The Bill Simmons Podcast - MLB’s Struggles, NBA Asterisks With CC Sabathia and Ryan Ruocco, and Jason Gay on Pandemic Parenting and Regis Philbin

Episode Date: July 29, 2020

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons is joined by CC Sabathia and Ryan Ruocco of the ‘R2C2’ podcast to discuss MLB's shaky start to the season with multiple Miami Marlins players testing positive for COVID-19, how some of the concerns surrounding baseball can also be applied to the NFL, getting ready for the NBA restart, sports broadcasts during the pandemic, Ryan and CC’s dream podcast guests, and more (2:10). Then Bill talks with Jason Gay of The Wall Street Journal about some of the challenges the NFL will face for the 2020 season, how New York City has adapted to COVID-19, pandemic parenting, and the passing of Jason’s friend and TV icon, Regis Philbin (53:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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the podcast of CeCe Sabathia and Ryan Rucco. They're coming up in a second after we hear from Pearl Jam later. But this pod's been around for a couple years. It's excellent. And just in general, very excited at both of them in the ringer family. So we're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk

about what's going to happen with baseball. We're going to talk, uh, basketball stuff, you name it. It's all coming up. Also coming up, Jason Gay, our friend from the wall street journal, one third of the sports reporters, which we haven't done in a while. We have to bring that one back. By the way, we're going to talk about, uh, the pandemic, what it's been like as parents, um, what it's been like as sports fans. And we're going to talk about Regis Philbin who passed away, who was, uh, just a really enjoyable guy to have in everybody's life. But Jason had a personal experience with him. He worked with him and, uh, and he came on to talk about that and a whole bunch of other things. So that is all coming up. First, our friends from Pro Jam. All right.

R2-C2 has joined the Ringer Podcast Network. CeCe Spath is here. Ryan Rucco is here. They just recorded their new first podcast with Max Scherzer. And, I mean, we might as well talk about that. We're taping this. It's almost three o'clock Pacific time. CeCe is pessimistic.

If I give you over under nine and a half days left in this baseball season, you go over or under? I'm going way under that. Under. What would you do? Would you be done at this point? You would be in your car driving home? Yeah, you know what?

I would have... I keep saying that I wouldn't have started, but I know myself. I would have been out there with the guys. I would have been out there with my teammates. But this weekend, like after seeing what's happening now, like the Yankees going to Philly

and then staying there two days, not playing. Posted to come home to play tomorrow, but then now we're going to Baltimore. I would have definitely gotten my car and just drove the fuck home. I'm not doing this. My shit don't work like that. I can't do it. Well, it's starting to happen in football. I lost some of my Patriots defense today.

I've seen that. football. I lost some of my Patriots defense today. But I assume don't you guys think in baseball, we're going to just see guys be like, hey, man, I'm good. I'm out. I'm just leaving. And that's it. You know what? I will say, Bill, I would have thought that until we talked

to Max Scherzer. He had the most Pollyannic view of anybody I think I've heard from yet. Like he's like, yeah, we knew, I mean, you guys will hear when you hear the episode, but he's like, he's like, yeah, we kind of knew we were going to be dealing with this in some fashion at some point. So we've prepared to this and we feel like we can engineer around it. So it actually, it made me feel a little better because he's high up with the players union. So it makes me feel like that may be more of the consensus among the

players than I realized it was. Yeah. He made it, he made it seem, I mean, I mean, he has a great attitude about it, but he loves baseball.

He wants to pitch like he wants to be out there. So he wants this to work. You know what I'm saying? I mean, but I, you know, I mean, you know,

it is what it is. He knows, he knows a lot more than I do about it, but just outside looking in, I'm, I'm, I don't know what would it be like to be in that locker room especially like you know you're in a clubhouse

but people are trying to stay yeah within six feet of each other you're on planes together like i just i i would just think that'd be so weird we spend so much time together on planes like you know the yankees we have breakfast together like together on planes. Like, you know, the Yankees, we have breakfast together. Like we do a lot of things, you know, all together. So to not really have sit close to your teammates and like, you know, not be able to, to, to really hang out, um, seems like it'd be super hard, but, um, like, I mean, you know, like Max was talking about, you're here on the episode, you know, guys want this to work. You know, everybody wants to get out there and play.

So I'm sure everybody's following protocol as much as they can. But it's hard. Even when I'm down there, you know, I got the special assistant job so I can go down to Yankee Stadium. And you have to have a mask on all the time, like indoors. You know what I'm saying? So that just makes it, you know, a little tougher. But it's something that, you know, we can do to, you know, get the do to get the season off and try to get these fans a real season. Ryan, CeCe loves baseball and obviously would talk himself into any scenario. You and I are just fans, although you would do some announcing.

Have you been shocked by how boring baseball is when you strip away a lot of the stuff and it's just 30 seconds between pitches and nothing else happening and nothing else to look at? You know, what's funny, man, is I'm, I'm actually, I've been surprisingly happy with the crowd bikes and the way they've been, or the fake crowd noise and the way they've been pumping it in. So I think that like my focus in between pitches has been more on like oh you know what they kind of nailed that murmur like yeah that that sounds like the right crowd murmur right so so like i've been thinking of it more technically so i i've actually i've been good i i've been enjoying it but i you know i also i was actually thinking about it from a broadcasting

standpoint. I'm like, more than any other sport you do play-by-play for. And I do a ton of basketball and I do a good amount of baseball and I'll do some football and I do boxing. Baseball, you need to have all these stories and the conversations. And it's only about 10 to 12 minutes of action. So to your point you take away like the ability to get those stories to have those conversations for the most part and then the other stimuli in between pitches i was thinking about how often we're showing fans just kind of having fun i can go to a hot dog or something you know what i mean exactly i can go to paul o'neill like oh paul that looks good doesn't it yeah ryan you know let's get it ordered up to the boot you know like that's gone so to your point yeah that'll that would be challenging like to be on air during that time especially

i've noticed the announcers and you can feel this with the bubble basketball too they kind of is in basketball they're not there So they have no feel for how to interact with the game and in baseball, same thing. But now there's no fans, no noise. The announcers are really overcompensating and they're, it's almost like they, they feel like they have to fill the air and they're just going to keep

talking. And it's like, and it's like, I would actually go the other way and scale back. So I'm interested when ESPN and Turner take over, when we actually have the real games, we don't have local announcers anymore. I'll be interested to see how they handle that balance,

right? Because you don't want to overpower it, but you also need to fill the void. So there's some, there's some in between thing. I don't know what it is. Bill. It is so funny.

You mentioned that man. Cause I called the WNBA is opening four games this weekend from studio in Bristol. And I felt exactly what you're talking about. I like I called myself a couple of times like I am definitely and I talk a decent amount anyway. But like I'm like, I'm definitely talking more than I normally would, you know, because and in some sense you're like, well, because you don't want it to sound empty and hollow. Right. To the viewer. But in the other sense, where to your point, Bill, laying out could be better, is they are hearing sounds of the game and effects that you normally wouldn't be hearing. And there's some value to that for the viewer and for the listener.

Lesson baseball. Have you liked the look of the NBA games, though? Because me and Ryan were talking about that on the pod. Seems like we're watching a Broadway show, and they're playing. It's a weird feel. It's like a stage, almost, set up. You know what I'm saying?

It's worked better than I thought, and I think they'll keep tinkering with it. But honestly, it looks like the video game. It looks like the video game. Yeah, it does. It does. My son plays 2K all the time. And really, the way they've done it reminds me of that. But you talk about the ambience.

Like, OKC played the Celtics last week. And the announcers, there was... I don't know why, but there might not have even been announcers for a quarter. And you could just hear the sneaker squeaking. But whatever they were doing, I could hear Chris Paul. And my dad was telling me in Boston, it became kind of a story the next day. Like the Celtics weren't vocal enough.

Chris Paul was so much more vocal than the Celtics. Do the Celtics have a leadership problem? All from people listening to Chris Paul just yelling at his teammates. And I was like, you know, I'm old enough to remember. We had season tickets in the seventies and eighties with the garden. They're just playing the fucking Oregon and that's it. And we could hear area. We were sitting close.

We could hear everything on the court. And I kind of want that to come back. I part of me is thinking like, bring back the organ. We don't need any of the musical cues. Just have like an organist in there, just crank it away. But, uh, CC, you must, I know you're a huge hoops fan. You must love hearing the guys talking to each other. Yeah. I really enjoy that. I mean, in any sport, when you can get like that insight and just hear things that you normally wouldn't as a fan, um, you know, we love that. So yeah, I mean, of course, I mean, I love,

and I even love like like, the angles. Like, you saw Chris Paul throw a pass on the baseline the other day that he normally wouldn't be able to throw because fans would have been in the way. You know what I'm saying? He got a little more space, made that pass on the baseline, and, like, you know, it turned it into a great pass. So that type of stuff, you know, we'll get to see these guys be a lot more creative, you know, without, you know, with having so much space on the court.

You know what's funny about that, Bill? Like, there are so many times when i'm doing a game sitting courtside and i'll like for some reason at one point or another maybe i just like you know i take the one ear off and like you're listening and you're like oh man like i forgot how cool it is like when you're hearing all these sounds and the interactions which like you know if you're sitting even though we have effects maybe to a certain degree in our heads that you just don't, you don't hear them when you're hearing like the game, when you're calling it and you realize and see, you know, you sit courtside all the time, man, like it's cool hearing them interact like that. So I actually do think that'll be good for the fans hearing some more of that this season. They'll have to tape the land. Yeah. Yeah. There's so many things you pick up.

Courtside's weird because depending on where you are, it's actually a really uncomfortable vantage point of the game. You can't get a feel for a lot of it, but it makes up for it with the audio experience and hearing the guys mumbling under their breath to the refs because it's such a big part of it. I'm sure baseball is like this too. The umps just don't want to be shown up.

The referees don't want to be shown up. But if you're doing like, hey man, that call fucking sucked. Fuck you. You're holding your shirt over your mouth. You can kind of get away with it, but you can pick up all that stuff. What would you want to hear from baseball, CeCe, if the mics... Because obviously

you have the guy at first base. Yeah, you know what? I would honestly just like... They did spring training games this year where the guys were actually mic'd up during their at-bats. Like, I would love to hear that. I mean, obviously, you know, Britt threw an inning with the mic on.

Like, I don't know how hard it would be for pitchers, but if we can get, like, Rizzo with a mic the whole game, like, I would pay for that. Like, I would, you know what I'm saying? Like, some of those funny guys in the league, you just get them a mic for the whole game, let them go up to the plate. And you know, he plays first base and he's, you know, real personable. So I think, you know, if we can get those like how they did in spring training, I think that'd be a lot of fun. Would you have worn a mic?

Never. They would have to bleep everything out. It would have to be taped to late by two hours. The best guy ever for that would have been Pedro because he would have been screaming and swearing at everybody for a three and a half straight hours. You would have just heard me

yelling at umpires the whole time. So what do we do if baseball goes away? What happens? The NBA picks it up for us, man. No, but like, as baseball fans,

we just, we're going to have like like a potentially a 10-day season and then it's just gone we have no champion nothing but see that's why that's why i don't see it happening bill because it's like i i think now that they've committed to this like yeah granted i'm sure ideally they were gonna avoid you know half a team getting hit at one time but i think once you're in it you you kind of have decided i am i'm going through with this unless you know, half a team getting hit at one time. But I think once you're in it, you kind of have decided, I'm going through with this unless, you know, whatever. You saw some ridiculous amount of cases, like you have 150 players.

But, you know, they just got the results back. Zero of the other 29 teams, right, had positive, you know, cases. So I just feel like it's going to be a fire drill. But if they're willing to make up the schedule as they go, like they're seemingly doing right now, diverting teams to different cities, I think that shows me that they're just hell-bent on finding a way to play these games,

however many they can. And then they'll go to win percentages if they have to. Yeah, but are you guys good with, like, what if fucking Baltimore plays 35 games and they win a lot of, you know what I'm saying? Like in the winning percentage is what it is when they get into the playoffs. Like, I don't understand like how they're going to figure this out. Some teams only play 50 games. Other teams play 60.

You know, some teams play 52. Like, how are they going to figure this out, man? Like, it just seems crazy. It's got to be winning percentage, right? Yeah, but I mean... The thing is, because we see this happen with the Premier League, the sample size is so small. Basically, anything can happen.

And if it's a 50-game season or whatever, you can just have two people get hurt in a division and one other team gets hot for two weeks. And then, you know, you're flying. Ryan, you're not going to be surprised i asked cc before you joined us when we we weren't taping it i was like would you if you won if you won the title in this weird goofy season would that count for you and he's like fuck yeah that's a full title no asterisk here no if you if you play man and you play in the playoffs i don't give a damn

what the scenario is especially this year because it's gonna be harder this year this is this this is crazy it's like unlike any other year we've ever experienced so you win this man you can put an asterisk by it but it's still a fucking title right in some ways too right like it's like where it could be harder is you have all these teams to your point bill that otherwise wouldn't even be factoring in probably that now all of a sudden do factor in like you know if you even with the expanded playoffs right if you have to beat like the blue jays in a three-game series you know that you could easily lose to them at a three-game series and be gone you know so i i think it will i think the i think as fans the only time it may feel delegitimized if is if we end up with two like weird teams in the world series that

otherwise we don't think ever would have gotten there and yeah who are those weird teams though i don't know well even if you ended up with like the blue jays and the marlins in the world series like you may end up feeling like does eh, does this really feel real? Like, if it's the Yankees and Dodgers, you're going to feel like, oh, no, this is real. That ain't fair, though. You know what I'm saying? Like, that's not fair.

I get it. Like, it has to be a big market team to win. Like, I think they, I think, I mean, I think it'd be cooler if somebody else came out of this. You know what I'm saying? Obviously, I'm a Yankee fan. I would love for us to be in the World Series, but I think it would be fun

for the fan base of baseball if it was the Reds and whoever else. You know what I'm saying? Ryan just revealed himself as a big market baseball guy. He's a baseball Republican. Fuck the small market teams. That's right.

You know, I was a huge fan of Fuck the small market teams. That's right. All the money. You know, it is. I was a huge fan of reading about the ABA. Yeah. Back in the 70s. And they would have these seasons where like a team would just fold after eight games. And then they would, you know, then they would figure out the schedule. The last season they played, they only finished the season, I think, with six teams. And I think they started with like nine or 10.

So it reminds me of like what we grew up reading about with some of the leagues that were trying to get going or trying to hold on. But you might have a baseball season where it ends. If, if, if you guys are right in this keeps going, it might be 24 teams by the end or the, you know, you may have six teams just get suspended. But I think CC made the key point. It's fits the Yankees or the Dodgers or the Cubs fits a real team that has to get suspended with real money and big stars and stuff like that. And they keep the season going after that. That's what, yeah, that's when, you know, they're committed to the bitter end.

You're right. It's a lot easier to stomach the Marlins dealing with this than if all of a sudden half the Yankees had it. No, no doubt about it. That that's very true. I do think like, you know, we're always,

isn't it so funny now too? We used to like debate, like, can you, can you add this rule? Like baseball, such a traditional sport. Can they bend just a little bit to the idea of this?

And now it's like, you got no choice, but to be malleable because the only way you're going to have a season. Right. Do you think we'll get rid of the code finally? CC? I hope so. I mean,

but I was watching MLB network the other day and somebody was on Tim Anderson about bat flip. And I'm like, yo, let it go, man. Like, I mean,

it's never going to be a fun game. If you guys freak out about bat flips, like it is what it is, man. Like, I mean, I would love for to be a fun game if you guys freak out about bat flips. It is what it is, man. I mean, I would love for them to get rid of the code. I would love for them to keep the runner on second base in extra innings. I would love for them to do that so you don't have to waste pitchers. I mean, nobody wants to play 17, 18 innings. You know what I mean?

Let's get the guy on second base. I mean, even if it's not the 10th inning and the 11, let's get the guy on second base. I mean, even if it's not the 10th inning and the 11th inning, put the guy on second base and we go from there. No, the 18 inning games are for people like me

in my 20s in Boston with nothing better to do, getting home from bartending and the Red Sox are in the 16th inning and be like, this is great. I'll stay up to 4 o'clock

watching this. Those are the only winners with 18 inning games. Ryan, what was it like? I'm sure you've done this before, but now you're going to have like this is great i'll stay up to four o'clock watching this those are the only winners with 1880 games ryan what was it like i'm sure you've done this before but now you're gonna have to do it over and over again what was it like to announce a game from a studio and try to have the same kind of energy not just to fill in the spots but just like you're basically narrating a tv screen yeah it's we you know what's funny too too? We talked about our whole monitor setup. And I had them give us kind of like...

We have a couple of huge monitors that show the game cut, right? Like what you're watching at home when you're watching the game. And then I had them give us some different cameras as well just to see... Because if I'm watching the floor, I'm seeing things at times and leading the director, right? I'm not just reacting to the monitor but doing the game it's like you really you can't even take your eyes off at least maybe i'll adjust the main game cut because it's the only way you're really able to see the action happening and that was you know that was weird for me just getting

used to having that limited vision but the thing that I felt good about actually was like, I was wondering, am I going to be able to like get into a call? You know, like, because it feels like such a sterile environment. Whereas like if I'm courtside, there are times where I'm like standing up, fist pumping. You just like get your whole body into a call. And I was like, I don't know. And then Allie Quigley in our second game on Sunday, she hits a go-ahead shot to lead this late comeback for Chicago.

A three right off the bench with 15 seconds left. And I'm all into it. Really like body. And I was like... And Rebecca turns to me. She was like, it sounded real. And I was like, okay, good. I did feel... I felt invested. And I was wondering, I think

actually having some of that sound in the arena it helps like and and even like them pumping into the fake um you know defense defense all the arena like sort of musical choices i think it helps you kind of simulate a little more of a real experience than i thought it would be so i felt better about it than i thought i was going to because that was my biggest worry man you know you're sitting in a studio are you gonna feel the you know the stakes right like i don't know have you fit watching i know it's you've only watched scrimmages so far but even like watching the red sox have you felt the stakes have the games felt meaningful to you

yet bill no the basketball felt closer because that because just in general, I'm just used to watching at least basketball in a closed environment like that from summer league. So it felt more normal. The baseball, the fans were just a bigger part of it than I think I realized. And I knew it was a big part of it, but there's so much dead time. I can't get around it.

But then when you see somebody hits a homer and they switch to that overhead shot and there's so much dead time. I can't get around it. But then when you see, you know, somebody hits a Homer and they switch to that overhead shot and there's empty seats, it's just hard not to think like, wow, this is weird. And I don't know when you get past that with the NBA, you don't really have to worry about it because they've gimmicked it.

So you're not thinking about it in baseball. I don't know how you, how you don't think about it. I'll tell you this though. This is CC is one chance to be a color analyst for baseball games because you're on the travel, right? Just do it on Zoom. It sounds good, but me and Ryan did two innings of one of those summer camp games,

and there's no chance I can do a game without cussing. I can't go four innings without dropping an F-bomb, so that's not looking too good in my future doing games. You have to be a special channel. That's what CeCe wants, man. He wants a YouTube simulcast

where you could curse in-game. Let's do that, Bill. You got to hook that up for us. If we could do a game, and I could do it on here, and me and him watch the game, and I could just watch it, I think it'd be funny funny i think it'd be great i'm gonna make that happen because i would like to swear just as much so that would be really fun we should do a red sox yankee game is what we should do oh my god not this year not with the red sox team you would be our number two starter right

now rehabbing your shoulder um hey one of one of cc's things is he happens to know like every famous athlete in every sport what what's going on in famous athlete circles with the with the corona and this whole world give us take us behind the curtain as jalen rose would say what is what's going on in the famous worlds you You know what? I haven't really talked to anybody, man. I mean... Oh, stop it. I don't believe that for a second. No way. I'm trying to think. I mean, I golf with Tuck a lot. He lives over here, so I've been seeing

him. You know, I talk to Stray every now and again. He's doing good. But, I mean, you know, I don't really, like, try to bug the guys right now. What about the current guys, though? What about Mookie? You must have texted with him after he signed. I talk to Mookie damn near every day. I talk to him all the time.

Yeah, I mean, I talk to Aaron Hicks pretty much every day, Giancarlo, all these guys. Do these guys feel good about the season? What's the vibe? I know, like I said, I mean, Mookie is like Max. You know what I'm saying? He wants to play. He wants to get out there.

He just got the contract. He's in L.A. Like he's super excited. You know, a few other guys are like, I don't know. What are we doing? Like, should I be playing? Like I'm getting calls all the time. So it's, you know, guys on both ends of the scale just trying to figure out, you know, what's best.

And, you know, but I think the most part, the baseball, the guys that love the game want to get out there and play, you know, Ryan, uh, I had this fantasy that Mookie was going to use the Dodgers for a year and then come back to Boston. And then when I talked to CC a couple months ago and he just pissed all over it in like two seconds,

he's like, no, no, he's out of there. He's, he's not leaving California. He's signing with the Dodgers. No seconds. He's like, no, no, he's out of there. He's not leaving California. He's signing with the Dodgers. No way.

That'll happen every once in a while. I remember C has been saying that about Mookie for a while. We did a podcast last year with Mookie and Price in season. It was great. It was really fun. It was also like,

there was something to it, right? You have active Yankees cause CC still playing and active Red Sox at the same time during a series, um, which you can imagine what some of the, you know, Twitter responses were to us,

uh, you know, yeah. Yeah. Fraternizing with the enemy. But like, I remember getting done with that and the way Mookie was talking about Boston.

And I was like, eh, I don't know. And CC immediately, CC was like, Oh, know and CeCe immediately CeCe was like oh he's out cuz he's got he's definitely got yeah that was with KD too remember I kept telling y'all yeah KD is going to Golden State everybody's like no he can't do that KD is going to Golden State bro like he wanted to play there so Mook wanted to play in LA he wanted to get out of Boston so you know I'm happy for him. How about Giannis?

What's your Giannis prediction a year from now? A year from now? Yeah, he's a free agent, 2021. I keep hearing that somebody, they were saying that he was leaving. But he seems like the type of person that will, he'd want to stay in Milwaukee. You know, like he got drafted by those guys, they have a good team around him.

But you know what? With this bubble, there's going to be some super teams coming out of this shit. They're all at an AAU camp right now. They all hanging out, guys are figuring out who they like, who they want to hang around. Oh, I can see my game with this guy, all of that shit. So you never know after what we're witnessing, what we're going through right now, what's going to come out of this.

But my gut, initial gut, is that Giannis will stay in Milwaukee. Milwaukee's a great place to play. Hey, let's take a quick break to talk about Stamps.com. As we slowly adjust to a new normal, we still need to be smart about how we do business. Luckily, Stamps.com is here to make things easier. They bring all the mailing and shipping services

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That is stamps.com. Enter BS back to Ryan and CC. Ryan, you also have the Knicks who have cleaned out yet again. Brand new front office. Oh, man. And they picked a front office. I actually think this is the first smart front office

they've picked where it's people who have relationships, right? They have Leon. They have Wes. And they have this whole Kentucky pipeline. And the players, they have really good relationships all over the map. And if they were ever going to recruit guys

to come to the Knicks, that's kind of how you have to do it. It can't be with grumpy old Phil Jackson talking about the freaking triangle. It's got to be guys who are on the ground who knew Anthony Davis since he was 17 and shit like that. Right. I agree, man.

I agree. And we've seen, I mean, we've seen them, you know, try it over and over and over and over again in this city and not get it right. Right. This is the first time where I feel like they hired the right guys to try and run this because it's also about like, okay, you know, if, you know, certain ingrained mouthpieces are telling me, no, this time it's different. I'm not trusting that. Right. Or, you know, or if you have Steve Mills hanging around for years and years and years and years, and it's like, okay, you say it's

different, but this piece is still there. Like, and he's still like, don't you need to change that piece this time? These guys, not only they have the relationships, but I think they've earned the trust of players around the league. So when they say, I'm telling you, it's different. I'm telling you, we have control. I think they're believed. I always think about this story, though. We were doing a Bucs-Knicks game in Porzingis' first or second year, I want to say, and Doug Collins and I are doing the game, and we go in to interview KP. And he's missed like a couple games, and he's so excited to be back on the floor

before any big injuries. It was like a tweaked ankle. He missed two games. He is so giddy, loving life, like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. And Doug turns to me, he says, you see how happy he is? Let's see how long it takes

before this organization bogs him down and he's upset. And all of a sudden that smile goes away forever. And it was like, you know, it happened in like two months after that. Like, and obviously then the rest of his Nick tenure was a train wreck as far as the relationship between him and the organization goes. And I just think it became so predictable, no matter how excited guys were to be there, no matter what their skillset was, whether they could develop on their own or not, just the mentality, you couldn't handle it. So I think it takes somebody who,

you know, kind of hasn't been there, right. To, to not have that weight on them anymore, to change the experience for the players so that they aren't up. Here we go again, you know, because when one thing goes wrong you know bill it snowballs in this town and then all of a sudden you start to feel that momentum from the fan base and that narrative that exists with the knicks here in this city if if wes and leon can't turn this thing around with the knicks then it's not gonna get turned around like shut it down go home shut it down bro like if down, bro. Because I've been knowing Wes for 20 years. And Bill, you're friends with him too.

And his relationships with everybody. Like you said, Ryan, if he's telling you something, it's the word. You know what I'm saying? It's gospel. So, you know, I mean, he's been great to me, you know, for 20 years. And like I said, I mean, if these guys can't turn it around with the relationships that they have, then there's no turning it around. I mean, guys love to play in New York. Look at DeAndre.

DeAndre's with the Knicks, right? And then he stays in New York, but he wants to be in New York, but he has to go to Brooklyn to go to an organization that's going to, like, you know, take care of him and try to win and put him in the best situation. So guys want to be here. Guys want to play in New York. It's just, you know, you have to get the franchise right to be able to

recruit the right players. You're not being able to get KD when he wanted to come to New York when his business was moving to New York and you still can't get him. That's pretty bad. We saw the same thing that you just described with the Knicks, Ryan. That's what the

Clippers were like until Sterling left. And I remember even making, I did a draft diary the year they drafted Eric Gordon. And it was, I think I wrote something like, great pick, perfect fit for them. I can't wait to watch the hope slowly get drained out of his eyes over the next four years. And it was literally exactly what happened. He came in

wide eyed. He's going toe to toe with Kobe and, you know, he, and by within three years, he just has that look on his face and it's just the way it is. So I don't know. I don't, I don't know if Dolan's Dolan's as bad as Sterling, but I know that's what the culture that was in there and that's what they need to change. So I think those guys can change it. Can we talk about, um, how you guys got hooked up once upon a time? How did you guys end up doing a podcast together? Cause it's three plus years old now. Yeah. You know, the, the relationship started bonding over hoops, man. We, I, CC was in his first year with the Yankees and, like i quickly learned i i was 21 doing stuff like hosting for the scoreboard at yankee stadium uh the first year of the new stadium and i quickly

learned like and you know this bill like if you're talking to athletes they would much rather talk about anything other than their given sport right like you know if you're trying to build relationships and cc and i just kind of bonded talking basketball because at that time he was a lakers fan i was a lakers fan at this time things have changed since then but you know at that time he was a lakers fan and so we we were that was when they're in the finals in 09 and 10 and uh in 09 against the magic and we were bonded over that and then then i when i was hosting my show on espn radio you used to text me see when i was on the air and stuff and um and then we would always talk about we ended up having

like common friend circles and we would talk about uh like hey we should do something someday and then uh like oh like we should host a show and then i stopped hosting shows was like oh we should do a podcast but you never know how serious you know someone is and then i don't know what may i actually never asked you see but you called me then but in the spring training of 2017 and you're like it's time let's do this now i don't know what made you do it right then but i just was uh like i had just came out of rehab that year before um you know in 16 uh and or in 15 but and played 16 and I just felt like I was old enough. You know what I'm saying? Like, I was 17 years in the league at that point, and I was, you know, basically saying

whatever I wanted to, so I just thought it'd be cool for me and you to be able to do it. And one of the big things that, you know, me, I mean, we have a lot in common. Obviously, we came from different backgrounds, completely different, but we like a lot of the same things, and I just, I can feel that right away, and I, different backgrounds, completely different, but we like a lot of the same things. And I just I can feel that right away. And I, you know, I reached out and texted him. I was like, man, we should we should just try and just start a podcast. And, you know, our group text that we're in, like, is always like good conversation. So I just felt like it would work.

And I think the one thing that we both wanted was it to be upbeat and not like beating down people or going at people. And I don't like this guy and I don't like that guy. And, you know, I think it was, you know, I think it was a conscious decision on both of our parts to make it a fun podcast where people can come on and enjoy themselves and laugh and talk shit. Yeah. You know what, Bill? That was the thing, man. Like we I remember us having that convo and we were just like, we don't want to make mountains out of molehills. We want to hear guys come on and feel comfortable to tell stories, share perspectives, not be so on guard, but really feel comfortable being themselves. And from hosting Daily Radio in New York for five or six years and

growing up in this market, listening, like, you know, growing up in Boston, listening, I just doing it. I got sick of that. Like I got sick of like trying to make something into a big deal that I just knew wasn't. And, and, and this was an avenue for us to still have that sort of connectivity with an audience, but also like get to hear interesting insights. And our guests know, like you come on here, we're not, we're not doing gotcha stuff. You know, we're like, we're just going to give you the chance to actually express yourself. I was talking to Jalen about CC, uh, two weeks ago. And I, and, and I said this to you, um, how much the conversation I had with you a couple of months ago reminded me of when I talked to Jalen in 2010, where he wanted to have an impact in media, but not in the traditional course of how athletes are supposed to have an impact in

media where it's like, all right, put a suit on, sit behind the desk, move your hands, take your turns. And Jalen was laughing because he's known you. Obviously, you guys have known each other for a long time. He's like, yeah, I knew CeCe wasn't built for this life. He was doing Get Up, and he had a suit on, and he wanted to keep his hat on. And I was like, this guy is not going to make it at ESPN. I'm so glad I did that, though. I'm so glad. I'm grateful that they hired me, and I got the chance to do that during my final year to let me know that, like, I wanted to, like, do something less traditional.

You know what I mean? Right. Like, that's not something that I can really fit into. And like I said, I mean, I can't really probably do a baseball game either because I'm going to drop an F-bomb at some point. Like, you know what I'm saying? It just is what it is. So I like talking about sports like a regular person. I'm a huge sports fan.

Whether it's my group texts with Ryan and the guys that we're in that with or my guys from home, we have serious, passionate conversations about sports. Sometimes it ain't always clean. It is what it is. I want to get that across. You know what I'm saying? Just like everybody

else in their friend circles had these conversations, this is what we talk about. Well, I'm excited to have you for the basketball bubble. I think the basketball bubble is going to be amazing. My wife wanted to go see friends that we have in Santa Ynez this weekend. And I'm like, have fun. I'm going to be in front of a TV for three straight days. You tell me how it goes. I'm just so ready. Yeah. And I didn't think I would be, but I'm going to be in front of a TV for three straight days. You tell me how it goes.

I'm just so ready. Yeah. And I didn't think I would be, but I'm like, even in scrimmages, I'm like into it. The scrimmages are good. Like watching Bobo do his thing.

Finally. It's been fun. And even like for me, I didn't think I would be a big baseball watcher, but I'm watching every game. Like, like I'm watching my guys pitch. I watched Lester pitch last night.

Like I watched Sonny pitch. I watched Bauer pitch. Like I'm having every game. Like, I'm watching my guys pitch. I watched Lester pitch last night. Like, I watched Sonny pitch. I watched Bauer pitch. Like, I'm having a good time just being an actual real sports fan. Like, I love it. It's great. Well, we were all like Tom Hanks on the Castaway Island and then just waiting for something to show up on shore, right? It's like, yo, some FedEx packages. What it is?

Oh, an ice skate. And that's how I felt with the baseball. I'm totally with you. I watch, I always only watch Red Sox games. I'm sitting there, I'm watching that. I was watching WNBA. It's like, oh, people are playing sports and it didn't happen 25 years ago.

This is great. Right. No, it makes you wonder. Remember when we went through that like brief period of time where we wondered like, can we just on a daily basis watch old games? Like, can we, can we go through this during this period of time? The answer was yes. For two months. Exactly. Like for, for a brief period of time, it was like, it was cool. I remember like watching game,

game five of the 96 world series. I'm like, Oh, this is great. And then eventually I'm like, man, I needed something. As soon as Saria seria came back i was like on every seria game just something that's live and and it feels good to have it the nba i do think it it looks good and there's also something that you can connect with with like a basketball tournament right like even yeah it feels there's like a legitimacy embedded in it also helps that we had 75 of the regular season right like so makes it easier to accept but i think it feels like just watching the scrimmages didn't feel like watching exhibition it felt like very legitimate no the guys stayed in shape i think it's fun that there's some teams that are different you know like portland has nurkish back and collins

yeah and are a completely different team now and a team that if they can get in the playoffs, I think would actually be tough to play. The Lakers lose Bradley. They lose Rondo. Now they have to like really rely on Caruso. Yeah. Indiana loses Sabonis.

They have to figure out their new strategy. Philly's playing Simmons and power forward. The Celtics have Kemba who, depending on who you talk to, like this is a really serious arthritis thing that he might have going with his knees. Like it's, and he, it doesn't sound like, uh, it got any better over the last four plus months. So that's a huge wild card. And then you lose home court advantage. And it's like, anybody can beat anyone in this bubble yeah you know whereas like for milwaukee it was such a huge advantage to be the one seed and now it's like what does that even mean if they play philly in round two in a bubble who fucking cares

they say who cares who's one and who's four it doesn't matter so i don't know it i definitely think it's there's so many storylines going on. Plus you have LeBron trying, you know, this could be his last chance. Yeah. And I want to see Jokic like, like light now he's skinny. I saw him dunk the other day.

I'm like, yo, if he's doing that, moving around, like Denver's going to be really good too. I mean, I mean, I want to see Luca in a,

in a series. Like I want to see him in a playoff series. Like he catches fire. Like he's going to put some, he's going to, he's going to fuck up somebody's championship plans. I want to see him in a playoff series. He catches fire, he's going to fuck up somebody's championship plans. I'm telling you. It's going to be fun to watch. I was debating on him for first team All-NBA.

Trying to figure out if I could squeeze him in. Over who? Well, I ended up cheating a little bit. I put Davis at center so I could have uh Giannis and Kawhi at forward and then LeBron and Harden as guards I put LeBron at guard that was my big cheat wow he played point guard yeah he did I was just like these are the best five guys

I saw this year I want to put them on the first team. This would make sense as a team if these five guys played together and so anyway. You know what's crazy? Just thinking about it as a tournament style, everybody keeps saying, watch out for Houston, right? Because this feels like the kind of area where Harden could thrive. But see, I've been thinking a little bit

of what you've been thinking too. I think Luka is dangerous in this kind of setting too. I don't know. There's something... I i don't know see you you tell me if this is a real thing but it feels like in this kind of setting there's some kind of like competitive switch that that can go off for certain guys in this setting where they're like oh no no this is you know this is my tournament i can carry a team for a series i can do that when i'm not playing on the road there's something about that that feels real i don don't know why, but it does. Yeah, 1000%. I mean, you even look at like Luca, but even look at like somebody like Jason Tatum, like Tatum can get in the bubble and just like

go crazy. And then the Celtics win the championship. You know what I'm saying? Like it's so many different guys that can kind of just go off in this tournament kind of AAU setting that they're used to and really witness things. So I think it's going to be a lot of fun. I don't think it's going to be who we think is going to be in the finals. I think it's going to be, I honestly think it's going to be Boston and Denver. That's who I'm picking. Wow.

Denver. Yeah, I like Denver. I feel, I always go like, if my life depended on it, who am I picking? I think the Clippers are the safest bet because they're, they're all healthy. The team is, is pretty malleable in a bunch of different ways. And I do feel like the Lakers, you know, they, they are going to have some issues on the guard standpoint where they're relying on like Caruso and Quinn cook. These are guys

who have never been in big games. The same thing with Philly where everybody's like, no shake Milton, they figured this out. And it's like shake mountains played for two weeks. He's never been in a big game in his life. Like everybody always discounts, you know, reps and pressure and just,

you know, to, to say Philly. And by the way, I'm scared of Philly because of the bead, but like, all right, they just figured out that lineup right before the pandemic hit. And this is going to be

what carries them to the finals. Like shake Milton's going to climb on that shake Milton horse and ride him for four rounds. The guy just got here. So yeah, I think the Clippers, the Kawhi piece, the defense, the malleability, the fact that the, the, the worst thing they had was no home court advantage. Cause any playoff game, thereability, the fact that the worst thing they had was no home court advantage because any playoff game, there's half the fans on the other team are in the building. So now that's taken away too. Good coach. Yeah.

I trust Doc. George is going to have to go off. Yeah. Yeah. He's going to have to go off. I trust Doc too with having the right touch for this unique setting, you know, like, like besides the fact that he's, you know, he's an incredible coach in a million different ways. Like I do, I think it's, you know, to be able to get the most out of your team and keep them also

right mentally during this, I think that's going to be a little bit of a unique challenge for coaches. And I trust doc with that group. I, I agree with you, Bill. I think the Clippers are the safest, safest pick. And in the East, I actually, I love Milwaukee, but I like the Celtics. Oh, I love hearing this guys. Thank you. This is really nice about you. Such a great way to start our relationship. I like, I'm a, I'm a young legs guy in weird situations like this. I was talking to my pod last week about the 99 season, which was condensed. And it really kind of favored somebody like Duncan, who was at that point second year in the league,

just running amok. The Knicks had Camby and Houston and Sprewell. They just had this young energy to them. Larry Johnson. Yeah, he was pretty... He was on that team. He was like... I mean, that was the four point shot year though. Yeah. But that would seem to favor the Celtics, but you know, that one of the things I'm worried about, my dad was talking about this with me last night was does Philly just say, we're good at number six. We're going to stay here.

And then it's Celtic Sixers round one. Round one. Where if Tice gets two fouls in the four minutes in the first quarter, and now we have like Ennis Cantor defending Embiid or Grant Williams, like it gets dark fast for the South.

So I would rather not see Philly. Anyway, all right. So your podcast. What about Miami? Because they were on fire right before everything stopped. Well, and they just added Iguodala, too. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the teams that are well-coached that have the vet,

like Jimmy Butts. Yeah. Him. He'll show up for these things and he'll have a he'll carry himself a certain way and i kind of like that um i don't know that's what's so great about this it's like you could tell me any scenario like you threw out denver i'm like all right maybe if gary har Harris got hot, and all of a sudden they're getting weird role-player stuff, and then Jokic is going off,

and who knows? All right, so your podcast, it's going to be like one and a half times a week? Yeah. Something like that? Three every two weeks, maybe? Yeah, I think that's fair. Every Thursday we'll have an app, and then we'll be sprinkling in additional ones too.

Yeah. And we'll get all CC's horribly biased NBA takes. It was fair to say the NBA, I'm not biased at all. You can ask Ryan. I've been a Laker fan, a Warrior fan. Now I'm rolling with the net. So, you know, I just like good basketball, man. So you're just a bigamist

i just like big good hoops man mba bigamist he's just married to five teams is there a dream guest you're thinking about over the next like six seven months yeah i mean absolutely uh see well we know cc one one year we decided like for we do like a christmas challenge for each other like and as the gift the other one would have to get you know the other host prize guest on and and then we just we totally forgot about that idea never followed through on it but for cc it was will smith who he actually met this past year on the shop. But so I think that would be a dream guest, right, CeCe? Definitely.

But I was too, like, anytime I meet Shaq, I mean, I meet Shaq. I see Shaq all the time. And I say the same thing every time to him. Like, oh, man, I'm such a big fan. Can you take a picture? Like, I lock up. So when I saw Will Smith, I wanted to ask him on the pod,

but I just locked up, man. I was just excited to be there with him and hear his conversations and stuff. lock up like so when i saw will smith i wanted to ask him on the pod but i just locked up man i was just i was just excited to like be there with them and like hear his conversations and stuff but i'm a huge huge huge will smith fan so he would be uh him and shack would be two guys i would love to have on the pod for sure will smith secret tall guy yes he is oh yeah yes yeah oh yeah he's like six three six four right yeah he's like six four for sure yeah wow man that is big come on ryan you got to keep up on your secret tall celebrities i've been lacking clearly exposed immediately man i've always said to eminem as a guy i've always wanted on and cc is friends with friends with his manager, Paul Rosenberg.

So, you know, we tried. But Em's like, you know, he's a weird interview. But I feel like if you have enough knowledge, maybe you could leverage that to get a little something out of him that you normally don't hear. I don't know. I feel like he'd come on and be standoffish. But you're such a huge fan that you would get him to start talking. You know what I'm saying?

That's my goal. You would hit him with some shit you would hit him with some shit he'd just open up i feel like so and then anything star wars too bill anything star wars c and i are such huge star wars fans we're like you know we we haven't yet had the star wars guest on yet but that's like that's a goal too getting so some big star wars folks harrison ford what's the goal let's do it absolutely that would be so sick oh my gosh just don't tell him to fly his plane to your studio to do it wait what why is he still flying he should not be flying just don't fly anymore harrison ford we love you we should not be flying flying. No more flying Harrison. Dude. He,

every time he flies, something wrong happens, man. Oh, we got to protect him for sure. Well, I've admired the podcast for a while. It's a pleasure to have it at the ringer.

It's a pleasure to have you guys in, uh, in our circle. I look forward to all the good stuff you're going to do. And, uh, it's been fun getting to know you. Thank you for coming on today.

Good luck with the podcast. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, man. Love what you've done with the ringer, man. You're the podcast goat.

So this is a, this is a huge step for us and we're pumped about it, man. Yeah, for sure. This huge, huge step for us. Like he said,

you are to go to the podcast. So we're excited to be here, man. All right. Appreciate it. Thanks guys. All right. Before we get to Jason,

I wanted to mention CeCe collaborated with Roots of Fight, which is one of my single favorite places and a place that I get the majority of my t-shirts. Rootsoffight.com.

He collaborated with them on the official Negro League Baseball Centennial collection. Ruko's actually wearing the Jackie Robinson shirt in the pod that we just did,

but go check that out. I love roots of fight.com. Really like those guys. So there you go for that. Let's talk about FanDuel. The NBA is back. FanDuel sports book celebrating, giving you the chance to get an even bigger win when you bet the Clippers

versus Lakers game this Thursday for every 2,500 fans who bet on the Lakers to cover FanDuel Sportsbook, we'll move the line one point in the Lakers' favor. As long as enough fans keep betting, the line will keep moving. Best of all, we'll pay you out at whatever the line lands by tip-off so you don't have to wait to get in the action. Basically, they're giving away money. This is how it works. They did this with the Bucks versus, they're giving away money. This is how it works. They did this with

a Bucks versus Sixers game earlier this year. Opened at Sixers plus eight and a half. Ended up Sixers plus 59 and a half. I'm pretty sure they covered. If you already have a FanDuel Sportsbook account, just look for the Spread the Love Market to place your bet. Again, quote, Spread the Love, unquote. The Spread the Love Market to place your bet again, quote, spread the love unquote, to spread the love market, to place your bet. And if you've been holding out, then here's your chance to start betting on Fandula with incredible odds. Just download the Fandula sports book app or visit sportsbook.fandula.com today, 21 plus present in Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia,

Indiana, or Colorado must wager and designated crowdfunding market. Max wager 50 bucks. Payout at minus 110. Gambling problem. Call 800-GAMBLER in West Virginia. 1800-GAMBLER.NET in Indiana. 800-DONE-WITH-IT in Colorado. 1-800-522-4700. Before we get to Jason, new rewatchables went up. We did Ghost, me, Chris Ryan, and Amanda Dobbins. And you get to hear my thoughts on whether this movie was an accurate depiction on what happens when people go to either heaven or hell.

I have some controversial takes on this. You can hear it. It's up right now in the rewatchables feed. Without further ado, Jason Gay, here he is. All right, we're taping this on Tuesday afternoon. Jason Gay is here from the Wall Street Journal. Sports is in more flux than it's been really in the last three months, I would say. Everybody was kind of expecting baseball to work and football to work and basketball, I think, is working.

But the football stuff, guys are starting to bow out with football now. We've seen multiple Patriots leave and now it just seems like it's going to be a steady stream of that do we have football this year i'm more confident in professional football's ability to find a way than i certainly am when college football's ability i mean college football i mean you know the nfl is like you know it's it's it's 32 teams it It's one commissioner. College football is like herding cats. I just can't imagine you can create any kind of structure where you're going to have, you know, no disruptions.

And you're seeing schools already and conferences already back away from fall sports altogether. None of the big, big, big conferences have done it yet. But we've certainly seen adjustments with conference play and all that kind of stuff. I know I'm hedging here. The NFL is just such an operation, such a battleship, that it's very hard to imagine that they will just not give it a full go. But you look at this last 48-hour stretch with baseball, and if you are not in a bubble, if you are not isolating, if you are not in a bubble, if you are not isolating, if you are not doing the kinds of things that the NBA or soccer has done in this country, you're exposing yourself to risk. No question.

Yeah. And when the Marlins had the big catastrophe this week with all their guys testing positive, I can't say it was a surprising news story. No, of course not. And I it's, I said this on Thursday's pod. The worse run you are, the more trouble you're going to be in stuff like a freaking virus and a pandemic. And the baseball, I was actually watching when Manfred went on the first ESPN telecast and was doing his victory lap. He's like, we're so proud of our guys. You know, this is a hard thing to figure out.

I was like, what did you figure out? hard thing to figure out it's like what did you figure out you didn't figure out anything you you put no systems in place at all and you've left the door open for all kinds of terrible things to happen and now you know it's already happened and in general are you you know we're around the same age um are you surprised by how the lack of urgency for baseball to come back that was just in the general public compared to how this would have played out 40 years ago? You mean in terms of what the public wanted, like in terms of just like, get us baseball, get us. Yeah. People freaking out. Like even remember 94 when they went on strike and it was like, oh my God, you guys are going away. What are we going to do? And I just haven't felt that way this time around. Yeah, it's an interesting question. It also requires realizing that we're about 18 controversies and crises since when baseball had all this labor strife about whether or not they

were going to actually come back and look for a minute that they weren't going to come back at all. It's also strange to realize that baseball was the first program to come forward with a bubble presentation. Remember that? There was like a myth. They're going to do the whole thing in Arizona. They're going to use the in the approach. I mean, baseball effectively has a medical plan, an isolation plan, but kind of just shrugged its shoulders and said, look, we're going to regionalize here, but everyone's going to play in their home cities. And I don't know,

the organization that ends up looking the best in this whole thing is Canada. Canada was kind of like, yeah, no thanks. We'll see you guys next year. Blue Jays, we love you, but you might have to play in the United States for this season. Or the British where they had the open and they're like, cool, we're just going to take the insurance money. We'll see you next year. And same thing for Wimbledon. The British were out immediately. They want to know part of this. How smart does that person feel? That person who checked that pandemic box on the insurance plan at one point. Wimbledon has given prize money to athletes. They sort of rationed

out a bunch of money to people who had been participating in the tournament, which tennis is a sport where we know how much the five, six, seven, eight top players in the world make, but people are in that top 200 are barely breaking even sometimes. So yeah, good for them. I mean, look, a lot of this stuff is the kind of thing where like once these ships get moving and the situation shifts with the pandemic, it makes it very hard to, you know, improvise from that. I read read today on espn the talk of like well is there a feasibility for an nfl bubble can you actually like go and do like containments within 32 nfl cities and just contain the players like say the patriots are all staying at a hotel in foxborough and everyone's living within two miles of the stadium can you do that nfl teams i mean

one nfl team has more personnel than the Eastern Conference. There's just so many players. And also, you're talking about a five-month stretch, whereas the NBA was the buy-in for like, okay, if you win the damn thing, you're going to be there for three months. But mostly, everybody's going to be out there within a matter of a month and a half or around that. Well, it seemed like you could do different parts of the country, right? Maybe you put four teams in each bubble spot or eight teams in each bubble spot, but it still doesn't solve the problem of 16 games,

12 games, 14 games, whatever, and just having to play different teams, not being like baseball, at least you could play somebody for four games in a row. So I just don't know what the NFL does. They could be like, Texas has facilities. They could, they have the hotels. They could potentially in two or three different parts of Texas, try to have an NFL season

there. But would you want to be in Texas with 32 teams right now? And that's, that's been a hotbed. Like that doesn't make sense either. So I don't know what they do. Yeah. I don't know either. And you make a good point with the hotbed part, which is that it's impossible to separate this conversation about sports from what's happening contextually in the rest of the country. And people say, well, why did the Premier League finish its season? Why did Bundesliga work out? Why is baseball having all these problems? It's like, well, when European soccer was returning,

their rates were significantly lower than what we're experiencing currently in the United States. I mean, no one's had the kind of numbers that we've had. And so they were in a much better position when they returned to normal. They're having conversations over there about returning fans. And it's a much more foreseeable situation over there that it certainly is here right now. And we're just kind of, I just feel like we're just kind of gripping the wheel and hoping that

we get through it. And, and, but that's just not the way to go about this. It's certainly been the case in Los Angeles and the extended Los Angeles where everybody was really careful for two months and then it became, all right, well, we're not going to just keep doing this, right? I got a, you know, summer's coming. What are we going to do? And the mayor caved, the governor caved. And then all of a sudden we have restaurants opening and tattoo shops and bars and beaches.

And by Memorial Day, it was like no virus was happening. It was like, what are we doing? And people who had never gone to the beach to get a tattoo were suddenly like, that sounds great. Yeah, great. Let's combine all of this stuff. Indoor bars on a beach where I get a tattoo. Yeah, no, there's a lot of that. And I also feel like, you know, when you evaluate the meaning of sports, obviously sports is a much bigger production than simply the athletes who are, you know, on the field and the ownership and all that kind of stuff. There are a great many lives that are impacted, economies that are impacted by it. But,

you know, for me, and I know you're in the same boat, you know, like 5% of Jason is worried about the NBA bubble. 95% is worried about school in September. What am I going to do with my children? And those, I mean, the fact that I don't know what my kindergartner is going to do, what my second grader is going to do. That's crazy, you know? And we're- Well, I mean, that's, I feel, we have a lot of parents who have young kids like that. I have a 15 year old and a 12 year old. They can, you can learn on zoom from teachers and do homework and have 70 to 80% of the school experience. You miss all the social stuff. When you start talking about younger kids,

you can't, that it's just not going to work on zoom, anything fourth grade and below. You have no chance. The whole point of fourth grade and below is social. And now you're removing that and you can't tell a kindergartner to be on Zoom with other crazy six-year-olds. It's just not going to work. And I feel really bad for the kids, not just the parents. Like that's such a shit. You only get to be in kindergarten once.

That's such a shitty way to have a kindergarten. Yeah. And I'm starting to sort of see that. And I'm probably, you're probably seeing that with your children too. Like we've had like, you know, a chance to give them some, you know, time with friends trying to be smart and wise about it. But that whole socialization of it, of their lives, which I feel is probably at my kid's age, a bigger part of their educational development

than, you know, whatever they're doing with books and computers and things like that. They're missing it. I mean, it sucks. And it sucks to think of like a lonely seven-year-old kid, but there are a lot of them out there around the world. Right. Well, and then the other piece of that, seven, eight, nine, 10, you know, there's a lot of stuff to do when you're alone and you get used to it, you know, and you think like, I have video games. I make my own schedule. I don't, I don't have to have these interactions that might not turn out that well. And then all of a sudden they get used to just being alone and they're not even 10 years old yet. Yeah. You know, and I don't know, there's so many, there's so many repercussions to this

now that this has lasted so long. I think I've been thinking about it from the youth sports perspective too. And these kids that are just losing an entire year and depending on, you know, what sport it is, it could be the most crucial year you're going to have. Like if you're a 10 year old soccer player, that's probably the most important year

you have in soccer, where you're really, the field's starting to get bigger. You're starting to put together concepts and to just remove that for a year, I think has dramatic ramifications. You can't pick that up in your backyard. It's impossible. Well, I can just say that I've thrown so much batting practice this spring and summer that I can't wait to see it. And I want to see some live pitching and see if there's any development for my kids. But yeah, they miss all that. And just any degree. I saw something this morning where they were showing Halloween candy starting to show up in drugstores. What are we doing here? Is the Halloween that's feasible? No,

that can't be. I'd bet anything against Halloween being normal. Yeah. My younger, my younger kid asked about that. Like, is Halloween happening this year? And I'm like, I'm pretty positive. No, I can't, I can't imagine a worse idea than Halloween. Like a crowded neighborhood, people walking around taking candy from people. Yeah. Well, 2020, like every day is Halloween, you know? I feel like that's really when the wheels could come off for a lot of this stuff because the election will be right around the corner. People will be probably home with their kids, I'm guessing, during a school year.

Yeah. We won't have any college sports. The NBA will be on the tail end. We might not have football. We might have a death rate that's piled up to staggering proportions. God knows what's only going to happen over the next two months. There's this whole divide between the two sides. The one side saying, oh, the COVID's not that bad.

It's basically a worse flu season. What are we doing? The unemployment, all that stuff. And then the big thing lurking at the beginning of November, the election and how that's going to play out. I remember being in meetings at the Journal a year ago when we were talking about stuff like,

okay, what's going to be our plan for the Tokyo Olympics? What's going to be our plan for the 2020 summer? And looking at the whole landscape of, you know, we're going to have these conventions in Milwaukee with Democratic convention, big convention in North Carolina for Republicans, you know, like it's going to be a crazy summer, folks, you know, put on your helmets. And I mean, just none of us could have foreseen something as, you know, stressful as this. Although I don't know how you feel about it it seems to me that you know had someone said to you in mid-march what are you going to be talking about

in late july if there's very little sports back and the sport would have been the olympics it would have been olympics and that's it right yeah no but i mean like i think that sports you know candidly i'm kind of proud of the way that I think the sports media has been over the last, like, five months. I think they have been pretty diligent about covering these sports and what's happening in sports and certainly the social justice movement within them responsibly in interesting ways and, you know, putting forward voices that they weren't in the past. And, like, I think that that's a good thing. And I wouldn't have predicted that there was that kind of agility for sports media because, you know, there was no games to evaluate. What have you done?

Cause you're writing this Wall Street Journal column that veers in a whole bunch of directions and you've had to make it much more of a sports and life column yeah right and write about your own personal stuff and what it's like to be in the tri-state area and all that stuff like you're you're mixing all that stuff in and it's not really a sports column as much anymore well yeah and all i mean uh make it up as you go along kind of i think that like there's no way to sort of plan it out because the situation seems to change with each passing week and month. But I think that, as you mentioned, I write a good deal in the first person and I did that beforehand. But it's also interesting, sort of the shifting mood. I mean, like New York in March and April was not... Right. It's grim. There was a very grim mood around here.

And I think as time has gone on, you know, obviously there's a great new dynamic happening in the city where, you know, I don't want to say like we're out of the woods or there's, you know, tremendous positivity, but the signs are hopeful. The buy-in in terms of wearing masks is hopeful. I don't know. I just feel like the role of being a columnist is simply to tell your truth, you know, your personal truth. And as simple as that sounds, I think that's the job. And there are a lot of people, you know, there are stories that we've done that are completely apart from sports entirely, and there's no real connection to it. But I think we've found that readers are engaging with it. I think that there's a huge hunger for information, analysis, translation, you know, and I have colleagues who are just doing amazing stuff all over the place. You know, and also like, look, let's be candid about this right now. There's like, there's a lot of disinformation

out there, right? Especially when you're dealing with a public health issue like this, the importance of really good reporting and skillful reporters and people who know their, you know, SHIT is critical. Yeah. It's tougher and tougher to know who to believe and what to believe, depending on what source you're getting from and what the agenda is when they wrote the piece or all that. It, it seems like it's very easy these days to skew a piece a certain way and to go into the piece before you even wrote it, knowing what the angle is going to be. And I think, cause we're in this business for a living, we can kind of spot when something was clearly intended to be a certain way. And I find just the down the road journalism has been more and more interesting than people who

are still trying to do that. Especially when they're talking about the government and some decisions that are being made that anybody with an IQ over 85 would be like, what the fuck are they doing? And to try to write about that in a balanced way is really hard. Yeah, no, I think that this is like, you know, put into sharp relief some of the chronic issues that have been going on for a really long time with regards to, you know, accuracy and biases and things like that. Because it's one thing if you're talking about pure politics, but when you're talking about the public health, you're talking about people's livelihoods, both physically and economically, being correct

and being honest when you don't know, which is a huge part of it, is so integral. And my one line answer is read the newspaper. You know, I think the newspaper is, whatever newspaper it is, is a generally good sourced, edited, reported source of information, whatever newspaper it is. So I'm a big believer. What do you see for the next four or five months in New York?

How does it play out in the city? What's it like there now? What's it going to be like there in October or November? Well, I think, again, it's not as, you know, dour a situation as it was in March and April. Certainly, I live in an apartment building where my downstairs neighbor works at a major hospital in the city, and we'd sort of breathlessly hang on his reports every day about how many people were coming in, how many people were doing that. As that number kept climbing in the spring, it was terrifying, and things have settled down quite a bit. I'm not somebody who's covering the day-to-day in New York City of coronavirus, so I hesitate to put myself forward as any kind of expert on it. But it does seem like here in the city, there's been some stabilization, some embracing of this big version of normal.

You see now all the restaurants have overtaken both the sidewalk and the street areas. And so the streets in the neighborhoods look like you know european streets in a funny way um there's a lot of activity look mass you know not everybody is wearing a mask but i think they're a good good chunk of people are you know certainly more people in mass than not um social distancing rules seem to be being respected. And then there's this very, very vibrant and still very active protest scene in New York City, which continues through the summer. And there's constant stuff happening there. So it is quite a summer for this city.

But New York's not alone in that. This is a national, if not international thing. Well, the one thing with New York City is you think about elevators, subways, cabs, Uber, all these people, 20 people on a street corner waiting for the walk sign to go and things like that, where in LA, a know, it's a lot of people are in their cars and there's still an Uber thing to some degree. But I was just thinking like, if you live, if your office was in the 68th floor of some building, or if you're an apartment building on the 12th floor, whatever, you're going to be in an elevator. You're going to be in an elevator

with four other people. And just that, that constant, Oh shit, I got to have my mask on. Why isn't that guy have a mask on? What the fuck's going on? All that stuff is in play. And that's a huge question. And that's a good point that city office life has yet to return. There was this piece in the journal the other day about just sort of midtown office buildings, how many people are back in those. Because some offices are actually coming back. So about 10%. And I actually saw the 10%. I was like, that feels like a lot.

That feels like a lot of people are in the office. Which is a crazy thing to say about a 10% occupancy rate. But yeah, that whole part of New York City life of just taking the train to your office job and getting your hot dog on the street and what that whole culture is like. I mean, that's changed. And there have been 50 billion columns about what it means for office life. And I actually think, and I'm curious what you think. When this began and there was all the conversation about, okay, now we all work from home if we can work, if we're lucky enough to work from home.

OK, now we can do virtual learning if we're lucky enough to have access to virtual learning. I thought, OK, this is the great disruption. We've been waiting for this moment to happen for a very long time. There really didn't seem to be a case for like paying $60,000 to send your kids to college. We're going to really disrupt it. But I feel like over time, the in-person case has really made itself... The case for in-person learning has been made very strongly. The idea of community and the idea of what you get from being in an office setting and talking to people. And I know there's all kinds of like non-essential nonsense that happens when you're in an office. And I'm one of those people who finds it very hard to work, you know, at a desk in an office and has to be away from that.

But you miss that socialization. And I think that you're seeing, and there was another piece in the journal about this, that like, yeah, the people who are like the work from home gurus are suddenly saying like, yeah, maybe there was something to the idea of stacking everybody into an office and what kind of creative osmosis you might have there. But it's not coming back soon. You just saw Google's big announcement, what, 200,000 employees. You know, they're not expecting anybody back for months and months and months and months. And I think everyone's going to follow along. Yeah. The spitballing that you get from being around an office, I really miss that. Especially like some of the ideas we were able to generate was always like at least a few people in

the room. It was something I was always really good at. Your daughter, she's not college age, right? No, no. She's ninth grade. Okay. But like I was talking to a relative who's in college and they're talking about what their college plans are for coming back. And they're like, well, 20% of the campus is going to be occupied. So like, you know, 20% of the students that are normally there are going to be there and they're probably going to give priority to the freshmen and sophomores. And they're like, it sounds like it sucks. Yeah. It does sound like college. I know I've been talking to a lot of people about this. Some people are just deferring for a year. People who are going to college, they're just like,

well, why would I want to spend my freshman year doing this? So that'll be interesting to see how they manage that. And then from an office standpoint, you talked about a disruption. And I think this is something that has popped up over and over again with people I've talked to who are either in the decision-making part of this, or just are in an office where the office used to be a huge part of it. And then everybody kind of realized, Oh, maybe we didn't have to do some of the things we were doing in the past. And maybe when we come out of this, whenever that is, maybe I don't have to travel to New York and Chicago and LA or wherever I'm going once a month.

Maybe I could do some of this stuff on Zoom. Maybe I don't have to be in the office every single day. Maybe I could be in the office three out of the five days. Maybe we could arrange it so only 50% of the office is full each day. And then on Thursdays, that's when the meeting happens. I do think people are going to start thinking outside of the box on this stuff over the old way of just like, Hey, come to the office Monday through Friday. This is what we do. I don't know if you need to do that anymore. And I think for New York, it could be a game changer. You know, if people only had to go in the office three days a week or living in Connecticut or New Jersey or whatever versus five, then there's less cars on the road. And you know, there's a lot of good benefits. There's good for the atmosphere. It's good for health, all that

stuff. But I think there's a more existential question then becomes like, do companies want to even be in New York? What's the point of that? If you're only having people come in for two days a week or three days a week, why are you spending all this money for office space? And why are your employees spending all this money to live in this expensive part of the country? Like if we're going to go virtual, let's go all in and like just decentralize everyone and let everyone go where they want. You might see that happen. I mean, that honestly might be where it goes. I know in New York and LA, the commercial real estate people are panicking because, you know, if you have the 68 floor office building in New York City

that you just finished building and it's going to be available in November 2020, how are you going to fill all those floors? Who's like, cool, sign me up. Give me floors 32 to 38. That's not happening. Yeah. And I admit that my faith in New York City is nothing more than faith. My faith is like, okay, New know, New York, you know, we've been knocked around

before and came back really strong. And like, and I just feel like, you know, there's this wave of like stories like, you know, they left New York City for the suburbs and they say they're never coming back. And I just feel like in 18 months, we're going to see the, they hate the suburbs. They can't get back to get to New York City. But I don't know that. I'm hoping that will happen because it's happened in the past. We saw people leave and then come back because they missed that, whatever thing New York city gave to them. But what this last

period has proven is we don't know. We're old enough to remember each trend as it happened, right? Like in the nineties, that was a big move to the suburbs, get out of the city. You don't want to be in the city. You want to be, you know, living in a town near the city. And then starting in the mid two thousands, moving back to the city became a big thing, especially for people who were in like their fifties and sixties. It was definitely like, that's why Boston, downtown Boston took off. I think downtown New York was the same thing where people kind of wanted to be the, where the action is. You know, when I was growing up in Boston in the seventies, early eighties, like the goal was always to get to Weston, Wellesley, any suburb that was away from

the city. And by the mid 2000s, it was the opposite. People wanted to actually be where the action was, where the restaurants were, all that stuff. So I don't know how it plays out now. Well, I was, you know, my mother still lives stuff. So I don't know how it plays out now. Well, my mother still lives in the Boston area. And I was back there and it is a weird town without students. I mean, when you think about how many colleges are there and how many students are there, and even in the summertime when there's not as much college happening, there's still a ton of students around. And we were walking around Harvard Square and it felt like an abandoned mall. And that is just a bizarre thing. It's like basically downtown DC. Now my dad always,

my dad said cause they've also closed all the bars. So you have no students and you have no bars, which were probably the number one and two things you would think of when you, when you're in Boston, especially like in October. Sure. It's people are just doing stuff. And now it's like people are on power walks and what, you know, just kind of, everybody's got their headphones on with putting their mask on when somebody gets 15 feet away, taking the mask off. If there's some daylight for a while,

what are you doing for exercise? You riding your bike? Like, what are you doing? I've been riding my bike like a mad person. Yeah. It's like, uh, that, that has been something that has kept me sane. Um, and I'm very happy that I'm doing that, but I find that like, even the people who found their little niche during this, like, oh, I'm going to teach myself how to cook or I'm going to be a bicyclist or I'm going to lose weight or I'm going to be a hiker. Like we're all kind of over that. We just want to get back to whatever amalgam of things that we used to do before. And like, you know, we've watched all the TV shows, we've read all the blog, you know, like, what are we going to do? Well, I've noticed people either gotten better shape or worse shape, but there's no in between. Nobody's in the exact same shape. They either put on 10

to 20 pounds or they got in awesome shape and they're bragging about it. This is where I am. I have ridden my bike more this year because we don't keep the data than I have in 12 years. Like since before I got married and had children and I have not lost a single pound. Wow. Yeah, it gets tougher when you're older. Well, yeah, it's tougher when you're older, but it also just like, there's a lot of incoming, okay? You know, as well as the exercise going on.

Well, the other thing is, you know, speaking of just where we are in 2020, it's so easy to monitor every aspect of what you're doing. Yeah. So everybody's kind of on their own, but like I have a whoop. I have my iPhone, which tracks stuff, and I've been walking all over the place, and I'm looking at my steps, what my respiratory rate is. On the whoop, you can find out

how much REM did I get last night, how much REM sleep, how much deep sleep. And you're just assessing yourself like you're LeBron James or something. And meanwhile, it's just like, we're just us. It's not like we're professional athletes. When you go for a walk, and I think I heard you say that you'd like to, you'll do calls on a walk.

Will you like walk and you'll have the mask like, you know, with you in the case you run into a bunch of people, but like, can you do the phone call with the mask on, which you see a lot of in New York city, which looks really funny. Like someone just sort of talking. You can, it doesn't sound great. That's why you got to do the mix and match. I do stuff.

I'll be making work calls. This happened to me a couple of weeks ago. And I just ended up like in this deep part of Beverly Hills. And I realized I was too far away from where I live. And I was like, how am I getting back home? And I had to walk to my mom's house to get a ride back. So sometimes you get a call, you just get lost in thought. And I'm so used to walking now,

I'm not even sometimes even concentrating on where I'm going. Well, but also like, isn't it? I mean, it's not really a part of like LA culture to begin with too. And like, I would think of like, you know, you see someone walking around, but really they're like, what are they lost? Where are they going? Like, does that guy's car break down?

Who's he talking to? Like, yeah. The weirdest outcomes in LA, everybody walking, which the only way I could compare it to like for somebody from New York to understand is if everybody was just on hoverboards that levitated six feet in the air and we're just traveling that way. And you'd be like, wow, that's weird. That's what it's like to see people walking in LA because nobody walks here. And then the atmosphere is that the sky and the air is just cleaner. Yeah.

And you can actually see things from far away and you didn't realize how damaging basically how our day-to-day life was. Have you been on an airplane? No, I have not. I mean, neither. It's not on my list. Feels like a big. Me neither. It's not on my list. Feels like a big step.

Yeah, it's not on my list. Let's talk about your friend Regis. Okay, yeah. So one of my favorites, really an amazing career. Like the definition of a late bloomer. Definition of a late bloomer, yes. Where he's, I don't want to say bouncing around because he was doing better than that,

but had a series of jobs, you know, for the first 15 years of his career. By the time he's in his early forties, he's basically a morning show guy in LA. He's with Cindy Garvey, Steve Garvey's wife. And it's probably his sixth or seventh gig at that point, maybe eighth. He had been the sidekick on the Joey Bishop show way back when he had taken over the Steve Allen show, all this stuff. And then he becomes kind of this belated morning show phenomenon, but it's still local ends up in New York teams up with Kathy Lee. Who's, um, I don't know if she was married to Frank Gifford yet. I don't think she was, I think she was Kathy Lee, who's, um, I don't know if she was married to Frank Gifford yet. I don't think she was. I think she was Kathy Lee Johnson initially. Okay. And then, then they just, it's lightning

in a bottle that takes off that goes national. All of a sudden he's famous. He's one of the big daytime hosts we've had. Then Kathy Lee leaves and it's like, well, that's not going to work. They bring in Kelly. Who's like a unicorn and it, and it goes to another level. And then as all of this is happening, Michael Davies has this idea who wants to be a millionaire. Regis becomes the host. And at, in his sixties, he becomes one of the biggest stars in America. Yeah. Yeah. And then you got to know him later, which we can go into in a second, but I don't really remember another career like that.

No, no. And you're absolutely right. The late bloomer part, especially, I mean, this is a guy who went to college and was in the Navy. You know, he didn't really even get going until his late twenties. He was a page for Steve Allen.

He worked on the Tonight Show behind the scenes. And yeah, it was sort of knocking around. And he only got on camera, really, for the first time in San Diego. He had a Regis Philbin show where you just would like, you'd be like, who's in San Diego today? And they would just come on the show. And whoever was passing through town doing a show would go on Regis' show. And he built up a little bit of a following reputation there. But it was certainly not what he would find later in his career. And it is an unusual TV arc, yeah, because usually you find that liftoff period happening in your 20s, 30s, at the latest, your 40s.

But Regis' great ascension didn't really happen until his 50s and 60s. And even his 70s, a millionaire, he was in his late 60s, I think, when it was starting. I have a very hard time, though, with this 20th anniversaries for things that are from year 2000. There's a rash of them going around now and it makes me feel a thousand years old, like almost famous as having a 20th anniversary.

Survivor's another one. Yeah, I agree with you. Because it does seem like it happened yesterday. The internet was in shape at that point. Like it wasn't that much different than now. It's hard to believe 20 years ago. Right. But Millionaire was like this like classic or not classic, but just like sort of like genre breaking show in that it became this phenomenon pretty quickly, like overnight. Oh yeah. And then they're like, we're just going to put it on all the time. It's going to be on every night. And not only is it going to be on every night, it was the number one show every single night for months and months and months and months and months. It just was like,

I've never seen anything like it. There's nothing that compares to it now. And also it was like, there hadn't been game shows on primetime and generations when this thing happened. Right. It's what we, growing up, we always heard how important game shows were in primetime. But we never saw it firsthand. We never saw that happen again. And Regis is sort of like, and I wrote this in this thing I wrote about him the other day,

but just like, he was, you know, the consummate host. It was not a guy who came on to show us the pontificate or be a blowhard provocateur or anything like that he was just somebody who would give the wheel and you get it from point a to point b and he calmed people down they liked them and you know i i i michael could do a much better job of telling the origin story of how he got that job on millionaire but like it doesn't you know it, it didn't, wasn't a natural idea. Regis primetime,

you know, uh, uh, quiz show for not, I mean like you wouldn't have drawn it up that way, but really for that sliver of time, there's been nothing like it in TV ever since. So I remember after my parents got divorced and I started going to,

um, school in Connecticut and we would get shows like, you know, in the early mid eighties shows like live at five, which was, um, school in Connecticut and we would get shows like, you know, in the early mid eighties shows like live at five, which was, um, you know, and then you'd, there'd be the today show. Good morning, America, stuff like that. There was a specific way to do the show. And the male host always had a specific kind of personality, right? He was, he, you felt like you knew him, but you didn't know too much. He was kind of stable. He was just like, you know, like the dad driving the station wagon kind of personality. There were

never like big sticky kind of personalities. And when Regis, when the show with Kathy Lee started taking off, it was like, he had taken this thing that existed, this job, and he made it so much more personable. And you would just watch it all and be like, man, that guy seems, I would just love to hang out with that guy. That would seem like the most fun guy to sit next to at a dinner table. He just seems like who he is on the show. It really seems like he's the person. And some of it was shtick, but it was weird. You mentioned this in your piece. It was shtick, but it wasn't because it was authentic to him and he would get, he would come out and he would do this. And, but it, he kind of was in on the

joke. It was never, it was never, I'm doing this, but I'm not in on the joke. He always knew what he was doing. I think that's why I why people like Letterman and all those dudes loved having him as a guest because he had such a firm grasp on what his persona was. You know what I mean? Well, that's also like it sort of mirrors it becoming a national show too. I think, what was it? Dana Carvey did him on SNL. Oh, yeah.

Early days. And they would always gravitate to that sort of like that. Yeah, the big Regis moments and stuff like that. But yeah, he was authentically himself and they weren't doing a heavy lift at the top of that show. They were just talking about what they did last night. They'd be like, so it was George Hamilton's birthday again. Right, right.

But I had never seen anything like that though. They would start the show and I know it wasn't like this, but they made it seem like they had showed up at 8.59 for the 9 o'clock show and they poured Regis some coffee and just turned the cameras on. And I know that's not what they were doing, but I think the ad-libbing stuff felt so authentic and real because I think it was.

Well, I think it actually was closer than you think because Regis lived across the street from the studio where they did the live show. And I remember asking him, what was the latest you could leave your place to get on the air? Because they would go live at 9 o'clock a.m. Eastern. And they'd come over to his place and do wardrobe and hair and makeup. And I think he said he could get out of there with about 12 minutes to nine, like at 8.48, walk out the door. And he went on and they did that cold, those openings.

I mean, those were not pre-programmed. And I think very specifically, that was a very specific decision to do it that way so they could surprise each other and say things and, you know, come up. So that wasn't his deal. Like he wasn't somebody who was like doing preplanned bits too much. Right. You have to have a lot of trust in the person you're doing it with. And I think in general,

like I think Mike and the mad dog were like this too, because they're taking off the nineties. Regis is already established with kathy lee that this two person format where you have two people that the chemistry is is the show and it's like you you can fuck around with it however you want but ultimately it's how those two people interact with one another is the show and i think what makes him really special for me and really unique and really different than pretty much anyone we've had is his ability to connect with whoever he's with. Cause you think like Kathy Lee, especially in the second half of her career, like she was a handful, you know,

and there was all these stories about like, man, she's a little off the rails. She's a diva, all this stuff. And you never would have known known it regis just knew how to sell her and i gotta say like kornheiser's like this too to do tv with i remember when i did pti the first time um and i had no idea what i was doing he just sold the shit out of me you know and he made it he would he was going to make sure i succeeded right and i think regis was the same way with whoever he worked even when who wants to be billionaire, you'd have these contestants and he would always be able to make the contestants super comfortable and they would always be the best version of themselves. So the, your experience was way later when he was, when you launched, um, the show with Katie and everybody

on FS one, it was like the first show, right? Wasn't that the inaugural? Yeah. It was crowd goes wild. The, the rollout of, uh, of FS one. Yeah. It was called crowd goes show, right? Wasn't that the inaugural? Yeah, it was. Crowd Goes Wild? The rollout of FS1, yeah. It was called Crowd Goes Wild, and it was on five days a week for one hour live. And that's another thing about Regis that we should talk about, which is that the vast, vast, vast majority of his television career was live television,

which in and of itself is a totally different organism. And that shows how skillful the guy was that he could do that without a net for not years, but decades and generations that he was so good at that. Because in addition to the fact that it's a challenge to actually do a live program, it's a stress. It takes an energy and it takes a certain kind of composition of a person to be able to do that well. And obviously, he did it as well as anyone ever did.

It's really hard to explain unless you've done it. And both of us have done it. Whatever was going on with you for that whole day, you need to be on for that hour. And you have to be a gregarious alert in the present moment version of yourself and on the ball and if you're having a bad day or if you're tired or if you're sick there's kind of no hiding on tv especially now in hd people are going to see through it well i mean i i came to i mean i had no business being on that show i had no television background going into it and i was on it basically because of regis and michael davies who you know

worked with regis and put this show together and um i you know the thing that i vastly underestimated about television was just sort of that kind of like exhaustion afterwards you know and i wasn't doing a lot i wasn't expected to do anything except maybe say like four or five things during an hour um but you would feel actually winded like you had a physical event at the end of the thing. And I remember like I would finish these shows and we'd be walking off our set. And I'd like take the little IFB earpiece off and I'd like unbutton my tie and like, you know, wander back to the dressing room. And I'd look out the window and Regis' town car would be blasting down the street. And I was like, that's how you stay in TV for 60 years.

It's like, he's just a professional. He does it. He hits his mark and he's gone. And he does not sit around and like decompress and do like the postmortems and stress out like the rest of us. He was a different kind of creature altogether. Yeah. That energy is really unique.

Magic Johnson was like that. We could do like an hour-long pregame show, go back in the back, eat, come out for halftime and he's back on, come off, come out after the game, boom, he flipped the switch. Meanwhile, I'm like a carcass.

And he could just do it. And I think Regis was like that too. I think there's just certain people that just flip the switch, you're on, you're going. I mean, they say they're parallel in sports. Like, you know, it's like, you know, the great, great athletes are, you know, they're not overthinking it. They're going out and they're reacting.

They're being impulsive in the moment and they're instinctive. And maybe there's something to it with television. I mean, my limited experience with television, I'm convinced that the best people at it, you know, mean, my limited experience with television, I'm convinced that the best people at it, you know, Katie was kind of, you know, at the early stages of her career, but you could clearly see that in her. You can't really put your finger on precisely what it is, but they have that ability to connect through a camera and not get unnerved by the moment and build that kind of bond with an audience and and

and uh the the people who can do that genuinely are rare there are a hell of a lot of people on tv there probably never been more people on tv now but in terms of people who can just actually have that kind of like through line career where they do it again across generations i mean that's what made him so exceptional and that's why like people like letterman loved him you know like you know regis the loss of regis is not just like the loss of like you know an individual but like he is connective tissue to a whole other era of television you know a whole entertainment and entertainers and stuff you know and i think letterman adored the fact that Regis was the second banana,

the Joey Bishop, and that Regis had sung on television with Bing Crosby. I mean, Bing Crosby, that kind of stuff. I mean, you can't even make it up. I remember Regis telling me a story about he had gone to dinner. He's like, I went out to dinner with your friend Dave. Not my friend, but I certainly idolize Letterman. But the dinner table was Regis, Dave, Rickles, and Steve Martin. Wow.

That's a four top. I would just hide. Jesus. But, you know, the Letterman piece of it, Letterman always used to say how he was a broadcaster. Yes. That was how he would describe himself. He's like, I started out as a broadcaster in the 70s,

and I still feel like, you know, on my show, that's ultimately what I am. Those are the people I grew up watching. And Regis was like that too. He was just a broadcaster. I don't know if Regis was like that too. He was just a broadcaster. I don't know if there are people like that anymore, because I don't know what would be the career arc that led to you, quote unquote, being a broadcaster who's now talent.

Right. And also you had these sort of starts in the boondocks. I mean, Dave was a weatherman, and you grew up in the weirdness of of local television i mean like think of the people who have gotten those shows in recent years i mean jimmy fallon and seth myers were famous people before they got their late night talk shows and they could really hit the ground running because they had thousands of hours prior to doing this and like right it was like everything that made dave dave and everything that made Regis, Regis, I think was that kind of idiosyncratic background that was like really not, you know,

being a famous person for a really long part of their lives. Or somebody like Kimmel who gets thrown into the job and over the course of a couple of years gets the reps and now is a quote-unquote broadcaster, but started out as a radio guy, you know, and you kind of get thrown in the fire and you learn how to do it. Regis is learning how to do it. You know,

he's in these different morning shows. There was one part I, there was so much about his story. I didn't know where at one point he has the LA show or the San Diego show, one of them, but on Saturday nights, he's flying to St. Louis to host a St.

Louis late night show just for people in St. Louis. And then he would fly back to do his L.A. show. I'm like, what the fuck? And this was like in the early 80s. And by the way, this was continuing years later when I worked with him. You know, he'd be doing this sports show for Fox. He'd be doing it four or five days a week. And then he'd say, well, how was your weekend?

I was like, well, me and Joy did two shows. We played in Toronto and we played Montreal, you know, they would do two song and dance, like, you know, husband and wife banter and song shows. I mean, he was a crooner in addition to this. And yeah, I mean, he's, the idea of what fame is in 2020 is so different than what fame for Regis Philbin was. And it's very hard to sort of like imagine someone is going to reach a point

in their lives where they have that kind of just cultural penetration. Like he's just, everybody knows who Regis is. No one ever went on Regis' show, but now who's Regis again? Like everyone just knew him there was no explainer happening they didn't have to explain what this guy was i mean he just was you know this this institution the only thing i can compare it to a bunch of years ago i went to a i went to a brooklyn nets game with larry king long time that's a good comparison yeah but nobody doesn't know who Larry King is.

Like you might have an opinion about him one way or the other, but everyone knows he's got a hundred percent recognition pretty much. I mean, maybe there's a generation now under 25 that doesn't know who Larry King is, but there is a pretty significant 50 year demo that knows everything about him. I think millionaire, I just don't think the amount of people that were watching that show at its peak,

you're talking like 30, 35 million people. And now that's like the Super Bowl and that's it for what kind of number or some Adam Sandler movie on Netflix. But I think when you think about that level of fame for just a broadcaster slash host, probably not seeing it again. And it's a really interesting story how they fucked that show up too,

where it was like a huge success and they didn't really have anything for this slate. And I think it's something even in Iger's book, like he talked about, like they kind of just needed to put it on every night because otherwise they're going to potentially be in fourth place. And they basically bastardized the show

and extracted every ounce they could get out of it and ruined a show that probably could have been on for five years at the level it was on or close to it, you know? We're forgetting another ingredient of Regis' late blooming. And it was, this man was paid like unbelievably. Oh yeah. He was like 20 million a year just for millionaire, right?

I think so. And then another like, you know, 10 figure deal for live. I mean, he was just really, really making a lot of money at an age when most people are out of the genre. It's incredible. Well, it's also interesting that it was Regis and Kathy Lee. They somehow caught lightning in a bottle a second time with Kelly.

And then Regis eventually leaves. And Kelly's able to keep that franchise. So that franchise evolves three times. And then I think they would have thought, I guess, Strahan, but then Strahan leaves. So I don't know if it'll keep evolving the way it has, but just the fact that that show basically for 35 years now has been relatively intact or felt familiar in some ways. It's really hard to do. And its success also corresponded with what happened in news, which was that the

morning became this hugely significant day part. And like today, Good Morning America, those became these juggernauts. He's like high earning, like, you know, entertainment slash news shows. And they were huge vessels. And so like when you had that kind of lead in and they got that total shift right on live. Right. After you got through Good Morning America, which was, you know, had a lot of light stuff, but also had some serious stuff. You weren't going to get buried in like news headlines on live.

It was a nice sort of palate cleanser and stuff like that. And they figured that tone out perfectly. And you met him because he liked your column and he reached out to you? I think that, yeah, he was a journal reader. And I think I originally, I reached out to him because I wanted to go play tennis with him. You know, he played on the Notre Dame tennis team.

And he, you know, he co-hosted that famous Advil commercial where he played tennis with Joy. But he, you know, it kept getting canceled for a while. He had a bad knee, a bad elbow. He had a tree fall down in his court in Connecticut. And then I ended up going to play tennis with him at Mar-a-Lago. Oh, wow. And this was like 2011, 2012, like, you know, when Trump was just the Trumpster. And yeah, that was what, that was my introduction to the guy. And it was everything you would imagine it would be. It was like Regis, like being Regis on the tennis court and like yelling and throwing his racket and saying he was bored and all that kind of great

stuff. And then he pushed for you to be on the TV show. I guess so. Yeah. I mean, like he had reached out and said like, you know, uh, we're doing this show and I want you to go meet with these people. And this was Michael Davies's team. And I just figured it was like a favorite of Regis that they would sit and listen to this jackass from the Wall Street Journal for 20 minutes. And it evolved into being on the show. And at first I thought I was like, oh, I'd show up once in a while to like tell them about finance or something.

But it evolved into a full-time show. And I don't know if you remember, but there were 795 people on the panel of Crowd Goes Wild. Yes. It looked like the Supreme court up there. It was just one of the more bizarre experiences ever, but I, you know, listen, I had no business being there and I loved it. It was, I never would have gotten that opportunity if it weren't for him.

The lesson as always is don't put more than four people on any sort of studio show. I mean, what is the number? I kind of feel it's two. I mean, I think four is hard. Three. I always felt like for studio, like doing sports, I thought three was the best. Because three, everybody's involved.

Everybody's getting shots off. I think for like an opinion show, you really only need two. There's a reason PTI is the most successful of any sports show ever. It's two people. You don't need a third person on that show. You're firing back and forth. You're playing off each other. That's how it should go.

When you get to five, and having been on those shows with different numbers, I remember there were a couple times when we would have a half hour show with five people on it for NBA. And it's like, what are we doing? It just becomes a race to get your 22nd point off. have a half hour show with five people on it for NBA. And it's like, what are we doing? It's just becomes a race to get your 22nd point off, you know? And then if somebody else goes for a minute

and it's a three minute segment, it's like, well, everyone else is screwed now. I never understood why the producers didn't understand like how cumbersome that was. Yeah. And you still see it, especially on like cable news, like after like, and I'm like, Anderson Cooper's like got 12 people around him. And I'm like, who thinks this is a good idea? Certainly not Anderson Cooper. Anderson Cooper's not like, you know, it'd be great if I could throw to 12 different people in a 20 minute segment.

Could that, could we, could we make that happen? Like, I just don't get it. I would argue the host, it actually benefits the host. Cause he's in complete control at that point. Cause somebody finishes, it has to go back to the host, then they throw it to the second person, then it comes back to the host and he's always controlling it. Whereas if it's three people, four people become a conversation, people start audibling, doing whatever. And then he, you know, so the host is always the big winner with that. We, when we used to do the, I did the draft two years, it was so geared toward the host and it was like, they didn't really want any interaction at all. They wanted it specifically pick host talks, Billis, 45 seconds, me and Jalen kind of ad libbing off Billis back to the host, one camera shot, the more one camera shots of the host, you know, how, uh, how, you know, how of a host show it is when the host is turning and looking at the second camera. That's what, you know, but I, I mean, it goes back to what we're talking about with Regis and

Kelly and Regis and Kathy Lee, like that format of just two people shooting the shit people had been trying that for 40 years. and then they finally cracked it. And it was the best way to do it by basically ad-libbing, trusting each other and not doing too much pre-production and just going. Right. And not show-offing.

You know, they would never, you know, they haven't, you know, Hugh Jackman's here, but, you know, it's like whether or not they saw the movie, it was probably a 5% chance, right? They weren't going deep on that. You know, they were like, Hugh, what'd you do last night? You know, that kind of thing. And it was very a 5% chance, right? They were going deep on that. You know, they were like, Hugh, what'd you do last night?

You know, that kind of thing. And it was very sort of casual. And they did that kind of thing where they integrated Gelman, the producer, Michael Gelman, into the show. He became a character on the show. And like, you know,

you see that in Letterman too, that Letterman's whole sort of like backstage crew became part of the on-camera life of the show too in really funny ways. And like, I don't know. Stern was the other one. Stern, Letterman, whole sort of like backstage crew became part of the on camera life of the show too. And really funny ways. And like, I don't know. Stern was the other one.

Stern Letterman and Regis were the three that figured it out. Right. How to, how to make the supporting people, the peripheral people became just characters. Right. Right. And it was smart.

And a little tension isn't a bad thing. You know, I think that too, a little bit. I could never, I could never totally figure out Gilman. It's just like Regis almost needed a foil. But anyway, that's a story for another time. Jason Gay, sorry about your friend. Good to see you.

You haven't been on the pod in a while. I hope you're staying safe out there in the tri-state area. I've been enjoying the comms. I really like your Regis comm. Go check it out. If you're listening out out there in the tri-state area. I've been enjoying the comms. I really like to read this comm. Go check it out. If you're listening out there, go Google it. If you missed it, it was good to see you. Hope all is well.

Appreciate it, Bill. Thank you. All right. Thanks. All right. Thanks to CeCe and Ryan. Thanks to Jason. Thanks to ZipRecruiter.

Thanks to FanDuel. Thanks to the Rewatchables. Go listen to Ghost on that feed if you want to hear us talk about a 30-year-old movie that made $505 million. How is that even possible? I will have one more podcast on Thursday.

We'll be putting it up after the Clippers-Lakers game because I definitely want to play off that one. And then we're going to three days a week, starting on Sunday. We're still in our back. So get ready for that one. Enjoy the rest of the day. I don't have feelings within

On the wayside I'm a person never wanted I don't have feelings within