The Bill Simmons Podcast - Sports TV Secrets, MLB’s Murky Future, Hollywood’s Next Phase, And Bong Joon-ho's Championship Belt with Joe Buck and Alan Yang | The Bill Simmons Podcast

Episode Date: April 2, 2020

The Ringer's Bill Simmons is joined by sportscaster Joe Buck to discuss breaking into sportscasting, covering his first World Series at 27 years old, the differences between local and national broadcasting, the obstacles of a three-person booth, the search for the next great sportscaster, concerns surrounding the upcoming MLB season, his new podcast 'Daddy Issues With Joe Buck and Oliver Hudson,' and much more (3:20). Then Bill talks with screenwriter, director, and producer Alan Yang to discuss COVID-19's effect on writers' rooms, his new Netflix film 'Tigertail,' celebrity TV cameos, functioning without sports, and much more (1:03:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of the Bill Simmons Podcast on the Ringer Podcast Network is brought to you by World Central Kitchen, one of my favorite charities. We are facing an unprecedented emergency right now, unlike anything our country has ever experienced. Our economy is ground to a halt. Schools and businesses are closed. Travel is restricted. Restaurants face an uncertain future. Traditional safety nets like school feeding programs, child care services, and senior centers struggling to stay open. Millions of Americans out of work now struggling to put food on the table for their family. We also have people on the front lines all over the place, people that work for hospitals, ER, ICU, all of them putting their lives in danger to protect us,

to help us, to try to save lives. Those people, guess what? They need to eat. And they're working crazy hours right now. World Central Kitchen is delivering fresh meals all over the place. Tens of thousands of meals daily. You can donate there. Just go to their website, wck.org, and you can help in a whole bunch of different ways. They're also helping people on the front line. One of the things they're doing, the Feed the Front Line in Los Angeles,

which you can find on their front page. I donated $100,000 to it. Anthony Davis donated $250,000. A bunch of people have donated to this, actually. And you can donate, too. Go check that out. It's helping out at least 450 people working in hospitals, ICU and ER units, and six hospitals in the Los Angeles area. There's a bunch of places like that, though.

Go check out that website. It's really important, not just because it's getting meals to the right people, but it's also keeping some local restaurants that are all in peril right now, at least working and making food and trying to stay alive. I hope everybody's staying safe out there. This is glad we're in April, but glad that March is done. April seems like it's going to be even scarier than March was. We'll see how it plays out. Glad we're able to do some content for you. If you checked out theringer.com, you'll know we're still writing pieces there. If you check out the Ringer Podcast Network, we are still cranking out stuff,

including the rewatchables where we just did Tommy Boy, Shea Serrano and I did Fast and Furious 7 a little bit earlier. And the Book of Basketball podcast, our little redraftables idea that started with the 96 draft on this podcast. We've done 97, 98. We're doing 99 later this week. Probably going through until about 2003. Then I'm not sure after that. You can check out all of those on the Book of Basketball podcast because we started a little emergency season two coming up

we're going to talk to joe buck who has new podcast launching and is a sports announcer with no sports to announce and uh our friend alan yang who has a new movie coming out called tiger tail we're going to talk to him about that but a whole bunch of other stuff too this is a good podcast first our friends from Pearl Jam. All right, Joe Buck is here. one of our most famous sports announcers. There's no sports to announce. What's your life like? Well, I've tried to be creative.

I've tried to beg for Twitter interactions that allow me to call play-by-play of people's daily lives, which have been fun to do. It's added a little bit of a charitable element to things, but it's, it's weird. This is the time of year where I would typically be off anyway. So I'm kind of used to that. I just miss sports as a fan right now. It just being able to plop down on the couch and flip a game on and not having that is, you know, like I would imagine for most Americans, it's left a huge void in my daily life, which I don't think I realized even being in sports, how much I rely on sports to make me happy. Yeah. You kind of conceded this part of the sports calendar to Jim Nance. I mean, the real loser from sports announcers, Jim Nance loses his March Madness, then right into the Masters.

That was like the Nance wheelhouse. Yeah. Well, you don't know this, and I'm willing to reveal this on your podcast. There's like an underground society of play-by-play guys. And we meet once a year, and we determine what parts of the calendar we're going to dominate. And Nance, uh, way back when, when we first got together, uh, like dead poet society said, I want, I want March, March madness. I want April the masters. And we were like, Hey, Michaels and I looked at each other. We're like, let's let's let him have it.

And and now, you know, we got nothing and he's got nothing. And we're no longer meeting or speaking to one another. So it's good. So you had you basically told everybody October. It's me time. October is mine. Yeah. You stay out of October.

You guys can have whatever else. But October is mine. Literally, you can have every other month. Guys, there are 12 of them. There's can have whatever else, but October's mine. Literally, you can have every other month. Guys, there are 12 of them. There's only one that I want, and I want to be bouncing all over the world. I want to be calling two different sports, and I want to be fighting with my wife and my kids while I do it. And October is my month, and that's the one I got. So we'll see once we get there what the hell's going on in the world. So it's you and Michaels and Nance are kind of the most established biggest play by play voices we have for professional sports. And I'm sure there's some, some real

camaraderie with everybody. And maybe if it's, if it's just two of you, maybe you complain about the other guy a tiny bit, but it went to three of you. Everybody gets along. It's just two of you, maybe you complain about the other guy a tiny bit. But when it's the three of you, everybody gets along. It's like one of those deals. You're like girls in a sorority house. It is. It's like the Richard Lewis. I forget what the name of the movie was, but a bunch of comedians sitting around a dinner table or having drinks.

And they were all so scared to get up to go to the bathroom for fear of what was going to be said about them when they got up and left. Yeah, you're right. Actually, I don't know those guys that well. I played golf with Michaels a couple times in that Tahoe event, and I've been around him, and he couldn't be nicer. Obviously, he was as much a contemporary of my dad's as he is mine. That's how long he's been doing it. And then Nance, we just never have really crossed paths that much. So when he did that shout out at the end of the AFC championship game,

previewing the Super Bowl and mentioning my dad, and it was just such a cool thing for him to do. And honestly, that was the first time that I was aware that my dad called that Superbowl between, uh, the chiefs and the Vikings. And it was the only one he did on TV. Nance knew more about my dad is what I'm saying than I knew about my dad. So basically what you're saying is you were on Nance's corner and he was pretty cold too over the years, but now he's starting to warm up. That's how I interpreted that. Just for the aggregators out there, the sports media blogs. Yeah. Jim Nance, cold to buck. Yes. And it's starting to thaw. I don't know. For some reason, it's not like we had... I was kidding, obviously, about the meetings. We just don't ever interact. I think, I wish we did more because I feel like we all have similar experiences.

Every sport's different. Al's been through different generations of players and how the play-by-play has changed over the years, what fans expect out of a play-by-play guy. I wish I knew them better, but I just don't probably the guy I talked to the most is to Rico and, uh, another fantastic play-by-play guy who literally could do anything as he proves every time he shows up on TV. Well, maybe that's a generational thing. Cause three, cause your generation is our generation. We're all kind of, kind of all kind of relatively the same age.

I did your podcast. And we ended up, even though I was the guest, I flipped it on you a little bit, like I like to do when I come on as guests. But we were talking about how much I hated you in the mid-2000s, which we've already talked about on this podcast. And then how that evolved for a bunch of different ways. So you can listen to the new podcast you have with, uh, Oliver Hudson, daddy issues.

Cause I'm on that this week, but you're our first guest. Let's not, this is a slough that off. You are the, you're the Bill Murray to our combined letterman. You, you are, it was an honor. Plus we did it on zoom, which I think all of us are trying to figure out, but, um, it was actually fun. I felt like we're all in the same room together, even though we were on a, in three different locations, but. But here's the thing in you and I never talked about this. We should have on my podcast,

daddy issues. Uh, I, for whatever reason on my public television as a kid, and as we've determined, we are basically the exact same age. We used to have the show Zoom, which I think originated in Boston, right? Wasn't that a Boston kid show that people of a certain age will know what we're talking about? Nobody else will. But yeah, I remember the theme song. I watched that whenever it was on. I watched it theme song. I watched that whenever it was on. I watched it religiously.

So we were talking a little bit, but I want to go into it more because there was one piece of it that we didn't talk about. So you come in, you're young, and you've been pretty open about trying to figure out what your style was. You get that job at a...

You're doing major events. You're barely even, we even 30 at that point when you were getting some of those gigs, like near late twenties. Yeah. My first world series, Yankees, Braves in 96,

I was 27. Yeah. So it's going through, you're still trying to kind of figure out what your persona and your style and all that is. And at that point there's a, a huge, some are all hang is. And at that point, there's a huge Summerall hangover. And Summerall is, you know, Summerall is the guy that, uh, I think

Summerall maddened together, but especially how Summerall did football play by play specifically. It was like, oh, that's how you do it. The play by play guy just kind of sets picks, says as little as possible and lets the color guy run amok. And you're in there and you're trying to do your version of the Summerall thing. But I didn't realize this till recently, some of those interviews you've given and stuff, you eventually realized you were doing a Summerall impersonation and you had to break out of that and try to figure out what your own voice was that what year was, what year did it really hit you? Like I'm not being fully Joe Buck yet. Well, I mean, you know, this is, this is stuff that I go to bed thinking about and stuff that I wake up thinking about. And, and sometimes I see highlights, uh, of games

that I've done and I cringe and I don't like them. When did this dawn on me? It dawned on me after 2011 when I had a paralyzed vocal cord and I got through it. I kept working. I got it. It's in my book. I have no problem talking about the whole hair plug thing that I did. And I got intubated and it sat on my laryngeal nerve and I came out of it unable to really make a loud noise at all.

And I couldn't keep my air. I couldn't really talk through an entire long sentence. It was, I was shaken to my core. And when it came back, I thought, I love what I do so much. And I think I've taken it for such granted at this point in my life that now that I have this voice back, I'm just going to let it fly. And I think that's what made me really realize that I wasn't myself. I was trying to be somebody else. And I think as far as football, two things happened. One, yeah, we took over for the greatest team ever in some Roland Madden. Two, it was three guys and it was Troy Aikman and Chris Collinsworth. And I was trying somehow to get out of the way as much as I could. So it kind of fit that minimalist style, but I had kind of a, uh, there But there was a lack of excitement to my voice that when I listen back to it, I'm like, God, it just drives me nuts. And so it was a lot of things that happened in my life on and off the air that forced me to really evaluate the job I was doing and to have more fun and let it fly. And that's kind of where I've come out from 2012 on. Well, the good news is nobody ever watches old games. So at least you're saying,

oh, wait, no, that's all we're doing right now. I know. It sucks. Well, you had a good one this Sunday. had Pats Falcons a game that's near and dear to my heart that has to be the craziest football game of all time but what you were just saying I feel the same way about me as a writer

where I can't really read anything I've written before like 2008 and it's stuff like I had a pretty big audience there. There's a couple of things where I'm like, ah, I would do like 85% of that, 90% of that. But I look back at that stuff now, I didn't really know what I was doing until I was like 39, 40, something like that. And I'm sure it sounds like announcing is kind of similar to that. It is. But I was thinking about this when I was getting ready to interview you. And I think

the big difference is this. When I show up to work, the action's going to happen no matter what. And I have to be ready for it and I have to give it my best. And I've never given a game anything less than my best. I think sometimes I got too in my head and I listened to too much noise about you're rooting for this team or you're rooting against that team. And so I tried to play it down the middle and what came out in the wash was just kind of flat. But for you, when I was thinking about you and you're making a name for yourself and you're really changing the way people looked at sports writers, and you're this internet sensation. I don't know how you stare at a blank Word document, start in on it, and don't just constantly go back over, I can do that better. I can make a better reference here. This can be

funnier. I would never turn anything in. The difference is I have to be ready and it's going to happen whether I'm calling it or not. For you, you're generating it. You're self-starting. And that, man, I don't know when you're young and you're trying to make a dent and trying to establish yourself, how you were able to just keep writing and able to hit the send button. And now I can't write anything. Yeah. I think it's like, uh, it's almost like race car driving or something when you, when you're younger and you're a writer, your fingers start moving. You just kind of go with whatever happens. And that's the hardest thing. That's the hardest feeling to keep going as you get older,

because when you get older, you become naturally more safe. You know, you, I think we all talk, you talk yourself out of stuff. And it's same reason, like with marketing, you know, the ad demo that they really care about is 18 to 34. Cause those are the people that are most likely to switch their opinion on something or be impetuous. And you get older, you get more stuck in your ways. For writing, that gets really dangerous because you're just less likely to take chances every time you write. I think we're all too safe. I think I'm too safe. I think that's the reason why I wanted to even do a podcast where it's kind of off on the side and whatever I say there can kind of live over there. I'm smart enough to know that if I say something really moronic or stupid or offensive or whatever, it will bleed into my other life and could end up costing me my job, theoretically. But I think social media, you handle social media a hell

of a lot better than I do. I think growing up as the fat kid, growing up as my dad's son, always trying, feeling like I have to prove myself. It doesn't matter who's shooting at me on Twitter or whatever it may be. I take a lot of that stuff not well. It hits. It hits hard. And sometimes I have a tough time putting it off to the side. That's why there have been times where I've just taken it out of my life. Otherwise, it's just too suffocating. But I think I was talking about this with somebody today, that I feel like social media has taken a lot of the personality away from people who are on the air or doing what you do or whatever. I assume every time you hit send, you think, this is back when you were writing,

you're thinking, this is a good piece, but when you were writing, you're thinking this is a this is a good piece. But there's going to be somebody who's going to rip this thing to fucking shreds. And and I'm going to have to I'm going to have to withstand that and stand on my own knowledge that what I just wrote was good. And that's that's how I wish to be more on the air. I wish to go back to how I used to be before social media. When, even when I was 27, doing the world series in New York, I watched those highlights and I'm like, man, I'm doing more stuff as a 27 year old scared out of his wits kid than I would be willing to do now because everybody's been kind of shoved into the middle lane for fear of getting ripped or whatever.

And, and it just sucks. It's too bad because I think a lot of people aren't... My dad was famous for his sense of humor. Harry Carey was Harry Carey. All the greats, Howard Cosell, they all were just themselves. And I don't feel like anybody is really willing or able anymore to be themselves. And that's a bad thing. Social media has had the biggest impact on that, by far, of any other possible cause we could come up with. And I would take back a million things I've written over the years, but I also didn't really have the fear of getting piled on. If I wrote something that came out the wrong way, or if I wrote some angle that just

turned out to be dumb. And, you know, I was, I was on my own for four years, basically my old website. And I took a lot of chances with columns I wrote back then. And some of them didn't work. You try gimmicks. It's like, you're a standup comedian. You're on stage. You try stuff. It doesn't work. You get rid of that. And the next time you come out, you do something different. I think we're losing the ability to just be like, fuck it. I'll just try this or fuck it.

I'll just write this. Everybody's pretty safe. And that's why you've seen in the last four years, it's really turned into a genre. These really, really poignant first-person essays about people talking about like, here is this thing I battled through and then I got out on the other side, which are a lot of times really interesting, but they're also like pretty safe to write. You know, if you're writing about some bad thing that happened to you or some ailment that you had, or some, something that was wrong with you that you fixed and you write about your whole journey, how, how that played out, nobody's going to shit on you for that. You know? And I, and I do wonder

like with, especially with first-person essays, we've seen a rise of those, but not a lot of rise of just people being like, I have a take on this. I know it's crazy. I'm going to get shit for this, but here's my take anyway. I wish we saw more of that. I think that's just gone.

I do too. And I'm not crying about it. I think the worst thing I can ever come off as is like a little baby or, you know, about this kind of stuff. I'm not. I'm just saying that when I look back on my dad's career and I was riding shotgun for a lot of that because he took me around with him. I was in every National League city by the time I was 12 and I was two seats over to his right watching him. He had such a freedom to do what, say and do whatever the hell crossed his mind. And that has to be, that's a feeling that I don't think I've had ever, you know, because when I was starting, I was trying to sound older than I was. I was doing the Cardinals at 21 years old. And then when I,

by the time Fox came along, I was 24, 25 doing the NFL. I'd never done football in my life. And I'm trying to navigate my way through that. Then baseball shows up and now you're on a big stage and you're a little scared to step to the center and grab the spotlight and say something that may upset people. So I think I will enter, exist, and die in this business without ever feeling like I can totally be myself. And that's, you know, only because I compare it to my dad do I know that I fall short in that category. Well, the other obstacle you had is that you hate every team in every league.

Correct. That's well established by now. But I was thinking... It's tough. It's tough when you're against all 120 professional teams or whatever the number is. It's an amazing accomplishment. It really is. I don't know how you do it.

And to me, it's mostly a baseball thing. And that's why I was thinking, you know, when you were talking about you starting out and you had these opinions, at least on some level, when you were beginning, you were representing the Boston fan. You were representing, you know, you were crying out in, you know, at times in defense of your, your Red Sox or your Celtics or your Patriots or whatever it might have been. And you're always going to find people that are going to, if it's well-written, I think, or well-presented, they're going to latch on to that from that whole New England stuff. But when I show up, I'm in the worst position because I have to scream and yell for both teams and neither fans hear that all year in baseball. I've done the other way. I've done it for the Cardinals for,

I don't even know how long I was there, 12, 15 years, something like that. And it's, like I said on our podcast, it's state-run TV. And that's how fans want to hear it. They want to hear somebody telling them on TV that their team is winning or losing, and they know that that person feels the same way they do. And when they sense that, you know, I think all this stuff has become a hell of a lot more tribal than it's ever been. And if you're perceived as being outside the tribe, man, they want blood. And I get it because I'm a Blues fan. And I watched them win the Stanley Cup against, obviously, the Bruins. And it was like the greatest fan experience I've ever had.

And yet, in the finals, for as great as Doc Emmerich is, and on the way to the finals for as close as I am with Kenny Albert, who I love and is wonderful at what he does, I wanted the Blues announcers to do it. Because I'm like, these guys, they don't care or they're rooting for the Bruins or they're, and it's just, it's just stupid. And I was, I was doing the same stuff that I hate when people do it to me. I said on your podcast that we did how for Red Sox fans in 03 and 04 until we actually won. Just seeing your face was like seeing the doctor

who told me that my dad wasn't going to make it or something. Like, it was just, your face was associated with pain. Right. And that's a tough one. It's Pavlovian. It's Pavlovian. That's not your fault, but it's a tough one to bounce back from

because I'm like, ah, fucking Joe Buck. All right, here we go. Run the Buckner montage, Fox. Cause I'm like, ah, fucking Joe Buck. All right, here we go. Run the Buckner montage, Fox. You fuckheads. Like it just made me so mad, but it's like, that's how you're selling a game to the entire country. You're not doing the game for the Red Sox fans. You're doing it for the person in Cincinnati who doesn't give a shit. Right. Well, I learned from 04 with the Red Sox and because of what you just said, it is part of the story. As much as you are so sad and poor,

the late great Bill Buckner is, is, is tired as everybody in new England is of seeing that ball bounce through his legs or past him or whatever at, uh, Shay, right. That was a chase stadium.

Uh, as sick of that as you are, it's part of the bigger story for the guy sitting in Norman, Oklahoma, who's going, hey, how long has it been since the Red Sox haven't won a long time, right? And you got to go, hey, it's been since 1986. And I don't start that video as you know. I don't go, hey, why don't we run the Buckner video here? I just have to put my voice to it when it rolls. But so then the Cubs are in it and they're in 2016. And, and during part of game seven, it felt like, okay, they're, they're cruising toward this win. You have to go.

And I almost gave a disclaimer, like, look, I know Cub fans are tired of hearing about 108 years. I know you're sick of it, but it's been, you know, here's tired of hearing about 108 years. I know you're sick of it, but here's what's happened in the world since the last time the Cubs won the World Series. Every Cub fan wants to kill me for even bringing that up, but you can't ignore it. It's too big a part of the story, and if you do, you're just not doing your job because you're scared of somebody in Highland Park, Illinois, tweeting

something mean to you. I guess you have to just live with it. Well, the Falcons Patriots game that I just watched, it's good when the announcers are doing it, when it's in your favor of your team. There's this moment in the second half, you guys run, you're coming out of the commercial, you run one of those fancy graphic packages that take like two days to do. And it's basically all of the titles Boston has won versus all of the titles Atlanta won. And at that point, Boston had won like 36 or 37 titles. We won three since you did the graphic. And it's like, and it's like one, you know, 17 NBA titles, zero or one NBA title for the Hawk and just going all the way through. And I remember when that happened during the game, getting like this strange sense of confidence

because I'm looking at it from like my old dead Red Sox DNA standpoint. I'm like, man, if I'm an Atlanta fan, I'd be so nervous right now. We've never won the Super Bowl. Somehow Brady's head hasn't been cut off yet. He's still alive. And now they're running this montage at me. I would be having a heart attack. And as it turned out, it was a justified heart attack. Yeah, no. And, and for people in Atlanta, when that ran, they're going, Oh, these guys just rubbing it in. Yeah. We haven't won anything. And, you know, for you guys now, you've had more duck boat. I mean, the duck boat tours, which I've been on in the great city of Boston, the great Garibaldi was our tour guide and a fantastic presentation of the history

of the city of Boston and going down into the water and all that. But, I mean, those things have been, they've been used more for parades than they were for their original use, which I guess were like in World War II or something. Well, I think it's over. Fortunately for America, I think the run has finally ended. The Red Sox are in transition.

Oh, are you just talking to yourself, Andy? You're just talking yourself back into your old self so that you can be excited. I'm contractually obligated to talk about it. It's just, you know, it's a new decade. We can't look backwards. We got to look for the next one. I have a couple of random questions for you.

Okay. Do you think a three-man booth works? No. No, I don't i i think well i take that back because i do like what and i'm not i'm not a diehard nba fan i i barely know who's in the league uh and i'm sorry i know that strikes deep to your core but i think the guys you don't have a basketball team you in st louis it's not your fault before mentioned hawmentioned Hawks. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the NBA guys, I think Breen and Van Gundy and Jackson,

I really think that's terrific. Now, I'm a fringe fan, so I enjoy what they do. I don't know what the perception is, but I think it's really hard because I've lived in a couple of them. To me, when two people can't look at each other in the eyes and have a conversation, uh, and just go from that forward when there's another person in there. Um, and I think I've been in three, three man booths. Yeah. The mechanics of it, it's probably too intricate or boring to talk about. But if a play happens and I shut up after the catch is made, and let's say Aikman takes it and he'll do whatever he saw. Well, while Aikman's

talking back in the day, Chris Collinsworth is hitting a button and talking to the producer in the truck and not listening to anything Troy just said, because he's calling for what replay he wants. So there you think, well, it's going to be great because it's going to be differing opinions. Most of the time you end up repeating what the other guy just said or some version of that because nobody is listening to each other it's way easier and the game breathes way more if it's just two people you know if i have something i want troy to hear me say i'll grab him by the arm uh because i want a reaction out of him when we're doing a game that can't exist when you've got three people. It just, I think it's really hard to do it that way. I, I told you how I did a three man booth with Tariqo and Jalen.

And basically the two, two of the people are going to control most of it because if you're going to have any dialogue back and forth at all, it's too hard to do with three, because as you said, you can't look at each other. You're all staring ahead at the court. So you don't know when you're stepping in. So usually one person has to lay out, which is what Tirico did for us the first three quarters. He just let me and Jalen do our thing. Then fourth quarter, the game got good and he had to kind of take over. So now we laid back and he did all the play by play for it. I don't really, I can't really think of many scenarios where I was like,

thank God they had three people here. I always feel like it's better with two. And that, you know, it's funny because there's some parallels with studio shows, which I've probably done more studio stuff than you have. Yeah. The pregame shows, three is the best number.

Three, it's a conversation and you're really playing off each other. You can see each other. Once it gets to four, you're just trading monologues. And, and then if there's back and forth, it's usually two of the four people. And then the other two are just kind of bystanders. And it's almost like if you go to dinner and there's three people, it's always going to be the best dinner. Like if you go with like two of your fancy Hollywood friends, like you,

you, Paul Rudd and John Hamm, just the three of you for dinner, you're going to have an awesome dinner. You bring the fourth person in. Now people are splitting off. And now there's like two simultaneous two person combos. And it's just never it's really

hard to get the four all you know interacting in a good way and i i don't know why tv networks don't understand this yeah i i totally agree and for one year i hosted fox nfl sunday and i yeah on the road in 06 and i our production meetings, which took place initially on the phone on Thursday, you'd go through the slate of games, and it would be, you know, game one was Cincinnati-Cleveland. Game two was New England against whatever, Tampa Bay. I'll rub it in. Right on down the line.

And it was like, okay, so for the first game, for the first game we're going to talk about, we're going to go in order, Jimmy, Terry, Howie. And then on the second game you bring up, it's going to be Howie, Jimmy, Terry. And then on the next game, it's going to be Jimmy, Howie, Terry. I just want to talk. How can this be at all conversational and appear unrehearsed if everybody has to wait their turn. And so we would do that. We'd do the pregame. And it was awkward. And we were on site. And it was

the NFL, not college football. So it didn't really work. And then I would race down after a double header game. And I would host the postgame. And the post game. They're like, I don't know why we can't capture the energy we have in the post game and have that for the pregame. I said, because in the post game, we don't have rundowns and nobody knows who's supposed to talk when we can be, you know, I know that Howie can run with this. I know Terry can do it. I know Jimmy can do it. Let just let us talk. And, and instead of having it all scripted out, I guess that's done for the director and some sort of semblance of, of, uh, of a show rundown. But my God, I mean, if, if the four of us can't talk about a game

that pops up, then nobody's doing any homework whatsoever. And it just comes off stale and stilted. You know, I think part of that is it's fear of a producer doing their job, just wanting to make sure, all right, what's my job in this? Well, I created the rundown. I threw them this segment. The lack of control makes them vulnerable if things don't work out. They'll be like, well, what just happened there? You let those guys go, and it was a disaster, but I'm with you. Like when we, so we would have the first charity content, it was me and magic and Wilbon and Jalen. And we all really got along and we would be in the war room, like watching basketball games.

And there was like real energy with how we'd talk, but in the pregame, everything had to be mapped out. And it was the same thing you said. It's like, all right, we're going to leave with this magic, Hugo. And then Wilbon will go next. And we're basically just trading monologues. But then the most fun would be if it was a double header and we had to fill time between the first game ended too early. And then the second one, we had to kill nine minutes and it was like now it feels like us it's like here we go now we have like now we're just shooting the shit for nine minutes because it's not scheduled or planned i don't know and it's engaging and it's entertaining and it can be off the cuff and more funny and i know and it's it's like i can't tell you how many times

people i've seen producers go, we can just capture what's happening in the green room when everybody's watching games. If we could put that on TV, it's like, well, then I have an idea. How about if we just walk out there and go? Can we do that? If you count me down, I'll start, I'll lead into something and let's just see what happens. Let's be crazy like that. And it's live TV. That's the world I live in. And when I hosted that show, it was like if I read one more script coming back from break,

I am going to spontaneously combust. Give me the game and where do you want to get? What's the out? How do we get into it? And what do you want to go to next? And in the middle part, we'll handle it. We got it.

I can engage these guys. And if I can't, then I shouldn't be sitting there. I think my favorite thing I've ever done sports-wise on TV was the NBA draft because of how unpredictable it was. And we still had to stick to these, you know, these formula stuff. Like the guy would get drafted and Billis would get like 45 to 50 seconds on each guy because they had to run the package. And Billis is, you know, he's unbelievable. He's so good.

He knows who all these guys are. I mean, there's no way you can know, I would imagine, you know, all these college kids. Right. So he, he has this thing that ends. And then it was like a free for all. And it was, we had Reese hosting, who is the best, probably the best host I've ever worked with. Um, and he kind of knows exactly when to come in and out, but it felt like unstructured. And I just loved it. I was like, Hey, we were there for like, I don't know, four and a half straight hours, not peeing, drinking water. You can't pee. You, you've helped these superhuman kidneys because you're locked into the chairs

with the wires. So you can't get up anyway. And if you get up, it's super risky and you, and it's just, it just flew. And it was so much fun. I really loved it. Because you can, you, when you're sitting there and you're doing a draft that the fun is not just talking about, you know, who's coming into the league, but where do they fit and what happened last year and how you see their team developing going into the next year. And that should just be conversation. If you know your stuff, and obviously you do, and the guys that were on set knew what these NBA teams needed and how they were going put together going forward. Hey, let, let it go. Let's see what comes out of this. Could be really interesting. Could be boring, but let's, let's give it a shot. Let's hope that it's, it's, it's spontaneous and fun. Well, at least in football, they figured out two man is the way to

go because all of the signature booths are two men booths. And I think if you're ever going to have a third person in there, I almost feel like it would have to be somebody who offered something completely different. You know, like, like what, what ESPN tried to do that year with Kornheiser, which I just think the mix of the three guys wasn't right. But the idea of having Kornheiser in the booth. I still stand by the idea. I thought it was a really good idea. It just didn't work with who they had. So much of it has to do with the chemistry of, of, you know, who the people are and that has to work beyond just the idea. I think you also have to have, like, I worked for a guy at Fox who started at

David Hill, who, when he came in, I remember Ed Gorin, who was right under him and was the executive producer, whatever David's exact title was, he ran Fox Sports. And Ed Gorin had come over from CBS with John Madden, with Pat Summerall, with Matt Millen, with Dick Stockton, with all these guys. And I remember it at our introductory dinner, and I was 25 or whatever I was at the time. And Ed Gorin saying, we finally have a boss in TV who doesn't give a shit what Rudy Martzke says. And now, now Rudy Martzke, who was the longtime USA Today columnist who wielded more power in the business than anybody before or since because it was a one-stop shop for everybody in sports television, executives, announcers, producers, whatever it might be. And now that

entity is Twitter. So you have to have, I think, a boss that's willing to go, Twitter may say this sucks, but I really believe in Tony Kornheiser fitting in here. I really believe, people may not like it. They may not like it now, but I am confident that this is going to work long term. And I feel like everybody's so knee jerk. And when it's something different, the initial reaction on social media, of course, is going to be scathing no matter what. There are few exceptions to that. You have to have, I think, the balls and the willingness to suffer all that and plow ahead and believe in your plan. If you have a good eye for talent, then those are the special booths or those are the, those are the special times in this business. Yeah. Reacting to what people on Twitter think is such a strange thing because their reaction is always going to be skewed toward being negative and getting jokes off and things like that. If you go to Twitter and everybody's just like, you know, who's great.

So-and-so I read this great thing today. You You know who does a good job, but we don't talk about enough blank. Twitter is not that. It's the opposite of that. So the fact that so many executives and radio programmers and stuff, they're just looking at Twitter mentions to try to get a feel for what America thinks. It's like, how about going with your gut? What do you think? Yeah. No, I know? What do you think? No, I know. What do you care about?

I, yeah, that's, that's the part I never understood, but I don't know that that'll change going forward. Can we talk about you? You must have a, at least a pretty good feel as a scout for who would be good just because you're thinking of it from the aspect of,

all right, if Troy get hit by a bus tomorrow, who would I want to do football games with? And you're looking at, you know, the current guys, like Peyton Manning always gets thrown around as somebody who would be an awesome color guy. I'm not sure.

I don't know how candid he would be. I really was convinced Romo was going to be good only because I had spent a little time with him and the way his brain worked and his sense of humor and stuff. It was just clear he was meant to do this. Are there guys playing now that you feel could potentially be Collinsworth, Troy, Romo-y when they retire? Yeah, that's a good question. And I agree with you on the two guys you just said. I think the best thing Tony Romo did was he got into this business almost like he'd never watched a football game on television in his life. He didn't try to sound like somebody else. He just went with his gut. And he's obviously been handsomely rewarded for going with that gut, but, but good for him. And he's changed the way I think people, you know, look at some of these analysts. So, and, and Peyton, I feel the same way. You

don't know until, you know, you don't know. And because I'm old enough, you're old enough to remember a time when Bill Walsh was going to get in TV and man, he's brilliant. He knows the game. He can talk. He's, you know, good looking guy, elder statesman in the league seconds you have to formulate an opinion on what you just saw and then do that over and over and over for three and a half hours. I mean, that's a different thing. So I'm with you. I think Peyton Manning could be amazing, unbelievable. He might be the best one to ever do it but i want to see it i i want to see you know how he was a guy that when he was playing you could hand him a script he hosted snl for god's sake you could hand him a script and he can pull it off he's smart he's brilliant but let's just

see how it would go so i i think drew breeze would be really great um really do. I'm on the fence with him. I don't... I wonder if he's too nice of a guy because I do think there's a piece of this if you're the only person and Troy is probably the only one who's had real success who I don't think is wired this way. But you just kind of have to not give a shit.

You know, like... You're right. He's not wired that way at all. Troy's not one of those I'm just saying this. I don't care even like, you're right. He's not wired that way at all. Troy's not one of those. I'm just saying this. I don't care if it hurts somebody's feelings. Romo will actually cross a line or two. And I think that's one of the reasons why he's good. Barkley's obviously like that. I think Madden in the eighties, I'd never heard announcers question play calls or coaching or why somebody was doing this or that. Like he, he had a curiosity that he didn't mind

criticizing. I, Breeze is such a nice guy. I would worry that if he was doing it, he would just be too nice. And I don't really want too nice when I'm in, I need people to be critical sometimes. Yeah. So I don't know. I don't, It could go either way for me. I just think I'm looking for somebody who can formula. Like I saw Drew talk on a thing from his office on the Today Show the other day after he donated $5 million to. That was excellent. I saw that piece where Hoda started crying at the end. That was emotional. Yeah, that was really good.

And then I thought, you know, this is a guy that really can put a point together and there's not a lot of extra words there's not a lot of him and han i just want to see somebody go right at it i want to see somebody see something or want to say something and they go right to it good point and that that's what i see with with drew breeze i think philip rivers could be interesting so that was the guy i was going to mention. I think he's he's the one I have the highest hopes for.

I was actually bummed when he signed with the Colts because I thought he was going to be the Monday Night Football guy. And I you could tell from the interviews.

I always say this on the pod. Like, go look at the postgame interviews. Who has a personality? Who seems like they don't give a shit? Who seems like they're kind of a little bit of a loose cannon? Like those are the guys that are going to be good on TV.

Richard Jefferson was a pretty obvious one. Richard Jefferson's really good at hoops now. That was a pretty obvious one because he was a good interviewer when he played, you know? You know who I think would be good? And, you know, you know me. I'm not all for sons of people in broadcasting getting into broadcasting but i think we've all seen chris long do what he's done he's really

transitioned out of the game extremely well i think he's more philanthropically inclined with his water boys effort and you know he's got a podcast yes but i don't know that he wants to do games but his brother does and kyle long i think is really sharp really funny uh has a quick wit and and could be one of those guys that's not a quarterback uh telling you about what's going on you know in the trenches and could probably still pull back and give you a bigger picture kind of comment. But I, you know, you think back to what happened with Witten and Booger and Joe Tessitore. First of all, it's a three-man booth. Secondly, you know, those guys really, you know, it's hard to start and just go and then just say, Hey, it accept us and wouldn't have ever done it. And,

and Booger hadn't done much, uh, you know, game calling game wise. Yeah. Game wise. And now, and now they're not only that they're in separate locations, they're not even close enough to, to grab the guy's arm or to make eye contact and say, Hey, I got something good here. They're, they're waiting and feeling. I felt that in golf. It's like, I, I'm not used to this. So I'm, I'm sitting in a, in a permanent location here in a booth. And our first year I had Norman next to me and we had Brad Faxon on 17. He's miles away. We had Steve flesh on 16. He's more miles away and nobody can see each other. So I, you know, I, I don't know that they had the best situation to walk into.

I just didn't think it was fair. I didn't think it was fair. Suicide mission by ESPN, putting Booger in a different spot on top of all the other stuff. Like what were the odds that was going to work? You could try to do that right now with you and Troy and anybody in a third spot. And it's not going to be easy. Absolutely not. You mentioned the golf thing. It's funny. Like we talk about the Twitter overreactions, that first major that Fox did. I don't remember what year that was.

15. People reacted like you were Michael Jackson dangling kids over a balcony. Like they were so were so upset. It's like, oh, Fox is ruining golf. Why are they doing this? Ah! Oh, I know. It was like, it was fine. You guys were working out the kinks.

It was definitely a little awkward, but now you look five years later, you guys are a thousand times better. I didn't even think it was bad to begin with. Yeah, no, it was funny. I walked out of that booth in chambers bay which was it was just a weird looking u.s open you'd never had you had never had a u.s open uh on this grass that the greens were not good players were complaining there was a glare the main critic in the new New York Times, Richard Sandemir, wrote that the Fox camera operators couldn't follow the ball. They're the same camera operators.

Camera operators are not like NBC guys and then only CBS guys. They're the same people. And it was just hard to see. And so we had a lot of stuff stacked against us, but yeah, I feel like we've grown there, but you're right. I mean, that's what I'm talking about. So if you're the ESPN guys, you know, and now you just launch into this, I felt it in golf. I've been there. It's just not easy to start up and just go, okay, now trust us. You know, we're going to cover your U S open and we're going to do it just as well as everybody else has. We're going to cover your U.S. Open, and we're going to do it just as well as everybody else has. We're going to try new stuff. We're going to put microphones in cups and all that

without people just absolutely freaking out. Yeah. Do we have a baseball season? Yeah. I go back and forth on this. I talked to one of the Cardinal owners the other day, and he said, right now, I would take July 1st and run. And I kind of feel like that's the point where it has to be going

by July 1st. I don't see some two-month season and then starting some crazy round Robin baseball playoff tournament. I just, I think they have the ability if they want to this year coming up, if they do play. And I, I want to lean toward yes to change it up with how they do the postseason. I just think we have to get a better handle on,

you know, what the next two months look like. I, maybe we start and there's no crowds. There's no fans in the stands. But I think there's just too much invested in this thing that unless it's just impossible, I think they're going to, yes, I think they will play somehow, some way starting at the latest in the month of July. The problem is with baseball NBA to a lesser degree, but I do think those guys can stay in shape on their own to some degree in baseball. You really need at least, I would say like two and a half weeks to just, you know, to throw and get the rhythm and the hitting, like that could lead to some of the worst baseball we've ever watched if we just rush back. But I, I think July 1st is the date for the

NBA and for MLB. I think for both of those, cause NBA can't go past labor day and it just can't, you can't bleed in a football. And then when do you start the next season? I don't see any way that works. So for both of them, you know, we have, I would say 10, 11 weeks here to see how bad April's going to be in the United States and around the world, whether what people's appetite will be for sports to even come back. Do people want to go sit in the stands again? You know, the NFL will be the one that just pushes the envelope with all this stuff though. They'll, they'll be back as soon as people could be back. And I think when you look at, uh, the rabid fan bases that those football

games have, there's not a lot of games by September. You're hoping things would be a little bit better. Football to me seems reasonable that it comes back. Baseball seems like the one in the most danger. At least basketball had a season already. They can just go to the playoffs, basically. Baseball is at zero. Yeah, well, as you and I sit here and talk, it's April 1st. And it wasn't that long ago that the president was saying i

want to get this country back up and running by easter and then a handful of days later was like no it's it's going to be the end of april and then you know as we make our way through april i think this the story this virus the reaction to it, the curve, everything else, the medical experts. I mean, that is changing rapidly. So I think to sit here on the 1st of April and go start talking about anything in July, August, September, it seems like five years from now to me. And I feel like so many things are going to change between now and then. Recommendations, wear masks, people just go stir crazy.

I don't know, but I will just go back to they need to be playing by the 1st of July or that first 13 days. I think the All-Star game is the 14th, whatever that Tuesday is in there. If you can get 80-81 games in, have an All-Star game, however they want to shape that, I think you can have a season. I do.

Before we go, why'd you finally want to do a podcast? I think it's in the same category as to why I wrote a book. You know, it's like, uh, you think, you know, me, you've heard me on TV for 20 plus years. I've, you know, done some of these big events and people I think have a perception of me, whether it's the Randy Moss thing or, uh, where, you know, I came off like some prude or whatever it might be. I just, I want to get more of my personality out there. Now, maybe that's a good thing. Maybe I'm a moron and I'm not that entertaining and it's going to suck,

but I want to give it a shot. And that's why I wrote a book. And it was, whether you talk to my therapist, you talk to my wife, or you get inside my head, it's the best thing I ever did for myself. And I said to the publisher, I don't care if one person buys this thing or 1 billion people buy my book. I just want to write it. And that's how I feel about the podcast. If one person tunes in and they know a little bit more about me and they're entertained, great. And if not, it's fine. I just want to put myself out there before it's all said and done to just show who I am and what I'm actually about. What made you want to co-host a podcast with a living lunatic?

Your text to me was so funny after we finished. Yeah, he's wired so differently than me. I am worried about everything. He is worried about nothing. I am, for the most part, straight laced. He doesn't even have laces. He and I, it's like the odd couple. But for whatever reason, probably through golf as much as anything, because we're golf partners, We're playing at a couple events every year. Our wives are friends. We have become really, really close,

great friends. And I think he is funny as hell. And I think he thinks I'm funny, for right or wrong. So it seemed like if I did it with Troy or if I did it, I just, I don't want to do just strict sports. I just want to do other stuff. And he seemed like if there's a person out of category X, he's, he's right at the top of the list for me. Well, whatever dynamic you guys have at work. Cause I said like four or five things I've never said on a podcast talking about like my, my parents' divorce. And he's one of those guys that as soon as it starts to get kind of personal, you can see his eyes light up.

He's been through so much therapy. Tell me more about the divorce. You can see it's like you talking about Game 7 of the World Series. Right. It's like, so then what happened? Your parents exchange you? How'd they do that?

Oh, man. You hung up and he was like was like oh we should have done more about the exchange what that was like for bill what that was like and how he felt and if he wanted to go back to the other parents and i'm like ollie you just gotta take your foot off the gas and let's just relax and and i he's good for me because he does get me to relax. And I think I'm good for him because I actually make him adhere to schedules and call people back and whatever it might be. So he's got a million daddy issues. I've got my own because I followed my dad into this business and I will forever think of myself as my dad's son and others will too of a certain age. And, and I'm always trying to kind of outlive the ghost who was my best friend, like you described your dad. And, and so that's, we all have issues, mommy issues, daddy issues, and it's, it's just a

way to get to know people better. All right. Well, the podcast is called daddy issues. You can subscribe iTunes, Spotify, wherever you get your pods. And this is fun. Good luck with it. This was the best week you and I have ever had. Now I feel like if we went out to dinner, we wouldn't have anything to talk about. We'd just stare at each other. That's why we'd have to at least.

We'd have to. And by the way, in the aforementioned three-person dinner for me where I have Rudd and Ham, would I have to rent Ham out from you? Do you still hang out with Ham? No, you guys, your whole section of the country, you're all loyal to each other first. It's like you guys are like the Crips. The Missouri. The Missouri. Oh, you really?

The blips. Who else is it? Everybody basically who's ever succeeded in any way sports or entertainment in the Missouri area. You guys are all like on a text chain. Why? Rudd has that thing that that charity thing that he does in Kansas City, which I've been to a couple of times. And it's like Sudeikis and Eric Stone Street. And God, who else is there? Uh, David Koechner is there. And it's just like on and on and on of all these people that are from Kansas city or from Missouri, or one time had a plane land in Missouri on their way to somewhere else. And it's just everywhere you look, it's, it's another one. So I don't know what's in the water here in the Midwest,

but at least as far as like Will Ferrell movies or whatever, you're going to see some Missourians making you laugh in those things. Well, I don't even know, Red, but the story of him and his son after the Chiefs won the Super Bowl, I've heard from like three different people. The most emotional father and son reaction at a sporting event. I think I like people are honestly touched by it. Like they were,

they were like completely broken by the end of the game. Did that picture make its way out? He sent me cause he sent me a picture of his son, Jack, who is such a diehard fan. But he's also, his son's 15, right?

So he's right in that wheelhouse. He's right in the wheelhouse. And he was so excited that the Chiefs won or were winning at the end that he actually had a nosebleed. I have the picture of Jack hugging and it's just like

tears in his eyes and blood coming out of his nose. It looked like he played in the game. And he's just like tears in his eyes and blood coming out of his nose. It looks like he played in the game. And that moment for Paul and his son was just so freaking cool. And by the way, Rudd grew up a Steeler fan, okay? I'm saying that right here, right now. Oh, my God. When I first met him, he was a diehard Steeler fan.

I'm just saying. So he's a sports bigamist? He could be accused of that. Wow. Yeah. Back in the day, we were teenagers, 18, 19 years old. And I was just about to launch into my career. And in our early 20s, he was doing bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs.

He was doing the dork dance. That's what he was known for out in LA. If you wanted to get this crazy guy to DJ your bar mitzvah, rudge your guy. And, and that's what he was doing. And I remember him specifically telling me that he was a Steeler fan. So if you had told me like, you know, Rudd's Rudd's on his second wife or whatever, I'd be like, Oh, all right. When you tell me somebody is on their second football team,

like, Oh my God. But it is his hometown team that he's kind of, but I will say this about Paul, about all my friends who have achieved some level of celebrity or success. That guy, Paul Rudd, is the exact person he was when I met him when we were 18. And that is the best thing I can say about anybody. But that guy has not changed one iota. He is one of the best, most genuine people I've ever met i i love that guy and i

root for him but he did root for the steelers yeah well there you go joe buck good luck with the new podcast thanks for coming on mine and uh and hopefully we'll get to see you on tv announcing sporting events pretty soon yeah that please that'd be great but thanks for having me on and thanks for coming on and being my uh my first guest with, with daddy issues. Thanks. My pleasure. All right. We're going to get to Alan Yang in one second. First $2,316. According to the FBI, that's the average dollar loss from a single break and it can derail you financially. Here's some advice. Protect your home with simply safe. The go-to guys for home security and masters of protection. They protect every door, window, and room with 24 seven professional monitoring.

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when you visit simplisafe.com slash BS. Once again, that is simplisafe with two I's, simplisafe.com slash BS. All right, Joe Buck was awesome. So is Alan Yang. Here's that interview right now. All right, my friend Alan Yang is here. We are on Zoom. This isn't how we intended to do this.

You have a new movie coming out on Netflix, April 10th. It's called Tiger Tail. You asked me a couple of months ago, you were like, hey man, I want to come on the pod, talk about the, I'm like, come on anytime. You're always invited. We thought we would be doing this in person and now we're wearing headsets. You seem in a happy location. There's trees behind you. Yeah, I'm lucky, man. Los Angeles is not the worst place to be, I guess, right now. It's been nice out the last few days. We can walk around outside, which my friends in New York don't seem to have as much of that luxury. You just can't walk outside New York and not bump into 1 million human beings. But yeah, thanks for having me on.

I know we talked about this for a while. These are not the circumstances we envisioned. No. We had dinner with Chang and Cho probably, what was that, like six weeks ago? It feels like six years ago. It was right before this all started. Yeah, we went to Quispoca and we had some meat and there was no inkling. You know, I mean, we had heard rumors of, you know,

the stuff happening in China, but of course, you know, people at the top of this country really did a bang up job. Really just tamped it down and just, you know, everyone's safe. So no, it's scary, man. It's really scary. Your life has changed, but then also not changed because you're in the bunker like writing stuff I feel like my life

has changed dramatically but then also like I'm still doing podcasts and trying to keep things normal but both of us are kind of conditioned to create content

by ourselves so I don't we're kind of kind of uniquely prepared for a quarantine I feel like I know right it's like you know we're really lucky like we're able to do you for a quarantine, I feel like. I know, right? It's like, you know, we're really lucky.

Like we're able to do, you know, look, a lot of our jobs can't be done alone. You know, I can't shoot a show. I can't direct a movie. I can't do any of that stuff. But if you look at what my job entails, you know, half of it is writing. Half of it's writing by yourself. Half of it is calls, reading other people's scripts and giving notes and helping them out.

And half of it is at this point doing press. So yeah, I've been putting the headphones on and doing Zooms, doing podcasts and doing radio shows, whatever. Yeah. So it's really like I'm doing three quarters of my job right now. Obviously, that's a very fortunate situation. So last time you were... Where were you working in 2008 when the writer's strike happened? Oh boy I think Very fortunately for me That strike happened when I was unemployed

Oh there you go Right before I think it was Maybe I'd gotten hired on Parks and Rec but that writer's room hadn't started So I was picketing every day But I didn't have a job So it's a very different time in my life from right now Where I have five jobs I was picketing every day, but I didn't have a job. So that's a very different time in my life from right now where I have five jobs.

Yeah, I bring that up because after that writer strike happened, the TV industry kind of reset a little bit. And they realized like, oh, we don't have to do hundreds of pilots. We can do less pilots. And they kind of figured out some stuff on the fly to both improve the industry and just change some bad habits they'd gotten into. How do you think TV is going to change whenever we get through whatever nightmare we're in now, where it's like, all right, there's a finish line. We all feel safer. But now we also have all this experience of like, oh shit, you actually can do,

you know, for what you're doing, doing a TV show. Obviously you can't film a movie, but when you have a writer's room and things like that, you don't necessarily have to be in the same room all the time. How's all that stuff going to change? I think the process of writing shows might change. Like you were saying, I think a lot of writer's rooms are weirdly continuing right now on Zoom. And I've talked to some other showrunners who are kind of weirdly liking it. Honestly, there's a social aspect

to the writers room, obviously. And in comedy, I think it really helps to be in this big, gigantic room. There's 15 of you in there, if you're lucky enough to have a room that big. And it's really fun. And people are kind of bouncing off each other. It's kind of multiplicative, right?

But I don't know, a drama writer's room, I've heard of people basically saying, hey, let's meet 11 to 1, break an hour for lunch, do 2 to 4, and we do 4 hours of meeting and then we can go off and write on our own. And that makes sense in some ways. And to me, this is all part of the larger trend of everything getting smaller and leaner. You know, writers' rooms of fewer people and rooms where, quite frankly, the showrunners can write most of the scripts with some input from some other people.

So I think more people have been getting shows and rooms are getting smaller. That's just going to keep going. And on top of that, pilot season is going to keep being in jeopardy. You know, that writer's strike you were talking about already ruined a lot of pilot season and made everything leaner. But I think people are going to have to go straight to series. If you had an NBC show, like a buddy of mine had a show,

a pilot for NBC, they couldn't shoot it, obviously. So now I think they have to make a decision and they're going to have to pick up some show straight to series. So I think that's just going to accelerate everything that's already happened. I mean, look, you've seen the landscape. It's Netflix and all these on-demand services, streaming services really just dominating. And I think networks are still kind of figuring out how to do things. And it's all changing, man. This is so crazy. It's really crazy. Yeah, it could lead to less pilots and a lot more bad reality TV and game shows. So are you caught up? Love is blind, circle, any of that reality stuff?

I'm about halfway through being caught up. The latest one, finally below deck. Enough people badgered me about it. Oh my God. And that's been on a lot in my house lately. Yeah, it's weird. You just go on these dives and now it's like it's shame-free.

Yeah, it's quarantine food, man. I know you're a Bachelor guy. I've seen a lot of seasons of The Bachelor. I watched Love is Blind. I was like, this is the next iteration. It made The Bachelor seem like from the Stone Age. It made The Bachelor seem like the dating game from the 50s.

Love is Blind was raw, man. That was really raw. You were going to go to these people's houses and it was like, if you went to Amber's house, it's like, wow, you go to all the houses on The Bachelor, those people are really well off and it's all the same house and every dad is wearing the same sweater over a button down

and you went to Amber's house, it's like, wow, that's a real person's house because it's a newish show. It felt like the real world in the 90s. It's just a new kind of show. Sex was definitely more of a character on the show too. In Bachelor, it's a lot of wink, wink. Something might have happened. A door is closing.

It's a horny show that's actually not that horny. Love is blind. They're just open about it. No rules, no rules. I mean, The Bachelor's on a Disney channel, right? It's owned by Disney. So it's like, they can't do that stuff. But you're right. You're just open about it. No rules. No rules. I mean, The Bachelor's on a Disney channel, right? It's owned by Disney. So it's like they can't do that stuff. But you're right. You go back and watch it.

It feels like the 1950s. You know, I love The Bachelor. I've seen a lot of it. But yeah, Love is Blind came out of nowhere, man. That thing came out of nowhere. It's leading to the next level, which will be, you know, we had the bedroom cameras, which the real world introduced to us

during the iconic real world Chicago season. But then they would cut out before anything actually happened. I'm wondering which one of these streaming services actually really starts showing stuff. Do we go NC-17? Do we go further? What are the lines? Are there lines anymore?

I don't know. Bill, I heard Quibi's taking submissions, man. You want to show over there, just text him. Just text Jeffrey Katzenberg. He'll give you that show. They're putting everything on, man. They called everybody I know. Quibi knows everybody.

This is a tough beat for Quibi the last few weeks. Although you can argue. That's actually good. Is it good or bad for Quibi? That's a question for you. Good or bad for Quibi? That's a question for you. Good or bad for Quibi? The crazy quarantine. Opening up in the worst economy in decades,

but on the flip side, everyone is bored and just wants to watch new content. So I don't know the answer. I mean, it seems like people are watching a lot of Netflix. I don't know that people are hankering to sign up for more services though. So it's hard to know, man. It's hard to know. It seems like a rough beat for Quibi maybe.

Yeah, the content... Podcasts are weirdly down a little bit, which makes sense if you actually think about how they're consumed. So many of them listen on commutes or when they're working out or when they're on

the train, things like that. If you're home, maybe you're a little less likely to listen to pods, but, um, but I would assume Netflix streaming movies, binge shows, all that stuff has to be on the fly. And you look at even the Netflix main page. Now they have that trending thing. And All American was second, which by the way, my entire family watched within three days of when it was out. So those kinds of shows seem like they're at the best advantage. You could turn your brain off a little bit, but not totally. And you're just in. Yeah. I mean, and obviously the elephant in the room, or should we say the tiger in the room? Tiger King, really? I'm telling people Tiger Tale is a sequel to Tiger King

just to confuse people and get them to watch it. But it's a testament to just how many people have Netflix. I think internet use and Netflix watching indisputably has gone up. Obviously, they don't give me any numbers. They've never given me any numbers for anything. But it's all people are doing, man. It's all people are doing.

What else can you do? That's it. I think Tiger King is a win for anything. But it's all people are doing, man. It's all people are doing. What else can you do? That's it. I think Tiger King's a win for you. For the success of your movie. Just having Tiger, people searching for Tiger and your movie comes up, they're like, what's that? I'm going to

slowly start the rumor that Joe Exotic appears in minute 45 of Tiger Tale. It's a backdoor sequel. You think it's about Taiwanese American immigrantsotic appears in minute 45 of Tiger Tail. It's a backdoor sequel. You think it's about Taiwanese-American immigrants, and then in minute 45, a guy comes in and is riding a tiger into it. Well, maybe they can... I mean, honestly, the content of those two things could not be more different. I know.

But maybe in the poster, maybe it's just Joe Exotic's shadows in the background. Yeah. Behind the characters. You're like, oh, what's he doing there? I agree with you. It's a win. It's weirdly a win

that something with the word tiger in it is the talk of Netflix. Like, the craziest, there's so many subplots. We shouldn't get off of Tiger King Tangent, but it's crazy when Shaq shows up. It's like, oh, Shaq is in this. Like, there's so many left turns in it.

They almost had enough to make a whole second season. Sometimes they have some of these streaming shows, it's not enough story for a whole season or not enough story for a series. It's like Tiger King, they could have made 10 movies out of this. It's just way, it's too much stuff. It's overwhelming.

And then you feel kind of uneasy after all of it. You're just like, oh, I don't know about humanity. Well, the weird thing is that there's no heroes. There's not that one person who's like, who's the good guy? It's like, no, there's actually no good guy. There's no good. I made that exact same comment to my friend

and I was just like, you know, there's often the cliche network note if you make a TV show is like, you know, who are we rooting for? Like, let's make this character more likable, more likable, more likable. And it's like, show me one likable real person in Tiger King and you can't. And you know what? It was a phenomenon.

It's just too interesting, right? It's just too interesting and too crazy and too much mayhem going on. So, yeah. Well, you know what I noticed? A reader sent this to me, or a listener. Joe Exotic, when he ran for,

what did he run for? Governor of Oklahoma? He got 19% of the vote. 19%. 19%. Like, that's, for all your Oklahoman listeners, you got to explain that one.

You know, I don't want to, I don't want to malign your state, but that seems pretty insane. Well, I'm sorry. I can't remember the reader off the top of my head or the listener, but he was saying how shouldn't this be Kevin Durant's number one defense of why he went to go to state? I was just going to say that. Kevin Durant should tweet today.

19% of people voted for Joe Exotic for governor. I had to go. You know why I moved to California. Between that. A state, by the way, who elected Arnold Schwarzenegger. Let's not forget that. Yeah, true. Compared to Joe Exotic, Arnold Schwarzenegger is Abraham Lincoln. Right. KD could be like Joe Exotic, reason one, reason two. I mean, have you seen Russell Westbrook play basketball? Not fun. Not fun to be his teammate. Those are my two reasons.

What about this Russell renaissance, though? I had ridden him off. I was like, Russell's done. He's done. It's just you're watching him just... But this weird five-out offense, this Trani Capella is like, I don't know, man. Westbrook, his numbers were crazy. His numbers were crazy

last month. He was one of the, I mean, there's millions of losers with the coronavirus, but from an NBA standpoint, just the season getting canceled, it was right there in this weird Westbrook renaissance where people were like, is this guy going to be like a 13-ball NBA player again? It was peak Westbrook. Yeah, it was peak Westbrook. It really felt like he was back. Right back to it.

And it's like, oh, hey, don't shoot any threes. Just drive the rim and dunk every time. And it's like, oh, wow, it works if you have four shooters around you, which he never had. He never had that before.

And by the way, speaking of losers, I got to say, I know you're a Celtic fan. I'm a Laker fan. We're both losers because those were two really fun seasons.

Those were really fun seasons. Your team was overperforming. And frankly fun seasons. Your team was overperforming. And frankly, I think my team was overperforming. No one could have seen LeBron doing this in year 17. And I didn't have them penciled in for 60 wins. I had them penciled in for 50. I think that's what the Vegas over-under was, 50 and a half or something. It was definitely, they were overachieving from a health standpoint.

I did not expect him to carry the burden that he was carrying. I thought... Rossello and I did a podcast on the Sunday before everything fell apart. So basically three days before the Rudy Gobert game, which I think we can now call the Gobert game or Gobert day or whatever day that was.

Yeah, March 11th, 3-11 or whatever that day was. The craziest day in American history. The Donald Trump press conference, Gobert test positive, Tom Hanks positive. All in one day, NBA canceled. The referee of the late night ESPN game, all of a sudden he had refed the Rudy Gobert game from a couple of games ago.

Now all of a sudden the players are, I mean that whole day. The craziest 30 minutes. Like it all happened in like 30 minutes. Right. So when we did a pod that Sunday night before we knew any of this was coming and

people thought like the people who know I hate the Lakers anytime I compliment them they're suspicious it's like I'm handing them a package of poison sandwich I'm like here I made you this sandwich and they're just looking at it wondering what's wrong with it I genuinely believe the Lakers

are going to win the title. I just felt like when it came down to it in a playoff game, when things slow down, it gets more physical. Fouls are so important. Referee biases, all the stuff that comes in, like they were just the hardest team to play. And if they could have stayed healthy,

I really thought they would have won the title. They legitimately had a shot. I think I listened to that pod. And where I sort of agreed with you guys was, look, in the playoffs, it's LeBron and it's AD. And they're so physically imposing. And I know, look, AD doesn't have the track record in the playoffs. But if you look at that series against the Warriors,

and he's played in the playoffs a little bit. And he was a monster. And he's a monster in a way that doesn't come and go like three-point shooting can. And LeBron's obviously a monster in that same way. And they're just so physically dominating. Obviously, look, it's a three-team race between Milwaukee, the Clippers, the Lakers.

I think a Lakers-Clippers series is probably a toss-up. That team is terrifying in the playoffs if they're healthy, right? And Milwaukee's obviously... But for some reason, I agree with you. If it's Lakers-Milwaukee, for instance, I just still don't buy Milwaukee's supporting cast. It's still Chris Middleton and Eric Bledsoe at the end of the day.

You know, Giannis is great. And Giannis, by the way, still doesn't have the track record that Kawhi or LeBron does. So you're looking at Giannis. Yes, he's been the most valuable player in the regular season, but in the playoffs, he's still got to show you something. You know, he's been the most valuable player in the regular season, but in the playoffs, he's still got to show you something. You know, he's still got to show it to you.

He got stopped last year. He got contained by Kawhi. I mean, you really could add the best, one of the best months of your life where you had your movies coming out. Don't remind me. The playoffs starting like three days later. Yeah, so we lost out on the movie premiere.

And look, there are greater tragedies in the world. But the movie is very personal. It's about my family. It would have been nice to... It's about my dad's story. I had my dad at the premiere and my mom and my sister and have them all together. We had a theatrical release as well that every movie theater is closed now. Look, there are much, much worse things happen.

But yeah, the silver lining is, look, it's on Netflix. It's not one of these movies. Look, I have friends who have movies who were theatrical and they just got pushed. The Fast and Furious movie, Justin Lin's movie, got pushed a year. It got pushed a year. We were joking.

I'm on a text thread with some friends. It's like a movie-themed text thread. So right now it's called Gemini Man. It's a dated title right now. But we were saying, there are no summer blockbusters this year. They're all going to be moved. It's a year without blockbusters. How crazy is that? It's just, it's only going to be prestige

films in the holiday season. And then the other thing was it was really shaping up for as the year of the Asians with the Parasite Oscar thing. We were talking about that at dinner. It was all coming up Asian in 2020. Let me ride that wave, man.

No, seriously, I felt it because, you know, I tweeted the trailer out for Tiger Tail on Thursday and it got a level of traction that it just blew me away. I mean, the response to it, and it's a movie, look, there's no big stars in it. It's, it stars Thai Ma, who's the dad in Mulan, which obviously got pushed as well. And he's the dad in the farewell, but it's a trailer that's in Taiwanese, Mandarin and English. And it, you know, my tweet alone, the trailer's gotten a million views or whatever. And like, I do think that people were primed to see Asian stuff because there's been a little bit

of a rise. People watched Parasite. Parasite was great. It helped everybody because now people are willing to overcome the one-inch barrier of subtitles and watch a great movie. So yeah, I do think that look, this movie couldn't have come out five... It just wouldn't have been made five years ago.

I started writing it four years ago and at that point, there was no Crazy Rich Asians. There was no Farewell. There was no Parasite. It was essentially the act of a madman to write a movie with only Asian people in it, which is what I did. And now it's like, yeah, it's another Asian movie. It's like, great. It's like, well, I'm happy for that. I'm happy that it's no longer like, what is this? I'm like, I got to read the subtitles. It's really exciting. Don't you think it's weird and bizarre that it takes like Parasite to succeed for Hollywood to go,

oh, maybe we should have some stuff with some Asians. What do you guys think? Yeah. And by the way, if you're Netflix, which is super global, I don't know if you've looked at the numbers, but most of the world is Asian. It's like China alone has more people than all of Europe. I know Netflix isn't in China, but same applies to all of those Asian nations. There's so many Asian people in the world. We don't know it because we live in America. And I never saw any Asian people until I was an adult in America. But we're out there. And even the Asian American community is really getting behind movies. And they've been really supportive of this movie. So it's

the beginning. I think, look, Hollywood will go wherever money is. Well, it reminds me of Black Panther, right? Like Black Panther, that whole thing. And they're like, hey, what's this? Can you imagine a Black superhero? And it's not extremely pandering or racist? And the same thing is going to happen for Asian people. But right now

there's still a newness. There's like a facade of seeing an Asian face on screen. And there's a scene in the movie between two Asian American women and they're talking together. And someone was saying, I've just never even seen that. One is really shy and one's really loud and crazy. And there's just different personalities. It's so rare. One is really shy and one's really loud and crazy. And there's just different personalities. It's so rare. We're used to seeing one in a movie or none, frankly. So I watched this movie with my wife last night,

thanks to my Netflix screener account, which I actually got to work, which is really the hardest thing to unlock on anything. This is a really serious movie and you're a comedy guy. Yeah. Again, another example of my insanity. I was cutting the trailer with my trailer editor and he said, we were almost done cutting the trailer. I was really happy with it. I've worked with him on Master of None and Forever and all of these other projects. And he said, wow, you really bit off a big one with this. It's in another language, a language you don't really speak. It's in another country with actors you've never worked with before. It's period. So it's the 60s, 70s. And it's all shot on film.

It's on 16 millimeter film. And it's a drama which you've never done. Like you really, you're basically insane to do this. I was like, man, I never thought of it that way. If I thought of that going, I wouldn't have done it. It's too hard. But no, it just seemed really natural. And I think when people ask me about why did you decide to do it, I just feel like I'm genre agnostic. If you look back at some of the stuff I've done,

I've worked on a late night show, an animated show, a mockumentary, a comedy with some social observational qualities, and a supernatural show, and an anthology show. And this being a drama, it's more about just what's the best story to tell. And in this case, the more I thought about it, the more I thought about my father's story in particular, this was the way to do it. And it also was a way to pay homage to some of those great Asian films in the past, Wong Kar-wai films and Ho Chau-shen and Edward Yang. And that was also a huge influence in making the movie. So, I mean, I wasn't surprised you did this because I've gotten to know you, but also Master of None, that's not like a laugh track, jokes getting shot out of a cannon type of show.

That had some serious elements to it. So this did seem like somewhat of a natural extension. Yeah, exactly. I mean, Master of None ain't 30 Rock. It ain't Family Guy. It ain't a joke-based show. It's really, we tried to make that a thoughtful show. And on top of that, we watched a lot of movies that inspired that.

And the way I used to put it is, Zeezen and I didn't go to film school. Our film school was making that show and watching great movies and trying to learn from them. And one thing I've realized, this is kind of a subconscious thing, but it was trying to take the techniques from the greatest movies ever made. Whether you're talking about,

I know this is going to sound pretentious, but really, if you're talking about Bergman and Ozu and Kubrick and Fellini and all of these amazing directors, you take these techniques and apply them to really modern themes and concerns and characters that have never been placed in that context before. So when you watch a Bergman movie, you movie, it's always the same kind of person.

It's unhappy Swedish people or whatever. But if you take that concern and you apply it to an Asian American immigrant who is coming to the Bronx, I've never seen that technique being applied to that story and that world and that character. Frankly, I've never seen a young guy moving to the Bronx in the 70s who's from Taiwan and doesn't speak the language and is walking the streets and is surrounded by white, black, and brown faces in America. And thinking about how alienating that is and how totally foreign that world was to my dad, that was very inspiring to me. And I try to use, you know,

these sort of techniques and stylistic sort of inspirations from the greatest movies I've ever seen. Yeah, but you know what? That's smart because most people haven't seen any of those movies. Because you know who else- You know who else does this?

Bill Hader is like the biggest film nerd of all time. And they're doing Barry. And they're borrowing from all these fucking weird 1940s, 50s movies that nobody's ever heard of. And you know it works. You know, if I steal stuff from EE, if I steal stuff from City of Sadness, these are movies that anyone has seen.

I mean, some people, you know, if you're a film buff, you've seen them. And, you know, if you go to Cannes every year, you might've seen them. But yeah, and you apply that. It's not a big community exactly exactly it's not a tiger king level love is blind level community uh people are not firing up uh city of sadness on a saturday night to fill their days it's a very long movie but if you stole from fast and furious 7 people like hey man what the fuck yeah be like i saw that in Hobson Shaw two days ago. He ripped that off, man.

He ripped that off. So what was your family's reaction to this movie? Because it's so personal. And it's really moving, too. I'll tell you when they see it. It's pretty funny that Simmons has seen the movie before my dad has. But what we're going to do is have a screening at Netflix. We're going to have a family screening and have them all see it before the premiere so that they became accustomed to it.

But obviously, that became impossible when every building shut down. So we're getting them links. I just asked today actually to get them links to see it fairly soon. But I will say I was most kind of nervous about my dad because a lot of it is about him. And I want to stress again, it's really, really fictionalized and inspirational and inspired by, not based on specifically. But I had written the script and I had that for a while. And I was in New York at the time. And my dad would sometimes come over to my place. And, you know, he would let in the exterminator occasionally if like the Orkin guy wanted to come over.

So he emailed me and said, hey, Orkin wants to come by today. I'm going to check on the house. I was like, oh, thank you very much. And later he emailed me and said, so I let the exterminator in. All good. Also, I saw your script on the coffee table. So I just read it. I was like, oh, great. That's not exactly the way. Oh, wow. Also, I saw your script on the coffee table, so I just read it. I was like, oh, great.

That's not exactly the way I planned you to get that story. And he said he loved it and he was really moved. And he had like one historical nitpick about like the opening sequence. But other than that, he loved it. And I remember where I was. I was walking on the street. I just shot baskets at the park and I was walking back to my apartment. But I remember where I was. I was walking on the street and I just shot baskets at the park

and I was walking back to my apartment. But I remember getting that email about how meaningful that was and how much the movie I'd made for my family. And I've stressed to them that this is a love letter to them. And I hope you're not offended by any of the portrayals in it because it's not a literal representation of any of you, but it's really about my appreciation for the sacrifices you guys made for me and my sister. Are you worried at all about some of the stuff that's building now in America with some of the stuff we're reading?

It ain't great. It's not my ideal situation. I think when I tweeted the trailer, and I kind of mentioned this. I think I said it's an unprecedented time for Asian Americans. What I probably should have said was, it's sadly not unprecedented because obviously there's been much worse racism in the past. I mean, you want to talk about Japanese internment, of course, there's been worse periods. But what was really disillusioning to me is just that I I thought maybe this was naive of me, but I thought

we were past some of this, frankly. You know, I thought we were past some of this and it's 2020, you know, Paris, I just won, you know, it's like, are we past some of this? And aren't we sort of, but of course that's naive, right? Of course that's naive and racism is alive everywhere, but not just America. But you just get disappointed. You think that that stuff's in the past and you think that people aren't harboring these resentments. But when things get scary and when people are tense and when times are difficult, sometimes you see that ugliness lash out. And it's really bad. Obviously, the biggest issue right now is everyone's health, and that's the number one concern. But hey, man, it's not cool to yell at Asian people, to spit at Asian people, to beat up Asian people. Of course, that doesn't even need to be said. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous.

When stuff like this happens, when things really kind of unravel, like what's happened over the last three weeks, it seems like some people revert to like the worst possible instincts, the dumbest possible behavior. It just becomes extremes in every sense, right? The people that are upset about certain behavior who are most likely to go on Twitter

and lose their minds, they're on steroids. And the people that are really stupid who are just like, ah, I'm still going on spring break. What do I care? And like, they're going to do their dumb stuff. And it's just like, everything goes on steroids.

It's unbelievable. So even the racists are like, cool, we get to be more racist. Yeah, everyone's worse. And I think in some cases, best tendencies are amplified, right? You know, it's like people want to go out and say F you. But, you know, I have friends in New York, you know, my buddies at these two Taiwanese restaurants, 886 and Whole Foods, you know, their businesses are in trouble.

And you know what they're doing is they're making food. They're making bento boxes and delivering them to hospital workers. And it's like, how can you be that good a person? It's so crazy. You see people helping and that stuff is what I try to focus on. But it's really disappointing.

And I hope it's a blip. I hope it's a blip. And I hope education helps. And I hope, honestly, culture helps. The more people see Asian Americans as human beings, I know how basic that sounds, but not inscrutable, not foreign, not alien, not someone from a different world from you, the more that I think racism will subside, I hope. Well, maybe this will lead to David Chang bringing the walking tall gimmick back where he's the walking tall guy and he's just going out and settling injustices with chef tools. Yeah.

I can see him doing it. He's got a cutting board. He's got a rolling pin and he's got Hugo strapped to his back. And he's just laying waste to everyone. I wouldn't want to get in a rumble with him, man. He's like two bills. He's a tank.

Especially if he's angry. Yeah. By the way, Hugo's going to be 100 pounds in like two days. You've seen that kid. Oh, I know. He's massive. He's a tank too, man. The WWE is already scouting Chang's son.

We need vigilante movies back just in general. All this stuff comes in phases where all of a sudden there's a horror movie and people are like, oh, horror movies. There's a horror movie run. It's like horror movies never went away.

You see it with game shows or certain reality TV things, and the gimmicks will just come back. And I always really liked those Vigilante movies. Here's an idea for you. I actually had an idea for a coronavirus movie. This was months ago.

This was when the coronavirus movie... Pre-virus. Well, the coronavirus wasn't that big a deal. That's when I started writing this movie. It was just... I mean, it's just an idea, but it was essentially this outbreak starts in America outbreak starts in America and, or starts in China, comes to America and there's Asian American racism. And ironically, one of the leading researchers who's finding a cure for Corona happens to be Asian American. And so it centers around her and let's combine these ideas.

Let's have a super racist society in that movie, the end of the world. And she becomes a vigilante and she travels around killing racists and curing the disease at the same time. I think that's a sale, man. I think in a Zoom meeting, we sell that. So again, Scarlett Johansson will play. Oh no, no, wait. She's booked, man. She's doing Parasite too. You said you had five things going on. Can you talk about the other four things? Yeah, I can talk about...

I might know what some of them are, but just for the people out there. Yeah, I mean, right now, look. Right now, it's... So we had a couple shows that were going to shoot very soon. One of which was Little America Season 2, which I do with Lee Eisenberg

and Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon. And that one I can talk about because that show has come out already. There's another show I can't talk about yet. And there's two shows I can't talk about yet. And press for this movie and another one in development. It's all stuff. Unfortunately, this is bad podcasting, but it all has not been announced yet.

So, you know. What about your five-hour documentary about the Mookie Betts trade? Oh my God. Is that 2021 or no? I got to talk to you about that. What should we call that? Short-changed or like losing Betts?

Or what do we want to call it? How do you feel, man? How do you feel? Brady and Betts? I didn't want to brought up Brady and Betts in a two-month span. What was the span? Brady, I was fine I didn't want to rub in Brady and Betts in a two-month span? What was the span? Brady I was fine with. We had him 20 years.

The Betts thing was about as mad as I've been at this point in my life about sports, about anything, just because I thought he was going to be in my life for 20 years. But now you look at it and the virus comes in and I don't think there's going to be a baseball season. I really don't. I think baseball is going to get canceled.

I don't see any scenario where even you throw like a mini spring training in, I don't think life is even remotely normal until July 1st at best case scenario. So then they would have to still do the spring training. Now we're into like the tail end of July. I think it gets canceled. So the irony of this just horrific Mookie Betts trade they made is he might not play a game for the Dodgers. He just becomes a free agent at the end of the year. What if he skips the season and there's enough

pressure, by the way, no pressure on you making this movement happen, but there's enough pressure from Red Sox fans and Red Sox ownership re-signs him. It's possible, right? They bring him back and they get all the guys in the trade and then it retroactively becomes like the best trade in Red Sox history. It's possible, right? They bring him back and they get all the guys in the trade and then it retroactively becomes the best trade in Red Sox history. It's possible.

Don't you just have to put pressure on John Henry? I mean, what is he spending that money on? Just have... I fully... I don't know. All I know is all the Dodger fans I know were super excited and all the Red Sox fans I know were super bummed. I don't know the ins and outs. I don't know all the prospects in that deal. But it just seemed to me, you're a rich franchise.

You're doing well. He's a top five player in the world. You can have him for his prime. Just do it. Pull the trigger. It seems like a no-brainer to me. But yeah, I don't know. It's a bummer. Do you don't think they'll ever play empty stadiums or anything like that? Do you have a plan for the NBA? Because I know you've probably... I'm coming up with solutions for how the NBA could come back. I'm sure you are as well.

Baseball seems weirder to play in front of empty stadiums. Basketball, I've almost come to terms with if it comes back, and I hope it does, that they play... I'm watching Cleveland play Charlotte in an empty high school gym in July, hopefully. I don't know.

I think at this point, people will watch it. We're taping this on... What day is today? Wednesday? Tuesday. Tuesday. March 31st. Yeah, we're taping this on Tuesday. They announced this NBA 2K tournament. I saw that! With 12 players, and KD was a one seed.

And I'm looking at it like, I'm looking at the rankings. I'm like, oh. And then I'm like, when is this? Friday night? Like, I 100% watch this. Bill, I texted that link to 10 fans. I texted it to 10 because I was like,

oh, KD's playing Derrick Jones Jr. in the first round. Like, what is this? This is, what are we doing? It's desperate. By the way, what about the seed What is this? What are we doing? It's desperate. What about the seeding of that? Why are they seeding them by their rating? Is that just so KD can be the one seed?

I don't know. That has no bearing on how good they are in the game. I'm sure that helped. My question, though, is can we gamble on this? Which I assume we can. What if there is a point-shaving scandal in the 2K tournament? Should there be repercussions? I was just excited to think about scenarios that had nothing to do with just being depressed about all the shit that's going on.

So if you ask me, will I be ready to watch NBA games and empty arenas in July? My answer is I was excited about this random 2K tournament that I don't even know what the stakes are. I'm like, what is it? Can I watch it? I'll watch it. And like, yeah, the betting implications are like, well, is it, are DeMarcus Cousins' hands too big? Like, can he not hold the controller?

Because he's got these massive, is Trey Young good because he sees the court? I mean, here's the thing. I kind of want to know. The dirty secret, and you've gotten to know a couple famous people want to know. The dirty secret. And you've gotten to know a couple of famous people over the years. The dirty secret with truly famous people is they can't go anywhere. And they're doing all the same shit we're doing now during the quarantine.

Because if you're Kevin Durant, you're just like in your hotel suite or you're in your fancy condo in some building. It's not like you're going, hey, I'm just going to power walk the streets of New York before this Nets game. You're not going anywhere. So he's playing 2K against all these dudes anyway. Now we're just going to be filming it.

That's what he does. You know what it is? It's just a huge branding opportunity for the boardroom. It's just the boardroom. Oh, yeah. Boardroom's a big winner in this, especially if KD wins it. I think after this is done, the boardroom is going to buy Disney. It's going to boardroom Oh yeah Boardroom's a big winner On this Especially if KD wins it

I think after this is done The boardroom is gonna Buy Disney It's gonna be so big Now it sounds like I'm slamming the boardroom But I You know

I'm not No it's the You have the combo of That should have been The finals There should have been A boardroom conference And an uninterrupted conference

Oh man Boardroom Uninterrupted There could only be one Whatever That's company named. Everyone has a production company. So whatever their company's named. Oh, I know. Has anybody, any athletes ever come to you to try to get you to write a show with like one of their famous, you don't have to say who the athlete is, but has that happened? Yeah. Yeah. Not only that, but like, you know, I've had, I've had like general meetings with athletes, which I love because, you know, I love sports, you know, I mean, you know,

Bill and I have known each other for a while. We've talked sports a long time before we talked to movies or anything else. And, um, it's very exciting for me. It's, there was very, there was one athlete, uh, uh, very, very famous guy who was, we had a general meeting and then, and he was like, you know, he loves comedy. And he was like, you know, what was really exciting about this whole thing is like playing basketball and he was like, he loves comedy. And he was like, you know what was really exciting about this whole thing is like playing basketball. This is like, I got to have a meeting with Mike Schur. I was like, Mike Schur?

You mean the showrunner of Parks and Rec? Like my friend, Mike? It's like, yeah, you can have a meeting with Mike. I love Mike. He's a nice guy, but it's so funny to have this like very famous person be like, I got to meet Mike. I was like, yeah, you can meet Mike. He's a cool guy.

He's around. He's a cool guy. He's around. He's a great guy. But that's like the guys who do billions in succession. Those guys in NBA circles and like CEO circles, they're like rock stars. Everyone wants a cameo on those shows. Yeah. I mean, it's secret. It's like secret behind billions and entourage and all those shows. It's like, yeah, you'll get, you know, people want to be on those shows. You know, people, that's the other thing you were saying. Like, here's the other secret about really famous people. They watch TV.

You know, it's like, they just watch things. Like, we've had people- They watch everything. Yeah, we had, I remember, I'll never forget. We were at a party one time. Me and Zs were just at this party and Drake was talking to us. And Drake said he was a big fan of Master of None.

And he's like, I've watched it all the way through twice. I was like, I haven't even done that in one sitting. That's insane. That's totally crazy. But it's like, I've watched it all the way through twice. I was like, I haven't even done that in one sitting. That's insane. That's totally crazy. But it's like they watch these shows because they have a lot of time on their private planes or in their mansions or whatever. And I think they want to be on them

because it's like things that they can talk about with their friends. But yeah, hey, look, any NBA players want to do TV or anything, hit me up. I'm always thinking of ideas. I love the NBA and I'm obsessed with every player. Basically, I know of you probably if you play in the NBA. Drake was like, I'm thinking season three, it's master. We get rid of the of none, but I'm the master. And it's just about how great I am. I'm good at everything.

It's never explained. Drake plays the same character, but it's never explained. He has Indian parents. It's all the same. It's about him, you know, like going to Diwali or something. But it's Drake. Did you understand the power of Netflix?

Not to make this sound like a Netflix infomercial, but you do master none with them pretty early in the whole Netflix TV show aspect of this whole thing. They had only been really, really... How many months was that after House of Cards? 18 months max, right?

That was... Two years? Here's the actual story behind that. They were so early. What people don't know is when we pitched Master of None, Netflix only had three shows. So we pitched it over a year before it came out because we ended up doing one more season of Parks and Recreation before we even started working on Master of None.

So when we sold the show, they had three shows. House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, and Lilyhammer, the show about a gangster in Norway. And so we didn't know- I don't even remember that. It was the dude from The Sopranos. It was like a show that they had bought from Norway or something.

But so basically it was a huge leap of faith for us to go with Netflix. And the reason we went with them is because they really believed in us. They believed in the idea. They believed in me as a showrunner and Aziz as a star. And we went straight to series, right? So we got believed in the idea. They believed in me as a showrunner and Aziz as a star. And

we went straight to series. So we got to make the show. We knew we would get to make a season of the show. But Netflix then was nothing like it is now. It was much smaller. They moved offices. It was just a smaller operation. Remember when it was a DVD company? I mean, it wasn't that long ago. It just wasn't that long ago. We talk about Master of None, that was five years ago. That's not that long ago, but it feels like an eternity. So Netflix, I don't think it was preordained to succeed. At the time, choosing between Netflix or HBO or FX or any of these places,

we got lucky because I honestly think that was the right venue for it. The same way that I feel, again, because of these weird circumstances, it's like April 10th when Tiger Tail comes out, it's like people are at home. They're going to watch it. It's just people are at home. And it's also all this weird Asian stuff is happening. It's like it's weirdly, you can't control timing.

You know, you can't control timing of things. You can't control necessarily when things hit or don't hit it. A lot of that is circumstance. A lot of that is the right time, right place. And Master of None certainly felt that way. Plus you're going to get the drive-by traffic of people looking for Joe Exotic for the first 20 minutes of your movie. Yeah, just like, where the fuck is Joe Exotic for the first 20 minutes of your movie. Where the fuck is Joe Exotic?

I thought he was in here. I'm going to stick it out. I know that a tiger's going to show up. Someone's going to do meth. Someone's going to get killed. Someone's going to get fed to tigers. I know it's in the name. This is the Asian sequel to Tiger King. Please. Spread that disinformation.

CGI one shot of a zoo early on to throw people off. Just get it in there first minute. There's the zoo. Where is it? We should quickly shoot a post credits. It's like it's in the MCU. Just have a post credits. And it's my dad meeting Joe Exotic

at the end. Before you go, can we, before you go, can we do the, uh, the Asian celebrity power rankings right now with the, where does, where does the parasite director, does he have the title right now?

Does he have the championship belt? I was talking to Chang about this. Yeah. So is, is bong the championship belt holder right now? I think he's got, he's got the cool guy holder, right? He's got the cool guy holder. right? He's got the cool guy

holder. I don't know. Like, does, I don't know if like regular people know who Bong Joon-ho is, do they? I hope they do. I mean, he won an Oscar, but, but he doesn't speak English and he's a director. I think he's up there. I mean, he's my number one. I love him, but who else is in the mix, Bill? I don't even know. What was that party we went to in Koreatown that night? The all-Asian birthday party. I was one of the only white guys there. That was a really funny night.

Just to give the listeners some context, I think we had dinner. It was you, Dave Chang, and Dave Cho, probably, right? Yeah. The four of us and Daniel Dae Kim was having a party the four of us and Daniel Dae Kim was having a party. So, we went to

Daniel Dae Kim. It was amazing. His company's party and it was in Koreatown and yeah, Bill was the only white guy there and it was like, yeah,

it was Asian Hollywood. It's like every Asian person is there. So, if we had all the heavy hitters at that party, who was like the Frank Sinatra

of that party? Who has the best table? I mean, look, DDK's up to this. I think it might be Bong. I mean, he's been around for a long time, but Bong is very hot right now. Bong is very hot. You know, you got, like,

and you got to go through, you know, these past few years. Like, you know, you got to put Awkwafina up there. And she's going to be really big, too. She's already big. She'll be really big. And you got to put Constance, and you got to put Henry Golding, and Randall, and be really big too. She's already big. She'll be really big. And you got to put Constance and you got to put Henry Golding

and Randall and Steve Yoon up there. And director-wise, you put Lulu and John Chu up there too. And Justin Lin, who we talked about. So yeah, those are the, I mean, I'm forgetting millions of people, I'm sure. You and Chang are in there. I'll say it for you.

Oh, thanks, man. Thanks, man. I'm in the director cut. I'm definitely a top 10 Taiwanese American film director. I'm trying to think what happens if Jeremy Lin walks in. Yeah, I think Jeremy's got to be up there, man. Jeremy's, I mean, he's still famous. Still exciting.

Yeah, it's still exciting. He's tall. He's one of the taller Asian people, not to be a stereotype about it, but he's tall. It's like, he'll stand out. And yeah, another Taiwanese American kid. You know, my wife and daughter

love Crazy Rich Asians. It's been on a few times at my house. That movie, if you just talk about comedy formulas, because you mentioned Constance Wu, it just made me think about it. Kind of like unassailable premises of movies. And when you, especially rom-coms that can execute this, like my best friend's wedding is like this too, where it's just like, I can explain this movie in eight words and you just go, oh, I get it. It goes global. It goes global. That one's

so good. Like Imagine being in the room when somebody pitches that and it's like, the family is incredibly rich. They don't like who the son chose as his fiance. That's the movie. Like, okay, what happens?

Give me the money. I think you've said this on the pod before, so I don't think it's a personal matter, but do you think your daughter watching Crazy Rich Asians has affected her decision to

date a half Asian guy? And regarding the movie, a very handsome half Asian guy. And you love this boyfriend. I've heard you rave about him on the pod. Great boyfriend. He's been a huge asset to the family. Now they're quarantined. It's Corona Romeo and Juliet. It's a whole saga. Thank the Asian-American film industry. Thank John Chu for casting Henry Golding for your daughter's great boyfriend. To live up to.

I think you have an unassailable rom-com presence in you. Yeah, I would love to, man. I've got sent a couple strips recently. Figure this out. The other thing that's nice about like I was saying about being genre agnostic is like I love a lot of different kinds of movies Like i've seen every marvel movie i've seen i've seen every big action movie. I'd love to do one of those I've seen every star wars. I'd love to do one of those

Uh, and I I watched my best friend's wedding which you mentioned I watched that like two months ago It holds up and it's like it's a perfectly made movie. And they're very difficult to do. I respect that genre just as much as I respect any of these other genres because to do anything really, really well is difficult. And I have an interest in a lot of different types of movies. Not just... Tiger Tail is a serious movie.

It has arthouse influences, but that's not the only kind of movie I ever want to make I mean that was part of the struggle With Parks and Rec that first season right They knew they had this Show they wanted to build around Polar But it was a show that was really hard to explain Okay

So what is this And then all of a sudden in season 2 they were like Oh here's actually what this is And it made sense but it's funny how Just trying to get to that eight to 10 words can be like the hardest leap with all this stuff. Yeah, you know, man, it's like sometimes when you get that chance, when you get that second season, it can be an unbelievable blessing. You know, it's just like, wow, can you imagine if that show had gotten canceled after one

season? Instead, it went 125 episodes and people love that show. That show has brought a lot of joy to a lot of people and enabled Mike to do more shows, which is incredible. And by the way, I learned a lot working on that show. I worked on all of those episodes. I was there for a long time. I learned a lot. And it was an incredible education.

Another really fun fun great experience what is probably never happens but have you thought like what is a master of master of none third season oh man you know is that too hard to even like conceive of or do you would you have to like just trap yourself in a bear cave with aziz for a month and try to figure it out? Essentially, Aziz and I've said, we'll do it if we have an idea that excites us enough. And we felt like, look, season two was a pretty big departure from season one. We want to do, if we ever do another season, we want it to be as different, as challenging, as risky, as ambitious and do something that really excites us.

We see them as little movies, right? You don't just do a movie for the sake of doing it. You do it because you're unbelievably driven and passionate about it. So we're still really good friends. We talk all the time. So we'll see what happens. That's definitely not what was driving Entourage during the last few seasons. It wasn't compelling.

Yeah, it wasn't compelling. They weren't doing a Vittorio De Sica homages in Entourage. Different kind of show, you know? Different kind of show. But they had a lot of jets and cool celebrities and stuff. I'll never forget that one episode

that Brian Grazer was on. When they're just walking down the street in Beverly Hills and they walk by him in a crosswalk and he's like, hey, wasn't that Brian Grazer? And they turn around

and he kind of looks and it's like the most obvious planted Brian Grazer and asked to be in the show cameo that's ever happened. It's like Brian Grazer calling Doug Ellen personally

just saying, put me in the show. Just put me in the show. Five seconds. My son loves the show. The other one that's classic and almost famous when Jan Wenner gets shoehorned into the

Mona Lisa Mad Hatter scene when he's looking in calves for Penny Lane and it's like, oh, there's Jan Wenner holding a newspaper. It's so clearly just planted in. You got to work on those. You need more cameos in your shows. Bleeding cameos.

You know who it's going to be? It's going to be all these NBA players. My next Asian American You got to work on those. You need more cameos in your shows. Totally. Bliton cameos. Yeah, just totally. Well, you know who it's going to be? It's going to be all these NBA players. My next all Asian American movie is going to be all Asian American. Except for, yeah, except for Anthony Davis and Contavious Caldwell Pope. Hey, it's Contavious Caldwell Pope. Well, let's get back to the sad Asian drama. Is that Frank Vogel?

Why is he the maitre d'? Yeah, you got to work on that. All right, so Tiger Tail, April 10th. I thought it was excellent. Thank you so much. I don't mean to sound condescending. I was really proud of you. I just feel proud when people make good stuff that I know.

So I was like, I was just proud. That's not condescending at all. I appreciate it. Honestly, I'm a tiny bit proud of myself because it's a very crazy thing to do. And like you said, a total departure in some ways. But like you said, if you like Master of None, there's something for you in this, for sure. If you like Little America, there's something for you in this. And it's not just for Asian people. It's not just for immigrants or children of immigrants. It's about a father and daughter. It's about lost love. It's about passion. It's about a father and daughter. It's about lost love.

It's about passion. It's about regret. And it's about being honest with the people you love. And it's really ultimately a universal story about a very specific set of characters. So I'm glad you liked it. I put everything I had into it. So I appreciate it, man.

All right. Good luck. I hope we have dinner at some point over the next 12 months again. I hope restaurants are still healthy and thriving again at some point in the next year. Let's hope restaurants exist. I look forward to having dinner and having you be the only white guy and then taking you to a Randall Parks party or something. All right.

Talk to you soon. All right. See you, Bill. Thanks. All right. Talk to you soon. All right. See you, Bill. Thanks. All right. Thanks to Joe Buck and Alan Yang. Thanks to SimpliSafe. Protect your home with SimpliSafe, the go-to guys for home security masters of protection. They protect every door, window, and room with 24-7 professional monitoring, no contract hidden fees, or fine print around-the-clock monitoring, just $15 a month. Three times less than the other guys, just $15 a month. Right now, my listeners get a free HD security camera when you visit SimpliSafe.com slash BS.

SimpliSafe for two eyes. SimpliSafe.com slash BS. We put up a ton of podcasts for you this week, including multiple redraftables. You can find all those in the book of basketball, two rewatchables, fast and furious seven. And then Tommy boys coming up later this week,

plus two on this feed. My podcast output is going to be extensive. I'm not positive. It will always be three podcasts on this feed. So just stay tuned. I'll update you here, or you can check out my Twitter feed to see what's going on. Stay safe out there. Don't forget to give to whatever charity you love. I recommended a world central kitchen, WCK.org

feeding America.org is another good one. But there's a lot of great ones out there. And the most important thing is to try to help out the people who are helping us fight this virus in the hospitals, picking up patients, the emergency room people, all that stuff. Anything we can do for them, try to get them more equipment, all that stuff. Try to do what you can to help out. Stay safe. Quarantine yourself if you can watch TV, listen to podcasts watch all sporting events

and we'll be back on this podcast on Sunday night with Priscilla, until then I don't have.