The Bill Simmons Podcast - Luka! Plus: The Bucks and Big Tech Craziness With Ben Thompson. Plus: Three Decades of Counting Crows With Adam Duritz.

Episode Date: May 26, 2021

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons shares his thoughts on another stellar Luka Doncic performance in the Mavericks' Game 2 win over the Clippers, putting the Mavericks up 2-0 on the series (2:45). Then Bill talks to business and tech analyst and Milwaukee Bucks fan Ben Thompson about the Bucks' Round 1 series vs. the Heat, the Bucks' 34-point victory in Game 2, the hypothetical Round 2 matchup vs. the Nets, and more (16:00). Next they discuss AT&T’s announcement to merge Warner Media and Discovery, streaming giants, Epic Games vs. Apple, and more (42:00). Finally, Bill talks with singer, songwriter, and Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz about the origin of the band, their iconic first album ‘August and Everything After’, behind the scenes stories about some of their most beloved songs, adjusting to a meteoric rise in the early 1990s, maintaining artistic integrity over three decades, Counting Crows' new album, ‘Butter Miracle, Suite One’, and more (1:09:00). Host: Bill Simmons Guest: Adam Duritz, Ben Thompson Producer: Kyle Crichton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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as well as The Ringer Podcast Network where we put up a new rewatchables on Monday night. We did The Rock. Me, Mina Kimes, Chris Ryan. That was a really fun one. I also popped on the sports cards, nonsense podcast to make fun of Mike and Jesse. We talked NBA playoff breakout guys possibly and, um, and wide receivers. And then I left, but not before I got in 10 digs at Jesse anyway. Uh, Oh, one more podcast for you. Flying Coach Season 2.

Peter Schrager, Sean McVay. And they have another coach on this week. I think they might even have two coaches, but that's a good one. Check it out on the Flying Coach Theater, Ringer NFL Show. Coming up on this podcast, Ben Thompson is going to talk about his beloved Bucks and a lot of big company stuff. Apple, AT&T. He's going to break all of it down for us.

And then somebody I've been trying to get on this podcast forever. A lot of big company stuff, Apple, AT&T. He's going to break all of it down for us. And then somebody I've been trying to get on this podcast forever, one of my favorite artists, Adam Duritz from Counting Crows. He's going to talk about his whole career, how he writes songs. He tells some cool stories. And my daughter has never been more impressed. I'll leave it at that. That's all coming up.

First, another great artist, Pearl Jam. All right. Taping this part of the podcast. It is 10, 14 p.m. Pacific time. I held off posting today's podcast. We finished it a few hours ago, but just in case something wacky happened with the two L.A. games late night. Of course, they did.

The Lakers ended up winning. They beat the Suns. It looked a little hairy there for a second. They were playing a lot of Marc Gasol, but with Chris Paul, barely able to do anything. That one felt like that was going to be the Lakers night. The shocker was Mavericks Clippers. Kawhi comes out, puts up 30 in the first half. He was in the all time. There's no fucking way we're losing this game zone. He's the finals MVP.

He's one of the best 30 to 35 players ever. And he was just like, we're not losing that game. Luka's like, cool. Well, we're not losing this game either. Luka Doncic, he's 22 years old. I think from a hoops IQ combined with presence slash talent slash just ability to dissect the other team, he's the most advanced I've ever seen. I mean, we knew this heading into the playoffs that this is probably true.

What he's done to the Clippers in these two games from a basketball intelligence standpoint is simply staggering. He broke the Clippers' brain tonight. The Clippers, Kawhi was 14 for 21 for 41 points. Paul George was 12 for 22 for 28 points. So their best two players lit it up. They shot almost 54% for the game and they lost.

And the game was basically over with a minute left. Luka put up 39. He was 16 for 29, seven turnovers, seven rebounds, seven assists, controlled everything. They threw everything they had at him and he just solved it over and over and over again. And, you know, it's hard not to compare him to LeBron because I remember when LeBron hit this point

with Miami second and third year where he just kind of figured it out. He became the queen of the chessboard. He solved, he had an answer for basically every single thing the other team was going to throw at him. He put it into his crazy basketball computer brain and then combined with his physical gifts, that's when his career went to a whole other level. And he was already great to begin with. The Luka thing, the fact that he's doing this at the age he's at with the lack of

reps that he has, this was his eighth playoff game ever. The other team had Kawhi, Paul George, Nick Batum. They're throwing Patrick Beverly at him. Terrence Mann was on him a little bit. And none of it mattered. And he's looking at them like he's Peyton Manning at the line of scrimmage in the mid-2000s going, oh, they're doing this. Oh, that safety came up.

Oh, all right. Hey, Reggie Wayne, instead of doing the cross, do an in-out and go toward the sideline. He's just dissecting it in the moment. And the Clippers didn't know what to do. You think about the game-winning three that they got. It's basically a wide-open shot because Luka has psyched out the Clippers

to the point that, you know, they're coming over. There's a switch. They're just completely discombobulated. I thought it was unbelievable. And it wasn't even like, look, it wasn't like he had an ESPN Classic fourth quarter. He made a couple of mistakes, missed a couple of shots, things like that.

But he had done so much damage at that point. He had some running mates. He got nine for 14 from Hardaway, 28 points. He made six threes. Porzingis even played pretty well, 8 for 12. What's happening with them, three things. They know who they are. They have eight guys that they play.

Each guy knows what their role is. Even somebody like Porzingis, who Rossello and I talked about, he kind of had a shitty look on his face this season. Even he bought in. That was the happiest and most gregarious. We've seen Porzingis in a Mavs uniform in two years near the end of that game. When you're playing with somebody who's as great as Luka is,

at some point, it could go one of two ways. Either you just kind of sit around waiting for that guy to carry you over and over again, or by osmosis, you become better. He's making you better, but you also have this confidence because you're on this team with this awesome guy. We see this happen in high school. We see it happen in college and sometimes, rarely, but sometimes it happens in the pros. Now, the question is, why wasn't that also happening with the Clippers, with Kawhi, with

the zone that he was in? And you saw it tonight. This is a team that does not know who they are. They really don't. They're throwing shit against the wall of the bitter end. Terrence Mann, who we were calling to play on Sunday, didn't play in the first half. Another DM. So he doesn't play in the first three halves of the series.

And then the fourth quarter, it seemed like he played the last 15 minutes of the game. They just have him out there. Reggie Jackson plays 30 minutes. Morris plays 25. Zubach, 22. Beverly, 23. Rondo, 19. Batum, 19.

They have no idea who their best five guys are. And they're throwing shit against the wall. And the result is basically what happened tonight, where Leonard and George had two really good offensive games. They don't really know what they're going to get from everyone else on the team. This is an unbelievable, unbelievable

subplot with them, where they win one playoff series last year. This year, they tanked the last couple games so they could play Dallas and get out of the Lakers division. And meanwhile, they willingly chose to go against Luka,

who's the best 22-year-old basketball player of all time. He is. I'm just going to say it. I can't. Yeah, maybe Magic. God, now I have to think about this. All right. I'm going to recant.

He's in the running for best 22 year old basketball player ever. Certainly the most accomplished, certainly the most statistically accomplished. And the Clippers were like, that's the guy we want. Well, that was really dumb. Um, and I don't know if, if, I mean, the Clippers' tortured history, have recounted it and broke it down many, many times on page two back in the day on Grantland. This is a team that from the moment they left Buffalo in 1976, I wrote a column eventually in 2009

called The Curse of the Sacred Buffalo. Since they left Buffalo in 76, it's been one disaster after another. And it seemed like they had finally solved it on Kawhi night. They get Kawhi. They trade all these picks for Paul George. And if they come out of this with one playoff series win in two years for all they gave up for those guys, and now Kawhi is a free agent.

And it's pretty clear. If they lose this Dallas series, you can't come back with Kawhi and Paul George. They'll either have to trade Paul George, maybe Kawhi leaves, whatever. But we talked about panic button teams on Sunday night. And Russell and I both said, it has to be the Clippers. They have to be, by far, far and away, the number one panic button team. And now you're looking at this going, wow, we got to go back to Dallas. We have to win at least one game in Dallas. At least we have to win game three or game four. There's going to be at least 15,000 fans there. There is a Luka mania that has gone to another level. Those guys haven't played in front of a crowd like that really since Luka's been good

because you think about last year, they were in the bubble. So Luka's never had a signature playoff game in front of his home fans. I think this is done. Normally, I don't pack it in this early on teams, but I don't see a roadmap for the Clips unless everybody on Dallas just went ice cold for the next five games.

I don't see it. I don't see Luka losing four of the next five, which is how this would have to play out. Unbelievable turn of events. I hate using words like unbelievable, insane, because I think like, especially with Twitter, we're basically using the same 20 words now over and over again.

This is pretty unbelievable. I remember Zach Lowe texted me before the playoffs. We always text back and forth about awards or what are you doing for playoff picks? And he said he was toying with the idea of picking the Mavs. And I was like, wow, that's ambitious. I just couldn't do it because of the Porzingis piece.

I did not think Porzingis was at a level where it just seemed like it was Luka by himself with a bunch of role players. It just didn't seem like enough as much as I did not like this Clippers team. But I really wish I had picked them. Mavs in six? Maybe it might not even be Mavs in six. So we always have the one complete monkey wrench in the first round

where the combination didn't see that coming or I can't believe what a bloodbath that was. Maybe it's this series. It might be. Because Luka's that good. And if you start, I said this on Sunday night, I'm going to say it again. When somebody is truly great, when they're transcendent,

which I think we can all agree Luka has a chance to get there if he's not 80% there already. In the NBA, it usually happens for them sooner than you think, sooner than you expect. That's the way it goes. Magic won a title as a rookie and put up the legendary game six in Philly to win the finals MVP. Bird won in his second year. He's a little bit older. He was 24, 25 at that point. Bill Russell won a title in his first year.

LeBron got to the finals in 2007. I think when he was 22. On and on and on with the great, with the truly great players. Um, it happens for them sooner than you think. And, and we're always surprised, but we shouldn't be. I think Luke is that good. I actually think he has a level to go in this series. I think he could go up one notch higher is five for 13 today. He was two for seven from the line. Makes one more free throw. He's got a 40-point game. But if I'm the Clips,

first of all, the Ty Lue coaching, I just thought it was abominable. Ibaka plays six minutes. I don't get that. I don't get how they use Terrence Mann in this series. If I'm going down, I'm going down with Paul George and Kawhi, with Reggie Jackson, who's the only guard they have

who doesn't seem afraid to shoot, Terrence Mann, and God, I don't want Morris out there because I don't trust Morris. I mean, this is part of the problem. I guess maybe Batum, but it's not like Batum has slowed down Luka. I don't know what they do. So this is a roster problem, which dates back to last summer when they had all these...

They had no picks left to trade. They had to pay $64 million to Morris. They had to make this Luke Kinnard trade where they got rid of Shamit, who I thought had trade value. And now Kinnard doesn't play. Morris is overpaid. And they're kind of stuck with this roster

and don't really have a lot of options here. So they either have to pray that the Mavs go cold or they're headed toward a pretty bonkers offseason. This is a team that thought they could challenge the Lakers in LA. This is a team that is currently breaking ground at some point soon on a new basketball arena, changed their uniforms, thought they could go toe-to-toe with the legendary Lakers. And they're doing the opposite. And on top of this, the worst thing of all of it is they asked for this. They asked for Luka Doncic.

They asked to go toe-to-toe with somebody who has a chance to be the single best part of his generation. So congrats. Classic Clippers. You did it again. Every time you thought the Clippers couldn't hit rock bottom in a rockier way, they find another rock to slam against their head. So there you go. All right. We're going to bring in Ben Thompson right now. Sorry for that little tangent. I'm not going to talk about the Celtics. If you've listened to this podcast the last three months, none of this is a surprise. Of course, they're going to get swept by the Nets. And that's the way the whole season is going to play out. But anyway, all right, here comes Ben Thompson. This episode is brought to you by Movember. The mustache is back with a vengeance.

Look at Travis Kelsey. Before he rocked that Super Bowl ring, he rocked that super soup strainer. Grow a mustache for Movember. You'll do great things too. You won't win the Super Bowl, but your fundraising will support mental health, suicide prevention,

and prostate and testicular cancer research. And if you don't want to grow a mustache, you can still walk or run 60 kilometers, host an event, or set your own goal and mow your own way. Do great things this November. Sign up now. Just search Movember. All right. Ben Thompson is here. You know him from the Stratechery blog. Huge Bucks fan. And so the way we do this podcast, we're taping this right now. It's four o'clock Pacific time. It's seven in the morning where you are. You're in the far East.

If this is the first basketball talk we've heard tonight, then that means we just put the podcast up and nothing weird happened with the two LA games. I am assuming that the Lakers and Clippers will win. If you hear me at the top of this podcast, that means at 10 o'clock tonight, I told Kyle, holy shit,

I got to do 10 minutes at the top. So we're going to send the two LA teams are going to win the big story of these playoffs so far. Your bucks put some chest hair on their chest, strutting it out, kicking some ass. I'm a believer. I have to say it does feel a little bit like a trap.

I mean, the last time that we had this sort of game two just dominant win was against toronto and i proceeded to buy like multiple plane tickets because i was going to go to like all the as many of the final games as i could and uh that was uh it probably says something about my demeanor as a bucks fan that i did make sure to buy all refundable ones um which. It turned out to be a good idea. But yeah, I mean, well, you and I have been talking offline and you know that last year I was not optimistic and this year have been pretty optimistic and I'm not too surprised.

I thought your last podcast with Ryan was spot on where where game one was just all about a mental block. And they were clearly the better team. It was clear going in. It was clear in that game. I mean, they made, you know, 5 of 31 threes or whatever. But if they had lost, you definitely had to worry, I think particularly with Giannis, that they just, like, they would start freezing up.

And that didn't happen. And it certainly felt like the floodgates opened in game two. Obviously, we'll see what happens, you know, in game three. But they didn't shoot that crazy well. They shot 40% on three. Like, it wasn't like they were shooting like 80% or something like that. It was just, so I don't know. Fingers crossed.

We will see how it goes. Yeah, we said on Sunday night, it was the rare game one must win. And it was only a must win in game one just because the way the game unfolded, where it seemed like they might blow it. And that's when the history comes in and the baggage and all that stuff, they fought through it. I'm with you. I don't even feel like they've even played that great yet, which is weird to say. Cause they beat the shit out of Miami yesterday, but it wasn't like, you know, I still feel like they have a higher level to go. They're clearly

better than Miami. Miami is not the same team as they were last year, especially at the swing spots. And then the holiday and even that Tucker trade. Go through, do your whole thing for the audience about the hidden benefit of how great that P.J. Tucker trade was for you. Well, the Bucs have a history of doing this where they make truly atrocious moves and then like six months later pull a rabbit out of the hat and get out of it like remember when

they signed up one of the plummy brothers i always get confused about which one it was um they signed up to like a 40 year 50 million contract and somehow dump them on michael jordan and the hornets and then uh and then they did a similar thing with this, with DJ Augustine. They signed him to this truly extra contract, three years, $21 million. And not only was the guy already not useful in the playoffs, small guard, you know, don't do well, but he's completely washed.

And now they have this sort of sitting on their books and that's what sort of their panic move when they lost Bogdanovich. And by the way, how good do the Bucks look with Bogdanovich right now oh my god it's it is frustrating but uh but you know it has to be harder Giannis has to climb the steepest mountain is the way that it goes but they dump Augustine and they give up a first round pick this year but they move back to the top pick of the second round. They only moved back a couple spots. It wasn't that bad at all.

And oh, by the way, they get P.J. Tucker, who you were very concerned is washed and does not look washed at all. He looks great. Yeah, I mean, the thing is, you almost do that deal even if P.J. Tucker's washed. Oh, absolutely. Without question. You gave up, what, five, six spots in the draft max

and you got rid of this contract that people are giving first rounders a way to get rid of even a 7 million a year for three years thing. It was a terrible contract. It's the biggest mistake this league makes over and over again is just overpaying bench players and guys who can't make a difference. That's, uh, not like 7 million is not like crazy. It's not like paying somebody 20 million a year

who's DJ Augustine. But the bottom line is now you have Jeff Teague, who's basically the same player who's also equally washed like DJ Augustine was. And you're paying him five bucks. He's been way better than DJ Augustine. Yeah, fair. To be fair to Jeff Teague.

Which is not saying much. But the thing that really matters here is the Drew Holiday edition because it's a two-part addition. And this is the part that was so underrated when it happened. Was one, Holiday is a good player. He's much better than I realized. I mean, obviously, everyone saw him against Portland a few years ago.

Really? You're like an advanced stats guy. You knew he was good. No, I knew he was good. But, I mean, you watching him just, like like take the soul of whatever person he's guarding every night is really just incredible experience and the other thing is i mean he's just a bully when it comes to going to the basket i mean the pressure to have a second guy that just puts intense pressure on the rim like that you know in addition to yannis is just really really effective but he's only the second best player in the deal. The other part of the deal was the opposing team for the Bucs

no longer has Eric Bledsoe on their side. And it turns out that makes just an absolutely massive difference. I mean, people talk about, oh, people are building a wall against Giannis. Well, when the wall is four on six, it's a pretty difficult wall to scale. And I think that that cannot be overstated what a huge difference that makes. I mean, Eric Bledsoe would be okay in the regular season. In the playoffs, just an absolute disaster. He'd get the ball, not know what to do with it.

He didn't score over like nine points or 16 points, or he averaged nine points against Miami last year. Holiday's already been incredible. It's just such a massive upgrade. Yeah, Bledsoe could not be trusted at all. I think everybody officially wrote him off last year's playoffs. I started to write him off two years ago because I thought he really hurt them.

But last year it became official. Like this guy cannot be one of the best five players on the title team. Yeah. I mean, Toronto's really did the blueprint. They just, they stopped guarding him after game two and they just, whoever's guarding Bledsoe is going to sit in the paint and then Gasol and leonard are going to double yannis and it's it's not you can't run offense that way

people think about they would think back to that series they have a kawaii scoring and talk about brooke lopez and all that sort of stuff the problem in that series was the same problem last year which was offense and the problem on offense started and ended with having a black hole who the other team didn't bother guarding. And that was Eric Bledsoe. Yeah. And then so New Orleans ends up getting stuck with him in the trade. They get George Hill, they flip for Adams with a pick to get Adams. And then they get a whole bunch of picks that, you know, now that we know Giannis is staying, unless he has some sort of serious injury, God forbid, um, those picks aren't going to matter because when you have a guy who's top five every year, you're just not going to be in the lottery ever. So I, the thing with holiday,

look, you could see it all year. Um, it's the little stuff, right? It's like the play he made, um, near the end there, the game with like 35, where it's loose ball. He gets it because he's an unbelievable athlete. He's got two guys chasing him. He still gets the layup off and he does so many things that go beyond the stats, not to sound like a cliche, but on top of it, he does the stuff you can see where he can actually initiate offense. Now you have these three guys who can initiate offense at a really high level. So I think that trade's been a massive, massive success for them.

It's turned out about as well as you could, like you gave up nothing you're worried about and you got somebody who's a top 25 guy in the league. Absolutely, absolutely. And I mean, I do like to pat myself on the back because I was a critic. I hated the Bledsoe trade when it happened as a critic all along. So I'm happy to throw it in the pile of Bucks moves, two-part moves,

where the first one is an abject disaster and the second one pulls a rabbit from the hat. And because it's absolutely the case that, you know, and he fits in so nicely with Middleton specifically and that they have very complementary sort of strengths and weaknesses. And Middleton, if you're running a pick and roll with Holiday and Giannis on one side and Middleton's on the weak side, I mean, that's extremely difficult to handle. And this is the thing where, you know, I told you a few months ago, I'm pretty optimistic about the Brooklyn series just because I think we can do more to slow them than they can do to slow us.

And I mean, obviously, I have beer goggles on right now, but at least I've been consistent on this point. We'll see. We'll see what happens. But it's pretty exciting. And I'm jinxing myself. I'm so nervous right now. I'm jinxing myself. Well, that's the thing this is either going to be where we laid the blueprint for all the good stuff that's about to happen to the bucks or this would be a seminal moment where

all the bucks fans blame you why did you go on simmons podcast it all went to hell when that happened and we we've talked about this another time but but we can do it again. Like the Bucks fan base, secretly a bunch of lunatics. I don't think they get enough credit. It's a lunatic fan base. You guys are nuts. Yeah, I'm petrified. I honestly,

I'm thinking about hanging up the phone right now. I have to be completely honest. The honest piece of this. So they make the holiday trade. They don't know if he's staying. They're hoping he's staying. All signs pointed to seem pretty positive. You don't know for sure.

And then he signs huge sigh of relief. Hey, in the deep recesses of your soul, playing out the worst case scenarios, was there just an abyss as you thought of all of the picks going in this true holiday trade and then Giannis leaving and being on the Mavericks in seven months?

Like you had to have been thinking about that in the deep recesses. Oh, absolutely. I think I, I think that, you know, the problem with Twitter is you always end up making tweets that you regret and no one does that better than I do.

But I did post some tweet about this being the darkest, most awful post. I think it was the same day where they signed Augustine and Bobby Portis and they had just screwed up the Pat Connington contract. So he went from having a two year deal where he's overpaid to a three year deal where he's drastically overpaid. And I was like, this is the worst off season in the history of the NBA or something along

those lines. And needless to say, Buck's Twitter lunatics do not continue to give me grief for that. But, yeah, it was I mean, it was dark. It was definitely looking over the edge in a very serious way where you're looking at the possibility of, OK, one last run and then basically oblivion as a franchise for the next decade. Like that was really what was sort of on the verge of happening. And, you know, I mean, and then Giannis Reza, I mean, that's Giannis. He just, he's everything. And I do worry that, you know, he doesn't, I hope, just hope his career isn't wasted in Milwaukee.

You know, I hope this is the year just for, just to get that monkey off the back would be incredible. And what a story it would be, I mean, not just to re-sign with the small market, but, I mean, the gauntlet the Bucs are facing this year is pretty insane when you think about it. But that feels like if Giannis ever does win a title, that's how it has to be. It has to be, like, maximum difficulty. Like, you're just running straight through the wall. You're not dodging teams.

You're not doing anything. And from a sort of narrative sense in watching Giannis' entire career, it feels like this is how it has to go. So again, now I'm jinxing myself and getting nervous. Well, think about not to compare you guys to the Red Sox and Cubs because you have won in the last 50 years.

Granted, it was 50 years ago. But the Red Sox and Cubs, because you have won in the last 50 years. Granted it was 50 years ago, but the Red Sox made it as difficult as possible. And they won the Cubs. They made it not only as difficult as possible, they actually blew the game in the ninth inning. Then there was a rain delay and they rallied back and win. Like usually when you're getting this kind of monkey off your back, it never goes easily.

There's bumps and bruises everywhere. And as you said, you have a gauntlet coming up. And I don't want to get ahead of the Miami series. I do think you're in really good shape. I'd be shocked if Miami came back. I just don't think from a talent standpoint, they're the same team. But

assuming you get by and you play this Brooklyn series. I know Brooklyn's going to beat my pathetic Celtics. Who does Drew Holiday guard in that series, in your mind? Would you put him on Harden or would you put him on Kyrie? So, I mean, with the caveat that I am very much just a fan, I would put him on Harden and basically dare Kyrie to beat you.

And I think a combination of Giannis and Middleton and Tucker can at least, you know, bother Durant a little bit. Durant's probably going to average 35 a game, but I think Giannis can average 50. But so it's kind of going to come down to can Kyrie make up the difference? And, you know, frankly, as someone who's faced Kyrie in the playoffs, that sounds, you know, like I want him feeling like the man. I want him feeling like, oh, wait, this is on me. I got it. And I think that's a I would rather have him taking those shots than than particularly

Durant. And so to me, that's what I would do. But again, you'll have to see how it goes. I mean, Holiday obliterated Kyrie also in those two Brooklyn games a month ago. I mean, so we know Holiday can absolutely handle Kyrie, but, you know, we'll have to see how Harden handles it. But that's my initial thinking is put it all on Kyrie's shoulders. Kyrie wants it.

You have a chance to sort of disrupt the chemistry of Brooklyn along the way. And I think that's how I would approach it. Interesting. I love that you just casually did the throwaway line about how Kyrie and the playoffs against you guys. I mean, two years ago on my, my team, he didn't show up. He was probably the main reason you guys won the series. And what'll bother me is if it goes to the next round, it's like Brooklyn, Milwaukee, Kyrie looking for a little revenge for two years ago. It's like,

there's no revenge. She's not on the Celtics anymore. We don't get revenge out of this. I could care less what happens with him. I would put him on, I would put Holiday on Kyrie. So I disagree. I think he can take him out. I think they can throw enough people at Durant where they're not going to take Durant out.

They're not going to shut him down, but they'll make them work. He will, he'll get to his 30, but it will take time. There'll be a bunch of different people on him. You have Giannis in the middle. And then I think you,

you have to make Harden the one that beats you because I actually think same logic you have, but if Harden's doing the one-on-one, I've got to be the one who scores. That's not great for Durant and Kyrie, right? If Kyrie's in his head because he's got Holiday on him,

I think you throw length at Harden and if he goes to the lane, you have Giannis to protect the lane. So then the only question is the foul trouble. But it would be an awesome second round series. And I think the best thing you have going for you is Brooklyn just hasn't played with each other enough. You could feel it in that game one.

We're taping this for game two tonight, but you know, they, they went all one on one in game one against the Celtics. Then they eventually figured it out. But, um, the lack of reps, you could see what the Lakers too, in game one, the lack of reps versus what you have, where you, you know, say what you want about coach bud at this point, but there has been a system in place. The two best players have been playing together for a long time. The role players all know who they are. Holiday can fit in anywhere, and I just think you have more stability than Nets.

Yeah, it does get to our other big weakness though. The weakness number one is Bud, without question. Yeah, do two minutes on this because I don't think people fully understand. Well, I think that Bud is a brilliant floor raiser. He really is.

And he was the sort of coach that Milwaukee needed coming off of Jason Kidd. Like, he professionalized the team. He makes it, like, you learn to play a certain way as best as you can. And you're going to be

an incredible regular season team year in and year out. You've seen this throughout his career. I think the challenge is in the playoffs, you have to adjust not just game to game, but quarter to quarter. And he just doesn't adjust quickly.

And when he does, it's not always adjustments that sort of make complete sense. And I think you see it. You see some coaches that are just more system-oriented coaches. And fans obsess over in-game decisions, and they don't see all the other stuff and i think in that case bud does get a bit of a bad rap all the other stuff

he's he's great at like building a program i think but the in-game adjustments just don't seem to make sense and or happen too slowly i think is is the thing that happens and he and there's also a thing where he want he wants to do a system instead of pounding mismatches. And I think this was a big problem in the last few years where teams would load up against Giannis and there wasn't a sense where, oh wait, if they're going to guard Chris Middleton with a shooting guard,

throw it to Chris Middleton in the high post or the mid post and let him shoot turnarounds all day long. Is that an efficient shot in the regular season? Well, for Chris Middleton, it actually kind of is. He makes them, but at some point you just got to make a team pay for playing you a

certain way. And that's not an approach he's traditionally taken, but we'll see. I mean, there are some good signs. I mean, this is where I'm talking to myself into it. You know,

the top player played 45 minutes in game one, which is a big improvement. Game two, they started to hunt Robinson and Dragic more, which they didn't do in game one. I was pulling my hair out in game one. But so hopefully there is some changes there. They've changed

the offense a little bit to give Giannis more pressure releases against the wall. And so we'll see. But the other problem is the off guard. It's that second guard. Dante. Who do you trust? Who's the guy you trust the most?

I don't trust Dante. I'll tell you that. Yeah. I mean, the problem is Dante is kind of he makes three or four plays a game that are just incredible. Like he's got he definitely has the instincts, but he also makes three or four plays that just make no sense at all. He shoots layups

differently every time he takes one you never know if it's going in conantin is just a uh you know he just jumps all over the place on defense he's not reliable on that end at all forbes gets picked on i mean the first brooklyn milwaukee game brooklyn attacked forbes like eight possessions in the road beginning of the fourth quarter it It was brutal. And that was what won the game there. He's probably unplayable against the Nets. I think so. Because that's the problem where when you have all these one-on-one guys, all they want to do is hunt mismatches.

So they are going to find whatever weakness the Bucs have on the court and are just going to pound it again and again and again. And so that's going to be the big thing that the Bucs are going to have to figure out. Last Bucs question, and then we'll move on to big tech. So Giannis, the last couple minutes of game one, you get that feeling like, oh shit, up the free throws,

all around the rim. It's like, can this guy actually handle the last three minutes of a game like this? And I'm still not positive I have an answer. I think what's different about this Bucs team is with Holiday and Middleton, you can patch together enough offense that maybe you're using the early 2000 Lakers blueprint where Giannis carries you for the first 45 minutes, and maybe the other two guys take over the last three. But that's the looming guillotine over Giannis' whole career, right? Do you trust him in the last three minutes? What happens if he gets fouled?

Aren't other teams going to go out of their way to foul him? And that seems how they solve that and how much they use him and utilize him in crunch time. Isn't that the biggest thing they have to figure out? Because I still haven't. Yeah, I think that's definitely the case. And the other thing we haven't seen yet is a team start really intentionally following

Giannis because I think that could really get in his head. And so that unraveled. Yeah. Yeah. And I could see Spolstra pulling that in game three or something like that. Just to hack a freak. Yeah. I almost kind of hope he does because this is the series. At some point, it's going to happen to Giannis in the playoffs.

He's got to deal with it. Giannis' weakness is this mental aspect. He gets in his own head, particularly around the free throw shooting. Maybe it's the same as the 10-second call, it was BS.

I mean, it's actually, it should be a technical foul for the bench to be counting. That's against the rules. People don't know that. But, but, you know, it was going to happen at some point.

So might as well have happened now. And, and yeah, it's a fair point. And, you know, obviously we don't have a Kobe. Kobe, you know, I think, you know, I came to appreciate Kobe so much more later in his career

and looking back on those teams, how important he really was to those Shaq teams. But, you know, we also it's like our second guy is nowhere near Kobe, but our third guy is way better than whoever was roll and dribble handoffs with Giannis where he's going to the basket. And you saw yesterday that when he's going to the basket in that regard, he's going to finish the play more often than not. I mean, Trevor Reza tackled him like a free safety and he still made the shot. And so if he's getting a situation where he's missing the end one free throw, that's certainly better than, than where he's, he's hitting one of two or, or missing both. Well, it'd be amazing if it ends up being Giannis and bead in the East finals,

not to get ahead of ourselves, but that is, that is a possibility. And you know, the bucks could have taken and bead. I feel like it's like an underrated. What if of the tooth of the 2010s, right? Because the bead was going to be the first pick. He got hurt. Cleveland got scared off at one because they knew they

probably wanted to trade the pick because they're getting LeBron. They didn't want to have an injured asset. And then Milwaukee wanted Jabari at two because he was the quote unquote local kid, even though he really wasn't. He's from Chicago. But there was a world in which they could have just said, fuck it. Giannis is two years away. Embiid's two years away. Let's go.

They could have been the better version of the process. They could have had Giannis and Embiid on the same team. Oh, there's so many, there's so many brutal things. I mean, there's a lot of Sacramento Kings energy

where this player has suggested he likes our market, so we're going to take him. Like the Marvin Bagley thing right the Bucs it's been rough I mean there's so many rough draft picks I mean the Thawne Baker year the guy who picked next was Sabonis I mean imagine Sabonis at the five you know playing next to Giannis and well what about the choice between Curry and Monte Ellis and they took Ellis allegedly I don't know if that's true, but yeah. They took DJ Wilson

over OG Ananobi. I mean, there's just, it's the Bucks have no right to be here at all. They took Giannis at least. And the previous regime took Giannis and traded for Middleton. The Brandon Jennings for

night trade where Middleton was a throw in and that's basically carried the team for a decade and is the only reason why there are contenders. And, and it speaks to one, what a great guy Giannis is and I'll, what have a great player he is, but two,

I mean, the NBA man, it having a player like that just covers over such a multitude of sins, you know, and I'm not going to, I'm not going to dump on Tatum or anything like that just covers over such a multitude of sins, you know, and I'm not going to, I'm not going to dump on Tatum or anything like that, but that's where you see the difference in levels between like a top five and a top 10 or top 15.

Like you have someone like Giannis, you're competing for a title year in and year out. Even if you have like Deadwood, like Eric Bledsoe on the roster and, and you're a 50 win team, no matter who's on it. It feels like a privilege, right? It's a privilege to cheer for him.

I want nothing more than to see him succeed. Fingers crossed. Hopefully, he just didn't jinx the entire thing. I feel pre-guilty. I'm Midwestern, so it's even worse. I feel guilty about something that hasn't even happened yet. I'm happy that you got through that game one at least and there And there's a lot of hope, uh, for, for the playoffs, by the way, Fando, we're doing these bird bets, points, rebounds, and assists. Wednesday's bet

is going to be Trey young versus Julius Randall. And I think we boosted the Trey young side, but said, check that out on Wednesday on Fando. The odds will be there. We're gonna take a break, come back and talk about big tech. All right. You have a lot going on. You have the bucks in the middle of everything. You might have Brooklyn come in and then Philly and then the Lakers, who knows you, you might completely fall apart in a week. We don't know, but you also have in your stratechery blog and your podcast and all the stuff you cover has gone haywire. The last time you were on, we talked about the Disney Fox merger. This time let's, we talked about the Disney Fox merger. This time, we have like three things to hit

and I want to do it. We don't need to spend two hours on this. First one was AT&T and Time Warner. AT&T basically looks at this giant merger they did with Time Warner. It feels like it happened yesterday. And they go, man, we're bad at this. Let's get, let's get out of this.

Um, and they end up, and it was like, it was basically like what the bucks would do trying to get into the DJ Augustine contract. No, I actually did this. I, I, I opened up the daily update. I wrote about the article and I did a paragraph with the bucks because I wanted to make that exact analogy. I mean, everything about this initial deal was, was not just a disaster,

but it was a disaster in very, in a hilarious way. I mean, the, the big picture is it made no sense. It never made any sense. It, it,

it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it,

it, it, it, not just me, but other people wrote this on day one when it was announced, it made no sense for a phone company to buy a content company. I mean, what about what about their rationale where they were like, no, now you get your phone and you could watch HBO on it.

It's like, I can do that anyway. What do you guys need to merge for? Yeah, well, because the problem is that if you have a sort of what we call a vertical business model where you're competing in a zero sum game with other companies against Verizon or T-Mobile or whatever it might be. You want the reason to have interesting services is because you want to differentiate your service. Like, oh, if you come to if you come to AT&T, that's the only place you can watch HBO. But the problem is that if you do that, it destroys the value of what you just bought because the value of it comes from sort of reaching everyone. And so a horizontal company like any content business, you make the content once you want to spread it in as many places as possible.

It's fundamentally at odds with a sort of vertical based business. So it made zero sense. What you do in that case is what Verizon deals like Disney Plus. Verizon made a deal with Disney Plus and said, we'll offer it to our subscribers. You get a big jump in sort of your subscriber base from day one and then you pay us some money and that's, you just make a deal. You don't have to buy the company and go and take all this, all this huge amount of debt. But what's funny about it is, you know, the truth about mergers is they always say, oh, we have synergies and stuff on those lines. Mergers make sense when there is a degree of anti-competitiveness to it. Like you do it because like if AT&T and Verizon merged, like you can see, oh, yeah, they're going to be an even bigger company.

There's going to be less competition. They can pool their resources. It's very obvious why that sort of makes sense. Disney and 21st Century Fox, you can understand there's similar types of businesses, why it makes sense. AT&T and Time Warner never made sense, which made the Justice Department suing it even funnier because they're suing something

that is not anti-competitive at all because it's nonsense. And like, so that was sort of the biggest- It's actually, it's reverse competitive. It hurts both parties. It did. It did. I mean, so AT&T, you know,

if you want evidence that this was sort of like politically motivated, that's by far the most compelling, you know, sort of bit about it. Yeah. But so you get to this deal where it makes all kinds of sense. Like Discovery has their own service.

Discovery is sort of a very unique player in the field because they have they sort of own this niche of HGTV and the cooking channel or travel channel or whatever it might be. Super cheap content that just sort of like you sit down and you watch. It's like three hours later. It's like, what am I doing with my life? But that's like great content for a streaming service. They have a lot of international possibilities. You know, companies that own all their content have a much better hand internationally because they don't have to worry about cutting deals or getting out of deals. They can just sort of go direct to consumers. And it makes all kinds of sense to combine that with Time Warner's much more sort of branded, well-known content, which sort of

attracts consumers in the first place. So putting these two pieces together makes a lot of sense. It's sort of a, as good of a recovery as you could hope for, for what was a truly atrocious deal in the first place. So that's the Milwaukee Bucks analogy. It's amazing. And it was a train wreck that was a train wreck the entire time. There was no moment where you're like, oh, this is actually going better than I thought. It never happened at any point. I know because, so you could analyze it from a business perspective and it was bad. But then you're like, well, I can imagine

there being a culture problem between a phone company and an entertainment company. But it's like, you know, maybe they'll figure it out. No, they didn't figure it out. They just sort of like, they drove out all this talent, particularly on the HBO side. They proceed to water down the HBO brand. I mean, go to the HBO brand and watch Big Bang. I mean, like a show that is like the antithesis of everything that HBO stands for.

And and so you're very much sort of rescuing the detritus of a shipwreck and see if you can build, you know, sort of a smaller boat along the way. The other thing that is underappreciated about this deal, though, is one of the things that has driven Disney for a very long time has been their strength in the cable bundle. You know, people talk about ESPN, but it's not just that they have ESPN. It's that they have a whole bunch of channels. And so people like, oh, ESPN, they get nine, 10 bucks or might be up to 11 or 12 bucks per subscriber. Look how profitable it is. That's actually only the edge of the profitability because all their other

cable channels, they would charge more for them than they should because it's in a bundle. It's with like, there's a bundle within a bundle. And so you get ESPN, ESPN2 and the Disney channel and all the, you know, and all these other channels you've never heard of. And what this does do is discovery is now going to be just nearly as big as disney or perhaps even bigger as far as number of channels where they they have you know the hgtvs of the world they have all their sort of their content channels that they already have combined with tnt which

is obviously a big sports property combined with cnn with all these different other pieces and so there's a they're gonna actually improve their cash flow significantly. Cable still exists. It's still out there. It's definitely declining. But there's still a lot of money there. And that's actually a very nice fit with their sort of attempt to sort of build a streaming service. And so they're actually well-placed. There might be more mergers.

It's something definitely to keep an eye on. Comcast Universal looks very lonely. CBS Viacom looks pretty lonely. We'll see, you know, you go through this process in tech and in business where stuff unbundles, right? The internet comes along, everything breaks apart, but then it reforms into bundling because bundles make a lot of sense. They make sense for consumers. They make sense of sense. They make sense for consumers. They make sense for producers. They make sense for distributors. And what we're going through is, you know, we're going to come out of this with like

three streaming services max. And a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money along the way. But we're going to end up in a place where you're paying about as much as you did before. You're just paying different people. And I think you can see that starting to take shape here. Well, the irony is that's what I grew up with. We had three major networks. And now we have three major networks.

It's just we have Netflix, we have Disney. And it almost mirrors like the college sports scene, right? Where we have a bunch of people that were like mid-majors. Yes, it's a great analogy. Somebody that won the WAC. And it's like, all right, well, you guys actually aren't gonna win the title i think that's what made what gonzaga did so amazing is like they actually were able to transcend that but um it didn't see disney and netflix are the sec and big 10 like they're they're yeah they're gonna be fine no matter what like they're and

everyone else is sort of trying to figure it out right Right. And HBO Max, which I agree with you. And I actually think HBO got out of this pretty unscathed because they still have really good content. I'm a little biased. We have a thing there. But the HBO Max thing is just like this weird conglomerate of all these different things. They shouldn't have just not called it HBO Max. They should have called it like, I don't know, the Orange Network. Pick a name.

It's peak phone company thinking. It's like, I know that name. We're just going to slap it on there. The phone company wins because you have no choice, right? They're inherently terrible marketers. And we certainly saw that happen there. So I guess what you would say is nobody wants to be a mid-major. Everyone's just going to end up, maybe we have four major things instead of three, but nobody wants to be where HBO Max was, which I don't know. I didn't see this confirmed, but people were saying that if you really look at it, they had like 20 million subs, right? Like if really, if you're removing all, like you get free HBO for a year, all this stuff, it's like an audience of 20 million

and you can't compete against Disney. That's already over a hundred. You have no chance. Yeah, this is always, and this is the mistake, the problem that all these folks are going to face, which is if you're starting late, when you think about there's a piece of content out there, right, and they all want it.

Well, Netflix can say, okay, we're going to spread this content over hundreds of millions of users. Right. And so our price per subscriber for this content is quite low. Disney can say, oh, we have, you know, nine figure subscribers. Our price per content is quite low. These other guys come in and they're subscale. And so their their price per content, price per subscriber, I should say, is way higher, relatively speaking. That's number one. But number two, you could get away with that if you're like Amazon or a startup. And Amazon's quite large now, actually, as well, because that's like you're building a business and people will invest in you, just like they invested in Netflix. The stock market gave Netflix or the death market,

I should say, and the stock market tolerated it, all this money to sort of build that position. The problem, if you're an existing studio, is you're not just paying extra on a per subscriber basis for content. You're not getting paid extra by everyone else to sell your content. And Sony is actually very underrated in this regard, where Sony, they just cut a deal with Netflix a little bit ago, and they also cut a deal with Disney. So they're keeping the window where like the first run on streaming will be on Netflix and the second run will be on Disney. And they're double dipping on all their content and their content's like gold because all these streaming services need it. And so not only is Sony not wasting tons of money on buying content, they're making tons of money by selling content and doing what they're good at. They're good at making content. They're not good at running a customer service business. They're making tons of money by selling content and doing what they're good at. They're good at making content. They're not good at running a customer service business. They're

not good at marketing. And that's, you know, that's the other mistake all these studios are making. And so they're going to come back at some point. I wrote a few, a couple of years ago that Netflix is going to have sort of a rough few years, but they're going to actually come out of this far, far stronger. And I think that's exactly what's happening where, yeah, all this competition and they're paying more for content than they would like to. And, you know, people's attention is divided. But at some point, these folks are going to come to their senses, just like AT&T did, realize this is a massive waste of money, not just in what you're spending, but in what you're not making. And then they're going to start selling to Netflix again. And then Netflix is going to be great.

Well, and then you have Amazon and Apple who tried to get in the content thing, but they kind of half-assed tried to get in, you know, where it's like, yeah, we're doing content, but yeah, you're doing some content. Netflix, if you look at what they did, which was really shrewd and you've written a ton about it, but you know, they, they, they banked other people's content for multiple years. Then they really started making their own. And by the time everybody realized what was happening, they had this massive lead. I think Amazon's trying to catch up.

They're going to spend $9 billion on the MGM library, which seems like it's maybe twice as much, the experts were saying, as... And it's like this belated catch-up game where like, let's just throw money at it. It's like watching an NBA team be like, ah, we need a center. Let's throw money at Andrew Bogut.

And they just kind of go. So it just seems like Amazon and Apple can always rely on the deep checkbooks to fight back when they need it. Yeah, they have lots of money, which always helps. The other thing is, given, you know,

you think about Amazon's business, like they want you to subscribe to prime you subscribe to prime you spend more money like you just use amazon as your default for shopping and anyone can you know think about just the u.s anyone can subscribe to prime anyone it's like a service that's available to everyone and it's available to everyone in not in a zero-sum way in a in a win like you can shop on you know your local retailer and you can also shop on Amazon. And so in that sense, them acquiring content that makes their service more attractive aligns in a way that AT&T, where they're in a zero-sum game with Verizon and T-Mobile,

it never made sense to have differentiated content because that content needed to be everywhere. So whereas Amazon can credibly say, oh yeah, we're acquiring this differentiated content that's going to be available to the entire market and is going to accrue to other businesses. Now you can make the case it's still too much and they're wasting too much money on it, but at least it is a business argument that makes sense given the nature of the business they're trying to drive. Unlike AT&T, which, you know, it honestly never made sense at all. Not for a single moment. Can we do merger speed round? Most likely merger for you. What's the next one? Oh, everyone says Comcast and Universal. Yeah. Well, I think in the entertainment industry, Comcast, Universal, and I would also say Viacom are both sort of just sitting out there.

Universal in particular is in a pretty weak position. I think that makes a lot of sense to combine with this new Discovery bit. Obviously, I think they have to spin off some of the news channels because there will be some overlap there. But to me, that's what sort of makes the most sense. Discovery and Time Warner critically don't have a broadcast network. And I still think it'd be very difficult to combine CBS and NBC, for example, or ABC or whatever.

So the fact that they don't, to me, makes that the most obvious sort of wink up. Any other ones? What about, by the way, I have no inside information on this. Obviously, I work for one of the two companies, but wouldn't Spotify and Netflix

be the ultimate? Like, that's one where it would be like, holy shit, those two video and audio together. Well, you have to raise the question, like, what is actually being gained, though? Like, like Spotify and Netflix, this is always the question in mergers, which is, could you have accomplished the same strategic goals by just doing a partnership? And Netflix and Spotify already do partnerships. Like they, you know, where you can, I think they have a college one where you can subscribe to both and you get a cheaper price. And if you think about it, like what, what other benefit do you sort of want?

I mean, the, at the end of the day, they're, they're complimentary and people can subscribe to both. And then you don't have to deal with all the expense and cost of, of actually making an acquisition. But if you're talking Comcast universal, that's a different animal because that's a one plus one equals three from a scale standpoint. Absolutely. Yeah. You just,

you have to get to scale and it's not sustainable to have all these streaming networks is not sustainable to be small. So one of them has to bulk up. What is the point of Amazon spending as much money as they spent on Thursday Night Football in your mind? Because that seemed crazy to me. I don't understand. Are they going to add subscribers with that? I don't get it. Well, it's interesting to think about why Netflix does not do sports, which is what Netflix offers you is streaming. And so when they acquire content, that content is attractive, not just to their current subscribers who watch it the moment it drops, but that content is in their library forever. And it's a reason to

subscribe going forward. Like there's Netflix shows I've never watched, but are on my list. I'd like to get to them someday. Right? So that's why they would never acquire sports. Amazon, on the other hand, wants you to buy more stuff, right? Like their payoff is sort of just getting, they care much more about the customer acquisition part of it than they do about necessarily needing their streaming service to be a long-term monetizer.

Streaming is all Netflix has. That is their business. And so they have to think in that regard. Whereas Amazon is this massive sort of offering and and they want to you know i wrote they sort of want to take a tax of your entire life like that's amazon's goal right they take a little bit of your computing power that you know they take a little bit of your buying power it's just shipping etc etc and so yeah it is i think just some people aren't subscribed yet and particularly when they get exclusive games that's just a way to get more,

you know, to get more customers. I think, you know, I would imagine that Amazon's very data driven. They already sort of had it on a non-exclusive basis. I, I guess it probably worked.

And now, now they're going to have exclusive games, which is a big difference. You know, I think that they probably suspect it's just going to drive that many more, that many more subscribers. And it's not just, it's not just that it's not just acquiring subscribers. And it's not just it's not just that.

It's not just acquiring subscribers, but it's getting subscribers used to using Prime. Like get, you know, get Prime installed on your TV, get Prime Video, you know, acquire a Prime Video stick, whatever it might be. Get Prime Video on your Roku. And now you're watching other Prime shows. You're already used to going to the app. So there's payoffs that come not just from the event. It's also sort of reshaping customer behavior in a way that sort of accrues to you in the long run. So they're hoping to get like Bob from St. Louis, who's not an Amazon Prime member yet,

but the Rams are, oh, St. Louis is bad. They don't have a team. Let me do that now. Keep this in though, Kyle. Sorry, St. Louis. Bob from Kansas City. Painful. Sorry, St. Louis. That was really,. Painful. Sorry, St. Louis. That was really, that was not intentional. That was not an intentional drive-by. Bob from Kansas City

who wants to see the Chiefs doesn't have Amazon. And he's like, all right, cool. I need to see the Chiefs. So now he's on Amazon. Now he's like, hey, what's this Amazon Prime?

And now they have them. Their hooks are... So this is actually, you actually raised a really interesting point. So number one, it's not just the guy that signs up for the first time, but the guy who's already a Prime customer, but doesn't watch Prime video. Like this is a reason why, oh, I already have this. Great. Let me go install it and watch it, et cetera, et cetera. The interesting thing, this is where the NFL is so smart, is Bob in Kansas City actually has nothing to worry about because they will still show the game on local TV in the home markets of the teams in the game. And the NFL has always had this requirement.

When they did the deal with ESPN back in the day, every cable channel was required to simulcast the game on a local broadcast over the air channel. And it's so interesting because it's one of the reasons the NFL is so much better placed than any other sports league for this world of, of cord cutting, because they're not really susceptible because they have a culture of over the air broadcasting and that's built into their business model. And so if you cut the cord, you can still go buy rabbit ears. And, and a lot of people do that just for the NFL. And it's interesting. It's one of the many, many ways where the NFL, you know, you obviously have a history with, uh, with, uh, the NFL's league office to say the least,

but you've sort of looked back and it's like, okay, if your commissioner is widely reviled, there's a good chance he's actually doing his job. And if he's beloved, there actually might be some red flags. And I think that there's some aspect of that when it comes to the NFL. It's an extremely well-run business. The NBA is very well-liked

and maybe there's some issues now. Yeah, there might be a little bit of a lack of accountability in the NBA. The better analogy is that Bob from Kansas City was a huge Patriots fan. Exactly. And the Patriots are on. Last thing before we go, Apple versus Epic. The Apple app trial, which is, you wrote a great piece about it today,

where everybody's argument kind of makes sense, which I think makes it so tough to kind of figure out what should happen. Basically, Apple's a loan shark. They're like, you can loan us money, but we're going to take a 30% vague. They're just grabbing money from everybody.

But their argument is, hey, we've created this entire ecosystem. This whole ecosystem only exists because, because it's ours. So yeah, we're going to be taking money. And the question is, is 30% of the app, is that too high of all the revenue from it? Should it be down to 20? My gut is that this will settle with them dropping down to like 25% and being like, are we good, everybody? But where do you, how do you think this plays out? Well, I think there's a bit where I feel like Epic is the wrong company to make this case

because at the end of the day, what is Epic selling? They're selling like costumes and dances and this digital paraphernalia that doesn't cost anything to create, just sort of floats in the ether. And it really is just a fight about money, right? Like there's, there's no, like nothing is actually hindering Epic's operation of their business or, you know, it's not the whole classic, what sort of businesses are not being created that could be created in the case of Epic. Well, you know, they're, they just want to they just want more money and they want Apple to have less. And I'm actually fairly sympathetic to Apple in this regard, because you think about all these games that are just heavily engineered to just lift as much money out of your pockets as quickly as possible. And if, you know, it's already bad enough in the app

store where there at least is some modicum of control and parental controls and you have to put in a password. You imagine some of these companies get you to put your credit card information in and it's going to be a disaster. I think there's very real value in Apple's control in games. And there frankly, isn't that much of a societal cost of them taking their share. So, so this, I feel like this is a bad case, a better case. I don't know if I can talk about this in your podcast is Spotify. I think Spotify has one of the most compelling cases. I don't know, cut me off if you need to. Listen, it's free speech. I mean, Spotify is directly competing with Apple for a music service,

except that Spotify, if they want payment, their app is to pay 30% and Apple doesn't. I mean, it's blatantly unfair. It's so unfair. And so Spotify doesn't have payment in the app. So they can offer the same price as Apple music. You have to go to the web and Apple's like, you can't even say in your web, you know, inside your app that you can go to the web to sign up. You have to launch the app, but it's like a blank screen. It's like, that's where I think it crosses the line. Once you get out of games, get into like content or creators, like Twitter announced this new thing for like, like, you know,

they have this new spaces product, you know, competitive with locker room, which I know you have to go on, but they, you know, you could sell tickets. And if you sell a ticket for five bucks,

you pay Twitter that you pay Apple their share. Cause you have no choice. You pay Twitter their share. And suddenly the creator is like making half of what they, they sold it for. And to me, this bums me out suddenly the creator is like making half of what they sold it for. And to me, this bums me out because the Internet is so interesting and exciting for the new business models it creates. The idea that people can sort of own a niche. Obviously, my entire career is built on this idea.

And the fact that Apple is just sitting around taking a skim, it's perhaps legally okay, but kind of morally sucks. And, and so, you know, that's sort of my point is there's no good solution here because you don't want Congress legislating how this stuff works. You don't want the courts doing it. Apple should just chill out and like, you know, like I get the game thing, but let's make sure we leave room for sort of innovation elsewhere. And they, they just haven't really done that. Or say you're going to use 10, 10% of that 30% to put back in toward new creators or however, there's some way to spin it where you're just not like stuff in your pockets.

That helps from a PR perspective. But yeah, I mean, I think that the, that's the weird thing is, you know, Apple is facing this lawsuit. They're facing action in the European Union. The Justice Department is reportedly investigating them for a side business, for a side hustle, right? Like usually like when Microsoft gets busted for for Windows, it's like, yeah, it's Windows. It's like

their core business. Absolutely. They're leveraging, you know, the hell out of that Apple. It's like, you know, their core business is selling iPhones and oh, by the way, we're running a hustle on the side and we're going to hold onto it for dear life. I mean, it's very, it's a very valuable one. A huge part of their market cap is tied up in that. Cause it's, you know, money that just keeps coming in without ever stopping. Yeah. But it's, it's but it's just kind of odd how they're so locked down on it and just, you know. But yeah, so we'll see. We'll see

what happens. I think they'll win the case maybe with a couple things around the edges. But it's not going away. It's going to be an issue sort of going forward. Well, I save some stuff for the next time you come on because you're a Bucks correspondent. It feels like the Bucks are going to be relevant for a couple months. But next time you come on, we should talk about...

You are just trying to curse me. You're not trying to curse anything. I think I was last on... I bet on the Bucs. I was last on like two years ago and now you're saying it all the time. No, you were on last year. I bet on the Bucs.

I'm in. I have a Bucs-Lakers finals bet. I have the Bucs to win the East. I'm in on your team. Next time you're on, we got to talk about Substack and writers going straight to the people and that whole thing,

which you were eight years ahead of everyone on that, but that's now become its own thing. But we're going to save that for your next appearance. I think you would be a very interesting person to talk to about that specific topic. So I'll look forward to it. Well, I'm not a writer anymore. My fingers don't work.

I know, that's why it's so interesting. Yeah, like we're tired. All right, Ben Thompson, great to see you as always. Check fingers don't work. I know. That's why it's so interesting. Yeah, like a retired. All right. Ben Thompson, great to see you as always. Check out the Stratechery blog and newsletter. You can, you can, is it a blog or a newsletter or both? I get it. I call it a blog.

What do you say? It's a newsletter? I call it a blog. This is why I get mad at Substack actually, because they're like, oh, it's a newsletter business. Like, I don't know. I write a blog. You can receive it via email if you choose.

But to me, maybe just because I'm old, like to me, I own a website and that's what gives me my freedom, gives my independence. And, and yeah, I mean, but we said we'd talk about it next time. So, well, it's fucking awesome. Go check it out. I learn a lot from it every week. Ben Thompson, good to see you. Good luck with the bucks. Oh, fingers crossed. All right. Adam Duritz is here. He's a guy who's been in my life since 1993. But amazingly, in my life a lot the last few years, the kind of crowds of my daughter's favorite band.

And on these soccer trips, it's always the playlist that we go to. So I feel like you're in the car with us. I told her that you're going to be on today. And she flipped out. It was the most impressed she's ever been with me ever my entire life. Really? That's kind of wild. I feel like usually it's my friends who won't stop playing our music and their kids want to kill them. I'm glad it's the other way around. Nice. Well, she loves, uh, she loves music. She loves singing and she loves, we talk about the lyrics and the songs and stuff.

And I think one thing that's been great for you guys is just the playlist era, right? You have this whole career of songs and then you can string them together. You can put them in any sort of order you want, depending on what mood you are. And you guys just have a shitload of them and they're all great.

And it's going to endure, it feels like. I was wondering whether people put us on those prey lists at all i'm glad to hear they do yeah yeah um can we go backwards sure so 93 you you your first album becomes i think one of the best first albums of the last 30 years and you go from nobody knows who the fuck you are to a massive overnight success, which is funny because the first song that becomes a hit is kind of about you want the success. You're dreaming for it. You want it to happen. And then it all plays out that way. And you're on MTV and all that. You've talked a lot since about having such a weird relationship with fame and success as that's happening in the moment. What do you remember about that 28 years later? Well, it was really weird because Mr. Jones, I mean, yeah, it's a song about wanting to be a

rock star, but it's also a song about knowing or the guy in the song, not realizing that it's not going to be everything he wants it to be, you know, and, and you're supposed to hear through his delusion about when everybody loves me, I'll never be lonely. You know what I mean? So it's got both sides to it, you know, and then it happens and it's like, I mean, I had to be impressed with myself. That is some seriously prescient songwriting. But I mean, it was also weird because like we had a big fight over the song. The label didn't want it as a single. And I didn't even think it was a particularly great single. We all thought Rain King was the big single, but you'd put out introductory songs

back then. They wanted a murder of one because it had that Jesus Jones drum beat. I wouldn't let them edit anything. So we couldn't use a murder of one. I suggested Mr. Jones. We agreed to disagree and release nothing. And then we went on tour opening for a bunch of bands that were doing really well. Suede, the Cranberries, Cr cracker and we just lied to radio people about what our single was and it almost just seemed like a goof you know it didn't seem like it's not like it was really going to work but it did like suddenly that song sort of took off and but even when it was doing really well at radio and we finally released the video which happened because as i remember it mtv called geffen and said where's the sync where's the video for the counting crow single and geffen had to say

what is the counting crow single again because and they're like mr jones what kind of a conversation is this um but even when we put that out we still weren't even in the top 200 i mean it was when we played round here on saturday night live that the the record jumped 40 spots a week for five or six weeks and landed us at number two all of a sudden for a couple years um so it was weird it was like it kind of came out of nowhere but we'd been on the road for a while like i mean not i don't know it seemed like a while for us it's probably three months four months when we played saturday night live six or seven months when the record really blew up and like eight or nine months before we realized it, that something had changed. We could see it on the chart was huge, but the culture didn't really hit us.

I remember because we went away to, we went on our first European trip that April of 94 and it was no big deal. We'd played some headline gigs right before we left and we were, you know, mid range thing. We came back to the States and landed in new orleans during jazz fest i got mobbed everywhere i went at something i'd been going to for years and then we played tip patinas there's like a thousand people inside the club and 5 000 people outside the club on the street it was crazy i mean all of a sudden we realized oh everything's different now and then we had a big summer tour where it was clear that it went insane but would you know you didn't you don't realize it at first because the the beetle mania part of it doesn't hit you right away i was kind of overwhelmed so we're talking it's four years before the internet really becomes anything right

and there was this old school way of discovering music where especially with that album it was my friend jim great he's like you got to get this new conan crowe's album it's really good and you had to make this decision in 1993 do i want to spend 15 bucks on this cd or not do i trust my friend do i trust this one song that i heard on the radio do i trust this one video i saw is this worth 15 and i remember i bought the album and I was going back on a train from, uh, from Boston to Connecticut and listen to it. And it was such, it was just such a distinct start to finish album. There's a couple from that era that I feel like, like the first Dave Matthews album was like that first Cranberry's album was like that. But nowadays I think like 20 years later, everything you described, it's almost the opposite. It's like the bizarre version of it, right?

It would be on the internet, it would take off right away. You would be immediately enjoyed and dissected in five minutes and then that would be it. So it was like this organic way to kind of discover and fall in love with an album that honestly, I really miss. You know, I think it happened back then you know like man rem had six albums five or six albums on an independent label before they ever put out a major label album so like they were so they'd spent so long being everybody's indie cool discovery that you know it almost made them teflon for the rest of their career you could there was nowhere there's

no reason for anyone to ever say a bad word about them. You know what I mean? Cause they had, you know, we had one album that way, but you know, yeah, it was a different era that you could never have a career like REMs. Now it would be,

it would be, it would be bizarre. Really, really surprising to do that. Um, because yeah, the internet eventually finds things and just, and then it,

it feeds on them in almost the way radio used to, where like the radio, the bigger you got, almost more of a death knell it was because they'll play you so much, they'll make people hate you. You know what I mean? You'll annoy the shit out of people after two years with a successful record. Like I'm sure Mr. Jones got on people's nerves

after a while, you know? And the internet now, it will eat you up that way if you're not careful. Well, my generation, I graduated from college in 92 and we were just very, very, very wary and fearful of somebody becoming successful. Right. We wanted people, we wanted to keep them in their little cage over here where we love them. REM is a great example,.M. was like the best college radio band of the 80s. And then they started to actually become really successful. And it was complicated for a lot of us, right?

It's like, wait, wait. And I was still like, I'm all in. I like these albums. And other people are like, nah, fuck it. They're too mainstream now. And then you'd kind of shift to like the Pixies or, you know, Billy Bragg or whatever. You would just have the people,

like you would gravitate toward the people. When it happened with Nirvana, my buddy House, who loved the album before the album that blew up. And then when it happened with them and you could see Cobain was like, wait, I don't want this. This wasn't what I intended. It didn't seem like you totally wanted it either

based on the second album. Well, I think, I'm trying to think of the best way to put this. was very worried about it you know i've seen this come and go in people's careers as a fan you know uh it was pretty obvious to me you know we were mr jones was a sort of single we eventually put out the video i refused to do anything but round here for the second single because i i really wanted to establish who we really were and the plan was always to go with rain king after that but we were so big by the time round round here was out that i went to the rec company i said i'm done i won't release any other singles i won't make any more videos this album is big enough i want a career, not one record. And it has to stop. And I, and they were furious.

And like, I was like, I don't care. I, this is great. But also I was, you know, I'm a weird guy. I'm very awkward around people at times. It was hard for me having to talk to everyone in the world. All of a sudden to have the whole world come to you was difficult. And I was friends with Kurt and I saw what happened to him. And he looked to me a lot like me three years later, you know, and he was a very, very sweet guy. I mean, I'm not best friends or anything. I knew him though. We were label mates and I really liked him. And then while I was in London, not London, I landed in, I remember very distinctly landing in Paris in April of that

year. You know, we were supposed to be on the cover of Rolling Stone. We were waiting. I had just met David Wild, the writer and Mark Seliger, the photographer, and they were actually really good guys. And I finally felt better because I was nervous about being on the cover of Rolling Stone. People won't realize it now, but that wreck, that magazine was omnipresent. It meant your face was going to be on every street corner in America. Well, that magazine was on the present. It meant your face was going to be on every street corner in America. Well, that SNL, the combo of that, there was no way to recover from the fame combo of those two things. I mean, I was very nervous about that. And I'm in that hot, that hotel in, in Paris. And there's a, they asked me to come to like the courtesy phone.

And when I picked it up, uh, my former A&R guy told me that they, cause Kurt had been missing for a few days. They found his body and he killed himself. And I'm sitting there in this lobby, having gotten this phone call, maybe I'm the first person in Europe to find out, you know, and I look at it, these two guys from Rolling Stone who want to put me on the cover of Rolling Stone. I was terrified, you know, and, uh, you know, I, I knew that I wasn't as comfortable with that stuff as a lot of other people would be. And it was awkward and difficult for me. And I had a hard time with it. And I really, I was scared. And I, you know, I didn't look, I wanted to be a rock star,

but you don't know what that means until it happens. It lands on you. Like, you know, and for me, I struggled. I mean, look, I've said this a million times. If you woke up on Mars, you'd take a few days to get used to the gravity. You know, it's been 30 years now. I'm used to the gravity. I still am awkward. But, you know, I got a little burnout. I just took the last seven years, not off. We've been playing tours, but I didn't want to put out another record because I wasn't

ready to do all this, you know? Right. But yeah, especially at that time i really really struggled and it took me a while and i i got out of the bay area i moved to la you know and i and then i felt better i wanted to be creative again but yeah but the thing is i've always written songs about myself and my life and how i feel so of course the second album was going to be about a struggle with fame because that's what my life was about right then it was about i became a famous rock star and here's what i went through and these are they're just as honest as the songs on the first album they're just maybe a little less relatable i guess because i was going

through something kind of unique right then right well it's i mean honestly one of the great music genres right the artists struggling with the fact that they become way more famous than they thought they were going to be. You had Have You Seen Me Lately, which there's two versions of it, right? Because you do the second one and the unplugged. Oh, yeah. We had that. We played Storytellers and we made everything acoustic. And

the unplugged acoustic version is, I think, incredible. I think it's in the running for best song you've ever done. And the performance of it. And it's my daughter's. I think it's in the running for best song you've ever done and the performance of it. And it's my daughter's favorite. But it's all about not being able to deal with being famous

and not knowing who to trust and all that. What's cool about it, though, is the fast version of it, it hits like a totally different way. And it's like two different experiences, which I think is a really hard needle to thread. I thought that was really cool. where it's like two songs that can mean two different experiences, which I think is a really hard needle to thread. You know, it's like two songs that can mean two different things, basically.

Well, you know, the songs have a lot of different shades. At least, you know, when I'm writing, I try to write about, they're not simple. Like even Mr. Jones is about fame and the desire to be a rock star and the dream of it. And it's also about, this isn't going to be what you think it is. It's not going to fix everything in the world.

You're just going to be famous, you know, which is great in some ways and not great in other ways, you know, and, but all of my songs have those things in them. And the nice thing about acoustic versions is, you know, it's like Beatles songs. Once you've heard something enough, I don't know that you hear it anymore. You just kind of know it, you know, but acoustic versions give you a chance to like open up some of the other facets of the song and introduce people to other things that are going on and explore different kind of emotional parts of those songs.

Maybe lean a little bit on something else. So if a song has been leaning 70% one way, maybe you can lean it a little the other way. I think those versions on that, Storytellers, I think the one of Angels of the silences is really cool fantastic beautiful um like with accordions and the mandolins it's a great uh version of that on there yeah we really i really enjoyed like that was a lot of work too man because you have to come up with whole new arrangements for all your songs and you guys are playing different instruments too right you're

like fucking around with people just doing grabbing another one for one song that they didn't normally play yeah i mean it was like we really put a chance that whole summer when we were on tour for for recovering the satellites we worked every day at soundcheck and we added acoustic sets to the set in the middle to make ourselves develop all these different versions of the songs to play on storytellers because i wanted it to be like a completely, like a whole new album full of these songs. How did you find your guys? What year was it? And how many of them were people you'd known for longer

than just you're looking for people to fill out a band? All of them, really. I mean, we were all in other bands. I met them. I mean, Dave Bryson, after my first band split up, I decided I didn't want to play music anymore. I was kind of like my first experience. It's hard running a band. You end up fighting with your friends. I realize now it's just part of it. Yeah. The first time that happens,

it was kind of hard. I mean, honestly, it's what separates people who do things for hobbies from people who do things for their life. You know, the hobby is just for fun. And the first time you run up against something that's not fun, it's a big thing you got to get over and i had a problem with that at first and i decided to like earn a bunch of money and go backpacking around europe and quit playing music and then get on with my life oh so you're one of those guys yeah i went to go play i went to go backpack around europe but as soon as you're like ethan hawk and reality bites a little bit you know but when i landed in europe immer joined uh camper van beethoven and went on tour opening for uh 10 000 and i was like oh fuck you man that sounds awesome he's playing

the greek theater i'm like okay i gotta go back home i was away for a few months and i was like i can't do this anymore i gotta go play music but the night before i left i'd gotten together with some friends and i they introduced me again to dave Bryson, who I'd met when he was doing sound for one of my bands once. And we started doing some stuff together. And so I kind of had something to come back to. And all the other guys, they played in other bands that we like open for or closed for. I knew Dan and Charlie. They were in this guy, Patrick Winningham's band. They later released a a tender mercy's record a few years ago but that band was really good kind of country gospel um you know bowman i knew from another band called a mad affair uh charlie matt was in dave bryson's old band and then eventually like when we got jim bogus i'd known him for years he played in a band

with emmer and he also played with cheryl crow uh yeah so immer and i had been friends from the very beginning he plays on the first 45 i ever made we'd always wanted to be in a band together and we just assumed we'd start one one day but once i got into counting crows i wasn't leaving so we had to decide that he was going to join our band which we but what's crazy about it is you had so many songs for the first album like you left stuff off that became in a couple cases some of people's favorite songs from the band i don't know i don't understand how you were that prolific with the first album well i mean i've been writing songs for all and i think that uh i'd been in some really good bands and i tried to bring those songs to those

bands like round here isn't even a it was like it was a himalayan song uh the other ones you know so the ones that didn't end up on the record i think they're really tuneful uh they're pretty cool melodically i don't think there were anything we really would have even considered for the first album some of the demos ones there's a song called the 40 years there was another one called love and addiction you know we didn't even really consider those songs for the first record. Einstein on the Beach was never even considered. What about Marjorie? Marjorie was.

Marjorie we tried to make on the first album and tried to make on the second album. Marjorie's got a different problem. It's just got a structure problem. It's a really cool verse. It doesn't really have a chorus. It just kind of had this refrain. It built in a really cool way. It just Marjorie and Shallow Days.

I thought we're both really good. They just had some structural problems that we realized when we went to record them that kind of, they just didn't work. So you were thinking about that album, how all the songs almost like a batting order in baseball. And if you put the wrong, even if it's a good song on its own, you put that song in the batting order and it's kind of screws up the album. Well, yeah. And I think one of the reasons we've never made bad albums is I have a really high bar and I'm really strict about like what goes on a record.

Some of those songs, even though they're really great melodies and they're tuneful, it just didn't mean enough to me. You know, it's got to really mean something and like like einstein on the beach which is a great song and really catchy piece of pop it was me trying to learn how to write a pop song and i love it but it's more clever than it is meaningful and i never even considered it for the first record i have a marjorie story i bet no you don't get that a lot Remember this was the mid-90s Where the era of bootleg CDs Where you could get Because we didn't have the internet

And there was this place in Boston That used to sell them And there was a Counting Crows I don't remember if it was one CD or two But it was some concert you played in Europe And Marjorie was on it And I was like I can't believe they didn't put the song on the album.

And also it's like, it's really dark. It's like one of the darkest ones you've done. It's like, it's actually like a short story. But anyway, somebody broke into my car two years later and they took like my 12 best CDs,

including that one. It was gone. There was no record of it. And I was like, Oh, so then years later, but yeah, they that one, it was gone. There was no record of it. And I was like, oh. So then years later, I'd be like, yeah, they had this song Marjorie. And then all of a sudden the Spotify, now it's back. They released like some massive August

and that exact song that used to be on the thing is now you can find it on Spotify. And it was a live performance of it. It was good, but it was, it must be weird for you that these songs can just come back to life in this weird way in the internet era but those demos that we made at first got out the demos that got assigned and they had all those songs on them you know they they got out early on i think it was called i think the bootleg was called flying demos so people have had those and they

got on the internet pretty early um i mean, I've actually gone, there were things I was looking for that I had to find on the internet. I had to find the internet myself. I hadn't heard a version of August and Everything After for years, the song. And when I wanted to play at one point, like, I don't know, like maybe around the millennium or a few years later, I had to find that on the internet, our webmaster. That might be the one where I actually went on Twitter and said, hey, I can't find a copy of this song. Anyone got it? And somebody's like, yeah, I got it here.

He sent me an MP3. I can't remember if that's the case. But it was one of those songs I had. There were a couple that I was looking for at one point that I've only found through the internet. So when you're laying out the first album and you go round here in Omaha, back to back, which it's really hard for an album to do this.

And it's like rarefied territory where the first two songs set some sort of mood. And this album, for some reason, is just like throw this on a road trip. I'm on a train. I'm moving in some way. And you put it on and it's like the perfect thing to start.

Do you know that as you're picking the songs? Do you, do you think about what should be for, yeah. Cause it seems like you're the type of guy who would obsess. I don't know that it's going to work, but I'm really, really, uh, focused when I'm making sequences. Like it's really important to me that a record flow from top to bottom. You know, it's not a surprise when I think about it, that I made a record where all the songs are connected like this one, because it's really important to me that a record flow from top to bottom. You know, it's not a surprise when I think about it, that I made a record where all the songs are connected like this one, because it's always really, really important to me to get them. I've left some of my favorite songs off records because as good as they were, they didn't flow right. The record didn't work. I left Chelsea off of recovering the satellites. It's one of the best songs I've

ever written in my life. Um, and one of my favorites in that it was just this, uh satellites it's one of the best songs i've ever written in my life um and one of my favorites and that it was just this uh it's me on piano and vocals and a trio of horn players from new orleans that were really good friends of mine just sax trumpet and uh trombone my friend curtis watson who plays the trumpets on uh angel 14th street brought two of the guys from his band the soul rebels brass band at the time and the four of us just did that song but it's fucking incredible but that piece of piano and horn kind of concerto didn't work i could not find a way to fit it in recovering saturdays where it flowed and eventually i had to leave it off i just it was upsetting but it was i couldn't do i did the same thing with baby i'm a big star now the song we put on the end of i was gonna ask you about that from rounders yeah well you know it's because i did not on anywhere by the way it's not on no i know that's my fault

and i'll tell you how it happened i had you know i wrote colorblind and like the day after i wrote colorblind those guys came to me and asked me to come see a screening of their movie and showed me Cruel Intentions. And I said, this is the weirdest thing, but I think I wrote the perfect song for that scene last night. I don't even have a demo yet. I'll have to go do it. You know, so here's the escalator with Ryan Felipe. Yeah. I mean, that's definitely going on our record and I already know it's on a soundtrack and a movie. So a month later, John Dahl comes and says, I'm directing this movie uh called rounders and i really want you to do a closing theme for it i was like oh my god john doll he's a genius absolutely you know so they showed me rounders i loved it and i went and i wrote and i'm in the

middle of recording uh this desert life at this point um but i write a lot while i'm recording and i just finished like before i did uh colorblind iblind, I had just finished Mrs. Potter's lullaby, which I also wrote in the studio. And, uh, I wrote baby, I'm a big star now. And we recorded it and man, it's just such a cool song. I mean, I loved it, but I know it's gone on the record. And so I told people from rounders, you can have this for the movie. Absolutely. I'm going to give it to you. It's written for your movie. It's about your movie. I just just you can't have it for the soundcheck album because i've already got one song on another record pretty soon there's going to be nothing on our record that's not like already somewhere else no one's going to want to buy our record

but then when i went to sequence the record um i could not get baby on big star now to fit on the record it just it's too long it didn't. I already had like this eight or nine minute song and Mrs. Potter's lullaby. All my friends is five minutes. Wish I was a girl. There's like all these long songs. I could not find a way to sequence it and have baby. I'm a big star.

And it did kind of stick out a little bit. Cause it's not about the same stuff as the other songs. And I left it off. But the problem is because I didn't give them that song, there's no soundtrack album. I think there's like a score album for the movie, but there's no like soundtrack record. I don't think either way it wouldn't be on it.

So where's the song? Is it hiding in Bulgaria? How does it get on the internet? It's the only place it is on the end of the movie. But don't you own the song? Yeah, but I haven't put it out on anything. I love that song. Just put it on Spotify. Just give it to them it's easier said than done you've never been on a record company but what do you think the chances are they've lost it

oh interesting i mean look let me put it this way bill i i wanted some stuff from uh recovering the satellites when we were doing i was looking for this piece of one of the songs that I wanted to try and use on Saturday nights when we did Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. And I couldn't get people to call me back. And finally they admitted to me that they had lost it because all of Recovering the Satellites was gone because they never picked it up from the mixing studio.

They have the, when we finally mixed it for the last time, it was too hard because there's too many tracks and you had to use these slave reels where you put two tape decks together to mix something. It's a real pain in the ass. So the guy who mixed it took everything over to a digital 48 track and just mixed it off that so he could do it on one board.

They got the digital 48 tracks back from the thing, but they never picked up the two inches. They just lost them when they were done. Like at the very beginning, forget storage. They lost them five minutes after we finished mixing. And the 48 tracks only have the stuff we put on the record. So the other stuff that was never mixed then, like the stuff we were working on, songs we were in the middle of, they're just gone. Then for years since we did Recovering Satellites, because we filmed like four different things, the Storyteller Show, Live at the Ten Spot, both of which are on that live album, Josh Taft, who did the Alive video for Pearl for pearl jam filmed the first concert which we took the video of uh angels of the silences from it's a great concert film and then uh what are their

names valerie ferris and jonathan ferris and valerie who did a little miss sunshine they did like a a documentary of us while we were making the record. And so I was like, on our 10th anniversary of that thing in 2002, I called the label up. We want to do a deluxe edition of Recovering the Satellites for the 10th anniversary, but we want all this film. We know there's not a lot of extra tracks, but we need all this film stuff. They wouldn't get back to me. They just kept putting, oh, we can't find it. It's somewhere. We'll look for it. Years go by. 15th anniversary. I do the same thing. Ask for it. Nothing comes back. I don't know if you heard this a few years ago, but it turned out there was a big fire at one point.

Universal's vault. Yeah. And they hadn't told anybody about the fire because they didn't want, they were embarrassed because they lost all this stuff. So they still won't tell us what's lost. I don't know what's lost,

but I know they had a fire. I have no idea if you have two choices. You could either just, just cut it out of the end around her. So just release it, like just remix it, make it better. Or you do the Taylor Swift and you just redo it. I've never, it's like so hard for me because I sing everything so differently the day after we get out of the studio. Yeah. That the thought of, I mean, we should have re-recorded everything years ago, but I'm afraid it wouldn't sound anything like the records at all. In a weird way, it makes the song, it gives it an extra oomph because it's just like,

it's gone. It's just, you have to watch the end of Rounders. That's the only place you can hear it. I did. I did it like a few, like last year sometime, I literally put on the end of the movie cause I was just dying to hear the song. Yeah. It's really good. Going back to those first two albums. Who is, who's Maria?

Cause one of the things I like about what you do is we kind of go into your universe with the songs, right? The songs are going in all directions, but you have like a couple of characters in the songs. And one of them is Maria, who I know nothing. I have not Googled this. I didn't research it, but my takeaway from at least the first two albums was like, oh, this was the love of this guy's life and broke his heart. But was that a real person or is it like a conglomerate of multiple people? Who was it? Maria is like the one character on all the early records that isn't actually a real person.

It was just like almost like a stand in for me in some ways, a stand in for like all the things that make me want to write about things. It was the one kind of fictional character. I mean, I've written in the last few records a few more of those. But before that, I really kept everybody's real names in it. I think partially it was I had a crush on Maria McKee before I was friends with her. I mean, the funny thing was I was really good friends with her after that.

But I think it's maybe why I used the name, but it really wasn't about her. But then once I used it around here, I would come back to it in other places to talk about those same things you know well it's also it's a great word to say in a song because it's basically you get three syllables and five letters yes you could throw it in wherever you could rip it off or you could say it slower but yeah I figured

it was a composite character or something because I thought it would have been weird if there was some girl named Maria just walking around francisco going he won't stop writing songs about me he keeps throwing me in like it just would have been a little strange well the nice thing when i write songs about people is they're generally not terribly critical of them right i mean like anna monica potter uh elizabeth they're, those songs may make them sad, but they love those songs. And the songs are very respectful of them. I mean, but I don't write much about why things are someone else's fault. Well, Anna Begins was about, that was definitely about somebody.

Which one? Anna Begins. Oh yeah. And she's a very good friend of mine. She's still, I still know her really well. She's married with three kids. She lives in Sydney. She's always, she was an Australian girl that I met on that backpacking trip right before I came back.

Oh, by the way, I meant to tell you this when you said it earlier. The song that I started The Real Counting Crows with was Marjorie because I wrote that on the plane or I think I wrote that on the plane coming back from Europe on that trip, keeping it in my head, just humming it and then getting home and figuring it out on the piano. But I think that's the first, that's the song that was actually kind of the first Counting Crows song. Wow. And it's still unbelievable to me. It didn't end up on the first two albums, but it makes sense the way you explain it. It doesn't fit. I have a voice memo in my phone right now from sometime last year during the

pandemic where I was thinking about how do I fix that song? Does it need a chorus? And I like recorded some ideas I had that might launch out of that pretty well. Instead of just going to that instrumental break, what if it went to, I don't know. And I, so I was actually looking at that last year, um, long before I, it must have been, no, it must have been 2019 because it was before I ever wrote anything off the suite. I found myself thinking, how do I fix that song? Because it's broken.

Yeah, but see, I disagree. I think in concert, there's like this long break, right? There's like a four second silence near the end. And it's really effective. I think that's an impossible thing to pull off when you're in a room with like, I don't know, 7,000 people, 15,000 people, the song builds to something and it stops. And then the crowds kind of, you can kind of feel the energy of the crowd being like, wait, what's going on? And then you go again.

I don't know. There's something dramatic about it. I don't know if that song needs a chorus. It's weird, though. It worked live. It worked live at first, but there's a different kind of scrutiny when you put something on a record. You get swept up in the moment live, and you can get away with a lot of shit live

that you can't get away with on record. And I didn't realize that because I really loved that song. It really was the birth of the band in some ways, and it's a great song. I mean, the verses are pretty killer. They really good you know but there was just a way there was something that got exposed when we went to record it and we did it for two different records there's a version the only version i have i'm sure i actually have the original one of those demo

things but like the version for uh it's really cool on satellites because it has all this melatron flute stuff like sounds like Penny Lane flutes. And it's actually a really cool, the thicker distorted guitars against the Mellotrons in those breakdown sections between the verses. They're really, it's really cool, but it just doesn't work somehow. It just, there's something that you get away with live that we weren't getting away with on tape.

It just kept happening and it needed something. And I, yeah. There was a weird backlash against you with people my age, um, heading into the second album, just cause you kept dating celebrities. Were you aware of that at the time you kept dating the best looking celebrities of our era? And at some point people like me were like, what the fuck? Fuck this guy.

How does he keep guy how does he keep how does he keep getting these people what what is happening but so were you aware of that because this was early internet oh yeah yeah i'm fucking charming i mean i really am like just about the nicest guy you'll ever meet when i'm being nice other times not so much you know uh yeah i mean i didn't know what to do about it i mean i thought it was going to happen which is why i tried to shut down that first album i was sure it was going to happen and i wanted to try and avoid it um yeah i didn't know what to do about it i mean like i was getting pillared for dating beautiful women but like it seemed like a

great idea to me right and i was getting in trouble for like, I wrote an album about struggling with fame, but I mean, I was struggling with fame. So did you want to be a celebrity or you didn't? Cause it seemed like you didn't want to be a celebrity, but on the other hand, you're in relationships with some of the highest profile women of that era. So it's like, you kind of at least didn't mind that part. No, not at all. I mean, I mean, why would I, I mean, I mean, other than like what it's actually like to date actresses who are insane people, you know, uh, that's the only part I minded, but no, it's like, I was, I moved down to LA cause in my working, in my struggling artist town, everyone was furious that I succeeded. I moved to a working artist town where people just wanted to know what kind of work I was doing. And I loved moving to LA. I met, I mean, I, I worked at the Viper Room. I, it wasn't just the

girls. I met William Burroughs and I met Allen Ginsberg and I hung out with them and I hung out with Tom Petty and, you know, Gibby Haynes, you know, and, and I got to go to, you know, I love movies. I've been a fucking movie freak my whole life. I absolutely love films. And I got to go to movie premieres. I would often try and sneak past. I would ask them if I could just sneak around the line. I didn't want, I really don't like taking pictures. It makes me intensely uncomfortable in front of cameras. But I did want to go to movie premieres. That seemed like so much fun. Me and my friends would go, we'd party, we'd meet hot girls. Like what else would you want to do? It's like, I'm just like like it's a normal all-american boy

i just wanted to meet girls it seemed like a really great idea and the girls you know all of a sudden when your tv and your movie screen turn into windows instead of walls you know like that you can walk right through that's really cool but like i i didn't like taking pictures i was just you know the problem is people don't want you to pick and choose but in life we pick the things we like and do them and we try and avoid the things we don't like if if they're required as part of our responsibilities we do them like everybody as a grown-up you do the things that your responsibility demands that you do i liked going to movie premieres and seeing movies before they came out i thought that was cool. I still think that's really cool. I hate the photo lines. I still can't stand it.

I feel so stupid. The girls, what'd you say? You're going through this whole thing with fame because your album took off in some crazy way. And then at least, I think you're dating at least one of the friend stars as that show's becoming an even bigger phenomenon than your album.

Like 40 million people are watching that so you're you're watching it through that lens too and that leads to a lot of i think what was in the second album that's weird though because i when i met jen she came with some we had some mutual friends and she came to a show one of the before we record records for years we played viper Room shows. And so when I'm, because it was a great place to work on new songs and playing for audiences and it was where I worked anyways. So my friends brought Jen to the concert and they told me that she had a huge crush on me and they told her that I had a huge crush on her.

And like anybody with egos, what do you like more than someone who likes you? I mean, it's like, wow. I'm so, you know, the fact is I had never even seen friends because I had been on the road for a year and a half. The one thing you don't see on tour is primetime. So I had never seen friends. I had no idea. I had to ask Jen to give me a videotape. She gave me a box of videotapes with the first season i had never seen it but she was beautiful and really nice you know uh but i gotta tell you when i met her i'd never even seen the show i had i had no idea who she was she was just really pretty really funny really cool i mean it just seemed like why would i not want to date a girl like that it just seemed like a great idea right um but yeah and people got really pissed off about that stuff. And for like a good decade after that, we were really angry in the mid nineties. No, I mean, it was like

post magic Johnson. There wasn't a lot of premarital sex going on. We just, we had a big stick up our ass in the mid nineties. I didn't read a review of a record or a concert for 10 years that talked at all about the record or the concert. They were just like, this guy's fucking her. Fuck him. He's complaining about shit. He's whining, but he's fucking her. Fuck him. You know, and I was like, what am I going to do? Should I, why should I adjust my life? Because everybody else is a fucking idiot. You know, like I'm going to live my life and it's really having a, taking a toll on our career. That sucks. But I don't know what to do. I mean, I kind of got over

the actus. You first moved to Hollywood and everybody wants to date you. It's like, yeah, you're going to do it too. It's like, yeah, I was a single guy. I'd been a shy person my whole life. All of the most beautiful girls in the world arrived at my door. Well, you also, I almost feel like you had too many good songs. And now that we've had 28 years to kind of digest them and put them in a playlist or something. I was talking to a couple of people because I was telling a couple people I work with that you were coming on and they were just like,

God damn, they've had so many good songs. And I think sometimes there's a take for granted thing that happens with musicians, with directors, with actors or whatever. We just kind of get used to it because I love Mrs. Potter's a little bit. I think that's the best song you guys ever did. Like start to finish lyrically, musically. It's longer, obviously you put more into it. But by the time that album came out, I just feel like the bar was so high for you guys. And that song, I don't feel like has gotten its just due. Oh, I oh i don't think that especially that record which is maybe the band's favorite record in a

lot of ways yeah it's the one everybody wants to play in concert everybody wants to play potters they want to play wish i was a girl they want to play high life just for whatever reason within the band those songs the band is obsessed with playing because it's just they're so weird and complicated um yeah i mean i think i i read a review i've read a few reviews of this stuff for this record and i for the new record or mrs potter the new record yeah yeah no for the new record and i it's come up in interviews where people have said well you've never made a bad record that's weird after all these years or what does it feel like you've written so many songs that are all good? And, and I have to admit it for a minute, I thought, wow, it's so weird to

me that like, nobody thought so at the time, you know, and there's a part of me that feels like, yeah, this desert life, totally unappreciated. And because I think we were sort of a joke for a lot of years to people and a bit dismissed. But I said to this one guy the other day, you know, the truth is that bothered me like crazy in between records or when records are getting reviewed. But you go to make a record, you go to make a record. You don't think about any of that stuff. You write the songs because you feel some stuff. You record them. You make the best records you can. Every single one of our records is perfect to me. They're exactly, whether people like them or not, they're exactly what I wanted them to be.

I'm not one of those guys who's going to sit here and have a conversation with you about what he wishes would have been better. Because I don't feel that way about them. I feel like they're perfect gems. And I guess the thing that always occurred to me was this, I'm going to make these things. I'm going to make them everything I want them to be,

and they're going to be perfect. And that means that they're still there for people to discover later. So if people didn't like him at the time, or they thought we were a joke at the time, well, you know what? This desert life is still there. You could find it. If you thought, if somebody told you that it was ridiculous, that I was whining about while fucking famous chicks and complaining about fame is lame. Well, recovering the satellites is still there, man. You could just go find it and it's going to always be there. And so for me, that kind of was what got me through all that time is like, there's nothing I can do about this. You're going to live your life. I'm not going to live my life to satisfy all these other people. And I'm not going to the Grammys. I could give a flying fuck about the MTV Awards. I went once because I wanted to see R.E.M. play. I've never been to an award show except the Oscars that year

because I wanted an Oscar. My parents would have been great on their mantle. But that stuff doesn't mean shit to me. I've never been concerned with that stuff. I don't even care. We played the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I'm not sure I'd go if we were nominated because at the time it was magic to be at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Now I'm not sure if it means anything. After a lifetime in music, I realized award shows don't mean shit. My friends who are musicians, who love my music, who told me that I affected their music. Boy, when Chris Carraba, who's one of my best friends now, told me that his career is so much based on hearing my music. I mean, that means a lot to me because he's a genius. I love that guy. Here's something I'd throw at you based on relating to what you're talking about.

I think if you look at the bands, the non-grunge bands, the non-Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, the non-hip-hop acts, but you look at the bands and the artists that came out somewhere in that 91 and 95 range, which I think is the best stretch of music in my lifetime. Um, I wasn't there for the sixties,

but you look at hip hops, exploding raps, exploding. Um, we have all these grunge rock stuff. Huh? You're not with me. I'm there for everything.

I'm just saying it's my personal favorite. I'm not saying I'm right. I love it the most, but, um, I would say out of like the Cranberries, Dave Matthews, 10,000 Maniacs, all these other bands that kind of rose to promise for them, it seems like the County Crows music has endured the most now that we're in 2021.

And what's weird is, because I was trying to convince Billy Joel to do a documentary a few years ago and he didn't want to do it but I think he's like the on steroids version of what happened with the County Crows where I would say the County Crows even though I know it's County Crows the Billy Joel from 76 to 80 he's incredibly successful right he's selling out NBA arenas by himself he's playing a piano for 20,000 people. He's got

number one albums year after year after year. It's basically him and Elton John, the only two people like this. And he's taking shit the whole time, which leads to Glass Houses, right? But now 25, 30 years later, everybody's like, Billy Joe, I fucking love that guy. He's transcended these generations and none of that stuff matters. But I think it still really bothers him. And he didn't talk about it. He eventually stopped playing music because he's like, I feel like I have nowhere else to go.

I'm as good as I'm ever going to be. I don't want to do this anymore. You know, I'm absolutely certain you're right about that, about how he feels about it too. I was at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when he got inducted. And also it was and Roll Hall of Fame when he got inducted. And also it was the same night that McCartney got inducted

and Springsteen and the Springsteen with the E Street Band. And he was having a really hard time that night, I think. And so was McCartney because it was like either right after or the year anniversary of Linda dying. And he was kind of wrecked and i also think both of them were very hurt by the way the music business has treated them uh mccartney in like relationship with lennon making it in as

a solo artist years after lennon did because lennon was the cool one and mccartney was somehow in people's minds the sellout or something and. And, uh, and Billy Joel for what, exactly what you described, what he went through. And I was around both of them later that night too, talking to them and they both had clearly had a hard time there. It was relief in a lot of ways, more than just the joy of it. You know, they were struggling because look, music is like, unlike any other art form, it's our personal cool. We literally wear it on our shirts. You know, we define ourselves by the gang of people we like, the genre we like. We're cool. They're not cool because they listen to that. There's something about music that is more personal to everybody than other art forms are. And, you know, that's as a result of that,

we're always kind of redefining everybody because, you know, when you, as a result of that, we're always kind of redefining everybody. Cause you know, when you're discovering a band, it feels so cool to love them and be the one discovering them when you have to go to work and share them with the douchebag at the water cooler, who likes all that other shit music. You can't stand, you know, it suddenly it's like, oh fuck, man, I don't want to be in a club with this guy. I liked my club. Now I'm stuck in a club with you. You know, people are human and they're like that. it's critics are human critics man we're all music geeks you know like some of us grew up being music geeks both musicians and critics musicians don't grow up to be jocks in the same way that critics do sometimes critics grow up to like talk shit like like they didn't get to do it in high school

and now they want to bully and talk shit it's something that happens you know it's like you can bitch about it all day but it's just human nature and why should these groups of humans be different from other groups of humans you know you know you know the career has that you really did something i think this definitely goes for bill Joel when as the years passed, different songs you did become way more popular than they were in the moment. You know, like Billy Joel, like Vienna and Summer Highland Falls,

I think retroactively became two of everybody's favorite songs that he did, especially Vienna. Those were not like the hits from the 70s, you know? And then years and years later, as people are discovering his library, those are the ones that gravitated to. I always thought that part of the process is interesting. I'm sure it's happened with your music too. Like my daughter's favorite song of

yours is Mrs. Potter's Lullaby. She thinks that's, she couldn't believe that wasn't the biggest hit you've had. And I was like, yeah, it's just the way it played out. It was, it was Mr. Jones, which I think Mr. Jones, by the way, is now underrated. But in the moment, Mr. Jones was going to be the biggest song you ever did. It just was. Yeah. I mean, that stuff, you know, it is like you play concerts. It's it is Mrs. Potter's that they respond to. It is Mrs. Potter's that people have a deep or Anna Begins, not Mr. Jones. Not that Mr. Jones doesn't get a big thing, but people have these real emotional attachments to things, but also because they still belong to them. Those songs, they didn't have to share them with everybody, you know, like they're still, so they're still special.

And they have that, like the memory that you share of that moment with that song, whatever touchstone for you that it is, is still very much yours, you know, because that stuff is there. There's plenty of music that's that way for me too, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a weird thing. It's hard to live with people ridiculing things that are most important more important to you than anything in the world but look you can either crumble under that or not i'm a musician i wanted to play music i wanted to write songs it matters to me i may have taken a few years away from making records but though it's it's like well it's gonna say at some point you took seven years off here well not from playing though we were touring every year we toured for a decade straight when we finally took 2019 off which by the way just bad timing because that's the wrong year to take a

vacation right but i mean it's 2021 now and elevator boots is a hit on the radio and like i have done more press already for this record than I have done in, I don't know how many years. Like, I can't remember which record I did this much press on. It's been a really, really long time though. Um,

so we're not like, you know, the other thing that ends up at this point in your life, if you do last 30 years, which by the way, you won't, it never happens is that you end up just being a legacy band who plays greatest hits concerts,

which you did not do at this last album. No never we've been annoying i mean we've infuriated our fans by not playing greatest hits every concert by changing the freaking shows every night we've been operating like an unknown independent band since 1993 in a way that is ludicrous well that's been the biggest criticism with you right that yes you change you change even how you sing the songs in concert people can't join in when they're singing with you because you're going on you're stringing out a word or a phrase or whatever and they're like hey we're trying to sit with you buddy i am you're doing examining my own navel i'm interested in my own shit like you would not believe but like i am not interested in being the corporate sellout and we never have been we've

been doing our look we've made we made a covers album a few years ago. It's gotta be the most stupidly obscure covers album ever made. There's like one song on there that anybody would even know. Maybe two. If you know the faces, there's two. Otherwise there's one.

You know, and it's like, we've always been that way. We were always off doing our own thing because that's what we wanted to do. You know, like you sell 10 million records with T-Bone Burnett. They do not want you to go find Gil Norton because you like the Pixies. They do not care about the Pixies.

When you get a number one record with that, they don't want you finding the guys that did Sparkle Horse because you're obsessed with Sparkle Horse. That's your problem. They want you to fucking make After August and everything after, after, after, after. But like, you know, we've always done our own thing. And I feel really clean after all these years because of that. So I played elevator boots for my daughter. We were driving to a soccer game and I'm like, Hey, check out this song. It's just came out. Didn't say it was counting crows.

So she's listening. She's like, this is really good. It sounds like the counting crows. And I'm like, yeah, it does. So she hears the whole song. And then she was like, so who was it? I was like, it was Counting Crows. And she's like, what? You told me they weren't making music. She couldn't believe it. And we both thought it sounded like it could have come out, I don't know, 20 years ago. It really did sound like you guys.

Like 100%. It didn't sound, there was no age. It just sounded like you guys haven't missed a beat, which I think, as you said, like when you start ending toward the end of the third decade, your voice, you know, usually voices change, sounds change. It's just you end up being kind of the replica of yourself, but it's not you. But this actually sounded like you. Well, I mean, my voice, you know, I'm older and it doesn't have the range it used to have.

But I think I'm a better singer now than i was at the beginning um but you know i don't have the full high range i do sometimes we have to move songs down a little bit because otherwise we don't play them but uh what songs what songs did you have to change oh uh like uh another horse dreamers blues is too high uh i could sing uh have you seen me lately in angels of silences but it's a lot harder to sing them and i realized we weren't doing them as much and i really missed playing angels of silences and it's just that it was it's so loud that singing it that high would really wreck my voice during concerts so we just moved it down and then we could play it like we played it almost every show on the last tour we just we got into playing

angels of silences in a way we had in years because It had been just wiping out my voice during shows playing it and once we lowered it. Oh go keep me do it It's easier. It's no problem So it's kind of just because like I wanted some of these songs we realized we weren't playing them Made him a little easier to play There must be a few more but I don't remember which ones they are because I'm not actually playing while we're doing them can we talk about Miss Potter's La Bette for one second just because I'm interested in the process of creating a song

like that you have lyrics in there like if dreams are like movies then memories are films about ghosts which is just fucking cool yeah that's kind of true. But you have like these different moments in there. Are you writing one sentence lyrics that you're like, this is something I'm going to put this away for later?

Are you sitting out writing the whole song at once? Like, what's the process? That whole song is written in one night. One evening is long evening but uh i had they took i had a screening of a movie called it is robert town directed it it's billy crudup and her about uh steve the the orange kid who's the runner without limits that was fucking awesome yeah yeah and it's a great movie it's much better than the other movie about his life yeah it. It's a really well-made movie. I mean, Robert Towne directed it and wrote it. I love that movie. Yeah, it's a great movie.

And I just had such a crush on the girl in the movie. It really knocked me out. Monica Potter. Yeah. And we're in the middle of making This Desert Life. And I'm writing, I wrote half that record while we were in the studio. And I was just so fertile while we were recording. I just couldn't stop writing songs. But I was thinking about this thing I do, like falling in love with fictional

things, people on screens who aren't actually those people. It's so bizarre, you know, but it's a really interesting thing. And it's definitely been something that like has been a habit for me. Like I really do get caught up. Once I realized I could meet these people, I get caught up in falling in love with them. Like those are those actual people and they're not, you know, and we were working on the record and the, the piano is in a little, you know, it's in a house up in like, uh, East Hollywood Hills. And, uh, the piano is in a little room that's sealed off from the other things. We built this room so it's kind of semi-soundproof. Enough so that I could work in there when other people were working on other instruments. You know, electric guitars, not going to get bothered by the sound of a piano.

So I just kind of came up with this groove and I started working on the song. And I got like maybe the first verse and a chorus. And I loved it. I mean, it was so good, so catchy. And the guys, it's probably like seven o'clock at night and the guys go out to dinner and I'm like, I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to be here. And, um, either at the piano or I'm under the piano. Cause I had the habit back then of like, I climb under the piano when I'm, I got to, when I have the tune in my head enough, I'll sit under the piano with the pad and be writing lyrics and singing to myself. And then

I'll get back up and play them to make sure they work. So I'm up and down between the piano with the pad and be writing lyrics and singing to myself and then i'll get back up and play them to make sure they work so i'm up and down between the piano and under the piano and then the guys come back and they're back to recording and i'm like yeah i'm gonna stay in here and i'm working on this they get done recording it's one of my best friend's birthdays that night there's a birthday party the whole band's gonna go to the party i'm like yeah i'll meet you guys there later uh it's like because you feel like you're close at that point like you yeah i'm just still going and i'm writing verse after verse after verse i mean it's got about eight verses in it grouped in pairs of two i think is what this house song works right but i probably wrote about 12 verses and then you know rearrange them and cut them whatever

whatever i did to get it i don't think i wrote them exactly in order um but i i keep working at it they come back from the party. I never make it to the party. I kept telling them I was on my way. I never make it to the party. They come back one or two in the morning. I'm still there. They all go to bed because it's a house. Half the guys are living in it. I have my own place in LA at that point. So I don't live at the house, but I'm still there until about three in the morning when I finished the song, you know, and it's like, it's really good. I know it's really good. I can tell it.

It's just, it's so good. It's eight minutes long, which is a problem because it probably should be a single because it's so catchy. But anyways, we go back, get on with recording the record. I show it to the guys. Everybody loves it. They're flipping out. We can't wait to record it. But at this point, it's just, it's just the lyrics, the voice and the piano.

You haven't even put in the other stuff in yet. Yeah. So a few weeks pass because we're working on some other stuff. And we finish whatever we're working on. We're getting ready to record Mrs. Potter's Lobelite. It's going to be like, I don't know, it's like a Friday. We're going to do it on Monday night. We're going to start it Monday night and record it.

We spend the day Monday getting sounds. I get a phone call from my best friend, my friend Jen. And she tells me that she's a movie producer and she tells, she's the girl that got hit by the car. She's a long December's about her spending all the time in the hospital with her when she was hit by a car. And she tells me that she's working on a movie and she's been talking about a part for this woman. And this agent wants her to use Monica Potter. They get to talking about it. And she tells her, well, it's really funny. My best friend just wrote this song about her. use monica potter they get to talking about it and she tells her oh it's really funny my best friend just wrote this song about her it's really good

and she's like you got you're kidding me i i gotta tell monica can i tell monica and the girls she says yeah so they call the monica is so flipped out she's a huge counting crows fan they want to have dinner that night and i was like wait so you didn't know she was a counting crows fan you just liked her from the movie? I didn't know anything about her. Yeah, I was thinking. Wow, okay. She's a chick from Cleveland.

Good way to get to meet her. Write an eight-minute song about her. I mean, I knew. I was really good friends with Billy Crudup because my other best friend, who I've known since 1980-something, is Mary Louise Parker. We met when we were in Berkeley when we were kids,

who is, you know, at that point point living with Billy here in New York. So I, but I've never had a chance to bring it up. I wasn't, I don't know if I ever would have brought it up. It's just so weird. It's weird enough that I do that sort of thing. I don't need to like inform my friends of it. But so I end up going to dinner with them that night. And I take, you know, it's okay.

We take a dinner break from the studio. So I go down to this restaurant in Hollywood and then it's me. And the girl's like, I want to have dinner with him, but I don't want to go alone. And I was like, neither do I, you know, it's like me and my friend, Jen, her and her agent or manager, one of the two, whoever that woman was. And we all have dinner together. And we talk about it midway through dinner at Monica's finally like, okay, I gotta, I gotta just ask what's the deal with this song. And I said, well, I mean, it's not really a song about you. It's a song about me, but you're like a part of it because it's about like, I, it began from this idea of me, you know, having crushes on girls in movies. And, you know, I saw without, we talked about it for a little while. She goes, oh man, I can't wait

to hear it sometime. And I was like, well, this is going to seem weird, but we're actually recording it tonight. We've been doing sounds all day are you fucking kidding me we're about to start recording this song and it's literally it's right near there because i i couldn't go far i was in the middle of working so i just came down the hill to the restaurant it's basically at the bottom of the hill from where we're recording so i'm like we're in this house if you guys want to come up you can so her and her manager and jen they all come up to the house walk in the door i'm like guys this is actually monica potter um and we start playing we play the first version of the song and i'm taking a break to see how it sounds when i go in the studio she's gone they're like where

is he she's my producer says she ran out the back door i go back there she's like happily in tears she's you know she's just gone through a divorce a little while before that i don't think anybody had actually spoken nicely to her in a little while you know so and this is kind of overwhelming so she she listens to it a couple more times then she asked if she can come in the piano room where i am instead of being in the control room and be there so she sits and get her a pair of headphones she's like sitting on the piano bench next to me when i'm playing the song the last we played it maybe seven or eight times and it's killer and we stopped for the night you know it's really really good and I and a little while after that I see Monica again a couple days later we end up starting starting to date you know and I I was gonna say if you didn't at least go on two dates with her

after this then I that would have been the all-time Bill Buckner through the legs moment. Yeah, no, it's not that. Although, man, that was heartbreaking. It was. Believe me. It's tortured me for 35 years. I know. As a kid who also lived in Boston as a kid,

it was like, oh. Yeah. So anyways, moving past that, I don't even want to think about that. That and fucking Kirk Gibson. Sorry about that. I threw you off. It's okay. So we start dating.

And she lives like further out in the valley, like past towards Van Nuys. And like after work, I'll kind of go out there some nights and hang out with her. And so two weeks pass. And we've spent those two weeks diligently ruining the song.

And I mean, ruining the song. You can get tunnel vision when you're working on something and you go down the wrong road and something which was amazing. I mean, it was so good that night and it's all of us playing live, but we've been overdubbing for two weeks now.

And the song is the biggest piece of steaming shit you have ever heard in your life. It's fucking terrible. And I'm frustrated, angry. I don't know what's happened either. I just, it was so good. And now it's utter shit. I don't know what the problem is.

But I go out to Monica's house. She's like, how are you? I'm like, I'm just really bummed out. She's like, what's wrong? And I was like, the song it's terrible. And she goes, no, that song's great. I'm like, no, it's fucking terrible. Monica. She's not as fucking great. I'm like, Monica, I just left the studio. It's fucking terrible. She goes, no, I just heard it. It's fucking great. Like, what do you mean? You heard what? She goes, I got a cassette of it. What is it? She hands me this cassette. She goes, I don't know. When I was leaving that night, your, your producer gave it to me. It says, Mrs. Potter's lullaby, pick four, just TK four. I was like, oh, let me hear it.

She plays it for me. Fucking awesome. It's so good. And I said, oh, so that, so you knew how to fix the song. I said, I guess got to borrow this cassette. She goes, you got to bring it back. I'm like, well, I got to, I will bring it back, but I got to borrow it. I go into work the next day. I'm like, everybody, just nobody stop what you're doing. Come in the control room. Listen, I played it. It's like awesome. They're like, oh, what the fuck is this? I go take four. We got, we just got to like, be really careful now. We're gonna start just whatever we're working off of. Forget that we're going back to take four, the drums and the keyboards are fine.

So it's almost like a writer just being like, I just went sideways. I'm just, I'm dumping the last 20 pages I wrote and I'm starting over from page eight. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of what you sometimes it's, it's easy in the studio to like lose your focus and get tunnel vision and like not, you can lose the big picture. It's why for years I didn't want to work in recording studios. I only worked at houses because I didn't want to be in one of those places where it felt like we had to be perfect and right. Cause that's what we were doing with Mrs. Potter's Lobby.

We were getting it right. And it was dead and lame. It was just limp, but it had been perfect. And all we did was go back and be really, really careful this time about whatever we were doing wrong. Just go back to this. This is really, and it was, and you know, and that's what you hear. It's just take four with, you know, there's still some overdubs, but we didn't fuck it up the second time. So how long did you last with Monica? How many dates?

Oh, I don't know. We dated for like, uh, probably a few months, maybe oh i don't know we dated for like a probably a few months maybe i don't know a while ago what a great story for her plus she built her confidence back up yeah i mean we're still friends i stayed friends with her forever um you know like we would for years and years we would play cleveland she would come out with her whole family they're great and i i just it came up something the other day and so i I sent her a note on Instagram or something and said, hey, how are you? I just saw this thing you did. And so we just talked, it was like a month ago, maybe. And she seems like she's great.

She's happy. She's a great girl. Just a little crazy. But they're all crazy, you know? But she's a great girl. But you knew that with actresses at that point. Yeah, but I mean, like, they're so cute. What are you going to do?

That's what, when I was working with Magic Johnson and Jalen and I would always ask him questions about the eighties and, uh, he, we were just like, well, give us some lessons. And he's like, don't date actresses. That was, that was like, what his first was. He's like, he's like, they're always about what, what they're doing, what their, what their next thing is, their career. They get, they're going for this audition. doing, what their next thing is, their career. They're going for this audition. It's just them, them, them, them, them. And if you're a famous person, you're also kind of narcissistic about your career too. And it's just not going to work.

You know, it's very hard to find one. It's a lot. You've got to deal with a life where you're, it's so different from what I do. Like you're rejected or approved of every day, especially for a woman who has a brief window and then you're it's so different from what i do like you're rejected or approved of every day especially for a woman who has a brief window and then you're too old yeah but like there's so much rejection so much judgment for how how able you are to pretend to be someone else that it can be hard to figure out who you are for actors being an actress is a tough tough life and uh i got a lot of sympathy for it.

Well, it seems like you, and you've talked about it. It seems like you're in a really good place last couple of years. It's, this seems like the most, uh, I don't know, gregarious or whatever comfortable you are with this whole thing about being a public figure, just talking about yourself. Well, I, you know, I, I, I've been in a really good relationship. I think I changed a lot over the years and I've been in a really good relationship for like four years now with someone who's really brilliant and a great writer and was a poet when i met her and has recently in going back to school again has discovered that she loves acting and i was like what are you fucking kidding me she's like she's only one point she wanted

there was a play she wanted to audition for it was probably going to be all remote because this is just last year. This happened because of the pandemic. She auditioned for Sarah Rule's Eurydice and got the part of Eurydice. It was the first thing she'd ever auditioned for in her entire life. First thing she'd ever wanted to do as an actor. She got the lead role and she is good at it. But I was like, oh, you've got to be fucking kidding me. I kicked this habit.

If you weren't so fucking cool i would dump you right now like but she is you know and i it's been different like i learned a lot about how to be a grown-up from staying in a relationship for once you know do you think the kind of career you had could happen now in the tiktok era yeah i mean i don't see why because here's the thing it wasn't tiktok then but it was other things there was always a thing that a lot of pressure whether if you wanted to feel it of people telling you how you should be to be you what kind of records you should make what kind of records you should make now that you had a hit record you know there has always been that and it's been hard but like it's always the same thing you can listen

to all that shit or you can be you you know people have more power than they think they do in the entertainment business you can always say no i mean they'll tell you what the consequences are and there will be real consequences but you can be you can do your own thing you know we had a huge fight at the beginning of our career with saturday night live they were great to have us on and they made our career they really did but we had made an agreement on some things they changed everything the week we were there doing the show what on what songs you were going to play what songs we were going to play what order we're going to play them in whether we're going to edit the songs uh all these things that we had all agreed on ahead of time they changed all of it uh and i and I would not bend. And, uh,

I really thought that it was, I knew it was important that the first thing the world heard from us was round here. And I didn't want to be editing it. And, uh, I had agreed to play the show because they agreed to let us play around here. And they made our career because we played around here on that show and our record, which wasn't in the top 25, jumped 40 spots a week. And it established us. Mr. Jones was a catchy song, but around here said what we were. And it made our career. Without Saturday Night Live, we would never have a career.

And it took me on the day of the show threatening to like, hey, I'm going to leave. Yeah. You're not telling me what to do. I'm going to fucking leave because we had an agreement and you're not doing it. And it's kind of punishment. I mean, we owe them everything. We do. We owe them everything.

And maybe I was wrong to be a stubborn asshole, but I thought it was important. Now, there are consequences. They made our career. They've never had us back and they probably will never have us back. And I totally respect their right to do that because I was a dick and I refused to back down. And I was terrified because who the fuck says no to nbc and the really the most influential show for forget the comedy uh but the nobody has done more for musicians than that show 100 you know and and uh like i said i without

a doubt i think they made our career but they've decided never to have us on again and you know you know, okay. I've learned you can say no. If you think something's important, you do what you think is right. You got to pay the consequences, but you know, it is possible to stand up for yourself. And just a lot of people, it's scary because it's so hard to get a job playing music and support yourself that when someone threatens you and tells you, whether it's a TV studio or your record company, that they know what you need to to do and if you're not going to do that well you may be a failure and it's all your fault shit's scary you're preaching in the choir on this stuff my friend but you know if you don't stick up for yourself and some sort of internal compass on what you think is the right thing to do there's a lot of mediocre people that can steer you in

the wrong directions and then you can't get it back. Yeah, and I know, like it was hard for me to hear about how we were a mainstream sellout band in a lot of ways when I knew that we hadn't backed down or bent for anybody. You know, like we had millions of dollars

offered to us from the record companies. We went to Geffen for $15,000 advance each of us. We took three, not each of us, $3,000 each on our first record because they gave us a higher royalty, allowed us to kind of believe in ourselves and they gave us complete creative control. Wow.

And I was ruthless about that, but they gave it to us. We traded all the money in the world for that. But, you know, I knew how we'd handled our career. So to read the shit if other people are saying about how we're like some kind of sellout it's like oh fuck you man i don't you don't see me showing up the mtv awards kissing everybody's ass and like i want to play music you know you know what's interesting about saturday night live and i think why it's such

an important pop culture document um it catches the guest hosts and the musician at this kind of perfect point of their career. Right. Like with that, like for instance, um, Olivia Rodrigo was on two weeks ago. She has her new album coming out. She's like for my daughter's generation, the most important person right now. And it gets her the exact week that's happening. And then 30 years later, you'd be like, Oh, that was the Olivia Rodrigo week. So like when you were on Saturday Night Live, they're catching you at that moment, right? Specifically. And sometimes it'll be a band that it was the one time it happened and then they disappeared and never thought about them again. Other times it's the beginning of something which happened, you know, most famously with Nirvana and

Pearl Jam, where it was like when they went on those shows and then they came back the second time, they were at a different point in their careers, right? They were like these established behemoths. The first time it was like, we're here. Which I think is a really, it's the, one of the things that has made that show stand out. Well, and because they're brave about it too. I got to give them props. Like I said, when they had us on that show, we weren't even in the top 200. I mean, not even our, our record hadn't even charted yet. I knew we were two 13 cause they, they do actually keep those numbers, but those numbers don't count. They're not real numbers. We were like a band that didn't exist. And they put us on Saturday night live. Good taste back then. Who was the guest host? It was supposed to be Tom Hanks,

but somebody, I have to say this this it is ludicrous somebody in his organization or just him realized that maybe the week they were releasing philadelphia saturday night live wasn't the way to promote that movie so at the last minute he dropped out and sarah gilbert did it and she was great she was really nice to us she was cool uh for roseanne but it was supposed to be tom hanks. But I mean, they're absolutely right. Maybe not Philadelphia. Yeah, that would have been a little weird. What advice would you give to a young songwriter, young musician,

somebody who's in their teens, who's looking at TikTok or wherever and thinking, I've got to do some dances. How does somebody learn how to write a song? Is it just listening to, you know, bands that they, and musicians that they want to emulate? Is there something deeper going on? Do they have to force themselves to rate 40 minutes a day? What advice would you give? Listen to all the great music that you love. I mean, study it, but also realize that at some point it's got to come down to, I mean, when I say studied, I mean, look at how hard people worked. People that are really, really

talented. Look how much they demanded of themselves. How they didn't take it easy on themselves. They didn't write the easy rhyme. How much they made themselves work. But at some point, it always has to be you sitting by yourself in a room, humming a melody that sounds great to you and writing something about yourself that you really feel, you know, and that can be, it could be about how you just like a beat, you know, James Brown wrote some songs that are just about get up on the good foot. They're some of the best songs ever written because he's really means it doesn't have to be a long in-depth you know it doesn't have to be like dax and brown or me or somebody you know it can be just get up on the good foot which is awesome you know but it's got to be something that seems like you just it

sounds great when you hum it and then like it feels great when you play it to you like more than anything else make something that means something to you i don't know what kind of advice advice to give people really because a lot of my advice being who i wanted to be through my career i caught a lot of shit for it i'm not sure it pays off to not go to the grammys to not go to the mtv awards i didn't want to it seemed like bullshit to me i didn't want to go but there like bullshit to me. I didn't want to go, but there's a certain advantage to going, you know, and being on TV and being playing at being famous, but not if it doesn't feel good to you. You know, I don't know what kind of advice to give you because the

stuff I did wasn't always the best idea. I might've hurt my band in a lot of ways, but I do think at the core, the most important thing is do something that means something to you. You know, like fucking do something you love and don't forget what everybody else says. You know, you know, I think, I think that's important. Well, I think with writing, the advice is pretty similar, right? Because people ask me, how do I become a good writer? And it's like, well, what books are you reading?

Oh, yeah, I should do that. You know, like, oh, what's your favorite book? What do you mean? And it's like, how do you become a good writer? If you're not reading everything, they have a fucking million books in my house, you know? And, and that was, I'm not, I'm no longer writing. My fingers don't work anymore. But when I did, you know, it was mainly because I was reading everybody I could possibly get my hands on and then trying to figure out what my style was out of all those people and it would seem to me that being a musician is the same thing right you're not only you're listening to all these different

people but you're taking little pieces of them and bringing them to you well when i first started writing songs i i thought they were pretty good and i liked it for the the moment i wrote my first song like to me i was a songwriter it defined my whole life from that moment on like i wasn't that good but it was who i was and i had a reason to be me a reason to be alive a reason to you know something to do and uh but after that i really wanted to learn more about it too i i think i did get like the rolling stone record guide and i just go, flip through it and find five star records and go listen to them because I wanted to learn about it.

I know at one point I went and started at the very beginning and went through every Stones record. It seemed important. Did the same thing with Dylan. I already knew it with the Beatles because my parents had those records, but you know, I went and I read and I read and I listened and I just, you know, I was. Who was the biggest influence? Big star probably, I guess. I mean, except at the beginning I was so into the Beatles know I was who was the biggest influence big star probably I guess I mean except at the beginning I was so into the Beatles when I was young as a songwriter probably

big star and how I wanted to run my career you know there's a huge failure in their career um but you know I idolized Alex Chilton and I loved Alex he was a lot of people from our generation idolized him. Well, because for me, it was... There are places that did a song about him. Yeah, I know. And that's why I said the 80s. Because for me, it was the birth of hip hop

and all the indie rock in the 80s that was really like... Although, if you really asked me, I would tell you that music has never changed. It's always great. It always has been. Sometimes it's harder to find. Like right now, there is more good music right now than there has ever been before.

There's never been a time anywhere close Like right now, there is more good music right now than there has ever been before. There's never been a time anywhere close to right now because you used to have to have a record contract because it was so expensive to go into a studio and you really had to have one because it was impossible

to distribute records. Printing up CDs and getting a truck to take them to some fucking store in Des Moines, like it was impossible. Well, think about our generation

because I think we're around the same age but like when i started buying cds i don't know 84 85 there was really only like 15 years of music to even draw from right and even some of the stuff in the early 70s i wasn't crazy about and now i look at my daughter's generation where it's basically 50 years of popular music that holds up there's stones albums from the late 60s that are still good now, you know? And there's so many different directions it's gone and I'm envious of that with them.

Well, yeah, the best stuff's never gonna stop being good. But also like their generation has, since everyone is free to do it in their bedroom now with a computer and all you have to do to distribute your record is upload it to Bandcamp. It means that it's available. It's hard to find, but it's all out there. You want to put the time in, you can find, you can drown in good music.

I can never catch up anymore. There's so much backlog of shit I have to listen to that I want to listen to that I'm dying to hear. I'm a million miles behind. Well, so the album's out. Elevator Boots, what made you, what, before we go, what drew you to that one? Were we trying to say how long did it take? You mean making it the single or just writing the song? See, just like that, just as an example, because that was the first one you released, but what made that one special to you? Well, it's really the one that like, it's also the

one that made the suite a suite because I wrote, tall grass was the first song i'd written in five six i don't know how many years um and i was playing it back for myself the next day and trying to see if it was done i was messing around with the ending singing those lines uh i don't know why i don't know why over this chords i changed the chords and sang it over some different chords and i kind of liked that and i started thinking well maybe this is a longer song. Maybe it's like Palisades Park, where it has some different movements. And then the music I changed it to, I sang this line, Bobby was a kid from around the town over that. And I thought, oh no, it's not a longer song. This is a different song. All of a sudden, I thought, what if I wrote a series of songs where the end of one is

the beginning of the next? And that got me excited about playing music again. That's the first time it made me really want to make a record, which is why I think two of the songs like Bobby and the Rat Kings and Elevator Boots are very much about my relationship with music, which has probably been the most important thing in my life, both as a kid who grew up and it was his comfort, his joy, his solace, like music I'm obsessed with. And also because at a certain point I began making it myself. And I think that Elevator Boots is about my relationship with it as a guy who plays and Bobby and the Rat Kings is about how I feel about it as a guy who loves music and who has

been a fan of bands and for whom other bands are a touchstone and they provide the emotional soundtrack to so much of my life and i think those two songs really you know in some ways maybe this record is about revitalizing my interest in something that has always been the central thing in my life that i was kind of taking a break from for a bit you know uh awesome well i think that gives me hope maybe maybe I'll end up writing something again. Who knows if you could make a comeback, maybe, maybe, maybe it's a comeback here. Uh, Adam Dirtz, it was great to spend all this time with you. I really appreciate it. And, uh, it's been awesome to watch your career unfold over the last almost three decades now. Thanks, Bill. I really

appreciate it. Anytime. Really. All right. That's it for the podcast. One more coming on Thursday. If you like Counting Crows, I did a playlist on Spotify. I'll put it on my Instagram stories, spitguy33. Solid Instagram feed. Mostly posts from me there. I've been laying off a little bit on the social media all over the place, but I still post on the Instagram from time to time. And also, if you really want a good Instagram feed, check out the Murph 33, our puppies are just where we post pictures of our

puppy. Who's not on a puppy anymore. He's a gigantic man. He's a seven month old man. And it's, it's been fun to post. We all take turns posting photos in that one too, because he cracks us up. So check that out if you love dogs. Who doesn't love dogs? I'll be back on Thursday with more. See you then. I don't have feelings within On the wayside I'm a bruised son I never want to say

I don't have feelings within