they have their mid-level on this though or at least like some forage and stuff?

It's pretty tight, but I'd have to sit and redo the math. But they could because they're shaving some money off. I mean, they'd get guys. I also think there'd be a learning curve of, like, fitting Jalen Brown's game with the point. You're going all in on point, Yokic, like, almost all in, depending on who you get in free agency. And sort of fitting Jalen Brown into that universe, I think would be, have a little sticky at times.

It kind of went all in on that anyway, didn't they? Well, the Murray Yokich pick and roll, and, like, Murray is like a fail safe. It's like, all right, so tonight's Jamal's just cooking. You can run all that stuff with Jalen Brown. It just feels a little, a little different than me, to me, than, and maybe that's fine. And you obviously get bigger. And there's something kind of fun about like Yoketch and a bunch of wings and like tweener forwards, just taking up the entire court with their arms.

Right. A little more flexibility. That was my favorite fake one of all those. Who do you think has a longer meeting about that trade? So it's just Murray and Cam Johnson for Jalen and Hauser. That's it. who has a longer meeting about it about that trade alone i think denver has the longer meeting because they are they are at some sort of crossroads where they need to figure out we're really good

we fell short um we had a lot of health issues erin gordon again um you know the two teams that were above us and the tinnies are just so goddamn good that and we have this all time great player in the middle of his prime, has what we do growing stale, is it time to make change almost for change's sake? Is it time to just sort of risk a little bit of like instability in the way we play just to get our upside up a little bit? Or is that too risky?

I don't know, but I think they are at a major crossroads as a franchise. They also have to bring back Peyton Watson, by the way, which we didn't bring up. But I think that's part of that trade, right? That saving 10 million makes it way easy to bring him I mean, just imagine a lineup of Christian Brown, Jalen Brown, Peyton Watson, Aaron Gordon, and Nicole Yolkich.

I have no idea how that works on offense other than Yolkish answers every question on offense that has ever been posed to him. But that's a pretty funky lineup. And that would be like, I would pay a lot of money to watch that, watch them work that out. Well, basically, you'd be getting weird. Yeah. Which is, we're going to talk about Minnesota after the break. But it's the same kind of principle.

To me, if I'm them, I don't think. The team I have, I can beat O KC in San Antonio and they're fucking pit bull guards on both teams. And I don't think I can get Jamal Murray through two straight rounds of that. Plus Minnesota, maybe too, with McDaniels and Edwards. Like, I just, you could see them wearing down in real time, I thought, last year. So that would be the reason. But that would be a weird one for me because obviously Yokech and Curry are my two favorite non-Seltics. and to have Jalen on a Yokic team.

And I'm about as pro Jalen as you're going to find. He really, I thought he was just awesome last year. And I love the fact that the best quality about him, and this is what advanced analytics isn't going to measure, is he really is up for the challenge. If somebody else is a good team with a really good player, he takes it personally and wants to outplay that person in a game. And it sounds like a really dumb thing to say,

but there's just not enough guys in the league that are wired like that. You know, where it's like, oh, this guy, I've circled this game. I've been dying to go against this team tonight. So anyway, all right, we're going to take a break, and then I'm going to unleash my lamello trade opinions.

I can't wait. The Bill Simmons podcast is brought to you by Fandul. Fandle making the USA's run even more exciting. And it's threatening to become a run, by the way. Every match, every goal, every step toward the knockout stage, there is more on the line. than ever before. And now new customers can bet just $1 and get $250 cash if USA, our team reaches round of 16.

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December 1st, 2025 ends on July 31st, 2026, multiple entry periods. Visit www.micholabultra.com slash superior access slash FIFA World Cup 26 for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes, and details. One last point I wanted to make on that Jalen trade. We didn't have a Houston trade in there because Houston has literally been telling everybody, we want no part of Jalen. We're not interested. That team was a Bravo show last year.

How were they drawing the line at, oh, Jalen Brown would make us weird? You guys had the weirdest team in the planet. You know what Jalen Brown would do is actually show up for games and not roll over in a playoff series? Anyway, Lamello. Wow. Okay. Yeah, it's just like, settle down.

You guys were a disaster last year. Educate me. What's the number one Bravo show in your life? What's a Bravo show that you watch? Real Housewives. So all the Real Housewives of any variety, that's all Bravo. Everyone. Salt Lake.

They're just still spinning off cities. They did Rhode Island. If you go to Rich Newport, Rhode Island, there's probably some good stuff going on there. Some good accents, too. My wife's a big below deck fan. All right. Lamello trade. You already gave your take.

I did. Do I'm going to give the cliff notes of your take? Or do you want to just give your 45 second take? No, I want to hear the Bill Simmons cliff. Let's filter it through your ears. I listened to your pod. It was a very entertaining pod. I listed in a nice little power walk.

very hot LA. And you were bullish on the trade for for both teams, actually. I think it's like, I think it's like a B for both teams. If I were a trade grade guy, that's what I would, that's about what I would do. I'm at A minus or A for Charlotte. And I'll go into the reasons in a second. I couldn't believe the trade from Minnesota. I fucking hated it. I hated it. I just couldn't believe it. You do this trade. I wrote down some notes. You do this trade if you want to become the most beloved NBA team with under 25 fans who play video games and are online a lot. It's a 2K merchandise jersey selling trade. I get it. You don't want teams to double Anthony Edwards anymore. So I feel like I get it

is kind of an important qualifier to. I hate the fucking trade. I get it on paper. Lemello Ball would solve a lot of problems that you had when Anthony Edwards last There's one problem. He doesn't fucking play. He's played two seasons of the last six. Last year, Charlotte brilliantly, only he played big minutes early, got hurt, came back. I watched a ton of Charlotte last year, as you know.

They were using him like a race car on Sundays, just driving him slowly around the block. He averaged 27.5 minutes a game for mid-November on, Zach. they were really, really careful about not getting him hurt again, almost like they knew they were going to trade him this summer. Flawed mid-20s superstar. What does that mean? Well, just that's how you're able to get a guy like this for Nas Reed

and a first round pick and a swap. And I get it from the Minnesota side where on paper makes sense. Now they could play Lamello and Ant and I.O. together against these smaller lineups against San Antonio and against OKC, which they didn't have the option to do last year. And the only thing I really understand from it is that they built that previous team to beat Denver, right? Conno is like, we have to beat Denver. What is the team we can put together to beat Denver?

And now it seems like they built this new team to beat O.KC and San Antonio who are going to have more talent than them. Well, how do you beat them? These two, three-point shooters. And we can guard with I.O. and McDaniels and Gobert, hopefully protecting Lamello. and we're going to have three-point shooting variants with these two guys who in any game can get super hot. I just don't trust LaMelle at all. And if you're wrong,

ants leaving. And by the way, Tim Connolly might be leaving too. He's got a year left on his deal. And if I'm Tim Connolly, I'm cool making this trade because if it doesn't work out, I'm seeing you guys anyway.

I'm going to be out. It's got a year left on his deal. So this to me feels like a Hail Mary trade that your fans are going to like because LaMelle is the best player in it. The Charlotte fans are mad because they love Lamello. Lamele doesn't fucking play.

I wrote down, he's the least durable good guard of the last 25 years. Six seasons, 9,400 minutes, zero playoff games, which puts him on this crazy list

of guys who have averaged 20 points a game in their first six seasons, but have played less than 10,000 minutes, and it's basically just him and John Moran and Zion, and that's it. He's not reliable.

He has a, I think he has metal in his ankle. Like this is not like, oh, Steph Curry had ankle injuries too. Lemell's injuries are way worse than Steph Curry's were. And I just wouldn't have bet on it. I thought this was a crazy trade. Okay. I mean.

That's it. That's where I've landed. Well. And I landed there right away. All that, like all the availability stuff is a thousand percent fair game. Also, something I probably should have mentioned more when I, when I reacted to day was there is this sort of like drip, drip, drip, trickle-down effect of Minnesota transactions kind of chasing their own tail a little bit, similar to how Dallas had to chase its own tail

when like, all right, we left jail in Bruntzgo. We got to trade for Kyrie. The Grant Williams thing blew up on our face. We got to trade him and a pick to replace him with Pete. There's like a little element of that of like we got. Phoenix too. We traded everything for Gobert. We're a little asset poor. Now we're really expensive. We're probably going to have to trade towns. We trade towns. Okay, that didn't really work. Now we have to do something else. So there's a little bit of element of like chasing their tail a bit.

I get all of the concerns. I guess my, if you're worried about Anthony Edwards' happiness level, I guess my question would be what you just hold for something else down the line and go and do you do not make the Randall trade? Like what do you do if you're Bill Simmons, Timberwolves, GM? Well, the Randall trade, they clear, was clearly a money dump, right? and you could say it was a two-part trade and it opened the door for Lamello

but I also think they just wanted to get away from Randall and not pay this crazy luxury tax thing. I have real questions about them spending a ton of money in general. I mean, they're spending right now. The payroll is going to be high. I think they're going to add it. I think they're also not done.

I think that's important to say. They're not done rounding out the team for next season. But the town's trade was that financial trade period. Yeah. That was it. That was we've got to get off

some of this money and do it. and it turned out to be a really crazy trade. They have, I think, $11 million to spend on four guys. They don't have their own first, control their own first for seven years. What did you think of that Iyo contract was the other one that I was kind of shocked by? Five years, $112 million? What was going on there? What do you, I mean, that's what I like him, but Kobe White got the same annual,

actually a little more, less years, but same annual. Kobe White got three for 74. Yeah, less years. 25 a year. I was at like 22 and a half a year. Five years though? Well, yeah. I mean, this, like, don't you want, so you can't win with these contracts, right? Like, if they're too short, you're like, oh, man, we only got that guy and he's going to be extension eligible, this and that. And now this one's too long for you. They got,

how old is I? I know, I like him too, and I thought he was really good in the playoffs. If I had told you in February, when he got traded for a second round pick that he was going to sign for a five-year $112 million deal in the second apron thing. I just would have been surprised by it. He's 26 years old. You can't win. Like if it's a two or three-year deal, do you want a three-year deal just right down the middle?

That's it. That's the perfect length. I just thought it was interesting. They properly, maybe even splurged a little on Iowa, but they've been cutting corners with some of these other stuff. And, you know, Randall was a guy who made multiple second team all-MBAs. And the reason that he went sideways after the all-star break, because they fucking try to trade him right for the trade deadline for Janus. And he was never the same after that.

The other drip, drip, drip, drip thing I neglected to mention in the drip, drip, drip of assets is the Dillingham pick now working out was a big, a big. Right. But at least that turned in Iowa. Right. But they had to, again, they had to throw picks and all there, they're chasing, not just mistakes, because I don't know if the Rudy trade can be classified as a mistake anymore, but they're chasing. They're just, it's like a better that is losing and keeps chasing and keep spending more to try where you're giving it's like the Ponzi scheme blackjack thing first of all they missed their title window they were a conference finals team twice in a row and the west was weaker and they had a real chance and they couldn't get there and you go back to that Dallas series

I think was really probably their best chance when you think about that matchup and they couldn't beat him um I didn't mention this in my lamello case or anti lemello trade case and I really like watching lamella last year and I enjoyed the hell out of the hornets we have zero I repeat zero evidence that Lamella Ball can hold up for one playoff series with his hoops IQ or the physicality of a playoff series, much less for what Minnesota is trying to do with a trade like this, win four playoff rounds or at least three to get to the finals. We've never seen him play at the level of the playoffs we just watched with the physicality of the teams that we watched and just what basketball is like, you're going to need, this is like the Wembe conversation. If this is your second best player, sorry, buddy, you can't play 27.5 minutes each game, you know, in a series. Like, we're in need you for 37 now.

And it's going to be really physical. And you're going to get banged down. You're getting knocked in the basket support. You can't take the 30 footer with 30 seconds left in the game, down one with, you know, 20 seconds left in the shot clock. Like, you have to become a smarter or better player. I thought he made a lot of strides last year. But that Miami playing game was a roller coaster.

I mean, think of how nuts we went after. after that game. Then the next game, they got blown out. But I just, we have no evidence that this is a guy who could handle a playoff series against San Antonio Oro. Okay. But this is exactly why the Hornet Triton. It's exactly what I said on my show is like they, just the physicality, toughness, all that stuff you just said. Plus, I do, and I said this too, I do think their record in the play in tournament, it's only been four games and three of them have been like absolutely disastrous blowout losses. And in the Miami one, he did have 30 points, but I think he should. shot 12 of 31.

Also, fair to note, like, he's a rookie, but Khan was a disaster and down the stretch of the season and including in those games. I mean, Con heard his back. He wasn't the same, the last 10 games. Don't you talk about my son that way. I was going to say, I don't know what would happen if. He was hurt, though. I don't know, like, Hugo, Hugo versus Khan is becoming, like, the battle for your heart is,

is getting a little, it's getting, it's, they both have, they both have some work to do to prove themselves to you. Listen, I love them like I love both my children. We don't pick. When you have two kids, you just support them. And so it's an easy out for you because when the Hornets play the Celtics, when one team plays the other, you're going to cheer for the Celtics because that's your team. Like, we need Hugo going to get traded for another team.

That's the true test of who your real love goes to. But that's exactly why the Hornets, I think, trade. I think it boils, you can make the case about picks and salaries and all this stuff. I think it really just boiled down to we watch the playoffs and we just don't think he can hang at that level. And that those are all fair. Those are all fair. We don't trust them physically or basketball IQ wise to win 16 playoff games in this guy. I think you can get over the IQ stuff because like you said, I think it trended well last year.

I think being the second, the clear second best guy on a team is going to really kind of force him to recalibrate some of the ways he plays. But I think it's more of the physicality stuff. And I think that's a completely fair bet for Charlotte. I think when you combine this trade with the Bridges trade that happened today that we're going to talk about, I think Charlotte has come out looking awesome just to put those together. Great work by the Hornets who continued to just kill it under their new regime. For Minnesota, I would just ask again, what are, what path? I mean, according to John Krasinski, they tried to get Jalen Brown and they couldn't get,

you know, like this package was not going to get them jail and Brown. So what do you, you're trying to compete with San Antonio and Oklahoma City. You're on the clock with Anthony Edwards. What the status quo was not acceptable, right? Like that's that like we, we clearly they didn't think so. You're laying out all the, you're laying out all the logic for some of the, the worst big NBA trades we've had over the last 40 years. I don't. I don't.

Well, we got to do something. I don't. I don't disagree. Something in a lamello ball. I don't disagree. First of all, I think lamella ball. I think a lot of this has. has to do with what your prior is on La Mello Ball.

And you and I have disagreed about Lamella Ball for like five years. I just think he's better than you think he is. I've always thought he's been better than you think. I thought your durability, though. That's fine. I like when guys play. It's like it's one of my weird things. It's not weird.

It's not weird. But you got to do, I guess you're saying just do nothing and just figure it out later, which is a completely like a logical way to go about it. I think the wolves had concluded that that wasn't an option for them. The case for it is. they're going to be good. I think this is going to work and I think they're going to be good. If your bar is, well, can they beat San Antonio four times out of seven or Oklahoma City four

times out of seven? It's a pretty tough bar to hit. But I think offensively, this is going to be a super. That's my bar for all the trades they made because I felt like last year, one of the reasons they didn't look better in the playoffs was they had a bunch of injuries at a bad time. Well, they still have one. In the playoffs, I always got hurt during the playoffs and DeFincenzo got hurt during the playoffs. Like to me, this feels like, like an overreaction, all that. And so the stat I had before, first six seasons, less than 10K minutes,

just guys who average 18 points a game, basically merger on. It's Jha, Lamello, Zion, and Clark Kellogg. That's it. Those are all the guys in the last like 45 years. He turns 25 in August. And if you're trying to make the case for Minnesota, you would say, look, we've seen a lot of success

with immature, injury prone, talented guys in the first like five, six years of their career who went to a different team and put it together. And I think there's going to be nights with this team. And I'm sure that Minnesota fans will be on high alert. And even people I have in my life, like Nate Tice who like Minnesota, there's going to be nights when they're on TV on a Thursday night. And they're playing somebody awesome. And Lamello hits A3s and the aunt hits nine and they beat somebody by 18 and they look awesome. And they're doing like chest bumps and all kinds of stuff in mid court.

And people go, oh, how's that L'Below trade now? I'm just telling you. Talk to me in April and May. There's going to be Bill Simmons, poo-pooing it. No. Yeah, yeah. Just wait. Just talk to me, April and May.

I don't care what happens October through March. I just don't. Here's the real question with Minnesota. And I don't, I think people think this question has been answered because they made two straight conference finals. And there had been such a woe-be-gone franchise for so long between Garnett and those two conference finals that people think the question has been answered definitively as a yes, they should have made the Rudy Gobert trade. If you just reverse time, like, if you assume that the

Gobert acquisition is why they ultimately had to dump towns. And we all said when they traded for Rudy Gobert, a town's deal looks inevitable because of the financial realities and the fact that he's a center and all this. Like, we all said it at the time. Like, as soon as that trade happened, even before it happened, I remember saying, if they do this, the town's trade is the next domino that will come eventually. Did they give up on Ant plus towns too early by making the Gobert trade? I think it's still kind of an open question because it not only robbed you of a lot of assets, I think they over, they clearly overpaid for Gobert. Like, it both got them team success to a point that people have already stopped

questioning whether they should have made the trade or not. And that's okay. but they clearly overpaid either way. And it forced their hand on cat. And we just didn't get to see all that much of like Anthony Edwards plus Carl, Anthony Towns is the foundation of the team. I think it's just an interesting question. I hated the go bear trade as much as any trade I've ever ever that's been made. They made two conference finals with it.

I don't know if I was wrong. I didn't get to the finals. I thought they gave up too much. That's the thing. I don't know if you were wrong. And like I was on TV that moment. And I said on ESPN, I am in disbelief at how much they gave up for Rudy Gobert.

And I was as puzzled as you were. I maybe didn't hate it, hated as much as you did. And I'm not even sure you were wrong despite the conference. I guess you are wrong because of the conference finals. But like this, all of this starts with that trade. With all that said about the Lamella trade, I never would have done it.

I would have thrown my body in front of it. I'm really excited to watch them this year. I think they'll be really fun. But that's the problem. They'll be really fun as a regular season team. And I don't think as constructed, I think they've reduced their odds to win three straight playoff rounds in the West.

I don't think they have the same odds. They added variance, but I don't think they win the durability. I just don't trust Lamela. Also, doesn't it scare you that Charlotte's like... Of course. Yeah, we're good. Yeah, take them.

He's not even on a max. He's at $43 million. And Charlotte, by the way, just could have brought back Kobe White and tried to do what they did last year. And they're like, we're good. We're going to move on now. It was a classic selling high.

There was something else I wanted to ask you. Now I forgot what it was. I'm sorry. No, about this trade. By the way, the other thing with this trade that I thought was interesting that everybody missed, Josh Green was just shoved in this trade. I mean, he's like 15 million a year.

He was irrelevant for the Hornets. Well, I was listening to dump them in the trade. I was listening to one pod where they were like, oh, this is a great, like, you know, they, Josh Green, you know, Minnesota got a lot of depth in this. That was a good get. But I'm like, good get. This was like a must, you have to take him. That was like Charlotte. If you're doing this,

you're taking this. Oh, that's what I was going to ask you is, let's try to just put this trade in a vacuum. I know that's not possible, but like in a vacuum, both with Timberwolves history and like cap ramifications and all that. Do you think Lamello

for Nas Reid and one unprotected pick and a few swaps that may not even like it's unclear if they're going to am out, is that actually too high of a price for a lamello ball? Is that that much that you're giving up

if you're Minnesota? A six man of the year who's now going to start and is a good player has some defensive issues, some swaps that may or may not be anything, a really good pick and some seconds. Is that actually that high of a price? Think about where we were in September,

October when we were talking about Lamello, Jha, and Tray Young altogether. When I was the one saying Lamello has the most value of the three and it's not close. We had this conversation. I thought I was a little closer than you did, but I thought those were the three. And it seemed like he had the best chance to be redeemed and maybe traded instead of giving away. Trey-Hen was given away. John Morant not only can't be given away. That's the other subplot.

You're going to have to add a pick to get rid of him. Le Mello, they rehabilitated his. trade value, enough to where they got, I thought, you know, I think you would have taken that in September. Even if it would have made the fans, man, it's like, look,

we don't know if this dude's ever going to play. They were able to get 2,000 minutes out of them and they were able to trade them. My only point is if you isolate the trade, which you can't. I get that. But I don't think they, like, overpaid for lamella ball

to some crazy level. I think it's like a fair trade. But you have to throw the Randall into it. Yeah. Randall has to be part of the trade. They traded Randall, Nas Reid and I guess that's fair.

The pick and the swap for Josh Green and Lamello is the trade. Right? And that's, I don't know. I feel bad for the Minnesota fans. They haven't won a title

since 1991. And Lamello is going, this is going to be a very seductive combo. I'm telling you, there's going to be nights where you're like, holy shit.

Aunt, Aunt and Lamello had 23s combined. This has never happened in the history. There's going to be nights. They're going to be really fun together.

We'll see how long you can play from a Charlotte side. And they did another trade today. So they traded Miles Bridges for Grayson Allen and Royce O'Neill and won that trade. They won that trade just with the three players of it. Just Miles Bridges for Grace and Allen and Royce O'Neill, I've won the trade. No, how about this? I'll throw in the worst of my 29 swap. You'll get the less favorable version of that.

And you give me your unprotected first in 33. And Phoenix is like, that's that. It's great. Let's do it. What a fucking terrible trade by them. That was why, I mean, I just, the picks, explain it to me. I mean, do I have to explain it to you? Are you making me do that?

How can nobody, how about top, I guess you can't put protections on the picks anymore, but. I checked. I was like, I texted lots of people. I was like, no protection on it, not anything. Top, nothing. Top, okay. For a year of Miles Bridges, he's a free agent next year. So here's the thing.

It's not going to be a year of Miles Bridges. You know that. They're going to resign Miles Bridges, and you have to price that into the trade as well. And that could make your evaluation of it, Bill Simmons, even worse, depending on what the number is. And they're probably going to extend Dylan Brooks to. And all of a sudden, this team's going to be pretty expensive. I don't want to explain the trade to you. I don't like the trade for Phoenix.

They did it because they didn't have a real power forward. They got one now. They did it probably because Miles Bridges is a Michigan State guy. great. Congratulations. And they did it because they saved money. They saved money this year. And they get $29 million of Grace and Allen plus Royce O'Neill, who they view is just sort of fungible,

whatever, seventh guys off the books. And they get a starter. He's going to start. Who signed those guys? Just out of curiosity. The Sons signed both of them. Oh. So the Sons now have to get off the money that they gave to these guys?

If I was a Sons fan, I would be losing my mind. Why did you give these contracts? You made me be, Ish be a spokesperson. You assigned me the fucking job. So let me do it without interruption. So I tried my best to do it. I don't like the trade.

I think it's an awesome trade for Charlotte who loses La Mello Ball, right? So they lose like the high-wadage star. A guy that I think should have gotten all-NBA consideration this year, like third team all-N-Ba. He was in the mix for that. They don't get back a player in Kobe White resigning, plus Grayson Allen, plus Royce O'Neill that's anywhere near as good as La Mello Ball.

But Kobe White's good and is a viable starter. I think they lose some playmaking and passing. They're going to have to make up. But what they have now is so much depth if those guys are all healthy that they don't have to speed up Steinbach. They don't have to speed up Christian Anderson, but those guys maybe already, they have like a lot of good players on this team. And in the regular season, that's really important in just sort of getting through

the season. And they kick the pick out they owe to 2029, so they're not under a huge amount of pressure. And it's a swap thing anyway. So it's not like a huge risk. Well, they have the best collection of picks probably in the Eastern Conference, though. And Phoenix said Unprotected 233. I get what they're doing. What they're doing is we're exchanging a future pick for a now pick because we've traded

all of our now picks, our near window picks for Durant. And we need to be able to do stuff in this period of time when Devin Booker is approaching 30 or whatever he is. that 2033 pick, just like the 2013 son's pick that Memphis, I believe, has. Or these bucks picks that Portland has that it's like, oh, that's nine years from now. What do we care?

And then it's like, oh, now they're coming. Important to state we don't know what the rules are going to be in terms of trading draft picks and lottery and all that stuff. But those picks are going to be extremely valuable trade ships. And I don't, it's not like Phoenix has any roadmap

to being a title contender in the next three or four years. So I don't. Well, I have a follow-up idea for them that you're going to do the thing where you can't speak for a minute. Okay. But Charlotte's picks. So they have the 27 Dallas first top two protected next year. They have a Miami pick that's going to be unprotected in 28. They can swap with Minnesota in 28.

They have a bunch of swap stuff. And they have unprotected Minnesota Charlotte in 2003 on top of a shitload of flexibility that they have now. because Zach Lowe, they traded Lamello, Green, and Bridges, $78 million. Turn that into Nause O'Neill and Grace Now on $52 million, and they also have $41 million trade exception with all these picks. They have their mid-level still. From some of the reporting, it seems like Kobe White was not a slam dunk to come back as like a third guard. And when they traded Lamello, all of a sudden that Kobe White deal was done,

they're going to have O'Neill who can play 3-4. They're going to have Nas who can play 3-4-5, really. Grayson Allen coming off the bench has yet another shooter. And by the way, where did Grayson, Alan go to college, Zach? Where do you go to college? The team I always cheer against in the tournament, I think. Duke University, located in North Carolina. Where did Kobe Way go to college?

Where did Rick Schenall go to college? So they have coming up the bench, Alan, Naze, Anderson, if he's good, Culpriner, Steinbach, a year of Grant Williams, they, I'm so impressed by, I've been saying this for two years. I've been so impressed. Every move they've made, I'm like, another good one. Oh, like that, great one there. Is this the team you would want to be in the East now for the next seven years over everybody

else? Not next two, next seven. Seven years, I get my pick of teams. Just for how they're locked and loaded right now. I like the city. I like the city, too. I like the ownership. Okay, so can I give you some candidates?

Yeah. By the way, I didn't prep you for this because I wanted to see your agonized reaction. No, this is great because I love to imagine like this is like a like where could, where would I want to work? Off the top, Charlotte is definitely maybe number one. If I trusted the Rinesdorps at all,

the bulls with Caleb Wilson and Swain are like now kind of interesting. And if I were the person that's in Buzellis. That's in Buzellis. If I could like save the Bulls, like what a legend I would be and how fun Chicago is and all that. But, you know, I don't trust the owners. And they don't have that same level assets. And you have owners that aren't going to ever spend. The wizards, despite getting DeBanza and having all this stuff, they're just still the wizards.

I can't put them above these teams. Their uniforms stink. The arena is dead. I can't, I can't do it. Trey Young for four years. I'll tell you, I'll tell you two cities. A city I like, I mean, if you give me three. Seven years.

Seven years. I'm saying seven years of assets, players you have now, chance to win a title. You got to factor all of it in. I just like Philly a lot. I like the city of Philly a lot. Seven years lets me ride out the Embed thing. So you've been, VJ, Maxie,

I'm going to have expirings with Embed in Georgia in here. I have a fan base that the moment anything goes wrong, I'm going to be blamed and tortured. Yeah, okay. It's weird that Boston's. Atlanta's a good one. It's weird that you've mentioned eight teams and didn't mention Boston, which I think speaks to maybe where Boston is right now.

I'm just going seven years. I'm just going fun. I want some warm weather, too. So Atlanta is a good one. I want good weather. It's clearly Charlotte. Charlotte flipped this around. They were the worst run team in the league or in the top three year after year for 15 straight years.

Right? 12. They haven't won a playoff series in like a gazillion years. The entire time I've known you. And now one of the things I like about this is, I, you know, I think there's a lot of reasons they probably, I don't have inside sources with Charlotte. Like, I'm sure there's a lot of reasons why you would be like, it's time Mimba Bomb from Lamello. I would guess one of the main reasons would be what we saw from Miller and what we saw from Kahn as a rookie, which is the worst he's ever going to be. Is there more there from a ball handling, playmaking?

Can we run more of the offense? Can we have more movement? Can we be more unpredictable? Can we just have like a 12-man team? Can we start to look a little OKC-ish without the shade piece of it? Can we have depth, shooting, interchangeable guys? And then you guys, I was really glad Krasinski talked about this on the pot. I thought he was excellent that you did on Thursday.

Talking about Nas Reid, what a fucking great guy he is. I mean, other than KG, the most beloved and I guess aunt. but probably a top three most beloved Timberwolf ever. Unbelievable behind the scenes guy. Selfless, like was one of the, like really could have torpedoed or allow what happened with them the last couple of years and just didn't.

And I'm just a huge fan. We know what he looks like in the playoffs. I just think that team needed more adults and less kids. And they feel like they have now flipped out with Kobe and with, with Nas and I'm sure there's another vet coming. But I really like. they're sitting. They have, the hornets are in an unbelievable position.

And it's not like we, I don't think you're missing anything about why they did this trade in the myriad of factors, including Faith in Miller and Khan to level up even a little bit. I think part of it is also like, we're not, we're not going to get carried away with what happened in the last three months of last season. Right. We're not going to push all in for 26, 27. we're actually willing, if we do end up taking a small step back,

we're actually willing to do that. And we're fine with that. And, you know, if we do miss the playoffs or something like that, like the new lottery rules are pretty good for us in a lot of different ways. And so we're not going to accelerate for short-term gain. We're okay with that if we think it's the right move. And we sold high in a guy that might never play 2,000 minutes again for all we know, in Lamello, right?

It's a big one. Fiend who only has regular season win odds for two teams, just by the way. Okay. Interesting. 50 plus wins for Minnesota is plus 108. So that means they think they're right on the 50 win level. 45 plus for Miami is minus 210 and 50 plus is plus 140, which means they think Miami is probably in the 46-47 range. The more I think about that trade for Miami, I, have you really?

really like just spent five minutes in your brain thinking about an offense with Janus and Bam and where they go? Yeah. Just just the geometry of where are they going to be every possession? Yes, of course. That's, I did a whole podcast about it. And I said, I know you did a podcast, but did you come up with an actual answer. The number one reason that I'm skeptical that this is a championship contender, now we got to see how they round out the, the, we don't know anything, right? We don't know Powell. We don't know Wiggins. We don't know, like, we're going to learn all about what their team is going to like. By the way, Powell, I think they

started cutting his minutes as we got closer to the playoffs and then the playoffs. I think he's out. Well, I mean, that was a Powell hero. We have no faith that we can defend with those two guys on the floor together thing. But I mean, it's going to be very hard for them to make a competitive offer to Nora Powell. I would also bet on him being elsewhere

at the beginning of the season. My point is we don't know what the team's going to look like. But the number one reason I said I'm skeptical that they can build an actual contender out of this. Like a true blue finals championship contender. is I just think at heart, BAM and Janus are too duplicative on offense. And I know that that sounds crazy because Janus is this bulldozer to the rim and Bam shot seven threes a game last year and all that.

At their best, they are still guys who want to operate in the middle of the floor. That's what they do. They do it differently, stylistically, but that's where they want to live. And despite BAM taking a ton of threes and all that, that's where they really should live. Like, I don't think any—Bam's got to get much better as a three-point shooter for defenses to treat him like he's a real threat out there. And even so, I don't see that. I'm just like, do you want Bam out of,

he's not Carl Anthony Towns. I want Carl Anthony Town shooting 10 threes a game. He's that good of a shooter. I don't want an interior bruiser like that who's just an okay shooter shooting eight to 10 threes a game. I'm not sure that I want that. And so reminds me a little when Houston tried to make it work with Hakeem and Barkley in the late 90s.

You know, it works somewhat. And they did make the Western finals, but Barclay had to move out and Barclay had to shoot more threes and he was never a good three-point shooter and I just, I always thought it was clumsy and then remember they had Pippin that one year and then it was like, oh my God.

And like to be clear, I think Miami's gonna be really good. I think defensively they have a chance to be special. I think the East is like going to be very interesting but also very deep next year. I just win the finals and that's the goal when you make a trade like this. It's going to be really hard and that's before you get into the Janus

who seems to be injured at the end of every season for five of the last six seasons. I do not think Miami's going to be very good. I think they'll be fine. I think that'll be like between 43 and 47 wins depending on how much Yonnas plays. Again, the price is palatable

and you just have to, you know, there's three paths. There's the status quo, which clearly wasn't going anywhere. There's this path, which may go in any number of directions. And then there's the what if we use all these assets on someone else path.

And I just don't know if they saw that path anywhere else down the line. And in the meantime, I don't know what the upside was. So I get it. I'll tell you, if I was 80 years old, I definitely would have made the trade. Steve, back to Phoenix for a second. Sure. John Morant for Jalen Green, what else do you want me to throw in if on Memphis? Okay. All right. I mean, now we've reached a point where, we're, is that an unprotected pick? So Memphis, Memphis gets Jailen Green.

Straight up. This is a one for one. Who has 36 this year and a player option for 36 to next year. And I get off from a rant and I have to throw in a first, an unprotected first. I'm asking what I need to throw in because I have better picks than that. I could give you my best of Minnesota, Cleveland, or Utah in 27. I could give you my Orlando first in 28 or 30. You tell me what you want. Let me flip it around.

Why is Phoenix doing that? because they can get an extra pick and they can roll the dice with John Morant for a year and hope change the scenery. Devin Booker, a really good fan base and maybe we,

you know, this is last stop for job, basically. Here's my answer if I'm Memphis. I'm throwing in nothing. That's my offer. It's John Morant for Jail and Green. I'd probably do that just to clean the slate and I get an interesting prospect

to not even a prospect, interesting young player to take a shot, on a player who is not really covered himself in glory. So you're doing the Michael Corleone. My offer is nothing. Yeah, my offer is John Moran. You either want them or we don't make a deal. Because if they have the equivalent contract, I feel like they're like just equally

sort of unknown in different ways as just assets going forward or whatever. Like John Moran has obviously reached the level in the NBA that's well above anything Jalen Green has done, but he's older and has a whole boatload of issues that come with him. but like their contracts are the same length and John makes $8 million more a year, whatever. Like I don't like I'm not, I'm not interested in, I'm not that psyched about exchanging him for Jalen Green

even if it's completely toxic with him on the team, then I'm throwing you any good draft assets. So you get nothing. That's it. Deal with that. You either want John Moran or you don't. Do you like the idea of John Morant, Devin Booker, Miles Bridges,

all of their centers and a couple other swings. I think of guard. Let's just, how about Phoenix? Just chill. Like, feel good season. You brought back all your key role players who everybody fell in love with, Colin Gillespie and Jordan Good. Let's just take a beat now.

Okay? Take a break. Controversial transaction today on a bunch of different levels. Let's chill out. No more team Sparty. Like, let's just chill. I would do it if I could get a real good pickback from Memphis. You're not getting one for me if I'm Zach Clement.

I'm hanging up the phone. Sorry. Zach climbing. Boozer. Coward. I'm happy. This is what I'm saying. I'm happy.

I hadn't talked about. this on the pot either. You already did, but they got beef stew. They're just back, baby. What do we get? We had grit and grind grizzlies. What do we have? What is this version of the grids? They didn't nickname. Verno, come up with the nickname for these guys. It's not, you can't do grit and grind again. It's got to be something else. It's like the don't fuck with us, Grizzlies. My favorite moment of your, it's just like three men in a front line. My favorite moment of your draft recap podcast with groggy house, uh, and draft beat Nick, uh, Jay Kyle, man. Just a great.

odd couple of guests. My favorite moment was it pivoted from how I was saying something housey to like about Camboosor and the pick and to Kyle Mann being like listing off the players Cambooser was going to help make better in Memphis. He's like I think he's really going to like Cam Spencer and Camboos are going to have a good, good chemistry. Like we've, Cam Spencer like that's going to be a big winner. I think it transitioned from all the foods that you had ordered and how you were trying to

keep house awake by. mentioning food to Jay and Kyle Mann, hard pivot into Camp Spencer and how that was going to fit. And everybody woke up. I mean, I woke up. I was like, wow, we ordered a pizza too. That's a big night. John Moran is a no-go for you if you're any of the other 29 teams at this point. I don't think they have anything for John Moran right now.

I mean, who's the team, right? Like you go through the list of teams that need point cards. Toronto isn't on Lamello. I don't sense it there on John Morant. Minnesota made its move. I don't mean, Sacramento just drafted a point guard. I don't think they need to be in the business. If you're Minnesota, would you rather, now, actually, I would have rather done Lamello?

Just Naz Reed for John Moran, basically. I mean, I think Memphis would have been thrilled to do that, although now they have a whole bunch of people. I think they would have thrown a pick for that. All right. Before we go, a couple quick things. Sure. It's June 28. What happens with LeBron?

I wish I had a hot, good answer for you. I don't, I don't know. I really don't know. I'm surprised how many people in my life have asked me what I thought was going to happen in him. Why are you surprised? He's LeBron James. I just, there's these giant chess pieces, either, you know, there's Kauai might get

traded, Jalen Brown, Jamal Murray, Detroit has all this caps space. There are all these things as we head toward. Anthony Davis. Anthony David. We, you and I think, out of all these ones, Anthony Davis, is that would be my bet my life. You hate when I bet my life. I would bet my life on the day on the AD trade this summer over all the other famous

man. The only thing, the only time I ever said that phrase out loud about sports was when Croatia was in a penalty kick game in the last World Cup and Luca Modrich walked up. I said, I would bet my life on Luca Modrich, baby. I bet he made it, of course. So I have said Golden State for three months. You're sticking with it. I'm sticking with it.

I'm sticking with the expendables. that includes Anthony Davis, which I guess that would have to be Butler in the 2027 first, or I don't even know what needs. I'm sure Washington has to get some pickback. Have we bought House in Anthony Davis Wizards, Jersey? Like, we got to pull some money and get him one. House is treating Anthony Davis like he's, like, like when somebody steps into the White House because the president got, you know, pushed out or died or impeached or something.

and there's somebody like Gerald Ford. Like Gerald Ford. Anthony Davis is Gerald Ford for House. He's just here for a year. He's going to do a job. Anthony Davis is inexplicably Washington. He's not staying and they're going to turn him into a pack hopefully. What's going to be more fondly remembered in the Anthony Davis era in Washington in all the great fashion.

Oh, Dallas. No, the Dallas. Or the one and a half quarters that he played in his Dallas debut were the match. This is why. This is why we did trade. This is it. Will Chamberlain for 40 minutes. For like a year.

That was their Super Bowl weekend. They clung to those like, remember those two quarters? That was division. That was crazy. So I would say Golden State. I wonder if the Clippers who have both cap space and flexibility in a bunch of different ways to add him, I just don't know if LeBron James would ever play for the Clippers. Now, he did, he did go to Miami.

that was a surprise. He did go back to Cleveland and Dan Gilbert. That was a surprise. He went to the Lakers, which was Kobe Bryant's team when he went over there and kind of, by the way, still is. So I wouldn't rule him out going anywhere. The Clippers solved the most issues for him for get stay in LA, a lot of golf courses, doesn't have to leave his house. But Golden State's a 50 been a flight from here. And Golden State, as you know, is famously lackadaisical about making sure guys are around all the time. So if LeBron wanted to kind of come in and out, I think he'd be able to.

But in terms of living in San Francisco, you mean, the guy shows up five hours before every game and, you know, he said every practice. I'm just saying like after a home game at night, I'm going to fly back to L.A. I'll be back tomorrow. Okay, LeBron, we'll see you tomorrow. Like, it's one of those teams. there's there's flexibility built in with the vets okay um the question for me because the most fun team for him to go to is san Antonio wow this is where

Eduardo right now is like ding ding ding ding here's my social clip um what's up edwardo uh San Antonio he solves actual issues for him for them and could actually win the title with them would it be perceived as a ring chase or not to you. Well, also, and I think this is important vis-a-vis the Clippers discussion, it's a franchise that is dignified and I think befits LeBron's perception rightfully so of himself and the kind of teams and franchises he should be on. Yeah, you could sell that really fast. Like pops there. I've had a long relationship with him. This team's close. I could be the missing piece. I watched them in the finals for five games. They were missing that one veteran leader. And by the way,

it could be a trade where it's like Cornett and Keldon Johnson's expiring and then you can figure out how to pay LeBron 30 million a year for two years. But do you think it would be perceived as a ring chase or not? I think he's 41 and a half years old and anything he does in the direction of a ring is going to be accepted as like, it's pretty crazy that the guy is still a good player in the NBA. If he wants to chase another ring and have a new adventure, that's fine. I don't think it this is not, not to go back, but this is not a 29-year-old superstar signing with a 73 win team. I just think if that's what it is and that's what he wants to do, I don't think anyone begrudges him and people get more into like, oh, how's that going to work?

That's kind of exciting. Zach Lowe, we are in 100% agreeance. Oh, we are? Yeah, I think if I was like his conciliary, I would walk through San Antonio and Golden State. Denver is interesting too, but I actually don't think that cements anything. Just watching him a Joker would be amazing. They flirted with, I mean, you know Denver has been interested in him before. They tried to get him in for a free agent meeting at one point.

I think I or something like that. I can't remember exactly. But the money doesn't work. With San Antonio works because they actually have flexibility. They actually could pay him. Because the thing we always forget with these guys, they're not taking a pay cut. He's not going to go work for $2.2 million veteran minimum expansion. You just like this is why Kobe signed up for 40 and 40 the last two years.

Like these guys, they want to be compensated. They go to a franchise like they're going to sell LeBron Spurs jerseys. I really like the idea of him on that team. And I wouldn't consider it a ring chase because if I'm him, I want to keep playing. I'm still really good. This Lakers thing has fizzled out. They obviously don't want them to come back. They, it's, you know, it's been an uneasy dance for six months.

They want to turn the team over to Luca. and San Antonio kind of needs him. If he had been in that Nick's series, I think they would have won. All right, I'm not prepared to go reimagined the old finals that we just had with LeBron James as a spur. That's a bridge too far at this hour for me.

The Knicks won in five games. Give him all the Kelden Johnson, Luke Cordet minutes. He's out there in Crunch Time. You can't just let the Knicks be happy. We were already... I'll do respect to that. I'm doing a hypothetical alternative universe. I'm just saying if they had LeBron last year,

that was kind of what they were missing. Because I don't think Fox plays at that point. I think LeBron is in the Fox spot, and I think better decisions are made. There were several poor decisions. Would he want to live in San Antonio? I don't know. The Golden State case would be

you and Curry right out in the sunset together. The team is just, especially if they got Davis too, the team is just good enough that it's kind of fun. You're going to sell out everywhere. This will be like when the Eagles, had their reunion tour in 1995. It's the health freezes over tour.

It's just every place you go, it's going to be the biggest thing that happened in that city in a long, long time from a basketball standpoint, really since the Curry Warriors in the mid-2000s. Unless it's a back-to-back on the road.

Careful. Yeah, true. I forgot about that part. Maybe Curry and Lamar and just alternate, but all right, so pick. Where do you want to see him go? Make a pick. Where do I want to see him go?

Yeah. Where do you want to see him go? Basketball fan, Zach, I think I think I think I think Golden State is the most fun I think that to him and Curry together is the most it feel I've I've transitioned from it feels like sacrilegious to see them go from like sometimes bitter rivals during those four finals like no question there was like some acrimony is bitter yeah um to what we saw with team USA in the last two games at the 24 Olympics to to let's let's just have some fun and we're probably not going to win

but it's going to be fun like I think that'd be that'd be the most fun The two times I've been the most shocked sitting in my seat for a basketball game when Bird and Dr. Jay got in the fight, I was there. I still can't believe that happened. And then 2018 in the, I think it was the OT, a game one, the J.R. Smith game. LeBron and Curry got really mad at each other. And there was like a split second where it felt like they might actually get into something. And just watching was like, oh, my, LeBron was so mad. He was so mad about the J.R. Smith play.

He was so mad. he had just played the best game probably of his life and they were going to lose and he like hard-fowed Steph or did something and Steph got really mad and oh yeah, it was good. I think all camera angles have been destroyed. What I do remember is in the 16 finals in one of the Cleveland games

and I want to say it was game six. He has a block on Curry at the rim and it's emphatic and he kind of poses a little bit over it afterwards, not like directly over him, but kind of makes a show out of it, makes a meal out of it. And I remember thinking like that felt like a,

I'm the best fucking guy. I'm bigger than you. I'm stronger than you. And this has been cool. And you might still win this series. But remember, I'm the best fucking guy. Which is also what he did in 2018 in that first game.

He just physically overpowered them like Shaq in the finals. It was nuts. All right. So we're both saying Golden State. I would like the San Antonio thing though. That'd be fun. And by the way, if he went to Denver, I would talk myself into that in two seconds.

Hard not to. If they did the Jalen trade we mentioned earlier, and then they're like, oh, and our new point card is 41-year-old LeBron James. We're just going to try to figure it out in the fly. What is your craziest prediction for the week before we go? Craziest prediction for the week. I don't have a, but like, I'll go, like. Is there going to be something this week that makes you go, whoa.

Well, it's too late for a Kauai trade, right? Like, that's already been murmured about enough that that wouldn't be like, oh, my God, Kauai got traded. unbelievable. I will say, I think Kauai going to Toronto would get that reaction for me. I'm going to say Denver is going to do something big, and I don't know what it is. But I'll say a Denver moves that leaves people like, wow, that's what they did. I'll say that. I was going to say, imagine if the Sixers found a trade for Embed, but I just don't, I don't, I don't think it's possible. I'm going to, I have Detroit as my wow team. I think they're up to stuff.

Good wow team. The steward trade was really suspicious. I didn't really understand it. It felt like they were clearing some cap. But then they also got Isaiah Joe. So that only cleared half the cap. Maybe there was more to that story. Just feels like I think they should take in a swing last February and they didn't.

And now they probably will be my guess. And then LeBrongo and somewhere weird would be the other wow thing. if it wasn't Golden State or some of the other teams we mentioned. He's like, wow, he's going to Cleveland on the minimum. Can they even sign him to the minimum? Utah as a veteran mentor. What? That would be, now that would get a big wow.

My other row would be Jalen Brown just not getting traded, which I actually think wouldn't get a wow because I think it's conceivable. He doesn't. That's definitely conceivable. We've seen them put the toothpaste back in the tube in the NBA a lot of times. It was like, this is done. over. It's like, all right, let's

we, well, we had dinner and things are better. It's happened. This is like, this is like you go and buy like a Costco case of like eight tubes of toothpaste and you step on all of them and it's all over your bathroom all the tubes are out. It's a lot of toothpaste.

When's the next Croatia game? I believe Thursday versus Portugal. Oh, wow. Yeah, we got a bad draw. We got a bad and the winner likely plays Spain. This is the opposite of the draw Croatia got two world cups ago. I don't think you got that bad of a draw. Portugal is tied to the bitter end to an aging star.

We've seen how this goes. Spain. I think it's good for you guys. Winner gets Spain is tough. That's tough. But Croatia had a very good draw two World Cups to go when we got to the finals. Like the bracket broke exactly right. So like, you know, what goes around comes around.

I think you should do pods Monday, Wednesday. and you have to go to the game because you're 2 and 0 this year. I don't know. It's in Toronto. It's not like it's in... No, but it's going to be free agency is going to be going hot and heavy.

You're encouraging me to do this to skip out on day two... Do it on Wednesday. Of NBA free agency? No, you got to go the game. You can't... This is once every four years. I've already been to two, man.

It's two more... Two more World Cup games than I ever thought I would go to. You got to go. All right. I think you should go. All right. I'll go to tell my wife.

Let's go. All right, Zach Lowe, a true pleasure. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back with Taylor Sheridan. I want to warn people. He did this from his ranch in, I think, Wyoming. And the Wi-Fi is a little spotty,

so there's times when it cuts in and out a little bit. We did the best we could with it. I thought it was an awesome interview. I had a great time with him. But just bear with it. There's going to be a couple times where it gets choppy. Anyway, we're going to take a break. Come back with the one and only Taylor Sheridan.

All right. So I never asked for a lot of guests. We have a great booker named Allison who's always like, do you want this person, you want that person? I always send her a very short list. And Taylor Sheridan has always been on the list. I've always wanted to talk to you. Really admire your career, everything you've done and your productivity. And now all of a sudden you wrote a book, too, just when I was like, what's up with this guy?

How does he keep doing it? How does you keep churning this stuff out? And now you're coming after books. I have so many questions for you. What made you want to write a book on top of everything else you're doing? Well, so it's a bit of a long story. Luckily, you've got a long podcast, so we have time for it. It's true.

So you got to go back to 2003 about, okay? Yeah, about four. I'm living in L.A. And there was a gym about, oh, two-thirds of a mile from this apartment that I had. And me and my roommate had run over there and work out every day because we're actors and anything else to do until we go to whatever shitty job we're going to. And there was a guy that started working out there. And this dude was, he looked very different than the typical West Hollywood gym crowd.

I mean, this dude was jacked with all these prison tats, not the, not the tribal bullshit that a bunch of Hollywood actors get. Like stuff was done home. Right. Anyway, so he was very fascinating with fitness. he'd ask me this and I'd ask him that. We kind of became friends over the court, you know, just in the gym. And then he became a personal trainer there.

Got certified and did all that deal. And he actually trained my wife. So he became pretty good friends. One day we were talking and he just bullshitting over lunch and he kind of casually mentioned. I think I'd mentioned a movie or something and he hadn't seen it. I mentioned in there. And I'm like, where have you been in a cave? for the past 17 or 20 years?

He's like, no, I was in prison. And I said, oh, well, walk me through that. What happened was some kind of accident? He goes, no, no, no. I was a criminal. You know, I was a career criminal. I was a drug dealing, armed robbing, burglaring criminal. And so I spent most of my life in prison and most of my adult life.

And then I discovered fitness in prison. and that's really, I didn't want to spend my whole pretty terrible place. And so I got clean, got clean, got straight, really focused on fitness, and now I'm a personal trainer, and someday you watch, I'm going to have my own gym. And within, I'd say, five years of that, he did have his own gym. And it became the biggest privately owned personal training gym in L.A., which is saying something, because there's nothing in L.A. but gyms. and, you know, freaking laser surgery,

just the stuff that's in L.A. Coughful. It was very different than the gyms in L.A. It felt like a gym, right? He's playing the only music he knew. So like 80s rock and 70s rock. And it was a really cool place. And he was doing really well.

And I started having success with storytelling. And then I got the hell out. I moved out of L.A. in 2013. moved up to Wyoming, and we'd check in every so often. And he actually wrote a screenplay about his life, right? His life of crime. Pretty good. He sent it to me once, and I'm like, pretty good, man.

Nothing ever came of that for him, but it stayed in my mind. Keep moving forward to 2020 and COVID hits. and I'm the only film production, TV production in America filming. I'm the first one to go back to work. And the way I was able to convince the Screen Actors Guild and the Directors Guild and all these guilds is the safest place this crew can be is on a big ranch in Montana. Right? There's no, if everyone's negative when we get there, we can't give it to anybody,

as long as nobody leaves. So they said that's fine. Stay on the ranch. So then I wanted to, I wanted to, so we didn't all go crazy. I called, I wanted to build a gym on the ranch. So I called Tom and said, hey, can you give me a connection to whoever you get your gym equipment from? I need to buy a bunch.

And mine, they shut me down. And I said, what do you mean they shut you down? We're closed. They shut, L.A. shut down. Well, every business is shut down. You can't have a gym right now. We're on lockdown. And I said, well, don't sell all your equipment.

What are you going to do when it opens back up? Just sign up for that PPE stuff. And, you know, Newsom's sending money to everybody else. They'll probably send something to you. And he's like, they're not sending it to white ex-cons, buddy. I'm like, I've already applied. I'm not getting any money. And I said, okay, I'll send a flatbed.

And I sent a flatbed down. I bought a pile of. So I didn't talk to him again, you know, years go by. And he reached out. And, you know, by this point, I got so many shows going, I'm so busy. It's, you know, someone's got to call me about 10 times for me to actually get a chance to call them back. And I finally reached back out to him and said, hey, how's it going? And he said, man, I'm in a real bad way, Julia, go kind of handle that.

That's coming up the road. I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, they found a mass angle father. His partner had died. And he's trying to raise his five-year-old girl. And he's an ex-con. He's a felon. And he cannot find any work, reliable work with enough daycare to take care of this kid.

And so he was asking me about the movie business. Is there anything that he could do for me? And I said, I mean, I can probably get you some stunt work or something, you know, transportation department. I don't know. Something, but you're going to be working 14 hour days. You're not going to be with your kid.

I don't know how that's helpful. And he asked me, said, can you give me a loan? I mean, I got one more months rent. Can you get me a loan to figure it out? And I told him,

I said, look, I have a 100% failure rate of loan and money to friends and them still being friends. So I can't do that. I'm not a bank. I said,

but let me think. There's, everyone has a story. Right? And your story has value. So let me just think about what that would be. And there's a book that I had read many, many years prior to this called The World's Most Dangerous Places. And it was written by a guy named Robert Peltin Young. And it's the most fascinating thing I'd ever read. It's essentially a travel guide for war correspondence about every single place where there's a war going on in the world. And this is a very accomplished war correspondent who wrote it. And at times it was very cynical and at times it was laugh out loud funny. And then at times it was very thoughtful. And I thought we're mad for a book.

And he's not the only one who's done something like that. You could look at, you'll remember this from the 80s, oh, anything for dummies, right? House building for dummies, Spanish for dummies. whatever it is. And they had taken a similar format and made it very digestible. So I just thought how interesting and would it be if we wrote a travel guide for prison. And to be, for the most part, I think, is a really good deterrence to someone from going there, right? But also, if someone did happen to do something dumb, now their career criminal, this book isn't for them, and they know it anyway.

It's really for a guy like you and me, because everyone's always wondered if you've ever watched Locked Up or any of these shows, what would I do? How would I navigate that world if I find myself in it? And so here's an expert in that, right? Here's someone who spent 17 years in state and federal prism of security prisons and had to navigate the worst of the worst of the worst and came out, came out good, came out not a criminal, right, made those choices, a success story. So I called him back and I said, look, here's what we're going to do. And it's going to be work. We're going to write a book. And it's going to be how to not die in prison. And we're going to use your experience. And I've done a ton of research about prisons

because I've got a TV show about prisons. But that's research. It's not. first-hension of a storyteller and a guy who's already proven to me that he's good at telling stories coming together to explore this world and how to get through it or hopefully how to never go and and so that's what we did so he wrote the first three chapters and i write the intro and then he writes the body and and together we shaped the body of that and we took that out synit to all the publishers, and Simon and Juster stuck their hand up. And Simon and Schuster said, we want to put this out. We want to do it.

And I said, great. And Tom rolled up with sleeves, and I rolled up mine, and we sat down, and we came up with this. So if we were doing this in person, I would have interrupted you like 10 times. So she were telling that because I thought this book was so interesting. All of my experience from knowing anything about prison is just from TV. movies, right? And it's, and it's like, it could go from like Shawshank to the show you did or a million things, Jericho, Mile going way back. But this is like so detailed. It's almost like, you have glossaries in there. You have all these. Do not do this. Do not. I thought it was really,

I thought it was really interesting. And I've never read a book like it. It's one of those things where prisons have been such a huge part of, you know, any society. But nobody really knows anything that happens in there other than what they basically watch or read. Yeah, you know, so, and I talk about this in the book, there is a scene in episode three of the first season of mayor of where a man is arrested for killing a child. And it actually is a parole violation. So the guy doesn't go to county. He goes straight back to prison immediately. and when he comes in, there's this frenzy, right?

Because a child killer is the one person in prison. Everyone can look at and say, I may have done this, but I never did that, right? And so there's a bull's eye on these guys. And we filmed this scene where they, and after the first take, I start hearing buzz over the radio. We need a medic. actually we need two medics

and I run upstairs to see what happened. Why do we need a medic? Someone have a heart attack? And most of the extras in this scene were ex-cons who had actually stayed in this prison,

which had been decommissioned, so now it's empty. Of course, we're paying a few hundred bucks a day to these guys and there's not any work because it's COVID. And so they jumped at it, right? And two of them had panic attacks that were so bad that they had to go to the hospital. And then there was a third one who, you know, we closed them in and locked them in the cells. And this guy starts screaming, you got to let me out.

I can't do this. And we let him out. And he's like, I starts taking off. And it's like, I'm sorry. I can't, you know, you don't have to pay me. I said, no, no, no. For what I just put you through, we're going to pay you. And they left.

They were done. They wanted absolutely no part of even reenacting it. So that was the first thing. Obviously, we all can imagine and surmise that it's a terrible place, right? It's not designed to rehabilitate. It's a whole lot of people have proven to society that they can't get along with society. We crammed them all together and along with each other. So it's a model that isn't designed to in any way rehabilitate.

It's just they're on a big old time out for however long that may be. Right. But it was so fascinating to me that I thought just what a really rich world to explore. And I would imagine somebody reads this book and they're thinking about losing, losing their temper or they're thinking about, I'll have another drink. I can still drive. Because here's the very real world consequences of that. Yeah, Oz beat that out of me, but my five years or six years, whatever was watching Oz. I love that show. So the story, the story with you, which everybody knows at this point, was you came late into the writing thing,

right? You were an actor, then you were acting coach, all that. And you didn't really start writing until 41. And then you became probably the most prolific writer of the last 15 years in all the shows and movies that you've done, really in the last, it's been like decade and a half, basically. Yeah.

Did you, I have a million questions about this, but did you, were you writing before age 40? Like, or did you just dive into it then? I didn't understand that part. No, no. Not in any way that, no. it's not a skill that I had developed. But you have to remember I'd read,

I don't know, by that point, 5,000 scripts, 10,000 scripts. And of those scripts, 9,9004 were bad. You know, I can recount, for the 15 years that I was in Hollywood, I can recount to this day, the excellent scripts that I read, right? I still remember.

And there were very few that I read and I thought, wow, that's going to be something. So most of them are bad. And so I knew when I started writing was to simply not do what everyone else was doing. And what everyone else was doing. and what everyone else was doing was taking shortcuts, essentially breaking all the very basic fundamental rules of storytelling, because they couldn't figure out their story.

And so by that, I mean this. With a movie, you're supposed to show me what's happening. The camera is supposed to move the story. The dialogue is supposed to tell me how the, the people in this world feel about what's happening or what they hope to do or what they wish they hadn't done or had done. Right? So if you stick to that one very basic rule from the beginning,

never have a character tell me something that the camera should show me. And if you go back and watch movies that maybe you like the premise and maybe you like the way it started and then toward the end, happen. It's just, and it just felt a little easy because they couldn't figure out an intelligent way in the story to show me something, so they just had this character say it. All these Marvel movies do it at nauseam, where they will just have information dumps that you have to follow to get to the action rather than actually moving plot with action, right? And then the other thing that I did was basically find the most interesting thing, most interesting way to say anything.

I'll take a scene from hell or high water where you have Jeff Bridges character walk in and he's questioning this waitress about the two boys that just robbed the bank across the street. and he says, you know, describe them. And she doesn't mention height or hair color. She mentions, you know, they look, you know, they're young enough to know better, but you're too old to know better. And still, you know, and they'll look brokered than these guys over here, but better than these guys over here. And so just find interesting ways of saying they're in their mid-30s and they were dressed

casually and one's got blonde hair and one's got red hair. Right? So what's the more interesting way of describing something or somebody? And then I think the other thing that I try to do, and this probably comes from me having been a journeyman actor, which means most of my roles were smaller roles or guest star roles. I always try to make the impact to the overall story. In other words, those individuals that are just there to push the plot along somehow have an impact on our. our lead character, whether they make them recognize something about this place or feel something or mirror something in their own lives, that all these little people have a big impact on our, on our main character, on our protagonist. And then that allows the audience to feel completely submerged in a world, right? Because now everybody has a point of view, everyone,

the guy at the gas station, the waitress, the... Right. You know, what you said about letting the... people show you versus writing all the dialogue for them to tell the thing. Tarantino had this thing about Steve McQueen, about how a lot of the stuff that he would do was just him reading situations and just him being a movie star and just the concept of movie stardom sometimes doesn't have to be about dialogue, but just about seeming like you're a movie star on a screen and soaking things in

and stuff you do with your eyes. I notice like with your shows, a lot of times it's about, like even the show, the Michelle Fifer show, which of course I loved because I enjoy other shows, but a lot of it is sometimes

it'll just be her staring out, you know, having a glass of wine at the end of the show and just trying to process stuff, you know, and thinking about things. Like there's moments like that. And I don't know if,

I don't know if shows and movies are doing that in the same way anymore. They're always like, especially now in the streaming era, everything's in a, rush. Everything's like they have to tell you, here's the murder that we have to solve. And you're going to see the murder in the first three minutes. And we're going to, but it seems like your show is a way more patient. Yeah. And there's a few, I think, explanations for that.

Okay. And one is, I think the most important one is who's writing these stories. Okay. And this isn't an indictment of other writers. But, but, But where are they? Well, if they're in LA or they're in New York. And if you're a Purdue are, if you allow this business to do it to you, you are from the second you wake up to the second you go to bed, you are, you're going. You're meeting this, that meeting, this meeting, tone meeting,

prop meeting, casting this. Then I got to go sit with my room of writers and we're going to put a bunch of stuff on a whiteboard and we're going to outline and you take this and I'll write that and you do this. And then I got to go home to my kids or my wife or my husband or whoever. And we're going to try and carve out two hours of meaningful relationship and then off to bed we go. Where in that is the time to reflect? I live in the country. I live in the middle of nowhere.

So before I start riding every day, I take about a 30-minute walk. And there's no traffic because the road's mine. It's on my ranch. And I just think. and and I'm also not scared to leave my phone behind. So I had time to reflect and actually think like a character. The bigger challenge, and I'm very fortunate. Wait, can you hold on that one thing?

When you're reflecting, are you thinking about ideas for shows or show, like, are you just thinking about life? Like, what are you thinking about? It depends. It depends. sometimes I'm just and I think this is with any storyteller when you can get to a quiet place and I don't mean a physical quiet place

a quiet place inside yourself the idea is come you don't have to go hunt them right they just come so you know fortunately I'm the only person around because if I wasn't people would think there's this on this dirt road talking to himself and

but that's what happens you know I just my routine is is very set and and when I'm writing I've always returned I'm in the cat this is the first place I ever bought this this house up here in Wyoming and it is an 1,800 square feet and I always come back here because this is where I can control the quiet and this is where I can get the most done so the second probably greater in influence upon writers into the industry. And it didn't used to be this way when Steve McQueen was a movie star at Paramount, right?

And Bobby Evans ran the, ran the studio because writers were turned loose. Directors were turned completely loose. There weren't endless rewrites. There weren't meetings with executives about tone and mood and all this nonsense, right? And then you didn't have a lot of people. And by the way, the studio executives and the network executives, native group in the industry, right? These are marketing executives for the most part.

Or maybe they, whatever they studied law, whatever. Then they came and they got a job in the mailroom at CIA or WME and hated that shit. And so then they ended up as an intern at some network. And then through attrition, they find themselves the head of development. Well, what do you know about developing story? You know nothing. So they get terrified, panicked. that the audience won't get it because they actually have no storytellers.

So they don't get it. So it needs to be written on the page. There's all this stuff. They want backstory. They want basically they want synopsies of who all these characters' lives are before we meet the character, none of which is applicable to whatever conflict the character is facing. I've had many actors come up and ask me, so what's my backstory? I said, you have carte blanche.

You don't have a backstory. character did not exist until I wrote them on that horse on that hill. Didn't exist. So I'm looking through very narrow windows. But our business at this point is truly governed by these executives because they're the ones that are going to determine whether or not your script is going to go into production. And they're going to try and control every element of that. The greatest thing that I have is I came up in independent film, right?

So the first movie that I made was Sicario, that's an independent movie. Thunder Road, Basilis Wanuk, he went out and raised the money from, and they just gave us a chunk of cash. And we went and hired who we wanted to hire and made it. The same thing with hell or high water and the same thing with Wind River. With Wind River, I mean, that money came from an Indian tribe in Louisiana. They're just here. Go do it. I never saw a producer.

One time I was talking to my DP, we're standing on the top of this mountain. And I said, you know, we never met anyone who gave us this money. Like, I have no idea. We never met him. I don't know. We could just leave.

We could go, we don't even have to make the movie. We just, this is a tremendous amount of responsibility for someone who's never done it before. But that, but I, so every decision that I got to make, I made, and I got to make it for what I thought was best for the story.

And since I wrote the story, I felt the most qualified to do that. So when I made my deal with Paramount, I made that same deal. I said, this is not a democracy. There's no committee. You're going to pay me and you're going to give me a bunch of money and I'm going to deliver you these shows, one of them, because I'm just not that special. I'm pretty common and I'm going to tell stories that common people are going to understand. And that's most of America.

You're not going to win no Emmys with me, but I'm not trying to win Emmys. That's not my goal. My goal is to sit somebody on their couch and move them, make them think, make them laugh, scare the shit out of them, excite them. That's what I want to do, because that's what I want from a show,

right? I don't want to be, I don't want to be preached to. I don't want someone to tell me how to think or why I shouldn't think this or should think, look through this rectangle box and go to another world and escape. And so I have such a streamlined, system that I'm able to create this massive volume of product.

And I bet I work less than a guy who has one or two shows on the air. I want to talk about that system, but something you said earlier, this is like the biggest passion point of mind with anything with TV. Because over and over again, the best shows or the best ideas of the most successful things seem to come from like one vision, one voice, maybe two, but usually it's one person. And those are the best shows that we care about the most.

And over and over again, all the streamers and the studios, they seem like they ignore that. That instead of like the one voice, it's like, well, now here are ideas. And now it's like you're trying to do creativity by consensus, which is the exact opposite of all the greatest shows we have. So why do we do it that way? the reason they do it that way is to justify their jobs. And they're not wrong. So when I first started at Paramount, there was a huge development department, right?

There were all these people whose job it was to sit there and give me notes and tell me what to do and how to do it and this and that and the other. And after four years, they got rid of that department. So all those people got fired. Right. Because they didn't need them. They had no job.

because I wasn't returning their calls. I wasn't, I wanted, I didn't, I didn't respect because they're not, they don't do what I do. Right. You know, let the story teller. Job justification. Yeah.

And if you look at some of the, I give Taylor, I give Taylor Sheridan notes. What do you give them, what are you giving them notes for? He doesn't need your notes. No. And if you look at,

if you look at some of the real bellwether shows, right? Some of the, some of the shows that, that really, and there's a number of them, You can go back to early Stephen Botchko, David Milch, and these guys that were David E. Kelly's another one that guy. Right?

No one gave that dude notes. And he was a one-man band. He writes all his. That guy was writing Chicago Hope. That's 22 episodes of television. And what's the other one that he had on? He had three shows on the air at the same time. All right.

All right. Bill. The practice. He had picket fences. and he's writing every word himself, making every decision, and he obviously built a very tight team of filmmakers around him, right?

Those shows was excellent. Right. Excellent. Well, when you talk about your system, I think this is part of the genius of what you've figured out. You've had all the same people, basically, that you had your first movie.

And you have this whole, infrastructure in place so that when you're making stuff, you have like a shorthand. It doesn't need to be three months to set up. You can do it in four weeks. And that's the biggest reason you have all these shows, right? It's even better than, you know, I have editors assistants that are now senior editors. I have production assistants, you know, guys that were running around getting coffee that are now first assistant directors, this argue one of the top three most important people on the set. I have camera operators that are now directors.

I have an editor who's now a director. I have directors who are now also producer directors and executive directors. I promote from within exclusively. I have a lead costume designer that used to be an assistant costumer. I have a assistant, literally, not even probably not even supposed to be in props.

The kids like 15 years old, he's just helping his dad. Now he's a prop master. So is his sister. And they only know one way to do it. They only know the way that we do it. So there's no arguing or debating about what cameras we're going to use. There's no debating about the lens package.

There's no, I don't have to teach anyone the color palette. Nothing. They know what I like and don't like. And so the system is so streamlined. Our days are so much easier. I had to learn this, right? Wind River was incredibly difficult for me to do. The first two seasons of Yellowstone were incredibly difficult.

And then I figured it out. And I had to get rid of a lot of people along the way. I had to fire a lot of people who didn't see it my way and wanted me to conform to the way that the business does it, as opposed to the way that I wanted to do it. And so all we really do is make everything the exact same way we made Wind River, just on a much larger scale, right? That was a gorilla. Now we make $235 million dollar gorilla

Gorilla television series. Right. Well, one of the things you're good at is you're targeting people who have actors, lead actors, who have had real success, but you somehow work well with them. And now because you've had success, they want to work with you.

So now you have somebody like Billy Bob, you have Landman. He's like literally the perfect guy on the planet to be in Landman, but he also wants to be in the landman. But he also wants to be in the, landman, which I don't, maybe in 2015, you're not able to convince them. But, you know, now, now it seems like you're getting whatever actors and actresses you want, right?

I was getting, I was getting whatever I wanted from day one as far as actors goes with Sicario. I mean, those are, those were our top choices, right? Oh, really? The same. Oh, yeah, same with Hell or High Water. I mean, I told, I told David McKenzie, I said, look, I wrote this role. I wrote it for Ben Foster. I wrote it for Ben Foster. And they kept looking for everybody. And I said, I don't know. You could just hire you to do that.

And then he actually went on a, he got on a yacht and went for a week trip with his family where he had no cell service and they still hadn't pulled the trigger on Ben. And I just said, fuck it, I'm hiring him. So I just called this agent up and said, he's hired. We got him. He said, really?

I said, yeah. I had no authority to do it whatsoever. So then I got just called the costume. Call Ben Foster, get his sizes. Because with SAG, as soon as the costume designer calls, you're booked. You're booked. So when he got off the boat. But it was the perfect choice.

So, yes, I've been fortunate to get the actors that I wanted, but I was an actor. I write for actors. I write words that they want to say. And now I do it even differently. So with Billy Bob, with Kurt Russell and Michelle, Harrison Ford, Helen Mirren, that's who I had envisioned for the roles, but I hadn't written a word. And I told Billy Bob, I said, here's my idea. This is the show I want to do.

I'm going to do it if you don't want to play the role. I'm not going to go try and fit a circle in a square, but I'll write it for you. And he said, okay, Helen and Harrison said the same thing. Michelle was a little bit tougher sell, but she finally acquiesced. and she was terrified to commit to something she'd never read a word. But when a writer is writing specifically for an actor, right, in a role that they were born to play, how can that not work? Wait a second.

You have to tell the audience exactly what you told Billy Bob Landman was, because I actually know this and I thought it was great. So what did you tell them? I said, I want to make a drama with bad Santa running an oil company. And he was like, I'm in? He's like, that's the greatest fucking thing I've ever heard in my life. Yeah, let's do it. So when you're coming up with these ideas, do you have a piece of the idea?

Do you have the whole thing played out? Is it just as simple as that where you're like, bad Santa runs an oil company? Okay, that's something. Or is it like, are there cases where you're like, Like, oh, no, I'm way more into this. It's always a lightning bolt, right? Every time it's a lightning bolt. So for Landman, a buddy of mine from high school worked out in Odessa Midland, and he was essentially,

oh, some type of site manager would be the term, right, with the title. But essentially, he's just a problem solver. He's a crisis manager, right? of which they're, and I'm watching TV and some guy, some wing nuts driving through the streets of Odessa shooting off a gun, shoots like seven or eight people before the police run him down and kill him. And I knew my buddy was in Odessa and I knew he's always driving around. So I just called him and said, hey, make it sure you're good. He said, good.

What do you talk about? And I said, well, there's some lunatic running around Adesa shooting people. and it's all over the news and he just starts laughing and he says that happens here every day every day he goes it just happens out in the patch he goes

this place you don't understand what this place is he started telling me stories and that's when I got the idea for Landman and then coincidentally not six weeks later so I pitched the idea

to Paramount and not six weeks later this podcast drops that Christian Wallace from Texas Monthly had done. And I listened to it. And my apartment, you know, hey, have you heard about this podcast? I said, I'm listening to it right now. It's awesome. And he said, we're worried that someone's going to try and buy that and make a competing show.

And I said, well, then you buy it. I mean, this is endless stories we can explore. Let me talk to this Christian guy. So I talked to Christian who had been it. he had been a roughneck and was a very thoughtful, good writer. And he didn't know how to write a screenplay, but I didn't need him to. I just needed someone to help me manage the autithist off and make sure that we tell the story. I'm a big believer in holding a mirror up to the world and writing down the reflection

and not having any judgment on it and making it truly, truly authentic. Like, this is what it is. If I make a movie about a ranching family in Montana, I have to make that movie for professional cowboys, right? They have to sign off on it first. If I make a movie about the military and the CIA, those guys have to watch it and wonder, how did this guy know about it? It has to feel that real. So the same thing with this.

I need experts. I need experts that can help me get immersed in the world to deeply understand it. So yeah, no, but it did start out. And that's kind of why it's tonally so schizophrenic land man, which I like. I like a show to make me think and then do something that's almost vaudevillian, right? That's cartoonish because all of our lives are kind of cartoonish, if you think about it, right?

So these ridiculous dinners that are Angela's fantasy of what are, and they're so preposterous and nobody wants to do them, which is a repeating theme, but she keeps doing it because it's her fantasy of what, of what a family's supposed to do, but her family's so non-traditional. It's so ridiculous,

all these strangers living in this house together. So it's a lot of fun to do that show. Well, you also, another thing you do that I've never seen anybody else do, you'll grab these really good actors or known actors, and maybe their schedule won't allow them to be in the show as much as you need them in the first season

or maybe you want them for season two. How you use DeMe More in Landman, it was like she's one of the stars of Landman and she wasn't in it that much, but your whole idea for her was season two, that's when you were going to need her. And I told her, when I met with Demi about that, I said, look, here's the thing.

You're going to be an extra in this show for seven episodes. You're an extra. And the critics are going to fuck. They are going to come after me. I'm underutilizing this. Can't write for women, all this nonsense. And then I'm going to kill your husband and you're going to have to run the oil company. But I said, but, and I have a very, you know, the critics in me, I don't care what they think.

And it annoys the shit out of them that I don't care. And I'll be the first to tell you that there are things. I do that rage bait them a bit, and this is one of them, right? And episodes to where they could have watched it and realized that flip, but I did, and I just sent them the first three. Because fuck them, honestly, right? And so with DeMe, I knew that when we put it all on her shoulders from an audience standpoint, you've just seen her in little snippets as this housewife, right, in the background,

living this fantasy. So we've set her up by omission to be someone that the audience has already predisposed to believe can't do this, capable of doing this job. Right. And so not only does she have to overcome every character in this world's opinion of her, but now she has to overcome the audience's predetermined opinion of her. And I let her do it in the first scene of season two. Right. I give her a monologue that basically says, you gave her too.

I'm meaner than my. Yeah. Yeah. Where I say, you know, I'm essentially, I'm the bigger bear and you're about to learn it. How many questions it at times that she's a true wildcatter like her husband, betting everything on this impossible drill, which is what, and that, and that's actually based on an actual, there's a woman who runs an oil company in Texas, a wildcatter. And she, that was her rig that I filmed, that shallow rig. And the story of that rig blowing and then that insurance money being used to double down, that actually happened. And she's risked $2 billion she does not have, both the character and the real person, the character's based on, on a lottery ticket. And it's insanity.

But if the lottery ticket hits, it's, you know, you're talking, you're talking, not just generational wealth. You're talking, I don't even,

it's hard to comprehend the numbers you're talking. And it, and that's the riverboat gambler addiction that these wildcatters have. It's fascinating. Think of the fortunes that it, think the Hunt family, for example,

you know, that's in the 1920s, did the same thing, wildcatting. And a hundred years later, the family's still this institution in North Texas. So you'll throw, because I've felt that you were doing this. Sometimes you'll throw stuff in a show specifically as like a this to the critics or just to mess with them.

It does feel like you're tweaking sometimes. Pagan, pagan roommate. that's one of the few times the network and even some of the actors called me and said, you sure that you don't want to compress the resolution of Pagan and Ainsley what you do at episode 10

where they become friends and you don't want to put that in episode 9? I said, no. No, exactly for the reason that you're asking. I want to piss you off a little. And then, oh, how dare I? And then you watch the next week and go, oh, uh-oh, got me to judge what by.

Yeah, that's the difference between TV and a movie. Right? The TV show's not over. So to sit there and treat an episode as though we've completed anything is ridiculous. Right? It's not done. I'm not done storytelling. You just saw a little sliver.

You can't judge the thing till it's done. It's not like a movie. How many seasons are, Like you're doing Land Manor, I don't know, pick a show. Are you planning how many seasons ahead? For me, five years. Five years. Five years, max.

Then, because beyond that, now it's just problem with a week. Right. And go back to, remember that show, Beverly Hills, 90210. I love that show. Remember that show way back to day? Right. So think about that show for a minute. So Jason Priestley's the big heart throb, and he's the guy, and they take him on this story arc,

and then everyone gets a little tired of Jason Prousty. So then they're guy now. He's the heart throb, he's this, and then that kind of peters out, and then they take Brian Austin Green. It's his turn. We do the same exact thing we did with the other two. So your lead characters that you've been following have fallen back, and this next one takes place, and Ian Zering's next, and now it's just romance of the week, right?

because it went too long. So if you go into them knowing this is the length of time that we're going to explore and then have the courage to end it at that point in time, now you have a completed thing. And it stands up and you can rewatch it. The amount of people that rewatch 1883 and 1923 in these basically long-form movies that are just designed to be digested over a short period, Madison is the same way.

It's a six-episode season, right? Yeah. So you, I mean, I know where that, I know where every show ends. I know how they all end. And I think you have to know how they end. Or if you don't, how do you know where you're going? You may not have the ending,

but you need to know thematically, how does this world resolve? What are you, what are we saying? Right. And if you know that, then you can write toward that. And, you know, with Yellowstone, Kevin was only supposed to be in the first three seasons. That was in his contract. In my mind, that's when his youngest son takes over.

And then we have to watch this and lose that ranch over, you know, or not lose the ranch, whatever the case is going to be. But the network was so scared of not having Kevin be a part of it, even though Kevin was ready, he was ready to go. He had other things he wanted to do, but he stayed on for another two seasons. And that was just because the show was such a behemoth. It was such a huge hit that the notion of giving up a hit before it had run out of juice to squeeze is very foreign to a network.

And there was even pressure from some of the cable companies wanting to put it in their deals that they were going to get an X number of seasons of Yellowstone to re-up with whatever this cable company is. I mean, that's the power of a really big hit show. But creatively, that can run in opposition. And finally, Kevin hit a point where he's like, I got to do my own thing. And I'm like, I got to do my own thing, too. So, so, but we, we had originally conceived it together that it was three seasons. and then the baton is handed, or if that wouldn't have been better for the show,

because we had to tread water for a bit there. I think it was pretty evident. Well, I think COVID ballooned that show. It was already a big show, and then I felt like in COVID, when everybody was trying to catch up on stuff, and what the fuck am I going to do for four months? I don't know.

I've watched another show I haven't seen yet. And all of a sudden, it felt like Yellowstone was somehow growing. It was crazy. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, what was there to do? Everybody was stuck at home.

Nothing. Yeah. And then whenever, which was in different and different places, you know, the big cities were shut down for, you know, L.A. was shut down for over a year. Yeah. At New York for maybe six months or more. I don't know how long. I didn't go to either of them, but, you know, I had friends in L.A. still driving around with a fucking mask on in 23.

You know, what are you guys doing? It's over. We called them lunatics. You're not to do that anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I was driving my daughter to Arizona for soccer tournaments because they wouldn't let anyone, even in the fall of 2020, they wouldn't let like any sort of high school club soccer stuff

happen. So you'd have to drive across the line to where it was. So the good news is we got to spend a lot of time together. It was an interesting disease. It's, you know, it's the first disease in history that doesn't spread it. protests. I don't know if you're aware of that. Yeah, we found that out. Yeah. Wait, I had a couple more questions for you about actors.

Cole Houser, who I always loved, you seem to find over and over again these people where I'm like, oh, I was like that person. Like, Kathy Riley was, she was unbelievable in flight. She'd been in some good stuff. So I wasn't surprised she took off. But Cole Houser, like he was in Goodwell hunting with Affleck and Damon and he was at school ties. Like, he was around for a while and nobody unlocked them and then you unlocked them. So how'd you unlock them? The movie that I saw

that made me and I remember him from Dazin Confused, right? That was a great role that he did. But it was he played in pitch black

with Vin Diesel and Gretchen Moll. And and he was so good and he was such a he was such a heavy actor that understood nuance and and what i mean by that is there's actors who could convey emotion uh there's an actors who who can just their essence feels believable and then there's wordsmiths someone that understands which syllable of a word you stress changes the meaning or the emphasis and and and there aren't as many that have that right

and and to have that and have an emotional presence those are the great ones right and and and he has that uh and and and maybe he has it he's not a traditional looking pretty boy leading man and that may be one of the reasons that the business was he's a dude he's a man's man and at a time he came up at a time when they were buying sort of pretty and undrogynous they didn't want

that in a man and our business didn't foster that they didn't develop that they really wanted something that they felt was a little safer or more relatable whatever the case may be and he felt a little more throwback he felt a little more 70s as an actor

that style, which is what I grew up with, right? That's what acting that I was always drawn to. And so he didn't even audition. I just, we just, I just knew it was it. I just knew. So when you're approaching like a TV show or a movie, because I was feel like the best way something's going to succeed is like, you're bringing me into a world.

I don't know anything about this world. Landman Zee is the example of this. It's like, I don't fucking know anything about how they make oil in Texas. So you're just pulling me into that. It seems like you're the best at this. Every TV show or movie you do, you're pulling me into something that I don't really know that much about. So is that intentional or is that just the outcome?

You have to understand for me, the landscape is the main character that everyone's reaction. to. So what's the star of the Madison? The Madison River, this idyllic place that has this incredible ability to heal, right? Which is, it's, it is the land. It is, it is land that's so, that people would kill for, that they would die for, right? It has so much value and, and is so grand. Same thing with 23. Same thing with 83. With the story of the mayor of Kingstown is the opposite, right?

Here's a place that is broken. It's a complete failed society. When your last business, including to is human incarceration as a city, you're done. Right. That's it. Attracting prisons, if that's the business you're getting, then look what you're attracting with those prisons.

and now you've sunk your city, right? So even though the city is really the antagonist in that one, it's still the main character. With lioness, it is the, it is the, forget good or bad oral, it's stated constantly, the main character of that is our societal survival, as perceived through people who do not apply morality to those decisions. Morality is another agency.

Their job is to make sure that the United States remains the United States. Period in the story. Someone else's job to interpret if the way we do that is good or bad. So those to me are really interesting landscapes. For Lioness, for an example, we've seen that a version of that, a version of that world a number of times. I just juxtaposed it and made the James Bond character a woman. And let's watch a woman deal with having two daughters that she's not present to raise.

And that the husband has to be the one that stays at home and be passive and question why she has to do this. And let's watch that discussion and that debate from a different perspective. Yeah, another thing that I love about your shows is you find yourself, like my wife, we loved 1883 and 1920. We love those shows. But my wife was always, we would watch 1883. And my wife was like, I would have been really good in the 1800s. I just think that that could have been my best time.

I would have, like, known how to make stuff. I could have defended myself. Like, I just would have owned 1883. And I'm like, yeah, part of, part of, part of, the greatness of these shows you just put yourself in. I would have done terrible because I had bad eyesight. I feel like I just would have been killed. I just would have been done immediately. She would have been great. She probably would have been running a small town. But it's funny, like, watching these different things and being like, how would I fit in in this? Where would

I fit in Yellowstone? Where would I fit in the land man? Just because I don't know anything about those worlds. But I'm sure you get that all the time. People like, I would have been awesome in the 1880s. But we all, I mean, isn't that part of the great joy of, of storytelling and witnessing it, whether it's, whether you read it in a book or whether it's a TV show or a movie or wondering what that character's life is like right after the movie's over? What did they do after that? Like, that's a fascinating thing.

And that's the greatest compliment you can give the storyteller because they successfully built a world for you. Right. Well, you also flip something. Like in 18, there's stuff in those shows that you always knew, but you didn't really think about. So like in the 1880s, there's really no rules, right? You go somewhere and it's not like they have a set of laws or anything in place and people can just fucking go nuts.

So you're defending yourself on a totally different level at all times. I've just never really thought about that that much. Then I'm watching the show. Like, fuck, what would I do? The only, it was completely self-policing, right? You had to determine what your own boundaries were. If you, if you as an armed gunman, you're traveling across the planes and you come across weak man and his wife and two daughters, the only, there are no consequences of actions

other than losing the gunfight. which you can assess pretty quickly whether you're going to do that. So what's going to keep you from killing the dude and robbing him blind, killing the wife, raping the wife,

selling the kid, what's going to keep you only you? Right. That's it. There was no law. That's great. A fascinating and a pretty terrible time because there were plenty of people

that didn't have, there was no boundary for them. Right. Did you ever think in your wildest dreams Yellowstone would turn into what it turned into? Like not only a massive, probably the biggest show of the last 10 years, but also a universe that went backwards and forwards. Like when did you realize what the fuck? Look, when HBO, when I, you know, I sold this show to HBO first. And I told them in 2015, show on television, I told them that.

You told them... And I told them it's going to be the biggest show on television, period, and the story. And when the executives at Paramount read it, they couldn't believe it was available. Couldn't believe it. They were shocked that no one saw it. And it scared everybody. And I had the argument many times that they said, look, they just tried to do this. They made that movie Cowboys and Aliens, and the Cowboys genre dead.

What's dead is dumb movies about Cowboys and Aliens. That's a bad genre. Maybe don't do that. But every time someone makes a good Western, it's a fucking hit. Every time. Unforgiven. 310 to Yuma, Silverado, they're all hits. Right.

Because it's a very uniquely American thing to explore. That period's fascinating to us. To look at it's the closest thing that we had to a medieval times, right? That is our dark ages. Our medieval period was the mid-18, post-Civil War 1800s.

Are there any shows in the last 10 years that you've been jealous of? I gotta be honest with you. I haven't seen anything. I haven't watched any other shows. Oh, you're just locked into all your, well, you're doing seven shows.

You probably have to concentrate. Well, I mean, look, here's how I expect. explain it. You're a dentist. Okay. When you cough is, do you look at pictures of teeth? Right. You know? Yeah. I don't want to watch anyone. I don't want to watch my own shows when I come home. I got to, you know, I don't. So, so no, I haven't seen anything. We have to end, because I know you're running low on time. We have to end on Sicario, which is an incredibly important movie in the Grant Land Ringer universe that I am in. That's my Yellowstone universe. We did it for rewatchables. This movie podcast we have a couple months ago.

It's a movie that people really liked when it came out. And it feels like it's gaining steam and growing as the years pass and has become, I think, one of the best movies of the 2010s. I'm sure you knew it was good when you were doing it. But did you ever think it would have a tale like it's had? I mean, and I don't want this to sound arrogant. I've never taken a movie out. I've never, you know, all my scripts are specs.

In other words, I don't get hired to write them. I have an idea. I sit and I go sell it and sell it with the intention of making it. So typically with my projects, I either put into them a penalty, which makes it like if you're not going to make it, I'm going to make it really painful for you to not make it. Or I'm going to mandate in the contract that you make it, that you have no choice.

Yeah. And so I don't take something out if I don't think it's going to be a hit and it's going to be really, really impactful, then I don't make it. Then to me, it's not ready to be taken out. I can't. And there's a lot of people.

I'm very fortunate in the fact that when I first started screenwriting, I didn't fall into the dangers. There's traps in any business, right? You could say that if you're an actor, the big trap is getting on some sitcom that goes for 10 or 12 years. And you may have, yeah, you made money and you had a stable job, but is it fulfilling you creatively?

And are you going to have to overcome that typecasting when you get out? I was having a friend of mine who called me for advice today about this, where she got offered this job. It's a money job, but she doesn't really want to do it, right? But she was conflicted. What do I've got two kids? and I asked her, I said, okay, are you behind on your mortgage? No. Will you be behind on your mortgage in six months? No. Okay. Then you don't need to take a money job. None of us got into this to make

money. The fact that it pays well is pretty shocking to all of us. None of us, nobody got thinking, I certainly didn't get into screenwriting for the money. I got into it because I was tired of compromising and I wanted to control my own destiny. I had no idea that it paid well, right? I got my first residual check for Sicario. I was like, oh, shit. I wish I'd have done this 15 years ago. But so with Sicario,

I wanted to write something that was unique in every way. I wanted the structure to be unique. I wanted to really play with who is the protagonist. And I wanted to give the one, character with with a moral compass no power and then it's probably the first time that i was already fucking with critics uh because i made that character also a woman which which means instantly they're going to assume the reason i i did that is because i think women are powerless when it is

actually morality that froze her it wasn't gender it was the fact that she believed that she believed in right and wrong. She believed in playing by the rules in a in a sphere where there are no rules. No one is playing by the rules. The cartels aren't playing by the rules. The cartels don't even have rules. They may have their own codes amongst themselves, but they have no rules. And so now the federal government decided that they were going to play with no rules, which would not be the first time our government has decided to do that. You can ask Maduro about that. And and so here's what it looks like. What if they treated criminals like enemy combatants? And so I wrote that script on a five-act structure instead of a three-act structure to play with the, you have a preconceived,

your condition when you watch a movie to know 17 minutes in, there's going to be a big revelation, and I'm going to know what this movie's about. Right? And then we're going to go off on the journey And about an hour and 10 in, we're on the mission. We found the villain, we found the gold, we found the thing, and we're on a mission. And for the next 15, 20 minutes, we're going to see if we can achieve the mission, whatever that is. And we typically know, even though it's exciting to watch, we know they're going to get the girl or they're going to win the fight or they're going to conquer the hill or whatever it's going to be. We know, right? But if you start playing with that structure,

and I don't really tell you what the goal is until the end of Act 3, Act 4, well, that feels very different. You know, the shootout that happens on the border is really in the end of the second act. Okay, and I built that battle within its own little five-act structure. If you watch it, you could sit there and find the beats, to it. And I did that to completely disorient the audience about how in the world,

I mean, it's, we're only 40 minutes in. I think everyone's about to die. I don't think anyone's safe. Right. How could the movie be over? And then you've got an audience that's truly jarred and on the edge of their seat. And I knew when I wrote it that I had effectively done that. And the way that you know that, you can read it and look at it yourself. But the reaction of the town, like Hollywood went nuts for that scripts. It scared the shit out of everybody.

Nobody wanted to make it. The producer who decided to make it was his name is Basil, and he had made The Town with the movie that Ben did. Great movie. And again, on paper, that's a pretty dark film. it wasn't one that the whole world was running around saying we got to make this movie. People would read that script and go, damn, this is a great script.

I don't even want to begin to think of it. I'm making it, but damn, I can't wait to see it. And Basil didn't hesitate. And the first director we sent it to was Denis Villeneuve. And when Deni read it, I had to make it.

I knew I had to make it. And when we had Denise, I knew I had a director that could execute the way that I had structured the script, he would get it, he would understand it. Because he's very comfortable telling complicated stories. So when we had those pieces and then the cast just fell together, I think we all knew.

We all knew what it was. Well, it's interesting. I mean, you have to- I was surprised that the way that Lionsgate released it, I think if it had been really hit domestically. I think that they decided to make an awards play. And I wouldn't have done that. I would have treated it like a summer movie.

And then you walk and you think you've seen this exciting thing and it slaps you in the face and you walk out of there going, what in the world did I just see? You know, they did that with platoon, which was brilliant to treat that, you know, to not tell the world. We're about to punch you in the stomach. Right.

But it's interesting because obviously you made all your success and you bet on yourself in all these different ways. But, you know, a little, a tiny bit of luck helps every once in a while, right? Like you get the director for Sicario, who turns out to be one of the best directors of the last 15 years and he likes the movie. I can't think of anyone else who would have directed it. Like, looking back, he was perfect. I would say it fortuitous.

You make your own luck, right? Right. Lucky is when Fortunus is a better word He signs onto your shitty script Yeah He signs onto your shitty script And now it's great

And it goes out and it's a hit And through no Through nothing that you Now you're lucky Right That's lucky Here's another example What if you had just gotten a job

Acting on some show That locked you down in 2010 Where you were doing well Like what if you were on I don't know CSI Orleans and you were the third lead and that's just what your job was. Would you even have written? Well, remember, I quit Sons of Anarchy too right. In 2010, I was on a show and thank

God that they had so little respect for me that they offered me garbage. Garbage. They made it really easy to walk away because it was easy for me to sit there and say, okay, I'm going to do this for the next six or seven years and and i'm and i'm still going to have a second job with this junk they're paying me and i'm going to miss my chance to be a creator a chance to tell a story that's also if they hadn't if they hadn't treated me so disrespectfully i i would have never they hit me over the head with a mallet that made it so clear that the only way i was going to get to be an effective storyteller was if i because actors are storytellers uh yeah it was if i told my own stories I was never going to get the opportunity as an actor.

And look, I'm not saying I was a good enough actor that I deserved it. I guess I didn't, right? I guess I didn't because 15 years in this business and I never had that opportunity. So I guess I was doing exactly the acting. That's all the acting I should have been doing. They helped me see that. Was there a fork in the road role that you came close to getting or you'd think like, man, if that had happened, maybe I'm going this way instead?

Yeah, there was one. There was one. I was a couple. But there was this movie called American History X with Ed Norton. And the role that Stacey Keech played was written as Ed Norton, character's best friend. And they had tapped me for that.

And then either the director or Ed or whoever made a decision that if it was his friend betrayed him, and they're not wrong, by the way, but if the friend had betrayed him, it didn't make a greater statement

about what they were really focusing on, which was this, you know, racism, at an extreme. And so if it's just how does his best friend being a fucker and betraying him lead to this epiphany that everything that he believed about race was a lie, right?

So they, so they, as a storyteller, they rightfully went back and addressed the script and changed it to make this character much more of a leader and a father figure and not so much an equal to, to, and more part of an organized racist, like supremacist, as opposed to a bunch of skinhead drug dealers, which was what it was originally, right? So probably the right decision for them from a story standpoint, but, but it, but it costs me a job.

Have you, have you ever? And then the other one, the other one was, I got pretty far down the road on Walking Dead, And Bernthal beat me out of that role. Really? Yeah. Yeah. So he was on when he did Wind River, you know, we were talking.

And I'm like, you know, you saved my ass, dude. I was damn near, I was damn near still an actor. Oh, man. And then he ends up in Sicario, too. Yeah. Yeah. So you never thought about, I mean, you popped in, you popped in Yellowstone, but you never thought about writing one thing

that you would be like one of the stars in or that bug is gone. The funny thing is, oh, no, I play a character on, on, and he's sort of one of these career at ground bench, just a, just a hammer.

He's just a, he's just a hammer. And it's fun to do those stunts and to run around and, you know, shoot the guns and play, play that. And I get,

you know, if I do, an episode, a half of that, a season, then I've scratched that itch. But I've ironically been offered roles, you know, since. And I haven't, I've turned it all down. I don't have any interest in spent four months on. Would you have interest doing rewatchables if you're ever in L.A.?

Because we would love to have you talk about one of your favorite movies. I feel like you'd be really good at it. If you ever do rewatchables in Fort Worth, Texas, I'll do it. I might have to come, I might have to get like five choices. I'll come. I'll come to you because I think you'd be really good at this. I've made it pretty clear. The only way you're getting me back to Los Angeles is if it secedes from the union

and I'm drafted into the Army to take it back. It's the only way. All right. That's good. A lot of people feel that way about Los Angeles. My friend William Goldman, who's sadly not with us anymore, but never wanted to come back here. He was like New York, New York, I never want to come back.

That's it. Some people just, that's it. They're done. Yeah, no. I love New York. I love New York. That city's way, way stronger than whatever political wind is blowing it in any direction, right? Whereas L.A. is built on sand.

It ain't strong. There's no foundation there. That's sorry, sucker. It's probably that way. The book is called, at a not die in prison. It is out. It's out on a hardcover right now, June 23rd.

I'm going to have to come to Fort Worth to see you. America heard you say, if I came down and you'd do a rewatchable. But it's great to talk to you. I really admire everything you built. Yeah, we'll figure out something. But congrats on everything, though. It's been fun to watch from afar. Thank you.

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