The Bill Simmons Podcast - A Quarantine Mailbag, Plus Michael Lewis and Jason Bateman

Episode Date: May 29, 2020

The Ringer's Bill Simmons answers a bunch of listener-submitted mailbag questions (2:10), before he is joined by author Michael Lewis to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic, the effects of youth sports being cancelled, what a return to sports arenas may look like, the most interesting coaches, and more (33:55). Lastly, Bill talks with actor and director Jason Bateman about Season 3 of his Netflix series 'Ozark' as well as the HBO miniseries 'The Outsider,' his evolution as a director, reactions to 'The Last Dance,' the '30 for 30' documentary series, quarantine life, bringing back baseball movies and sitcoms, and more (1:39:20). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tonight's episode of the Bill Simmons podcast on the ringer podcast network brought to you by zip recruiter. We're heading toward month four of the quarantine. We know when sports comes back, a lot of stuff is going to be different from how we go into the games, how we order food and drink, whatever it is. Well, a lot of things may change as our world opens up again. One thing won't change our presenting sponsors, zip recruiters mission. They'll continue doing what they've always done, helping growing companies hire for their teams and helping people find jobs. If you're actively hiring, ZipRecruiter will invite candidates to apply to your most urgent roles, making it faster and easier to reach people you need by bringing employers and job seekers together. ZipRecruiter is working to help all of us. ZipRecruiter.com slash work together. We're also brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network, where we just launched another new podcast. I'm really proud of this one. It's called Higher Learning with Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay. And they talked about a whole bunch of stuff in their first episode,

which you can find right now on Spotify and on Apple. They talked about the Georgeorge floyd tragedy they talked about doja cat they talked about um joe biden going on uh going on with charlemagne they went they talked about oh man the bachelor whether the bachelor is uh is secretly racist a lot of good stuff in this podcast you can check it out wherever you get your podcast also check out the ringer.com where we continue to do great stuff on sports and pop culture as well. Very proud of everybody over there these last three months. Coming up, I'm going to do a little mailbag at the top. And then we're going to have Michael Lewis, the famous author. And then we're going to have Jason Bateman, who's going to talk about season three of Ozark and life in quarantine.

So this is a good podcast. A lot of stuff going on. Very excited to have the mailbag back. But first, our friends from Pearl Jam. All right, we don't have the last dance with Michael Jordan anymore. We don't have celebrity golf with Tom Brady and Peyton Manning. We don't have a lot right now until some sports start making a move. You know what we do have? Mailbags. I haven't done this in a while. I have no excuse. I? Mailbags. I haven't done this in a while. I have no excuse.

I don't know why I haven't done this in a while. I get a lot of great emails from listeners, and I don't know why I'm not answering them on the podcast. You know what I'm going to promise you guys? Summer of mailbag. Yeah, it's back. You might remember I did this on page two and on Grantland a couple times.

Called it the summer mailbag. Just answered stuff every week. I'm going to really try to make a commitment, but you guys have to do so as well. You got to send me some good questions. Don't be jerks. Send me good questions. I can actually use for the mailbag.

Email me at the mailbag at the ringer.com. So there you go. All right. Here's the first question. It's from Aaron Solomon. He asks, should ESPN trade Stephen A. Smith for Fox's Joe Buck ESPN finally gets their Monday Night Football commentator

Fox pairs Stephen A. again with Skip Bayless here's my answer so my first instinct was that's ridiculous the sports media trade that can't happen then I started thinking about it we don't have sports right now

you know what I've really missed beyond just live action games, being in crowds, being normal, all the other stuff that come with sports? The transactions. You know, we had the draft that held us over for a little while. And then there was some more, a couple more signings and that, then it just got super boring. Well, how about some sports media trades? What if we try to mix things up? So ESPN, if they did this trade, they get their football announcer. They've been looking for one forever. They've been looking for an anchor. They tried to get Al Michaels. They put a whole bunch of people on the Monday Night Football team. Now they have their signature guy, Joe Buck. Put him in there for the Major League Baseball,

put him with A-Rod. NFL, he handles all of it, Monday Night Football, everything else. He could pop on different shows. He could co-host PTI. I feel like they could get a lot out of Joe Buck. I like Joe Buck. It's funny that we were all against him for a while

or mad at him or just had too high expectations. Now everybody's back in. Fox, they have Coward. I think I'm a Coward fan. Not ashamed to admit it. They have some other big names there. Stephen A pushes it to another level. He is the biggest name in sports TV right now.

You get him. You give him a daily show that competes with ESPN, but that's fine because ESPN, they have other, other ways they can get around, you know, they could just make, get up longer. They can do a whole bunch of things. And then they can put Stephen A on a Fox NFL stuff, all these different things. I'm not against this trade. I don't, I think ESPN says, no, if you said who says, no, I think ESPN would say, we'll do it. We'll think about it, but you've got to throw in some picks. We need, uh, we need two unprotected lottery picks. Um, they'd be selling high

and Stephen H just signed a huge new deal. His approval rating has never been higher. He's at the peak of his powers. Sometimes that's the best time to trade somebody. A little reminiscent of when CBS got rid of Brent Musburger because they knew they had Jim Nance waiting in the wings. The problem for ESPN is they don't really have anybody waiting in the wings who could be nearly as big as Stephen A. But they would be solving a huge play-by-play void.

And guess what, folks? Games are more important than talking head shows. They just are. The amount of people that watch a Monday Night Football game, and it could be the worst game possible. It could be Panthers against the Jets. It's still going to be more people than would ever watch a First Take episode.

First Take eats a lot of innings. That's very valuable. They can carve it up into different things. That's very valuable. I think we're in the ballpark though with this, though. I'm not against this. I'm really not. I think sports media trades in general, I wish Rosillo was here. I'm going to throw this at Rosillo on Sunday, but in general, sports media trades, I'm all for it. Next question is from Robbie. Do you think we'll have an MLB season? So I've been looking at this from every angle. I've been reading a lot of this stuff and I feel the same way about major league baseball as I do about, um, Rocky relationships, um, including,

you know, people in my extended life, couples that I've heard that either I know or I know of that maybe the quarantine hasn't been great for them. I think what happens with the quarantine is if you have a bad relationship or you have a rocky relationship or you have a tumultuous relationship, in real life, the quarantine exposes

pretty much everything that isn't working with that relationship. You're crammed together. You can't get away from each other. If the other person was bothering you in any way, it's just going to be worse during the quarantine. If you drove each other crazy kind of already, even when you guys are getting out of the house, now that you're stuck in the house, it's going to be way worse. I think with the MLB, it's a bad relationship. It's a dysfunctional, uncomfortable, spiteful relationship. It's actually like having a bad relationship in your life, only the people aren't dating.

It's a sports business relationship. But it does feel like a bad romantic relationship where at every opportunity, they're just going to do something spiteful to one another. And this has been going back to the late sixties and the seventies. They've just always battled. I think for that reason, they're not going to be able to figure this out. There's too many agendas. I don't think they really respect Rob Manfred that much. I think their agents are too heavily involved in things. The players, there's such a disparity between the superstar players

and the other guys from a salary perspective. We're already hitting June. We haven't even had spring training yet. And I am so pessimistic that it comes back. I would say the odds are like eight to one, honestly. And the shame of it is if the MLB had come back, they could have really owned June and early July, at least until the NBA made a comeback.

When is the last time people really cared about baseball in the middle of May, June, July? I mean, I can't even remember. You'd have to go back to the early mid-2000s. It's a blown opportunity. I don't blame the players for either not wanting to play or not wanting to take huge pay cuts, all the different reasons that this isn't happening. But I also think it's a missed opportunity. The other thing that would really concern me if I was Major League Baseball is there's not the outpouring of people freaking out that we might not have a baseball

season. I remember when this happened in 1994 and they actually had the strike, people had a fucking heart attack. Everyone was so mad. In 1981, it was even worse. We had so little to do in 1981 when baseball went away for, I think it was two months, it was dark. It was brutal. There was no box scores, no highlights during the early days of ESPN highlights, and there was nothing else to do.

And it was really dark and abysmal. And I think with this, I'm shocked by how un-upset it seems like people under 40 are specifically about the fact that baseball might go away. I think older people are upset, but it's a little alarming. It makes me wonder if baseball needs to rethink everything because if anything, there was more enthusiasm for the shortened, raced-up baseball schedule of 80 games, 90 games leading into the playoffs.

I know I was more excited about that than I would be for a 162-game season, but the whole thing is just not great if your own baseball stuck. Playing off that email, Andre writes, there's no winners with what's going on in the world, but as far as sports goes, it's an absolute lock that the Astros

are the clear winners of this. No one's talking about their cheating anymore. So much hatred in February and March. Now it's all gone. When and if baseball does finally return, there will likely be no fans to boo and spew hate at them. And then when fans finally do come back, it will have been so long,

they'll be happy baseball will be back. The heckling will be a hundred times less. Players will have likely forgotten. No intentional bean balls or anything like that. Andre says the Astros are, I hate using the word winner during a pandemic, but definitely it definitely played out in their favor. Let's put it that way. I couldn't agree more.

I would, the thing I was most excited for the baseball this season was for the Astros just to be this supervillain that all of us were against. The way I feel about the Yankees just every day of my life, we all could have shared that feeling, and now we can't. And it makes me sad because I was so ready to hate the Astros.

So speaking of Houston, Jonathan from Austin writes, assuming the NBA is canceled, well, it's not going to be canceled, but the big winner could have been Daryl Morey because the Rockets wouldn't have lost in the first or second round. The Thunder and Chris Paul wouldn't have advanced further than the Rockets. No one will remember his comments about China. He can plausibly deny the salary cap went down because of his comments because it went down because of the pandemic

and arguably has to come back next year now. So it's interesting. He would have been villainized within league circles for making the salary cap go down. Now that's off his hands. The Houston, I think in a neutral site as a six seed, no matter what playoff format that come out, they have a chance to come out of this in better shape than I think they would have during a normal season where they would have had to, you know, win on the road every series basically. So, um,

again, hate using the word winners during a pandemic, but it certainly played out a little bit in his favor. There you go. Speaking of COVID-19, Billy Woods wants to know, are we going to see a rise in bank robberies that have robbers in the COVID-19 mass that we see every day now? Could this lead to heat two or point break two

with quarantine mass? I think Point Break 2 happened and we blocked it out of our mind. I know Heat 2 hasn't happened and there's been talk about Heat 2, a Heat prequel, things like that. But that is an interesting... There will be a really good quarantine movie made pretty quickly after all of this ends. And I think it'll be, I'm sure there'll be a rom-com one. I'm sure there'll be a Noah Baumbach type relationship falling apart quarantine movie. And there will definitely 1000% be bank robbery movies. So again, no winners in a pandemic, but something that plays in our favor, because if we, if we have more bank robbery movies, guess who wins all of us? Uh, some NBA emails about how to solve the, uh, the playoff thing.

Brian Lando writes, here's how you solve home court for the NBA playoffs. Each home team gets to have their newly appointed audio supervisor being control of the arena sound system. They would pre-program the song's chance crowd noises they want in any given home game situation, chance of defense on big possessions, refuse suck after a bad call, LeBron's favorite song

on a big Lakers possession, and so on. The advantage is that a properly prepped and creative audio supervisor can help their team out. That was Brian's take. Couldn't agree more. I love the take. I like the idea of HomeCourt being one audio supervisor. I love everything about this idea. You know what? I have nothing to add. You win all the way around. And I think that would actually be weirdly hilarious. I'm still, my number one choice is having these guys,

just Mike and us being able to hear everything on a 30-second delay. But if we can't do that, that's a good second choice. Adam from Dallas writes in, could this year be the catalyst for the NBA going back to a best of five in the first round playoffs? There's nothing more annoying as a fan than a 1C going up 3-0, losing game four

and stretching a series another three or four days. It seems like they're very nervous about doing this idea this year because of the lack of home court and the fact that you could potentially, let's say the Lakers are playing, I don't know who the 8 seed would be, depending on what the plan, let's say the Lakers are playing I don't know who the 8 seed would be depending on what the play let's say Portland gets in there

and it's Lakers Portland and Dame just gets hot in two games. Dame has 49 in game 2 and 56 in game 3 and then all of a sudden the Lakers might get bounced in a game 4 because Dame got hot for two games they're not going to want to do that to the higher

seed so I don't see that happening with this with the lack four because Dame got hot for two games. They're not going to want to do that to the higher seed. So I don't see that happening with this, with the lack of home court. I think in a perfect world, the way to do it is you do the best of five in the first round and the first seed gets four of the five games at home. So you're basically stacking the deck for them. There's something you would really earn by getting a one seed in your conference. Now, Bart, reader named Bart, I don't have his last name. Sorry, Bart. He is saying how I always want the NBA to do five games for round one. His idea, wouldn't a better way to fix it be to have the series end if a team goes up 3-0, but keep it a seven-game playoff if not. That way we don't have to suffer through a crappy game four,

yet good series can still go the distance. It's a win-win. It also heightens the stakes for game three. If a team is up 2-0, you almost need to split the first two games. Why haven't we already moved to this? What's the downside? I really liked this idea. Now here's another great thing about this. It increases. So let's say the Lakers go up to

nothing on the Blazers and you know, in, in a fat seven game series, the Lakers, and I'm saying this is like, if we had home court, if we weren't in a pandemic right now, um, in normal situations, the Lakers would be like, ah, maybe take our foot off the gas pedal a little bit. This series, we won our first two. We only need to win two more. We have two more at home. We got this. In this situation, you're up 2-0. You can end the series by winning game three. I'm coming out guns blazing in game three. I really want to finish this off. Conversely, if you're the other team, you're down to nothing. It's now a game seven for you. If you lose, you're out of the playoffs. I think it's a really good idea. I would actually love to see

them do that for round one. And the other stakes, if for the team that finished it off and has a three Oh sweep, then they would get more rest too, which would be another benefit. So I like that idea. Here's Marcus from Temecula via Phoenix. Glad you clarified that, Marcus. He says, the best case scenario for the NBA bubble campus is that the league requires the other players to sit courtside and watch games when they're not playing. They're already in the quarantine bubble. Therefore, no safety concerns. What else are they going to do in Disneyland?

And what other scenario would we ever get real-time fan reactions of LeBron sitting courtside watching Giannis or Chris Paul watching the Rockets? The Sixers watching Tatum and thinking what might've been. Thanks for throwing that in, Marcus. I love that. Here's my answer to that. Great idea.

It reminds me of in March Madness when the team that won comes back out to watch the next team or the team that's about to play is out there watching the game before it. It would be a little mix of the slam dunk contest with the guys sitting courtside. You'd have definitely people with their families. LeBron would not turn down the chance to be sitting next to a couple of his kids on camera. I'll tell you that much. He'll, he'll,

he'll sign up for this right now. Um, not a lot of downside to this. I don't think you could force the guys to go to every game, but maybe half, maybe you say you have to attend at least one game a day, something like that. Or maybe, maybe they,

uh, maybe they plan it out. So people are assigned different games. I like that. Or maybe they, maybe they plan it out. So people are assigned different games. I like that idea. I also, they're already doing this, it sounds like, but I like the idea of having the families at games for a couple of reasons. One, it'll be more noise.

And then two, it's going to lead to an altercation and nobody will get hurt. It'll be fine. But it's, you know, we're going to have, listen, we can't even get through youth soccer games with eight-year-olds without parents getting into it with each other. You think, really think we're going to get through the NBA playoffs without families from two different teams somehow get into it. I can't wait for those stories. So sign me up for that. One more email about this. Ryan in Park City is talking about the World Cup tiers thing that KOC

and I talked about in the last podcast and was saying about excluding teams at the bottom, whether it's a play-in tournament, but the bottom six teams, seeds 25 through 30 are just out, or the World Cup tiers where the bottom 10 teams are out. Ryan in Park City

correctly points out, Steph Curry drives the ratings for the entire league. He's the one player that truly transcends basketball into mass culture. A little exaggeration, but let's let Ryan feel it. If you want America there when basketball comes back, you must have Steph Curry. Is the 10 seed really any more deserving than the bottom seed? Neither have earned anything, including all teams. That's a great point. Dallas has, I think, a 10 and a half game lead over whoever the nine through whatever seeds are. You're right. Steph Curry should be involved. The other option is, um, no, I was gonna, I was gonna say the other option is you let Steph Curry just get drafted

and total the playoff teams, but I guess that would be illegal. But yeah, Steph Curry, even if he had a puncher's chance of pulling some sort of upside off in a playoff tournament, at least for one round, because he put up 55 points, that would be delightful. I was in the mindset of Steph and Clay could be back for this, but from everything I've heard

from the Warriors' side of things, there's no way Clay Thompson comes back. So knock that idea out of your head. Brian from Albany, New York writes in, is the popularity of the last dance not just due to the absence of live sports, but our fascination with serial killers? Doesn't Michael Jordan fit the profile? He doesn't just murder opponents who challenge him. He actively seeks out new victims to prey on, inventing personal insults to fulfill his power fantasy.

He can easily switch from being charming to cruel and shows no remorse for his actions. At times, he even swears off killing, only to relapse years later when the hunger returns. Is MJ the Ted Bundy of sports athletes? I already wrote this in my book. He's the only one we described like Hannibal Lecter. It was always, he'll rip your heart out. He'll go, he's going for the jugular. He'll kill you. You can't sleep on him. He'll rip your, rip your throat out. So yeah, maybe that's part of what this was. MJ, the Ted Bundy of sports athletes. Also both handsome and both have

mysterious kind of sabbaticals that we haven't really figured out what happened where Ted Bundy just ends up in Florida and there's some missing days there. We don't really know what he was up to. Same thing for the, uh, for MJ playing baseball with the Birmingham team. I like it. I think it's a, I think it's a strong one. Let's take a quick break and then we're going to finish a couple more mailbag emails. Hey, if you're doing more searching than streaming these days, I have good news for you. HBO Max, a new streaming platform

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Restrictions apply. Start streaming today. All right, a couple more emails. Andrew Owens says he was listening to the Jaws rewatchables and wanted to point out how eerie it was listening to the conversation about reopening Amity during the middle of the shark crisis.

And he writes, just to point out a takeaway, Chris Ryan was speaking like a prophet. If you remember in Jaws, the mayor really wants to get the people back on the beaches, right? And Roy Scheider's character is like, that shark's still out there, we can't do it. And the mayor's like, fuck it, we'll get the people out,

it'll be fine. And then guess what happens? Shark attack. shark's still out there. We can't do it. And the mayor's like, fuck it. We'll get the people out. It'll be fine. And then guess what happened? Shark attack. It's a solid point. It's hard not to think about some of the stuff we're reading and think about the mayor from Amity, who, by the way, we decided on that podcast, did one of the worst jobs.

He's really the James Dolan of local mayors. That's how I would describe him. Another email. This one is from Max, who is a senior at Stanford university. Um, his question is for Jason Concepcion and Mally Rubin. Well, guess what? They're not here. So I'm going to have to answer it. His question is this is Jerry Krause's Chicago bulls tenure. The perfect analog for David Benioff and DB Weiss's run as game of throne showrunners. Krause was the architect behind an all-time great NBA team,

having the foresight guts to draft Scottie Pippen, replace Doug Collins, trade for Dennis Rodman, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then he rushed the teardown, pushing Phil and Scottie out prematurely and alienating Michael Jordan. Ultimately, fans remember him more for his terrible decisions down the stretch

than they do for constructing the championship teams in the first place. Now to D&D. They approached George R.R. Martin to turn his book series into a TV show, seeing the potential it would have in that medium. They passed his test, got his blessing, began crafting the divining TV show of the 2010s. Nailed essentially every casting decision and were the architects beyond the show for six amazing seasons. Sounds like MJ. Then at the end, they rushed the

conclusion of the show, skipping over valuable character development like Krauss. D&D are remembered for ending the show too fast, making 13 unsatisfying rushed episodes in the last two seasons when everyone, fans, HBO, whoever, was asking for 20. For this reason, I submit to you,

they are the perfect analogs for each other. Jerry Krause, David Benioff, and D.B. Weiss. Thank you and keep up the excellent content. I got to be honest. I have nothing to add. And I think those guys did an amazing job. And I've even gotten to talk to them a little bit over the years. I think what happened is they saw the finish line with Game of Thrones and they just wanted

to get there. And I'm going to guess 10 years from now, if they had to do it over again, they would have done those two last 10 episode seasons, really tried to build some stuff out and get out. But I think that show had consumed their life. And I don't want to say destroyed it because it worked out great get out. But I think that show had consumed their life. And I don't want to say destroyed it because it worked out great for them. But man, doing that show is an all in thing. You're living in Ireland. You're living in all these different places. You have this crazy fan

base who's just reacting to every single tiny thing. And I honestly think they wore out. I think if there was a move where they could have played baseball in Birmingham for 18 months, they would have. So I think they just wanted to get to the finish line. And unfortunately, um, I thought those last 13 episodes were better and more enjoyable than most people. I still, it's high quality entertainment. I wish we still had it. Um, yeah, they didn't land the plane in the way everyone wanted and they should have gone for 20 episodes and they should have taken more time, but shit happens. I don't think it's as, it's nearly as indefensible as the Jerry Kraus thing. The Jerry Kraus thing was, let's get rid of MJ and Pippen. And then I'm going to prove to you yet again,

that I was the star all along. That's really what happened. And he's had some defenders since the doc. Listen, we all know what happened. He pushed those guys out. He, he got the six titles. He thought their run was ending. He knew they weren't going to be able to pay Pippen.

He knew Jordan was getting old. He didn't want to deal with Phil Jackson anymore. And he was good with the six titles. He just wanted to start over. I, that to me, that is way more indefensible. Mitch wants to know, while everyone is salivating at the potential of the Bucks with Brady and Gronk, I'm getting serious 2012-13 Lakers vibes. A few past their prime stars, offensive-minded coach will make

them, quote, click. I see it all going down in flames. Prove me wrong. A week ago, I would have said, I hope you're right. But as we learned during the golf match, I can't quit Tom Brady. I'm not going to root against him. But I do think, good point. We have no idea. Gronk, if he plays nine games, I'd be shocked.

And if he's 60% as good as he was three years ago, I'd be surprised. Brady's 43 years old. I think the 2012-13 Lakers analogy is a really good one. So I'm down with that. Jeff Scott from Huntington Beach, he wants to know, listening to recent podcasts

and watching the latest episode of Undertaker's Doc made me realize the Kobe-Duncan debate is eerily similar to the HBK-Undertaker debate for best of that generation, the WWE. Both sets defined an era with Tim Duncan and Undertaker having just a top-notch, consistent work ethic and respect level that lasted all the way through.

It almost worked as a detriment, as both didn't stand out nearly as much as the flashier guys, Kobe, Iverson, Shaq, HBK, Rock, Austin. And then the comparison gets even more wild when you think how Kobe and HBK started young and immature, to say the least, and then almost reinvented themselves into leaders and role models in the later parts of their career, even somehow managed to do the unthinkable and have no regrets or thoughts of return after retiring. Kobe moved on to his success. HBK faded from the limelight. He's happy.

That's a really good analogy. And you're right. I would personally have HBK ahead of Undertaker because I think it's basically him and Ric Flair as the two best ever to just get a great match out of somebody else. But the Undertaker's 30 years really does remind me of Duncan for that 19 years where he's just always there and he's always at a certain level. Maybe the first half of his career, obviously he's more talented and athletic than he was in the second half of the year,

but the know-how and the fact that he never really got his just due, neither did Undertaker. I wasn't a huge fan of Undertaker's big guy against big guy matches. I just didn't enjoy them that much. When he had the right opponent, it was a lot like Duncan. He needed the right opponent to be great, and I think Duncan was the same way. All right, two more emails,

and then we'll go to Michael Lewis and Jason Bateman. Sean Young writes, as a Bucs fan, I took to Google to see if I could find why the Bucs traded in an in-prime Ray Allen away. I clicked on the first article and read how Allen just believed head coach George Carl never liked him for seemingly no good reason and forced management to ship him away. That is true. There was a George Colin, Carl Ray Allen, uh, kind of semi feud. Um, so then Sean writes, I said to myself, okay, fair enough. I guess that sucks, but at least it's an explanation. Then the bombshell hit me. Next paragraph, Ernie fucking Grunfeld was the Bucks GM at the time. Ernie, who would then leave the Bucks at the end of that same season to terrorize Wizards fans for too many years.

Look at that trade. The Bucs received a 34-year-old 28-game rental, Gary Payton and Desmond Mason, jettisoned where an age 27 prime Ray Allen, Ronald Murray, Kevin Alley, and for whatever fucking reason, a 2003 first round pick to top it off. Wow.

Countless times I'd laugh naively when Bill would rib Wizards fan Joe House about Ernie, never knowing House and I shared in some mutual pain for he as well torpedoed my franchise. Keep up the good work, Sean Young. That's a great email. I forgot that Ernie made that trade. Ernie's just done a lot of damage.

And we cover this in the 2005 redraftables that Russel and I did. The mid-2000s, really from, I don't know, 03 to 07 is just an epic run of bad GMs. Epic. World-class. Leading me to write the atrocious GM summit in 2006. That's how bad it was.

So there you go. Last email from Andy from Indy. He says, when the NBA playoffs start, who is the first player to have a video made of them playing social distancing defense? James Harden is obviously the runaway favorite if Trae Young isn't in the playoffs. But don't sleep on Joel Embiid,

who would be my dark horse as the guy who has done no conditioning or working out during the quarantine. Well, we don't know that, but I'll take Andy's word. So Andy from Indy. Andy makes a great point. When people don't play defense in whatever this NBA bubble campus, World Cup,

whatever this playoff thing is, there's going to be the social distancing jokes. It's going to happen. It will be what Brian Curtis calls on the press box, the overworked Twitter joke of the week. Every time somebody lets somebody go by or doesn't box someone else or stays two feet away, we're going to have the social distancing jokes. That's just the way it's going to play out.

I have a bonus email from Ryan Pombrio. He says, we were talking about an asterisk, right? Everybody thinks this is going to be an asterisk season for who doesn't remember the title. Ryan hates that the 99 Spurs title has an asterisk. He says, there's a few reasons that's BS. One, it gave us proof of the Ewing theory. And how many miles have you gotten out of that? That's true. 2012 had a strike short in season, but nobody ever brings up the Heat title as an asterisk.

That's also true. Third point, if the Celtics had won, Bill and others wouldn't want the asterisk. Think of it like the tuck game. It's a purely a sour grapes argument by the other teams. Very fair. Number four, the Spurs won 56 games the year before Duncan is a rookie.

So the team was not a fluke. That's true. And he was also hurt when they lost in the playoffs in 98 to Utah. Duncan got hurt in the playoffs. And a lot of people think that's the Spurs were actually the best team in the West in 98, but Duncan being hurt, hurt the cost. Then the fifth thing he had, the Spurs got screwed in the Derek Fisher 0.4 seconds game in 2004. Among others, there were several real titles they were robbed of. That's a fair point. So 2004,

the Fisher shots ridiculous. I still don't know how you do that in 0.4 seconds. 2006, Manu has the dumb foul on Dirk. They screw that one up. And then 2013, the Ray Allen shot. The closest anyone's come to winning a title without winning a title. So Ryan's right. It probably evened out. And I think that's a great point about the Heat in 2012.

Never brought up ever. Why aren't they asterisked? Plus, Derrick Rose went down in the first game in round one, and they were the one seed. So good points all around. All right, the mailbag was fun. Again, if you want to send a question, don't be a dick. Just send me a good question, themailbagattheringer.com.

And we're going to take a break and come back with Michael Lewis. All right, we're going to bring Michael Lewis in here in one second. First, during this time of social distancing, connecting with friends over a beer today looks pretty different. As the original light beer, Miller Lite, has always been there to bring people together

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Michael Lewis is here coming off his widely lauded appearance on the Flying Coach podcast. It's all downhill from here. He has a second season of his podcast, Against the Rules. Is it actually coming out? Is it out now? It's just starting to come out. So the third of seven episodes came out today. It rolls out once a week. Yeah. So your last book was about that we should probably be a little more worried about the federal government.

I tried to tell you. It's just a shame. It's a shame that isn't relevant now in 2020. I don't know. This is one of your biggest misses in a while. I tried to tell you. I think I tried to tell you last time I was in there. You're looking at me like, what are you writing a book about the federal government for?

I can tell you that if you had wandered around like I wandered around and got the briefings that the Trump administration had not bothered to get from the outgoing Obama administration, you would have thought it's just a question of how they're going to kill me. I don't know. I don't know how, but something's going to go wrong and they're not going to be ready for it because they just have no interest. No interest. And it was just a question of what uh and i mean i don't know if i told you this the last time we talked but but um as i was getting into this thing i had this idea it was a crazy idea and at the time i had it i was actually whacked out on opioids because i just had a hip surgery yeah but but the idea was all right this guy's got to manage the risks of the federal government. And he doesn't care at all about them.

And he's just dramatically increased the likelihood of lots of bad things happening just by not caring. You'll probably be able to take an actual death toll as a result of this. And I had this idea of going into Times Square and renting out a big billboard and creating what I wanted to call the Trump death clock. And it was just going to scroll the number of people who died because they didn't manage this thing properly. And I actually found someone who was willing to pay to do it, like the money was there. But I couldn't do it in an intellectually respectable way. I got some data people together to try to talk about how you might do this. It's always going to seem like it's all BS. So I dropped it. But last week, someone put up the Trump death clock in Times Square.

Oh, really? Yes. And it's specific to this, though, which is easier to do. It's like, what number of deaths would we likely be experiencing if the pandemic response was as good as Germany's? I don't know exactly what their baseline is, but they're actually scrolling this thing. So it's come up. But anyway, this takes us way away from what your audience is interested in. No, it's what I'm interested in because this has been the reality for the last 10 weeks. And I haven't heard enough people kind of play out the other scenario of, forget about the Trump, the Republicans, Democrats, all this stuff.

Yep. Let's just, we use like war, the baseball stat. Yeah. Let's just say we had someone with an average war as the president. They're just average. They're just average. They're a C plus. And they're in the fourth year of their first term. And all this stuff is starting in Asia, we think late January, although it's starting to seem like it was even a couple months earlier than that. What does the average president do those first six weeks that

the current president did not do? A few things. The first thing is that you make sure you have good tests. I mean, I think that's the biggest thing. And if they had not gotten rid of the pandemic response unit inside the White House, it was on the National Security Council and had been put there on the back end of the Ebola epidemic or almost epidemic. Because the administration had seen that if you just let all the agencies do what they're going to do and don't coordinate them, there's no checks. Like you can't check and see if the CDC's test actually works. You're just taking it on faith. And it's harder to coordinate the response. So I think that's the first thing is you have the ability to find the virus. In a way, we haven't yet. Still, the testing, there's been a lot more testing, but it's mainly because so many people are going to the hospital sick.

You aren't going out into communities. I mean, there have been some exceptions just in the last few weeks. And I actually kind of wrote about one of them recently where someone went into a four-square-block neighborhood in the Mission in San Francisco and just tested everybody to see, one, how widespread it is. But, two, you can study the genetic markings and see how it's moving. You can see who got it from whom and how. And so you can just manage it better. So that would have been, I think, the first thing. The second thing, what other things would you have done?

Equipment seems like a big one. Obviously. You would have had all these doctors all these doctors and nurses getting sick i mean that you would have had much better could just just protective wear for the for the for the people in the hospitals but i'm thinking of things like um response inside nursing homes i mean if you look it's kind of interesting we don't know enough about it still but you kind of just look anecdotally at where people are getting really ill. It's not like passing a jogger in the park. You're not hearing that story. Or getting it off like a can of soup in the supermarket. It's churches, cruise ships, nursing homes, hospitals. There are a couple I'm missing, but it's where people are together in a confined space for a long period of time, it seems. And I think you might have figured that out quicker and you'd have been

more careful in those spaces. You know more about it, Sarah. But the bigger thing is you back away from it and you say, what, we're 4 point something percent of the world's population and we're almost 30 percent of the deaths in the cases and we're the United States and it started halfway around the world, it makes no sense. I mean, it just makes no sense. Well, you also think you have people ranging from Bob Iger running Disney to Adam Silver running the NBA, people who are in charge of stuff who are smart, who also know a bunch of rich people who have interests in different parts of the world. And all of those people were moving and super concerned and trying to assess the worst case scenarios in February. Yeah. So, you know,

I left out the big response, which is you shut down things earlier. It's hard. It's hard to do because doing things that are preventative requires, you say a C-plus president, you would require some communication skills to say, this doesn't seem to make sense because we don't have a lot of cases of the disease. But let me tell you why it makes sense for us right now to freeze. And if we freeze now, we'll have to freeze for a much less long period of time. So you'd have done that. I mean, there was actually, you know, the Bush administration did actually create a pretty detailed 200-something page playbook, as it were, what you do. Because Bush himself was freaked out about the possibility.

He read this book by John Barry, a great pen, about the Spanish flu. And he said, what's our plan? And they generated a plan, which they then explained to the Obama administration, the Obama administration built on. But the center of it was the social distancing stuff. And it's been done. You know, obviously, we've been doing it, but we've been doing it in a pretty kind of, I mean, it hasn't been a consistent national policy, right? It's different from place to place. And that dilutes the effectiveness of it.

But it's also been like, the difference between California or San Francisco and New York City is that San Francisco was really aggressive and shut it down really early. And look, it's like, nobody's got it here. I mean, or very few. It's impressive what you could have done. But it would have been hard to do and it would have required some salesmanship because people,

when the bad thing doesn't happen, nobody like gives you credit for it. Like, why do we do that? Nobody got sick. You have to explain that. That's why nobody got sick. But so there were things to do. Well, it's almost like buying, you know, a bunch of different insurances for a house you bought that you probably aren't going to have to worry about ever using or, or whatever. And you don't want to use it. Right. Yeah. And it's like, ah, shit, do I need that?

And you think about just Trump's history as a businessman, which is always like to push the chips in the middle of the table. Ah, get rid of that. We'll just take the resources from there. We'll put it here. And worst case scenario, I'll just go bankrupt or this will go under and I'll just figure out another solution, which is kind of what he did with our entire pandemic response unit. It's like, ah, why would we put money there? I'll just put it over here. Yeah, it is like that. It's shuffling. It's also's also the view that i mean at the bottom of it all i think uh is if in your head you know at the end of it you're going to be able to tell a story that

completely absolves yourself and like i was great no matter what happens then you're much more prone to do this kind of stuff right like you if you're? If you're not going to feel the consequences of your actions in any way, and you're actually somehow in your head being able to tell yourself, oh, I did a really good job, no matter what you did, you're more likely to run those kind of risks. So I think... Well, I also think what happened in 2009 made people kind of less scared when we probably should have started getting scared. Because I even think, you know, we have probably our office shut down the day before the go bear game.

Uh, yeah, we shut our office down that Tuesday. We're pretty early, but the week before we had a whole bunch of people, probably like four or five people going to Boston for the Sloan conference that, which you've been to. Yup. And we just didn't feel good about it. And that week we canceled and we canceled everybody. And we also had people going to South by Southwest. We ended up canceling that.

We were just like, it's not worth it. Like, you know, on the plane, who knows? Right. So it was in the ether. But what's ironic is like, I went to All-Star Weekend. That was February 15th. So didth. I flew back and forth. I, I didn't even occur to me. Like that was a dangerous thing to do. We're in Sundance two weeks before, and now it's come out that the people had the virus there and people got sick

there. They didn't know why they were sick. So it's funny how the human response to just being like, ah, it's fine. And it's not. And it almost like you belatedly are like, oh shit, maybe I should be more scared. We're really badly wired to anticipate risks we've never seen before. Right? Like if you haven't seen it happen. Just in the opposite is,

once it's happened, you exaggerate the risk. Like you just know that when this is over, people will be looking for the next virus. We don't do that very well. But that's one of the reasons the government is there. It's to do that

for us. It's to manage those risks in a way that we don't naturally do very well ourselves. You think these big companies are moving and making decisions in February and they know what the risks are. And you would think the United States is the ultimate big company who would be moving at the same pace as the other major companies, but that wasn't what happened. I can't get my mind off this stat. 4% of the world's population,

30% of the cases. I just can't get it. I can't believe that that's us. I'd have thought us would be better than the rest of the world. It would be bad, but it wouldn't be nearly as bad as it was in other places. And the French are kissing each other all the time or whatever. It would be worse in other places or in third world countries. But this us that has managed this thing so badly. I was saying this to your friends, the coaches, on Steve Purr and Pete Carroll on their podcast they have with you. You look at it, and I feel like we're this really badly coached team. Yeah.

We have all this talent. We have the scientists. We have the medical staff. We have all this talent, and we're losing this game in the most extraordinary way we're not playing like a team and the talent's not organized properly

it's just I find it bewildering what else have you noticed now that we're 10-11 weeks deep here just smart guy stuff that you've noticed because you're always looking at this stuff thinking about this stuff i'm not a smart guy i i i've been living it like you've been living i'm stuck at home and kind of wandering i get i get to

wander around the streets of berkeley um i have i have two a couple of sources of insight um that that maybe you don't have just because I've been out doing some reporting. And one is how interesting the testing could be, because I've been spending time at the Chan Zuckerberg biohub. It's Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, gave 600 million bucks to create this thing a few years ago. And it was a really fascinating endeavor. It's research that's designed to eliminate disease by the end of the 21st century. It's like one of these grand goals. But the guy who runs it is a guy I actually met a few years ago. His name is Joe DeRisi. He's an infectious disease specialist. He was at UCSF. And he was, if you had some bizarre malady that no one in the

world could diagnose, you ended up in his office. And he would find the most curious things inside people. And anyway, they were smitten by him and they put him in charge of their biohub. And he's turned the biohub into a coronavirus testing lab. He did it in three weeks. In three weeks, he had the biggest, fastest coronavirus testing lab in the country. Their labs are bigger, but he was faster than any of them in their labs. I don't know if anybody was faster. And he had an army of 200 and something graduate students working for free, and they're still all doing it. And he's asking, I got this ability to test now. It's like, I got this flashlight in the dark room. What do I do with it? And he's just started to go do things like take a four square block area that's very diverse and say, who's got it? How is it moving around? It's a detective story. And I think no one's

paid that much attention to that detective story because we've been in such defensive mode. It's like just trying to figure out who's dying. But going out into the community and like just saying, here, take the test, you're going to get an interesting picture of it and more sort of a way to respond to it. I mean, what I notice now is everybody's going to climb in the wall. Everybody's kind of, we have not found out, we don't know anything more about it that would enable us to open up safely than we did when we went into lockdown. And yet everybody's pretending like, oh, be on the end of the spectrum in terms of the righteousness with which we wear our masks. Oh, yeah. Our fidelity to the law, all that stuff.

And even if you walk around, people get very lax. You know, just the masks are down over their nose. They're up in little crowds now. There's more socializing. So people are just sick of it. And so the disease is going to come back. That's what's going to happen. It's not going to just go away. So the other thing that interests me, this isn't smart guy stuff, but it's sort of like stuff that I just wonder about. Vaccine,

right? We don't have a globally coordinated hunt for a vaccine, which seems kind of crazy because it's a global problem and you wouldn't want to distribute the resources kind of in it. On the other hand, maybe a little competition is good, but there are three hunts for the vaccine. We have one supposedly that the Trump administration is coordinating supposedly, Operation Warp Speed. Yeah, good luck. There isn't such a thing as warp speed, but that's all right. And then we have the Chinese are apparently doing their own thing. And then there's an interesting consortium in Europe. It's a shame. I think it's a shame we're not kind of coordinating with them. But I've talked to people who are in the middle of this, and like a lot of journalists, and the range of opinion is like, we might have a vaccine

in October, to we might never have one. That's informed opinion. Nobody knows. But the hunt is so unprecedented, what's going on, this scientific pursuit. That means that we never see anything like it. And the resources are being thrown. I assume, actually, we'll probably get a vaccine. But what happens to that? That's what I wonder. So you're not going to get instantly 6 billion doses of this thing. You're going to have 100 million doses of the vaccine. Who gets them? Right now would be a really good time to have that conversation where we can all kind of agree beforehand that wherever it's found, it should go to, I don't know, people who are likely to transmit these or nursing homes or whatever. There's some smart strategy for distributing the vaccine,

not whoever gets it just keeps it for themselves. Well, we just saw how that went with toilet paper and some of the other stuff. It didn't go well. We need to see, we should be sorting that out now and that that conversation is not really happening. It's,

it's alarming because it's got to someone, not everybody, one of these three groups is going to get this vaccine first. And then to, someone, not everybody, one of these three groups is going to get this vaccine first. And then the question is, I mean, the potential for conflict over it is huge. And the potential also for it just to be not distributed in the efficient way

to attack the virus. So that's kind of a... I mean, there's so many ways that can go wrong, right? Reason number one, it could go wrong. We never come up with a vaccine. Yes. Reason number two, we have two sides come up with a vaccine

and then fight for who's getting the credit for it, like what happened with Robert Gallo and the French when they had the, with the HIV back in the late 80s that the band Played On was about. And then three, how do you distribute it? And everybody's talking. With the HIV back in the late 80s that the band Played On was about. And then three, how do you distribute it? And everybody's talking. I don't want to say naive.

It's almost like too hopeful where they're just like, well, when we get the vaccine, you know, like you're getting milk from the grocery store. And there's so many variables that come with that. All of it makes me so nervous. Not to mention our government. Yeah. Anyway, I miss sports it's it's like it's like the number one thing that i miss uh it's it's uh and it's getting worse and worse and worse like i that i normally you go cold turkey and after 10 weeks you feel better i don't feel better i feel worse about the sports. Yeah. Isn't it interesting

what it says about our daily lives and our psyche that sports was this important? Like, you measure the different months by what sporting events are on, which is basically how I live my life. Yeah. Well, it's my, the rhythms of my day are driven, have been driven by sports probably my whole life and, or, and, and, or my children's sports. So the whole thing is just, when it just vanishes, it's amazing what it does. I wanted to talk to you about that because the youth sports part of this is the part that basically fell by the wayside. Everyone's focused on NBA, NFL, baseball, MMA, all the major ones, soccer, when's that come back? And meanwhile, youth sports has been completely decimated. I know your kids play.

That's what one of your podcasts is about. My daughter's a soccer player. My son plays a whole bunch of things, but her soccer season was about to happen and it just got, that's it. Now she's probably not playing soccer again. She's just turned 15. She's going to lose a whole year. I mean, there could be way worse things to happen in life, but there's millions of kids who are losing these, either the senior year of their high school career. This is

the final bow on their whole career and she's gone. Or people who are like, you know, if you're an eight-year-old soccer player, to me, that's the most important year because that's when it's like, all right, it starts to sort out who's athletic, but now you're learning actually space, where to go, how to move, how to just not cluster. And to just think about like this whole generation of eight-year-olds that just lose that year,

that's going to be really damaging. And I think about this a lot, not to mention all the money stuff and U.S. soccer, all that stuff. The money stuff is huge. It's a tens of billions of dollars a year industry and in all the sports. And that's, you wonder, so you and I talked about this a little bit before when I saw you last. But my child, when I looked at my now 18-year-old senior year in high school daughter's travel softball schedule. If I just gave you her last year itinerary and said where she was spending the night every night and didn't tell you anything about who this person was, you would have said she was a traveling salesman for some multinational corporation. Right.

She was like in hotel rooms 50 nights a year. And she spent 20-something nights a year in Irvine, California at these tournaments. And this was going on not just in softball, but soccer and volleyball and all these sports. This whole structure arose that depended on travel and these huge businesses were have been built on the back of it and these things are they're they're i wonder i mean there's an argument that these things were maybe not the best thing in the world for the kids i don't it's but into some doubt uh and what it's all because it's all partly largely fueled by colleges and scholarships and all that i kind of i've been watching this i kind of wonder what's going to happen at the college level uh like like um are the colleges going to reevaluate

like the importance of athletics to them if they them. If they don't have football next year, are they going to have anything else? I don't know. You kind of wonder. Or are you going to have all the amount of scholarships you would need to match football and then get rid of everything else? Yeah, that would be it. So you'd have women's soccer, soft softball and football and you're done. Right. They're going to all have these huge budget problems and it's going to be a natural place to look to cut. Well, unfortunately, that's what happens when you have terrible

times like this. I mean, we're seeing it in media too. Things that are just barely getting by or things that the person kind of wants to cut, but it would seem kind of ruthless to do it. And it gives you an excuse that there's all these different ways there's going to be cutbacks. But like, I look at youth sports and I'm thinking like so much of this stuff was just barely getting by. Right. And the moment you introduced any sort of negative, anything, it was going to flip it on its head. And I think that's already happening. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So, so in any case, it's been, it's been just really interesting to see how central all this was to my life. And it will be nice when we start to get back to at least some sports who's coming back first.

You, you must know which, which league. Well, but this is the irony of the youth sports thing, right? Like basketball, you have a sport run by 30 owners, most of whom are incredibly successful and smart. With the best commissioner we've had probably in any sport in a long time. And they're talking to everybody and putting so much time, thought, energy into how to do this bubble thing. And I do think they're going to come back, but think about all the,

all the energy they've spent on this, all the money they've probably just spent trying to figure out how to do it safely. How would you ever replicate that with like a YSO soccer? It's never happening. Right. I have parents on my, my daughter's team was like,

do you think we'll be back in the fall? And I'm like, no, there's no way we're going to be back in the fall. It's not happening. They're not going to, you know, whoever, whatever youth sports thing your kid's in, they don't want the legal liability of they had a softball game and three kids in the game got COVID because they didn't do the testing right. It's just not happening.

Right. I think it's, so I think when you move to the NBA level, the amount of time, the fact got COVID because they didn't do the testing right. It's just not happening. Right. So I think when you move to the NBA level, the amount of time, the fact that there's less players, it makes sense to me. Baseball has all the union versus the owner stuff that makes it hard for them to agree on anything. And then football is just a ton of people.

So I would say basketball is the easiest one. What do you think? I agree. I bet they can get. What do you think? I agree. I bet they can get back and have some kind of playoff. Yeah. In an empty arena. Which in itself

is going to be a little odd. I mean, I guess for the players, it'll be like practice. But it's going to be odd watching it. I mean, you know, it's funny, just like a laugh track gives you some sense of how you're supposed to respond

emotionally. Or music in a movie. You take the music out of the movie and you don't know what you're supposed to feel. You take the fans out of the arena and it might be kind of odd to watch. We saw with UFC they

did the big pay-per-view two weekends ago. It actually was really cool not to have fans because you picked up all these other pieces like the dialogue, the corners, the announcers. I kind of liked it. If they figure out how to do that with the NBA where you

can hear everybody in the court and they're not afraid of the repercussions of that, I think it would be pretty cool. It just is from the health point of view, the sport that should be the easiest to bring back is baseball because the baseball players don't have to get anywhere near each other. As long as they don't spin, you know,

you put a mask, I guess you put a mask on the umpire or something, but, but it's, or you don't even really need the umpire, right? Maybe that's the solution. I would say golf and tennis should be back. Oh, there you go. Those are the two, like tennis, especially you could just have different balls for their handling.

The person who's serving, they have different balls and you could conceive by type play tennis and never touch the other person's ball and Right. And then stay six feet away. Like I, I feel like that could come back. Yeah. Golf. Same thing. They did a skins game last week and it wasn't very good.

It was pretty quiet, but I do think they could have golf tournaments. I think it'd be fun to watch. Yeah. So yeah, it's, it's gonna, the problem is right now,

as you said, things are on the upswing a little bit, but as soon as things, as soon as we things are on the upswing a little bit. But as soon as we have a step back, how do people react to that? What happens if there's a surge? Then the other thing is the stock market is unbelievable right now, which makes you know this world way better than I do. It makes no sense to me why we would have a surging stock market. People don't know where else to put their money.

I mean, it's driven when, you know, treasury bonds and treasury bills are giving you a zero percent return. That's where you go with your money. But it doesn't make, you're right, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense because there's just so much uncertainty. It makes some sense if there's a vaccine in October, right? Yeah. But if there's never vaccine in October, right? Yeah. But if there's never a vaccine, it doesn't make any sense at all.

And that's a total unknown. Yeah, anyway, it's watching people's response, watching the way the very same people who were kind of on pins and needles a month ago and very careful about their personal interactions and obeying the rules and so on and so forth, getting very sloppy. It feels a bit like people are mistaking the event. They're thinking of it as like recovering from an earthquake or a tornado, when it's not like that at all, right? It's like the earthquake is still going on and the tornado is still in town.

But people are pretending, kind of pretending it's not. But you don't think that because we've been able to change our habits so successfully over the last 10 weeks, that some of that just instinctively is going to make things better? Oh, I agree.

Yeah, I do think it will make it better. I don't think that they're going to, they're is going to make things better. Oh, I agree. Yeah, I do think it will make it better. I don't think that they're going to... If you're getting rid of these large gatherings, people aren't going to church and singing on each other, or they're not going to corporate conferences, or they're not going to arenas. How about sporting events and concerts? I mean, you have 20,000 people crammed into a basketball arena.

Yeah. No, I think that will have huge effects. Subways? Subways, right. I mean, I look back at, if the virus was really here, like late January, Sundance range,

all the way through to all these, basically the next seven, eight weeks, even the Sloan conference that had 2,000 people at it, I'm kind of amazed it wasn't way worse. I would have thought it would have spread even... It's a really good point, right? And the data is apparently a little funky,

but the last I saw of it was within families. Like there's only like a 15% chance you got it if you're someone in your family got it. And that's, it suggests that it's kind of harder to get than, you know, you might think. It's the anecdotal. It's just, you got to be in close proximity for a long time with someone who's got it.

Because I know somebody who had a birthday party and some people flew in from outside America for it and a bunch of people got it at the party. And you think like, all right, why that party but not when I was at All-Star Weekend, I went to a bar on Thursday night that had a thousand people in it and we're all jam-packed like sardines

and we know the virus was here at that point why didn't like 500 of us get it yeah that's the part i don't even think scientists understand they don't why it's why how it passes and why this is why this guy at the biohub joe da risi is so interesting to me because that's the question he's asking it's sort of like how are people getting um how and where is And when it comes into this little community, how is it traveling around? And as a result, and how is it not traveling around? Like, why did, in this building, did 10 people get it? And in this building, one person had it and no one else got it. So it's, I mean, it is amazing to have so many big unknowns. I don't know about you, I found it journalistically really kind of energizing

in the very beginning because it's starting to get a little old, but it's a really interesting thing because even the people who know the most don't know that much. And you can see them kind of trying to, when people are trying to figure it out, it's an interesting story.

The most disappointing thing to me is, and maybe just because I'm a generally optimistic person, it's been such a volatile last three plus years here and everything is just like, you're on this side or you're on this side. God forbid you ever have a conversation about anything. I really thought when we had like a pandemic and we were in a situation

where we were going to lose 100,000 lives in two and a half months, which is basically what's happening, that that stuff would go out the window and everybody would kind of be like, let's just figure this out. Almost like it would be like in a sports movie where the two guys on the team who don't like

each other, it's like, all right, man, let's put aside our differences and try to get this W. And not only has that not happened, it's been the opposite. I feel like it's actually exacerbated all the deep rooted issues that we had and made it worse. And that is depressing. And I wasn't prepared for that. It didn't have to be that way though. And it may not have to be that way forever. It has a lot to do with leadership, right? If the leadership is intent on dividing,

if the coach wants the team to hate each other, the coach can make that happen really easily, right? But if the coach wants the team to actually cooperate with each other, the coach can make that happen really easily. Right? But if the coach wants the team to actually cooperate with each other, the coach can make that happen too. And so I do think it has a lot... It is true that these divisions kind of... They don't go away,

but they really can be played differently from the top. And they've just been played... Trump has led to divide. And that's how he leads. Since day one. But the thing is, he could have used this moment Trump has led to divide. And that's how he leads. Since day one. But the thing is, he could have used this moment as a moment to completely

reconceive his presidency. Oh, totally. If he comes in in mid-March and he's like, you know what? I fucked up. I misread this completely. I'm going to do everything I can

to fix this. And just being honest from that point on, I actually think it could have changed the course of how he got remembered. And instead it's how he's going to be remembered. This will be the first thing I think in the paragraph. Let's hope it's not the first thing, something else,

something else where it's happening. That's a good point. But I mean, I just think like this, this was all basically the old dennis green you are who we thought you are like he's basically used this to do all the things he was doing the last three and a half years anyway it's almost like it didn't matter what the situation was right the question is which way the society bounces because this is going to go on past the election in some form and if he's out of there and you got and biden's in in there, I can totally imagine society sort of starting to heal itself in some way just because it starts. The longer we live with it, the more people kind of internalize the existential threat, I think. than my narrow political perspective. Whatever jollies I'm getting out of my tribal identity

are overwhelmed by this bigger problem. And let's fix this bigger problem. Well, you mentioned the vaccine thing, how worried you were about all the variables with that and how underreported that was. Isn't the election the same thing? What if we aren't able to actually have a normal election? Do you worry about that?

Am I worried about it? I try not to think about any of this stuff I can't do much about. Yeah, that's fair. But I don't think the election is going to be postponed. It's too impossible to do. Yeah, that will not happen. That won't happen. So the question is, how will it skew the election if people are afraid to go to the polls or if you can't,

if you can't mail in your ballot? Or how easily would it be to hack the election, which we've already had happen four years ago? Right. Right. Could it happen again? Could it happen in a worse way if we have even less people, you know, voting conventionally? Right. I had no idea you, I had no idea you and I were going to spend an hour talking about this depressing stuff. What do you want to talk, go optimistic. What optimistic thing do you want to talk about? Well, you know, what optimistic thing do I want to talk about?

Um, uh, I would love to go optimistic. I just see you and I want to pick your brain. Cause you know, you run the few people where I'm like, Oh man, I got to try to feel better about maybe he'll make me feel better about. Well, you know, I, but I tell you what has been really interested me is the way there are people compensating for the lack of leadership. So there's the stories I've been following are stories of they're mainly at the local level now, right?

Because the federal government has abdicated its responsibility to coordinate any kind of response, it's kind of said, you guys handle it yourself. Go buy your own PPE, find your own ventilators. You do whatever you want to do with the social distancing. And everybody's kind of figuring out their own path through this. The performance at the local level in many cases has been really, really impressive. And the performance, like people trying to find ways to offset the ineptitude of the administration has been, that's been really heartening. I think, you know, I have not stopped thinking it's, this is an incredible country, like with incredible abilities. It's just massively disorganized right now.

That's kind of how it feels. And I interview people. I think, God, we're going to be all right. We're going to be all right because we got all this. We have this here. There's a kind of stuff we have. We just screwed it up and we just have to bounce. Um, so, um, I've been the other source of pleasure, like in the last 10 weeks for me is it has been a total joy to do this podcast.

I mean, I've been, I've been, and it's a different sort of podcast than what you do, because it's, it's sort of like me doing my book in a, in a podcast form, right. Doing a long magazine things and around the theme of coaching. And coaching is a really happy subject. It's a happy and interesting subject. And people helping people get better at stuff and the ways that has changed has been... So I haven't actually spent much of the last 10 weeks feeling

depressed um because you threw yourself into work that's right yeah if i pay too much attention to like i don't watch cable news but if i pay too much attention to what trump is doing i get pissed off but other than that uh generally you know i threw myself into work, but it's telling stories about this society and the stories themselves kind of make me happy. So that's been a source of optimism. Who's your favorite coach right now, by the way? I tell my kids this all the time. There are a lot of things you can't control. It's sort of like how you respond to them it's the big thing and it's a total joy watching my kids respond to this

because they've responded we had a joke for the first like month every morning we get up and say we're going to win the pandemic today and and uh how are you going to win the pandemic tell me how you're going to win the pandemic and they were and they have all they've all been extraordinary and like their resilience it's been a tough and i, and as a part of me thinks if it stopped now, just for them, this would have been an actually very valuable experience. That it's a degree of uncertainty, darkness, difficulty at length that they haven't really experienced in their lives. And they've seen, they had the experience of responding admirably to it. And that's a muscle you sort of, you build.

And that's been fun. I don't know, have you noticed that in your family? I think most people who are at least in the position where they're not just in danger all the time or, you know, just try literally trying to survive. I think it's human nature and it's very American too, to try to figure out, well, how can I make something good out of this? And I think we've seen with the, with the family structure, I know it's been with a bunch of my friends, parents and kids spending so much more time together than I think they would have normally for, you know, whether it's like your 18 year old daughter,

you're talking about how she was in 50 hotel rooms. When you have a kid who's on a travel team and you're driving around on Saturdays and Sundays, like that ends up being the whole day. And you know, you're in the car with them a little bit, you're watching the game, but ultimately that's, now it just seems like people are spending time together and doing dumb things together and playing board games and taking walks

and binge watching movies or whatever. And it seems like the time that's spent together reminds me of when I was growing up in the 70s and we would go to see my dad's family and we would all just kind of hang out in a room and watch TV and make dinner and just kind of shoot the shit. And then the night was over.

I don't know if that was happening as much anymore in the device era. Everybody's like, I'm on my device, you're on your device. She's upstairs. And everybody's just kind of split all over the place. Right. So it seems like the connective tissue is stronger from this.

I agree. I agree totally with that. And there's a sense that you're kind of, even when you feel like you wish you weren't completely stuck in the same place with the same people all the time, you are, so you got to figure it out. And that's been kind of great to watch. Also, it So you got to figure it out. Yeah. And that's been, that's been kind of great to watch. Also, it reminds you, these are my people. Yeah. Ultimately,

like this is, this is my group. Yeah. Here's where I am. Yeah, that's totally right. And sometimes they could remind you in the wrong way too. Yeah. I know people who have broken up, you know, people who are dating people who thought they were going to get married and they spent eight, nine weeks together in the quarantine and like, I'm out get, you know, I think it's kind of nudge you in good or bad directions, depending on how strong the relationships are. So this is a version of what you were saying before, how, you know, in media enterprises that were just hanging on or that there was,

that there was any, there was any kind of inclination to ax it or end it. This gave everybody the excuse. A version of this has happened inside people's relationships. Yeah. Relationships are weak. The virus finds it, you know? Oh, yeah. The situation finds it and exaggerates the weakness.

But if the relationships are strong, it sort of dramatizes the strength. And that's been cool to watch the strength being dramatized. But I was thinking more just internal. I mean, I've got a 21-year-old, an 18-year-old, and a 13-year-old. And they shouldn't all be here. The 21-year-old should be at college and the 18-year-old should be just out. We should be playing softball. Yeah. Should be on the streets with his friends. But they're all here. And watching them kind of take the punches, because, I mean, for them, for me,

it's kind of been a matter of minor inconvenience, right? I mean, like, I got to stay home more. But, I mean, the 18-year-old lost her senior softball season. She lost prom, her graduation. The 21-year-old loves college. She's missing a bunch of her college. The 13-year-old loves college. She's missing a bunch of her college. The 13-year-old, on the other hand, my son, he's like Huckleberry Finn. He's never been happy.

My son's the same way. Do we ever have to go back to school? Please, please don't find a vaccine. So we're like, don't cure this. This is unbelievable. It's like the longest snow day ever. Yeah, that's exactly right. We used to, when I was growing up, when I was growing up in New Orleans, kids used to

routinely phone in bomb threats because they didn't want to take a test. And there was never a bomb. And the consequences, this was way pre 9-11. So the consequences were not like the FBI's at your house. It's just school got shut down. This feels like the longest bomb threat ever. It's like, and he is like, he was always happy, but happy in a way I've never seen him happy. Like happy as a human being can be.

And so, but to watch them internally process the whole thing and deal with where they've had loss, deal with the loss. That's been really interesting to me. And happy, and basically a happy experience I've said this I've said this on this pod before but I think I actually like that it's played out

I don't like anything how the pandemic's played out I'm just saying the variable of it it's kind of reminding people that we need to see other people and be around people. And it's fun to be in groups. And it's, I think I really feel like people miss being in groups and miss being around people and miss the freedom.

Yeah. Just like the freedom of being like, I'm going to go meet my buddy at a bar tonight and the Laker game is going to be on. And once that stuff's been removed, I think there's been an appreciation for a lot of these little things that I think we just all took for granted. And when that all comes back, I don't think we'll take it for granted. And this is the first, I won't take this for granted moment we've really had as a country since 9-11 you know when there are a bunch of other things like that that i wonder i wonder you know once i imagine it's going on for a few more months

and then we maybe we sort out a there's a vaccine and then we move on into back to supposed normalcy but what lingers from this is a really interesting question and one of the things I wonder is, we'll have spent a lot of time viewing other human beings as agents of infectious disease. Yeah. Like, you're spooked when you're in the presence of someone who is not your family. I wonder how long it takes for that to go away,

where you're actually comfortable sitting in a crowded restaurant or actually comfortable shaking hands or hugging somebody. I think some of that stuff's going to just be gone. I think handshakes and that kind of just intimacy with strangers, not intimacy, but casual

intimacy. I think it will now be a fist bump culture or just a wave. I think it's going to change the same way that like 9-11 changed how we travel in airports, where it's just like, all right, we're not traveling that way anymore. Now this is the new way we're going to travel. I think the way we greet people is going to change. The way we think about being in groups, even when they say, Hey, it's cool. We're fine. I mean, think

about with HIV and AIDS, the, there's so much we didn't know in the late eighties, early nineties. And then as we learn more and then there still was that fear basically all the way through the nineties. And then in the two thousands, things started to heat up again and when sex when sex became death yeah yeah people became afraid it became unprotected sex was like a really like dangerous thing to do or we thought and then you eventually realized that not as dangerous as we thought so if this is true if people just generally um have a different attitude towards proximity towards other human beings. How long is it before, even after a vaccine pro sports comes back with build arenas? I mean, that that's, you know, I think it's going to be, I think it'll come back in Texas, Florida. Some of these plays

like football where these places, it's just, those people are going, they don't care. But I think the day to day stuff, like the game 50 of the Clippers season, when the Grizzlies are in town, people are going to be like, I'll just watch this on TV. Go to a movie theater. Yeah. What about Broadway? I mean, when's the next time someone's going to go sit in one of those crowded little theaters? Well, think about, think about you're in Broadway, You're crammed in watching whatever, and the guy behind you keeps coughing. Yeah. What do you do? Run.

That's the stuff. It's not like pandemic, no pandemic. We're still going to have flu season from November to March. People are going to be sick. We're going to have people coughing around. Right now, it's warm weather. It's about as healthy as it's going to be,. We're going to have people coughing around. Right now, it's warm weather. It's about as healthy as it's going to be.

But flu season's coming back. It won't mean people have the coronavirus, but you'll never know. So that's the stuff where I'm just like, stuff is just not coming back right away, regardless. Yeah. It'll never be quite the same. No. No, but that's the thing. It's like, I think we've all come to grips with this, that whatever the outcome of this is going to be, whatever we're going to miss about the way it used to be, that's gone. Like move forward. Think about where we're going. But the old way is gone.

Like the Sloan conference, 2000 people crammed into that thing. That's not happening again. It's just not. This culture is really good at taking lemons and turning it into lemonade. We have a cultural advantage, but it drives me crazy that we've been so stupid. Your podcast

is called Against the Rules. Before we go, though, tell me Give me your top three favorite coaches right now and why Well, this would take us outside of the podcast Because I didn't do any famous coach profiles No, I know, but it's Sorry, so who are my favorites? No, this is just pure podcast

Yeah, yeah, yeah Can I reframe it slightly? Yeah Who are the three coaches Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can I reframe it slightly? Yeah. Who are the three coaches that if you said I had to go right about coaches, I'd go right about them? That's even better. That's why you are who you are. It's a better question. Greg Popovich.

Okay. Why? That's more of a history story, but I think, I don't know how it's going to be going forward with the Spurs. It's just, it's a bit like the Moneyball mystery, like how they did, it's from the outside, it's just really interesting how they've done what they've done. It's a different story. It's Popovich getting players to buy into a system in a culture where players don't usually buy into systems. It's players getting, taking less money than they could get on the open market to stay with him.

It's players improving in pretty dramatic ways sometimes, like Kawhi Leonard. It feels like something slightly different has happened in San Antonio over the last 27 years than happened in the rest of the NBA. And I want to go try to explain why.

And I suspect he's try to explain why. And I suspect he's the main reason. And so if I was your editor, I would tell you to flip that angle. Okay. What would you say? When Kawhi leaves, pushes his way out, goes to Toronto.

Yep. And then that team starts to become something else. Would the angle then be Greg Popovich's way was the best way for 20 years? Can it survive in the new NBA? No, I think that's part. I agree with you. I agree that that was the moment where they left the old script.

In the old Spurs, Kawhi Leonard becomes a slightly underpaid superstar who is the core of the franchise. And who feels lucky to be there, even though he could go anywhere else. That's right. But he feels connected socially to everybody there. It's like family. But that graph didn't take. You know, it's amazing. There's this Bob Costas thing that made the rounds Sunday night. So he did the play-by-play for Jordan's last Bulls game.

Right. And after the game, he's at the table with the two guys wrapping up the telecast. And I mean, he was amazing the way he could go off the cuff for two straight minutes or three straight minutes. Does this two-minute monologue about this last

Jordan moment? Could this be the end of this bulls team? What's going to happen to sports. We're seeing this start to shift where we're not going to have these great teams anymore that have endured for years and years and have won and lost. And, and he's, and this is in June 98,

he's basically laying out everything that's about to happen with professional sports. And like, he's saying, I hope you enjoyed this team because the way professional sports are going, we might not see teams stick like this together again. And he's fucking right. And this was 22 years ago.

I thought it was amazing. He just nailed it. Anyway. Yeah, no. So, so that's, that's right.

And it isn't. So you want to give my other two coaches, um, Mike Leach at Mississippi State. Okay. And I wrote about him ages ago when he was at Texas Tech. And there are characters I just can't get out of my mind. It's almost like you walk into their lives and you walk into a novel that's happening.

And the character just creates the story. And if you just sit with Mike Leach for a day, the story starts and you're up and running. So, but at Mississippi State, I mean, it's like putting Mike Leach into a Faulkner novel. And it's Starkville, Mississippi. And he's going to have, it's the first time he's really in the middle of, of the biggest talent pool in college football. And it's going to be really interesting to see how he does. So he's interesting. The situation's interesting. So that, that's a, that's another subject.

That's a good one. You should just do that one. I think I will do that one. Yeah. I will do that one. And then the third one, you know, I might go, just to keep you moved to a different sport, I might go grab one of these coaches who are sort of the analytics-based coaches in baseball. One of the podcast episodes is about, partly about this guy named Kyle Bode,

who's now the pitching coordinator for the Cincinnati Reds. But like six years ago was coaching in the little league in Seattle. And he just figured out stuff about the way the body moves. I mean, just measured stuff that people hadn't measured before and found ways to make pitching motions more efficient. So all of a sudden you turn the guy who was throwing an 88 to someone who's throwing 96. And that sort of the application of science and data to coaching is, I mean, a very good book was written about, the MVP machine book.

I'd like to go spend more time with one of those people. I'm not quite sure who it is. It might be him. It might be someone else. If you said I had to go write about a baseball coach, I'd pick someone like that. It wouldn't be necessarily like, it wouldn't be a head coach. It would be someone who is fixing people's swings. That interests me. Well, remember Tom House way back when? You had a couple of people like that, it was the first wave of those guys, but a lot of it was gut instinct. Yeah.

Yeah. And now it's just completely flipped where they, you know, they, we have so much technology and intelligence with all this stuff now. Yeah. So, uh, so I think those would be my three coaches, but I know the minute we're done, I'm going to think of six others but those now let me ask you this before you let me go if I let you point

me in the direction of some coach and I say I go write it you want me to write about someone who would it be I think Nick Durst or Brad Stevens. Oh, so for NBA coaches. Yeah, so there you go. Brad Stevens, I'm with you.

Yeah. I'm really fascinated by how they've adapted to the way basketball just completely changed over the last six years, but kind of kept some of the old school stuff too. Like what Nick Durst did last year with that weird Kawhi situation. And he's not even playing every game. He's got a whole bunch of guys who,

they don't know if they're going to blow up the team after the year. And I just thought he did a really good job. And I think the stuff Stevens has done just as a Celtics fan watching it, there's a feel to only a couple coaches. I'm really hard on coaches. There's only a couple guys out there that I really just feel like have a feel for it. I think Steve Kerr's like that too, actually.

But I'm interested in like, they're this new wave of like the people that learn from the Popovich generation, but they're also learning from kind of the Daryl Morey generation. And now they're the hybrid of those two generations. And those are the two guys I think of that it's like, whatever this next generation is, those would be the two guys that lead the way, I think. So I didn't say Steve Kerr because he's too obvious, but yeah.

He's pure Popovich Jackson generation who has now learned how to also adopt the stats. But Stevens especially has just come up as this old school guy who has blended in all these different generations. So I would have him. Now I'm going to take shit from people. Of course, you named the Celtics coach. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do you find that the passions are running higher or lower in this big sports intermission? Are people responding more violently to your opinions or less violently? Oh, I think the Jordan versus LeBron thing was about as volatile as it's been in a while. Because people, it's almost like how I always used to joke about how Portland

only had the Trailblazers. So it was like, it counted as four teams. That's why they were so insane. Because it was like, take the four teams you care about and merge them together and that's Portland. And I think because there were no sports, the Jordan LeBron thing just became all the sports at once.

People were just, the takes were insane. The takes were crazy. So the emotions are looking for the place to saddle. If there's only one place, it becomes like a nuke. Yeah. So that's why you have like the Utah Jazz, the Indiana Pacers, like these one sport cities. Like there, you go to the games there

and it's like life or death. It's like what it used to be all over the place. Right. All right. So Against the Rules, season two, 10 episodes? Seven. Seven? Yeah.

And then what? What's next for you after that? I've got a book idea. And I can't tell you about it yet. Don't tell me. That's probably what I'm going to do. I'm going to go write a book. What's the process for that?

Like a year? A year, close to a year before I start to write it, then six months to write it. Do you believe the whole Gladwell theory that books, audio books are going to become more dominant than real books this decade? No, I think he's, I think. I think he's right that the audio book is going to grow faster than the real book. It's been doing so for a while, but no. People like to read.

I mean, I just... I think the nice thing about the audio book is that it will be different. The print book is going to be the print book, and it's not going to change. But the audiobook is evolving. It's going to be more like a podcast. People will put their interviews, splice their interviews into them. You'll be listening to actors who will perform the parts in novels.

So there will be sources of growth there. But I think the habits just don't change that fast. And I think the real book is going to be, at the end of the decade, the real book will still be a more valuable commodity to the author than the audio book. I feel like the audio book helps the book. Yeah.

Actually, like weirdly, everybody wins. It'll just be more people consuming whatever version of the book you care about. There's people who say it's about the e-book, right? The e-book was going to put the paper book out of business. In fact, it just almost the opposite happened. You felt like you were selling, yeah, a whole bunch of e-books, but you're selling even more of these paper books.

So, no. The audio book is the most interesting thing right now because it's the changing thing. But I don't think it's just going to get i think people still are going to this reading experience is peculiar it's different from listening give me one prediction for media this decade could be anything um people well i mean this isn't this is a this is a this is too obvious but the thing you're doing now is is is going to be it's getting as big as tv uh i mean the podcast the market for these podcasts and the audience for the podcast uh i mean, I think that, so I think, here's a media prediction.

Pushkin Industries, who make my podcast, could very easily become a kind of impressive studio, like the equivalent of, you know, Paramount Studios, where the shows have such an audience that's actually taken it seriously as a big business. I think that could happen. I hope you're right, because we're hoping that happens with The Ringer. I know.

Well, it's kind of already happened. Yeah. Well, we're working on it. Right. Right. Yeah, I think this decade, if you're producing content, you have to be ready where things move as they move. And if you're stuck with just one idea and then things move, that seems like where we've had most of our media failures over the last 30 years where it's like,

oh, wait, I was doing this. Things are shifting that way. I can't audible. The ones that are malleable and kind of ready to move and jump on whatever the new app, those are the ones that usually seem to survive. I even think the New York Times, they've done an unbelievable job

at just turning themselves into a digital multimedia site that does a whole bunch of different cool things. And they're, you know, for all the reach they have, they're spending their money. media site that does a whole bunch of different cool things. For all the reach they have, they're spending their money, I think, in smart ways. I've been really impressed by what they've done the last six, seven years. Yeah, I agree. I agree. They were supposed to be dead, right? They're not dead. Yeah, remember that? Michael Lewis, this was fun.

Always good to see you. Yeah, take care? Yeah. Michael Lewis, this was fun. Always good to see you. Yeah, take care. Say hi to everybody in Berkeley for me. All right, thanks for doing this. See ya. All right, we're bringing in Jason Bateman in one second. First, what's the number one sign of a bad home security system? A home security system that's so complicated, you never use it. That's exactly the type of security system

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That's SimpliSafe with two I's, simplisafe.com slash BS. Check it out, simplisafe.com slash BS. All right, Jason Bateman is here. So the last time he was on, I hadn seen ozark yet and i said i'm gonna watch ozark the time will come i didn't realize it was going to be a quarantine and a pandemic but i'd been saving it for the right time dove in 30 episodes which i think a lot of people did because it was trending on netflix only the crystal meth heads like you that just could really hunker down for 30 hours. When I told you I was watching it, you were worried that I was watching like five in a night.

And I was like, no, no, no, I'd never do that. It was the most I ever watched was two. But is it weird that I missed the family? Now that they're out of my life, it's not a family I should miss. And yet I kind of miss everybody. There is a little something admirable about the way in which they try to maintain some semblance of normalcy or traditional kind of, you know, like they dad kind of get on them about, you know, making sure they're, you know, doing their schoolwork and treating their friends right. And that kind of nonsense, which, you know, is obviously by design, Chris Mundy, our showrunner, head writer, he's very diligent in a great way

about keeping that kind of banal kind of traditional domestic kind of skeleton going through this thing so that when you put this sort of criminal flesh and and and muscle on it it uh it it'll kind of pop you know I suppose did you feel like I mean you also had season three coming out right as all hell is breaking loose in the world did you feel like a lot of people picked up the show yeah for sure um and there's some um semi-anecdotal semi-unofficial data that says that uh people uh either heard about the show that everyone was watching it and so those who hadn't seen it before, uh, went back and started watching up our season one and season two.

So the, the, the Netflix numbers and the popularity of the show, we've got a bunch of new, new viewers, which is, um, which is,

which is great. There's a lot of really good work done by a lot of really good people that I'm, I'm happy. Um, you know, people see, cause you know. You put in the same effort for stuff that stinks versus stuff that's good, stuff that's high budget versus low

budget, wide release, small release. You never really know how many or who it's going to hit. And if you end up being proud of something, it's just gravy that it finds a big audience. So the show was already successful. You did well at the Emmys, stuff like that. It's on Netflix. You never know how many people are watching, things like that. It really does feel like season three was at another level because it comes out right as everybody's just home. I don't even know what else people were going to watch. Right.

It was like, who are you competing against for the eyeballs? Just that specific part of the month. It was like, all of a sudden you guys are there and it was like, here it is season three. And just everybody's in. I think we were also drafting a bit off of tiger King. Cause I think that came out a couple of weeks beforehand. Um, and that was a juggernaut. And so when you're on the service,

you, you might see a, you know, a thumbnail for Ozark or, or, or something. So, um,

but yeah, I was hooked on that. Uh, and, and I'm also, uh, so good. Um,

and I've still got two episodes left on last dance, which I'm excited about. I'm sure you've got a big opinion on. Oh yeah. I banged that one out. Yeah. Did you dig it? Oh yeah.

I mean, that's, that's, that's part yours. Yes. Ish. No, it's, it's we, when I was there, we were trying to get it done, but it took another 10 years. And that's, it's, we, when I was there, we were trying to get it done, but it took another 10 years. And, uh, that's a, that's a,

a distant cousin or first cousin of 30 for 30 for 30. Yeah. It's like, it's like a younger half sister or a half brother. It's like different, different mom, same dad kind of thing, but it's still feel like it's a relative,

like close relative. I just think it's really cool that like, you know, the, the people who like should know, do know, but many more should know cool that like, you know, the people who like should know, do know, but many more should know that, that, you know, you're, you're the, you're the father of 30 for 30. You just kind of, you don't, you don't light your hair on fire about that. It's kind of a cool, it's like finding out somebody went to Harvard, you know,

but they didn't tell you. Well, I mean, the amazing thing of it was how now I look back and you know this, cause you've been out here for 40 years and I look back at all the ways it could have not happened. And we're just hitting these little invisible points where it's like, oh, we passed that one. Oh, oh, wow. We're getting, oh, this might. And now I look back. I'm like, that was crazy that I had so much confidence this was going to happen because it definitely shouldn't have happened. There should have been.

And it's timing too right i mean i i i'd be interested to look back and see with that first episode what the sort of the television landscape was at the time like what what was there was there a big a big hurricane where everyone was indoors like this with the virus you know that like because we definitely took you know we're very lucky that this thing came around when we when we were launching and um and movies are like that, too. You know, the right timing or terrible timing. I mean, I know some friends have had movies that just get wiped out because there's a big storm on the East Coast and no one goes to the movie theater. Boom, there's your opening weekend and you're done.

Yeah, it's funny. I think people think 30 for 30 was really successful right away. It was the opposite because they didn't really promote it. And the day we launched it was with this Wayne Gretzky documentary. That's what Bird did, right? Yeah. And it was a Tuesday night and it felt pretty open from a sports standpoint. NBA hadn't started yet.

The only thing we had was this wildcard baseball game going against it. It was like the Tigers versus the Twins. And we're like, all right, the only thing that would fuck us is if this game went into extra innings. And of course it's like a five hour game. It just, it cuts right in and we're going head to head. It was, this is before ESPN had baseball. It was on TBS and we're going head to head against, and nobody's watching the doc, you know? And we're like, Hey, coming up 15 minutes. It'd be, well, it's like the bottom of the eighth and some wildcard playoff game. So it took a while to lead in, right? If it was an ESPN game,

it was a lead and that would have been cool. Oh my God. Well, so what, what turned the corner for us was we ran one after the Heisman. Connor was smart enough to grab this schedule spot after the Heisman. Connor was smart enough to grab the schedule spot after the Heisman. I think it was either the U or Marcus Dupree. I can't remember which one. It was the Heisman leading into 30 for 30.

That was our moment. That was when things started to flip. It was a college football episode. That was it. Then we got all this drive-by traffic and then we got momentum. But yeah, when we launched 30 for 30, I still have the email. I sent an email to every friend I had telling them this was coming and really mad that ESPN wasn't promoting it more.

It was like, you know, they're not really promoting it, but we have this new series coming out. I'd really like if you could spread the word. I'm just sending this to like a hundred people. Oh my God. It's embarrassing. The other thing that's, I want to go back to Ozark later,

but the other thing that's happening is you, you've just made a lot of movies at this point and they're just on all the time on either streaming services, cable, a couple, this whole Simmons family might've watched couplesples Retreat about three weeks ago. Oh, man. That was the best phone call I ever got.

I think it was Vince Vaughn and Scott Stuber called me. They had this film, and it's going to take place in a resort, and it's just going to be us buddies. It was sort of like the Sandler, you know, mode. Oh, yeah. And we picked a good spot to go, and we're casting all our friends, and your character, we named him Jason.

Like, are you up for it? And I'm like, well, where? What are we talking about? Where will we go? Well, we set in Bora Bora, and we just, your whole family, bring anybody you want, and you have your own house on these, you know, out over the water.

We're going to, we're going to take the whole resort. We're going to shoot it there and live there for a couple of months. Are you in? I mean, it was just like, what's the catch? It was unbelievable. And now that movie plays on a loop there. That's the, the St. Regis in Bora Bora. It's like, it's got like its own channel or something.

Wow. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, that's saying the recipe of let's make a movie while I'm also in an awesome location with my family. Because we watched it because when we were really stuck in the house before you could go anywhere, that first month, and we just started watching movies set in fun locations, like Just Go With It, the Sandler movie that's in Hawaii

with Jennifer Aniston and the descendants couples retreat, basically anything that was in the Caribbean or Bora Bora or Hawaii. We watched all the Hawaii movies, like anything blue crush just because it was like, Oh, this is cool. We're in a different place.

We're not stuck at our house. Just kind of looking at it. So paint me this picture. So you, you are like the person, you're making me look bad as a father. You're sitting down with your wife and your kids and you're finding family friendly films to watch and you sit there and marinate and you, everyone's got their snacks and you're watching movies and giggling with one

another. Yeah. That's happening at our house. It's actually, yeah, I know. We're making everybody look bad. Well, and then like, after they all go to bed, do you go out and murder people? Are you that great? Come on, Bill. What else are we going to do?

We're all stuck together. You're not slipping off to your man cave and ignoring your children and your wife a little bit each day? No, just during the day. Just during the day. We didn't watch like, there's lines we won't cross. Like we're not like, hey, to my 15 year old daughter,

hey, come watch season three of Ozark with us. Like we're not. She can watch that. No, she, no, that's what I'm saying. No, no, no. No, she can't, what are you talking about? You can't watch Ozark. Yeah, well, there's, I think there's in the three years there's i think there's one

scene that you can't show a kid until they're like 30 no i think 20 maybe and it's when it's when uh wendy uh videotape on her iphone the the senator, the senator's husband that's got a prostitute in a hotel bed. Yeah. And she's got him tied up to the bed. Do you remember that scene? That wasn't the scene I was thinking of. Which one were you thinking of?

I mean, I don't want to spoiler alert this for that. I'm going to spoiler alert this for people who haven't seen it. Was there killing? No, there's a pivotal doggy style sex scene where like real plot is advanced that you're involved in. That's true. That's true. That's a tough one. That's a tough one to watch with your 15 year old daughter.

Maybe that's not on my list. Yeah, you might be right. You might be right. And that was difficult to do as well. So you have season three, Laura Linney's character, her brother pops in. Yes. What's his name? Tom Pelfrey?

Tom Pelfrey. Unreal, right? What a great actor. You're cast in that part. It's like, alright, bipolar brother. This is going to have to go a couple different ways. He's going to have to really go off the handle a couple of times. We got to get this right. Cause in the wrong hands, this will be bad. Right.

What is the, what's the process of trying to find that guy? Or do you have that guy already? And you're like, we got to figure out how to work him into Ozark. Like, how does that go? No, we didn't have him already. We only had, we had the season mapped out, but we didn't have the specifics of those scripts written in long form, except for the first couple that that character was in. So while I never talked to Chris Bundy about this, my assumption is that he was watching what this actor was great at,

what he was decent at, what he might be less comfortable with. So he's scouting him like a player almost? I mean, I want to think so. Again, I never talked to him about this, and I'm just projecting the way I would probably do it. I mean, it is one of the advantages you have doing an episodic show. You can kind of calibrate what this character is going to be based on the strengths or weaknesses of the person that you cast. Whereas with the feature, you know, you're the script's written, you, you know, you can't, you can't move that

much. So I feel like that character got better as Chris discovered how incredible this actor was and what kind of taste he had. He could write him really unhinged and know that the guy wasn't going to be making a bunch of faces and being disrespectful to people with that or being stereotypical. You know what I mean? I thought he was awesome. It was one of those performances like when I'm sure he'll get nominated when he doesn't win, I'll actually get angry. If he doesn't win, I'll be like, what the fuck? This is a robbery.

We gotta call the police. I'm sure he'd be, he'd be, he's already really, really thrilled. He had a great time with us and um and we're so bummed that he's gone now but um well not necessarily yeah there's some stuff on the internets i was talking to chris about that yesterday uh or we could do flashbacks you know i mean we have this problem with everybody again sorry about the spoilers but we have we have this problem with um with everybody that that we that we cast because the characters are already written and their storyline is already established, whether they live or they die. We just end up falling in love with these people and just dread the day that it comes where they're no longer going to be on the set again.

It's tough. Well, then you have the lady that plays Ruth, who's also really good. And I saw her, she was in some on demand movie, the assistant Julia Garner. Yeah. I was like, I'm in,

I didn't even know what it was about. I'm like, I'm in, here's my buddy. Here's 699, whatever it was. Fantastic. That was a great.

Yeah. It's really weird. Yeah. It's, I thought it was really, really, really interesting. I didn't,

I didn't love it, but I really respected it because it goes for a specific type of storytelling thing that I had just never seen before exactly how they did it. So I thought it was totally worth seeing. Oh, well, check that out. It was presented on demand and a little bit different than what the movie is. It was one of those... It almost made it seem like it was more of a thriller.

Yeah. But, um, but yeah, it was a little bit more sort of a theory all and it's indescribable. It's worth seeing though. Yeah. I do recommend it. Um, so, but you were also doing, you were doing Ozark, but then you were also doing the HBO show too. Yeah. The outsider. Um, uh, it was, uh, I was trying to do both of those at the same time. Just started outsider a little bit earlier. Um, and the, the, the, the, the goal, the challenge was to oversee both of them. Um, the people who produce Ozark MRC, they brought me the outsider and they said, you know, do you think you can do two you know would you like to try I said yeah please that would be a great challenge and um so I directed the first two and um and you know executive produced uh the the show kind of oversaw it and of course put the whole crew together and the cast together and um but I I brought in uh Andrew Bernstein who was a

guy who directed um some episodes of Ozark to be our producing director, to really kind of be the guy boots on the ground while I left and went over and did Ozark. We shot them on stages that were really only about, I don't know, a quarter mile away from one another in Atlanta, so I could pop back and forth. But the reality is that I could really go back and forth, but the reality is that I could really go back and forth. So, um, you know, I can't take any credit for, or anything that, that people loved, uh, after those first two episodes, um, that, that was all them. And, um, it got a really nice response and I'm super proud of, uh, the, the, the tone that, that we, that we hit, I wanted it to be a little bit more of like the Stephen King, uh, shining as opposed to Stephen King, let's say one of his more sort of, you know, pulpy, um, uh, versions, which are, you know, equally good and equally tough to do. They're just sort

of different tonally. And, and I, I'm just, I don't watch a lot of, a lot of gore, a lot of jump scares, but that kind of moody off putting unsettling kind of tone of the shiny or something I tried to, to put into outsider and said, great, great crew helped me do that. You know what movies like that, that I was just randomly watching last night was the thing John Carpenter. Yeah. Same kind of vibe where you're just like, ah,

I'm really uncomfortable and I'm not even positive. Why? Right. yeah. Kurt Russell? Kurt Russell. And a lot of those guys, like a lot, like seven or eight of those guys. Didn't they do it? They did a remake of that, did they not, a few years ago?

Yeah, and the original, as usual with this, the originals is better. The original's good. There was one even before John Carpenter, I think. There was like an old black and white one, original, original. OG, I think the kids are saying bill oh gee how uh how are you picking your projects these days um i mean the whole sort of picking projects i think is a little bit um more overstated than than than what is the reality for, for most. I think there's probably

two or three actors or actresses that really get to pick, you know, that there's genuine conflict, you know, there's too many great opportunities. How do I do them all? You know, most of us are just happy to just be asked and yes, please, we'll do it. But if there is anything that ends up being a scheduling conflict, the thing that wins out is usually the project that's got the best people that are involved, you know, regardless of how much work I have to do on it, whether it's an acting role that's up high on the call sheet or down low, or if it's something that I would direct, it's really about the people that are involved with it, because that'll let you know kind of what experience you're going to have with it because you're there a long time. And so it's just that it's about, it's about the people.

Do you feel like I'm skewed too much more toward drama, drama the last couple of years, I need to work in something a little lighter. Yeah, that's, that's mostly a directorial thing. I'm just drawn to, you think, for you to dive deeper into the other departments in a drama as opposed to a comedy. Like you can overshoot a comedy, you know, you can overscore a comedy, you can over edit a comedy, like, um, you know, so dramas, you can, you can build a mood and the whole look and a whole feel, whereas comedy, if you move too far away from, you would ideally like to have your audience with a constant grin on their face so they don't have that far to travel to get to a laugh. Yeah. there's by maintaining that grin, there's certain things that you shouldn't do. And that kind of, uh, for me, at least right now, uh, eliminate some of the stuff I like to do as a director,

but that's probably my naivete. I, I probably, if I got into directing more comedies, I'd probably see that there's plenty of, of places for me to play with. And, and, you know, with lighting and with camera and with, you know, music and, and editorial rhythms and all and with camera and with, you know, music and editorial rhythms and all that kind of stuff. I should do some more comedy as a director, but right now I'm digging the challenge with the drama stuff. So you're thinking you're almost more of a director than an actor where your brain is right

now. Well, you know, after a bunch of years being on a set, you absorb a lot of what people are doing and, um, to have the, the, the privilege of the, the job where your responsibility is to actually provide guidance and, and, and yeah, direction or a plan, um, for, for that process. Uh, that's, uh, that's a lot of responsibility and demands that you have paid attention and absorbed all these things that you've been observing. So I've always wanted to challenge myself to see, have I soaked up enough to really warrant that responsibility and that leadership, that position? So it's been a challenge that I've really enjoyed kind of taking

on. And it's a more complicated, more kind of holistic process as an actor. It's not taking anything away from actors, but, you know, an actor truly, you know, works about 15 minutes an hour. You know, they're in their dressing room and waiting for the crew and the director to set up the shot. You know, a lot of movie making is going on while, you know, we're in our trailers watching judge Judy, um, you know, and then they knock on your door, they say, we're ready for you. And you come out and you hit your mark and you talk. Um, yeah, it's more complicated than that, but I, I just like,

I like being with the crew and setting up the shot and, and then bringing in the actor. And then you're still working while the actor's working because you're watching and you're taking notes and you're trying to figure out how the next take can be better. Now, if I'm also acting in it, now I'm fully submerged. I'm working 60 minutes an hour and a real masochist menu there. That doesn't sound fun. I've never understood how people direct and act at the same time. It's almost like if somebody was a player coach in the NBA or something, like if LeBron was just like, I'm going to run the Lakers too and run the offense. Well, but you know, if the, the, to go with that analogy, you know, uh, acting's always been really, really comfortable for me.

It seems like playing basketball and shooting the ball is really comfortable for LeBron. So strategy and play design and tempo and all of that stuff that a coach might chime in on would probably be more efficiently and surgically executed if you're on the floor. I mean, if Phil Jackson was on the floor and he had the ball, literally had the ball, you know, he'd be able to, in real time, adjust things, pivot, you know, literally. Where, you know, with acting and directing, I can give an actor a note while we're in the scene together. Or I can wait until somebody on the crew is, you know, done, you know, doing what they need to do, like a camera getting into position before I say my line, things that I can observe because the acting is so comfortable for me, I'm able to absorb, you know, the performance of the other actor and also be able to help out with all the technical stuff that's going on in real time while we are acting, you know, because there's, you know, there's all kinds of things

that are going on behind the camera that the crew is doing, that as an actor, if you're aware of those things, you can really help make them work kind of like a Swiss watch, you know, the timing, you know, you hear these stories about how Fincher is really specific about the composition of the shot and making sure that the shadow comes across the background just at the right time before the actor reveals the glass that's chipped. There's this dance that goes on, and if you're aware of that as an actor,

you can really help make that happen on take three instead of take eight if you're a good soldier. Do you have to trust somebody on the set to give you notes on your acting since you're the director and you can't give notes to yourself? Yeah, I mean, I don't officially deputize anybody, but I hope that I create an atmosphere on the set where, you know, if I if I really go sideways someone's gonna you know say buddy that sucked you got to do another one or you know you can do better or you know right true truly you you can tell like LeBron can tell if he misses a shot really badly or if he's running too slow or you know I can I can

tell if the take was no good and we'll just do another one right away. And then when it feels like that was pretty good, then we've got this video playback where I can go back and I can just rewind it and look at it and confirm whether it, whether it was good or not. What was the first thing you directed just in life? It was an episode of, um, the Hogan family. Uh, when I was 18. This sitcom. Wow. Yeah. With Valerie Harper and then Sandy Hogan. Come on. Who are you talking to?

You have to explain the Hogan family to me. Yeah, that was really cool. It was three years into the run there, I think, something like that. So I was very close with the cast and the crew. And, and they, they helped me out quite a bit. Did you, we, we just did a back to the future rewatchables podcast that had this whole backstory of how Eric Stoltz was Marty McFly for five weeks. And then they basically fired him because Michael J. Fox that opened up and the whole thing. Did you audition for that? That was right in your like wheelhouse kind of age range

where they must have auditioned every actor for that. Right. No, I don't think that I did, but I do remember, my sister was doing Family Ties, of course, with Michael J. Fox. And I remember, because I'd finished work,

I don't know what I was doing. I think maybe it's your move or something at the time. And, and my mom or my dad was, was my set sitter, my guardian, my, you know, um, person over 18 with me. And then we, so we would finish my hours would be shorter because I was younger than Justine. So I remember we would drive from Universal where we were shooting that over to Paramount where Justine was shooting her show. And I remember kind of watching them deal with how Michael J. Fox wasn't there because he was still shooting or they needed to get him out early so we can go shoot because he was doing it at the same time. And I remember thinking, God, this guy this guy's got it i mean he's the funniest guy in the world he's the head of this show he's doing a steven

spielberg you know uh produced movie and like ah it was it was pretty cool and he's such a nice guy well initially so all the i didn't know a lot of it till we did the research but they wouldn't let him out of the contract or they wouldn't let him additionally do it. Plus family ties. Cause Meredith Baxter burning was pregnant and all the episodes were revolving around Michael J. Fox. So they literally couldn't spare him. So they do the Eric Stoltz thing and then that falls through. Then she's back on the show so they can kind of spare him. And he's leaving at six o'clock and doing back to the future till two 30 in the morning and then go back to spare him. And he's leaving at six o'clock and doing Back to the Future until 2.30 in the morning. And then going back to Family Ties.

And he's just doing that for eight weeks, which seems bonkers. Some stamina, yeah. Yeah, we were saying like- What was it, 20? We were saying 1985, that movie comes out. It's the biggest movie of the year. It makes $200 million,

500 million worldwide, whatever it was. And he's also on Family Ties. He's got one of the four biggest shows and he has the biggest movie of the year that's about to shoot two sequels after that. It's like Michael J. Fox. Had it going.

Had it going there for a while. Because the other thing with that show, and it's weird why some some shows have the legs even into 2020 right like I still feel like Seinfeld has legs Cheers has kind of lost its legs I don't feel like anyone under 30

Cheers is really on the radar for them and then Family Ties is just off the radar and I don't I always felt like the three biggest sitcoms of that of the 80s were cheers cosby family ties kind of in that order yeah but it's probably mad about you as well and there were there were a few i mean that was 90s oh yeah yeah sitcoms were just enormous and i mean you do you miss those i i miss them a lot. I think that, you know, that's a format that everybody would still love to enjoy. In fact, they do. I mean, Chuck Lorre, you know, those are huge hits, those shows. many as there were back then uh i don't know i mean they went through a period where they just they weren't cool i guess and people kind of moved off of them and single camera comedies came around

like wonder years kind of started that role malcolm in the middle things like that yeah but i feel like uh we should be able to go back to it in some form or maybe a hybrid of it like the larry sanders show or um i've been trying to crack it for a while. And, um, you know, yeah, it seems like, yeah, it seems like there's two different lanes, right. Where you have a big chunk of America watching shows like young Sheldon and things like that, where it's just like way more people than you'd ever think. And then you have like in the New York, LA kind of cities, they're just gravitating toward this really smart single camera shows or the and then you have like in the New York, LA kind of cities,

they're just gravitating toward this really smart single camera shows or the stuff that's on cable, but wouldn't necessarily watch Chuck Lorre shows. But you can have, I mean, I think today's sitcom would be, would be, would, would be edgier, more sophisticated, more subversive like a Seinfeld. I don't think it would be as sort of earnest and populist as, say, The Cosby Show or Family Ties. Although Family Ties is pretty highbrow at times. But there is something kind of in on the joke about Seinfeld's humor that I think feels a little bit more current that I think if it was to have a resurgence, it would need to have that. I think comedy's

changed a bit. We've been watching Seinfeld with my son. He's been getting into it a little bit. He was like 12 and a half. It's still funny. I mean, some of it's dated, like the clothes are terribly dated. They don't have cell phones, things like that. I mean, some of it's dated, like the clothes are terribly dated. They don't have cell phones, things like that. But the actual concepts of the show are pretty good. But I think for that generation,

the under 20, it seems like the more recent shows like The Office and Parks and Rec, that kind of style is the kind of comedy, half hour comedy they're used to. So the Family Ties type show just isn't a style that people do anymore. But I think you're right. I feel like I could come back.

Yeah, because look, it's more, it's more performance than acting. All right. I mean, you've got the, you've got the audience. Uh, so you, you, you literally do hear the audience laughing. So there's a bit of a, of a shared wink with the audience at home that you are putting on a show, you are putting on a performance, there is a proscenium there, it is basically like a filmed play. And so the style of it is, you know, set up, set up, joke, set up, set up, joke. And as opposed to, you know, when you mentioned Office or Parks and Rec or things like that. It is single camera. There is no laugh track, and you can get into a close-up,

and jokes are revealed through watching people think or a camera reveal or something like that. It is a different flavor of comedy, and I think people would enjoy the other as well they just just needs to be uh kind of they need to be exposed to it because it is a new generation that really hasn't hasn't seen a lot of it uh except for uh chuck shows i have an idea yep so marty get season four ozark marty gets knocked unconscious As he's unconscious, whole half hour dream sequence where Marty's family is just an 80s sitcom.

I think that's what happens. Then you get to test it out. It starts by, by he gets woken up from his unconsciousness by just roaring laughter. A sort of studio audience. Yeah. A warmup guy is doing his bits, and he just shakes him awake, and he turns around and looks around. You're in Marty's point of view.

He turns around and sees this whole studio that he turns around, and he sees Wendy's there, like, loading a gun. I think you're onto it. Do I have to cut you in on that now? Yeah. Maybe it's like season seven. Maybe it's like when it's at the end of the line,

when you're just, you're dragging Ozark along, just trying to get to, you don't even need to get to syndication. You're already syndicated. Are we? Does that even exist anymore? No, it doesn't. You're already cashed in, right? It's already syndicated on Netflix the moment you can binge it. It's weird. Netflix does not pay you in money. They just give you free subscriptions to hand out to your family. Just hundreds of subscriptions? You get free months.

Can you tell me about, is there a season four plan? I mean, obviously nothing can get shot right now, but once things become normal again, is there a plan of action? There has been no announcement, but we're all feeling hopeful and confident. Season three, as we've been talking about, was really well received. But Netflix has their rhythm and their data and their process, and we're all kind of anticipating some good news, but we haven't gotten it yet. I need more from Marty in season four. Too many picks.

Too many picks. Too many screens. You said too many screens. It was great to see Wendy, Marty kind of dropped them into this problem right in season one and then in season two they kind of got their legs under them as a family and then season three wendy kind of took the initiative and season four i don't know um but uh it would be it would be interesting to see you know marty's got to kind of you know know, shit or get off the pot. He's either

got to get with her or, or turn against her and start wearing a wire, right? I mean, get her, get her out of his way so that he can take his kids back to Chicago and, and live a normal life again, or double down with her. And, and now they become kind of a double-barreled shotgun and uh we kind of you know steam towards some kind of a of a crescendo uh when i don't know but um yeah it it there was sort of um sort of a marty kind of assessing things in season three and waiting to see what the fallout was going to be from from from wendy Wendy's initiative. And, um, I think he's, he's got a, he's going to be forced into be a little bit more proactive instead of reactive, uh, this next season.

Maybe he convinces the leader of the cartel to buy the Dodgers. God, then you could shoot some Dodger stadium stuff. That would be that season five, man. But although I really don't have any complaints with some Dodger Stadium stuff. That would be pretty good, man. Although I really don't have any complaints with our Dodger ownership right now, and I empathize with them too. This is going to be a great, nice, smooth transition into sports, Bill. But that Mookie Betts situation is just a total heartbreak and expensive. But fortunately, I'm not writing the check.

Well, it devastated me and many other Red Sox fans because we love Mookie Betts. If there was another team he was going to go to, I was happy it was Los Angeles because I could go see him play. He's just absolutely fantastic. He's honestly one of the best Red Sox players of my lifetime and I think he would have crushed it for you

I think you keep him though from everything I've heard he wants to be in a big city it's a one year deal right yeah but I think he resigns I don't think he leaves I think you end up with him but who knows like we you know I'm so nervous about baseball even coming back

because you have the players and the owners are just cats and dogs. No matter what the situation is, they fight. Why was, why was it just a one-year deal with Mookie? Did they just pick up the last year? Yeah. He had one year left. The Red Sox were trying to sign me a big extension. He wouldn't sign with them because I don't, I don't,

I honestly don't think he wanted to stay. And instead of rolling the dice with the last year, they just decided to trade him. And then why would he not demand that whatever team signs him commits to a long-term deal as opposed to the non-surprise of whatever the ass end of his deal is with, with Boston. Why would he let somebody just kind of take a look at him for a year and then decide later? Cause I think it's a bet on himself type thing.

So he's, so basically if he really performs for the Dodgers, then when he signs that long-term deal, he can sign it for a long, for, for a, for a bigger number. But didn't he have a great year last year for Boston?

He said he has a great year every year. He's and he'll have a great year for a bigger number. But didn't he have a great year last year for Boston? He has a great year every year. And he'll have a great year for the Dodgers. We had Dave Roberts on the podcast we do with Pete Carroll and Steve Kerr. He's delighted. Mookie Betts is unbelievable. He's going to be awesome. He bet on himself

much like when a lot of people don't know this, when you did Ozark, you did a deal for season one, but the deal was if this does well, I get 25% of Netflix. And I mean, now look at you, you're my Netflix minority owner. It's not a lot of publicity about this. I'll tell you what, I really wish I would have taken my salary in Netflix stock when we, when we did Arrested Development, because that was their first, that was their first year. It was right on the heels of House of Cards. So first year or second year of original programming and just,

just not that it was an offer, you know, to, you can have money or you can have stock. But I wonder what they would have said if I said, listen, I'll take a dollar a week or whatever seg minimum is. I'd want but I want the rest in in stock. Oh, I'm sure they would have done that. Yeah. That Arrested Development season is an underrated checkpoint for Netflix because everyone points to House of Cards. I've told this story in this podcast, but they bought 30 for 30 from us in 2012. And we thought it was hilarious because we'd already, we'd already done all the 30 for thirties. It was,

it was finished. It was, it was like having leftovers for dinner. And then somebody being like, I'll give you full price for your leftovers. Like'm like, great here. Take them. This is awesome. And so they paid for all these. They, it was a lot of money. I can't remember what it was, but it was a lot. And we were like, this is crazy. What, what are they doing? These guys are idiots.

You want to, you want to start talking about, about Bill Simmons making a lot of money right now? Should we, should we, should we, should we whip out last week's paper or last month's paper or something? Nah, it's fine. Lord. It's fine. Good for you.

Thank you. I appreciate it. If you guys could see Bill right now, he's just dripping in jewelry. It's just there's gold ropes all over the place. It's a great company. It's much like Netflix. They have their shit together. Spotify.

Spotify, yeah. They have their shit together in a whole bunch of awesome ways. We'll talk. Spoken like a man with a new deal. So what are you doing during this quarantine other than hanging out with your family? You're working on a possible podcast that you haven't announced yet.

Correct. What else? I am doing next to nothing. I'm, I'm being, uh, respectful, uh, to the people that are working very, very hard. Um, and asking me to do my part, which is, you know, stay the hell out of their way and stay home and try to squash the curve or whatever the hell it is. Um, so that's not a big ask, right? I mean, stay in your house is easy work for a lot of folks. Helping the kids out with school is trying, but again, champagne problems. I am watching MSNBC 24-7 and reading the paper and just following this incredible social, political,

economical, medical tidal wave. I find it just endlessly fascinating, not in a in sort of a schadenfreude kind of or disaster um you know disaster voyeur type of way but it just truly fascinated it at all of the the implications um and the consequences that this is it's um i'm really curious to see how we're all going to respond to it considering uh we don't have a real great brain trust with their hands on their wheel right now. So it's just every day I'm fascinated to see how we're clogging holes. Does your wife like you more or less than she did three months ago? That's a great question. I'm pretty sure it's less.

I'm weighing in as less. i'm in the less camp i haven't met a lot of people in the more camp yeah she uh the the the humor used to work because it was only kind of in the morning and at night and now she's got to deal with my bits all day uh i just i'm not that i don't i don't have a deep well. There's an overexposure problem. Yeah, exactly. She's getting tired of watching me walk around in my pajamas. I mean, I literally have not worn anything other than pajamas for eight weeks and slippers. So she's tired of hearing those things flack all over the house. I'm living a very, very boring life, but I say that in the best way.

I am not complaining whatsoever. I've been jogging pants and shorts for 10 weeks now. When you say jogging pants, is that weirdo for sweatpants? Yeah. What's wrong with you? East Coast, we say

jogging pants. I'm sorry. Sweatpants is West Coast. I'd love a call-in on that. I don't think you're going to get a lot of backing on jogging pants. Jogging pants sounds like a Lululemon special. Jogging pants. Sweatpants. Stop saying it.

Sweatpants? No. stop saying jogging pants. You say sweatpants. Well, I'm wearing those. Either. Have you ever pulled off a tearaway like the basketball players? No, I've always wanted to though. Me too. I don't know. How does it work?

In the crotch, I guess is where it is fixed. It's basically shorts with like legs zipped next to it that when you tear it off the legs just come off basically like like two-thirds the way around your leg right but isn't it like buttons or snaps all the way down the outside of each leg isn't that the way it works yeah what you What you said. Yeah. Yeah. So you want those? I feel like it'd take me four or five polls to get them all the way off. It's like the three-year-old is trying to blow out a birthday cake.

They just never make it. I wouldn't be able to do the cool one poll. Let's do this thing. Well, I've been watching a lot of old sports because I'm just like in, you know, withdraw and there's that whole tear away Jersey NFL era that we grew up with, with like Earl Campbell, where they would go to tackle him and his whole Jersey would disintegrate. I don't know. It was two years and gone. I don't know what they were thinking,

but this day must've been like 50 Earl Campbell jerseys a game that they just ran through with this weird role. I once did a terrible football movie called Necessary Roughness. First of all, how dare you? You just hurt so many feelings by calling that movie terrible. There's a lot of love for that movie out there. I say terrible with love. There was kitsch in it by design.

I think they didn't release this in the fourth quarter. Let's say that. with love there was there was there was kitsch in it by design i think i think no one was they didn't release this in the fourth quarter let's say that um so anyway um i you say earl campbell and it i'll never forget uh there was a a sequence in the film where all these uh my team this college team uh played against these convicts um um, convicts, these prisoners, they had their football team. And I guess the studio thought it'd be fun if they cast all the convicts as these, uh, pro football stars. So it was, uh, it was Earl Campbell. It was like Ed Too Tall Jones and Jim Kelly. And, and, uh, they even had, uh, uh, uh, uh, well, Herschel Walker was there. What wasn't, what was the name of the boxer that, uh, that, that beat my, that Mike Tyson bit his ear

off? Oh, Evander Holyfield. Yeah. He was in it. Anyway, I'll never forget, uh, taking a leak in the, uh, in the men's locker room of this old, you know, small junior university or whatever we were shooting at next to Earl Campbell. And it was one of those long troughs where there's no high splattering everywhere. Well, I don't remember that, but I remember taking, um, a, an ill-advised look to my right and down, um, Mr. Mr. Campbell. And, um, look to my right and down um mr mr campbell and um we just never never really felt uh closer to being um uh a eunuch um a boy yeah uh just good for him. Just so impressive.

That's why he always had great balance. Incredible balance. It's like when you try to push over a three-legged stool, you can't do it. They're going to stay up in high winds all day. But necessary roughness. Scott Bakula is the 40 year old qb kathy ireland female field goal kicker supermodel place kicker uh that could just yeah it was um and sinbad sinbad i think was our tight end um height of sin. He's never been hotter. No, he was. Mid-90s.

He was flying real high. I was not. I forget what position, what was your role in that movie? I forget. I haven't seen it in a while. I was a tailback and I was a weak safety. And I was so afraid. My mother's British, so she wanted me to play soccer my whole life as a kid, never let me play football. So I'd never, I still haven't, except for that movie tackled anyone. And I'm, I'm just, I was petrified then I'm petrified now of like, what do you do with your head when you tackle someone, you know, you got your helmet and you got your shoulder pads. It seems like, you know, all good. But I just felt like if I, if, if my head hits somebody, it's going to jam my spine, it's going to jam my neck. So what do you do? So I worked at this thing where I just would shrug my shoulders really high and leave them there so that my helmet would drop down into the cavity of the shoulder pads. And I thought to myself, well, that'll lock it in. That'll make it

so that I don't get my neck broken when I tackle somebody. I remember the stunt coordinator just taking me aside and saying, son, have you ever played football? I said, no, but we got a stunt double for me, right? And he said, yeah, yeah, let's just bring him in. I said, great, I'll be over on the sidelines, right over my line. Yeah. But now you're too old.

You're out of the sports movie range. Yeah, way too old. Now you're playing GMs, you GMs owners and coaches that you're in that point of your life. Yeah. Or place kicker. I could be Kathy. I could be Kathy Ireland's part. Yeah. Yeah. I guess play old place kicker. Yeah. Yeah. Age out. Even Koster when I, uh, when I had Koster on last year, cause he had the draft day, like five years ago, he's the GM. But he had been like, he'd been a cyclist. He'd been in three baseball movies, you know, the whole thing.

And it's about mid 40s. If it doesn't happen by then, it's just, you know, you run out of time. A couple of people have brought me baseball movies. And I just keep thinking, you just can't do another baseball movie. Because I just feel like they're inherently soft and the and great ones have already been done so why not leave it alone and then and another person brought me the idea of remaking slapshot the other day and that just sort of i thought well that's kind of sacrilege like you wouldn't want to touch that what's your feeling on both those i mean slapshot's iconic. I just think it would,

people would actively root against a remake because it's such a beloved movie. But baseball, I think, baseball and boxing just seems like you could always make those. How many boxing movies

have there been at this point? A Kajillion? Yeah. They still come out with those. What about Bad News Bears? Could we do Bad News Bears, couldn't you? So Billy Bob did that in 2004 with Richard Linklater and it wasn't good.

No, it was one of those things where it's like, Oh, this'll be good. And it just, it, the problem is the original one that we grew up with is completely politically incorrect,

which is one of the reasons it was so funny. Right. You can't do that now. I was saying a bunch of nasty things, but Tanner was Tanner. The shortstop was, was like a Matthau saying a bunch of nasty things. Well, Tanner, it was Tanner the shortstop, was like a racist, but it was hilarious in 1976. And you can't, yeah, that's not going to fly.

So when they did it in 2004, it was like, you could tell the focus groups had been brought in to figure out what the composition of the team was. And it was just like. Oh, they just softened it up. Yeah, I do think though. So here's what I'll give you another one. Cause I already gave you an entire Ozark episode. Um,

I do think there is a youth sports parents, black comedy movie is sitting there as somebody who's been on a lot of, a lot of soccer sidelines over the last eight years. There is some sort of parent idea. Will Ferrell did, uh, did a good one that, um,

um, that was a, that was like a comedy though. I'm saying like there, there's a deeper dive to be made. That's something with some dirt under its nails. It's not necessarily for kids, but kids are in it.

It's almost like little miss under its nails. It's not necessarily for kids, but kids are in it. It's almost like Little Miss Sunshine crossed with youth sports. Kind of that kind of vibe. Like a really well done. You're diving into it. Like, why do these people care so much? These are eight-year-olds. Yeah. Moms and dads really getting after these coaches for their kids' playing time.

All that shit. Because you think like millions of people are in youth sports and yet there's the only youth sports movie. Any of us could rattle off as that will Farrell movie, which was like a slapstick comedy. What was the one, what was the one about Nancy Kerrigan? And,

um, uh, that was last year. The, um, I Tanya. Yeah. It's something,

a lot of dirt under the nails, right? Something in that tone right yeah that'd be cool that's almost too dark can't get too dark yeah you see dark you've been in that ozark too long right but i mean you can't especially in a comedy because you can always win it back you get somebody laughing and then they're like true well i it is funny it's true true your your wi-fi cuts out like every three and a half minutes well i got two kids in school inside doing zoom so that's probably the problem yeah i i got uh

sorry about that no that it's happened with at least half the people we've had we got we had to get boosters for some of our people because everybody's using more Wi-Fi now. So these Zooms, it'll be going great, and then all of a sudden it's just gone. Yeah, and Netflix even offered to reduce their hold over bandwidth during this pandemic so that the public had more access to the pipe. True? Yeah. They were like, we're not going to reduce our Tiger King bandwidth with right during this pandemic so that the public had more access to the pipe. True.

Yeah. They were like, we're not going to reduce our tiger King bandwidth or Ozark season three, but we'll back off. Yeah. We'll back off on everything else. Um, this was fun.

So I'll, we're doing, I'm going to do your secret project you're working on podcast wise. So it's a home and home for us. I'll see you tomorrow. Yeah. All right. Good seeing you. Thanks for doing this. All right. Thanks, Bill. Take care, man. All right. Thanks to ZipRecruiter. Thanks to HBO Max. I highly encourage you to go check it out. Not only all the HBO shows, not only a bunch of other great shows like South Park and Rick and Morty and Friends, but one of the best collections of movies I've ever seen,

maybe the best, including the Criterion Collection, a lot of Warner Brothers stuff. I mean, man, I haven't had a chance to really dive in, but I saw 20 movies that I wanted to watch, including an old friend of mine, Can't Buy Me Love. Yeah, they also have new Max originals for everyone, including Love Life. All your favorites in one place for just $14.99 a month. HBO Max, it has started streaming. It can dominate

your weekend. Visit hbomax.com to learn more. And thanks to SimpliSafe, the home security for right now when feeling safe at home has never been more important. Designed to be easy to use while protecting your whole home 24-7, starting at 50 cents a day. Order online. It's easy. Open the box. Easy. Place the sensors, plug it in. Your home is protected around the clock. No technician has to come to your house. Head to simplisafe.com slash BS and get a free HD camera for my listeners. We'll be back on Sunday. Enjoy the weekend. Stay safe. I hope you're doing well. I hope your family's doing well. We'll be back on Sunday. Enjoy the weekend. Stay safe. I hope you're doing well. I hope your family's doing well. We'll see you next time.