The Bill Simmons Podcast - Ep. 84: Keith Olbermann

Episode Date: March 31, 2016

HBO and The Ringer's Bill Simmons welcomes Keith Olbermann to discuss "the never-ending state of stupidity" in politics, learning to compromise in America (19:30), the impact of social media on cable news (25:00), baseball’s future (32:30), Pedro's peak All-Star Game performance (42:40), how to fix 'SportsCenter' (54:15), and modern sports news (1:00:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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For just $14.99 a month, visit simplisafebill.com to get my 10% off discount. Simplisafebill.com. And we're also brought to you by The Ringer. Subscribe to our new newsletter at theringer.com. Boy, we had a really good newsletter for Wednesday, whatever that March 30th, Wednesday. Really good one. Probably my favorite one so far. I went in a whole bunch of different directions. Check it out. We are heading toward 200,000 newsletter subscribers. The Ringer ringer okay here we go well it's raining frogs keith olbermann is on the bs podcast how are you as surprised as you are how about about yourself? You had to move. You're in the process of moving. I am in a hotel room with two dogs and about one,

one thousandth of all of my possessions right now as I had to move. Yes. So when you're in a hotel room, it's almost like a nightclub. You have a capacity of a hundred. And if somebody enters the nightclub, you have to kick somebody out. Exactly's like okay i don't really need both of these jackets which one of them is going into storage and that's very i mean it's sort of healthy you know where everything is yeah that's for sure my advice to all the younger collectors out there is just to be careful early like around 25 really start making your choices wisely because the stuff just adds up and adds up and adds up. And eventually you don't know what to do with it. So what have you been up to?

Like you're sitting out the most incredible political election, I think, of my lifetime. I mean, I'm sure there was crazier ones before I was born, but it just feels odd to not have you prominently involved commentating on all this stuff. Well, a couple of things. I think I agree with you wholeheartedly. Two, I would say that's not, what has happened has not entirely been my own choice. And three, to be fair, as there's been, I've had kind of a, until recently, I've had kind of a mixed track on this. I've sort of enjoyed not having to do anything, particularly as this got sillier and sillier and stupider and stupider as it has. And my last experience, I don't know if you've ever heard of this place I used to work at,

most recently called ESPN. But I needed a little time to decompress after that experience as well. I know that feeling. Yeah, just a touch. And there's all of the welcome to the Alumni Association. There's a little bit of multiple explanations for it. But I've been in talks with people about going back into political television since this is actually true next month will be or may beginning of may will be the second

anniversary of the first set of talks and that the the television i just saw a thing online i think today asking why with all this going on politically like the evening newscasts their ratings are not significantly higher. And it was like, well, somebody noticed. And somebody noticed that the cable networks, despite all this craziness, their ratings are up a little bit, but it's not like what happened in 2008. And they're just now getting to sort of 2012 level of enthusiasm. And as much as the boasting is about look at all the ratings for the republican debates and everything else the rest of it nobody's watching and there's

there's been a sea change relative obviously to all of media but it's hitting news last and i'm where whereas i've been talking to these original kind of mainstream old guard, OG kind of outlets. I don't know if it's the right place to go. And as to the idea of sort of sitting it out, there is one thing we can be confident about, Bill, which is that this stupidity is not going to suddenly stop. We're not going to run out of this. Not when Anderson Cooper and Donald Trump are arguing over whether or not Donald Trump is a five-year-old boy.

I mean, we're nowhere near the bottom of this yet. I mean, we really aren't. And I think the general election will be twice as entertaining, especially after the Republicans try to take the nomination away from Trump in Cleveland. So it's going to be, there's plenty of time. And I don't think there's anything close, but as I said on TV last week, I'm coming out of retirement. So I'm going to do it one way or the other. Even if I'm just writing, I'm going to be doing something the rest of the way.

I totally get the philosophy of decompressing and taking a step back, taking a breath, kind of recovering. I mean, I think we were both probably in similar places to some degree. Was there a moment during this political process when all of a sudden you were like, oh my God, I got to get back into this? I think when I, I mean, it's a personal thing rather than one moment. It's a combination of both. I bought in the Trump Palace in New York in 2007,

largely because that was at the height of the market for real estate in this city, and I got priced out of everything else. And I was really overpaid, and I still couldn't afford anything where I wanted to go, or within like 30 blocks of where I wanted to go. So my girlfriend at the time and I said, let's, you know, okay, maybe we'll look at a Trump building. And we went in and it was at that point, wonderfully appointed and great views and everything else. But I went in there with hesitation. But the day that I actually said, I've got to get back into this and I've got to get out of this house, was when Donald Trump said, boastfully, that if he went out onto Fifth Avenue and shot people, it wouldn't impact his campaign negatively. And there's obviously in the first statement there is the idea that he would just give voice to the idea of walking out onto Fifth Avenue and shooting people,

which is discouraged here in New York City. But on top of that, there is this idea that he would view that as part of the political calculus, that there's nobody around here who I care about. When this is where, without this city, he would be selling newspapers in an outdoor stand outside Madison Square Garden. He wouldn't even have one of the indoor locations in Penn Station. And thirdly, the other part of of swerve away from this, um, semi-fascist freight train that he's driving. And at that point I said, check, please. And called the real estate person and said, get rid of this. I'm moving and, and I have moved and I'm

trying to move where I can make these opinions known on a regular, perhaps hourly basis somewhere. Right. As you know, this is the first time you've been detached from this whole election process in a while as you're just watching the different programs and shows and all this stuff. What have you noticed now that you don't have skin in the game and you're not thinking about your own show every day? Well, to be fair, my assessment of it is very skewed because even, you know, I was at, people think of me as a peripatetic guy who can't hold a job and blah, blah, blah, blah. I was on MSNBC from, let's see, Dick Ebersole hired me to come back to NBC in October, 2002. And I was still on the air there as of January, 2011. So that's a pretty long stretch, pretty much daily stuff. And I, I didn't watch a lot of other, a lot of other cable programming at that point. I just couldn't, I mean, I never, I never thought it was very insightful, for the most part,

on that network and on others. And I just was, you know, a little burnt out quickly. And so my assessment of what's different now is hindered by the fact that I didn't really pay that much attention to it in the old days. But I will say this. What's missing in the assessment of what's going on on cable news is that there's no... Nobody's noticed that on top of all of the Trump coverage

and that, you know, is the media inventing Trump? Is Trump taking advantage of the media? Whose fault is it? He's killing off huge amounts of time that no longer need anchors or pundits or analysts or anything else. He's providing so much free programming that it's really like, it's almost at the stage as if the NBA provided ESPN and Turner a free game every night. And imagine, and with no announcers, by the way,

and the players did the announcing themselves. So this is the thing. I don't think people realize it. You might be headed there. Well, all right, yeah. Sometimes, trust me, I know you know this, sometimes if you tune in, you feel like that's already happening, where there are no announcers. But we'll just let that pass so we don't get in any more trouble

than we're already in. Good idea. What I'm saying is, if Trump gets up there and for 45 minutes drums up people into walking out with an ineffable, unspeakable, unclear in their own minds hatred of something or somebody, and they just cover this for 45 minutes. Well, you just killed 45 minutes. I mean, you don't need an anchor. You don't need a camera in the studio.

You don't need the entire... I mean, production costs for, say, a show like mine used to be... It varied, but depending on how much you paid the meat puppet, it might be, you know, $10 million or more a year for the whole show. Right. Your dogs are fired up, by the way. Yeah, they're not fans of Trump either.

These are, I have two Malteses, and I know they sound like, in the background they sound like I have two horses in the hotel room with me. You should have said pit bulls. They sound fierce. Yeah, the one is particularly outstanding because she will bark at anything.

And then when whatever it is she's barking at returns her interest, she immediately comes back and hides behind me. Right. Which is, I don't know. That's a little dog thing. That's the definite. Well, yeah, but I have another one who's just like three-quarters of a pound bigger who doesn't do that. So it's endlessly entertaining, which is not, I can't say that for Trump,

and I can't say that for cable news, but back to the point now that the dogs have checked out of the barking business. I mean, it's free programming, and they are getting decent ratings with it, although it's like years ago I got stuck covering Clinton Lewinsky, that story, every night. We did that show 228 nights in a row, or 228 shows in a row. You got fed up with it eventually, right? Well, but understand what the context of it was.

We had started this. They had hired me, literally. I went in to interview with a guy named Andy Lack, who was running NBC News then and has been brought back to run it now. And I went in to talk to him about a once-a-month spot for Dateline, a sports spot, because I was going to have a new job

in which i had like fridays off or something like that and i'd get offered espn that day for fifty thousand dollars and they turned it down i said i'll come up on sundays and do sports center with dan they went no we can't control you we don't want you here that was literally the quote uh does that sound familiar to you at all by the way uh it rings a bell. Just a vague, yeah. I mean, the number varies from decade to decade and individual to individual and how much they need to repress stardom and popularity. But the basic premise remains unchanged from generation to generation and probably will be thus in the year 3000. I'm going to see this guy. And at the end of this thing, he says, you want to do a cable, our cable news network needs an eight o'clock host. And we want to do a news magazine

kind of show live every night. And we'd also like you to host the World Series and work on the Super Bowl. And I heard Charlie Brown's teacher's voice. I heard, super bowl World Series. And I said, yes. So the next thing I know, I, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, Super Bowl World Series. And I said, yes. So the next thing I know, I'm on the air from Secaucus, New Jersey, doing an hour of news every night. And we started with crap like,

our lead story was once the Farmer's Almanac came out. That was our lead story. And we had a guest. We had the editor to talk about. So you're saying that 75 days from now, it's going to rain in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. And then one day I'm out doing a story, it's the Super Bowl week, and I'm out

interviewing John Lithgow on the set of Third Rock from the Sun and the Clinton-Lewinsky story breaks. And suddenly I'm talking in a two-way with Tim Russert in Washington about how the president might have to resign. And our audience went from 100,000 one night to a million and a half the next. So needless to say, NBC was really interested in maintaining this kind of result. And I understand where MSNBC and Fox and CNN, which have all had ratings problems in the last five years, just can't resist this opportunity because, you know, they've got not only better ratings, but free. I mean, they don't have to spend any money beyond the satellite costs and the camera crew that's there, and maybe one $150,000 a year reporter.

And it's just, it's a windfall for them in a time. What's happening to news on television is akin to what happened to newspapers beginning 30 years ago, but obviously it accelerated because of the internet. So this is manna from heaven when it hasn't rained in 10 years. What do you think is the most interesting show right now? On cable news, just anywhere for, for politics. Cause like, you know, another guy who's not here anymore, who, yeah, I mean, that would have been, uh, this kind of would have been perfect for him. Oliver's Oliver's done a good job, but he's only on once a week and he doesn't always do politics,

but yeah. And, and my, uh, my old college, college uh nearly had a fistfight with him we went to college together but we're never in the same class made bill maher once a week yes it's it's a problem um there isn't something on a consistent basis i i i don't watch any of it on a regular basis um do you think do you think it's even possible anymore because it seems like it's just so polarized now everyone's on one side or the other. Is there any way to even... Do a balanced kind of thing? Yeah. I don't even know if it's possible. way and you know uh the compromise of 1850 which was supposed to settle settle the slavery issue by saying okay south of here it's okay and north of here it's not okay that didn't work i mean the

civil war itself was not a failure to compromise all sorts of moments in history in which political parties disappeared i mean you know the whig Party finished second in the 1852 presidential election, and they didn't have a candidate running by the 1860 presidential election. resolution and nothing really resolves them other than some sort of massive, I don't want to say tragedy or disaster, but big events of history tend to make these decisions. But they're not decided by compromise, nor would be this political divide. This is not going to be resolved, I don't think, by even people who, to my mind, somewhat deleteriously to the people, the interest of the people who supported him. To some degree, I don't think Barack Obama pressed most of the points he could have as president from a liberal point of view or a democratic point of view. I think he tried to reach out for compromise and got nowhere as the Senate refusing

to accept a nominee for the Supreme Court for the last year of his presidency. But, you know, I just mean the Civil War was needed to resolve slavery because we couldn't figure out a way otherwise. And the Great Depression solved a lot of economic uh lunacy of the 1920s and even dating back to the days of the robin robber barons in the late 19th century and the second world war solved a lot of this i mean people you know 1940 there was a move to make Charles Lindbergh, the great aviator, the Republican nominee. And his campaign was, his campaign promise was, under no circumstances will we get involved in any kind of European war, and we will not admit refugees from Europe. That was where he was going with that. And then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and took care of that option but we've all i mean you you talk about crazy elections

this country is we claim to be experts on compromise uh the the the declaration of independence and the constitution are full of compromises unfortunately one of them kept slavery intact which obviously led to the civil war 75 odd years later but we're really not that good at compromise we're really not that good at it and i don't i don't see any great soothing balance whether we're talking about something as stupid as cable news, TV on cable news, or the society as a whole. We have two or more groups of people in this country, and you can argue who's right, you can argue who's wrong, and you can argue how big each group is, but they're two groups that kind of, we all live in the same space, but we don't interact. We don't accept any, almost any facts between us,

except there's only one fact that is agreed upon, which is that the media is against us. You know, you're a Republican, the media is against us. And those mainstream bastards at CNN and MSNBC and ABC, they're all against this. And if you're a liberal, it's those mainstream bastards at Fox News are against this. That's the only thing we agree on. And, you know, I think there is general agreement that Donald Trump has one of the more magnificent comb-overs in human history. But other than that, we have no, there's no, I've said this for years, and it started in 98 doing that Clinton-Lewinsky thing. If, thank goodness, that we do not have pure zones in which there are all the red states in one area and all the blue states in the other, I think we'd have been shooting by now, because this is the intolerance of either side,

and I don't absolve myself from having contributed to this. Even if it was defensive on my part, I still contributed to it. But we don't have a middle way at this point. Nothing that has been tried has been effective. And clearly, the Republican nominating process suggests that there's a whatever percentage or conservatives, ultra conservatives, anti establishment, whatever you want to say on the conservative side of things. They're they have no interest in compromising with the current situation. They they want to overthrow it. And, you know, if that means sort of ending democracy here, so be it.

I wonder, I mean, I know it's an especially crazy year, but I keep thinking about how has social media changed this stuff over the last eight years? Unbelievable. One thing that, I mean, everyone mentions the obvious reasons why it's changed it, but one thing that I think, people tend to follow either on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. You follow people that you get along with.

You follow friends. You follow people that think like you for the most part. And I wonder if that reinforces these two sides where it's like, you know, say 10 years ago, maybe I'm reading publications or websites that kind of lean toward where I am. And maybe at my family Thanksgiving dinner table, I'm going to disagree with a couple of people, but most of the friends in my life are going to believe most of what I believe.

Now it's like your internet life, everybody's kind of where you are mentally with things. And I wonder if that splits the sides even more. Unquestionably. I was, you know, let's get this out of the way. Great minds think alike. I was looking at Twitter two hours ago thinking exactly that, just reading who it was and what the topics were being discussed.

And I was thinking, yeah, you know, I don't follow Ann Coulter, do I? No. And I don't, you know, and you have to, I don't, to the degree of, obviously, if you read Donald Trump's Twitter feed, you get so many answers about him. I cannot bring myself to follow him. And because we've turned it into a competition, Obama said the other day, you know,

the historians in the future will not look back on how many retweets a particular political note got, but they'll be looking at the full historian's value of what I'm thinking. What about American society suggests to you that that's remotely true i mean donald donald trump i don't think he has actually said how many twitter followers he has but it will come up before he's done whatever happens he will give you and he will be within what i have five six seven million whatever he's got he'll he'll be able to recite

it to within i'd say 20 plus or minus. The over-under is 20 on how many Twitter followers he says he has as opposed to how many he really has. But because it's competitive, I cannot physically push that button and make it one more. Right. You just have to bookmark him and then read it without him getting the follow. Yeah. But I mean, this is how much it's become a contest and not just a contest in the traditional American political sense of it, but a contest in terms of, well, I have more likes and I have more followers and I have more retweets. I do it. If I say something particularly obnoxious about Trump, I go and check and see how many times it's been retweeted. I do it. And I'm sitting there going, why are you doing this?

Have a little self-confidence that you're fine. But back to your point, it's absolutely accelerated this process by which it is almost as if, and it certainly is proceeding exponentially faster than it did five years ago, five hours ago, five minutes ago. It is moving towards the point where everybody that you really don't agree with is a ghost. And we all occupy the same space, but you only see the people with whom you are at least in 51% agreement with. Yeah. You know, and I mean, when Dan and I wrote that SportsCenter book, which is now pushing 20 years ago, the blurbs on the back of the book included one from George Will. And George Will, I think, would take a swing at me if I saw him in person today.

You know, it just, and it's, it's again i'm not i'm not sitting there going look what these people did to my america i'm part of this too and i made money off doing this but but your point to it i don't know how many people have sat and thought about this besides you me and i i hope a thousand other people have thought about the impact of this, but it's absolutely true, and it's terribly dangerous. And the only comfort in it, and again, I don't want to encourage the thought that there's going to be some sort of trauma that shakes us out of this, but I'm just reading a book by a man named Paleo about the caning uh a famous event in american pre-civil

war history i don't know if you it's about senator charles sumner of the tunnel of the same name from massachusetts who was a strident uh anti-slavery um speaker and he was, I don't know what you would call him in terms of today's politics. I don't think there's anybody as vivid as a speaker nor as personal as a speaker. And he went after congressmen from the South and insulted them on the floor of the Senate. And I mean, in a day in which, you know, if you criticized some congressman's wife's hat, he might challenge you to a duel. Right. He criticized two related family members who were in the House.

One was in the House, the other was the governor somewhere. And Preston Brooks, I think was his name, congressman from somewhere in the South, went onto the floor of the Senate. He was one of the offended relatives of this guy that Senator Sumner had criticized. And he took his cane and he beat Senator Sumner nearly to death at his desk on the floor of the Senate. The North reacted to this, the anti-slavery group reacted to this like it was an atomic weapon being dropped. The people of the South sent Congressman Brooks a supply of new canes. So in history, we have been here before. And I just hope it's not something Civil War-like that resolves this because maybe this generation's better than all the ones before, but it really scares the hell out of me.

And I'm glad, as odd a picture as it presents, I'm glad that there are pockets of conservatives and liberals scattered throughout the country rather than all in one place. Well, I can't imagine a better place for the Republican convention to happen than Cleveland, which I don't know if people made this point, but seriously, the most tortured sports city in America we have. And now they have this convention of all the conventions they could have had. Oh, boy. I mean, you know, the untold stories of Cleveland, never mind LeBron and the Cavaliers

and everything else. Right. I think, you know, there's two things I think of in Cleveland. I think of, and not just the Indians not winning since 1948,

I think of two things. The NHL, before it used to expand every hour and a half, the National Hockey League was going to put a team, when there were only six of them, was going to put a team in Cleveland in the 50s. And the Norris family, which owned the Blackhawks and the Red Wings and Madison Square Garden and therefore controlled 50% of the league, said, we're not expanding.

Why would we expand? That means we won't controlled 50% of the league said, we're not expanding. Why would we expand? That means we won't control 50% of the league. And so the Cleveland never got its team. They got a team briefly in the 70s for a year and a half. The Barons. The Barons before they merged with the North Stars. The other Cleveland story, and you'll remember this or know of it, I was watching it, was the Royals used to play a couple of games in Cleveland

every year, the Cincinnati Royals. And with Bob Cousy as the coach in 1969, early in the 69-70 season, they were beating the Knicks by, what was it, six points with 10 seconds left? Oh, is this when he put himself in? No, he had played in that game, yes. I don't know that he was on the court for that, this sequence, but the Knicks won the game trailing by, in my memory, they were down

20 with 15 seconds left in one by two. But I think it's, the reality to it, I don't have in front of me, the reality to it was almost that bad. And I just think of that, when you think of Cleveland sports history, I think of that and, you know, and the cheap beer night and the folding metal chairs

and everything else. And those folding metal chairs, you know, those could be useful at the Cleveland convention. I'm thinking that we might see a lot of that. You know, Cleveland did dodge one bullet. Bill Cosby almost bought the Browns. Oh, God. So they have that at least.

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Very, very happy with MailChimp. When we start sending you emails about our 20% off BSPN t-shirts, it's going to be with MailChimp. Just kidding, we're not doing that. At least not yet. But thanks to MailChimp for helping me and everyone at The Ringer build our audience before our website launches. It's incredibly easy to use. Check them out. Mailchimp.com.

And I also wanted to mention, did you know Ken Burns directed a new two-part, four-hour film about the life and times of Jackie Robinson for PBS? Oh, it's happening. The movie tells the story of an American icon whose lifelong battle for first-class citizenship for all African Americans transcends even his remarkable

athletic achievements. When Jackie broke the color line in baseball in 1947, here's what was going on. Martin Luther King was a junior at Morehouse College. President Truman had not integrated the military. The Supreme Court had not ruled on Brown v. Board of Education, and Rosa Parks had not refused to give a receipt on a bus. The movie features extensive interviews with Robinson's widow, Rachel, whose recollections and personal archive of photographs open a window into Jackie's private life that we have not really seen. The man was a civil rights pioneer

and a fierce integrationist. After baseball, a widely read newspaper columnist, divisive political activist, a tireless advocate for civil rights. You want to watch this film, directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon. It's called Jackie Robinson. It is a two-night event premiering on PBS on Monday, April 11th. And now back to Keith Olbermann. Let's talk about baseball for a second. Sure.

You love baseball. I would say you're on the front battalion of baseball fans. Oh, your dog's got excited again because we switched to baseball. I'm on the 12th floor. The dogs heard somebody moving on the 31st floor. They have great hearing.

Baseball's in a very strange and I guess good situation, but it's turned into a local sport for the most part. Entirely. It's doing better than ever from a business standpoint, but yet I'm a Red Sox fan and I could care less what's happening And it's doing better than ever from a business standpoint.

But yet, I'm a Red Sox fan, and I could care less what's happening in the NL Central. And I would never watch a game that wasn't the Red Sox unless it was the playoffs. And we've gradually drifted toward this point. Is it a good thing or a bad thing, or is it anything? It can't be a good thing or a bad thing, or is it anything? It can't be a good thing long-term. And to the owner's credit, I've been saying that it can't be a good thing long-term since at least the 90s. And so far, they keep making more money every year. That's amazing. But, you know, we know this firsthand every year the the television's dependence on live programming um and the price therefore of live programming in terms of sporting events doubles or it feels like it doubles and the

sport you would never put on espn or fox sports one or you know nbc sn or whatever the sport you would never put on and would never bid for and if if you did bid for it, there wouldn't be any competition for it, is suddenly worth $200 million a year. Because you're talking about 1,000 hours of programming, if you include the spring training, the pregame, the postgame. But it's stuff that is the only television product that is still considered largely a television product. Obviously, you can get baseball games through MLB's packages and such and that with every other sport.

But in terms of what's on a TV sports network, it's the only thing people are compelled to watch and will not watch or rarely watch on DVR. So its value continues to shoot upwards while the value of shows featuring, say, people like, oh, you and me continues to drop. And economically, it makes ultimately no sense to have anybody but interns in studio shows on the major sports networks. That's where it's going. But what baseball is managing to do is to devalue the national package. And whereas so far it's continued to grow a little bit every time it's been up for bids, you know, Fox is not going to pay what they paid previously for a package of national games

that are now shown almost exclusively on cable. It doesn't make any sense. And the price relative to the NBA or relative to the NFL has been plummeting for only 60 years. My first boss in television, I got hired by CNN in CNN's second year of operation when the guy came and tried to hire me for headline news as one of the sportscasters. He wanted me to move to Atlanta. I was working in radio for Charlie Steiner, and I had a nice little gig going in Times Square. And the guy goes, we're trying to hire five sportscasters for a total of $95,000 a year. And this is how long ago this was.

And his name was, it's $95,000 a year total. And I said, how are the other four guys going to live on $25,000? Because I'm not moving to Atlanta for less than $70,000. And this guy was named Bill McPhail, brother of Lee McPhail, the former president of the American League, son of Larry McPhail, who introduced night baseball and broadcasting and obsessive alcoholism to the front offices of Major League Baseball. And Bill and his good buddy Pete Rozelle devised this system in the 50s by which they married the local broadcast of an NFL game to a network broadcast, a national broadcast, the situation we still have today.

And by doing that, they created something that never really existed, with the exception of the New York Yankees, the Chicago Cubs, the Boston Red Sox, maybe the St. Louis Cardinals, and then you're out. They created in the NFL countless, maybe now 100% of the teams have fans, large, measurable fan bases in cities that they may not be playing in as a visitor for the next five years. And this is the reverse of baseball. It used to be, and I was talking about this with, I just happened to see this, somebody sent it to me or something, it was a thing I did with Letterman years ago,

and he asked, what happened to the all-star game in baseball the all-star game used to be the time when you would see all the stars in the other league or on the teams that didn't get a lot of national exposure and you'd see them on tv once a year you had to watch the all-star game the all-star game was like a huge part of my childhood it was amazing I used to I used to keep score on a giant score sheet of my own making for the All-Star game, because it was on top of this idea that if you were in Boston, you're seeing the National Leaguers almost the only time you're going to see them except for the playoffs in the World Series. Well, it also really meant something to have one of your guys in the All-Star game. Exactly. And facing, if Fritz Peterson of the Yankees, and I don't think

this actually happened, but he had to have faced somebody famous from the National League, I'm thinking I saw Fritz Peterson pitch to Roberto Clemente. And that was like, are you seeing this? Did you see that pop up, that foul pop up behind third base? And that would be on the back page of the New York newspapers the next day. But now, first off, you've erased that the thing that baseball had uniquely in American sports was this two-league concept, which they fell into because there used to be two rival businesses, and they never really agreed to do anything except try to kill each other. They stopped doing that about 1903, and then afterwards for 75 years, there was still no cooperation,

or nearly no cooperation between the two of them. They've erased the idea of the leagues with interleague play, which interleague play had its value and created some novelty, and it created some money for them instantaneously, and it created some new excitement in some respects, but it totally devalued the All-Star game. What does the American League mean to a 20-year-old baseball fan? What does the National League mean? And in the World Series, we had this a couple of years ago where the two World Series teams had met in the next-to-last series of the regular season.

The joy of the World Series was you could get excited about the Philadelphia Phillies and the Kansas City Royals, because they'd, other than in spring training, never stepped on the same field together. There was something instantly historic about that, and that's gone. So now you've gotten in a position where, with the exception of us old diehards, are you going to watch the World Series if your team is not in it? You might, but probably not. Quick interruption on this. Yeah.

When Pedro struck out five of the first six in 99, that was a moment. And part of the moment was that this was the only time he was going to pitch against these big guys that we at the time we all kind of thought the balls were juiced maybe we were in denial right he was going against Sosa, Maguire and Bagbo and just guys that he was never going to go against and he took them all down and it was awesome and that's like the last all-star game moment other than when they had to stop the game and uh i don't know that i feel like

that was the last relevant baseball moment but it's partly because of what you're saying is that well the interleague play has now devalued those moments i'll tell you an extra story to that which was i was that was that game was on fox and that was the first year i was working for fox and i was in the dugout and i was in the national league dugout. And those guys came back going, nope, nobody's going to hit him tonight. And the startling thing about it was, and it was one of the first signs I had that there was real trouble. We were in Fenway Park, and I had worked a year in Boston, and I knew that Fenway Park has this certain mythology, and the Red Sox fans have a certain aura nationally. I mean, it wasn't true every night.

There were plenty of good seats available through most of the 1984 season. If you wanted to go see the Red Sox, you could pick them up. Don't even worry about it. How much cash have you got? We'll give you these two seats down front. It was possible to do that. But it was still startling to sit in that dugout and watch him just, you know, ball leave his hand and disappear visually from the dugout and watch him just, you know, ball leave his hand and disappear

visually from the dugout and hear the National League players go, thank God he's out of our league and all the rest of that. And here, almost nothing in the ballpark. I mean, my dogs are louder than the ballpark was for the most part. When finally, this is during or right after that run of strikeouts. Sean Casey came over to me and said, hey, what's that noise? And I said, what are you talking about? He goes, listen real close. And you heard a voice.

And it was a Field of Dreams moment because we're in Fenway Park, and it's a distant voice. And I didn't hear it at first. And then Casey pointed it out. I went, wait a minute, I do hear it. He goes, I'm getting scared. What's this voice and we've identified it as noise coming from the right field corner behind the pesky pole at fenway park and what it turned out to be was that was where they were holding the mid-game media news conferences for pitchers who had just left the game of players and it was so quiet in Fenway Park in the moments after Pedro Martinez

struck out the five guys in a row that you could hear just the in-that-room PA system echoing across the All-Star game. And I thought when Ted Williams drove off the field that night, something went with him, certainly about the All-Star game and in some senses about baseball. And I don't know that it's ever been the same since it did feel like in the playoffs last year and and maybe social media had a little bit to do with this but it you know now there's like this five week run

when people are in on baseball the ratings were pretty good it seemed relevant the people enjoyed the uh you know that theets kind of took it close. And then, you know, the Halloween night, everything fell apart. They gave the World Series away thanks to Daniel Murphy and Joanna Cespedes. Yes, yes. You know, I was, you know, I live in a big trick-or-treat neighborhood. And I was kind of manning the door and running back to the TV and going back and forth. And I had handled the door, came back,

and I could tell from the reactions that they were showing in the fans that something truly horrible had happened. My Red Sox DNA kicked in. I was like, oh, no. Oh, God, something happened. I rewound it two minutes, and there it was. But, man, baseball is the only sport where that happens. Yeah. Well, because baseball is, as you know, it's, it's 10 to 30 seconds of as intense excitement and physical activity as in any sport followed by a period to digest every

play. And, and, and sometimes things move so fast that you get three or four of them in a row, which will then lead to a pitching change or whatever. And you see this, not just the shock, but an excess, an overload of information in the fan that has just been, you know, just had his heart punctured by Daniel Murphy. If you look at the World Series film, I'm not a Met fan per se, but of the two teams here, I'd be closer to being a Met fan. And I don't know how many people I know with the Mets who I consider friends. So I invited a friend of mine who used to produce Craig Ferguson's show, who came in from LA and is a diehard Met fan. And we went to all

three games in New York. And in the World Series video, on the game time play in the ninth inning of the fifth game, you can see us. Look for me in a bright orange fleece under a black Matt Harvey jacket, and it's me and my white hair sticking up. You can see me just to the left of the plate. And the two of us are like, my friend is giving the out call as Hosmer sides in safely. But just watch us in the occasional shots we're in

in the last inning of that game, and you will see us collapse like Wade Boggs at Shea Stadium. I mean, when I saw this for the first time, I said, I don't remember doing any of that. It was like an out-of-body experience. And I wasn't a totally invested M fan although my friend mike was yeah and he was we basically had to pour him into the car but you know um that you're right there is there's a pickup for the playoffs the playoffs once again have now become more interesting than the World Series, which is a disaster unless that's fixed somehow. How did you fix that?

I don't know. I've gone through a million ways. I flashback to my own childhood. How did you know the World Series was important? I knew the World Series was important because when I went in, when my dad said, I have tickets for the game Wednesday, game four against the Orioles, 1969 World Series. You'll have to get the day off.

You'll have to go talk to your homeroom teacher, seventh grade homeroom teacher. And I said to her, Miss Barton, and she'd been there, I think she was there and they built the school around her. She'd been there like 800 years. I said, Miss Barton, I need to be excused Wednesday. My dad has gotten two tickets to the World Series. And I don't think I'd ever seen her smile. And she said, can you take me with you? And, you know, it was like, oh, this is important. And the same time

once I wanted to watch a world, listen to a World Series game, and I had a transistor radio with me and I asked the teacher about it. I had the, I was like this as a kid as well. And I asked, could I listen to it with my earphone? And the guy goes, I don't know, only if you give us updates based on outs and hits. So every time there was a play in the 1968 World Series, I would raise my hand and Mr. Modulinski, the science teacher, would call on me, and I would say, McAuliffe grounded to third. And he'd go, thank you, Keith. Meanwhile, looking again here on the plant, the structure of the plant, this is the, you know, it's school stopped.

The answer was, it's a long way of saying, school stopped so you could watch the World Series. It was on during the day, and I know they would never get any of the money that they're getting for the nighttime World Series games. And I talked to Dick Ebersole about this. He said, I suggested we should have a day World Series game, but of course, Buddy was all with that until I said, of course, we'll have to pay you a lot less for it. That was the last time they discussed it. But, you know, at some point, you can't keep draining the water out of this ocean that used to be the greatest sporting event on the planet, certainly on an annual basis. You left out one other part. The season goes too long now. It's stupid. Yeah, but Rob Manfred, who, by the way, was on campus with us at Cornell when Mar and I and Bill Nye were all there. And I was just like, we must have all nearly had a fistfight.

Manfred was a year behind me. I didn't know this. I had never met him, never heard of him until like 10 years ago. But Rob Manfred was talking upon election about cutting the season back. And I was like, oh, you want to cut back to 154 games. Oh, A, that's not enough. You want to cut it back seriously. Cut it back to 140.

Yeah, I was going to say like 148 seems right. But cut it back. But what does this mean? This means if you go into 154, that's a 5% cut in games, which means a 5% cut in back, but what does this mean? This means if you go into 154, that's a 5% cut in games, which means a 5% cut in revenues, 5% cut in TV income. You think the owners and the players are going to give 5% back? They're going to deflate the business by 5%? No, what they're going to do is say, that's a great idea, so let's just charge the fans 10% more so we can make up for the loss. There's no way out of this, and that's one of the problems here. No baseball businessman would look at the economics of the

last 10 years and say there's any kind of long-term problem, but I am convinced in my study of baseball and sports finances and sports financial history that this can't keep up indefinitely. It is, to refer to something I mentioned before, it's the economic boom of the 1920s or the 1990s. It can't be indefinite because it requires, you know, everybody to be able to make a profit and nobody lose any money. That can't continue. The other thing is it changes the actual product because it gets so

freaking cold by the time they have the world series it's like watching a different sport yeah and well and and the other and the rule changes and the roster changes they make in september and and everything else are just it's a just it's a different world and there's no um there's no awareness that that they need to make fixes. And certainly, the way baseball has grown over the last 150 years as a business in this country, there's never been anything close to a consensus just among the owners as to what to do next, let alone owners and players working together. It is hilarious how they just try to protect the way it was in like the 1920s you know we we live in this culture of social media look at me selfies snapchat all these things that

society has moved toward this direction of people just wanting to show that their personality and a free spirit and an individual at all times and yet baseball baseball is like, no, no, no, can't do that here. But it's, Bill, it's much worse than that because at least there would be some sort of, you know, if baseball had been always conducted by Trappist monks. Which may actually be what happened. But it's not because, what's the last one? The two big ones here are people are still

god bless america people are still talking about jose bautista's bat bat flip i know six months later like it's no like it started the second world war you know it's like archduke ferdinand got shot that was the first world war that bautista bat bat flip started the second world war but the but the thing with with this is not only are you still talking about it but the last two guys are goose gossage who i love i i one of the most sincere genuine guys i've ever known in baseball yeah goose gossage is the author of the greatest keep your lee elias keep tom lasorda goose gossage is the author of the greatest foul mouthed string of comments. He, he, he lost it. He melted down in the Yankee clubhouse in 1982. You can find this on, on YouTube. It is

fantastic. And it it's, it, it's so not like him. And he's the one complaining about Bautista flipping a bat. And then Mike Schmidt comes on and says, well, we never showed emotions like that and tried to show the other. When Mike Schmidt hit his 500th home run, he did a kind of cha-cha dance around the bases, rolling his arms, and it looked like really bad disco. And then when he retired, he burst into tears and didn't do... Bill

Mazeroski burst into tears during his Hall of Fame induction, and then said, I just can't go on, and left the stage in 92nd. Greatest Hall of Fame speech of all time, because it was only 92nd. But Schmidt went on in his retirement press conference and it was, and I want to thank

the Phillies organization. And this went on for half an hour. And I'm just thinking, Mike, another great guy, Mike, don't you, have you never watched your 500th home run? Right. And it was a 500th, it was a meaningless game. The Phillies weren't competitive. They were in third or fourth place. They had no, it had no impact on the pennant race.

I don't even remember if it had an impact on the game. And this guy basically is Leslie Nielsen-ing it around the plate, around the diamond. And he's complaining about Bautista. It's these misty, water-colored memories of the way things weren't

in baseball. There's always been this. Babe Ruth was one long, non-stop celebration of Babe Ruth. And, you know, did he do it a little bit more subtly? Maybe. Probably the stuff that he celebrated and how he celebrated it, we just didn't see. And they involved stories of him running naked through a train carrying the Yankees from New York to St. Louis, chased by another naked figure, a woman carrying a butcher knife.

I mean, you know, it was a different world and the reporting was different. But there's no difference. And yet baseball is trying to be stodgy about something as stupid as a bat flip. There were bat flips in the 19th century. You're going to like this next question. Speaking of franchises that people are holding on to that have kind of changed course over the last few years, how would you fix SportsCenter?

You and Dan had the best SportsCenter ever, and now in 2016 their ratings go down every year. You have the internet. You have ESPN.com cannibalizing SportsCenter with news. I can get highlights on my iPad or my computer immediately after a game. Why do I need SportsCenter now? All right. Well, first off, thanks for what you said.

I don't know if it's necessarily true because I've gone back and watched tapes of Dan and me together. And we had a lot of fun. And for our time, I think we did as good as we could have. But I've looked at a lot of these things. I've heard a lot of these jokes that I haven't heard in 20 years. I mean, my own jokes and my own highlight narration and gone, that's not very good. Well, wait a second, though. You have to measure it, though, compared to what it was compared to everything else at the time.

Because, yeah, history is never going to judge anything kindly. No, and I've come to terms with the idea that it didn't have to be good. It only had to be the best we could come up with by 11 o'clock. Right. But, you know, in other eras, what Berman and John Saunders did was spectacular. And after I was gone, what Stu and Rich did was spectacular. And, you know, there's a different thing for every era. But we've discussed this already.

The problem at the heart of it is that years and years ago, our friend John Walsh said, I think this was 1993, said, you know, we've done all sorts of marketing and research. And no matter what happens to ESPN, as long as we have SportsCenter and it's a success, we will be dominant in this field no matter what competition arises. Our research indicates that the fans will stick with us if we lose the NFL contract, and they'll stay with us if we lose this personality. As long as we have SportsCenter and it's accurate and well done, we will be dominant in this field.

And it's not true anymore, because it can't be the centerpiece of the operation for reasons we've already alluded to. But they clearly, I think you would agree with me, they don't know that. And the attempts to, all the attempts to modify it are predicated on the idea that it can be what it was two years ago, five years ago, 20 years ago when Dan and I did it. And it can't for the simple reason that you just suggested. And I'll go even one further than that. At 11 o'clock, at 12 o'clock, at whatever o'clock there is. If I want, I think I've used this analogy before, if the lead story in sports at 11 o'clock on a given night is the New York Yankees plane has disappeared and we think we see it circling the planet Neptune.

We don't know how this has happened. And your anchors are Ring ring lardner and jesus christ are your co anchors for sports center and this is this is the greatest baseball story of all time and we think we see orbiting mars or neptune with the yankee plane there's babe ruth disembodied babe ruth is floating around and you're sitting there going but I want to know what happened with the Browns quarterback situation. You're not going to watch. I don't care who's anchoring, and I don't care what the story is. We balkanized sports news along with everything else,

and it's not a deliberate act. It just happened that way. At that moment, at 11 o'clock or whatever o'clock it is, ESPN alone produces podcasts, online stuff specific to, I'm waiting for, you know, having competing 11 o'clock shows somewhere in the ESPN family. One is devoted to the NFC and one is devoted to the AFC. That's impossible. Right?

You get down to that level of it. So there is no motivation except for old-timey guys who are either our ages or even older who want that sort of leisurely, well-done, paced kind of stroll through all the sports news.

But we're dying off. Generations have come behind us who say, I just want to know who's the leading candidate to be the Browns quarterback next year. And that's it. And I do not care what happened in the World Series tonight. And I do not care what happened to Steph Curry. And I do not care what happened. Gordie Howe has not only recovered from his problems, but he's going to play for the Red Wings tonight. I don not care what happened. Gordie Howe has not only recovered from his problems, but he's going to play for the Red Wings tonight. I don't care.

And as long as you're trying to create a situation in which you say, well, no, no, no, no, no, none of that's true. It's just a question of the format. You're going to get stuck investing huge sums of money in gigantic studios or specialized formats or just new anchor teams. Or let's, I've got it. We'll put one of the anchors in Los Angeles. No, we'll put both of them in Los Angeles. Why?

What's the, you could have one studio and just change the backdrop. They could all be from Bristol. Shut everything else down. It's not, my point is, it's not solvable. And their best bet is to, as I think ultimately they will move it, ESPN News would become the SportsCenter channel, and it will be 24 hours a day, and it will serve a great purpose and people will enjoy it,

and it will be the third or fourth level of interest within the ESPN family, and they'll have to live with that. They are not anywhere close to living with that yet. Well, I mean, this is what happened to me. As I think you know, they were... One of the parts of my deal going there was that they wanted me to do, and it varied from time to time,

they wanted me to do a sports center a month, a sports center a week, a sports center a week possibly, and go back up to Bristol and do one show on an intermittent basis, possibly as often as once a week. And I was all for that simply because, you know, what the hell, it was fun the first time. Let's see if it can be fun now. And we never got it done,

and I'm not really sure why it didn't happen, but I think it had to do with the idea that the colossus that Dan and me and Saunders and Berman and Tom Mies and Lee and Jim Bergamo and Linda Cohn and everybody who's there now, all of us built this thing up. There's still a strong sense that this is, you know, this is the, this is the czar's house. And we are, we are, we have a set of rules and it will be done this way. And, and the, this Olbermann guy is back, you know, just, just cause Trotsky came back to the Soviet union does not mean we give trotsky a spot on the politburo and i was i think they viewed me as like well that's a good idea but he's 45th on the depth chart we don't need to go to him and it was like well okay um i'm my value to you is is in a time when you need to sell nostalgia, maybe you want me out there. I will say this. There's one chance, I think, for the studio multi-purpose sports show. And I sat down with Jamie Horowitz, and I think if I don't go into too much detail,

he won't be bothered by this. He's running Fox Sports 1 and 2, I guess, now. Yeah. And he was one of the executive producers on my last show on ESPN. And I got along famously with him. We had a great time. He's my friend as well. Well, then, you know, I mean, he's all the travails he's had. They are as exaggerated and as little his fault as they are the stories about you and me. Right. He's he. He is a victim of people who are politicians in the way that Napoleon was a politician. So Jamie and I sat down more just to sit there and just talk.

Last November, lovely lunch, and we went on for two or three hours. And I said, this is what you have to do. I said, if you want to, I said, to me, if I were you, I would scrap your nightly all-sports sportscast. There's no future in it. You can't compete. I don't care who you've got. I don't care if you have Babe Ruth orbiting Neptune. Just scrap it.

Or you make a show that is everything in one place as fast as possible, which is what I tried to do on ESPN the last time. Only you cover everything except Fox. You cover all the other sports networks, including ESPN, the way I used to cover Fox News when I was on MSNBC, or the way Deadspin covered ESPN. Your third story might be about something bad happening in Bristol, Connecticut. I said, and you have to go for the kill. I said, this has to be done in a kind of, let's see who we stick a scimitar through tonight.

It has to be done that way. It can have no sacred cows, and you must approach the leagues and the owners and everybody else with utter cynicism. And if you want to say, we're not going to talk this way about Fox or Rupert Murdoch because he owns this place. I think he can get away with it. But otherwise, it has to be entirely truthful, and it has to be done at lightning speed. And he looked at me, and he said, and who do I get to do this? And I said, well, that's the problem.

So that's, to me, the only thing left, and even that would be a dying gasp. There's just no future in it. And you can, you know, I don't think I believed this until I went out on the air at 11 o'clock in August 2013 with my show, which I thought was a pretty damn good show. And it didn't click. And I thought, well, well okay maybe i suck now and to the degree that age made me suck a little more than i used to yeah but it wasn't just that it was that people are not interested in in in saying okay they're no longer giving you the

benefit of the doubt that dan and i got in 1995 which was all right they're talking about baseball now i know in a minute and 40 seconds they're going to switch probably to football. Nobody's going to wait a minute 40 anymore. Well, so I'm looking at myself in 1995, living in Boston. You guys would come out at 11, and then I would watch that one. But then at 2 o'clock, I think Kilbourne was there at that point. I'd watch Kilbourne because I'd get West Coast NBA. And I'd get other in West Coast baseball.

I'd be like, I'm going to run this back. And now 1995 me would just be on the internet looking at the box scores already. You would watch SportsCenter 20 years ago and I wouldn't know who won. It was almost like there was a suspense to it. Oh, the Warriors came back. Oh, here come the Kings. I don't know what's going to happen. And now I know was a suspense to it. Oh, the Warriors came back. Oh, here come the Kings. I don't know what's going to happen, and now I know what's going to happen. So, you know, it's weird because you said that you think they know it's in trouble.

I would argue the opposite. I mean, I don't think you build a $120 million set if you think that it's fine. No, I may have misspoken, Bill. I don't think they... I think they really thought the set was going to make it like this high-tech, new-wave, state-of-the-art sports center, which is not going to work. It's like every other pyramid every other pharaoh ever built. It's so people remember him by something.

And it's just as empty with as many secret caves that have nothing in them. But, you know, this is how different the world is, And it's just as empty with as many secret caves that have nothing in them. But, you know, this is how different the world is. And it ties in social media, which we talked about more in a political sense, but in terms of sports. In 1996, 5, whatever it was, Mario Lemieux, and I've told this story before, he was battling Hodgkin's disease and a bad back,

and he'd gotten through the season with the Pittsburgh Penguins, and he was worn out. And a friend of mine called me breathless, literally called and said, hey, I've got a story for you. And he was at the gym, and he happened to be on the treadmill next to Tom Rich, the son of Tom Rich, the agent who was Mario Lemieux's agent. And they just started talking, and Tom Rich's son, so many years later, I don't care, blowing the source here, Tom Rich's son said, Hey, are you a hockey fan? And my friend was, and he said, Mario Lemieux's going to retire for at least a season because he had all these troubles last year. And he needs to recover. And the guy gets off the phone and calls me with this scoop.

And it's 3 o'clock in the afternoon on a Sunday. And I'll spare you all the details of all the phone calls to try to confirm it. And all the meetings from the ESPN people who were on a retreat somewhere. And all the people we had to get it cleared by and through. That story held in the SportsCenter studios and newsroom for eight hours. We didn't put it on until 11 o'clock that night and until we got a second source, which was Rick Tockett, who had just been traded to the Penguins and confirmed that he was told the reason he was going there was they needed somebody to replace Lemieux. We didn't go with the story because we didn't have a second source,

and we sat on it for eight hours. And right now, I don't know what there is, what story could last eight hours. Eight minutes. Eight minutes. And who would say, you know, I never know what the lead story is going to be. I'm going to be surprised by something at 11 o'clock on SportsCenter. Nobody's surprised anymore. I'm trying to think maybe twice, three times in the last five years,

something in sports news has surprised me. And other than fatalities and deaths and all the rest of that, which are always bad surprises, it's just not there anymore. And your solution to it either, either has to be the production and the presentation cannot be missed. It has to be a supersized personality. And there's so few of them. Or you have to say, you have to lower your expectations if you're ESPN or Fox or whoever else is doing a studio show and say, we need to spend all of our money on live games and we'll have the interns do the pre and the post period.

Well, and especially if you're going to, if you're going to have a company that's built around the producers and the executives and the personalities are considered disposable. What organization would that be bill well i mean really the way to the way to save sports center would be to actually build around personalities but then you have to deal with the repercussions of having personalities and the ups and downs of them and the fact that they're going to have opinions and they're going to you know so i i think it's a catch-22 but what's yeah but we should what what makes the most money i? Isn't this the way that business people are supposed to think about it? Which makes

the most money? I think that's why we're doing this podcast right now, instead of working for them. Let's leave some meat on that bone, though, for the next time. I'm glad we finally did this. It's good to hear your voice. And I'll say the same.

We should have done this a long time ago. Yeah. And when are you going to start recording so we can play it for other people too? Oh, that's right. That's the oldest joke in the book. This will, so this will go up probably, we're taping this on a Wednesday morning,

this will go up Wednesday night. Hopefully nothing will happen in the next 12 hours which is ironic after your your thing about nothing can stay uh secret in eight hours but yeah this will go up Wednesday night it was a pleasure I'd love to have you uh back as as this baseball season approaches and the political election heats up uh good good luck with everything I hope you uh I hope you find a place to talk every day. We're working on it.

At minimum, I'll do a show with the dogs. They make talk enough. That's for damn sure. Alright, thanks. Keith Olbermann. Appreciate it. My pleasure, Bill. That's it for the BS Podcast. We might have another one on Friday. I have not decided yet.

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Thanks to the new PBS two-part movie Jackie Robinson, directed by Ken Burns. It chronicles the life and times of Jackie Robinson, his breaking of baseball's color barrier, and lifelong fight for equality on and off the field. Also features extensive interviews with Robinson's widow, Rachel, as well as her personal archive of photographs. The two-night event premieres Monday, April 11th, 9 p.m. on PBS. Thanks to HBO Now. You don't need cable or satellite to watch HBO.

Download the HBO Now app. Start a free one-month trial thanks to SeatGeek, the presenting sponsor of the BS Podcast and Channel 33. And check out TheRinger.com, and also check out BillSimmonsPodcast.com to catch up on all the Channel 33, the Shack House Pod, all that stuff. All those links are right there. Talk to you later.

Anytime y'all want to see me again, rewind this track right here. Close your eyes. And picture me rolling.