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

Episode Date: March 4, 2026

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons is joined by David Jacoby to answer some mailbag questions from the listeners (2:45). Then, Matt Belloni joins to react to the Paramount–Warner Bros. merger and to discuss the winners and losers of the deal (01:11:33). Host: Bill Simmons Guests: Matt Belloni and David Jacoby Producers: Chia Hao Tat and Eduardo Ocampo Bundle and Save Book now. #ULTRACourtside could get you closer to the game! https://michelobultra.com/courtside MICHELOB ULTRA® COURTSIDE ’25 to ’26. No Purchase Necessary. Open to US residents 21 plus. Begins on October 1, 2025 and ends on June 30, 2026 Multiple entry periods. See Official Rules at https://michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes, and details. The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit⁠⁠⁠ www.rg-help.com⁠⁠⁠ to learn more about the resources and helplines available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The Bill Simmons podcast is brought to you by Fandul Sportsbook. We are also brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network, where on the rewatchables, it is officially CR Month. That's right. Chris Ryan picked a bunch of movies. We did Sicario on Monday night. We did it live on Netflix. You watched on Netflix.

You've watched on Spotify. We're over here at Podcast. We have Fargo coming next Monday. And then the next one after that is going to be to live and die in L.A., which we've been waiting to do forever. a classic. And then the fifth one is going to be LA confidential. And we're going to let everybody vote for the fourth one.

So if you follow the rewatchables on Twitter, we'll have some choices for the fourth one. There's some pretty good. We're going to have 12 movies. Vote every day for one of the four. And then we'll make the finals the fourth day between the three winners. So that's what we're doing. Coming up on this podcast,

Dave Jacoby, my old friend from my Grantland days, my ESPN days, he is coming on to do a mailbag with me. We have like two-thirds of a mailbag, but some really, really fun basketball questions, some good nickname stuff as well. And then Matt Bellany, who you can hear on The Town,

we are going to talk about the Warner Brothers, Paramount, Crazy Merger, and all the ramifications and ripple effects. So action-packed podcast for you today. We take a break, bring a Pearl Jam, and then my old friend, Dave Chacobie. This episode is brought to by Expedia. You got to love a good deal,

whether that's a quarterback on a short, low-risk contract who competes like a top-tier quarterback, like a Brock Purdy once upon a time, or Expedia's bundle and save feature, which allows you to combine flights, hotels, and cars in one package for impressive discounts and not just that. But if you're a member, you can book an item now, add select items later,

and still enjoy bundled savings. For instance, if you're a football fan, you want to go to the championship, conference championship, the Super Bowl, wherever it is, and you don't know your team's going to be in, all of a sudden they're in. What do you got to do? I got to get a hotel. I get a flight.

I get a car. Expedia can do all three. You never know when your team's going to be in a big game. Use Expedia. Now, that is a winning strategy book now with Expedia. Dave Jacobi is here on a Tuesday afternoon. You're the first person who doesn't like the chairs. I do not like the chairs.

I don't like the way they look. I especially don't like the way they feel. You don't like the way they look? What's wrong with the way they look? I sink into them too much. Right? And I like a high top. And my posture will be better.

Less poochy pooch. And right now my knees and nipples are the same plane. Well, you've always had a posture thing. I want knees below nipples. Dating back to Jalen and Jacoby when we had the first chairs. And I would make fun of you that you were an invertebrate with the camera angle. Well, there's someone who wrote a very serious email that was like, you got serious problems. Who wrote that?

It was a stranger. Yes. And if you're just listening to this, Bill has something that. I had in like, I don't know, like, 1992, what is that thing? This lap desk? Yeah, you've got the, the bean bag

underneath the... Well, because I like to, we're about to do a mailbag. I'm very excited. Okay. I didn't want to have the mailbag too low on my lap because then I'm doing this

and calming up. Oh. So it's at a necessity. It's a posture move. And plus later, my wife's going to bring me dinner and I'm just going to eat it right. It's like this.

It's a posture move. So I did a whole thing about nicknames when Max Kellermer was here. A couple people pointed out some nicknames that I missed, including downtown Freddie Brown. I'd like to apologize to him. I'd like to also shout out downtown Julie Brown.

Who stole it from downtown Freddie Brown? Wab, Wubba, Wubba, Wubba. Slick Watts, the Boston Strangler, Andrew Tony, great one. Dr. Duncanstein, remember loving that as a kid? The microwave Vinnie Johnson, the mailman, the chief. White chocolate was a big miss. The glove, big country, AK-47, and then currently Greek Freak, Time Lord, and Slowmo.

I bring off this up because the whole point of the initial thing was we're just not good at nicknames anymore. We're lazy. We do initials. We do acronyms. And we just don't put any thought into it. I've got a take on this. Let's hear.

One thing about the sports media world that really bothers me is when athletes launch their brand or their logo, it's either their number. or their initials. No one has done this right since Kobe Bryant, who just stole it from a swarbed on like Kill Bill. Who had a couple of chances. Yeah, he tried a couple different gimmicks.

It's always just initials. It's just like, or like DA 7 or something. It's just like, why can't we be more creative than this? Well, that's, so Imran from San Francisco has a theory on this that we've gotten lazy. Oh. He blames Kevin Durant. Tough year for Kevin Durant. Emron.

He says, Kevin Durant deserves blame for rejecting a potential pantheon-level nickname, the Slim Reaper. Slim Reaper. And instead asking people to call him the servant, which no one wanted to do. Clares realized they could just reject nicknames that didn't fit their brand. And now we have these vanilla corporate nicknames instead, just a thought. Do we put this on Kevin Durant's loss thing?

I don't think it's really fair. But Durantula was great. Slim Reaper was great. And then he's like, I'm the easy money sniper. Okay. Easy Money Sniper. Slim Reaper was an all-time great nickname. We could have called him Slim.

We could have called him Reaper. And it also visualizes it. Like if slow-mo is a great nickname, but you can't like see it. You know what I mean? But you can see him. They've got the graphics of him in the hood and with the sickle and everything.

So yeah, maybe it is Kevin Durant's fault. My thing with nicknames, like Slickwatz is a good example. The nickname has to become how we say the person's name. It can't like there. We've had some nicknames over the years. when it's like the nickname's over here. I even didn't really love the answer for Alan Iverson.

It was just easier to call him AI. I know people like to push the answer. I never personally called him the answer. I always called him Iverson or AI. It doesn't roll off the tongue. Ultimately, where you want to be is like Clyde the Glyde. Yes. Neek.

You know, shorten your name, whatever. So anyway, Peter T. had an idea. There was a lot of con canipal suggestions, which people know. People know how to get into the mailbag. Just bring him con can't nipal. You send me some of the questions. I was like, oh, these people are just tailoring it right for Bill.

Yeah, listen. It's a human algorithm. Peter T. said, he said, mailbag nickname submission. Con Snow, Bill's the legitimate son in Charlotte, like John Snow and Game of Thrones. He said, as a Duke fan in Colorado, I love that your pot is now 25% Yokage and Knapple Talk. I resent that because I feel like it's 50% Boston talk, 25%. I'm taking the over on a 50. Okay. Okay.

Now, let's get to the good stuff. There was a lot of Stefan Castle. What are we doing here? This guy needs a nickname. I think people agree, right? Can I push back? Khan is a unique name in itself. And Castle is a great last name.

Like, why do we need to upgrade these? Well, just wait. Jude from Westport said it had to be something Castle or medieval related. He proposes the dungeon. He's locking someone down. He's sending them to the dungeon. I'm not against it. You've been locked down the dungeon.

Jacob and a few people suggested this wanted to call him the moat because the moat is perimeter defense for a castle. So it's like, you can't cross the moat. Do you know one you haven't thought of? What? You didn't bring up off night. Oh, for...

Davian Mitchell. Yeah. That's a great nickname. You don't like a defensive nickname. McBreen yelling, nobody is crossing the moat. Nobody's gross. A few people suggested this, though, and I think it's the winner for Stephen Castle.

Checkmate. Sure. You don't like it? No, I like it. I like it. And checkmate rises to the occasion. I don't know. I want to hear somebody test drive it.

Con, a lot of people go in DefConn 3 or DefCon 7, which is his number. Not quite there. Con air doesn't really work. No. And then a couple people suggested 2K. 2K is good. 2K is not bad. 2K is good.

2K is not bad. 2K had 35 last night. That's not bad. It's as good as we've heard a while. That's one thing about the answer. The word answer doesn't roll off the tongue the same way that 2K does. Do you see 2K hit 9-3s last night? It's pretty good.

The bigger question is, do you need a nickname if your name's Khan? No. So if we had a nickname Zahar, the nicknames are probably like, we're good. His name's Khan. It stands out. Yeah. It'd be so hard. I mean, if you're going to do something with Khan Knapples name,

Yeah. Nips is right there. Nipsey? Nipsey? It's right there. We had a Nipsey wrestle. A bunch of people for Jalen Duren suggested Bull Duren. Sure.

Not bad. Sure. This was the best one. I can't believe how good it is. More than one suggestion, so I don't want to give anyone credit. Josh Giddy. Don't. Just don't.

Just don't. Just don't. Josh Giddy, the Giddler. The Gidler had a triple. double last night. He could have the old 90s poster with like he's dressed as the riddler, but it's instead of a question mark,

it's a G. I'm not sure. Maybe like October. Josh Giddy deserved this nickname. The Gidler? But like, it's too close to something else. All right. So your favorite is 2K. Yes. Dan from Denman Island and Canada suggested

he was one of the checkmate suggestions for Castle. Where's Danman Island? I don't know. It's in Canada. he wanted to, he suggested for Kisan Wallace Twitch because he has such fast Twitch reflexes that we just start calling him Twist. I don't think he needs any name. There's a exa, a motocross mental militia guy named Twitch.

Okay. He was great. This is the best one. I don't think he has the right person for this, but it's one of the best names I've ever heard. He said for Jalen Brown to call him Halapeno, because this is what my group of friends who have a basketball draft call him because of a typo, but it also fits for when he's on a heater. That's a better name for somebody you play pickup basketball with.

It's like our friend Juan, we call him jalapeno, because he just gets hot in these games. Maybe. You don't like jalapeno? A typo? Any nickname you have to sort of like explain with more than one sentence, I'm out. Do you like jalapeno as a heat check nickname, though?

Only for like one of my friends. Okay. Yeah. So our best one is 2K. 2K. All right. So Alex Lollinger. Lions wrote in, there's this guy, Robbie of

Vila from St. Louis, the guy with the goggles, the 6th and 10 Center. You've seen him, college basketball. He has three nicknames. Cream Abdul-Jabbar. I'm in. Steph Blurry and Milk Chamberlain.

All of them. So maybe he'll save the nicknames. Abdul-Jabbar is it? Cream Abdul-Jabbar. Step Blurry is pretty good, too. Okay. Next question is from D-Bob in New York. Who do you think will be the top five players in the

league five years from now. So that would be the 2030-13-1 season. He said it's a fun exercise. You never would have predicted Shea or Wembe top five. Five years ago, the top five players in 2021 were Janice, Yoka, Jimbead, Curry, Luca, LeBron, in some order. To me in 2013, there's two locks, Aunt Luca. But anyway, he's basically like, who do you have? This is, this was harder than I thought it would be.

I thought, I agree. This was harder than I thought it would be. and one thing that I'm not going to allow is Hugo Gonzalez being part of the conversation. Did you see him last time? It's 16 rebounds. I did, I did.

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

Luca will be 32. Well, can we do the chalk picks? So if we're just going chalk, it's Wemby, Aunt, Luca, SGA, Whoa. Luca and SGA are 32 years old. I'm just saying chalk.

Safe as bets for five years from now. Safest bets. Okay. And I would have Cooper Flag as my fifth chalk guy. It would be 24 at that point. Everything we've seen how much better he's gotten just in the last two years. Luca and Shea at 32, I started to think that there are others out there. Okay.

Yolkech is going to be 36. He probably wanted to be playing. He's out. Yeah. I wrote down, I had different categories. Cade and Maxie. There's a lot of 29-year-olds. Cade and Maxie are on my list as well.

And Edwards, but he's in. Edward, Edwards, so can we put Wemby and Ant and Bold? Yes, absolutely. Can we put Cooper Flagg in Bold or no? He'll be 24. Yes, you can. I think there's no way he's not awesome in five years. There would have to be some sort of knock on with Terrible.

Yeah, yeah. But we're not even having that conversation. Wemby's in. So Wemby and Flag. Yes. I could offer you, AJ DeBanza, Darren Peterson,

D.P, D&P, Chet, Amman Thompson, Jalen Johnson, Palo with the big resurgence. Anybody else? Jalen Johnson is on my list. I'm glad you didn't bring up Tatum.

He's going to be too old. He'll be like 33. There's a little bit of me. I didn't write him down just for crime. Yeah, yeah, I know. But there's a little bit of me that's looking, at maxi like, I don't know, could be top five?

Because you have to play defense too. He'd have to be in the low 30s pointwise for like four straight years in a row. Basically where Mitchell is now. You wouldn't even put Mitchell in the top five right now. No. So probably not. Is there a world in which Jalen Johnson becomes like an all-around jack-of-all-all-trades, nine assists, and like 25 points a night guy?

The problem is you have to really win to be in this conversation. Yes. his Duke season didn't go well and he's never won anything with Atlanta. So you're really projecting with this. Yeah, I think we're there. I don't think there's anybody else in the list that we're missing. Okay, so Wemby.

But it's interesting that you would put Cooper in bold, guaranteed, and not even mention Nipsey. I didn't want to put that on 2K. It's a lot. It's a lot to ask of 2K. I think Cade should be in there though.

Cato be high 20s at that point. Yes. Like 28, 29. So I think he would be my fourth pick. And I'm sorry. I think Luca's still going to be there. It would be year 13, Luca. 32 years old.

He's already moves like a 39-year-old. When I think about Luca and Yolka, it's like, is this good or bad? Because he doesn't, like, Maxi relies on athleticism that diminishes over time. Luca doesn't do anything, athletic. So you wouldn't have SGA, if he was still this good in five years, you're now talking about the best guard career. anyone's had other than Michael Jordan. It would be better than Jerry West. It would be better than every guard we've ever had.

I also think they're going to win a lot too. That's why you might put a minute. He's borderline there. So two spots for Cade Luca SGA. I think, God, it's hard. This is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. Well, here's the other thing. There might be somebody we've no idea.

Like we wouldn't have said Anthony Edwards in 2021. There's a number one pick. But we wouldn't have said, Anthony Edwards will be one of the five best guys. And both Edwards and Cade didn't have a kind of like Cooper rookie year. I'm going to say Cade.

Ah, shit. It's hard to leave out SGA. It is. Especially now that they're the villains that we'd need in the NBA. I started that on Sunday. Explain to me why Cade won't be better at 29 in five years than SGA.

The case would be really physical style, putting miles on them the next four or five years physically might break down. Okay. Those big physical guards, it's almost like a big physical receiver or something, would be the case.

I don't believe that. His team's going to be good. He's going to have there. He's going to have Bullderin the whole time. They're going to bring in a second creator. Yeah, they'll have somebody yonis. Bulturn and beep stew. That's a great nickname.

Beef stew. Beef stew is a great one. It's a great nickname. I'm going to say Cade. You know what? I'm going to say SGA over Luca. I don't, 100% trust Luca. I don't know about Luca at 32.

that video the other day, which I actually thought was kind of a big deal. And normally I'm like, don't overreact to when guys get mad at each other on the bench. I could talk about that for hours.

Here was the key piece that I didn't think enough play. There was, I think it was Vanderbilt sitting next home. Yeah, it was Vando. And he was watching the whole thing. If you watched the video, he's watching them go.

And he's kind of like this. It was the most important thing that Vando did all year. He's watching and he's watching. J.J. walks away. It looks like Luca went out to put his arm out, but JJ walked away.

And JJ didn't seem to put the arm out. as Luke was putting out. And Luca got mad and stood up. And I think it was Vando. He's watching out of the corner of his eye and stands up with Luca to block him from chasing JJ down the sideline. If you watch everything he's doing, it's the stuff like we're at a bar at 2.30 in the morning and our buddy is like, uh-oh, don't let him go over there. And we're just kind of watching him the whole time. It's like, oh, there he goes.

We've got to get him out. That was the vibe. I didn't think it was good. I don't think it was good at all. And the first person that it made me think of was Nico Harris. And I've said this on the mismatch. But I've always felt like there's just more to the story of what happened in Dallas. And I think that they hated each other.

And he was like, guess what? You can be gone. I have that kind of power. Yeah. I think it was personal. And I think it was vindictive. And I think that he hated seeing Luca every single day. And I think that Luca was disrespectful towards him and probably vice versa.

They clearly thought he was a dick. Exactly. Yeah. You know what I mean? These things aren't reported. I'm not reporting anything. But, like, I think that that happened. I think there's a lot of incidents like this behind the scenes that we didn't see.

There's two types of people. And I'm in the wrong camp with this. Like, my wife instantly, if something's happening, she knows. Right? Like, if, like, when you have little kids and the kid is going down the pool, walking towards, crawling toward the pool or something. And there's a, there's the type of goes, oh, no. that's bad and then you act or there's the person who sees that and they're moving immediately.

That was Jared Vanderbilt. He saw it immediately. I don't think I would have stood up in time. What's the second time? What are you? I'm the one who would have, I would have sat there for the extra second been like, this is bad and Luca would have walked by me before I realized that I should be stopping it.

Because you, I don't like to compliment you, but you're an excellent room reader and floor sear. Not the instinctive. This is going, this is bad. What are you? Which side are you? You know, I rush to conflict.

I enjoy the conflict. I enjoy tension. I enjoy just the weirdness of it all and like saying things that I probably can't take back. You probably shouldn't say. The best version of this I've ever seen was our friend Jalen Rose. There was one time one of the NBA shows we were doing. And there was people arguing. I was one of the people arguing.

And we're walking off after the thing. And Jaylon goes, turn your mic off, Bill. just as we do, turn the mic off. He's braided that. He immediately, like, red the tea leaves about. You don't have to say it. I know you're going to say something that you can't regret. Turn your mic off. Phil.

And that microphone is going to frog past to the truck. Shout out to him. Yeah. All right. Next question. Gus from Texas. I saved this for, if we're ever going to do a mail back together.

He said, longtime BS pod fan. Thanks, Gus. Longtime fan of the challenge. Always loved when those two worlds collide, but it's been a minute. If the NBA a rival-style season like the challenge,

who would your favorite pairings be? Who would be the CT West team that would dominate? Who would be the messiest, funniest? So I sent this to you. I just want to tell Gus that I love him very much. It's a great question. It's a great question. So two-man teams,

this is the rivals thing that we love. So would they have to be rivals? I spent more time answering this question this afternoon to myself than I did it. Then I've put into anything I've done professionally in 10 years. You were the right part. This is it. This is your vortex of all the things you care about.

I have found the perfect pairing from the NBA to go to the challenge. But one thing I was thinking, is like, rivals or just the challenge? He said rivals, right? So I did think of sort of pairings that would be mismatched, we'll say, right? Like,

they're not real rivals because they, oh, Diabate and like beefs do, that's not going to work. You know what I mean? Or like Dylan Brooks and LeBron, that's not going to work. But I was thinking, I was like,

they did something like this. Do you remember the season that had like Sean Merriman and CM Punk and like Lolo Jones. Yeah, that was great. I remember thinking, I was like, this is a- Lolo quit.

Yeah, and then she came back another time, but I remember sitting there being like, this can't work, but the athletes weren't as good

at the challenges that you would think. Yeah. And of course, this first person that came to my mind with Johnny Bananas, the goat of the challenges,

and like what makes him good at this? And what makes him good at doing this is he's in great shape so you can run the final. Right. He's really good at room reading like we were talking about earlier and playing the social game.

and finding out who's aligned with who, getting the right people out at the right times. So I was thinking of a strategist. So my first answer is going to be a team that I think would be successful. So not Kevin Durant. Not Kevin Durant. Okay.

But the fun answer is a team that I really want to see. I'll give you that next. I think that I landed on teammates. They're not rivals, but it would be Cade and Ron Holland. Because Cade is very mature, very measured. He's very intelligent and articulate. Kate and Ron Holland.

I was not expected this. This is where I ended up. I've got a fun one though. Okay. The fun one is obviously. So why Ron Holland though over other people on the team? I think that Ron Holland's... Just because he's such a good athlete?

Yes. I think that his type of athleticism, he can like climb up stuff. So he'd be like... And Kate will be like the puzzle guy. Yes, exactly. Because obviously your mind goes to beef stew or whatever, but I think he might be just a little too big for this. And I think that Ron Holland's got a nice little level of crazy.

And I think Cade will be sort of like the brains of the eye. operation. Holland will be like a little intimidating and like a little wild card. So they'll be in the bunk beds and Kate will be like let's bring over Draymond Green we got to line with them. Yes.

And my favorite pairing for this. And I used to coach is Lamello Ball and Joe Mazzula. Just imagine like Joe Mazzula. You can't let Joe Mizzula in this. He's too crazy. He's got like a blindfold on and Lamella balls outside of the fence.

It's to your right. It's to your right. And Joe Mizzulo is just like, what the fuck Lamello? He just rips the blind. unfolded off and just cases after Lamello was just laughing and running around in circles. Like that pairing to me would be the one I would want to see the most. That's great.

It would be perfect. Joe Mazzula should be on the challenge. I think this is, this would be an unbelievable vehicle for Dremont Green too. I think Dramon would be great. I think he'd be the most compelling character. He'd definitely get kicked out of at least. If he did 10 seasons,

he'd get kicked out of three of them. He'd complain about all kinds of stuff. He'd probably get into it with T.J. at least once or twice I wouldn't mind Durant either like you see with him with Tyler Hero in the Miami bench and like

I watched that starting five show yeah but Durant they would just team up and get out in the first episode what would you do to Draymond he'd be like Cara Maria see that nobody nobody watching this knows what we're talking about

we're not talking to alternate language who would be the laurel of this the big bully oh I love Laurel so much That probably beefs them. Well, Draymond's more of like... I guess he is more than Laurel's nasty.

She will dress you down for no reason. Who would be the good guy? Would it be Curry? Everybody likes to cook. Like how everybody loves Mark Long? Everybody loves Mark Long. Everybody came to your house one time? That was fun.

Thanks, Gus. Sean from North Carolina. I wanted this question for you because you have kids. I only say you a couple questions. You don't know a lot of these. I know. So we used to live in a proper country. I would catch all sorts of classics on TV,

including the slightly sanitized version of Die Hard on TBS. Streaming services are great, but I wish they had a cable edit option. That way I could show my 10-year-old kid, Terminator, Terminator 2, without it being inappropriate. Do you think Netflix should add this the parent cut of different movies? Well, and would you show that,

would you watch this with your kids? You have older kids. And I was around when they were younger. And I learned one thing that I've taken from the Simmons household is just like, you want to see Halloween and you're six years old? Cool. Here's a kitchen knife. You know what I mean? It was just like, or like cursing in front of your kids.

You were very like thrown into the fire. You know what I mean? And I do that at my house as well when it comes to content. Like me and my son, he's 12. We watched Psycho Killer over the weekend. Oh. You know what I mean? Like horror movies, sex scenes.

I'll be like close your eyes. You know what I mean? But he doesn't really do it. So that's the thing. You have to know where the bad parts are and you cover. So I don't think we need the edit option. It's not necessary to do this. I agree.

And I also, I took a page from your book. It's just like, let the kids watch whatever. They're going to do it anyway. Yeah, it's fine. You can either, like, put your head in the sand and pretend like you're controlling it or do it with them and just kind of put hands over their face. One of my daughters gets super scared, so she won't watch. Fine.

Like, you're watching Terminator with your kid. And all of a sudden that guy's like, I came across time for you, Sarah. and you know they're about to get it on. Like, you know what? We're going to fast forward this part. Yeah. I'll just tell you it's going to get romantic here. We're not going to watch it together and you just move on.

My kids won't watch things from the 20th century. I came across time for you, Sarah, one of the great pickup lines in the history of movies. Like, what woman's not at least making out with you after that? You came across time? I came across time for you, Sarah. This is great. Thank you. This is from Alex and Delray Beach. And I've gotten this email a bunch of times from,

people about the 0304 Kings. You're familiar with them? Chris Weber's out for, he's a torn ACL in the postseason previous year. Pesia has his random MVP season, one of the most random top four MVPs ever. Before mentioned white chocolate, right? They're 40, no, he's gone by then, they have Mike Bibi. They're 43 and 15 through 58 games. Weber comes back and as Alex points out, the return was disastrous.

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

And then at the very end, you're just like, the Celtics and Jason Tatum. Do you remember this Kings thing, though? Not really. Yeah, I didn't really remember it either. Yeah. I didn't remember the Pesia piece, but was it a great deal. I remember like Lakers series and like Divodge and like that kind of free.

Give us your quick. will Tatum scrub to Celtics take? I know you've done on the mismatch already. No. Adding good players to your team, it helps. Is he better than Bailey Sharman? He might play like 14 minutes, too.

It's like adding good players to basketball teams doesn't screw them up. They didn't say one thing in the weird documentary they've made about his comeback. Wait, you're watching that? No, this was the thing on Celtics Reddit. He said he didn't come back to be a role player. It's like, oh. It's fine. Okay.

One of my basketball philosophy is like, there's only one ball. I hate there's only one ball. Yeah. Share the ball. I guess what? If you score, I score, Jason Tatum makes teams better.

We'll be fine. Yeah. Steve B writes, what if Steve Kerr does not have a contract for next year because Steph is winding down and Wembe is winding up? And he's replacing George Popovich to make a second run in the dynasty. I just like that he called him George Popovich. George Popovich.

I think Steve B too. Steve B. I was wondering, like, so Kerr, let's say he leaves this year, and the Warriors are going to be out of the playoffs. Like, they're, I think they're going to shut step down. I just, my spidey senses are like, he said, yeah, it's going to be like 10 more days. There's only 39 days left in the season. What are they going to, even when he comes back, they already lost Jimmy Butler.

They're not good to begin with. What are they going to play two playing games with Steph with not 100% need? Like that, that team should go for a lottery thing. KP's already got illnesses. Yeah. KP's not coming back. Like that's season's wash. Is Horford going to carry you to the second?

Curleaves. Curleaves, thanks for everything. I'm going to take a year off. I'll do media. Hopefully it comes to the ringer. Then San Antonio, who knows? And if anything ever happens on that team, then you wait for that or you wait for the Knicks or some awesome job.

You just do media for a year. When you do media for a year, your stock just rises. You see that every time. Yeah. Right? So you don't think he's going to replace George Popovich? I don't think he's going to replace. George Bobovich because Mitch Johnson's doing a good job.

That's the problem. I don't think that's going to be available to him. And Ms. Johnson wasn't supposed to be the head coach at this first. No. He wasn't. Could you see a front office thing? Maybe. Where it's like he's not on the bench, but he's just sort of like part of the thing.

I can see. My honest answer for this is I don't think he coaches again after this. I think he did it since 1415, did 11 years. He set up his son to potentially, He'd be a coach down the road. He won four, he won four titles. He won, how many do you win with the, he won, one, two, three, five with the Bulls and Spurs. Yeah.

He's won nine titles. It's done. It's a wrap. Just do media. There's a video that's going to be on the rewatchables. It's great. I'd love to have Steve on the Rwold. Martin in New York writes, where does Al Horford rank on the, I left my marriage for the stripper twice, and to know what's surprise it didn't work out list.

You saved that one for me. He saved that one for me. He left the Celtics twice because he thought the title window was closed only to be instantly proven wrong, 20 games into the season, and he did it twice. It is a tough beat for Al.

I never understood the I'm going to go chase the title with Golden State part. What title did you think he was chasing? You're in a conference with no KC. What do you think is going to happen over there? Also, like, they need you. Yeah. Because it's like post is sort of their other big

at the time before they got KP. I'm back to the Warriors. I never really saw it this season for the Warriors. I thought they'd go over the 46 or whatever, but I didn't think they would. But what did everybody say? Last year, after they added Jimmy Butler, if you look at the numbers, they were the best team in the history of the NBA. And I was kind of like, yeah, they were like in a playoff game for like two months in a row

to kind of like get in to the plan. The thing about NBA history, the older you get, the harder your chances to win the NBA title. That's one of the things I've learned. And the only chance you have is if it's like a weird, down year for the league where there's not a lot of stars and there's a couple bad drafts. Some of the younger players didn't pan out. Then you can kind of sneak in. The league's not like that right now.

The league's fucking loaded. You're not winning a, like I even look at Duran on Houston and Houston, you know, we'll see what happens with them. They've hung around. They're going to be a three seed, but they're still going to have to rely on Duran for 10 straight weeks in the playoffs to win a title and he's 37. I just think it's unrealistic. We saw in 22, remember Tatum took it to him in that Net series?

he was 33 in that series. He was four years older than that. Let's take a break and then I have some more mailback questions for you. The Bill Simmons podcast is brought to you by Fandul. Fandle's putting you in control right from Tip Off. That's right. You get to choose your reward.

Play it safe, go for it, whatever your style. You're in control. I'm going to figure out some sort of bet for the South Lake Charlotte game. But I think it's a big close game. I think it's going to have a lot of points. And I predict, my guy 2K, con canipple, some threes from him.

But just in general, I think it's going to be a fast pace, a lot of points game. I'll figure out what my final play is. Check it out on my Twitter account. No matter how you play, Fando's giving you the power to choose your word, own your game this NBA season. Head to fando.com slash BS to make your pick.

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All the superior skill on the court. This has been the case my whole life. The craziest thing, I mean, Wembe, stuff he's doing every game. There's two, three Wemby moments a game. We're like, I don't know if I've ever seen that. The number one thing for me is when he does the screen and roll, he's going to the basket. somebody throws him an alley-oop, and he just catches it and dunks it without jumping.

It's an alley-up, but it's not an oop. It's just kind of an alley. And every time he does it, I'm like, I've definitely 100% never seen that anymore. It's a superior play. Superior plays aren't just for the NBA, though. Try Mickelopulta, the official beer partner of the NBA. And a crisp, refreshing, superior light beer. It's the beer of Max Kellerman. He just told me that. Plus, they're giving you a chance to win court side seats, custom merch, and more. Lube Ultra, Superior is worth playing for enter now at mickleobotra.com slash courtside. Mickelobotra, Courtside, 25, 26, no purchase necessary.

Open to U.S. Residence 21 plus begins on October 1st, 2025 ends on June 30th, 226. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at maclelob ultra.com slash courtside for free entry, entry deadlines and prizes and details. All right, more mailbag with Jacoby. Mercury P. I don't know if that's a nickname or a real name. I'm so glad you're here for this question. He's proposing two new end of the season awards.

The Marcus Morris Award for Worst Best Brother. Oh. So you're the best brother, but you're the worst player of all the best brothers. Wait, the worst best brother? Out of all the best brothers of the combos, you're the worst one of all the best brothers. Oh, so the Lonzo Ball would win this year. No, that, no, we'll go into it.

But he also has the Seth Curry Award for best worst brother. I am so confused. Mercury P has got to get thrown for a loop here. No, no, we're walking through. So there's really three categories. There's worst, worst brother,

which would be Yonis's brothers. Thanases? They would win the, sadly. They're nice guys, but they would win the award for worst. Worst brothers for players. They're nice guys.

But they're the worst players. I just go out for coffee with the Atta Koupo brothers. If we had all the brothers and we did a draft, they would be picked last. Yes. best worst brother so of all the second best brothers who is the best second best brother

that's got to be Osir Thompson right yeah I'm trying to think I'll give you there the Kenney Mo Wagner Champany Aaron Holiday not a lot there

yeah Champany Rod Harper and the Celtics you know Cam Christie one of the Spencer's pick one So yeah, but here's where it gets interesting. Worst best brother. So it's the brother combo.

The better brother. The better brother. Who's the worst better brother? Oh, God. So I'll give you five candidates. Okay. Kegan Murray and his brother Chris. Max Christie and his brother Cam.

Caleb Martin, brother Cody. Tyos Jones, brother Trey. Or Justin Champany. his brother Julian. I think the answer is Tyos Jones. It's a little unfair because Jones

and the Martin twins are kind of on the other side of their peak. You know what I mean? The answer is the answer. We're doing the awards at the end of the year. Probably Tyos Jones.

It wouldn't have been Tyos Jones last year. Because the Morris wins. He was just playing better. Yeah. Interesting. Worst, worst. Worst best brother.

Here are the nominees. Wait, do you know how many brothers there are in the league right now? More than there's ever been in the past. 19 brother combos. Combos? Yeah.

19 sets. Two brothers, yeah. Wow. That's wait. 19 combos. That's 38 people. 38 plus we have some trees. We have three holidays and three in and two coupos.

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

all-star game gimmick that Nick suggested. I'm not at liberty to speak on this idea. No, hold on. He said Larry Bird should coach the black team

and Magic Johnson should coach the white team and the bridge generation divides and then you flip it with the coaches. All right. I really like that idea. No, I'm going to push back on this.

Okay. one of the scenarios, because I've thought about this a lot, too, it's not going to work. I've played this hypothetically. I've played this hypothetically in my head. But over and over and over again, I was like, this is not going to work. But one of my favorite hypothetical scenarios in this hypothetical game

is the white team jumps out to like a 10-point lead in the first three minutes. Black team calls a timeout. And in that huddle, the discussion that Black team has is just to be a fly on the wall. Listen to that. I think if you have a Caucasian head coach, you don't get that same conversation. That's my concern there. And also the race war that would come along.

This is from William McGlynn in Sydney, Australia. Oh. He said he just watched K to go for 27 and 17 and thought about how he got waived for no reason by the Sacramento Kings. He mentions how it's interesting that this has happened more than you think. The calves waved Isaiah Hartenstein.

the Grizzlies wave Stephen Jackson Danny Green got waived by the calves picked up by the spurs Alex Caruso got waived by OKC picked up by the Lakers and he asked what my favorite one of all of those were and I think it's interesting

I think it's Stephen Jackson because they actually win the O3 title because of how Stephen Jackson played in the playoffs if you go back and leave that team Robinson's got a bad bad bad Danny Green as well 2013 but they don't win in the finals that he gets hot.

Remember game one, game two? He had like 35 and 40 points. He was the MVP heading in the game six. That's just completely forgotten in history. That Danny Green was the best player on the floor. Yeah, he was. But I think it's Stephen Jackson because he actually swung the title. Yes.

If you go back and watch those games, he's like the number two guy in the Spurs. And he brings us all the smoke. And he brought us a bunch of joy. He was very pivotal in the melee. He's also really fun to have around the office. when I was at ESPN in LA. We gave him his first media chance on the Grantland Basket Flower.

He had a real presence. He had a real presence around the office. You knew when the elevator doors opened and stat came out. Yeah. It was a good time. Glenn Shepard says, I'm listening to the podcast with Kellerman.

Crazy that you went from discussing nicknames into discussing Darren Peterson's tattoo and Michael Myers. And the boogeyman is sitting right there is an incredible nickname. Do you like Darren Peterson? and more if his nickname was the Boogie Man. And we also haven't had a Boogie Man.

Boogie Man's pretty interesting. Because we had Boogie. Yes. Boogie Man's pretty good. The Boogie Man had 45 last night. And there's been a resurgence of Boogieman lore because of John Wick. Yeah. And Baba Yaga.

So like it is time to come back. Maybe that's the nickname. Bobbyaga. Too hard to say. Bobbyaga goes down. Baba. Yeah. But Boogieman would be a really good.

nickname, but I think that person has to be scary. Multiple readers were disappointed in me that I didn't stick up for Darren Peterson more when he has a Michael Myers tattoo. And I'd like to apologize to everybody. I had no idea. I had a Michael Myers tattoo. It's a pretty strong statement. All right, Ryan and Chicago wants to know, what five events would you include if there

was a Winter Olympics pentathlon? Distance speed skating, cross-country skiing, and downhill skiing are the most obvious three. Would you round it out with ski jumping and luge? ski jumping definitely. I don't know about Luge. Ski jumping and Luge. But so you have

distance speed skating. I think you have to do the fast speed skating too, right? The short track. Yeah. Cross country skiing would be the last event. Downhill skiing.

I think ski jumping's the fifth and I think we're good. Ski jumping would be amazing. So what are we creating exactly? The best five? Some pentathlon. Just a random pentathlon. We're not going to do any figure skating.

You can't do ten. I think tens to. We're not hockey. No hockey. No hockey. skating. Okay. This is just like,

so it's sort of like one athlete can, can do all of these things. Yeah, because when you think about decathlon, it's like jumping, running, endurance. A little shot putty here in there. Like strength.

It's all these things. So for Winter Olympics, it would have to be skiing, skating, endurance would have to be the five. A jump would be nice. I like a little jump. The jump would be,

so the jump's not fun anymore because everybody, there's no danger and everybody's good at it. But if you had these guys where it's like, The job is as weakest event. He told us he hasn't trained much for the job. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. This is from Joshua Tabor, college station, Texas. If you had to bet your entire net worth on one current NBA player to win at least three championships over the next 10 years, who are you taking? Okay. Well, it's a different proposal for each of us because it's the net worth part. But I had trouble with this. I think the only answer is Victor Win. Van Yamma. I had SGA and then Wembe.

I thought about SGA, too. I think SGA because the OKC situation. Exactly. They're going to cycle in more young players, so they'll stay under the cap. It would be an interesting fandole future that they couldn't do because you'd have to realize it over 10 years. But I think SGA would be like a minus 150 favorite. I think so too. And I wrote down in my notes,

just institutional knowledge. Just like they've won a championship before. Same front office, same coaching staff. You know, they're going to have to, you know, cycle through some roster spots, but they've got tons of picks. Sorber and Popich, the last two first round picks don't even play.

You know, that's funny about Sorber? So the Quipper's in OKC, they had the pick swap as part of the Kauai trade last year. OKC gets Clippers pick. They take Sorber. I think this is what happened. And then the quips got number 30.

And they took Neaterhauser. I bought stock last week. I had a whole argument with Mike Tolan and my seats about it because we went to the Minnesota game and I'm like, I really like this guy, and he's like, no way. And I'm like, I'm buying the stock right now. So Tolan's by witness, he's good. He's young and runs and jumps and I fucking like him.

I feel like they were like Zubatch, you had a great year for us last year. It's not exactly working this year. There's some new and theory stuff. But we've got Conan Nisierheiser, John Jacob, Jiglheimer Schmidt, coming off the bench. He's good. He's good. Clippers are kind of interesting. If Garland can come back and actually look like the Garland from the first 50

games of last year, which we haven't seen in over a year. Yeah, I know. Like them, though. I understand why they did what they did. They're kind of interesting. That trade was great. For everybody. If you get somewhere fifth, six,

seven, eighth, ninth pick, I've started to work on this draft. So they get the Pacers pick if it's five through nine. Otherwise, it gets pushed like six years. There's like fucking awesome scores in that range. Every guy from five to nine is a guy who could average like 25 points a game in the NBA.

at some point, maybe. Seems like there's a 40-point game in college basketball, like every week. These guys are like real. Every week. Eight Cuffs's my favorite out of all of them. Like, A-Cuff's going to come in the league and immediately be a guy.

So anyway, I thought that was a good trade. So we have SGA and Wembe. Who would you put third, aunt? Or Hugo Gonzalez. I can't make a case for flag, really. I think it's SGA and Wemby. It's too hard to say with Dallas. Think about it.

Three. three championships in 10 years. Last gotta win three titles. What do you mean? Last gotta win three titles. Is there a question mark at the end of that? Yeah. Oh, Steph Curry?

Yeah. It doesn't happen a lot. No. If you're talking generation, generational league. I had no idea you were asking me a question. You're like, last got to win three titles. It's like, what?

Step one four, Duncan won five, Kobe won five. if you're just going this century, three is like a lot. Like Bird only went three. LeBron. LeBron won four. Yeah. Yeah.

It's hard. But the LeBron was in the 03 draft. We're talking about the next 10 years. Yeah. Curry's the last modern guy who won three titles. Even Duran, only two. Clay Thompson heads are like, who about Clay? There's second parts of this question from Joshua Tabor in College Station, Texas.

Oh. If you had to pick one current NBA star whose legacy is, most at risk of looking completely different in 10 years, either way better or way worse. Who is it and why? I had a specific guy for this. Okay, please. No, you go. I wait, you're the guess.

My problem with this question is all of my answers were negative. And I was like, that's where my head went to too. You know what I mean? I was like, all of my answers were just like bad answers. Mine were Zion and Jha. Oh, interesting. I've already given up on those guys.

To me, that would be a positive if it changed. Well, I think Zion, it could be like 10 years now. It could be like, do you remember that guy's on Williamson playing the NBA? I think Luca's the answer to this. Oh. Zach United a thing on the Sunday pod, something I noticed with Luca's MVP is how we only had a top three and a top four. I heard that.

And I wasn't doing that because... I'm intrigued. But I wasn't doing it because I was like, he should have more. It's like, because we do that with LeBron and stupid. The only person who you could definitively say should have more MVP's than they won is Michael Jordan. He should have three more MVP's. he should have won nine, I think he won six, whatever it was. But the three that he didn't get, it's fucking stupid when you go back.

It's like, I can't believe he didn't win that year. Michael Jordan. Yeah, but also like, would you have a call him alone? The 97 one is one of the worst ones, but the 93 was ridiculous when Barkley won. There was another one in like 89 or 90. But with Luca, this is next year's going to be year nine. I'm intrigued by this bill. But what if he just turns out to be like Dominique Wilkins who made the finals once?

and it's like statistically the most awesome and he's in there with all these greats and then it's like he had one top three MVP, one top four MVP, only made the finals once and that's just kind of his career. All right, counterpoint. Counterpoint is the ceiling's still high.

Well, it's not only that is his style of play. We were just like 10 minutes ago talking about him in five years being one of the best players in the league. And I also think that what happened to him in this trade, however it happened or whatever really happened behind the scenes. I have no idea what

actually happened. But he ended up he like teleported to the Lakers. You know what I mean? And this team is not built for him. So we saw what happened when Nico did a very good job building a team for Luca Donchid. A pro-Nico stance. He did a really good job. We were all celebrating this guy, you know, with the PJ

Washington and Gafford or whatever. The Lakers are not built for Luca to be successful. And I think that when LeBron is gone, they will build a team for Luca to be successful and they'll have some good years. I see your glass half full on that. I am.

I think there's a Tatum Tatum coming off the Achilles in a possibly negative way. Just like he made first team on NBA a few times. He has two top four MVPs, but can he get back to where he was or was that the peak?

Or like Jalen Brown sort of like stays in this number one spot and he sort of perpetually sort of goes into like a role. The other guy I had was Lamello. What if Lamello? What if Zaylino? Jack had some good stuff about him on my Pots Sunday night.

What if we are now at this awesome Lamello moment where he's just going to be really good for like nine years? And he's remembered as this really fun guy who's in a lot of playoffs. Talk to me to me to me, Bill. Remember when we were worried about Lamello? He's awesome. You know I love Lamello so much. He brings me so much joy to watch.

I'm so glad that you're now on this team. We argued about Lamello before he was drafted. Do you remember that? It took me six years to warm up. I was in on Lombello early. And I said to something to this match. Every time he has the ball, he's just looking around. He's like, what's the coolest thing I can do with his basketball right now?

It's all he wants to do is cool stuff. As they've gotten better, he's pulled it back a little bit. He's become more of a winning player, I think, than just I'm out here to have fun and make highlights. Yes. And one lamell thing. With that said, he did drive the Hummer across the Guardian into, or across the yellow lines into that car. That was very concerning. Like, that was crazy bad driving.

I am looking at my phone. Because I saw it and I was just like, that makes no sense. It's not an intersection. He's not making a turn. Wasn't great. I would say that I watch a lot. The judgment still scares me, but I like where it's heading. I know you're watching a lot of Hornets games.

I do. And I do want to get your take on this. This weird substitution patterns in the end of the fourth quarter with lamello ball. Well, I think they're trying to, it's 27 minutes a game. I think sometimes they'll put a more defense lineup. But it's not offense defense, though. So it was last. year, that was one of the things where they just started benching within the games.

They seemed very concerned about putting too many minutes on them and kind of like, it's like when you have, when you have kids and you have a win with the kids and you're like, we're having a really fun time with ball. Let's go. Yeah. Before something bad happens. Yeah, of course. I just feel sometimes like he'll be not in there with three minutes left.

And I'm like, oh, I guess they're going to finish without lamello. And then with like two minutes left, they'll put them in. Yeah. It's weird. Corey Wallace writes, just listen to the alien rewatchables. Bravo for pointing out how much cats suck in general. I like to tell people that the bigger cats get,

the more likely they are to hunt you for sport. The bigger dogs get, they still lick your face and want pets like all good boys do. Also, I could go on and on. Cat shit indoors. They cover said shit with their paws. They walk on tables and counters. What are we doing here?

There needs to be more negative coverage of cats and media. This is wild. First of all, I just want to say Mallory Rubin is very important to me. And I can't go anti-cat and be as pro-Mallory Rubin as I am. So that puts me in a bad spot. I was in the same spot, even worried about doing this in general. Yeah, yeah. It is a good point, though, when you, when you, especially if is your Instagram algorithm ever

send you cats? Like cats, like hitting dogs in the face and stuff? I did get that same clips, those AI clips that you got, where it was like, oh, is it a cats fighting bears? Yeah, yeah. In the first 20 seconds, you're like, oh, my God, cats can beat up bears. And then you're like, oh, this is just fake. It is an interesting point that the bigger cats get,

the more they become predators. Okay. And the cats that we have as pets are just the mini version of those predators. But the first thing that came to mind was, I think it was that Liam Neeson movie, when the wolves were the gray, I think it's called. Yeah, yeah. Do you remember the wolves in that movie? So that could be dogs.

Those are dogs, and they are pack hunters, and Liam Neeson was at the edge of his life for two hours in the cold. I remember, this is in the 90s. I was dating this girl and her family had a cat. We were staying at her house, and I went down to get a water, and I heard this weird noise. And in the foyer of her house, the cat had a mouse trapped. And it was like doing the Michael Madsen and Reservoir dogs. It's like, I'm not going to kill you yet. Duck in the middle of you.

It's like really enjoying it. I was there and I was watching it. It was like just torturing this mouse before I finally took it down. I was like, this cat's a fucking psycho. I love how much you were enjoying it, like a voyeur.

I couldn't believe it. You just sitting there. The cat didn't even know I was watching. It was like, I got you stuck in the corner. Yeah, cats. I don't know. I've never had a tough go with cats. I had, there was two cats.

They were Siamese cats, but they were twins. So they're Siamese twins, but they were not conjoined. That makes sense. And they just sat in this closet in my parents' room, and they hissed at you if you walked by. And I'm like, what is the point of this?

Yeah, that's not. Like, what are we doing? Stephen or Ohio wants to know he was reminiscing about the Ricky Davis year before LeBron came, which would have been a great 30 for 30. And by the way, with the way they're picking 30 for 30 topics these days, might actually be a 30 for 30. Who knows? He averaged 20.6 points per game.

It was the area of the fake triple double. And he said, yeah, I know you've talked about. how easy it is for a lot of people to get to 20 points on a bad team. But he did want to know who is the worst player to ever average 20 points per game in a season. So I didn't tell you this question. I'm not prepped for this one. Yeah. I prep for it.

I went on basketball reference. Okay. First of all, I was very surprised how hard it is to average 20 a game. So it was like less people than I thought. And I had to do a lot of different stuff with the basketball reference. I'm trying to think is. So I went,

I tried to figure out like between 20 and 22 points a game. seemed like a good, because there were so many people I had to like narrow down the sample size and then they'd buy wind shares and PR. Let me ask you a fault question. I'm going to give you six points. Yeah. We're in the middle of like a scoring boom right now, but is what, where, is this the scoring peak or was this a previous boom in a previous era where it was like 150, 160?

There was another one, right? Yeah. Yeah. So are we back to, we're taking those people out of the pool. So all I did was go back to 19, the merger season. Copy that. I'll give you six players who I'll average 20 points a game. Mike James, 20.3.

Ricky Davis, 20.6. Dana Barrows, 20.6, made the all-star team that year. Never nervous Purvis Allison? 20.0 one year. Huh. Tony Campbell, two years in a row in the expansion of Minnesota, Timberloves. But I think our answer at 20.3 points a game. Jordan Poole.

Jordan Poole averaged 20 points a game. counterpoint. On a certain night, Jordan Poole looks really good. And the other counter would be he actually really helped them in the NBA Finals, helped them win a title.

Yeah. So maybe it's Mike James? I'm kind of looking at Never Nervous Purpose. So the other thing that was interesting about that, it was the only time he ever averaged anything close to that. He'd like one big year,

but for the most part, he was like between 7 and 13. So maybe that's the answer. Never nervous? Yeah, that's my answer. He doesn't exactly jump off the screen. when you watch him play basketball. He doesn't exactly jump

when you watch it play basketball either. Ricky ended up on the Celtics, which I know you remember. Of course. He had nights where you're like, wow, this guy might be an NBA player. Yes. And that's my pool.

That's my pool retort too. Yeah. It's like... Jordan Pull had nights. On a certain night, they're putting up 40. All right. So there's two more great questions.

Okay, let's do it. I'm going to give you the second best one first. And then I'm really excited about the last one. This is from Jay and Charlotte. He heard the Hornets Deep Dive that Zach Lowe and I did, and about Zach was joking about raising a divisional banner, wanted to know who had the saddest rafters in the American sports scene.

So I just concentrated on basketball. As a Hornet season ticket holder, he has to nominate, he calls it the Spectrum Center. Currently, the Hornets have three things hanging in the rafters, number six for Bill Russell, which everybody has. Number 13 for Bobby Fills,

who tragically died in a drag racing accident. And the Charlotte Sting, jersey number 32 for Andreas Stinson, who averaged 12 points a game in the WMBA. They'd never won their division made in Eastern Conference finals or won a playoff series since the arena. The most famous basketball movement in the arena is a drunk guy in a purple shirt, taunting Dwayne Wade and hitting two threes and a game six to close out the game when he had seven threes in the year.

Is there a sadder rafters in American sports? So I did the research on this, but I just wanted to present that chart of the case for you. So Bill Russell, who didn't play for them, Bobby Phylls, who tragically passed away in a WMBA player and no division or conference title, anything. I don't think you can get sadder than that. I'll present to you the Memphis Grizzlies. No, no any rafters either.

Bill Russell, Zach Randolph, Tony Allen. I'd still go with Charlotte. Minnesota, Bill Russell, and Malik Salee, who tragically passed away, and that's really it. I don't think they have anything else. They're going to do garnett. They haven't done it yet because you won't go back.

Yeah, but didn't they just sort of like... Orlando only has Bill Russell and Shaq, but they must have the 95 Eastern Conference title, whatever. And they made it no-9, so they'd have two. The answer is actually the LA Clippers. Oh. Zero anything. They have no retired numbers.

What? And they've never won anything. They've never won a conference finals. They have nothing. What about like a brand or something? They've nothing. They've nothing. They put high school.

uniforms of California players in their thing. I'm not kidding. They don't have a single retired number. I'm trying to think. They didn't retire. Bob McAdoo's number who won an MVP in the Buffalo Braves. They didn't retire basically name anybody. Chris Paul?

Chris Paul maybe will be the first one, but he had this terrible experience with them. Blake Griffin, maybe you get to a point where you retired Chris Paul, Blake Griffin. I think you do that. That's pretty sad, though. Couldn't you at least retire Daris Miles and Quint Richardson together.

Just have... That was a great year. It was a really fun year. We enjoyed it. But yeah, the Quippers have nothing. That's sad. So they are the most oppressive. I feel like just, if we're just going with just rafters,

you might be right. But it really touched me when he was like, nothing's even happened in this arena, notable in Charlotte. I was thinking about the one thing would be LeBron staring at Michael Jordan before he dunks in a playoff game. That would be like the most notable thing that's happened in that. I mean, in my memory. Well, now 2K is going to be raining three.

2K. They should put him in the rafter already. This is a little sorbay appetizer for the last email. John from Jersey City had an email for conspiracy bill. I thought I could turn you on to the latest NBA conspiracy. The Nets rigging the 2026 lottery. I'm a net season ticket holder. This is the upcoming lottery.

When I got my ticket renewal price for next season, I was shocked. they raised prices 24% for the same seats next season. Last year they raised it 3%. The only rationale I can think of is to upcharge their season ticket holders who have sat through the mess of the last two years because they must know something. The rest of us don't.

I'll tell you this, conspiracy bill did darken the room and smoked the pipe a little bit and thought about this one. Why would they raise ticket prices 24% coming off a terrible season? They don't have a single signature player, other than Michael Porter Jr.

Michael Porter Jr. Agor Dement. Yagor Jomon. Yeager Dement. What made them raise prices? But it's a large... It's a sizable leader. Conspiracy Bill was intrigued.

Huh. Tyler Dickey, by the way, wanted to know... I'm not buying that one, though. The rigged lottery. Conspiracy Bill got his people together, at least they talked about it. You had a meeting about it. Tyler Dickey is another sorbet.

he said when you talk about craziest stories of the season everyone's like Katie's Burners that was the craziest won't get crazy of that he points out the Trailblazers head coach got arrested by the FBI one game in the season I'm not the historian of the game that you are but I've never seen or heard anything quite like this

no one cares about Portland so this is easily swept under the rug did Chauncey actually mess with our players playing times in development and control outcomes that he cut minutes, so player props would hit unders? Why is this not a huge deal to anyone else? I don't know. Why isn't this a huge deal? I don't know.

Ramona just wrote a huge piece about him today, about how he had to, like, sell his house, and he had $5 million bail. Like, this is like a major, major gambling investigation, and he was in the poker and alleged. I can't say I know Chauncey that well, but he was around ESPN when I was there. And he is like, just like the most responsible measured person

I've been around in a professional setting. I worked with them too. I thought he was the nicest guy. Yeah. Like some of the stuff you hear about, like Malik Beazzy, you're like, oh, that's a little weird.

But like, Chauncey was just like a sweetheart. It's a good point. This one kind of just went away. It did. It did. It was so long ago. And also the K.D.

Berter thing, like he made a Twitter account and it was in like a group chat. You know what I mean? So he's not like, it's not even like public facing tweets. Yeah. Somebody in his group chat.

It just violated his privacy. Somebody betrayed the chat. Yeah. That seems to be. would have. Yeah. Okay, last question. From Dan and Manhattan Beach.

I can't wait for your reaction. I didn't send this team. What if instead of signing with any one team for next season, LeBron makes his retirement tour, an actual retirement tour, by signing a one-week contract with all 30 teams. Every team gets one LeBron home game where he starts and plays, and they sell thousands of limited to jerseys. New York finally gets Nick's LeBron,

Minnesota gets an Aunt LeBron team up. Miami gets heat reunion LeBron, we just keep going. He's not going to win the title in the matter where he goes. Why not generate news in every local market? Never happy, great idea. I couldn't pin holes in it. There's also this thing hanging on

where it's like, I have no idea where LeBron's going to play next year. It's just like, there's no sort of like natural thing. I did this on the pod. To be so with Zach about. You did the Golden State thing. Well, because I don't think Cleveland, I think Cleveland has a chance to the title every year and it's Donovan Mitchell's team

and he's not going to be like, cool, let's add LeBron. Like, it's his team. Jalen Brunson, it's his team. These guys don't want the LeBron retirement circus coming into their thing. They'd rather just win the title. Be my guess. Does, if he goes to the Warriors per conspiracy bill, does that team a championship team?

No, but it's like a Curry and LeBron last ride. Chris Das Porzengis and like Jimmy Butler off an injury and like that team is not that competitive. One last ride. Curry goes to Charlotte and his career. So I tried to think about could this 10-day thing work, and I actually think it could. Hold on.

Curry going to Charlotte. That's going to take shots away from Nips. It's an older... Oh, it's like a mentor. Pass the torch. I'll be the best shooter. 2K and him will work it out. It's kind of like a Chris Paul, Wemby thing. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. He's there to shepherd him into super start-up.

So if it was 30, he'd have to play for 30 teams. it's 60 games total right so we'd play one home game one road game or two home games or the road games maybe just the home games maybe it's a two game homestand limited edition jerseys

you'd have two jerseys for everything it's like a fucking cash cow it would actually be kind of amazing and the Celtics would be like whoa our LeBron game is coming up on March 4th oh the tickets would go out of control that's why they raise the ticket prices in Brooklyn because of the LeBron game next year.

Or is LeBron just going there next year? No. To play with a eventual piece of the team? Or Joman? Just said, that's it. That's his thing. So if he played on every team. This would, first of all, it would be an amazing,

nobody's done it before. The league just brought in two new partners and took billions of their dollars. Yeah. And this is a little gift they can give back. How about this? LeBron's into golf now. plays in these different cities.

Two home games and you can sample the best courses in each city over the course of two days. This will never happen, but it should happen. I thought it was an almost unassailable idea. I loved it. And then he ends up on the last team. And that's the team that has a chance to win the title. And you just kind of slide in. It's like, I had a really good time when I was on Minnesota in December.

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

you in House talking about a guy with a metal baseball bat playing for the Wizards. This will never happen. But it is intriguing. It's one of those things where it's like, okay, this won't happen. But if it did, what's the problem? It would be cool if he started out

with the shitty teams and then gradually got to, And then, okay, so he was like, we'll do it, but it's got to be in December. We don't want to screw with our team too much. Because I was thinking about, like, him on the jazz. And I was like, oh, you know what I mean? I was just like, well, I don't know if I'm going to even tune in for that one or like the wizards. I did think could there be a scenario where he only picks 12 teams?

But then I think the other 18, there'd be some fan base that I'd be like, what the fuck? And I do like the idea of him having the one game in like Memphis. Just fucking weird. He's wearing a grizzly jersey. But the thing is that city is on absolute fire. It's like basically Taylor Swift's Erez Tour, but basketball in LeBron is basically what it is. Every game would be an event. I think Brani also has to come.

So it's two 10-day contracts. You have to get both guys. Every text thread that I am on would be which LeBron game are we going to. Right. The second the schedule is released, every text thread that I'm on would be like, which one are we going? He does Nick's Nets back to back. So he has Nick's week and then Netsweek. New York for two weeks. He's doing all the shows.

Huge. Oh, yeah. It's like, this is amazing. Yeah, he's going on a day show. Yeah. It's a great idea. This is a brilliant idea. Dave Jacoby, you can hear him on the miss, hear and watch him on the mismatch with Verno, Chris Vernon. How's Verno handling another tanking season? You know what? He's not handling it well.

Yeah. But I think that we're doing everything that we can to support him. It's tough when you're whole, when you put your steak in the ground out, we are going to tank. Yeah, yeah. We got Triple J and Joe when they play together. Exactly. And, yeah.

It's going, it's not going great. He's watching a lot of college basketball. Oh, that's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good to see you, my friend. You see, too. Now it's time for a special segment of the show. It's called Value Mount Rushmore, and it's brought to you by Domino's.

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My first one would be when the Quippers traded Zubots was making $20 million a year so they could start playing the rookie center more, Niederhauser, who makes like $2 million a year. What a deal. If Niederhouser can be put up most of the stats that Zubots puts up, great. I just saved $18 million.

That was a good one. Late round fantasy sleepers. Always awesome. I always like to do running backs. at the end of drafts because you just draft the backups or rookies and just hope you strike oil with one of them. Futures, I like with the, like, looking for futures ahead for like the NBA NFL season. NFL, you always look for the bad team that has a good schedule the next year and a new coach

is a good one for the NBA. The team that starts to stack the lottery picks and then all sudden, even though people don't have high expectations like Charlotte this year, maybe they'll make a jump up. So that's a good one. And then a fourth one, glue guys. Always good if you're building a sports team, invest in those glue guys. The Celtics have a couple good ones, Jordan Walsh, Hugo Gonzalez, Hugo Gonzalez, sorry.

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This episode is brought to you by Expedia. Family vacations are the absolute best. I think my favorite place that I've been to a bunch of times with my family is Hawaii, a place that we could not go to when I lived on the East Coast because it was too far away and we went to the West Coast. And now it's like just close enough. Really fun.

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You can hear him three times a week on The Town, which you can also watch with his fancy video setup. It's a great pocket. You can also read his newsletter, part of the Puck newsletter world. Very essential, especially lately. There's always stuff going on. And just recently, Warner Brothers, which has been passed around like a Yankees Christmas gift since 2001, seems to have finally found a home.

Somebody wanted, finally wanted the snow globe. They wanted to keep it. Finally. I don't know if it's finally. We may be doing this all again in five years. Uh-oh. Well, today that the Paramount Stock got downgraded. to junk status.

So everything they just paid. Their debt was downgraded. Yes. All right. So I have so many ways to go here. I don't think there's been enough talk about the merger name. You've been joking about this on your pod because they can do the acronym. They can do PWB.

They can do Warner Mount, which you've said a couple times. Yeah, that's my preference. Does the Paul brothers interest you at all? Paul brothers or Paw? Just calling it Paul with like a paw. print? I thought you were going to go P-Sky. That's their current, their current monitor, it's Paramount Skydance. They do P-Skyy, which Craig Horlbeck loves. So do you think Paramount just absorbs it and it just stays Paramount? And that's like kind of their ultimate Trump card?

I think ultimately, perhaps that will be the route. The funny thing is, though, the Warner Brothers is much larger than Paramount. So if you're really looking at the, you know, what the brand is and what to do moving forward. You call the whole company Warner's or Warner Brothers or Warner's Paramount. And then you keep the streaming service as HBO or HBO Max and just kind of fold Paramount into it. Well, none of us were ever happy with WBD, Warner Brothers Discovery. It was just a complete mess. And everything Zazlov did was just bizarre and crazy. And including his victory lap last week, which you excoriated him for. And yet he's going to walk away with like $800 billion. It's, it is unbelievable.

The company lost two thirds of its value under his leadership. The only thing that raised the stock was the prospect of it being sold. And he locked out. He has these, the world's fourth richest man who's got a son who happens to love Hollywood. It's the, it's the greatest thing in the world. And all of a sudden there's a bidding war because Netflix is like, oh, we'll, we'll take that. We'll take HBO and Warner Brothers, if it's for.

sale and all of a sudden you got a bidding warrant. All you need is two bidders. And then next thing you know, the stock goes from $7 a share to $31 a share at the sale. Unbelievable. And some people were buying it when it was like 18, 19, hoping that we did get to the mid-20s. This, so I was really trying to think about this. And I was thinking about real life and culture. Is this the most faith anyone has ever shown in their son? Well, I don't think anyone in the history of the world, has had the wherewithal that Larry Ellison does in terms of just sheer wealth. I mean, I guess Elon has what, like 10, 12 kids that will someday be old enough to have to deal with his money.

But this is like in Game of Thrones, Queen Cerses, like Joffrey, we're riding with you, baby. We know you're 17 and we know you're sociopath, but I think you can handle the seven kingdoms. You'll see this in culture, but not in real life. Wait till Don Jr. runs for president. then we'll really see what's going on there. Well, I was going to say the bushes would be the other analogy, right? Like senior bush, like kind of grooming junior bush, but not in a situation where you basically incur $79 million in debt plus the junk, which is now 3% on top of the $79 million.

I've never seen anything like this. And I got to be honest, I'm not smart enough really from a mass standpoint to understand it. Well, isn't there a correlation in sports? aren't their legendary sports owner? I mean, Dr. Buss, perfect example. Dr. Buss, you know, and his kids running rough shot over his empire. I mean, there's got to be a million examples of very savvy sports owners who turn their entire kingdom over to their kids and all hell breaks loose.

Here's the difference. So I did think about that. And we see this in sports all the time. And almost always it goes horribly. And the kids, you know, they're basically their qualifications for the job is I'm related to my dad. and he's the rich guy who made all these things. They're not self-made, all this stuff.

In this case, David Ellison has tried to put in the time for the last 10 to 12 years to try to figure out, like, I want to be a content mogul. So it's a little different than in sports sometimes when somebody's like, okay, I'm going to fold shop. Here's my son. He's now the CEO and he'll be in charge of all of our basketball moves. You're like, oh, no.

David Ellison really does seem like he's ready for the moment. moment. I don't know if anybody else thinks he is, but it seems like he has a point of view and a style and a take on this, right? Certainly. And he definitely put in the time. We can argue about how successful Skydance was because their biggest successes have been essentially putting up money and glomming onto original franchises at Paramount. He had, you know, he had Top Gun. He's done Mission Impossibles. He had the Terminator franchise and he did those movies to varying degrees of success. So he hasn't made a huge impact via Skydance, but he's put a lot of money into movies and he's made a lot of TV shows. So in that sense, he has been kind of auditioning for this, but now he is in

the absolute big league. I mean, he's gone in a year and change from being a guy with a semi-success production company to arguably the second or third most powerful person in Hollywood. Yeah, because I'm trying, there's been so much glass half empty. I'm trying to think like, okay, what is the glass half full side? What are his wins so far? He gets credit for the Tom Cruise relationship and Top Gun Maverick, which he actually produced and made happen. And he gets credit for, I mean, these last couple of Mission Impossible's lost money.

so, but they were kind of plagued by COVID charges and ended up being some of the most expensive movies of all time. He has built, the TV business is not bad. He actually, he's done Reacher. He's done Gracie and Grace and Frankie, which lasted seven seasons on Netflix, which is kind of unheard of. So he has had wins in TV. He's a producer. Some producers, you know, some shows are hits.

Some movies are hits, some aren't. That's very different from what he's. he is now. He is an owner-operator of the two of the five legacy studios. And it's just, it's unbelievable how much power he's amassed. He has news now. He's never had news before. He's got sports. I mean, he's now the proprietor of the arguably the most lucrative NFL package, the ASC package on Sundays. He's got UFC. He's got golf. He's got March Madness. Now he owns all of March Madness. I mean, it's pretty unbelievable. Yeah, so I wrote down all the stuff that they have now, the content empire, right?

200 plus million subs. Now, I don't know how many of those are repetitive. I guess you find that out. In the U.S. antenna just did a study where it's 7.5 million subs overlap in the U.S. I don't know about overseas. But it's less overlap than with HBO and Netflix. There's a much bigger overlap there.

HBO Paramount Plus, CBS. an entity that I think got just discounted during this whole process, Pluto. Yeah. They got Pluto. One of my favorites. TNT, TBS. They own 902 and O.

That's a big thing for you. They have all the challenges. TNT, TBS, Comedy Central Discovery, MTV, all those, which I guess can just run as ghost ships on cable for as long as we have cable. Yeah. There's zombies. There's zombie networks,

and they will just milk them for the ridiculousness money. and that's it. CNN and CBS News, which who knows if they're even going to decide they want to be in news? And if you're going to talk about ways to cut debt, if they don't care about news to begin with,

that could be just a place that sadly they would just chop. They're going to chop. I don't think they're going to kill it. CNN still throws off a lot of money from affiliate fees because you can't not carry CNN for like the five times a year that people tune in to watch some kind of

breaking news moment. Like this weekend, exactly. But there are about 3,000 people that work at CNN. And there is a big overlap in terms of the product with CBS News. So that is the perfect place to start cutting. Yeah, sadly. Bleach report, they have, they have all this IP, including DC Comics, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Looney Tunes, Game of Thrones,

Top Gun, Mission Impossible, Star Trek, etc. And that's the biggest thing that shifted, I would say this century with the studios valuing that old IP more than ever, and now we're moving into the AI era, and it's even probably twice as viable as it was. If we look at what's going on with AI, and there's soon going to be anybody can create anything at any time, right? And YouTube is about to be flooded with AI generated content.

So in a sea where everything is possible, what isn't possible to recreate? And it's known intellectual property. You cannot recreate Batman with AI, unless it's license, which they may do, but they will own Batman. And you can do whatever you want with Batman. And I think that's honestly why Netflix was so interested in buying Warner Brothers, because Netflix is increasingly taking on YouTube. They're doing podcasts. They're doing all these other things that eat up innings and eat up time on the service. And if they see AI coming in, they wanted all of that IP.

in addition to the 100 years of movies in the library to put on the service. Right. So, like, for instance, they on the Godfather. There's a world where you could just do your own Godfather sequel between Godfather 2 and Godfather 3 and create all of the AI. And it sounds insane and awful. But, like, this weekend I saw a commercial where somebody used, was Airbnb, they used Golden Slumbers from the Beatles for a commercial.

And I'm like, that song's kind of sacred. This is now a commercial song, but we're just used to this. now. All the songs we grew up with in the 60s, 70s, 80s are just commercial jingles now. Yeah, but they're getting paid. Right. That's the difference. You have to pay for that. But people will get paid for this Godfather kind of stuff too. It just feels weird, but I guess. I mean, Disney just did a deal with Open AI to hand over all their characters for Do It Yourself content. And interestingly, in that deal, they did not give the voices and they did not give the actual physical human likenesses of the characters that are human. you have Luke Skywalker, it's the animated Luke Skywalker, it's not Mark Hamill.

And that's because of the guild, the union regulations. They don't let you do that. You have to pay money for that. And Disney just said, okay, you can have Lightning McQueen and Yoda, but you're not, they're not going to sound like Lightning McQueen and Yoda because they, that's still intellectual property that's controlled. So the, and this is the Wild Wild West coming up where we don't know, you know, you know, what if Fox just says, hey, the Simpsons, go to town.

Just make sure you pay us. And all of a sudden there's just Simpson stuff everywhere. Homer Simpson is involved in this Open AI deal. Yeah. Not Homer's voice because you have to get the voice separate from that

image. But you're going to be able to do Homer Simpson videos on OpenAI and Disney Plus very soon. You also get the Paramount Library, the WB Library, and two giant studio lots. Here's the thing.

So $79 billion in debt plus the 3% junk piece, so that's even higher. Paramount only controls two things right now when they merge these companies, which it'll take a year, assuming they merge. Headcount and subscription prices,

right? Other than that, they have no idea how this is going to go. But those are the two things that they can finagle the price however they want. Like, they could chop 60% of both companies and merge it into some smaller company. They could also raise the subscription price

to some crazy-noburn. number and do a little like what Disney and Hulu and Fox have tried to do, which has been really confusing. It's been really hard to get one of them. You kind of have to get all three and they dangled. They're pushing people to the bundle. Yeah, which is where we're headed with this, right? And it'll be like $35 a month. And you get HBO on Paramount and you get to watch football on CBS. And that's where we're headed, right? What they are saying is that there will only be one app. It will not be a bundle. It won't be like the Disney, Hulu, ESPN situation.

They are saying that these are going to be combined into one, they're calling it a super app, and that it will be something like, let's call it HBO Max, and then you go open it, and then there's Paramount Plus tile, and there's an HBO tile, and there's a CBS Sports tile, that kind of thing. So we've never really seen a deal like this

with somebody that is a really proud tech person that cares about this stuff and is like, we are going to innovate and do all, we have all of these different ideas. Like, Netflix has a great main page. You go to Netflix, it knows what you like,

it knows how to push things in front of you, and they're the best at it. You go to other pages. Like, Peacock is just a quagmire. You go to Peacock. Peacock still doesn't know that I go there every Sunday morning to watch SML.

They do not know that. How do I do it? Can you guys tell me? It's unbelievable. It's the worst app of all time. And then you finally get to SNL and it shows you the last 10 minutes of the episode that you previously watched.

And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. I never watched the last 10 minutes of SNL because I turn it off after weekend update. I want to just show me the latest episode. What's the new one? What's the new traders? Like, they just can't figure it out. So subscription price

will be one way to make the money back. I still don't know. Like I've heard you've talked at different pods about how do you get this debt down, all this stuff. 7.9 billion is like a brainbreaker. It's a lot. That's basically the entire Western conference of NBA teams.

Yeah. Honestly, they're going to have to cut a shit ton of costs. They're saying $6 billion that they're going to take out. It's going to be more than that. And they're saying that there's a lot of synergies and that they, you know, they will probably move everybody to one of the two physical lots and sell the other one. That's a couple billion dollars there. there's a lot of things they can do merging CBS News and CNN. There's things that are going to result in headcount reductions,

but also just like physical presence reduction and costs of office space and things like that. So you'll start to see those that come down. But the real risk here is that it can't come down enough and that this company just essentially becomes all about paying off debt. And they're just cutting costs and reducing output and service. the debt, and they're not actually investing in making this a good, you know, productive company like you should be.

Which is, I can't remember the first time I came on your pot and we talked about this. This goes to the heart of how stupid these media mergers are. I just don't understand them. They never work. I don't, even when you look at Disney and Fox, like, I don't know. Would Disney run that back if they could do that one over again, would they? I'd both to know if given a truth serum? Certain quarters of Disney would run that back.

Bob Iger insists it's great and I don't think the final, listen, I go back and forth on this. I don't know if Disney is where it is today as one of the companies that you assume will survive the streaming wars if it didn't acquire all the content engines from FX and from Hulu and from the Fox properties, putting the Simpsons on Disney Plus. I don't know about that. That is above my pay grade. There's probably some McKinsey study locked in the vault with Walt Disney's head somewhere.

Just like this is what we got out of Fox. But they spent a lot of money and it caused a lot of debt issues for Disney. And they're still kind of digging out of that. They got Avatar though. They got a lot out of it. But it was a lot. Now, we have a better example in Warner Brothers Discovery because that was a transaction that produced about $55 billion in debt.

And Zazlov and his team essentially spent the next three years trying to pay that down. And then that's where we had, you know, cutting the Batgirl movie and firing thousands of people and all these things that kind of, they took a hit to the brand. And luckily for them, they found someone to come along and buy this company. But if they hadn't, it would have been a downward spiral, I think. So would you say the best analogy for what Zazlov did here is he bought this house he couldn't afford in a neighborhood? that he liked, knew right away basically that he couldn't afford to keep the house and that this was going to go really badly unless somebody else was driving down the street and said,

whoa, I really loved that house. And that was his only out. That's basically what happened, right? The rich kid. The rich kid in school, he happened to befriend and he just decided that he'd really like that. And then another guy said, I'd also like it. I don't want the rich kid to have it. And then all of a sudden, it's a bidding war. I mean, if you look at the initial projections for Warner Brothers Discovery. They said that they were going to have $14 billion a year in EBITDA, which is a metric for profits. And it never even delivered in that first year. That first year came in under their estimates. And it's because the linear TV business, which is where these companies make most of their money still, the linear TV business is collapsing faster than people anticipated,

or that they let on. So they're like, oh, wait, we thought we were going to have 14 billion. Now we only have 12 this year, and next year we have 10. And finally, when they're selling this company this past year, it's down to 8.5. And it just keeps melting, melting, melting. And it just throws the entire business trajectory off. They had to find a buyer. Who didn't know that the linear TV was going to die dramatically? Like, we knew this 10 years ago.

What do we do it? It's a matter of how fast it melts. As soon as high-speed internet was here, like it was a matter of time. I think one other thing with these mergers that never gets enough credit, and I say this as somebody who's worked in a couple of big companies, they're so destabilizing. And I don't think people, you wouldn't know unless you were working in a company that they either got acquired or acquired somebody else.

But from the moment it happens, it's it's hunger games. And you have repetitive departments all over the place. And you have people looking over their shoulder and people looking for other jobs because they don't know if their job's going to exist. And it's just this amount of tension. Like if Spotify merged with somebody tomorrow, I'd be terrified. I know what I'm dealing with now. I don't know what I'm dealing with another company.

Right. And if you look at these Warner Brothers and HBO people, they just, they have different bosses all the time. Right. And with different bosses come different objectives, different strategies. And in a creative business, it's really hard to operate from a position of uncertainty and change. You look at some of the most stable places like Universal, which has had the same. ownership for the past 15, 16 years. The film studio at Universal was able to build up these franchises and build up the illumination

business to have minions and Super Mario and they had the relationship with Christopher Nolan. Yeah, you take a bet on Oppenheimer and then he's going to give you the Odyssey and all of a sudden you've got the biggest filmmaker. They have the Spielberg relationship. All these things, it takes a lot and it takes a stable team to do. And when you are changing the rudder every couple of years, it's just a lot. more difficult. Well, look at Amazon right now. Amazon's been trying to get in all kinds of different

things and every three months, they have another reword. It's amazing. I know. And they still haven't gotten what they want out of that entire purchase of MGM, which is a freaking James Bond movie. Right. And Rocky. They had to buy out the broccoli family because they essentially refused to make any movies for them because they hated them. Right. I want to do some winners and losers. winner the first winner we talked about him before but david ellison who i gotta say i i've only heard like at least decent things i don't he's not like a king joffrey character where people are like what a prick oh my god i've heard the worst guy very nice guy everybody seems to like him i don't know if he should be running one of the biggest content uh whatever

monoliths we've ever seen but he at least seems like not like a zazlov thing where he's in it to get some sort of payoff at the end. I don't think that's his intention. No, he seems to be in it because he genuinely likes this business and wants to make good things. Now, we can argue about his taste. He's made a lot of movies that are not great. And he has much more commercial taste than say, like his sister, Megan Ellison, who was a greatuteur producer and financier of movies until she ran out of money.

And her father basically said enough's enough. But David- That would make her not a good financier, by the way. Who? I would say Megan Ellison, baby wasn't a good financier because her movies less money. No, no, great taste. Yes, made some very good movies.

Yeah. But I put her rewatchable number up against David Ellison's, and I bet she has more. That would be an interesting battle. All right, winners and losers. First of all, 79 billion in debt, I just staggering. I'm giving that a winner just because I didn't even know that was possible. That sounds like fucking at a Star Wars.

You made the debt a winner? I think it's going to be a record. I think that's it. I think we've peaked. I don't think anyone's beating this. I guess these lenders, like Apollo and these big lenders. Whatever. I think 79 is going to be, this is like Barry Bond sitting, 73 homers.

We're never topping. I'm making it in a winner. And much like that, we will come to question how it all happened. Luser, everyone's scared of AI and what it might do to content. This is like your D-Day, because this is now the first time somebody that has, and Brian Phillips wrote about this for The Ringer this week. Somebody with real insight and awareness and ability to use data, surveillance, name anything evil that we're all afraid of.

TikTok. Don't forget. David Ellison's father, Larry, is one of the investors in the U.S. version of TikTok. And they still are talking about this, like, magical digital fairy dust that they're going to sprinkle over the whole company and turn it into a big tech media powerhouse. And not sure quite how that's going to happen, but I'm sure it'll be bad for the culture and our data and all these other things.

Well, it's going to be, AI is going to probably come in a bunch of different ways for content. I think for when you're talking about editing movies and producing movies and some of the stuff that has just jobs that have existed for 120 years, I'm sure that's part of their plan, right? We could cut the cost here, here, here. We could just have, instead of having 200 people on this movie, we could have 70.

That's throughout Hollywood, though. I mean, there is a push right now. The thinking is these movies cannot continue to cost $200 million to make, especially in animation, but even in other sci-fi effects-driven movies, they've got to bring the cost down, and AI is going to be a big part of that. All right, I have a controversial winner.

People who make content because, yeah, all right, I'm going to land this plane. You're going to be confused for most of the time. I think if Netflix got Warner Brothers, I think we would have moved into a dangerous place with content that I would compare to this. And I'm in an AL-keeper fantasy league where we can keep guy,

we can keep 10 keepers, we have minor leaguers and all that. And sometimes somebody will get a big lead in like July. And you have to decide, like, do I want to chase this guy or it would be stupid to chase this guy and make trades? You know what, I'm going to let him win the title.

And I have a better chance next year. I think Netflix's lead would have been, especially like with the know-how and the intelligence they have, I actually think it could have turned into a situation where everybody else is like, yeah, we're just going to pick our spots. We can't compete with those guys. And I don't know if it would have been great for people who do movies, television shows, and documentaries specifically.

Because who's bidding against them if everybody is just going to be careful because they can't beat Netflix? Not a bad take. I agree. And obviously, if this merged company can get its act together and become that third or fourth big player alongside Netflix and Amazon and Disney. That that creates a, ultimately creates a more robust market if there are four real players that can buy your project at any given time. And then

God knows what Apple is doing. Well, I was going to say, plus Apple, if you're a relatively famous person who looks good in a giant thumbnail. Exactly. And they're going to overspend on whatever you want to do. Jennifer Lawrence, come on up. We got an Apple show for you. Pose. Make a picture. Yes, yes.

I know. But you're a divorced mom and your husband's been murdered. Go. The, the, that is essentially what Ellison has been arguing and what they're going to argue to argue to regulators to approve this deal is that this was a necessary evil to get Hollywood modernized for the tech era and that these are globally scaled companies and, Hollywood has never faced globally scaled media companies

before. It's always been an oligopoly of only these five or six studios can distribute movies worldwide. That's why, frankly, that's why they stayed in existence for 100 years. Now that's all gone with the internet and you have scaled television companies

and they need to combine to chase that. And it's going to be painful in the short term. It's not, no question, taking these buyers out, like when Warner and HBO were competing against Paramount and all the rest, it was just better for buyers. But if this goes through, it will be painful.

And then maybe this company can build up and become a real scaled player. You're certainly not taking your best projects to Paramount right now. Right. And if you think about 2017, 18, 19, pre-COVID, there were just a lot of people that had money and wanted to do stuff and were competing against each other. And then that slowly died after COVID. Well, there was television.

There was cable television still making original shows. Now that's all gone. Cable television not making original shows, certainly not inscripted. So it's just the streaming players and a little bit of broadcast TV. And there, you know, it's just a lot less. Felonies, I decided to watch the Survivor season for the first time in a while because it's 500. It was a three-hour season premiere.

CBS is basically like, guys, we got to go three hours. We have two police shows, two doctor shows, two fire shows. We have football. We don't really have a lot going on. So we're just going to have this from 8 to 11 tonight. Sorry. And guess what? I watched it.

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

I don't know if he announced that on the pod. Would not surprise me. He does not age. Anyway, that's my glass half full is that maybe this will lead to two heavyweights competing for projects constantly, which I'm not against. I might be wrong. You forgot one loser. I think one loser. I have a lot of, I have losers coming. Continue. Continue. Well, I have another winner, the NFL. Because Goodell, who's just a genius with this stuff, puts that little thing in like, hey, if there's a merger, we get to redo our deal. Yeah. So now sky dance in the NFL, you don't need to, you know, it's not hard to figure out that they're going to be, have the hometown advantage. Yeah.

But nobody really has an advantage with Cadell and whatever he wants to do to get more money, he's going to do it. So if he decides like, I've decided we have Friday night football and we're going to use AFC teams and sorry CBS, you're just going to have to eat shit because we're going to have good games on Friday night. CBS will be like, okay, fine. Yeah. All right. Not much you can do. I mean, they've been slowly taking games away from those big packages. The one thing I would say is that I do think the NFL still needs broadcast.

I don't think you're going to see them completely abandoned CBS. I don't think you will either. Go to Netflix or something like that. They know their customer, and the customer viewer still wants that broadcast experience. In communities across Canada, hourly Amazon employees earn an average of a over $24.50 an hour. Employees also have the opportunity to grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free skills training programs for in-demand fields,

like software development and information technology. Learn more at aboutamazon.ca. So I have seven suitors for the NFL when this all opens up. You tell me absolutely have to have it. I'd love to have it or this is a luxury. Those are the three answers. CBS Paramount, I feel like that. So we absolutely have to have it, right?

100% agree. NBC? Yes, agreed. All right, we're two for two. That is, they have the number one program in all of television. It's an anchor of their entire sales strategy. And the Olympics are only every four years. NBA so far has not performed as much as they wanted to.

Oh, what do you talk about? Every game ever is the most watched game. we've ever had. Yeah. Thanks a deal for numbers. Let's see next year when the big data is compared against the big data. But it's a little less than CBS, but I still think NFL's must have for NBC. Well, we agree.

So that's two. Fox, I think, is must. Oh, it's mission critical. What is Fox without NFL? What are they? They have to have it. And they've seen both realities when they've had it and when they haven't had it. it and they don't want to go back.

No, that's what the Bank of America analysts, they just downgraded Fox because of this whole prospect of the rights going up because there's, what are they going to do? They have to just eat it. ESPN? Yeah. I think there have to. We have four half the habits. We're four for four.

I think they're a half to. With all the plans that ESPN is making and how much time they have put NFL on ABC as well. Yeah. Like that was not supposed to be the case. And they've renegotiated those deals to put Monday Night Football on ABC a lot. So I think it's a must have. More on them in a second. Amazon is our fifth suitor.

I would put them in the need to have it, but it's not a game breaker. Yeah, I'm putting them in the middle category. I think it's a like to have. Now, they love it. And it's one of the only things that consistently works. on Amazon and they feel that they've made great strides and getting better games and the productions are better and they've finally they've convinced that last cohort of people to watch you know when when they first started and took the games from Fox the ratings went down just because some people

in this country didn't know where to find the game so they forgot about it or whatever now they're bringing in more of those people and they it's sort of a cornerstone of their offerings but like with anything with Amazon it's a it's it's a luxury they are a sales platform They want you to buy more toilet paper. And all of this content is just in service of buying more toilet paper. And they need three or four things like the NFL to accomplish that goal. I agree. I wouldn't say they're on the level of the first four, but they're one level below.

And then the last two are Netflix and YouTube, which I would say are luxury needed, but you're not crying yourself to sleep if you don't get it. Exactly. You'll be fine. I agree. And especially Netflix. because they see the numbers and they have a big initiative to increase their advertising sales, and the NFL can do that.

But they're just not going to fall over themselves to steal away a full package of games unless it makes sense, unless it's bespoke, you know, the international games. I've always thought that they're going to eventually evolve into one international game per week or for, you know, 12 of the 17 weeks or something like that. And they will carve out those games for a 9 a.m. or 8 a.m. game every week. And it will be on Netflix. Because it will be global. So, Netflix can show. 12 international games. Netflix owns all 12. And by the way, some of those are already on NFL network. They could just easily sell them to Netflix. Yep. Take the Germany game. Take the Ireland game. If they have to take them away from CBS or Fox, so be it.

Yeah. And by the way, the NFL would tell CBS, hey, we're going to take these games. you want to fight? CBS, like, okay, take them. All right, so that's five. There are no other suitors, right? That's seven. Well, where's Apple? Yeah, where is Apple?

Where's Apple? You tell me, are they even in this? That is the eternal question. Are they interested? They have not wanted to dabble. They have said that, you know, they like their F1 deal that they just did. They like their MLS deal. The MLS might have a word about that.

but they have not wanted to just get a game or two here or there. And we'll see. You know, the MLB did a whole Friday night baseball thing with them. I mean, who knows if that works? There's just so many MLB games. But the bigger problem is how many people have Apple TV, I think, is the scarier question because I don't think it's a lot. It's not a lot.

And they're now doing things about that. They're selling through other things. They just did a deal with Roku to sell Roku. They capitulate and they sell through. I'm glad you brought that up. I thought that Roku thing was fascinating. Because that's their main competitor. Yeah, it was a wave in the white flag, basically.

Absolutely. And they did it earlier with Amazon. They basically came out guns blazing saying, we are Apple Incorporated. We are the platform that everybody has to have. And everyone's like, not really when it comes to premium video. And they basically raised the white flag. It said, okay, we'll sell via Amazon and we'll sell via Roku. And hopefully we'll raise our numbers.

I like Roku. one more winner here. Well, I have a couple more, actually. Netflix, who, look, I love the spin, and you've been on it, too, about, like, well, this is all along. They were trying to push this deal, and if they didn't get it,

it still was great for them because they sat on it. I don't think that's true. They spent a lot of time on this. Nobody likes to spend a lot of time to not get something. And have your stock go down 30%. Yeah, but they did. They did get $2.8 billion as a break. pickup fee, which they can just now put toward those international NFL games, you mentioned,

and other stuff. And a big competitor has taken on almost $80 billion in debt to go after this deal. So they got them that. They also, you know, the Ellison's wanted to buy this company for $19 a share in the fall. Right. And it went up by, what is that, 40% just because Netflix was involved in $19 to $31. So that's a lot. It would be funny if the Mavericks had been able to use this strategy.

with the Luca trade, where the trade went through and then the other teams were like, you didn't get enough. And then the Mavericks were like, we didn't get enough. The deal is now we're accepting bid still. And it was like, the Lakers were like, wait, we had a deal. What happened? Can you imagine if that were true in sports, if you could accept a trade and then everybody could react and up the offer?

Right. Because all it would do is create a lane there for fan bases to go completely nuts when a trade was made. And then the ownership would have to respond. Right. Well, that was why they'd ever wanted to. to leak it out. Loser.

Everyone at HBO probably because they can spend this all they want. We've been in this scenario before, ironically, with HBO with AT&T, wherever I said, no, no, it's going to be great. Everybody's going to work together. I'm going to go glass half empty on this. We'll see. But you mentioned on your podcast, how Casey Blois, who's, I think probably the most respected TV executive or one of them,

his contracts up next year. I think he saw what happened. and Richard Puppler in the 2010s when Stanky and AT&T took over. And this is, I want to see how this plays out for me. Listen, Casey has it in his contract that he reports to the CEO of the company. So if Paramount wants to honor that and have him report to David Ellison and not have to report to all the streaming executives that Ellison has hired, including a woman Cindy Holland who was at Netflix,

so I don't think she and Casey would mix well together, maybe that will work out. Ellison said straight up, HBO should stay HBO, do what they do best, easier said than done. What happens if they're bidding on the same project? Exactly.

What happens then? I mean, there have been examples of that. Netflix famously has a culture where you can get a no from one division of the company and then you can get a yes from another. So they do have competing arms there within the same company. I don't know what would happen there

if that situation. existed. I don't know if they'll have the resources to continue to do what they do. The HBO process is really rigorous. They don't just put stuff on. They are not afraid to scrap a pilot and start over. We just, we had Rachel Senate on the town with I Love LA. They completely reshot that pilot. Yeah. And most places would just say, just cut bait and be like, okay, busted pilot, we're done. But with HBO, you know, famously with Game of Thrones and like, they just, they work it a lot longer. And you can see in the product. And I don't know if that's going to be allowed anymore. Glass Hat Full Bill would say HBO is so different than Paramount from the audiences they're going

for that maybe this can work. It's definitely complementary. You know, they have that CBS-style audience on Paramount Plus. They have NFL viewers. They have, you know, the sports people. Yeah. And HBO is not that. They have a different cohort of people. And maybe one plus one will be three here. Maybe. Strong emphasis on that. M and maybe. The winner, the sports piece of Paramount, which now has the NFL, the AFC side, MLB, NHL, Champions League,

March Madness, the Masters, UFC, Zepha Boxing, which they just launched. Like, I mean, I'll throw the same with loser, ESPN, who has Monday Night Football, college football and college football playoffs, college hoops, Wimbledon, U.S. Open, NBA, NBA Finals, hockey, wrestling pay-per-views. Like, it's kind of even when you add all the Paramount stuff

against ESPN and suddenly ESPN doesn't look worldwide leaderish in the same way, right? And here's the interesting thing. It's in these deals where Paramount can start to deploy these sports across all of these new cable networks that they own. So you're going to see UFC on TNT or maybe even HBO. And you're going to see them try to get the most out of these sports deals and keep the price of those cable networks as high as possible for as long as possible, because that's what they make their money. Yeah. Winner NBC Universal, just because they can position themselves as,

we're over here. You don't like some of the politics, the paramount and all that stuff? We're just trying to do good stuff and be here and we have stability and come this way. I don't know if I agree on that one. I would put them in a loser. Listen, you remember, they were in. they made a bid on Warner's. It wasn't a very good bid,

and I think it was just to get a look at their books. But NBC Universal doesn't have a global streaming product. They have Peacock, which is only domestic. And in fact, their leadership just said today that they're not even trying to be global. They're good with domestic. That is not a long-term strategy. They need something.

They need some kind of transformative deal, I think, if they want to be considered one of the global players here, otherwise they're just going to get left behind. Well, they have a great movie studio though. Great app though. Peacock app. Oh my God.

Takes 20 minutes to find anything. I don't know. I feel like they can still position themselves as like the underdog that could against this and try to align with some other people and be like all these, everyone's spending so much money in this arms race and we're over here and we're disciplined and we have this business might work. Who knows? Maybe they'll do a joint venture with Amazon to get global.

or something. I don't know. But they have a great or get bought. Or get bought. They have a great movie studio. Yeah. They have, you know, they have NBC. They've got a lot of sports still. So it's not like they're bad. They've been bulking up on sports.

They got NBA and MLB. So it's not like they're not players. It's just the global streaming strategy piece is really tough. But is it okay to just have a good business and not try to conquer the, conquer the universe. Well, look at Sony. Sony doesn't have any global streamer at all. Yeah.

They don't have a general, and they have crunchy roll, but Sony didn't even try to enter the streaming wars, and they preferred the arms dealer's strategy where they just sell their stuff to everybody else. And it seems to be working out well for them. They had K-pop demon hunters on Netflix, biggest movie of all time. They have their movies now.

They got $7 billion to license their movies to Netflix. Wow. Now, it's a multi-year deal, and it's global, but that's a pretty big vote of confidence in your studio to get Netflix to pay you $7 billion to get the first run on the new movies and to be able to air some of the old movies as well. That's why these companies are worth what they are worth, because they have a hundred-year library of movies.

I would rather be them than Paramount with $89 billion in debt, just for the record. Well, and then what's going to happen if Netflix goes after them? They're not officially for sale, Sony. But, you know, if you want a company that's at least semi-comparable to Warner Brothers, as a studio, not the streaming component. Sony is sitting right there. They're not for sale.

They're owned by a Japanese company, but who knows? Sony and NBC Universal and that kind of level, I think it's okay. I think it's like in sports. You don't have to be the Dodgers spending $700 million on salary every year. How dare you? You might be okay being in the NL Central

and just banging out wins and playoff appearances. If that's good enough for you, then that's fine. I prefer the Dodgers. Loser, everyone that works at Warner's Brothers. This is just brutal. It's awful. This is like in all time. the set. And the gut punch. They were kind of coming around to Netflix. Yeah. They were,

Netflix was saying the right things. We believe in theatrical now. And we're going, this is going to be a vertical merger. We're not going to fire everybody. We love what you do. We're going to sell to other platforms. Then boom, within 48 hours, it's like yanked away from Netflix. And all of a sudden, it's not only the Ellisons who have turned CBS into more like Fox News, which is what people at the Warner lot do not like. And then they say all of a sudden they're going to smash together two studios and fire thousands of people. Loser movie theaters. Because Ellison basically said, we're going to do 30 movies over there.

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

Like they were just pumping them out to get them out because they needed that engaging. machine. And to put 30 movies a year in theaters, you got to have a higher bar than just kind of some of the Netflix slop. It's two studios, though. So it's really 15 movies from each studio. It is.

But that's more than each of those studios produces currently. Fair. Winner, Zazloff. I hate making him a winner. Oh, my God. He's going to make a crazy amount of money. It's unbelievable. This worked out for him. Bill, you're going to say crazy. I'm going to say grotesque. A guy should not

make $800 million off of a financial transaction that causes thousands of jobs to be lost. Like, what are we doing? I know it's all about the shareholders and he delivered for the shareholders and that's where his compensation was set. If the shareholders do well, he does well. But it feels, it feels like insane that this guy who managed the company down, down, down, and then got lucky when someone wanted to buy it can make that kind of money. It's almost like a plot out of succession. Absolutely. It's like a season three, season four plot where they're like,

we'll buy it, we'll ruin the company and then blah, blah, blah. My last loser is the city of Los Angeles because we're going to have a ton of people that are going to lose their jobs out of all this, which is terrible. You have these two lots. I'm still suspicious. They're going to keep both lots in the same. kind of, who knows what's going to have about that? I think they'll sell one. The question is,

will they sell one to Netflix? Netflix has wanted the Paramount lot. So maybe Ellison will sell, this was Craig's idea on the town, by the way, it's brilliant. They should sell the Paramount lot to Netflix, have them move in, and then everybody at Paramount Warner Brothers goes to Warner Brothers.

Interesting. We found out on your pod the other day, Craig loves the Saudis. We found that on the Friday podcast. Oh, he's a big Saudi fan. Pro Saudi. Yeah. They got to be winners here. The Saudis, if this deal goes through, we don't know what the money configuration is,

but it was announced a few months ago that the Saudis, the Qataris, and the Abu Dhabians, they have funds that are in this deal. So all of a sudden, they're going to own a piece of CNN and CBS News and all of these outlets that are pretty powerful in terms of potential propaganda. Well, they already own the Lakers,

so nobody seemed to care about that. No, but where Los Angeles is now, this whole decade, COVID, the Hollywood, just all hell breaking loose over and over again, all the strikes, the fires, which the lack of accountability, basically from everybody that runs the city and the state, which has just been disgusting to watch over and over again, the coverups afterwards that people are reporting about, not even noticing. I've never felt more uncertain about the future of the city. the city that you have Netflix moving and building an entire campus in New Jersey so they can get battered tax credits and build a bunch of stuff there and all these people bolting,

these studios empty, no matter you could go to Sunset Gower, you could go to all these places that used to be packed and they're just not anymore. Nobody has a plan for any of it. The governor of the state is now running for a 2028 election

instead of worrying about the state he's in now. And it's just the worst shape we've ever been in with all this stuff. Now on top of it, all these people are going to lose their jobs. I agree with you to a point. I am from Southern California, and I'm old enough to remember

like the late 80s, early 90s with the riots and the gang wars where you literally, I was from Orange County, you literally would not go to L.A. It was bad. And this is not that. Like L.A. is a pretty nice place to live.

We both live here. It's a great city to live in. But this is a existential moment for this particular industry that I think is a key driver of the economy. It's not the only driver. There's many, many different things about LA that make it what it is. But I think it's an underrated aspect of what makes LA, LA, is this creative class of people that come here to work in the entertainment business and that has, that needs a boost.

It needs some kind of incentive or, you know, maybe the city should declare both of these lots to be landmarks that cannot be developed so we don't get the Paramount lot turned into condos so that when this industry does come back, whether it's a new version that is AI powered or creator-driven or these studios get their acts together and there is a growth mode that they can come back and all these places can get filled with activity again. I do think it will happen. It's just cyclical and we are in a very big down cycle right now. It's awful. I mean, they built this bridge in downtown LA that they lit up every night. They spent years and years building it and within a year, everybody stole the copper from it, and now it doesn't light up at night.

And it was like, what was all the traffic for for five years? Like, I don't see a lot of planning and strategy with, I remember when I moved here in 2002, you know, you'd meet people and you'd meet people in like your kids pre-K and stuff, what do you do? Oh, I'm a writer. Oh, I'm an entertainment lawyer. Oh, I do props for movies. And everybody seemed to work in the industry somehow. And the more that these jobs and these companies, push that stuff, either they're pushing to leave LA and go somewhere else, or their jobs are disappearing. I just think LA is going to lose a lot of what made it LA. It's just not the same city if that happens. I agree, but I do think things are changing. Yeah. How many people do you know

that work in the podcast business? True. A lot now. A lot of those are here. How many people do you know that work in the creator business? Right. There are full-on agencies and production studios and YouTube has a huge presence here. These are things that were not in L.A. 10 years ago. So the entire notion of the business is changing. There's no pilot season anymore, although they're doing some pilots. But pilot season used to be a thing.

People would move here because there were 100 pilots of TV shows that were made between January and March every year. And it was like a boom town. That doesn't happen anymore. Every year, too, by the way. It was like the NFL playoffs. You knew it was happening. you could rely. Now we don't even have up front.

I know. Wasn't it, wasn't that your idea to have a Pluto channel just for busted pilots? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like, you just play old pilots? Yeah, we could still do it. There's a million of them. And you'd see big actors who were on bad pilots before they became famous. I just did, we just did Fargo for rewatchables for next week. And one of the tidbits was that Edie Falco was in the Fargo TV series developed the year after the movie.

And if it had become a TV series, she's not Carmen. Marillo Soprano. Amazing. Right? And it's like there's a million stories like that. And now we barely make any TV pilots. But I know when you have like the New Jersey thing, I thought was alarming, when Netflix feels like this is just better for us to do this than to stay here.

That's when you know. But it's not. Okay. But that the days of Netflix being building a production studio in LA, there's just not the land for that. They were, they got a swath of land there. True. To essentially run rough shot.

on whatever they wanted to do. They did the same thing in Albuquerque. We could have given them city of industry. I still don't know what happens there. Just give them the whole place. You could. Yes, you could. But there's not the infrastructure here.

There should be. I agree that there should be incentives in place here. And I feel like this state is kind of getting its act together a little bit with some of these production incentives. It's better than it used to be. But it's not competitive with these other places. They want it more. Yeah.

And they're just, they're going to get it because there's been this acceptance that. people in LA will just like they will be filled anyways and they're not filled. These studios are not filled. It's crazy to watch what's happening. These places were packed all the time and they're just not. Well,

one guy who really wanted it, David Ellison. He has a chance now. He can build a huge production studio in L.A. if he wants. Where is he going to get the money? He's already got a 79 million plus 3% of debt. Yeah. Billion. Billion.

Yeah. Well, the other thing is they're involved peripherally with a bunch of the sports stuff too, right? These European teams, the NBA Europe League, there's all kinds of IP that can come from that. So it's a, it's a daunting job. I don't know if he's ready for it. He certainly doesn't have the life experience or the work experience to run anything like that. But I also don't know if anyone does. I don't know who could have done this. You're talking about it's out of another era. Yeah. We take it for granted these days that these CEOs and people who run Hollywood are in their 60s and 70s, but like in the 80s and 90s, the people running the studios were like 32 years old.

You know, Jeffrey Gatsenberg was reinventing the Disney animation group when he was in his 30s. He was in his 30s, but at Paramount, he was in his 20s. And like, it used to be normal that you ran companies in your early 40s. Now it's less so. Well, we did a good job, but not talking about Trump. I'm glad for both of us. Matt Bellany, you have a Monday, Wednesday, say Friday every week and producer Craig,

we keep throwing under the bus and saying he loves his salaries, but it's fine. We share custody of Craig. The heart wants what the heart wants. And I am happy for Craig and he'll live very, he'll live in comfort for his entire life. If we were being held off a cliff like the kids and the good son at the end and Craig was holding on to us, who does he let go? We're going to have to give him true son and find out.

Me, of course. I don't know. I don't know. Are you kidding? You take them everywhere. You take them to these parties. I do. I do take him to part.

You put in more time because you live on the same side of LA with him. That's true. But you made him a star. You gave him a fantasy football show. So he made him a great at that. All right. He is. Tony, good to see you.

Thanks for all the time. Yes, thank you. All right, that's it for the podcast. Thanks to Jacoby. Thanks to Bellany. Thanks to Gahal and Eduardo as well. I'm going to be back on this feed on Thursday. Don't forget about rewatchables.

Sicario, that's already up. Bargo coming next week. It's CR month. buckle up, hold on to your seats, good times. I'll see you on Thursday. 21 plus and president select states for Kansas and affiliation with Kansas Star Casino or 18 plus and president DC, Kentucky, Wyoming.

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