The Bill Simmons Podcast - The 2020 Streaming Wars, Cheating Astros, Cheap-Ass Red Sox, and Rudderless Democrats With Ben Thompson and JackO | The Bill Simmons Podcast

Episode Date: February 14, 2020

HBO and The Ringer’s Bill Simmons is joined by business and tech analyst Ben Thompson to discuss monetizing digital media, streaming TV, subscription overload, podcasts, broadcast rights, NBA, and more (2:25). Then Bill and JackO have a long-overdue conversation about the Astros cheating scandal, Mookie Betts to Los Angeles, the Democratic primary elections, and more (1:21:36). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of the Bill Simmons Podcast on the Ringer Podcast Network brought to you by ZipRecruiter. The best teams start with great talent like the 2018 Red Sox. So much talent. And now, Mookie Betts is on the Dodgers. It can go fast. You got to appreciate when it happens. No one knows the importance of talent more than our presenting sponsor, ZipRecruiter. They deliver qualified candidates fast. Powerful technology scans thousands of resumes to find people with the right experience for your job. So effective. Four to five employers will post on ZipRecruiter

to get a quality candidate through the site. And then the first day, my listeners can try it for free. ZipRecruiter.com slash BS. Meanwhile, check out TheRinger.com, TheRinger Podcast Network, The Rewatchables, which put up The Breakfast club late on Wednesday night, me and Wesley Morris and Chris Ryan, the book of basketball podcast,

still in full swing. We did Dwight Howard this week, have another one coming next week and our new podcast. That's going to be exclusive on Spotify. Go follow this feed now. And when we have new ones, it'll pop up in your Spotify feed for free. It is called Music Exists. Chuck Klosterman, Chris Ryan, two people who have been on this podcast many times,

a whole bunch of big picture conversations about music. It's hard to explain. You've heard Chuck on this podcast many times. I trust that you trust that this will be good because it will be good. We've been trying to get Chuck to do a podcast for 10 years. He finally folded.

He finally caved. So go on Spotify, look for Music Exists and just follow that. Coming up, we're going to talk to Ben Thompson from the Stratechery newsletter about where things are going with streaming and tech and all kinds of things. He's been on this podcast before you've heard him and he's really good and he knows this stuff. And then later, my buddy Jacko, popular demand. People want him with the Mookie Betts thing and the cheating scandal and the Democratic, everything going on there.

He is coming up later as well. First, our friends from Pearl Jam. All right, Ben Thompson is here. He runs the Stratechery newsletter. I said that correctly this time. You did. You did. The last time I was like, Stratechery. But you planted your flag very early on.

Pay to read my stuff, Island. And now there's a lot of people there. Yeah, I mean, I think I was the first one to do it. I mean, like there's been paid newsletters for a long time, like on Wall Street and stuff that I like charge $15,000 a year or something like that and get a bunch of some hedge funds. But to do the sort of pay $10 a year

or $10 a month, I should say, now $12 a month and kind of appeal to way more people, make it up in volume. It was sort of a new thing that has only been possible in the last, you know, seven, eight years, thanks to companies like Stripe or whatever, where it makes it easy to accept payments. So, oh yeah. So yeah. So I was, I started that, the pay part in 2014 and it's been going pretty well. Motley Fool and some of the stock places were doing versions of this, but never for like just information. That's right. Yeah. And they would be, I think like Gr grants is like a very famous one.

And again, very, very pricey because they're limited to a certain assignment. They should actually mail out like paper printed on things. But this idea of being able to sort of just go to anyone, my main delivery mechanism is email. I mean, I have a website where I put free articles and the paid ones are there too,

but most people read via email. And the great thing about email is it's the one sort of feed people check every day. True. That you can get into for free, right? If you want to get into Facebook, you have to pay. If you want to get into Twitter, wherever you like promote it and make sure they see it, you have to pay. Whereas email, it's open and free. And if people invite you in, it's super awesome.

You know what's funny though? I have a 14-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old son. No email. Yeah. They're just text and Snapchat messages and Instagram messages. And if I email them something, I'm like, did you see that thing I sent you?

They're like, no, don't check email. So what's funny is- I don't know what's going to happen to that generation. I thought that too, but my daughter is 12 and it's interesting because they got their computer starting in sixth grade. Yeah. And maybe because, I don't know,

it's a little bit younger and kids are more worried about it, but they actually email each other all the time. Because some of the kids don't have phones and some do. And so, but everyone has computers and has email. So they use email.

It's so random. But you live in Taiwan though. I do, I do. But I mean, there, I mean, there's, you know, just as pervasive, even more pervasive mobile and chat and things like that. I mean, they now use Instagram a lot more.

I think it was more particularly when they first got it. It was sort of a new thing for some of them. But yeah, it's interesting though, because I think there's always a sense that, you know, people actually grow up and they change. And I think there's not really any evidence that email is actually going anywhere. Like Slack was going to kill email. Like, you know, and what actually happened is the company that donates email is now killing Slack. You know, I think email. And what actually happened is the company that dominates email is now killing Slack.

Right, right. So I think email will be with us for a long time. Being open and something that anyone can tap into and anyone can do remains super valuable. No one is going to build a protocol like email ever again. So I think we're going to be with it. It's going to be with us for a long time. So going from the paid newsletter era to where we are now, where you have pretty much every newspaper now has some sort of subscription thing. You have, you know, Vox is going to end up doing something, I'm sure, with all of their sites and with New York Magazine.

Vanity Fair has their thing. It's very hard to find free, high quality content at this point. When does this start bundling together? When does this start to look like video where you have Hulu plus Disney plus, plus ESPN plus for this price? When does that start happening with news? I'm not sure. I mean, cause there's, it's not unclear what sort of the forcing mechanism for that's going to be. I mean, Netflix started as a bundle. I mean, I guess Disney is sort of brute forcing it, but they already have so much content that makes it compelling. And the other thing with news in general is news is a very sort of difficult product to compete with because once news is out there, it's out there.

There's no sort of walking it down. And its value disintegrates over time very quickly. Whereas Netflix makes a show and that show is still valuable and a reason to subscribe like several years down the road. So the nature of, I think, text generally and that stuff is different. I do think some of the companies like, I think like Vox and BuzzFeed and stuff. I think they are going to make a go of it. I think they'll stay free, but you're right. A lot of like, especially newspapers and stuff are for pay. The other thing that's hard is you look at someone like me, at this point, if you want to bundle to work, the benefit, I need to get more money from people that subscribe, not for me, but for other people to make it worth the money I'm giving up from people that subscribe for me,

if that makes sense, right? And so it makes it very hard to get a bundle off the ground because you have to make it worth the while of the people that attract people to the bundle. And there's kind of like a valley in between where you are currently and the mountain you want to get to. And going through that valley is very, very difficult. So if you think about all the bundles that started they often

started because of technological limitations so the newspaper is a bundle and it started because you actually had to have one place to print the paper and put on a truck and deliver it right so that that was why it was a bundle the cable like cable started this is actually super interesting uh because there there was remote like uh cities or up in the mountains or whatever that wanted to get broadcast tv the signal was poor so they would band together to build a community tower to pull in the signal then run wires from that tower to all their homes it's called community access tv that is where cable came from what happened was i think it was actually james dolan uh the the the smart the smart dolan came along and started like bundling all these together into one product.

And then they realized, wait, we could actually use satellite to go straight to these and avoid the broadcast networks completely. And then HBO came along and TNT were really the first ones. And so then the bundle grew from that. But it started as a collective thing, right? It wasn't like there was an ESPN floating around and a TNT floating around and someone said, let's put these together. No, they started together. And so, I actually, because of that,

what's going to actually pull stuff together? Actually, pulling together rarely happens. It usually starts as a bundle. And then maybe the bundle breaks up sort of over time. Because I wonder if the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, whatever. You took like the six biggest newspapers and they said, we're all together now. This is going to cost $19.99 a month

or whatever. Or you could just get us all separately, but you can get all this together and you get all these things and save something. I actually think that would work. Right. But it's one of those things, again, where it makes total logical sense. And as a reader, it's very appealing. It's like, why am I paying for all these things? save something. I actually think that would work. Right. But it's one of those things again, where it makes total logical sense. And as a reader, it's very appealing. It's like, why am I paying for all these things to be great? I could read whatever I wanted to. But if you actually sit down as a decision maker at one of these newspapers and be like, okay, us six newspapers will say are going to get together. That means out of every dollar a subscriber pays, I'm going to get what? 16 and a half cents. Yeah. So that means I have to get six times the number of subscribers via this scheme

that I can just get on my own and keep it all. And so maybe if you're like the Chicago Tribune, you're like, that sounds awesome. I'd love to get the New York Times to get me more subscribers. And the New York Times is like, we have three, four million subscribers. Why do we want to share them with everyone else? Well, they would probably weight it, right? Like New York Times would get 25% or maybe you

pay 40 bucks a month or- Right, and you get into these schemes where how much do you read an actual thing, whatever. But then you're getting into an incentive problem. I think you don't really want to, getting in a situation where you're compensating writers based on how many people read it or whatever, then you're back into like the clickbait era.

You're trying to get people to read. And one of the great things about subscription is you win based on quality. So the incentives are to write really good stuff that people want to read and share and feel compelled they have to read. And so I actually think- Or to have good reported stuff that you can only get here. So people are like, you know, people complain about this aspect and justifiably so, but I think they overlook a lot of the really good things about the current system. And the fact that

your duty as a publication is very explicitly to your readers in a way it actually wasn't for, for, you know, the last hundred years where the advertisers were the ones that actually paid the bills. Do you buy the whole, the fear that there's a subscription bubble coming where people are just going to look at how many things they're subscribing to and go, wait, what am I doing? I have 22 subscriptions. I should have seven. Yeah, I mean, I think people, I get this question a lot in particular because- No, I don't like asking questions

that are like generic questions. I thought that was a really good question. I was excited about it. I mean, I have a lot, you know, or what's gonna happen, what happens is there's lots of newsletters out there. The reality is, is just because it's a good business model doesn't mean it's gonna succeed for everyone, right?

Like it's still business, right? You have to compete and win. So first and foremost, I don't think that's necessarily a problem for the folks that are already successful. But two, just because, you know, I think people underestimate the, people don't think about the internet the right way.

People think about media in terms of the media we've always had, which makes sense because that's their life's experience, which is you have the city newspaper and you have local broadcast TV, then you have cable sort of generally. And if you think back, all of that is defined by geography. The internet is, the whole point of it is,

it's not limited by geography at all. And so that's why all these business models got screwed up because they were predicated on something that ceased to exist. Yeah. But the implication is now you can build something new by reaching all over the world.

So Shishakari has something like 85 subscribers to 85 different countries or something along those lines. Really? And so what's interesting about that is because there are people that care about a specific angle on technology. It's like the strategy and business model side

of tech companies. And so I don't need to worry about getting all the people in Taipei, Taiwan, where I live, or Wisconsin, where I grew up. No, my market's literally the entire world and I can pick out one person in South Dakota and one person in Florida and one person in Belgium

and you bring that all together and you have a compelling model. And so I think there's lots of opportunities to do this. So there's people that write about just Apple, for example, or there's people that write about music or people that, I think there's a big journalistic opportunity to go into like smaller cities and focus on just a city or just a beat or whatever. And actually, I think it's hugely undertapped. And what the scale comes not from lots of people doing the same thing, like your point about the newspapers,

the New York Times and the Washington Post that are kind of doing the same thing. The actual future is not lots of people competing by doing the same content. It's lots of people competing by all specializing in these niches. Little tiny satellites. That's right. That's right.

Like Bucks Twitter. Bucks Twitter is an amazing place. If there was an awesome Bucks person, he would have 9,000 crazy Bucks fans subscribing. Yeah, well, I mean,

I, you know, this is something that I think the athletics have been very smart about is having, like, there's two beat writers that cover the Bucs. There's the local paper, which is, you know, traditionally been very sort of in in with the team and not very critical. And now there's someone else that's providing a beat writer that is actually not, you know, has their own point of view and is independent.

And that's super, super valuable. It's something that we're, you know, us Bucks Twitter fans are certainly willing to pay for. And I think there's gonna be more and more sort of opportunities there. What do you think of the athletics model? I think it's interesting because that's actually a bundle. So, and the reason why I think it works, at least on a theoretical level,

is people who like sports usually like lots of sports. And so, whereas, you know, someone who likes technology, for example, is not necessarily going to be interested in a site about culture, not to choose like a ring or whatever, right? But they're not necessarily willing to pay for it.

Whereas if I want to read about the Packers, I also probably want to read about the Brewers. I also probably read about the Bucks. And if that's all already in one place, then that's a pretty compelling proposition. And oh, by the way, some big story happened with the Lakers. I want to go read about it. I want to go read about the Warriors, whatever it might be. So I think sports lends itself to a bundle in a way that other platforms necessarily don't. Now, would I join something like The

Athletic? Well, no, because I think the great thing about this model is I, as an individual, if I can actually drive subscriptions by myself, the biggest return is to just keep it all for myself. But particularly for journalists, from a journalist's perspective, who don't necessarily have the capital or ability to go on their own for a year and try to build up an audience, to be able to join something like that also makes sense. So there's a lot of aligned incentives there. A couple of people have tried that and weren't able to really totally make it work. Yeah. In cities like Boston and Pittsburgh.

Yeah, that's right. And so I don't know, I would love to know more details about like how successful they were or whatever. But I mean, it's difficult, particularly, I think the opportunity is, I actually sometimes feel like a bad example for this model

because I do fairly generalized analysis about a wide range of things. And that's actually really hard to make work. Like there's analysis all over the internet, right? Like, why would you want to pay for something in particular? So I actually think the real opportunity will be more journalistic, but covering stuff that no one's covering. And in this case, people, yeah, they try to cover like the 76ers or whatever, but people are, there's plenty of people covering the 76ers. So you're, it's very, very competitive.

Whereas if you were to go in and cover something more like city government, like which maybe only like 2000 people care about, well, that's great. Being in a small pond is actually a really great place to be. So that's the challenge area. They were in too big of an ocean probably to survive. Remember ESPN when they did The Insider, which I think they still have.

But when they really started pushing this in the 04 range, and they put a lot of their fantasy people behind it. People like Chad Ford were behind it. Eventually some local stuff. And I remember in the end of last decade, it was pretty successful. Like they were telling me some of the numbers in like 08, 09. And it was like 800, 850,000 people or something subscribing. And it was really because they wanted like the NBA draft stuff and they, they wanted like specific things.

That's right. Going very deep as it works. And that's what they're doing with ESPN plus right now. Right. Cause ESPN plus they're never going to take, I listened to your interview yesterday. It was fantastic with, with,

with, with, with Bob Iger, but they're never going to take the big stuff away from ESPN. ESPN still makes a ton of money. And also it makes a lot of sense. It's like being live, you know,

advertising like sports. Sports is going to be the very last thing to go to a subscription model. But all the other sports that like a few thousand people care about, like there's no time. There's literally no time for that on ESPN. Like they're gated. There's 24 hours in the day, right? And so all that sort of stuff is a huge opportunity. Actually, I think one of the biggest missed opportunities

that people don't think about for ESPN is ESPN was pretty early to soccer and they should have locked up the Premier League like a decade ago. Like if they own Premier League and had on ESPN Plus,

like imagine how huge that would be right now. And that was, I think, a big missed opportunity in part because they, like I really admire what Disney's done a lot in the last four years. But unfortunately, it was the five to 10 years before that where their heads were kind of totally in the sand.

And that was a big missed opportunity. I think one of the problems with soccer was soccer was intentionally keeping their rights deals on short terms. Right. And always leaving the door open for somebody to just kind of lose their minds and come in with a crazy bid because Skipper was running ESPN at that point and he was the biggest soccer fan I probably knew in the late 2000s, early 2010s. And Fox just came in and blew him out. Yeah, but the other problem though is

with, of course, World Cup, but with the Premier League, it's on the weekends in the mornings. And ESPN didn't have the bandwidth. Yeah, exactly. The Premier League was never happening because they studied it and they were like, all right, well, we could put this on before countdown. Or we could put another football show on.

Yeah. And so we don't really need it. That's exactly right. Whereas now that they have ESPN+, their bandwidth is unlimited, right? They can show whatever they want to on there. So it's like a total shift in mindset as to what is valuable and why it's valuable.

It goes from what reaches the sort of maximum number of people and attracts the maximum number of people to actually what's really valuable is stuff that like some number of people

care intensely about. Because the more intensely they care about it, the more they're willing to pay for it. Well, the soccer thing, the Champions League went to TNT and TBS,

and I think they had mixed results with it and couldn't really figure it out. And now it's moving again. Where's it going? CBS? And it's like the Champions League is basically during the day, which is a disaster for, you know, especially in the East Coast.

But it's still like this important thing. And nobody's really been able to figure out how to unlock that but the the the nba stuff i think is coming up in like three years and the thing i'm fascinated by is what happens to the to league pass and what is that worth and especially what is that worth to not only espn plus but like the zone and if like because the zone they have it in canada if you look at the zones, sports rights in Canada, they have, I think they have NFL Sunday ticket and red zone and they have like NBA league, but like it had basically a mother load of stuff.

I'd be interested to see how that would work on an app versus flicking channels. Cause our generation, we're still flicking channels. Although in Taiwan, you're probably watching everything app, right? I stream everything, right? So when you're talking about this, I'm salivating. Because Weet Passes, from a technical perspective, is just awful. It's a terrible, terrible product. And if Disney were to acquire it and put it on ESPN+, and I could use the MLB BAM technology, that would be amazing.

Because we saw a version of it, of what it might look like when they had the World Championships last August. And they would have four games, basically, across. And it might look like when they had the World Championships last August. And they would have like four games basically across and it could be like US versus France but then next to it

was Spain, Croatia and then all four of them were going and you could basically like slide along and watch me at a watch. Yeah, you can see it

on MLB TV right now which is like it's the same technology and like there it's so much better than Lee Pass. That would be great. That's going to kill that will kill Direc yeah well direct tv is gonna die anyway but that'll

be like the death though and they're gonna lose either nfl or nba but um but i think that the league pass in all the different countries is i i can't even calculate what that would mean to like the salary cap what does that look like five years from now? How much money can they make from 170 countries with League Pass? Maybe. I think it'd be a bit of a slow build. I mean, because they're already selling streaming in China, for example.

Like that's the 10 cent deal. Yeah, no. So the 10 cent stream has basically League Pass. And that actually came back online within a week. Okay. So the hardcore fans could watch the NBA. What is still not back is the broadcast NBA over like CCTV, like the government,

like, like channel, but the Tencent streaming is back. And then you do have league pass elsewhere. I do think there's something compelling about, I don't know. I've never think about it more, but this idea of like,

especially ESPN in particular, going in with a, we're going to do away with the, with week pass and make it a part of ESPN plus as that's our bid, I think is, is pretty compelling. I haven't thought about that. I'm going to have to put more thought into that. It was interesting.

What Agar said in the pod I did with them was kind of buried, but he was talking about ESPN, the way it used to exist is going to just, he basically said it is going to start dying and it's going to be direct to consumer streaming. And I think what they realized with ESPN plus pretty quickly was it's, people aren't going to go there for shows. They're not going to go there for any given Wednesday and shows like that.

They're going to go there for games, more games, live events like UFC and shows like that. They're going to go there for games, more games, live events, like UFC and things like that. The UFC thing, which seemed like they overpaid. I actually, it turns out they didn't.

Well, you made a good point on that podcast that no one's ever overpaid for sports rights. Like it's like, he gave the one example. He said the Calgary Olympics. I'm like, all right. Other than that one time,

the exception that proves the rule. That's right. I mean, I do think that big sports events are going to stay on regular TV for a long time to come. What may happen, though, going forward is a lot more maybe on ABC.

What you see is a sort of a big return back to broadcast. And that's a way because two things have happened. One, the broadcast channels figure out how they can charge the same as cable to operators. So they charge these big carriage fees like the Comcast of the world to carry over the broadcasts. So they get paid just like ESPN used to get paid. But then two, that's a way to reach all the people that have cut the cord because like the rabbit ear cells are like exploding.

Like people like literally like they put up their house and they watch broadcast TV. And so I think you're actually going to see a shift of sports back onto broadcast TV, which is already happening, but I think it's going to accelerate even more. And that's also one thing the NFL was very smart about, was the NFL has always been very concerned about making sure they're on broadcast TV. So even like the NFL Network shows on Thursday or the games, those are always broadcast in the cities of the teams that are playing. So if the Packers are playing on Thursday Night Football on NFL Network, it will be

also available over the air for people in Wisconsin. That's been the NBA's mistake. I mean, one of the reasons I think the ratings have dropped is the first three months of the season, they're not on network TV really at all. And I agree with you. I think we're going to see over the next five, six, seven years, just more stuff going, more NBA stuff going on ABC. I think, you know, I could see Monday Night Football being an ABC thing. That's right. I think that's very possible. Yeah. And by the way,

why wouldn't you? What's the downside? You're going to reach more people. It really helps ABC. And then it has all these other benefits where you have, you know, the show right before the football game, Jimmy Kimmel and the news right after and stuff like that, where there's like real tangible benefits to it. Well, also the way Disney negotiates with the carriers, it's not just that they're negotiating just ESPN. Like they have a whole host of channels, right? And so you're so they're going to end up paying the same amount for ABC and ESPN that they would have paid if it was on ESPN. But yeah,

so I think that makes sense. It's going to go in that direction. What's not going to happen always. But what NBC on Sunday night, how that unfolded and how important it was to them and how it just felt bigger, that's the blueprint, in my opinion. And Fox was able to replicate it

on the Thursday nights. And the NBA has been shifting that direction. Like the Saturday night ABC game and stuff like that. And I, which is, I remember growing up,

like the NBC for, I mean, I was a little younger than you. So it was the, the NBC Saturday or Sunday afternoon game. Like that was where I knew like most of the players

in the league. It was a big deal. Like to have that going on, you know, the John Tash music or whatever. Yeah. Like that was where I knew like most of the players in the league, it was a big deal. Like to have that going on, you know, the John Tash music or whatever. Yeah. I can see, I could see Wednesday night,

which is normally has been an ESPN night forever. I could see Wednesday night becoming like a nine o'clock NBA game, you know, pick it marquee, really like make it the bigger games. You can flex, change the times. Cause there's always a lot of games on Wednesday. That's a model that would really help their ratings.

Yeah. I think flexing will be a big part of the next, of the next. Oh yeah. It has to be like, did you see the Monday night football stuff? They're already talking about how can we flex for Monday night football going forward, which really gets complicated for football because you have like- There's not that many games.

You're flying back to Wisconsin and you're timing it with the Sunday Packer game. You're leaving Monday morning. And then they're like, yeah, we're flexing that to Monday night. And that's like, now I got to change my flight. No, I think it would work better for,

it's interesting because the NBA, TNT gets the featured Thursday already where there's very few games on Thursday. True. So what's interesting though is ESPN can say, okay, look, we know there's a ton of games on Wednesday. That's cool. We actually like that there's a ton of games on Wednesday.

Well, we want- Now we have options. That's right. We want to be able to two weeks ahead of time out of these 10 games, we decide which one we want. Well, you see what happened this year where they get...

Golden State was risky anyway because they were always one Curry injury away from being a disaster, but they're such a popular team. They rolled the dice with it. Now you have like a Saturday night game, Golden State-Lakers. Well, worse, you had a bunch of Warriors-Pelicans games. And then the Pelicans were the other one.

And they had all these Zion games and he wasn't playing. And now we've hit the second part of the season and Zion is the single most compelling guy to watch on League Pass now. And he's like, not a national team anymore.

I know. It's crazy. We had to have all the Warriors, by the way. Everyone has underestimated that trade. Let's hear it. I think it's absolutely brilliant.

The whole thing from D'Angelo Russell to now. And what people are missing is from a Warriors flexibility perspective, it doesn't matter if Andrew Wiggins makes $30 million a year or he makes the minimum. It's the same. Regardless, they're going to be over the cap, not this year, but in the future years. They're going to be in the tax, not this year, but future years.

He does nothing to reduce their flexibility because as long as Joe Acob is willing to pay the tax, his burden on them is just tax money. Which means if Joe Acob says, fine, I'll pay the tax, then Golden State can say, okay, cool. We'll get a functional small forward. Whatever he gives us is going to be a bonus. We get this probably high first round pick, a high second round pick. We get our full mid-level exception this summer because we get under the tax. And by the end of the tax, those future Andrew Wiggins tax payments will be less than they would have been otherwise. And so they manufactured

this ability. They're going to trade those picks to get a couple more starters. Or trade those picks with Wiggins to get an impact guy back. Maybe. But I mean, Wiggins will be hard to trade because this is unique to Golden State. For anyone else, Wiggins is this toxic contract that is just awful, right? But from

Golden State's perspective, and this is what everyone's missing, his contract size doesn't matter. It's immaterial. And as long as Laker's willing to pay the tax. I love the trade for them, too. It's a huge credit to Laker that he's basically said to his front office, fine, I'll eat the contract in exchange for we have all these options going forward. And this is the key thing. Everyone is crushing them because they look at this contract like,

oh, that contract's awful. But if you can just imagine, what if the contract doesn't matter? Then you guys wait. The Warriors now have so much more flexibility than they did before they did the trade for Russell. And I think it's brilliant. This Joe Acob angle, I think, is underappreciated.

He deserves credit for this trade and why it's an amazing deal. It sounds like you're going to stay at his house when you're in the Bay Area. I don't know. He is light years away. No, I've never met him. Like everyone else, I've been making light years jokes. But it's literally a light years move.

It's using the tax as a weapon. I 100% agree with you. And there's one other piece that you left out. And we've talked about this a little on this podcast, so I'm going to repeat myself. The way the contracts have evolved, these teams either have giant contracts or tiny contracts, and there's no in-between contracts anymore.

And you take a team like the Warriors, where they just gave Draymond the extension. Curry's making $40 million. Clay's making, I don't know, $28, $30, $38, whatever he's making. And those guys are not only, not only would you not want to trade them, not only did you get the right value back anyway, but they're just part of your cap.

And then you just have to fill around with all these cheap guys. The Celtics are basically in the same spot where the only tradable contract they have between the really high ones and the little ones is Marcus Smart. And they don't want to trade them. Wiggins now gives them all these options that if Durant just leaves, there's no way they have a tradable contract. Nobody has tradable contracts. The thing people miss is they would still have been over the cap. Like they're never going to have cap space as long as those guys are there. Those three guys take up their entire cap space. That's right. So they would never have cap space.

So like, and also they'll mostly be, so they would have the taxpayer MLE, which is like half the size of the regular mid-level exception. And they would just be filling in edge guys

and they would never, they'd be done. You also- This literally gets, this puts, this reopens their championship window. Like this sequence of events. Well, you also have the ability,

Wiggins is like 27. No, he's 24. Or he's, I think he ends up at 27. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But you have the ability. Wiggins is like 27. No, he's 24. Or I think he ends up at 27. Oh, yeah. But you have the ability to then use him to get somebody who makes 20% more than him from a team that's... Oh, Wiggins is like 30 million, just to be clear. It's a brutal contract.

I thought it was 27 and ends up at 30. I don't know. I can't remember. Whatever it is. Not to underestimate how awful it is. But if they wanted, they could flip him into Tobias Harris. Philly would save money. It just gives them more options than it had. But now they can go underestimate how awful it is. But if they wanted, they could flip them into Tobias Harris. Philly would save money and you know, it just gives them

more options than it had. But I thought it was really smart. I think this is an almost unprecedented reset by them where we saw it in the Bulls with 99

and there's the Celtics and the Lakers have been in situations we've never seen. No, this actually the second Bulls run. It might be the comparable here,

where if you go back and look at it, the only common players were Jordan and Pippen. They're really, almost the entire team was rebuilt around them. The Warriors are poised

to do the same thing, but with three of them. Yeah. Yeah, like, they're so well-placed. Like, it's, and the other thing is, this summer,

so few teams have cap space. The Warriors are going to have the full mid-level exception. They're going to be the most attractive destination and be able to offer basically the largest contract a bunch of guys

are going to be able to get. They're going to have their pick of free agents. And buyout guys. Yeah, it's pretty, talking to different people that work for them, they were just saying like,

we were shot anyway. Like after five straight years of that grind, it feels like 10. Yeah. And it's not like they were going to win the title this year. They were running on fumes of the fumes of the fumes. And that's how guys end up getting hurt.

There it is. Clay did get hurt. And it was just going to get worse. So now you just get this reset button for a year. Nobody remembers what happens 10 years from now. You just remember, oh, that was the one year we sucked. And then that's it. It's pretty cool.

With the ESPN Plus stuff, WWE is coming up. I just think we should mention this quick, where they could basically offset their network and just put it on ESPN Plus, or they could, the rumor was Peacock. You basically take us over, pay us this big fee. Well, because WWE has their own streaming service. I'm saying all the pay-per-views. You basically absorb all the new content. A lot like what ESPN did,

but then also sell pay-per-views through whatever that is. I think that's going to play out that way. What do you think of that model? I really like the model where these people were going, we're going to own our own stuff and distribute our own content. And now it seems like it shifted to, oh,

wait a second. These jackasses are going to give us this? Ah, fuck it. The UFC thing. Like, they were trying to build their own thing. They did. Or no, UFC didn't. The Fight Pass. No, UFC had the Fight Pass thing, which they were really committed to. And then they were like, wait, all right, we'll just put it on ESPN+. Great.

The big thing with all these streaming services, I think you're going to see this with all these new services that are launching. They're going to go through this same journey. Yeah. There's two costs. The first cost is the obvious one, which is to actually build the service, to do customer acquisition, to actually do customer service. All of which you quickly realize just sucks, right? Yeah. And it's expensive.

The second cost is opportunity cost, which is the money you're not making from someone else giving just sucks, right? And it's expensive. The second cost is opportunity costs, which is the money you're not making from someone else giving you money, right? If you keep that content, you need to keep the content exclusive. So people have a reason to sign up, but that means you're not getting paid by someone else for that content. And so this is the reason why all these streaming services like Netflix, I think is going to have a couple of rough years because everyone's going to just coming in there selling Netflix content. Netflix has to do it on their own. But in five years when they all go realize, wait, this sucks. Yeah.

I don't want to do this. I just want to make shows. And Netflix is sitting there. We've been willing to pay you for five years to take friends off your hands or whatever it might be. And it's all going to go back to Netflix. And because to your point, this double, this double cost I think is underappreciated.

Everyone looks at Netflix or Spotify or whatever jealously, but they don't realize that you have to have a mechanism to make up that cost. This is why Disney, for example, Disney's different. Disney doesn't just have the great content to start out with. They don't need to acquire a lot of outside content. But also, they get people to go to theme parks and they can get all their email addresses and all their data. Like Disney has billions of fans around the world that they don't know nothing about. They reported what, 25 million new subscribers. Those are 25 million new people. They can contact directly and get them to buy toys and go to movies and special sneak previews, go to theme parks, go on cruises. They have so many ways to pay off that

double cost that it's worth it to them. But you have other, like AT&T Time Warner, like what, how are they going to sign up for your different phone service? It's ridiculous. And so I think you'll see these other ones, they realize that the economics, when you take the holistic view, ends up not making much sense. That they're better as a seller, basically, than as a self-creator. Right. The economics of creating something is you create a show once, then you can sell it a million times, right? That's why they've all been in this business

because it's a great business. You put a lot of money up front and then on the back end, it's all basically profit. Same as the tech industry. What they've decided to do is, okay, we're going to put all the money up front and then we're going to keep bearing costs

over time to serve our customers. That works if you can get to Netflix scale. If you're not at Netflix scale, you're bearing all this extra cost and you're restricting yourself from lots of revenue by not selling it to lots of other people. And it just doesn't make much sense. It's also, it's almost like the NBA title.

How many people can actually be in the battle? That's right. You know, you can say you have 12 contenders, but you really don't. If you look at the Vegas odds right now, it's Milwaukee and the two LA teams. Everyone else is 20 to one, 25 to one, stuff like that, because realistically, it's going to be one of the three teams. And I feel the same way about the streaming wars where you kind of know who's going to end up standing. And what's going to be fascinating is what happens to the others.

What happens to Peacock ultimately? Right. Which hasn't even launched yet. What does HBO Max look like five years from now? Are they doing what you said and just pivoting? And just be like, ah, fuck it. We'll just sell stuff. Yeah.

If I'm throwing out random predictions, I could see Apple acquiring HBO in the long run when AT&T gets up on it. There's always been rumors, right? It just makes sense. And the other thing, because why does Apple acquire it? Apple doesn't, same with Amazon, they have their own shows, not because they want to get subscription revenue, because they want to sell other streaming services.

Amazon makes a ton of money because people sign up for HBO via Amazon, and then they get to take percentage over time or things on those nature. That's why Apple did the Apple TV Plus, not because they want your $4.99 a month or whatever. It's because they looked at Amazon and be like, wait, our job is to skim off of other people's work in the app store. We want to do the same thing in TV. And so I think you'll see some shifts around there.

But Netflix and Disney are for sure going to be there. You know, oddly, HBO is just such a strong brand. It's such a legacy. Maybe it will survive. I'm not sure that AT&T is the right, you know. Or maybe it gets sold off. Right, that's what I'm saying. I think it might get sold off.

All the other ones, it's hard to see them in the long run. At some point, the idea of, wait, we can just sell our content to lots of people and that actually makes more sense so we don't have to bear all these extra costs i think we'll we'll end up breaking through i feel like fox there was some world in which they could have really competed and they just said screw it and they merged with disney and created this well remember fox split though because the because the other thing that's attractive is, like, live stuff's still attractive. So,

Fox kept the sports part. Murdoch kept the sports parts. He kept Fox News, which is the most profitable cable channel is ESPN. But I'm saying all that stuff together could have been its own powerhouse. Maybe, but the problem is you need a reason. What's the payoff for it?

Disney, the payoff is, we get all this customer information, we get to tie it into the Disney machine. Here, here, here. Right, because you're competing with Netflix, where Netflix has, you know, 100 million, 120 million subscribers, which means every dollar Netflix spends on content, they can spread out over 120 million subscribers.

So their economic advantage over everyone is permanent and structural. So you're competing against that. So you have to decide, I could sell to Netflix and they're 120 million subscribers, or I could keep it for myself and my 5 million subscribers. You have to have a really compelling economic reason in the long run for that second option to make more sense. Did you notice that the Netflixflix stock which usually is that it usually peaks around 380 and then sometimes it'll dip to 280 depending on how people feel about the stuff now it is circled back it seemed like people were afraid of disney plus for netflix and now people are like oh

netflix is awesome again and yet you always hear different takes on like how solid they are, how much smoke and mirrors is it? How much money are they burning through at some point? What, what is, what's the end game for that when you're just spending, spending, spending, spending, and the counter would always be, which we've talked about on this pod. Well, they can always raise subscription prices if they're ever in a bind. What did, what are the next five years of their company look like? Cause my guess would be they're going to merge or buy somebody to become even bigger. I don't know.

I don't think they're going to do that. I think they're going to keep doing what they're doing. So what has happened in Netflix, so everyone is aware that Netflix shifted from, so obviously they started DVDs and they shifted to streaming. Then the next shift everyone has in their mind is they went from streaming other people's content

to streaming their own content. Yeah. And that's actually, I think, too simplistic of an understanding. Because what's happened is what it means to be Netflix content has changed over time. When they started, the first one was House of Cards, right? They actually only, House of Cards was produced by someone else. Yeah. I think it was Sony, but I'm not sure.

They only had rights to the House of Cards in the U.S. So, the House of Cards showed on cable TV in Taiwan. I think that's where I actually saw it, right? And so it was a traditional model where someone else built the content, Netflix bought it, and then they also sold the content to Taiwan or to Europe or wherever it might be,

a European country. And so that was that model. It slowly shifted to, then Netflix started buying the worldwide rights so they could do to all their customers. What's happened in the last two, two and a half years is Netflix shifted to produce doing the entire thing. Yeah.

They produce all the content and that fundamentally changes by the creators out. And they're just like, we're owning this from day one. And so, so that changes how they pay though, because it used to be, they would pay as the show was delivered.

So that meant their, their total expenditure was maybe more, but it was spread out over time. If you shift to the vast majority of your content is going to be, we're doing it all, that means your upfront costs are pulled way forward. And so they're paying much more upfront for these shows. And that's why these two, three years, their negative cashflow has been astronomical

because they're in the middle of this fundamental shift of how they're paying for content. But that means going forward, it's going to be much more smoothed out because they're going to get the return of all this upfront payment. So that's why they don't have to deal with the creator nine years from now being like, Hey man, that's right. They own it all. They own everything. Right. And so it's really smart. I know people don't love the creators. Don't love it as much, but it's a smart business model. Yeah, and Netflix just has the power because we have all the users so we can come in. We pay you so much

that it's worth your while to sort of give up those rights in the long run and they can keep all the upside. So that negative cash flow is going to be less next year. It's going to be less going forward because it was just super high now

because they were still paying for lots of shows with the old model and then also investing in this new model. So it was like this two-year crunch where they were going to have to outlay a ton of money, but they've gotten through that. And so it's going to only get sort of better from a cashflow perspective going forward.

Hey, now that we're in full swing in 2020 and everyone is vowing to restrictive resolutions, Pepsi wants to usher in the new decade a bit differently by encouraging everyone to unapologetically do what you enjoy, even in the face of others' judgment. So Pepsi encourages you to let loose, be yourself, and live your life like nobody's watching. You know what I like to do sometimes in this podcast? Call my buddy Jacko. You know why? Because he lives his life loose. Like nobody's watching. You know what he likes to do? Talk about baseball and complain about the Red Sox. And most importantly, talk about whatever the hell is going on in politics right now. We're

going to do all of that later in the podcast with Jacko. But the thing I've learned with Jacko, you just let him loose. You let him live his life like nobody's listening. In his case, I know you're listening, but that's what you got to do. Pepsi, that's what I like.

Who is a main player in this whole world five years from now that we don't see right now? Because if you think back to 2015, there are some people that are here now that weren't there in 2015 like they are now. Is there anybody that- Like who though?

Well- You go back to 2015, that's when Iger did that earnings call, for example. And I wrote about at the time where Disney is going to be totally fine. They have all this content. They'll wake up at some point and realize they should do a streaming service. It turns out that what, at least in Iger's telling, you know, self-serving storyteller to be sure. But that was, you use that to convince the board to sort of shift.

Right. And you knew that Apple was probably going to do something. Netflix was well on their way. What the other thing on Netflix that people don't appreciate is most of these guys, you they're buying, you're, you're buying a show because you want to attract customers because they want the show.

Netflix doesn't do that. People go to Netflix. They open up Netflix. Then they decide what they're going to watch. People go to Netflix first. Well, and then the algorithm tailors it to your habits. People always think about… Like Kyle's habits.

Kyle, what is it all like? I do docs. I do docs. Docs and action movies. Some war TV shows. Yeah, there you go. There's lots of algorithms showing content he wants to see. But there's like this idea where people think watching TV, people watch prestige TV all the time.

No, actually people watch junk TV the vast majority of the time. And Netflix is like a pig wallowing in the mud of junk TV. Like they're just like, you want to fill time with crap, here's a whole shovel load of it and we own it all and so we're not paying a marginal penny on it and you're just consuming time just watching this. It's so funny that I mean, they must

have had how many years of intelligence and they just study the algorithm and they're like, ah, people like horror movies. People like serial killers. Yep. People like action movies. Yeah, they like crime proced like horror movies people like serial killers yep people people like action movies yeah they like crime procedurals they like to they like we can't find this person who did this crime and now 20 years later we found them and they just keep doing it yep it's and i've probably watched enough of it that the algorithm is just like, check this out. Hey, man.

Hey, another serial killer. Hey, this dude was eating bodies. And that's the majority. All the press attention is on the big shows, right? Those are useful to get new customers. But the way they keep old customers and people around, it's just filler. It's just filling time.

Have you studied at all or done any research on what this writer strike will mean to all this? Because I think it's going to be not only a strike, but I think it'll last for a while. And I don't know what the fallout is going to be because last time this happened in 08, it completely reset everything about Hollywood. In a lot of ways that turned out to be bad for the writers.

I have no idea. Yeah. I think it's going to be a thing and I don't really understand how it's going to play out either if people aren't making new content the libraries of the content you have becomes even more valuable if there's no shows you know what I mean? so Netflix might be a good thing for them

because they just have this war chest and maybe people go back I don't know what it means for network TV all that stuff audio is something you become fascinated by Yeah. And maybe people go back. I don't know what it means for network to be all that stuff. Since. Be good for sports. Audio is something you become fascinated by.

For sure. I mean, it's super interesting, you know, I think, think about podcasts and versus music. Because music has been, is this sort of like, the crazy about music is if you were to go back 20 years ago and say, oh the way uh which media industry is going to be thriving in 2020 you wouldn't have picked music you're gonna say that it's music yeah you know like it was about 20 years ago that Napster came out and like yeah it looked like they were gonna be devastated and they were uh but now you know streaming is great it's not they make more money per user than they ever made in the old days they don't want people like us talking about it either. They're all raking it in and they just want it to kind of, they're like, shh.

Yeah, it goes up every year. They're going to pass their peak in a couple of years of the CD era. It's amazing. But they also, the great thing about being a music company is the reason they have power and it's hard for companies like Spotify or whatever, they have to pay them so much of their revenue is because people listen to old music and the catalog is super, super important kind of to your point there. And the great thing about music is the moment a record is created, it is now old music, right? It's in the catalog. And so their negotiating position is like getting stronger over time as more music is made and has been getting stronger for years.

The difference with podcasts, and this is why I think Spotify is so interested in that, is podcasts lose their value very quickly, which at first seems like a negative. Because it's like, well, I spent money to create this and now I can't reuse it again and again like you can with music or TV shows. But it turns out people only want to listen to new content with podcasts. Like no one's going back to listen to like old BS shows, right? They want to hear the new show. And so that's really great for Spotify because that means if they get used to listening to podcasts in the Spotify app, they will keep using the Spotify app. They want to listen to music, they'll be in the Spotify app. Eventually they'll say, these commercials are annoying and they'll pay to get rid of them.

And now they're locked in and it's just a habit. And so podcasts are very good at creating habits, which is super beneficial for a subscription business. I think about this, what I do, right? I try to send out an email every day and make sure it arrives in the morning because I hear from people, they read it every day over coffee

or they read it on the subway every day. That habit is a super powerful part of subscription. Same with Netflix. Netflix, like people just sit down and watch Netflix. So they don't need to have a killer show all the time because people will just happily take whatever is on there. And so podcasts do that for Spotify in a way that I think music, music does not. And so that's a big reason they're going in that area. The combo of both of them, I think there's been some advancements that's really helped too. Headphones are better. AirPods. Shit like that. AirPods are incredible.

For podcasts in particular. The phone. Having it in cars. Like Spotify's and Tesla's now. It's like these little small victories where you think where we were 15 years ago where it's like, oh, Walkman. And I've got to bring my giant headphones with me. Where did you start the podcast at ESPN?

I started the pod in 07. I started downloading Apple Music in 04. I remember. Yeah, I started around 2004. You go to iTunes and you would sync it to your iPod. Well, first you would download it on your laptop. Then it was like this whole thing.

Yeah, it was this big song and dance. That's why they're called podcasts, which all the young kids don't understand. There was actually a product called iPods that you would use to listen to podcasts. Apple's like, oh, it's going to be a big thing. In retrospect, it was download to your computer

over slower internet speeds. Then you had to sync it to your thing and then you had to walk around with your wired headphones that were terrible. And now you don't need to download anything. You just press a button, pop the AirPods in your ear and it's instant. Yeah, it's a huge technological shift.

So it's like basically tripled the amount of listening time people probably have just from cutting down the process. Oh, I would say like 300x. Yeah. I remember when my podcast started in 07, it was only on ESPN PodCenter. I don't even think it was, I don't even think we were on iTunes. And you could just press a button and it started playing, but the file was really compressed.

So my voice sounded like this. And it, you know, the audio was just awful. If you go, some of them are still online, I think. Um, and then eventually when we went on Apple and I could feel the audience grow, it became this little like niche thing. And then I remember 09 in 2010, that was when people started, you know, stopping me or mentioning the podcast, not my column. And I'd be like, so you don't, you listen to me. You don't read me. Like I just couldn't get over it. Yeah. It was like this little novelty thing we were doing, but I'm reading this book right now.

I'm almost done. I'm trying to read 75 books this year, all nonfiction. I'm just trying to get smarter. Cause I turned 50. I was worried that the internet was breaking my brain, but I'm reading this book about, uh, maybe it broke your brain by thinking you need to read 75 books in a year, but it makes my brain actually work better. So I'm reading this book about... Maybe it broke your brain by thinking you need to read 75 books in a year. Well, it makes my brain actually work better. So I'm reading this book by Lizzie Goodman about when New York music took off again in 2001 with the Strokes and all those bands. And there's this whole section about Napster.

Basically, it seemed like the end for music where Interpol put out, they had an album that was going to come out and three months before it came out, everyone heard it on the internet for free. And it's like, well, what does this mean? Or is this, is this a nuclear war? Where do we come out of this? And now you think where they are in 2020 and it's, it's just an amazing comeback. We had to change what you were selling, right? You used to, what the music industry was selling was not music. They were selling physical items that played music, right? And everyone thought they were in the music industry.

It turns out they were in the plastic disc industry. And so once plastic discs went away, then the money went away. That's what happened to newspapers. Newspapers weren't selling news. They were selling bundles of paper that advertisers could put their ads on. It's the only way to reach consumers, right? So what the music industry sells now is they sell convenience. That's what Spotify is. sells now is they sell convenience like that's what that's what spotify is you could still piracy is still possible you could still go out together who the hell wants to bother when for ten dollars a month it's trivial it's right

there you don't have to do this weird song and dance to download your computer and put it on your phone no you just press a button and stuff plays and and that that's it turns out people like convenience. That's always been the case. The convenient option always wins over the technically superior option or the other option or whatever. You can charge for convenience and that's what the music labels sell, basically.

Via Spotify, via Apple Music, via whoever else will sell their stuff. Do you think we're done with innovations or is there another level to go to? Because I never could have guessed that the AirPods, which by the way, Apple will tell you this too, is the single most popular thing they've ever made. They can't keep them in stock. Everybody loves them. They have unanimous approval rating and people just want more and more. And they just made these new ones that my wife got me for Christmas where it's like the sound canceler

where you can basically just walk, you get hit by a car. You can't hear anything. You can shut out and you're on an airplane and it's like, you're not on the airplane. You're just like in your own little world. So I don't even know what's next from an innovation standpoint,

but I'm sure something's coming. Yeah, I mean, you can see them getting even smaller. And like the transparency mode on AirPods Pro is incredible, right? You can have noise canceling. Yeah, that's what I was talking about. Well, you can see them getting even smaller. Maybe. And the transparency mode on AirPods Pro is incredible, right? You can have noise canceling. Yeah, that's what I was talking about. Or you can do the transparency where it pipes in outside sound, but you can hear perfectly what you're listening to.

True. And so you actually have the volume much lower. It's actually better for you because it's layered on top of the sound outside. And now what AirPods Pro are with the transparency turned on, that is augmented reality. Like it actually is. I agree. Because you're layering on something onto the outside world. And so I think there's a ton more that's going to happen in the sort of the audio space.

And so it's a great place to be just generally because you can see, especially as it gets smaller, people just have them on permanently. Like it's already super convenient to pop out of your pocket and put it in. Imagine when something's small and you just have it in your ear all the time and you have information flowing in constantly. And to press a podcast now is not to look back and say, we sit here like, oh, imagine you had to use your computer to download and sync up your iPod. You know, Kyle and the future is going to be hosting a podcast. I mean, if you had to pull it out of your pocket and then you had to put it in your

ear and like, imagine how inconvenient and barbaric that was. So I think there's definitely a lot, a lot that's going to happen here. Well, it's turned the city of New York into invasion of the body snatchers. You walk around there and it's just, everybody's got AirPods on.

They're all just kind of not interacting, looking at anyone. And it's just all these people just lost into their own music podcast world. And that's it. It's made driving around. You know, LA, you drive a lot. It's so much more fun just to live here than it was 15 years ago. For sure. Where 15 years ago, you have your little CD book,

putting CDs in. Yeah. And you're listening to the same CD for the 47th time. What does it mean for Sirius? What happens long-term for them? Because everyone thought four or five years ago

they were going away, but they haven't. And they seem like they still have a foothold. But when you think like that people can just do whatever they're doing on their phone and just put in their car immediately, it would seem like it would be a foothold, but when you think that people can just do whatever they're doing on their phone and just put it in their car immediately, it would seem

like it would be bad for Sirius, but it doesn't seem like it has been. What I would say about Sirius is I don't pay any attention to Sirius. It's probably what you need to say. It's not just that. There's probably a use case that still exists. I think they're kind of muddling along.

I think they've done a fair bit with being able to also stream their content. Like they have an app and stuff like that. But I mean, I don't think they're necessarily a significant player. And what they did figure out is like the power of exclusives, obviously, right? I mean, they, you know, the Stern deal was transformative.

And not just for them, but for really emphasizing the world that we're in is a subscription world where you need a reason for people to seek you out. And so the power of someone like a Howard Stern or the power of someone like a Bill Simmons is so much higher because it draws people. It's an attraction to, to, to your platform. And then by the way, it doesn't mean that you have the payoff is necessarily people paying you

money, right? And serious it is, but it could be, Oh, we get to build an ad network. For example, which I think Spotify's angle is right.

The ringer is going to be free to everyone, but it's going to be Spotify. Now it's a build up this area, which for podcasts, you know, it's super dispersed, like podcast, like email.

That's a great thing about them. It's super spread out. Anyone can do it. Anyone can build a player that can pull it in. It's terrible for monetization, right? Who actually made money in email was like Microsoft with like Exchange Server and building a centralized thing, right? Spotify is trying to become a centralizing force

in podcasting because you have to have something in the middle centralized to actually have the scale to go get advertisers at a meaningful way, not just like Casper mattresses or whatever, but actually like big, big, big picture advertising. So it's going to be interesting to see how it plays out. I mean, there's pluses and minuses to it. As someone who benefits from stuff being super open, it makes me a little wary at the same time. My business analyst hat sounds like it makes total sense. It's exactly what they should be doing. It is so much more upside in the long run than music.

Like music, I think, we'll look back at Spotify and music was like a lost leader where it got them at scale so that they could actually go and do this other thing that is much more profitable and will probably be even bigger going forward. I don't know if you know this, but I've had a couple conversations with them. Oh, really? Yeah. Now their goal is to keep people on their app and keep people on their platform, which is anyone's goal, right? That's the same thing as Netflix wants you to go on Netflix and stay on Netflix. Apple wants you to go to Apple, stay in Apple. And I think with Spotify, what they realized is people who listen to podcasts are then more likely to listen to more podcasts, more music, and just kind of go there first. That's right. And how do you get the person to come there? And then how do you keep them there? I look at where audio is. And one of the reasons I

was so attracted to working with Spotify was I think audio right now in 2020 is kind of where video was in maybe 2013. I got a better, I got a better analogy for you. Okay, go. It's where the internet was in the nineties. Oh, that's good. Where you had all these pages all over the place and you could go to these pages and there was no, like there was advertising, like remember like punch the monkey or whatever, something like that. Right, right, right. Cause there was no centralized player. What it took was Google coming along and being the entryway to the web. True. And then Google basically sat on top of the entire disparate internet, centralized it into one place from people's perspective, then laid advertising on top of it and made just gargantuan amounts of money doing so. That's where podcasts are, right?

They're all spread out. They're all disparate. There's no one place to figure out where to go and put it all together. And so Spotify's goal- And then how to monetize it correctly. That's right. Yeah, you can use any podcast player to get any podcast, but no one has the scale, except for Apple,

to do the advertising piece, right? Spotify is great. It's funny. Spotify is very mad at Apple, justifiably so. They filed an antitrust complaint against them in the EU because Apple gets to take 30% if someone signed up on Spotify. So Spotify removed it. You have to sign up via the web, but Spotify

can't even put a link in their app to go to the web and sign up. This whole song and dance, I think is actually very abusive by Apple, especially because they have Apple Music competing. So they're very mad at Apple. At the same time, they should be on their hands and knees thinking Apple, that Apple

had this massive opportunity in podcasts and has utterly declined to take any sort of advantage of it. The majority of podcasts are still listened to on Apple Podcast Player. They could have all the data, all the infrastructure to build what Spotify is trying to build, and they're just not doing it, which means Spotify is going to walk into this opportunity that's going to be much more profitable than music in the long run.

And so Apple, yes, they're very mad at them, but they should also be thanking them. I think for Apple, it's small potatoes. It's right, it's too small. It's too small for them. They think like, if we make the right phone, we make a kajillion dollars and we could just make as many AirPods

and we just print money with them. And they, you know, it's interesting though, from me, from the, and obviously it's a little dicey for me to talk about given my own situation here,

but something happened. Maybe. I thought it was interesting that they cared way more about Apple TV and building that brand versus kind of trying to own audio. I think it was a mistake. I don't really, I don't really understand why they played it that way because on the TV building that brand versus kind of trying to own audio. I think it was a mistake. I don't really understand why they played it that way because on the TV side, just so you can go buy somebody. They should have bought Netflix like five years ago.

Or they could have. I feel like they could have taken down HBO if it was the right price three, four years ago or just buy some studio or whatever. I don't, to try to do that internally and you're hiring people and it's never going to work with the executives you have initially and all that stuff. Yep. I just would have, I feel like they could have, I know they could own Dottie of 2014, 15, it would have been over.

No, for sure. For not that much money either. It's absolutely true. I have no like explanation for it beyond the fact that it was just a massive mistake. No, we did explain it. It's small potatoes to them. No, that's true just a massive mistake. No, we did explain it. It's small potatoes to them. No, that's true. That's true.

But they could have dominated it. The other thing is you can't look at podcasts as it is today because, number one, still most people don't listen to podcasts. And number two, it's dramatically under-monetized for the amount of people that do listen to it. So you have two vectors for growth. Number three, too. We're in the very primitive stages of innovation. That's right. People either doing podcasts like this, conversational,

or they're doing narratives. And that's really it. Even we did the hottest take for Spotify, which has been successful for them. That's kind of an atypical podcast. It's seven minutes. It's one take. It's weird. I think five years from now, podcasts are going to be so much

weirder and eclectic than they are now. That's right. In all sorts of genres or whatever. How many serial took off? How many true crime podcasts do we have after that? A million? Netflix is churning out. Just wait until Spotify starts churning them out. Well, they're already churning them out though. That's right. They have a whole...

But everybody is. It's this fountain that never stops sprouting new stuff because there's always going to be more crime. But the big thing is... People love crime. Spotify is going to have so much more scale that their capability of monetizing that is going to be so superior.

The huge opportunities in advertising, and they're going to have so much more capability of doing that. It's going to be a similar situation to Netflix where their capability to monetize is going to be so much better than when else that they'll be able to, all the top talent will come to them. They'll just be able to, their economics will be much better. The other way, the advertising thing, the way to think about it, which doesn't exist right now and is really hard. And people have messed around with it a little bit, but the dynamic advertising,

the way to the best way to describe it is if I'm watching a basketball game on ESPN and I'm in Milwaukee and it cuts to the, and there's local ads for like, you know, Bob's car shop in green Bay, check us out. But in Boston, I'm watching it there and I'm getting like a Jordan's furniture.

And I hear all these drop out of Massachusetts accent. I'm watching it there and I'm getting like, uh, Jordan's furniture. And I hear all these drop out of Massachusetts accent. I'm sorry. There's 70 different cities showing the ads locally. And they're just, instead of just one ad that they're getting money from, they're getting 70 different smaller versions that probably adds up to more. And I think when you look at, uh, just where stuff's going with audio and if we, if we could potentially by we, I just mean like the audio. And if we could potentially, by we, I just mean like the audio community.

If there's a way to target somebody in Kansas City specifically, hey, there's a Chiefs game on Sunday. Tickets are $10 off, go to this website. But then in like, you know, Dallas, it's like, hey, Cowboys fans, come to the Cowboys team store. That's the upside of all this.

What's going to happen too, though, because it's streaming, it's not just a file that you're downloading when you listen on Spotify, right? A regular podcast player, you download a file so the ads are set. You can dynamically insert an ad on download, which some folks have tried to do. But Spotify, because it's streaming, they can know it's Ben Thompson in Los Angeles listening,

and they can put an ad just for me. So we could be listening to the same podcast. And Ben likes cheeseburgers. That's right. Yeah. And we could actually get different ads. And that's where they're really going to take it. And then they can actually give much more actionable data and feedback to advertisers

that they know it's being listened to. They know who it's reaching. And how much they can charge will be a lot better. The only thing you said that I disagreed with is that podcasts lose their value almost immediately because I actually don't think that's the case for some of them. And I know with ours,

the rewatchables. That's right. I used to listen to a bunch of the Binge Mode ones. The same thing. So that's another one. But that's your point. There's going to be innovation in podcast types, right? But I was locked on like the conversation about like the news of the week. No, no, I'm with you. But I think one of the reasons

that I wanted to do the Book of Basketball podcast because I wanted to create a podcast that you could listen to nine years from now. And I think with the stuff I'm doing on this feed, it's going to like me and Sal guessing the week 15 lines. That's over in two days. Oh,

the paracord will last forever. I guess the paracord will last, but you know, book of basketball, we saw with rewatchables where we hit a point probably September, October. If you look at the total listens for like a month, half of it was for the four new pods we put up.

The other half was for the entire library. And you know, for us, like, I want to create more stuff that could potentially have a life. And this is a huge opportunity for Spotify too, to start, you're walking down the street. I've already listened to my, my new podcasts. I want something else to listen to. And they, just like Netflix, they can algorithmically start surfacing stuff that they know I'm interested in that I like, and I can binge on like a new crime procedural podcast, wherever it might be. So yeah, I think it's interesting because I was very, a lot of people were putting down

Spotify, you know, Spotify was trying to make the case they're a Netflix comparison when they IPO'd. And my argument at the time was, you know, they're not because of this margin piece and the fact that music companies are much more powerful relative to Spotify than Spotify is, you know, than Netflix is relative to the content producers. But in the case of podcasts, they absolutely can be like Netflix. And so there the comparison makes much more sense. So it's like Spotify has like two different businesses that are both about listening, but the economics and value chains are totally different. And so what they're building now is actually in the long run, I think it'd be much more interesting, much more valuable

than anything they would have ever been able to do in music. There's another similarity too. They were a technology company that eventually started caring about content. And I think with Netflix, like ultimately the reason Netflix started winning was they, of the technology they had. And once they figured out how to combine the technology with their content decisions, it took off. And I think with Spotify, it's a really fascinating company that, unlike where Netflix was, I think 6, 7, not to make it sound like a Spotify infomercial, but they just have less people competing with them right now. That might change two, three years. But when Netflix was doing what they were doing, all these other big people saw it. They just got there earlier, planted their flag on it,

and got basically how many years it had started on Disney Plus? Like five years, six years? No, they started streaming like in 2011, I want to say. Right. Yeah, so a long head start. I mean, Disney was selling them content until 20, like 2015, 2016. I've told this story before, but I remember Connor, the guy I created 30 of 30 with. 30 of 30 was done.

We had finished the first series. You told this story when I was on the podcast last time. And he's like, we sold it again. And I was like, what? And now you think like, that was Netflix's genius. Yep. It's like, yeah, well, here's some money. And people are like, what? And now you think like, that was Netflix's genius. Yep. It's like, yeah, well, here's some money. And people are like, cool, money.

And what that did was- And then they just built this WordPress. That was the model, right? Because you build stuff, you could sell it again and again. And that gave Netflix this sort of content runway to start building up their own stuff

because they could build up the streaming capability and the customer base and then start investing. And again, just their own content being this long process of buying stuff and then doing the whole thing and then now producing the whole thing. Yeah, it's brilliant.

Netflix, if there's one, something like Google, it's impressive in a way. They were the right place, right time, right place. They had clearly superior technology. But it was a disparate market. Someone was going to come in and just clean up that whole thing and they did what Netflix has done the way they sort of laddered up their business

come into a very profitable and strong entity and just basically disrupted the entire thing is super impressive I think the most impressive management story in tech probably in a lot of ways we never mentioned Amazon.

Is Amazon lurking with all this before we go? I think Amazon... Because Amazon like just decided one day we're going to get into grocery delivery. Right. And yesterday my wife ordered Instacart and it was a bunch of Amazon bags that showed up and you think like,

well, they weren't doing this a year ago. So I think we've all learned never to rule them out with anything. So it goes in two directions. So right now, like I said, their value from content is it's a way for them to sell other subscriptions to other stuff. A reason why they wouldn't do it is Amazon is like really at its core, like a logistics company, and they're building up this massive just capability where other people can sit on top and then they, you know, to take a skim off of all that. A reason why Amazon would do it is because Amazon is very good at things that take a lot of money. They're like, they just spend and they will get a return from it.

The reason why, though, I think they won't ultimately is because Netflix beat them to it, right? Like Netflix already spent all the money, is already in the position, like Amazon would love to be the, we'll have random crap for you to watch and we'll just be omnipresent. That's like, that's like Netflix is what Amazon would want to be. Amazon wouldn't want to be a prestige TV provider.

They'd want to be a default, always on the background sort of provider, but Netflix beat them to it. So I think they'll probably just sort of stay where they are. And they probably compete with Apple with the stuff like 21 bridges is now available to rent. That's right. Come here, come to Apple. That's right. Apple and Amazon, I think are directly competing for, for that mark to sell, not just any of those episodes, but also to sell subscriptions to, to other, other people. Keeping a library of all your, you know, all your digital

things. That's right. That's right. That's right. So you can search on Amazon for a show and it happens to be on HBO and they'll sell you a subscription to HBO. If you already have HBO, they'll start playing it. They'll own the interface later. Yeah. And everyone all sort of plugs into it, but they won't make the level of investment and content that Disney or

Netflix will. Last thing, you get to regurgitate some of your old content here. So I'm sure at the end of the decade, last year, you're making predictions for the 2020s. And I'm sure you've been thinking about it.

Give us one prediction for the 2020s. Well, I think the big thing is everyone in technology always assumes that what's the next wave? What's the next thing that's going to come along and be the big thing?

And this is a bit contrarian, a bit risky, people will definitely throw this in my face if I'm wrong. I don't think there is a next big thing from a company perspective. We're going to have the ear stuff we talked about, right? And we'll have AR glasses. But I think the people that will win that is going to be Apple and it's going to be Amazon and Microsoft. And the companies that are there, we have phones in our pockets and we have these cloud services that are available anywhere in the world. And what's the logical endpoint to that? Like we went from a mainframe in a room, it's been kind of expanding, expanding, expanding, like unless we're going to have like interstellar, like cloud services or, you know, omnipresent computing in a way that's actually like, the thing with the phone is this screen is genuinely

useful for basically anything you want to do. once you get smaller there's some use cases where it's valuable but there's by definition stuff you just literally like you can't read on something once it like that's in your ear for example or watch it watch a tv show so what's going to happen is they're all going to be adjuncts to the phone so you'll have something in your ear and you'll have the phone there as like with it and so i think like we will be with, I think it's gonna be Apple and Amazon and like the same big companies in 10 years are going to be the big companies. But what's, so all the innovation, this is going to happen on top of that. Everyone's going to assume, oh wait, we assume everyone has a phone.

We assume there's cloud services everywhere. Now, what sort of stuff can we build given that assumption? Which is like what Uber is, right? Uber is like, oh wait, if everyone actually has a phone with them, then they can use that to call a cab and they can come pick me up. That assumes the presence of the phone. And so I think this idea of the phone's going to go away or be disrupted, like the PC was disrupted or the mainframe, I actually don't think that's going to happen. I think this paradigm, broadly speaking, is going to be where we're at. And then we'll have lots of innovation on top of that.

I have one smaller prediction that ties into the thing you're going to about to plug. I think these companies are all going to make it a lot easier for self creator, kind of self businesses, people create their own content to just have subscriptions for them. Absolutely. So, you'll probably be Apple and Spotify and whoever else where it's just like, here's my thing in one click. Now you're a subscriber and I don't have to get fucked on the backend

of people sharing the password, all that. It's tied specifically to your Apple ID or Spotify, whatever you have. And that's it. And you're my customer and one button, you're here. That's super interesting. I don't know if that's it. And you're my customer, and one button, you're here. That's super interesting. I don't know if that's going to...

I do think it'll be much easier to be a creator going forward. That doesn't mean it'll be easier to succeed because there'll be more competition, but it'll be easier to... It'll be easier to create and get money from people that like what you're creating.

That's right. This is sort of called Substack. That is explicitly modeled on Stratechery. But instead of me having to put all the pieces together and figure it out in 2013, it's in a box. You just sign up and you have all the tools right there. Boom, you're off. That's right.

So I think that will continue. We're going to see it happen with podcasts. There's been a bunch of new podcasts that are like for-pay podcasts and you go and you click a button and it loads into your existing podcast player, just like email. It uses the free standards. So I think that will continue. Will Apple and Spotify enable that is a very interesting question.

Because on one hand, they would rather you just pay the bundle price. But on the other hand, you have an add-on, so you usually pay $10 a month for Spotify. But then you could pay $15 a month if you want Spotify plus Sir Techery I don't know or could they get a cut from the feed too

well for sure they would take a cut from that what do they get for apps 30% yeah it's it's very interesting

I don't know which is a pain in the ass if you want to rent a movie on Amazon but then you have to actually go to the Amazon website, type in the whole thing, be like, can I rent this? And then you go back to Apple TV. The reason why it's

compelling though is because they already have, and this is Spotify's, why Spotify doing music first was important because it got them a huge user base that they can leverage to do this, right? Because if I'm going to be part of a bundle, you have to make sure that I'm going to make just as much or if not more money than I'm making by myself.

Which means you got to bring a whole lot of people to the table that I'm going to get. Which they basically tried with Apple News, right? Right. And I don't know if it's worked or not. No, it hasn't worked at all. And I think the,

and a part of it was papers like the New York Times didn't join because it was, why would I want to share? I actually like Apple News. It has a lot of magazines. It's got the LA times. It's great for end users.

And this is, and this is always Apple's problems in these spaces. It's great for end users, but the actual publishers get screwed. It's like the apps are like the, it's great for end users. You can buy once and get updates forever. Really sucks to be for,

for a developer. And so you, I think you've actually seen, there should have been much more innovation as far as apps on the phone. And I think there hasn't been. Maybe that's coming though. No, I think Apple...

That could be one of our innovations. Maybe. For 2020s. That would require Apple to sort of become much more developer friendly in a way that it just never really shown that they want to be. All right.

So the Stratechery... There you go. Two for two. I did a two for two newsletter. You can just go to stratechery.com. Yeah, Stratechery. There you go. Two for two. I did a two for two newsletter. You can just go to stratechery.com. Yeah, there's free posts. Ben Thompson. The posts are great.

I don't remember when I first became a subscriber, but it was only because you just signed me up. You were like, I think you'll like this. I have to say that I'm super happy for you. It's so cool that you did this, Sal. I'm a little bit bummed because I wrote the post. I think this is when you signed up. I wrote a post when Grantland closed.

Yeah. Saying like, actually, the way the business model should be is you should use text to build an audience and monetize via podcast. You need to be a holistic media company. But that's what I was telling them at the time. That's right. And so we were two peas in a pod on that.

And then you built it with the ringer and it was successful. So I could point to, oh, this is super successful. Like I talked about this five years ago and now it's no longer independent and empty. But I think what Spotify was willing to put into it demonstrates that it was right.

So I appreciate that. Thank you for all the support. I've enjoyed reading over the years. Always nice to, I don't know if we've done one in person, have we? Or did we do the support. I've enjoyed reading you over the years. Always nice to... I don't know if we've done one in person. Have we? The first one we did in person. Did we?

The second one was on the phone. So it's our third one. Third one, yeah. The trilogy. There we go. Because the second one on the phone, I had the epic Jason Kidd rant. Oh, yeah.

And then he got fired a month later. I didn't want to talk about the Bucs because I think it's always been bad luck to talk about the Bucs. But man, 70 wins is in play. It's not inconceivable because they can actually win when Giannis doesn't play, which... Middleton is

unbelievable this year. He's been really good. 28 minutes a game. I think that Boone didn't know how to use him last year. There was a clash where Middleton wanted to play in the mid post more and Boone was like, no, we're shooting threes. And that, like, Middleton's a great three-point shooter,

but that's not his game, right? This year, he's operating out of the mid-post much more. He's operating the pick and roll much more. Like, that's actually up significantly more. And he's killer in the pick and roll because he's so tall. He comes off and it doesn't matter for guys because he's 6'9". And so guys in his grill, he just rises up and shoots over him.

It's like... What time are the games on in Taiwan? They're on about 8 a.m. for me. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, it's perfect. A cup of coffee? Yep. I wake up and watch the games and then get to work.

I desperately want the Celtics to get to the two seed and not have to go anywhere near Milwaukee until round three. I'm full of complimenting Bill. I worry about the Celtics more than anyone in the East. Yeah, because we match up okay with Milwaukee.

Milwaukee's weakness is the wings. And you guys have all those wings. And it's like every game that we play, the Bucs jump out ahead and then it's just this drip, drip, drip, drip where we're just, every possession, we're getting killed on the wings. And like loose balls, rebounds,

like slashing, whatever. And so I'm, in the East, I'm most worried about Boston. Well, we're taping this on a Tuesday. The Celtics thing that's changed the most is Tatum's really starting to put it together in like real ways.

And ultimately in a series against Giannis and Kemba will be there. You'll have your guys be there. And Kemba kills our drop defense too, right? We have to switch out of what we do. If we beat the Bucks in a playoff series, it would be because Tatum and Brown went to another level and killed your

ranks and just outplayed them. And then everything else was kind of either you kind of held on or negligible or whatever. I can't wait. I hope, I hope they end up playing and run through. It'd be fun. Thanks as always.

All right. We're calling Jack on one second. Wanted to remind you about the newest podcast from the ringer podcast network. It's called music exists. The hosts are Chuck Klosterman and Chris Ryan. Long time friends from back in the New York days. You know,

Chris says the executive editor of the ringer. I think that's his title now, but something else. My apologies, Chris. I think that's what, what we If it's something else, my apologies, Chris. I think that's what we titled it. Should I Google it real quick? Inner circle guy.

I've been with Chris for the last 10 years. And Chuck was, when we launched Grantland, was prominently involved for that first year. And we've always been trying to get into a podcast. We finally figured out a format and a structure that we liked. And it's about music, and it tries to accomplish a whole bunch of different things. But it's big picture, really smart conversations about specific themes based off of albums, singers, trends, whatever.

And it's hard to crack the music podcast format, but I think this one is really good. You can check it out on Spotify. It launches next week, but follow it right now on Spotify. And then when the first episode drops, it will be right in your Spotify, the playlist, whatever, your library, whatever. It will be there and you can listen to it. It's really good. Check it out. Music exists. More details on the Ringer feed and everywhere else. And speaking of music, we did the Dave Grohl podcast that we ran earlier this week.

The full episode of that is on our Ringer YouTube channel. So if you'd like to actually look at us when we're talking, you could see I'm a little hungover. I'm as pale as I've ever looked in my entire life. I actually wanted to color tint it to make it look like I had more color on my face but it's like basically an interview TV show for that one

so if you like watching this stuff check that out as well alright let's call Jacko alright the fans have been demanding it they don't know where he's been there's been all kinds of Red Sox chaos there's cheaters in baseball politics is in full swing.

And he's here right now, our buddy Jacko. Jacko, this is your kind of time. The Red Sox traded their best position player in 60 years. The Democratic Party is going nuts. There's cheaters in baseball. This is really when you thrive. It's my time to shine. Let's start with Mookie Betts

Do you want to congratulate me for losing Our best position player in 60 years? Yes, I feel very good about it It's completely nonsensical I don't understand why Well first of all The Red Sox, like the Yankees Should never ever ever cry poverty

Because They both have a license to print money And the Red Sox, like the Yankees, should never, ever, ever cry poverty because they both have a license to print money. And the Red Sox have basically branded every single thing in the ballpark, outside of the ballpark, anything you could buy, any break in the game, everything. Like the Yankees. Right. So they make money hand over fist. And the notion that the luxury tax is really hamstringing them is insanity. It's crazy. And go ahead.

They also gave the Dodgers $48 million as part of the trade. Right. So they did this grand trade to ostensibly restock their depleted farm system and save a lot of money. But they're paying $48 48. So they got rid of David Price's contract, but not all of it, just half of it. So they're paying with $148 million. And they got back Jeter Downs. I love that he's named after Derek Jeter and grew up a ferocious Yankees fan, by the way. Yeah, that hurt. Who is okay. It was a semi highly regarded prospect, I guess. They got a catcher who is not super highly regarded and they got Alex Verdugo who looks like the lead singer in a limp biscuit

cover band. So I'm super excited about these developments. It has a bad back and a bad attitude. Apparently there's some questions about that. So, and he's going to, you know, he's in a rough spot because he has enormous shoes to fill because the fans by and large love Mookie. So the first sign of trouble for him of not, you know, hitting well or missing the cutoff throw or something, the fans are going to just murder him basically, not literally, but I mean, you know, with verbal abuse and what have you, and that will be ugly. And then he'll get ugly with the press. And it's going to be fantastic, I think. I have a couple Dodgers fans, friends, including one who absolutely loved Verdugo and called him Doogie, which I thought was funny and said he spreads the ball to all fields and all that stuff.

But after the trade got whatever happened, where it was on hold because of the twins prospect that we were trading for who could not pass a physical exam. And my Dodger fan friends were like, we're panicking. This, the backlash, the Red Sox received, they're going to back out. There's no way they're going to trade Mookie now. And I'm like, no, no, don't worry. They're going to trade them. They're, they're stupid. They're there. They're for some reason, want to get rid of this guy. And I got to say, it's don't worry. They're going to trade him. They're stupid. They're for some reason want to get rid of this guy. And I got to say, it's perplexing. Even if you just look at the basic premise of we have to dump Price's contract, but we're going to compete. Okay. Well, they're

paying $48 million to get rid of him. I think we're paying Martin Perez like $7 million for this year. Right. Ostensibly to replace Price. So now I'm at $55 million. $55 million, right. Next year's guy to replace Price, he'll cost like $7 to $8 million because you can't get anybody who can throw 150 innings for less than $5 to $7 million these days. By the time you add it all up,

it's that $48 million million plus seven million a year for a mediocre guy who's not as good as Price saves you 75% of what they just would have paid Price. Why are we cutting corners? They make 500 million a year. What are they doing? And the thing with Mookie, where they supposedly offered him a $300 million contract, and he supposedly came back and wanted a $420 million contract.

So they're $120 million apart. He's not a free agent until the end of this season. So unless you were going to get blown away with team's top prospects, and you were really going to have all these young studs that would be great for you in the future, which no team was going to offer when he's going to be a free agent. Why wouldn't you just hang on to him for a year, let him explore free agency, when he then does not get $420 million? Because who's giving him $420 million? Unless the Yankees get involved. The Angels gave Mike Trout $400 million, one, because he's Mike Trout, and two, because he's the only game they have in town. If they didn't give him that, they might as well fold as a franchise.

Mookie is great. He's not getting $420 million. So let him explore free agency, and then when he does not get $420 million, he comes back to the Red Sox, and maybe they sign him for $300 or $350 or or 325 or something that's more allegedly manageable for them. Why wouldn't they do that when you're not going to get a massive prospect call? So to do this, to get rid of 48, like you say, you know, $48 million of prices contract, but then you threw it, you know, you had to pay another seven. So really it's 41 million of prices contract. Yeah. seven. So really it's 41 million of prices contract. Uh, I don't understand like what, what you,

the Red Sox really need to save $41 million that badly to get Alex Verdugo Jeter downs. I also, I don't know this whole, we need to reset our competitive balance tax thing. Just sounds so shady. It's like you have to reset it. Why? Because you might have to pay an extra 40 million bucks this year. Well, I'm sorry. You're not going to make 110 million from the team this year. It's only going to be 60.

Nobody feels bad. But the fundamental thing that I just can't wrap my head around is there's like five, six teams in the league who can really afford a guy like Mookie, who by all accounts, by any statistical evaluation, is one of the best five to 10 players in the league, depending on what list you're looking at. But the big thing is he's only 27. This isn't like, you know, he's 33 years old and you're doing like the Albert Pujols contract where you're looking at like,

oh man, when this guy's 38, 39, he's going to be a DH. It's a disaster. This guy's an amazing two-way player. And of course the Dodgers were going to do that trade. He was like, oh man, this Dodgers deal might get held up. They have to come up with a different prospect. No, no, they were doing the deal because they're getting Mookie Betts. And guess what else? Not bad to have David Price either because he's two or four years with the Red Sox.

He's a guy who can go 16 and 10 and throw 200 innings if he's healthy. He's certainly better than whatever their fifth starter was. And with less pressure in LA, he's not in the pressure cooker of Boston with the media all over him and everything else. He could be more relaxed and play video games all night.

Nobody's going to care. He'll play with me and my son. I'll invite him over. He can play Fortnite with us. Also, huge outfield. I mean, I think Price is this is an easy prediction. You once owned all the David Price stock. I still do. You own $217 million.

You still got it, so you're hoping that it will come through and pay off. It was so funny. Somebody wrote a piece. It was a classic. It's so funny. In 2020, people are still writing these stereotypical Boston media pieces, but the piece was basically

Good Riddance, David Price. The whole balance of it, and it's on my Twitter David Price. Right. And the whole balance of it. And it's on my Twitter feed. I tweeted it, but the whole balance of it. I read it too. Believe me. It's like he turned,

he turned the clubhouse into us against them. Yeah. And you go, Oh, that sucks, man. I didn't realize he did that. And then you realize the us was all of his teammates.

And then them was the reporters. It's like, why should I care that a reporter didn't like David Price? Why does this keep me awake at night? That article had such a slant and it was like, well, he took the younger players under his wing and he turned them

against the press. You could have written the exact same facts of that article and just did a different spin like David Price, experienced leader, like helps young players navigate media. Keep away from the press. Right. Exactly.

Or like, you know, helps them navigate Major League Baseball. Like it seemed like he was like a team. Like usually you get murdered if you're not a team first guy. Now he gets murdered because he's all about the team, you know? Right. And like us against them. People usually love the us against them. And not to mention it worked.

They won a freaking World Series in 2018 and won 107 games. That's the thing. They probably cheated to do it, but still. Wow, hold on. We're going to hold that thought. It's like, yeah, he turned it into an us against them. And if it wasn't for him, maybe they wouldn't have won 119 games in the World Series. He's like, what are you arguing?

It worked. Us against them was a good thing. And the other thing is he was such a gamer in those playoffs. And obviously I felt vindicated because I held all the David Price stock by August. But the guy came up huge. He came up huge in Dodger Stadium, ironically, and he's pretty good. But the Mookie part of this, 100 years after Babe Ruth, not to compare it to Babe Ruth, the symmetry of that really concerns me.

The fact that I got my four World Series, I really only wanted one. Everything else was gravy. But I'm probably never going to see them win again now because we have somehow reversed all of the karma. Decades and decades. It was 1918 and now it was 2018. And, you know, get rid of your best player for money, basically. So it is interesting.

I think John Henry should have said he was funding no, no Nanette as part of this. Inside joke for the Red Sox. At first that, you know, they made this trade that obviously they agreed to all the players. And then they're like, well,

wait a second. Brustar Gratterall or whatever his name is. Yeah. He's damaged goods. So then like the Red Sox fans, I saw it all over Twitter and everywhere else where they got their hopes up. Like maybe this whole thing is going to implode.

Maybe Mookie will be back. And only to have your hearts broken again. So that was my favorite part with the new GM. It kicks fans in the teeth that once but twice. Drags it out for like a week. That was fantastic. I was the most... Just rip off the bandaid, ripped it off slowly. That was fantastic. I was the most. He just ripped off the bandaid, ripped it off slowly.

It was great. I was the most upset. After the first version of the trade, I was the most upset. I didn't know it was possible to get this upset about sports again. Where it really like, it sent me down a spiral. And the people out there are like, hey man, fuck you. You won four World Series. It's like.

Right. Russell and I talked about it last week. That's not the point. The point is I wanted this guy to be in my life for the next 12 years. And I wanted to watch him and I really liked him. And I thought he was a great role model for my kid. And I thought he was really fun to watch day in and day out. And the fact that we traded him for some nebulous need to save money thing.

When the team is a cash cow i just couldn't i just couldn't wrap my head around it and i was in a really dark place and i was texting with uh with hench my uh my fellow crazy red sox fan buddy and i this was like two days after the trade i was like, I feel like I'm in the seven stages of grief and I'm in like the just profound sadness part, whichever stage that is. And then he was like, I honestly feel like it's like a death. And I was like, I kind of get that.

I feel like obviously Mookie's going to be on the Dodgers and he's still going to play professional baseball, but it's just like, he's just been wiped out. This guy that I had penciled in for the next 20 years of my life, or I guess next 15 now, and it's just gone. It just went into thin air. It was like, of course we're never going to lose this guy. Who would lose? It would be like the way you think about Aaron Judge right now. It's like, well, why would you lose Aaron Judge? There's's no reason you're never going to lose Aaron Judge so I don't no I mean like it's actually a shorter drive for you to go see him 81 times a year now actually well he'll come over too with Price when Price is playing video games at my house

no I mean the Aaron Judge thing you just assume if Aaron Judge plays for the next 20 years all 20 years will be in the Yankees like you're signing up for that now. He's in your life. I can't imagine a situation where he's not playing for the Yankees unless he has a

series of injuries and becomes damaged goods or needs a new team or whatever. If he's healthy and he's doing Aaron Judge things, they're not trading him. That's it. Luxury tax be damned. Congratulations. I know nothing makes you less happy than when the Red Sox

are doing well and the fact that they've somehow figured out how to sabotage this season while simultaneously stabbing their fans in the gut and trading the most popular guy in the team is unbelievable I just can't get over it.

It's like, Oh, well, Jeter Downs didn't realize he was a top. Like my dad is drinking the Kool-Aid on this. He's like, you know, Mookie was going to leave.

I'm like, what do you mean? You don't know that. So Mookie is going to go to free agency and see what his market is. Guess what? I think he should probably do that. That sounds like a really good idea. Cause normally when people go to the market, they make a lot of money and he should do

that. And if they're offering him an extension lower than he thinks he can get, smart move, test your value. Doesn't mean we have to fucking trade them. Anyway, all right, let's talk about the cheating stuff. So I think we talked about it maybe six weeks ago as, as it was breaking. And now, more stories coming out

where, even in the Washington Post, we're taping this on a Wednesday. And, it just seems so much more elaborate and, and far reaching than I think any of us realized.

And I just can't believe these guys are really your opening day Astros. Here he is. Jose Altuve. And it's like, all of these guys cheated. And I can't believe they haven't cracked down on any of these guys. Do you think it's because all these other teams cheated too? And it's like, well, we're not, we're not going to flag these guys who went 40 miles an hour over the speed limit because everyone else on the highway was going 40 miles over

the speed limit. Or is something weirder going on here? Well, I'd say no to that because they, I mean, obviously everybody knows that steroids, the steroid era, that steroids were rife throughout the league and they had no problems flagging the guys in the McAfee Report or whatever the hell it was called, or the Mitchell Report that was based on what was the guy's name from New York. But, you know, that they used only this guy who was the clubhouse guy for the Mets as their source. And everybody that got their steroids from him or that he knew of was painted with that brush and they did not do any further investigation when everybody knows that it was wider ranging than that.

So they haven't felt reticent to just flag a handful of guys before. Allegedly, the claim was that if they went after individual players, then that gets the players' union involved because they file grievances and it becomes a more protracted thing and they didn't want the nightmare of that. But, I mean, the way these guys have handled it, you know, Altuve basically saying, well, we're going to go to the World Series now because nobody believes in us. Bregman appearing at their fan fest and doing this.

Well, the commissioner did his report to, you know, plead the fifth, basically, to every answer. And, you know, it's not basically to every answer. And, you know, it's not going away because I see stuff on Twitter where like other players, you know, Trevor Bauer foremost among them, but other players now, I read a thing now with a guy for the angels and said, everybody in the sport knows they use buzzers in 2019. There's all these different sources that claim that that's the gospel truth. Yeah. And that MLB like swept that under the rug because that would be too much. And I think the Astros could not have handled it.

The players any worse. Marlon Gonzalez came out who plays for the twins now and basically did an apology, but everybody else has put their head in their sand and Verlander, Justin Verlander, their team, one of their team leaders, who's always like chiming in on the rules of baseball on Twitter and not afraid to throw his opinions around, has been a ghost, basically.

Yeah. You know, if we went to Vegas and figured out how to count cards, and you stood 20 feet away from my table, and every time I was thinking about doubling down, you just started banging the trash can as loud as you could. You'd be escorted out of the casino in like 10 minutes. I can't believe these guys went through three straight seasons doing this and the other teams knew it and nobody like blew the whistle on anybody. That's why I feel like maybe everybody was cheating. They were just doing it the most egregiously and blatantly. Like even your Yankees. Oh, God. Here we go.

Well, you know, you've been prone to be cheaters in the past. You got in bed with A-Rod, one of the legendary cheaters of all time, to win your only World Series of the century. Oh, my God. But the Yankees are like, yeah, let's let this go. Let's move on. It's in the past. Like, why aren't the Yankees madder? Well, no, the Yankees are fired up. I let's let this go. Let's move on. It's in the past. Why don't the Yankees matter?

The Yankees are fired up. Aaron Boone at spring training today on Wednesday at a press conference, and they asked him directly, are you sure the Astros were not using buzzers in 2019? And he said, no, I'm not sure. He was not afraid to throw it around. That's the thing. These players, there's a fraternity, I'm sure, of baseball and the Omerta. They didn't want to rat anybody out and all that.

But I've been surprised, frankly, at how open these guys have been about, you know, yeah, the Astros have cheated for years and we've known it. Everybody knew it and we did things to counteract it. The single funniest. Everybody was doing that. They said the Astros. Well, I hope I hope that was all it was because because obviously the Red Sox report hasn't come out yet. There's some good conspiracy theories on the internet right now. One of the ones that worries me is the Red Sox know they're about to get annihilated

with whatever the report is, and that's why they're throwing away this season anyway. That's a possibility. They may also know that Betts had his best season ever in 2018. No, come on. Stop it. He only hit 260 last year, so they figured why are we going to pay this guy a lot of money? Almost 300. He hit like 298.

Alex Cora was the known ringleader of this Astros thing that's shaken the sport to its core, and then he goes to the Red Sox next year and they win the most games in their history. I mean, come on. They brought in the buzzers after Alex Cora left in Houston. I was talking to my dad about

this yesterday and we were just... My dad's definitely, because he's living in Boston, there's a little more Kool-Aid being splashed on him there. About like, well, you know, he might not sign here. And we were talking about it for 10 minutes and then there's this pause and my dad goes, you know, we don't have a

manager. Seems important. Spring training's about to start. We have no manager. Didn't they name Ron Renike the interim manager, but why is there an interim manager? Like, why don't you just hire a manager? Yeah. It's like, why is he interim? It's like if I just left the ringer today and they're like, Hey, we have an interim person running the ringer. Well, that's weird. What does that mean?

But it does feel like he's coming back though. They think they're going to bring Cora back after whatever suspension he gets. I think my guess is the storm for two years and bring Cora back. Is that the plan? My guess is if you suspend him, that's an admission of guilt. If you get in a room with him and you say, hey man. Go away for two years. I think it's going to be

one year, not two. Hinch got one year. And got one year and if you believe him and I don't but his claim is that he you know he was smashing tv screens and he was trying to get them to stop and they just wouldn't listen to him oh yeah I'm sure that's all true you know Major League Baseball's report claims he was like uh you know he was very reticent about this whole thing of course reluctant yeah whereas Cora was the ringleader of this thing and that he was really the driving force as the bench coach and came up with some of this system. So, you know, a lot of players who sang, I guess, pointed their fingers at Cora and Beltran, to be frank. And that Cora was the ringleader.

So if he's the ringleader and the reluctant guy gets a year, I would think that the ringleader is going to suffer a worse suspension myself. I love the reluctant guy who happens to be the boss of the ringleader. Get the fuck out of here. There's no way that happened. What are they talking about? And it's pretty convenient now, even like this Wall Street Journal article where everybody points their finger now at Beltran and Cora,

the two guys who are gone and lost their jobs, who aren't around anymore. It's like in movies when somebody dies and they're like, he was the murderer of the dead guy because he can't answer for himself anymore. Here's my response to your accusation against the Red Sox. In 2018, the year you would say, well, maybe that was the year they cheated. Sandy Leone hit 177 in 288 at-bats. If he knew what pitches were coming and still hit 177, he should just retire from baseball right now. Yeah, but he stinks.

Well, Jackie Bradley doesn't stink. That guy was hitting 160 for half of 2018. Does that mean the information messed with his head? Like, I don't believe it. Maybe he was confused. Maybe he was confused by the signals. It took him a while to figure out the way the code worked.

And also, the Red Sox guys have gone on the record being like, fuck this. Like, Bogarts, Endeavors, like, there's been dudes that have been like, look, whatever this is Like Bogarts, Endeavors, there's been dudes that have been like, look, whatever this is, we weren't doing that. Whereas you look at the Astros, the home away splits are legendary.

Who's that guy, Brian McCann? Yeah. He was basically 1927 Bill Dickey at home. Or even Altuve. It's ridiculous. Yeah. Well, the funniest outcome of this will be if Altuve it's ridiculous yeah well the the funniest outcome of this will be if Altuve

starts the season hitting going 2 for 40 or something that oh absolutely even if he starts at 0 for 10

it will begin it will be done absolutely I was talking I think it's going to inspire a lot of control and I think I don't think they have

any idea of how bad it's going to be because I think like other players it's not just fans the fans are's going to be because I think like other players, it's not just fans. The fans are fired up, but I think a lot of other players are fired up.

I think they're going to be like, I think they're going to be dusting dirt off their pants quite often. I think they're going to get buzzed more often than they know. I was talking to Chuck. No pun intended. I was talking to Chuck close to me today and I was saying how I actually was surprised this wasn't a bigger deal this whole

baseball thing. Like if it had happened in the NBA if they had figured out. Yeah. Like it just felt like it would have been 20 times bigger.

And he was arguing it actually is a big deal and it actually got people talking about baseball in January or February and he thought it was like actually weirdly good for baseball. And now I'm thinking about it.

I don't want to say he's changed my opinion yet, but it is fun to have a real villain in the league now. Oh God. Yeah. I never thought I would hate a team more than the Red Sox. Yeah. But the Astros are up there now. They really are.

I still hate the Red Sox. Don't get me wrong. But I, I mean, I really dislike the Astros. up there now. They really are. I still hate the Red Sox, don't get me wrong, but I mean, I really dislike the Astros. I really, really dislike them. I dislike the team. I dislike the players. I really have my blood up for them, no question about it.

It's great. It's great. I'm actually looking forward to this season for a variety of reasons, except for the part that I really... Except for the Red Sox part. Yeah, except for the part where the Red Sox broke my heart. And I know Mookie's going to do incredible for the Dodgers, too. Like, lock that down. The Bellinger-Mookie, that whole side of the outfield,

it's going to be, like, you know, way, way up there. But we're taping this on a Wednesday. Zach Cram is writing a piece for the ringer that is going up Thursday morning because we basically asked him to figure out how much of this is bullshit. How much, how much money are they actually saving? And he's like, he's like got one of those Nate Silverman numbers. Yeah. He's going to actually figure out how much of this is bullshit.

So hopefully he's going to figure out out how much of this is bullshit. So hopefully he's going to figure out this is all smoke and mirrors craziness. I hope it comes out to be about $1,100. They're able to buy one more TV for the clubhouse that AJ Hinch could smash. That's right.

We're taping this the day after the Democratic, the whole thing in New Hampshire. New Hampshire primary. It was bad times for Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden. Bad times. Joe Biden putting on a clinic. It feels like he's filming a documentary in real time about how to destroy a campaign. Now it's like, well, South Carolina, my campaign's just beginning. I think his campaign is over. And yeah,

I think it is too. And now we're looking at Sanders, Mayor Pete, who again has no credentials whatsoever. Right. Amy Klobuchar, who actually kind of like, who also had, the, the, the knives haven't come out for her yet, but they're about to.

They'll be dredging up everything from her past now. And then Bloomberg as the wild card. So if you had to guess right now, who is Emperor Trump facing in November, who would you pick? You know, it's crazy. I guess if I had to put money on it, I would put money on Bernie. Because, I mean, he either, well, you know, the crazy, stupid Iowa caucus thing. He basically won the popular vote, but somehow didn't get the most delegates because of the way they apportioned them based on I don't know what they apportioned them on, to be honest with you.

And they still can't count the votes, but we'll call that a half a win. He won in New Hampshire. He did not win as convincingly as he did four years ago against Hillary, but it's a much deeper field this year. He still won. So he won the first two. Didn't he have like one-third the vote

as he got in 2016? One third of the people? I thought I saw that today. I think the final numbers were, I think he got around 27% of the vote. I believe. And then Mayor Pete was right behind him within a couple of percentage points.

I think he got like 25-ish and changed. And then Klobuchar was there with like 20 maybe. Yang Gang threw in the pack. Yang Gang threw in the towel last night. So I would say it's probably going to be Bernie. He has the most passionate supporters. He has the most money.

Well, he doesn't have the most money. I shouldn't say that because Bloomberg, who is a multi-billionaire, he's been spending money like it's going out of style. So he has the most money of his own. Bernie has the most money raised among his supporters who are feverish in their support for Bernie. Now, the establishment, such as it is the Democratic Party, will do everything in their power to rig it against him and throw themselves against him. But if he does not get the nomination, having the most support and the most fever supporters, I mean, they will literally burn the Democratic Party to the ground. So the Democratic Party elders, to the extent there are any, have to be like tearing their hair out because if it comes down to a Bernie-Bloomberg battle

and Bloomberg is a billionaire who used to be nominally a Republican and it's him against Bernie, who the true believers, that's where their heart is, that's going to be a mess. That's going to be a bloody civil war. But I think ultimately, I think Bernie is going to come out on top.

Well, Vegas agrees with you. Vegas has Bernie at plus 120. Bloomberg's plus 225. Pete's at 8-1. Smokey Joe's at 15-1. And our girl Amy is at

17-1. Bizarrely, Hillary Clinton you could still get at 50-1, whose odds are the same as Elizabeth Warren. I don't want to parachute, but the notion, like, yeah, I've seen things about that, but there's no way. Bernie will burn the party to the ground if they did that, too. And it's not like she's going to parachute in and unite everybody and coalesce the party around her, most of whom hate her. So I don't think that's happening. Who do you think Trump wants to face? Because we're really down to... Bernie. Oh, you think that's happening? Who do you think Trump wants to face? Cause we're really down to, Oh, you think that's who he wants? Yeah.

Yeah. Why? Because, well, because the, cause it's going to be like the British election all over again. I mean, Jeremy Corbyn was a, you know, who was the labor leader party in the most recent British elections. And I realized that's more complicated because of Brexit and everything else. But you know, the labor party had the worst showing in its history, essentially, or I think in its history, against Boris Johnson, who is basically the Trump of England. And it was because Jeremy Corbyn had openly flirted with communism most of his career and was way out there.

And that's in England where they sort of have, you know, it's Europe. They're more open to socialism or democratic socialism than we are in this country. So I just think that Bernie screaming, you know, 78 years old, screaming about billionaires and, you know, threatening to take away your health care to give you government health care is not going to sell. It's not going to sell in Midwestern states for union guys that have collectively bargained for health care and don't want to go on a government health care plan. And it's like, you know, you're going to go with like it's going to be a choice basically of the lunatic I know or the lunatic I don't know. And it's going to you know, it's going to be ugly.

Excuse me. And I think Trump is ultimately going to win. That's who he would want to face more problems with. I mean, the dream scenario for Democrats was Biden, who, you know, is from Delaware and was born in Pennsylvania. He's got the Uncle Joe thing for, you know, white lower class voters, which is who Trump appeals to, that he could do some, you know, he could help in the battlegrounds there. But, you know, poor Joe is just a disaster and like imploding. So that's not going to happen. And now the establishment such as this has to put its hope in somebody else. But, you know, if they're putting it in Bloomberg,

I'm not sure Bloomberg sells nationally either. So he could sell fund. He, you know, he's got a fortune, so they would like that aspect of it. But Trump would definitely want to run against Bernie. If everybody that's left Sanders versus Bloomberg almost feels like Vince

McMahon is orchestrating that as SummerSlam 2020 or something. Yeah, that would be... It's just like, the billionaire! He's a billionaire! He hates billionaires! Bloomberg! Sanders! And they're going to do it that way.

And it'll be like, they should just have entrance music when they go in and the whole thing. But Bloomberg is literally what Sanders hates. And that's probably his biggest obstacle. The Mayor Pete thing, I'm just astonished it's gone this long. I didn't see that one coming. It's insanity.

I mean, there's these theories about him that he's basically like a robot that was created in a lab. Cause it's like literally like a year ago, if I had, I had no idea who Pete Buttigieg, I'm pretty tuned into politics and I had no idea who Pete Buttigieg was. I couldn't have named the mayor of South Bend, Indiana at gunpoint. And now he's like a household name and he's a legitimate contender for the Democratic nomination. I mean, you know, he semi-won Iowa and he came in a close second in New Hampshire. This is a guy who's 37 years old. He's the mayor of the fourth largest city in freaking Indiana. Right. I saw a thing after the Iowa caucuses when he won sort of the Iowa caucuses and he got whatever he got for votes, you know,

tens of thousands of votes, he had never gotten more than 9,000 votes in his life before. Because you can get elected the mayor of South Bend with 9,000 votes. Yeah. And now the guy is like a legitimate contender for the presidency. It's crazy. And here's a guy, I don't understand like why he wouldn't run for, could we run for Congress first or Senate or governor of Indiana? We're just going to go from being the mayor of South Bend to being the president? I don't know. And he's like, he speaks in platitudes and cliches, but the voters eat it up.

I mean, he has an impressive resume. The guy served in the military. He's a Rhodes Scholar, Ivy League, speaks multiple languages. It's all great. It's a great resume, but he's 37 years old and he's run South Bend. It's like when an NFL team hires some 30-year-old whiz kid

coach, and sometimes it works out. Mike Tomlin, Sean McVay. They're just like, all these guys suck. What about this guy? He's seven years away. Let's give him a whirl. Right. I, I'm most of,

back to the robot thing, because I think it's a crucial point. It seems like they've almost changed his voice to sound exactly like Obama in 2007. Well, yeah, he's definitely like studied every, like, I think it was like a clockwork orange, like where they had his eyes propped open and they're just putting an eyedrops and he was watching Obama speeches.

If you close your eyes, you wouldn't know who is who. And even like he has the pauses and how Obama used to finish the point and then kind of stare out at the crowd, kind of soaking it in for a second. And Pete tries to do that too, but he's got like a circuit in his back. I think it's really weird to watch him speak.

Like he really does seem like he came out of Obama camp. And it's like, here's our winner of Obama camp. Until somebody can prove to me that he was not created in a lab, I'm not going to believe it. Yeah, they should probably research that. It's just an odd thing. It's just an odd thing.

He's got like this perfect resume and he came from nowhere. No one's ever heard of him. All of a sudden, he's like a leading contender for the nomination to be the president. It's crazy. It would be funny if he malfunctioned, like he was giving a speech and he was going, and as I told Michelle last week, and as I told Michelle he was going and as I told Michelle last week and as I told Michelle last week

and as I told and then somebody came and hit him in the back I mean Chastin yeah I think this is we're headed for a clusterfuck of epic proportions these next eight months.

What everybody always hopes for is the brokered convention, where there really has not been one since. Well, I mean, a really one where the outcome was in doubt. It's been a long time since there's been one. In 76, the Republicans, you know, Reagan had sort of had a chance to unseat Gerald Ford, but not really. In 80, Ted Kennedy went all the way to the convention against Carter, but not really. So journalists are always hoping for that. And this year, you know, if Biden was ever to rally in South Carolina, because, you know, he's the only guy in the race, basically, not basically, he's the only guy left on the Democratic side that has some appeal to African-American voters, although I guess Bernie has made some inroads there.

Yeah, Bernie has. You know, if Biden was ever to sneak out a win in South Carolina or at least come close, you know, to Bernie, let's say Bernie wins and then Biden was close, at least then, you know, he'd be comeback Joe and they would hype that up. And then, you know, Klobuchar and Pete are still in there and Bloomberg is spending a fortune on Super Tuesday. I mean, you really could have a free-for-all, which is insane, but it could happen. A free-for-all, a complete clusterfuck that leads to somebody then facing Donald Trump and then Uber clusterfuck. Exactly.

It's insane. But you know what else is insane? Four years ago, we talked about this. I swore up and down there was no way Donald Trump was going to be elected president. That it just was not going to happen. And here we are. So, nobody knows nothing. The race has already reached the

point where there was an argument whether it should be clomentum or Clomentum. Did you see that whole thing? Yeah. And somebody said, no, no, it should be Clomentum. And they were arguing about that for Klobuchar, who is destined to become the Michael Dukakis of this whole thing where in the John

Lovett sketch a million years ago with Bush with the, I can't believe I'm losing to this guy. Like that's whoever she's in at the end, that'll be her demeanor. Just like, ah. Yeah, the knives will come out for her now because nobody felt the need to drop any oppo research on her. But now I saw a thing on Twitter today where she gave a speech a few years ago talking about how, you know, they needed order on the border. And they're, you know, basically not quite calling for Trump's wall.

But, you know, she was like a border hawk. So that's going to hurt her in Democrat circles. And there's a lot of stories about her being very mean to her staff and, like, abusive to her staff and things. So they'll dig all those stories up, too. Yeah, I was less alarmed by that because Donald Trump is our president. Exactly. People might be like, you know, we want a president who's tough. That's good. She's hard on the staff.

It was like, it's almost, I read those stories. I'm like, all right, how mean? Like, did she dump a soup on somebody or did she just? Well, she threw binders at people allegedly, like full binders of paper. But where? At their arm, at their head? Like, can I have more detail? You didn't hear the comb story?

No, what was that one? Oh, so this is a... I forgot where this was. They had this big article. I forgot if it was like... It wasn't some right-wing rag. It was like a legitimate magazine or something. They had articles up in there where...

I don't know if it was the Washington Post, whatever. Supposedly she she was she was going to catch a plane and she had some staff with her and they were like hustling to make the plane and so she said go get me something to eat and the staff person went and got like a salad at the airport and they got on the plane and he had neglected to get a fork for the salad so she was all pissed off so she like digs in her pocketbook, pulls out a comb and proceeds to eat the salad with the comb

while all glaring at the kid who's her staffer. And then eats the salad with the comb and gives him the comb and is like, go clean it. That can't be true. I don't know. It's good. Why would you, I don't know. I don't know. It's good.

Why would you, I don't know. I don't know if somebody would make that up, but yeah. So that's, maybe you want that in a president, you know, they're thinking on their feet,

make do with what we have. I'm Googling. Oh yeah, you're right. First result, Klobuchar ate her salad with a comb, report says. Yeah.

I don't make these things up. I don't mind it. If that's the worst thing, so she's a pain in the ass to work for, alright. Yeah. Could she beat Trump? Well, probably not. Right. I don't know, I mean, she may have some Midwestern appeal being from Minnesota

and, you know, seeming like not that threatening, except to her staff. You know, it's possible. I like that. Be great at the next debate if Mayor Pete just openly, like, with a comb, combing his hair right in front of her. What, this comb, Amy?

I like that she, they're definitely, she also has some stuff with people she put away that, you know. Yes, yeah. She has that whole side of the thing too. Yeah. But she has skeletons.

She took a couple innocent people away and stuff. She has skeletons from the past. Biden has skeletons from like 24 hours ago. Exactly. It's like, oh yeah, remember that dog face comment you made to that poor lady who asked you a question? He's rough. Poor Joe Biden. I didn't even understand that. that dog face comment you made to that poor lady who asked you a question? Poor Joe Biden. I didn't even understand that.

She was like, why did you do so poorly in Iowa? And he's like, did you ever participate in an Iowa caucus? She's like, yes. Then he goes, you're a lying dog face pony soldier. I saw that. I think he was kidding. It's a quote from some John Wayne movie. She wore a yellow ribbon or something from like 1940.

And like, Joe, can we be a little more timely with like, you know, can you quote what's part of time in Hollywood or, you know, anything that John Wayne, he literally could have said,

he literally could have said John Wayne to her and she would have known who that was much less a quote from a John Wayne movie. 22 years old. Right. Exactly. Like, I guess he 22 years old, right, exactly. Like, I guess he was trying to be funny, but it's like, unless you're familiar with obscure John Wayne quotations, it's not really going to be that funny. Even my dad didn't get it, and he's 71.

I think there was like an 85-year-old who thought it was hilarious, though. It's like, ah, John Wayne! And he's just like, he looks bad. It's like, I mean, it's really like his family ought to sit him down and be like, Joe, I don't think this is happening. Like you, you tried to wave the flag. You tried to, you know, carry the banner, but it's not your time. It's just your time has passed. It's enough.

You've done your service. It's good. You're done. Yeah. I kind of thought that was the job of somebody's kids to intervene for on somebody's behalf. Politics is like, you have so much confidence or ego that you think like Elizabeth Warren, why is Elizabeth Warren still in the race this Wednesday? She, she was like the leader. She, you know, she, she shot out early. She had this huge lead and now, and she got killed in

Iowa and then she got killed in New Hampshire, which is the state right next to the one she represents where she lives, the people that are most familiar with her. And she got 9% of the vote and she's like, well, the fight continues. The fight continues. There is no more fight. Yeah. It's ridiculous. You were counted out.

The fight continues. Yeah. It was a, it was a knockout and you, and you lost and the trainers taking your gloves off. I never, I never got the Warren thing It's like Michael Spinks after he got Knocked out by Tyson in like 14 seconds And he's like, the fight continues No, it's over

Sorry Michael, you lost in 91 seconds Yeah Sanders, Mark had corrected her I think people thought I think initially people thought Sanders, he had a shot, there's no chance. And then he basically took all this stuff, but I still, there's been a lot of stuff lately about, cause people thought, well, when Warren's out, Sanders will get all of her people and that'll be one super group of that demo and that will beat everybody. But I actually, I, if you look at Klobuchar and Mayor Pete, that combo, it's probably around the same amount of people. It's all going to come down to what happens with Bloomberg. He's, he's the wild card and he's, he's literally Dr. Evil.

He has so much money. He's in this fucking mountain with the Starbucks. Exactly. And he's already spent, I saw something earlier where he spent like $200 million already on TV ads and staff. And the closest person to him is the other billionaire, Tom Steyer, who spent like $120 million or something to get like three votes. And then Bernie has spent like $60 million or something of money that he's raised but I mean Bloomberg has like almost tripled the amount of I guess he has tripled

the amount of money that Sanders has spent and he's barely been in the race like two weeks now it's crazy and he hasn't even competed in any primaries or caucuses it's nuts he just has unlimited money Tom Steyer just should have set it on fire like a television special.

I don't know what he was doing. Firework show, you know, shut the money up in the air. Oh my God. It is, I'm at the point, I'm horrified by every candidate on both ends, Republican and Democrat. And if I was a reporter. The whole thing is, if you're a conservative Reagan Republican like me, like, and I love politics, you know, I was raised in it. And so it's my thing. And like, so to watch what's happened to it now and like what it is, it's just, it's horrifying. It's just absolutely horrifying that like, you know,

Donald Trump is the embodiment of the Republican party. It's just, it's fucking horrifying. It's just absolutely fucking horrifying. If I was a political reporter, my question, I would just tailor my question to things I cared about. Cause I would have given up on any of the actual issues. Amy, can you tell me, what did you think of the Red Sox, what they did with the Mookie Betts trade? Did you agree with how they were afraid of the competitive balance tax?

Senator Sanders, will you raise John Henry's taxes in let it the Mookie Bench situation? Just his own personal taxes. Oh, my God. All right, Jacko. This is fun to catch up. I'm glad you're well. This is your time of year, and we'll talk to you before the baseball season starts.

Sounds good. Take it easy, my friend. All right. Thanks to Ben Thompson. Thanks to Jacko. Thanks to Zip Recruiter. Thanks to Pepsi with the new year officially here

and everyone vowing to restrictive resolutions. Pepsi wants to usher in the new decade a bit differently by encouraging everyone to unapologetically do what you enjoy

even in the face of others' judgment. Like last night when I grabbed a rice cake from the pantry and just put peanut butter on it and ate it at 9 30 even though that violates basically everything they tell you about what not to eat after nine o'clock or eight o'clock whatever guess what it was a really good

rice cake with peanut butter pepsi that's what i like we will be back uh on sunday night don't forget about the rewatchables with the Breakfast Club. Enjoy the rest of the week.