The Bill Simmons Podcast - The NBA’s Vaccine Battle, 20 Years of ‘PTI,’ and Billy Crudup | With Derek Thompson and Bryan Curtis

Episode Date: September 29, 2021

The Ringer's Bill Simmons is joined by Bryan Curtis and The Atlantic's Derek Thompson to discuss NBA media day and vaccine hesitancy among some NBA players. They discuss how certain local mandates can prevent unvaccinated players from playing, the NBA and NBPA, media coverage of the pandemic, and more (3:20). Then Bill and Bryan Curtis discuss the upcoming 20th anniversary of ESPN’s ‘Pardon the Interruption,’ how ‘PTI’ revolutionized the argument show, and the importance of on-air chemistry (36:05). Finally Bill talks with actor Billy Crudup about his career, including training for his portrayal of long-distance runner Steve Prefontaine in ‘Without Limits,’ becoming a rock star for ‘Almost Famous,’ as well as his character in the AppleTV+ show ‘The Morning Show’ (57:30). Host: Bill Simmons Guests: Billy Crudup, Bryan Curtis, and Derek Thompson Producer: Kyle Crichton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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our two new local podcasts, as well as the Prestige TV podcast, which we kind of relaunched and having a lot of fun with. I did a Sopranos Hall of Fame episode on there last week, recapped first and second episodes of The Morning Show, which is the most ridiculous show of all time. Me and Amanda Dobbins had something on there on Monday. David Shoemaker and I are going to be talking about the season finale of Heels,

a stars wrestling show that we love. That will be next Monday. But we have a bunch of stuff on there. Billions, Ted Lasso, Succession coming up on there. So check it out. The Prestige TV podcast. Coming up, Derek Thompson from The Atlantic and Brian Curtis from The Ringer. We're going to be talking about the NBA and vaccines and media day and players not wanting

to get vaccinated and where is this going to go and how does it tie into everything that's happened in this country. Then Brian's going to stay on and we're going to talk about 20 years apart in the interruption. And then finally, one of my favorite actors, Billy Crudup. I don't know, it's been 15 years. I don't know how he hasn't been on, but we talked about The Morning Show and all the movies he's made, including he made a movie called Almost Famous, which I'm not sure I've ever mentioned on this podcast other than the 290 times I've mentioned it. But there's a lot of Almost Famous talk. But it's a really good interview.

This is a really good podcast. Let's bring in Pearl Jam. All right, we're taping this. It is 1.30 Pacific time. Brian Curtis from The Ringer is here. Derek Thompson from The Atlantic is here. Both of them have been on this podcast a couple times over the last few months. This NBA vaccine story,

I was totally fascinated by yesterday and how NBA Media Day, which is normally one of the dumbest days of the year. Everybody pretends they love their new team. They love their new coach. They're totally happy. They didn't ask for a trade. Usually all basketball related stuff and somehow became this weird proxy of what's happening

in America. And all the, all the stuff that came out of it was vaccine related. Derek, I asked you to go read up on it and just kind of learn what happened yesterday to today, what the league is going to be dealing with going forward, because I think it's going to be the dominant issue this year. What was your big takeaway reading all this stuff? Well, if you're grading the NBA relative to the rest of America, you would give it an A-rate. The vaccination rate of the NBA is much higher than the vaccination rate of the United States writ large. But the NBA is trying to reach 100 percent. And it is at this point, it looks like it's probably not going to get there.

You have a lot of really loud, outspoken holdouts. It's a very vocal minority with Kyrie Irving, Jonathan Isaac. You know, it really gets me about the reasons that they give. You always hear about this issue of personal choice and privacy. And in the big picture, I have a lot of sympathy for personal choice and privacy. I want people to have privacy in their lives. And I'm here for the argument that our athletes deserve more privacy than they're given.

But, you know, it's just ironic, I think, with regard to athletes in this respect, because, you know, these are people whose birthdays we know, whose heights we know, whose heights we know, whose injuries history we know. We read profiles about the relationship with their mother. We know when they get sick. We know when they have an injury or a surgery. We know the doctor who

performed those surgeries. We know all of those private details, and none of those details have anything to do with the contagion. It's impossible to catch a meniscus tear from a friend. It's impossible to have indoor transmission of ACL sprains. So I feel like people like Kyrie in particular are drawing the line of privacy at the very place where our individual decisions stop being fully private and start having these very dramatic public consequences. And yet you hear over and over again, it's a private decision, a private decision. I would like someone to respond to them if they have the ability to in that press room. It might feel private to you, but it doesn't feel private to your family.

It doesn't feel private to your trainer who is immunocompromised. It doesn't feel private to your coach who has a son who has asthma. It is the nature of pandemics to un-privatize our personal decisions and connect us in this web of contagion. And that is the issue that I think keeps getting this. Brian, how do you cover this? If you're like the beat reporter of Team X, how do you even handle this? And what happens if you're a beat reporter for Team X

or a columnist or a local radio host and you've been on Twitter or on your show or in your columns excoriating people for not getting vaccinated? And now this is somebody you have to cover for a living. First of all, second, your thought that this was the most interesting NBA media day ever. Having gone to the Lakers one a couple of years ago and I saw a well-known basketball reporter high-fiving the Lakers players. And I'm like'm where am I what what is happening here so at least it had a little drama plus David Letterman right standing up and asking questions to KD no you know to me I'll tell you what I would cover about this and

I think is actually just as interesting as Kyrie and the players who have opted out is talking to Kevin Durant and talking to Steph Curry in Golden State and saying, how do you handle this? Because we're always so fascinated by the dynamics within a team and listening to the very careful way that Katie was talking about this yesterday and Steph was talking about this yesterday really reminded me of very personal conversations within my own family where you're like, I love you, relative. I really love you. I really want you to be at this important event. But it's also really important to me

that you need to be vaccinated. And it's important to my kids and to other people in the family. And those are incredibly tough, tricky conversations to have. You want to have them the right way. And the way I heard those guys measuring their words, I'm like, oh, wow, this is a really high profile version of the exact same conversation. Well, and you're talking about leadership of players, leadership of coaches, leadership of a front office, the owners, there's this whole infrastructure

in place to kind of nudge people to adhere to the quote unquote team. And in football, you have 53 players. It's a little easier if you have a couple of people that maybe aren't following the herd. But in this case, 15 players per team.

If one of the stars of the team is just basically out for all the home games, that's a massive disadvantage. So you have that. You also have somebody like you mentioned Durant, really competitive, wants to win a title, is the best player in a team, came to Brooklyn, built this whole thing. Now it's being endangered by this other teammate that he has that he brought with him. So Derek, I think one of the fascinating things for me is the NBA for 75 years, we're hitting our 75th year with this league, over and over again,

has been able to reflect whatever is going on in America in a really unique way to the league. You know, and I grew up baseball as the American pastime. In a lot of ways, it feels like the NBA has become more of America's pastime in that it reflects America. During George Floyd and everything that happened last summer, the NBA was the crucial league for that, right? When you go back to player empowerment, when you go back to hip hop culture and how hip hop culture

was becoming the dominant pop culture in the 90s and it was reflected through the NBA. You go back to Bill Russell in the 60s and he's on the front line with Ali and civil rights and all this stuff. Over and over again, the NBA is there. And is it weird to think that the NBA is now at the forefront of this because of the profiles of the stars that they have? I think that's exactly what it is.

I think it's about the profiles of the stars that they have. You could say that in a way, this is the flip side of player empowerment. On the one hand, what does player empowerment give you? It allows individual players' voices on issues like social justice, Black Lives Matter, to be amplified. But it also means that the voices of Kyrie Irving and Jonathan Isaac are also amplified. And so we're now hearing in very public ways, you know, reasons for not accepting this vaccine, which in some cases among sort of family members or friends of ours who don't necessarily want to talk about their decisions, those decisions or

that rationality might be hidden from us. Well, now it's not hidden from us at all because of player empowerment. You have them talking to the media and saying, I'm not going to take this vaccine. I'm not going to tell you why, because I think this is an entirely private decision. I really think that this is the flip side of the coin of player empowerment. If you give people the ability, I think, to essentially have their opinions be broadcast really, really loudly across the country to reflect the ethos and the zeitgeist of the country, you're going to get the good with the bad. You're going to get Black Lives Matter. You're going to get social justice. You're going to get people talking about systemic racism. You're also going to get vaccine hesitancy.

You're just going to get all of it. Brian, did it feel like the NBA kind of wasn't prepared for this, that it didn't see it coming? Because they came out today. They did today what I thought they were going to do before media day, which is basically to call out the players association and say, Hey, we wanted everyone

vaccinated. The players association, they, they, they, they pushed back the NBA PA. They, they wouldn't play ball on it, you know, and that, and that's it. And that's where we are. I can't help, but think what would happen if David Stern was the commissioner. Now, first of all, Stern would have loved this. This would have been, you know, his, his way of just, he would have taken center stage. He would have made, turned this into big theater, but I also think he would have been really hard about this stuff. And I think he would have said, Hey, if you're not vaccinated, you're not getting paid period. That's like, we, I don't care if we come to a deal with the associate or not. And he probably would have

made this worse. Adam Silver seems like he is being more careful and more inclusive, but it also didn't solve anything. And now we're at this point where the season's going to start in three and a half weeks. And it doesn't seem like anyone has any idea how this is going to play out. I feel like they should have a better idea. Yeah, it sounds like they ran into the union issue. We have to collectively bargain this. We couldn't get anywhere with that, so we stopped. And then I think if you're the league, you're probably thinking, what if social pressure on teams solved this problem for us? Because we saw this right when baseball came back last summer, early on in the pandemic, and a lot of baseball players were saying, hey, don't go out tonight because we need

you to come back to the hotel room and do nothing so that we can be healthy and we'll have all of our players available. And it solved some problems. It didn't solve all problems. Then we got the football season, and I think social pressure within these teams has convinced some players to get vaccinated, but it hasn't convinced everybody to get vaccinated. And I think it feels like the NBA is saying we've done what we can bargaining wise. Now we're going to hope that there can be this person to person conversation saying, hey, you may not want to do this, but we need you. We just

from a basketball point of view, we need you to be available to play so far. And that's about how far they got. Well, the NFL went a lot further. And Derek, the last time you came on, we need you to be available to play. So far, and that's about how far they got. Well, the NFL went a lot further. And Derek, the last time you came on, we talked about that. The NFL, not surprising. Goodell, who I'm not a fan of at all, but he was a hard ass about it. He's like, hey, if you guys, if you have outbreaks, you're going to forfeit games. You're going to lose paychecks. Here are all the bad things that are going to happen. Adam Silver has not operated that way. And that's why he's been a more popular commissioner, I think, than Roger Goodell is. At the same time, it kind of feels like this situation, the Roger Goodell strategy of, I do not care about the players. This is a business. We are

going to protect our business at all costs. You know, the NBA is a business. And if they have guys that just aren't going to get vaccinated and you also have a very, very player-friendly commissioner, where does that leave us, Derek? If it's not going to be mandated, if it's not going to be like, say, Duke University, University of Florida,

the places where Kyrie and Brad Beal came from, they mandate immunizations. They mandate immunizations for Hep B and diphtheria and tetanus. The NBA can't do that in large part because of its union. So you lose the ability to mandate and you don't have essentially a Caesarian commissioner like Roger Goodell, who's basically going to say, I don't care what decisions you make. I'm going to force you to get vaccinated without actually having a mandate because it's going to be so easy to essentially require you to forfeit the game in case there are outbreaks on the team. Without that, all you have, I think,

is what Brian said. You have social pressure. That's basically it. You have social pressure from within the team, and then you have local policy. So local policy is a huge deal for the Brooklyn Nets because I don't believe that Kyrie Irving legally has the ability to, I think, walk into Barclays Center. I don't think he can enter the building. So I don't know how he's going to file for any kind of exemption to be able to play home games. And obviously, the Nets are not going to be thrilled about having a star player on their team who can't play in half of their games. So to me, I only see two avenues here. Social pressure from within the team, from within essentially the corporate family that is a team,

that the same conversations that millions of families have had between the cousins and the nephews and the fathers and the children. Please get vaccinated for the family. Please think about the broader community. You're going to have that. And then you're also going to have the additional pressure in some cities that have made it mandatory for people to walk into the building to have a vaccination card. I feel like Kyrie Irving is not going to play this season. And I don't say that in a first take kind of, you know, here's my take coming up next. I'm going to give my... After having followed this guy for his career, having seen him in Boston for a couple years

and just seen in general how he handles things, and he beats to his own drum, as we know. But I feel like he would sacrifice playing to be in control of what he should do with his body. I really think he's going to grab onto this and make it a thing. And that's going to ultimately, and he's not going to play.

What was interesting, I thought Jonathan Isaac, whether you agreed or disagreed with him, I thought he was really eloquent with what he said, and he had put real thought into it. And I think that was the difference between what he said and what Bradley Beal said was Bradley Beal just seemed like he was that generic, I just don't understand vaccines kind of the way he laid it out. Or it was just

like, oh, you could still get COVID if you have the, if you have the vaccine. It's like, yeah, but you're almost definitely not ending up in the hospital and you're almost definitely not dying. That's the point of the vaccine. You might still get COVID, but you know, um, with Isaac, it was, it was interesting to hear him talk about, I mean, I've already had COVID. I had the antibodies. I'm in unbelievable shape. I'm a physical specimen and I'm not worried about getting it, but yet he didn't understand the part. Yeah, but you could still get it and give it to somebody else who's not as good as shaping you. So it was really illuminating Brian, the just, yeah, but you could still get it and give it to somebody else who's not as good a shape of you. So it was really illuminating, Brian, just media day, like hearing all the same kind of misnomers about vaccinations and everything that we've been hearing for the

last, what, nine months. And now we got to hear it through some of our favorite basketball players. I also loved how the GMs talked about it because they all had kind of the same answer. We're expecting everyone to be available when the season started. Or fully expect. That was another one. We fully expect. What does fully expect mean? I saw Bob Myers of the Warriors. He's like, I don't want to talk about hypotheticals. I go, well, you know, training camp is starting right now. Yeah. So we kind of passed the hypothetical stage. Now we're in the stage of actual basketball. So you kind of have to answer. Well, there was some other ones who admitted like,

yeah, I just got my first shot last week. And it was clear, it was usually like somebody who maybe wasn't a starter. And it was clear that the best guy in the team or the coach or whoever is like, hey, you're getting the vaccine. You're doing this. This is not up for discussion anymore.

How does this play out, Derek, in the sense of some of the stuff that comes up is stuff people have deep down been thinking about, right? Like you hear, especially if you go on any conspiracy board, what about all the bad reactions to the vaccines? You heard a couple of players mention that yesterday. I know somebody who had a bad reaction. You hear that.

You hear, well, how come if I get vaccinated, I still get COVID, the beginning of an answer. So I was reading Jonathan Isaac's quote, and it really is a remarkable statement because he is 100% right about 90% of the vaccine. He says, I'm not anti-vax, I'm not anti-medicine, I'm not anti-science. Our understanding of antibodies, of natural immunity has changed a great deal. Taking the vaccine, it would decrease my chances of having a severe reaction, but it does open the albeit rare possibility of having an adverse reaction to the vaccine itself, end quote. That is 100% right. It just leaves out

the final 10% of it reduces the likelihood that I will transmit this to vulnerable people. And what just occurred to me is, you know, I'm a longtime listener of Brian's podcast and his criticism and evaluation of postgame interviews. What is the most cliche postgame interview answer? Well, we're just a team. Well, we're just doing this as a team. Ironically, the most cliche answer is the final 10% that Jonathan Isaac needs in his answer. This is not an individual choice. Pandemics just smash the boundary between individuals. This is a collective choice. That cliche, terrible answer that you give at halftime, at the end of games to every reporter, well, I'm doing it for the team. We're all in this together. We act as a team. It's not about individual achievements. That is exactly the perspective that you need about the vaccines.

It's not about your less severe reaction alone. It's about the decreased likelihood that you will pass it along to the broader team, your teammates, the assistant coaches, their families and friends, and the immunocompromised and elderly people that live amongst them. That's what it's about. And so what I would encourage people to do when they have conversations with people that do seem relatively educated in this point, like Jonathan Isaac is, is to just push them toward the sports cliche of the last 10%. It's not about the individual. It's about the team. And the team here is not just those who wear the jersey. It's those who support the people that wear the jersey and all the people that they go home to in their lives.

There were some good quotes about that yesterday or today. And Baxter Holmes wrote a story. And a lot of the people were unnamed in it. But basically, the trainer on Team X, that unidentified team being like, hey, my grandparents or my parents live with us and one of them is not in great shape and I don't want to bring home the virus and kill him. You know, and when you hear quotes like that, you're like, yeah, that would

suck to work for team being a work environment where you don't trust the people around you. And I think this isn't just a sports thing. This is a corporation thing. This is why the ringer hasn't really been in an office in 18 months, basically. There's a different level of trust that goes into that stuff. The NFL has somehow been able to manage it.

And it just seems like COVID now, year two of this, has just become part of the injured list. It's like a pulled hamstring. Oh, COVID protocol, he's out. has just become part of the injured list. It's like a pulled hamstring. Oh, COVID protocol, he's out. NBA is a much more naked sport. And we know these guys way better. There's less players on the team. I don't know. I honestly don't know where this goes, Brian. I don't know what that, what do the next three weeks look like? Walk us through it. Well, if I'm sending out the NBA long form bat signal right now, it's going to be, what are the conversations like between players on teams?

And it answers your original question of, how do you get people the right information? The best and most convincing conversation these people can have is going to be with Steph Curry or with Kevin Durant. And, you know, it may be that team ownership or the GM is calling Steph Curry. I'm sure they've already done it and said, hey, is there any way you can have this conversation? Because you're, you know, coming from you, maybe it's more convincing than us. I want to I really do want to know what those conversations are like. They're fascinating. Again, they do mirror the conversations that I think all of us have been having in one way or another. But that to me is what the immediate future is like. And as we get close

to the season, it'll become more interesting. It happened with the Red Sox. Chris Sale is like the leader of the team by all accounts, at least from a pitching standpoint is the veteran and most important guy. Then missed some games with the COVID protocol thing and then admitted he wasn't vaccinated. And this is a Red Sox team that had a really severe outbreak at the end of August, early September.

And you're just watching this day to day. And it's like, oh, who's that shortstop? I've never seen that guy. Oh, that's Jose Iglesias. When did we get him? And it's because guys are just getting shuttled in and out because they have this COVID outbreak. And then you have the leader of the team who's not vaccinated.

And we're in a pennant race. We're trying to get the wild card. And everybody's just kind of like, what the hell's going on? Derek, is it the non-vaccinated side? Which some of the arguments are pretty ridiculous. My favorite is that the vaccine puts something in your arm that allows you to get tracked by Bill Gates. But meanwhile, somebody's tweeting that and they're on their iPhone, which is tracking you everywhere you go. Maybe take a bigger look at what's

tracking you. The one thing that I think is a pretty good argument is our country's problems with dieting and just staying in shape in general. And especially during the pandemic and, and how many people are out of shape and the kind of foods that we make and soda and all these terrible things we do to our bodies. And then you hear the other side, like, why don't we care about that? Why do we care about this? And it's just opening up this can of worms of all these things we probably should be talking about, but I wish it was better circumstances. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. Look, we should, if the debate over the vaccines opens up a broader conversation

about how to be healthy in America, that's a conversation that I welcome. But if the question is, how should we get vaccinated or should we not get vaccinated? What's the healthy choice there? The answer is easy. People should get vaccinated. And once we do, then the country can open up in a way that will make us healthier. So for example, fewer people I can see going to my gym in Washington, D.C., precisely because masks are mandated, because there's been a little bit of an outbreak in Washington, D.C. There will be less of an outbreak as vaccinations increase and more people can go to the gym. I think the country will be healthier overall when more people make this decision. So I think that it's good if the way that we are

debating health in the country is not the end of a conversation that stops with sort of hopefully the end of this pandemic, but a conversation that keeps going. That's fantastic. But I don't want to conflate that with the question of people not getting vaccinated. People should get vaccinated. That's the answer to the first question. And then after that, let's talk about how to make Americans healthier overall. Yeah, I'm in the camp like booster shot. Sure. Sounds great. And I was never like a flu vaccine guy. I never got the flu shot. I don't know if you guys were, but I just was like, no, I'm good. I'll get the flu every year and be fine. This is a little different. I don't want to go to the hospital. That's actually a great example. I was just talking to a friend about

this. I have been a pretty sporadic flu vaccine getter. And I'm somewhat ashamed to say so, especially because I feel like, Bill, as I've talked to you, I've represented myself as extremely pro-vaccine. and of course I am. This experience will absolutely change the frequency with which I get the flu vaccine going forward. I'm going to get it every single year now. So maybe that's a very small, individual, subtle example of how the kind of conversations that we're having now about health will help us in the years forward. Brian, before we let Derek go,

what sports media takes are you most excited for over this next four years? Where are the zags? Who's going to be zagging and doing the, it's Kyrie Irving's body and his choice. What meat is on that bone? So I have been waiting for that zag, actually. And look, that's that that take could be out there already i haven't seen a ton of it yet because i think you know it is interesting to just read the way sports media goes on all these kinds of things and derek's right that this is all running you know smack dab into the player empowerment era but i i you know i'm looking forward to an interesting, let us say,

take on that, but I have not seen that yet. At least a, at least a big one. It's quite a zag sitting there for, uh, for somebody, Derek, it feels like every time you've come on, we've been at a different point of this whole vaccine thing. I remember, I don't remember what was it? April, May range you came on and we were feeling so great. And now, I mean, I know people in my life who've had breakthrough cases, multiple people, they all, you know, they got out of it, but it's just a little alarming that years, people are still getting it and having no idea how they got it. Oh, was it at my son's little league game? Was that at, you know, was I, was it from the Uber driver who took me from point A to point B? Like it's definitely, I was definitely more optimistic the last few

times I've seen you on Zooms with when this is going to end. Yeah. Look, the first thing to say is that all pandemics end. Every pandemic has ended and this one is going to end too. When it ends, hopefully in the next few months and not something that lasts several years, I definitely feel like Delta was a steroidal challenge. Whatever COVID looked like in March, Delta was COVID on steroids. And the vaccines clearly have not held up on the infection side, as well as people were hoping they would hold up in March and April. But where they've held up really, really well is on the most important fronts. They've held up really well in severe illness, and they've held up really well on deaths. And that's why you see month after month that the line between unvaccinated deaths

and vaccinated mortality continues to grow and grow and grow. So I don't think that the last few months have made the decision of get vaccinated or don't get vaccinated more complicated. If anything, I think it's simplified it because Delta is has been so much more contagious that it's all the more deadly for people that aren't vaccinated. But absolutely, I wish that we were still in the April world where it looked like we would have finally a year off. At some point, the combination of vaccinations, natural immunity, and unfortunately deaths will end this pandemic. And hopefully it is the next few months. This one's for both of you. And then Derek, you can go.

Brian, you take it first. Do you feel like the way the media has covered COVID and the COVID porn that we've basically had, where it's like I go on my Apple News and you see the four stories on the left COVID and the COVID porn that we basically had where it's like I go on my Apple News and you see the four stories on the left and one of them is always like, unvaccinated mom dies of COVID or vaccinated mom has complications or whatever combined with the fact that we don't talk about hospitalizations and deaths as much as we talk about just COVID

cases where it seems like hospitalizations and deaths have much as we talk about just COVID cases, where it seems like hospitalizations and deaths have dropped significantly. And it seems like the mainstream media should really be focusing on that and hammering it home because it's the best case to get the vaccine. But yet it's always about COVID cases, COVID cases, and it's always leaning toward, you know, kind of these extreme examples or some crazy story, things like that. Just from a media coverage standpoint, are we doing a good enough job yet? It's an interesting question. I mean, I feel I've tried to really avoid those kind of stories and listen to smart people like Derek and read smart people like Derek on this subject, because if there's ever been a subject where you pick two or three people and just went with them for the

entire pandemic and sort of probably collapsed your, maybe your news reading into a handful of people. This has been one of them for me. I don't, I don't mean you shouldn't read widely and all that kind of stuff, but I've just tried to find people I like and I trust and read them and sort of shut out a lot of that noise. I've done the same. Derek, what do you think? I think that one of the pre-existing conditions of the media that has been exposed by this virus is the fact that sometimes when we're very confused, we have a very small number of hands to play, and one of them is the shame game. And you see that, I think, certainly on, I think you see it too much on the left,

but also I think you see it too much on the right, that we can get to a point where rather than focus on evidence and report facts, we instead look to shame the other side and try to feel like we're getting one over our political enemy. And I wish, looking back, I wish there was less team picking in media. I guess I would put it that way. I feel like I came into this pandemic thinking America was so polarized. Maybe something really dramatic might unite this country. There's nothing more universalizing than a pandemic. It is everywhere. This is a global pulse that might be like the most universal international news story in the history of the world. Even World War II wasn't as international as COVID. And yet rather than flatten polarization across the media landscape, it's heightened it.

We came into it with these goggles to see the world, which was always my side right, your side wrong. And rather than throw them away and try to solve problems, I feel like too much of the media has just held the goggles tight to their face and refused to see this crisis in any way that isn't hyperpolitical. So if I could have one overarching criticism of the coverage of this pandemic, it has been that we can't get out of our way in seeing the world exclusively through hyperpolarized lenses. And that's really, really bad for telling people the truth. Because on a first-order basis, you're not telling people the truth. You're just telling people that their side is still virtuous

and the other side is still wrong, just over and over and over again. And I wish we found some way to break out of it and find a way to report on this virus across the political landscape that was evidence-first ideology last. So in 2024, you're saying President Caitlyn Jenner should destroy all social media coming out of the gate. Because, Brian, I was thinking about this with all the 9-11 retrospective stuff earlier this month. And you think like that happens. And it was honestly the most American moment of my lifetime. We were all on the same side with that. And we all embraced New York.

And I was living in Boston at the time. And I don't want to say patriotic, but there was like a patriotic element that sprung out of that where it was like, hey, we got to rebuild New York. This can't happen to us. And you could feel it. And we were all in it together. And I was thinking like, well, that had happened in 2021, how immediately it would have become this polarizing thing and people taking sides and trying to blame and pitting against each other. That was not what 9-11 was like. 9-11 was

really weirdly communal. Did you notice that at all when you were watching that stuff? It was interesting because one thing I read in all the retrospectives was there was this idea that, of course, in the immediate aftermath, there was a sense of pulling together and coming together as one. But pretty quickly that dissolved and it became one of those things where everybody says, oh, wasn't that great? We all pulled together. And then you look back and say, actually, we didn't. So when did that change was like what like a couple months later or were sooner than that i don't know derek may be able to pin down the date better than i can but it was i don't i would say that it was it wasn't that long after and then in fact we did go in lots of different

directions as a country and we've not you know this has led us to the path where we are now or been a data point on the path to where we are now. So I don't know. I really don't. Yeah, I guess Fox News definitely at some point started working it, but I don't know. I just feel like that those first few days, it felt like we were all involved in a way that I would have thought the pandemic would have triggered. You know what I mean? And it's just weird. It's just really, this has been a really weird 18 months. I mean, it's probably worth pointing out, at least when juxtaposing 9-11 and COVID, that after 9-11, George W. Bush, whom I wasn't a huge fan of and still not,

visited the site of the crisis. He recognized the reality of the tragedy. Donald Trump did the opposite of recognize the reality of the tragedy. Unfortunately, he downplayed the virus as much as possible, said it'd be over by Easter, and brought in people who were chosen, unfortunately, specifically, because he saw in them the ability to continue to downplay how serious COVID would potentially be. So I'm not a great man of history theorist. I don't think everything just flows from whatever the president says. At the same time, I think that certainly one of the differences between that crisis and this one was the leadership that we had. And that leadership was also partly reflected

in the fact that there were institutional ways that we sort of knew how to respond to a terrorist attack, both in New York and with our defense. That's not a defense of the wars that came after, but there was clearly an apparatus in place to attack the forces that attacked us. In COVID, we did not have that counterforce. We did not know how to attack the forces that attacked us. In COVID, we did not have that counterforce. We did not know how to attack the forces that attacked us. We had rampant failures from the FDA and the CDC and the

White House. We were not institutionally prepared for this pandemic at all. And I think that also created a vacuum of uncertainty, kind of fog of pandemic into which partisan and polarized voices flowed. And that I think was a huge part of why there wasn't any kind of unified sense of what this risk was. Because our leadership, our institutions and the White House didn't provide a clear evidence-based sense

of what the threat actually was. Well, now we get to relive those months on The Morning Show with Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon as season two revolves around the COVID response. Uh, Derek, we will continue to read you on the Atlantic. Um, thanks for, thanks for popping on and talking about this with us. We're going to take a break and going to come back with Brian. Thank you guys. This episode is brought to you by Movember.

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We have the Pardon the Interruption documentary on ESPN this week, 20 years of Pardon the Interruption. I think the exact date is October 22nd, about five weeks after 9-11, six weeks after 9-11, and a show that leveraged the relationship between Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser

has been told many times to guys that were on the Sports Reporters together that basically made their bones in the Washington Post together and became very close friends. And people were just listening to them talk in the office and somebody's like, that should be a show. And it just kind of went from there.

What are you anticipating over these next few weeks as people talk about the impact of PTI? And what do you think it means to you in the big picture, big kahuna sports media landscape? Well, a couple ideas for you. One is a couple years ago, I think this was Donald Trump's very first State of the Union.

I'm watching it on, I believe, NBC. And down the right side of the screen is a scrolling series of topics that kind of goes down as Donald Trump hits the various topics in the speech. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, the State of the Union is now PTI. It's had this unbelievable effect on television. And often I think very subtly, but it's amazing how many things have been stolen by other TV networks from PTI. We had the big ringer podcast on Cisco and Ebert. A lot of television was borrowed from that. A lot of podcasting was borrowed from that. And I think you could argue that PTI was kind of the second

generation of that. And people looked at that show and went, Ooh, how can we do our own version of PTI? What little tricks can we sell? Because I think in a way that show really made an argument show that you could feel okay about watching. In fact, feel good about watching and not feel like, eh, do I really want to watch this sports argument show? You feel like, I like these guys. I like this. This is funny. This is for me. And yeah, to me, that's my biggest takeaway. Yeah. I think Cisco and Ebert, I think the McLaughlin group really tapped into this for a few years. Yeah. Crossfire. Yeah. And Crossfire. And they were iterations of it. We'd never really a hundred percent seen it worked in sports. It actually worked better locally. Like I remember in Boston, Bob Lobel used to host that Sunday night show on channel four and the guys would come on and they would argue about sports and was like, this is good. I wish this was an hour instead of a half hour. But from a national standpoint, really SportsCenter was the only place

we'd sit and work. Then they would do the sports reporters on Sundays. That was fun, I guess. But PTI, they tapped into it. And I think it was one of those things, even though it was clumsy in the beginning, you watch the old clips and you go, oh man, look, wow, this show really grew.

They really found their footing. But it was still, really felt revolutionary even in the moment where it was like, oh, they figured this out. They figured out how to have two guys who are friends argue about sports under some sort of structure in a way that doesn't feel, I don't know, like it was kind of abusing some of the take format that we saw in later years,

I would say. So I think it's really important to remember this is 2001 that this starts, right? We're coming out of this era of national sports radio where the big stars are people like Jim Rome and sports radio. A lot of it, not all of it, but a lot of it on the national level is very much like a WWE promo. And these guys come along and they're like, we're not taking ourselves too seriously. I think Tony said something on the very first show of like, if we can have a talk show, everybody can have a talk show. And there was this whole sense of them saying, isn't it weird that we get paid to have opinions

about sports here? And I can't tell you that felt so different and so bracing in 2001, again, versus at that point, which was mostly sports radio out in the world. I think that was one thing. And I think Tony's whole nature, which you know much better than I do, but I was talking to Wilbon about this once, and he said, Tony, on one of the first days of the show was like, I hope you people are renting and not buying, looking at his crew. And and ron's like what are you talking about tony you know we've we have two years of guaranteed money worst case we're on the golf course and you know in a couple of weeks and we got a bunch of money and tony goes worst case that's my best case

right and in that you know tony would never he did this on his radio show too, but he would never be self-serious in that format. And I think it saved that format in a way and was kind of my, my dad in the sense of, uh, he was the guy that always got into trouble at ESPN and he had the radio show where every once in a while he would say something on the radio show that got him in trouble. And so there was a sense of like, all right, you're putting, putting him on PTI. That's, that's probably maybe that might not go that well. He might get himself into trouble there. He might get, the show might get canceled or an advertisement. You just didn't know.

He was much more of a live wire, I think, back then. Now you look back and he wasn't at all. But that was at least a consideration. The other thing was, it was a show that was on at 5.30 during a time when stories could still, content could really breathe in sports, right? You'd still wait till Wednesday or Thursday

for the Sports Illustrated cover story on the Sunday Masters or the Sunday Sports, right? There wasn't like this rush to, this would you think rush that we have now. So the 5.30, they would kind of weigh in and they would be the last voice of the day on whatever had happened the day before or what had just happened.

And it was an enormous power. It was the show that ESPN had needed forever. It came on when people came home from work. It came on during a time when people had VCRs and DVRs. They could watch it that night. And it just leveraged all these different things. And then what you mentioned was the other big piece was just putting stuff on the screen

that told me what they're going to talk about, which seems so simple now. But just to have like, you look at the screen, you see Red Sox and it's halfway down, like Red Sox, what are they talking about? The Red Sox, what are they going to say? You know, and that was really helpful because TV was just

a big blank screen with nothing on it and just people talking. And they figured out a way to gamify that and make it a little more fun. And they, you know, Eric Ridehome, obviously, who I've worked with, I've had the fortune to know for a long time. And, you know, I think he's going to get a lot of platitudes over the next few weeks. But he understood some of these things really instinctively, like people will want this, people want this, and all of it worked. Yeah. And I think one thing Ride Home's always been big about is television is about relationships. Yep.

It's not what Tony and Mike are saying about sports. It's about the relationship between Tony and Mike. And you and I have seen lots of people try this on television. They have a real friendship and they try to translate it and it doesn't work as a television friendship. It just doesn't, it doesn't turn into a TV show. And I thought the thing about Tony and Mike that was always so interesting to me was because they were both Washington Post columnists, they treated each other as equals. They didn't, agree on everything. They made fun of each other. They did all that stuff, but they were equals. It wasn't big brother, little brother. It wasn't, I have all the takes

and you don't know anything, which is what a lot of people get into because they get a little insecure when they get behind the mic. This is a lot of podcasting too, by the way, they get a little insecure. They want to be right all the time. Those guys really respected each other. And so the vibe on the show was really pleasant to watch. You didn't feel like, man, I'm, I'm, I'm watching a really awkward HR meeting here or something, you know, two guys that just hate each other. You're like, I know these guys respect each other. And I like, I like being with them. Right. And it captured at least the imagination of people who were like, I just would love to hang out with those guys. Those guys became celebrities immediately. And it was a lot more people watching ESPN at the time too. You're talking over a million viewers. And I think

that was the time of the company when the people who were stars at ESPN were major stars, you know, like Berman, um, Stu Scott, those two guys, um, Dan Patrick still there, Dan Patrick, even somebody like Kenny Maine,

he takes over for kill for, uh, for Olbermann and immediately becomes a household name just by inheriting somebody else's job. And that was the power of the platform at the time. I think those guys had that. I think the PTI of anything ESPN has done probably had the highest approval rating. You know, where just people liked it.

Nobody was against it. People like they got the chemistry between those guys. And you think it was revolutionary in the sense that we have this now on podcasts with two guys who get along and they're shooting the shit, make fun of each other. There's a million podcasts like that, right? And a lot of them work. Back in the day, it really didn't exist. It was Mike and the Mad Dog had their own thing at that time, but only people in New York could hear it. Probably a couple of local radio shows that worked. Other than that, it really felt unique that these two guys, I feel like they're my friends. And now that seems, I guess 20 years later, some of this

stuff seems either obvious or the impact of it has gone. But in 2001, it was impactful. Well, and I say what makes it unique is they haven't been able to re-engineer it. Nope. You know, they've done different versions of this. I think you could maybe point at Michael and Jamel's first show, you know, as a way of like two people that are friends, you know, forming a TV show

before they did SportsCenter at six. But how many people do you know have been trotted out? Like you're going to do a show together that doesn't work. A TV and radio. Radio is the other one. I mean, they've had a hundred radio. Radio is the other one. I mean,

they've had a hundred radio lineups over the last 15 years. And the only ones that really struck oil were Mike and Mike, which, when did that start? In the nineties? It was a, yeah, probably late nineties, early aughts, I would say. And then Coward. Those are the, and then I think Van Pelt and Murcillo were probably, were pretty successful too. But in terms of like those two time slots that they needed people to succeed, they've really only had those two shows. It's really hard. It's really hard to find chemistry. It's really hard to leverage all that stuff.

The other thing that nobody mentions with PTI, and this is, you know, at least a little personal to me because I've hosted it a bunch of times. And I don't think they realized this when they created the format, but it became an outcome of the format. You could slide other people in. And even though it wasn't as good as Kornheiser and Wilbon, the show was still watchable. And then they could build up different guest hosts. Whitlock was really good on that show. Levitar was good. I think I was getting to the point where I was good before I started doing more NBA stuff. But late night shows don't have that. Kimmel took

the summer off. It wasn't like the show was the same. It's Kimmel's show. That's it. He's the star of the show. PTI was able to keep the structure. And if somebody was missing, either Kornheiser could carry them or Wilbon could carry them or they could groom this new talent. And those guys just made people better. And I think that's another thing that makes it so unique. Yes. I was on the set one time when Keith Olbermann did it with Tony Kornheiser. Keith was really good at it. And I think the secret to that is the show is super produced and super formatted. Whereas if you watch first take, somebody starts talking and you have no idea when they're going to stop talking.

Right. But here I can see not only the list of topics, but how long everybody's going to go. So it really it really did become plug and play. And by the way, this leads us to the next question, which I think you've asked me offline a couple of times. Is there PTI post Tony and Mike when they decide to hang it up? Or is it so much about them and their relationship that nobody else can do it? I don't think they'll get rid of it, but it won't be the same. And it's funny because Kornheiser is just convinced like the show always,

I only have a year left. They'll get rid of me soon. And he's so great at it. And I don't know, I don't remember how many PTIs I did ultimately, but he was so, I did it for a week in like 2009. I was terrified. No idea what I was doing. The structure of the show makes it so that it can kind of walk you through it. And you know, it's like, all right, come out, have some energy. These four topics, take your take. The bell's going to ring. If you're up next, you have to turn to the camera. Like they do it. Like basically anybody can host it at least, you know, semi-competently. And then you try to get better at it. You realize the nuances and the stuff Tony was always good at was having fun within the framework of that. And that's what he's the best at. But those guys can

carry somebody like me in 2009, who's terrified and really kind of pull out the performance you need from it. And I don't, that's going to be a really hard thing for somebody else to do when those two guys leave. They both know how to do it. They can raise the energy. They'll sense it. It's like, oh, this person's energy is low. I'll raise mine. Or this person's stumbling along a little bit.

I'm going to come and save him. Tony's really good at especially flipping things around to kind of give an entryway. If you watch the show carefully, and he's the best at it, little questions that will allow you to kind of come right in so it feels conversational. I can't imagine anybody matching that. So yeah, I think the show exists. It will not be the same. I just can't imagine caring about anybody's So yeah, I think the show exists. It will not be the same.

I just can't imagine caring about anybody's relationship as much as I like theirs. I just, you know. You watch so many on TV and in so many podcasts. These people are together. They're doing repartee. And I just don't care. It doesn't work for me.

Well, they're also like, at this point, an old married couple. Like Wilbon drives Kornheiser crazy. He'll talk about it. He really does. And he'll get mad at him on the show. He'll be like,

oh my God, you said this last week. I'm so tired. And, but there's always the mutual respect, which is what you have to have. And I think when we've seen

TV go badly, especially ESPN, it's when that mutual respect isn't quite there. We saw it with the first take. Like Stephen A obviously didn't like doing TV with Max as much anymore. Nope. Once you, it's professional wrestling, as I've said a million times, once you're not selling the other guy's moves as well, it's a wrap. It's done. And I've been in enough TV situation at

this point. Like if you don't trust the other people on the set, it's over. And if you're in the split screen, if you're not nodding with a real serious face while the other guy's talking, that means you don't respect him. Yeah. Or the fake laugh when, you know, if somebody makes a joke and it's dead silence, it's like the Tariq O'Connor thing we always talked about Monday Night Football. It's like Tariq didn't really sell Tony's stuff. Like whether Tony was good or not in that role, I will, in my opinion, we'll never know. Cause I feel like if he had been without Michaels, Al Michaels would have sold it. And I've argued about this with Tariq. You know, I just feel like

it was a bad match, which is what happens sometimes. Sometimes people are a bad match. We've seen it at ESPN a million, a trillion times. Um, But I think getting to 20 years is hilarious because Tony, for at least the entire time I've known him, was convinced the show was about to get canceled and that they were going to get rid of him. And he's like, I'm old. I'm out of touch. I remember when they started putting Pablo with him.

He's like, it's like he's my grandson. I'm like doing a show with my grandson. Nobody wants to see that. I'm too old. But he's still really good at it. And people do want to see it. I think the audience has gone down just because I think afternoon TV has gone down for a million different reasons. Young people maybe aren't watching afternoon TV as much and TikTok's in there and podcasts and Instagram and streaming and Netflix. And there's a million competitors that they didn't have in 2001, but it's still a relevant show.

A million competitors. And by the way, ESPN is a very different place. ESPN is not being driven by newspaper sports columnists anymore. The ride home block, which was four shows is now shrunk to two shows and they're doing very different kinds of shows you know max kellerman in the afternoon things like that that are not in his in not the same format so yeah it does but it's you know to me it's kind of grandfathered in not to borrow tony's metaphor there with pablo but it's sort of grandfathered in i was before this week you know i was looking up some stuff on twitter and are looking up some stuff and just kind of looking around. And I had forgotten how many costumes they used to wear. It had a very like bargain basement, local TV, early Johnny Carson feel where they coming out fully in costume. That was really funny. And just kind of a nod of like, we know this is totally ridiculous, but we're just going to sell the bit. And it became kind of winning. Yeah. Well, they always managed to seem like they're having fun.

Who knows if they were actually having fun? I feel like they were almost all the time, but it never felt gimmicky, even though a lot of it was gimmicks, right? And what's hilarious about it is like Ride Home, he's still, Ride Home is still doing the voices. It's still this homemade operation. You hear like, you know, like they, where they ask the questions. That's Ride Home's voice going like, do you think the Bears will start Justin Fields next week? He's still like involved in the show in that way. And Kel Herr is the other one. And those guys have been there the entire time I was there. It was really fun doing that show and trying to get better at it to the point where it's like, oh, I can actually hang with this format with these guys. Because it's fucking hard, especially if you're on a Zoom like we're on now. You're on a half second delay. You have to kind of wait to do your fake laugh because you know you're on the half second delay. There's all these components to it. That's why when it's in person, it's always better. And I think the pandemic, you can see it. When these guys are in the studio together,

which they have been able to do a bunch of times, it's always better. It's always better to be able to feed off somebody and the whole thing. It's funny you say it's not gimmicky because the whole show is gimmicks. The whole show, everything. But it doesn't feel that way. It's so gimmicky. It's not gimmicky, I think is the way to say it. The show was gimmicks. The whole show, everything. But it doesn't feel that way. It's so gimmicky. It's not gimmicky, I think is the way to say it. Like the show is so produced. Everything is put in a little box and a little amount of time,

but it feels natural. That just, that is a really weird element of it. Yeah, and then Around the Horn popped up and people, remember there was all this Around the Horn animosity for years? Yep. And oh my God, Jesus, what's this? And now it seems like people, I guess,

are fine with it or they don't care. But it was funny that it was always like the annoying brother of PTI. We'd come out before PTI. It's like, ah, this guy. Here he comes. But then eventually people got over that and now the two shows kind of make sense together.

I guess. Yeah, I guess. i think i'm in the i'm in the don't pay attention to it around the horn always felt to me too gimmicky like it had taken the gimmickry to another level to the point i was like now it's not human conversation anymore so i'm out like that's that's when i pull the ripcord and jump out of the plane is when when it doesn't when it just feels like something other than people talking to each other on television. I never watched it. I always tried to watch PTI. I also think PTI hit that vortex where people feel like they watched it all the time, even though if they didn't. Oh, I love PTI. It's great. But maybe they weren't watching every day, which is really

where you want to be with a TV show. You just want the approval rating of, oh yeah, I love that show. Anyway, PTI, I'll be interested. The documentary, I think should be fun. The behind the scenes stuff. They always have an amazing crew behind the scenes. So it'd be fun to see some of those people get some shine. But just in general, it's such a unique TV show. I'm glad you brought up Siskel and Ebert because I think that was another one. And it's really hard to do this where you create something that just everybody steals from.

And it's like an all you can eat buffet from people grabbing ideas from it. And it's still going into its third decade here. But they can't ultimately re-engineer it. They steal from it. They take the gimmicks. They take the side-scrolling topics, but they can't recreate it, which is the ultimate compliment.

All right. Well, congratulations to those guys. Curtis, you can listen to him on the Pressbox podcast, and you're probably working on some cool piece. Yeah. We'll get a good Pressbox. You mentioned crappy food earlier. I do these nonfiction book revisits from time to time on the Pressbox, and we got Eric Schlosser on Friday talking about Fast Food Nation, which is 20 years old. A book I still think about, and I wish I thought more about when I

pull into the Jack in the Box drive-thru and go for the two tacos. Then I was reading it, and I was like, why do I ever eat that crap? Jesus. He's got to do a Starbucks Nation sequel. I feel like we're an entire Starbucks nation. All right Jesus. He's got to do a Starbucks Nation sequel. I feel like we're an entire Starbucks Nation. All right, Brian Curtis, good to see you.

Thanks, Bill. How can you be sure your child is making the right decision when choosing a university? The smart approach is to look at the facts, like the fact that York U graduates have a 90% employer satisfaction rate. That's because across its three GTA campuses, York U's programs are strategically designed

to prepare students for a meaningful career and long-term success. Join us in creating positive change at yorku.ca slash write the future. All right, this man is elusive. I've had a podcast since 2007. He's had an open invite. We hung out at a wedding once at Jimmy Kimmel's wedding. I accosted him, me, him, and Adam Kroll. We talked for like 20 minutes and yet still wouldn't come on.

But then the last couple of years, Billy Cruda started to open up. He became a little less elusive, started doing a couple of interviews. Now he's on a podcast. This is great. Welcome to the podcast. I appreciate it, Bill. Thanks for having me. The truth is when we spoke at Kimmel's wedding, I counted that as our podcast. So I didn't feel, if you needed, I know you're a writer. If you want to write about it, go ahead and lay down an article. I should have. I should have been recording it. I don't know if they had the recording on the iPhones back then, but I should have just run it as a pod. It was great. We asked you a million questions. It was a really fun wedding. It was

one of the, I think, the most unique weddings I've been to. It was awesome. I haven't been to any wedding like that before, where the amount of celebrities there, and also, Kimmel not really giving a shit. He seemed perfectly blasé about everything. Cracking jokes during the, I think, I feel like there was, he seemed perfectly blasé about everything. Cracking jokes during the... I think...

I feel like there was... He did some prank to Molly, too. I can't remember what it was. In any case, yeah, that was a pretty rare event for me. I don't go to those weekend after weekend. Well, so you started doing interviews a little bit more the last couple years. But then you... Go ahead, explain why.

No. So at the beginning of my career, there were, um, I always imagined myself as a character actor and I didn't see a distinction between actor and character actor. That's just what I thought acting was, is you play characters. And I didn't even consider the notion of creating some kind of personality that I would hawk. There's that aspect to celebrity and fame and actors in general. And now we have reality actors who occupy the same sort of entertainment space for the viewing public. But I imagined that my job was going to be to convince people that I was somebody else so that they could get two hours away from their life and be immersed in another story. I never imagined that what they would want to do is go see a Billy Crudup movie. I imagined that they would want to go see a movie that has people in

it who could only ever play that part. So the notion of cultivating some kind of personal story in the public eye was anathema to everything that I wanted to do. So I avoided as many interviews as possible, much to the chagrin of all the people I work with and the studios. But after, you know, I'm 53 now, well into my career, I'm not so concerned about being pigeonholed one way or the other. I've, I've established myself enough over time that, uh, if I have an opportunity now to promote, uh, things that I'm in, uh, I'm much more inclined to do so. Well, you had this stretch and it was right when you said that's all the time we have built. You had this stretch in the late nineties when you'd gotten almost famous. You'd gotten other, a couple other big parts

and people were like, oh, next wave of guys, this is one of the guys. This is going to be the guys. And you became kind of one of the it guys. Right. And then the consensus was, no, he doesn't want it.

He doesn't want to be that. He just wants to do the stuff he wants to do. He wants to do Broadway. Right. He doesn't want this kind of arc that some of the other A-plus listers had when they first hit it. And then they do this movie, they work with this director,

they'll do a superhero movie. You kind of went the other way. You didn't want it. Well, the model that you were talking about is very specific to film actors, to people who want to make their careers starring in films, producing films.

That was not what I was interested in. The people that I lionized when I was growing up were people who did theater and film, people whose versatility over the breadth of their career was the thing that made them significant. And what I also saw from the moment I started acting was people who were declared the it guy or the it girl of the moment. A different magazine came out the next month, I can guarantee you, and it was not the same person on the cover. And that happened again and again and again. And it came clear to me that that really wasn't an instrument an actor would use to pursue their career. It's an instrument that the studios and the magazines would use to sell their magazines. So I felt like, well, unless you guys are paying me to be on the cover, I'm giving away a lot more than I'm getting from this.

And at the same time, I had a genuine, not a kind of punk rock, but a genuine affection for the theater. I like going to the theater. The theater is an important part of my conversation with being an adult in the world. I like communing with people at the theater. I like being in plays. And when you finish doing something like Almost Famous

and it comes out and you go and do a play, the people in the film industry think, oh, that's an obvious, fuck you. That guy is totally sticking his thumb in her eye. When in fact, I just had a great part in the theater. I'm going to where the parts are. And I didn't

feel so fired up about it that I wanted to explain it to people. I just wanted to keep going about my career. And over time, it was either going to work or it wasn't. Well, your generation of actors, the generation right before was this incredible Pacino and Hoffman and De Niro. Pacino was doing plays for like, what, five years in the 80s? legendary, Raul Julia, Christopher Walken.

There's an enormous group of people who have been able to both do films and be a part of the long tradition of actors in plays. To get to play a part that somebody played not just 20 years ago but 120 years ago or 200 years ago. Those kinds of things make the chaotic business of acting occasionally heartwarming. So the notion that I would get to do, like recently, I got a chance to do Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett on Broadway

with Ian McKellen, Shuler, Hensley, and Patrick Stewart. And I played supporting parts in those, but it was just the four of us who did those two plays in repertory. We would do one one night, one the next night. When I'm in acting school, that is the dream.

There is no other... Of course, I'll spend nine months on that. Three of which are in Berkeley trying to figure out the play No Man's Land. It's an absolute no-brainer to me to have an opportunity to work with those masters on Broadway in my hometown. But to some people, it's... Well, Kimmel actually came up...

I think Molly dragged him up there. But they came up to Berkeley to see No it's well, Kimmel actually came up. I think Molly dragged him up there, but they came up to Berkeley to see no man's land. And we went out to dinner afterwards and he goes, Hey, that was, uh, that was really, uh,

interesting and cool. I don't know what it was about or why you do this kind of stuff, but it was kind of cool. That was a perfect response from... I'll just call Jimmy the Hollywood elite that he is. The notion that people had ways of connecting to an audience that isn't in a studio or a soundstage in Los Angeles doesn't make any sense to them.

So when he would say, I don't understand why you would do this, I would say, well, for the 400 people that were there tonight that were interested in watching Harold Pinter's inscrutable play, and the four of us tried to figure it out. Well, I like what you said about you're basically a character actor trapped

in a leading man's body, because I always felt that way about Brad Pitt, too. Brad Pitt is for sure a character. In fact, he's done one of the most incredible jobs I think of people in and around my generation of managing

both, and that's really hard to do. He used his level of fame and the way that he was scrutinized. I remember doing sleepers and being around him and awestruck at how this young man was navigating that cavalcade of pressure and attention. And to be able to get through that in some kind of shape that you can continue to produce the level of work that he produces is rare. And he has the exact career that anybody would aspire to, a character actor for sure. He doesn't do theater. So for him, it's movie after movie after movie movie, after movie, which to the movie people, it makes sense. But if you do, you know, let's say you do Moneyball and then you take

18 months to develop a production of Elephant Man off Broadway, people are going to think, oh, you, you know, thumb in your nose at Hollywood again. Right. When in fact you're, you're applying the same kind of ambition just in a different format. Sleepers was your first movie, right? That was the first one that came out. First major movie. Well, I did a film called Grind before that with Paul Schulze and Adrian Shelley and Amanda Peet, which was an independent film. I played, uh, an ex con who was, uh, just out of, uh, uh, jail and he, he, he couldn't stop himself from driving fast bill. That was his, uh, fast Eddie. And, um,

not many people saw that. Uh, so then, then I did, uh, sleepers. I think actually in between that, I did another movie that I got fired from. Um, yeah, like the first, the first big, big job I had, it was four days on a movie. Um, and, uh, I was supposed to work two days and then I had two weeks off and then I come back and work another two days. And I think it was in Arizona or New Mexico. I did my two days. And in the two weeks off, I had to go to my friend's high school, my high school friend's wedding. So I'm at the wedding telling everybody that I'm in a feature movie. I mean, I couldn't have shared it. I tried to take whatever light that they had for their wedding and shine it on my own burgeoning career.

And I got back to New York and my brother said... My brother and I lived in this apartment together. And he said, you got a call from the director. And I said, well, that's strange. She didn't talk to me much while I was there. Probably going to fire me. And before, before I could get that sentence out of my mouth, my agent calls me and said,

so I don't know how to say this in a tactful way. So I'll just say you were fired. And I mean, I was shaking. I was like, what? Like nobody gave me any indication that, uh, that I was not doing a good enough job. And also, it wasn't a huge part. It wouldn't have killed the movie to let me stay in it, even if I sucked. But instead, they decided to release me and recast it and shoot it with somebody else. But this is when I discovered what a great profession it was, Bill, because I still get residual checks from the job I was fired from. Oh my God. So was it a big movie? You can't say what the movie is?

I don't want to say what the movie is because the actor who got the part... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I got you. But then you get sleepers. But then I got sleepers. And everybody's in that movie. People listening, go to the IMDb. There's like 20 people in that movie that are famous.

It's unbelievable. And me and Ron Eldart are both, you know, New York theater actors too. And to sit at a table, you know, in the courtroom scene where Dustin Hoffman is our representation. Dustin Hoffman is our lawyer. You know, Dustin Hoffman is our representation. Dustin Hoffman is our lawyer. Dustin Hoffman is another one of these people

who had been a character actor and a theater actor as well. Their capability, his capability in particular, was legendary. And across from him is Robert De Niro. And the impossibility of that circumstance was not lost on Ron and I. We had an incredible time enjoying every bit of their company. So then, is it true that you declined an audition for Titanic?

What's the actual story with that? No, you know, I had committed to doing a movie called Without Limits about a runner named Steve Preconte. Oh, stop. We're talking about Without Limits. I'm very aware of Without Limits. All right, sweet. As a sports guy, if you weren't, you're going to have a talking to.

No, I think it's one of the best sports movies the last 25 years. Oh, that's phenomenal. But we'll get into it though. Well, this is, I mean, as I recall, this was 30 years ago when this happened or so, or 25 years ago. But the way that I recall, I had committed to doing Without Limits. And I had one meeting with James Cameron, and it appeared that there was going to be a conflict. And so I just said, well, I've already committed to that. So I don't think I can take that any further. I was never offered the part. It wasn't like they were

like, Billy, you're the guy. And I was like, you know what? Screw fame. It's a better story. Money or things. Well, that certainly is. So here's what happens. In a vacuum, stories like that take on their own life. So without me interceding in that moment and saying, guys, that's not what happened. Because I was trying not to talk to anybody about anything.

I didn't want to reveal who I was or what I was interested in or any of that. This story kind of took on a life of its own. It's funny. We do this Rewatchables movie podcast and when we research it, I have this section called Half-Assed Internet Research. So stuff on the internet and you have no idea if it's true, right? It'll be like casting what ifs, Billy Crudup was almost the guy and so and so, and he turned it down. We don't totally know unless it's in like an oral history or some giant feature about the movie where the actor actually has a

quote. I turn that down or whatever. I never know what's true or not true and you never know what unfolds. But Bill, even that, even me coming up with my recounting of that event is nothing compared to the inertia of the last 25 years of a different story. So there is nothing I can do to change whatever story is out there, no matter how hard I try. I mean, it'll take 25 years of me telling that every single time.

And it's kind of boring after a while, I suppose. Without Limits is an incredible movie. And the weirdest thing about that era, which I'm old enough to remember because I'm old, there were two Prefontaine movies at the same time. And it became a staring contest and neither one backed down. Yours was the one that was backed by Tom Cruise, right?

In his company? Yeah, no, it was literally a road race. And I found out about the other movie the first day I landed in Eugene. After I had already been doing prep in LA for a while, I land in Eugene, and I go straight to Hayward Field and I want to check out the hallowed grounds. And there's a meet going on. And one of the people who worked at the meet came up and asked me which Steve Prefontaine movie I was working on. Oh my God.

And I looked at him and I was like, there's another one? And sure enough, they were in production at the same time. I think what had happened, if I'm remembering correctly, they were all one group. The producers and writers all were interested in telling the Steve Prefontaine story. And there was some sort of creative rift between, uh, some of the writers and some of the producers and both of them.

I think Tom Cruise was attached to, to play Steve Prefontaine before that. Um, and I just took so long, I think at a certain point, he said, I think he said, I think I'll just produce this.

Well, what happened was as soon as one of the productions got up and going, the other one was like, no, no, we need to get it running too. Like, we can't play with the script anymore. We can't look for financing anymore. We have to get this going. So it was literally a race and a race to finish the movie, a race to get it out first. I think theirs came out first. But regardless, that's...

No, no, I'm going to say it because you're not going to say it. Theirs came out first. Yours was way better. Yours was way better. Yours was really good. Really good. Steve Prefontaine is a character whose life is short life is worth at least two movies. So I don't care if they come out concurrently or not.

Do you remember there was a Sports Illustrated? Yes. So I didn't remember because I didn't run track in high school. But my grandfather ran track. My father ran track. And I can remember that cover. And I must have only been five or six when it came out. They never put track and field people on the cover like that, I think.

And plus, he was a handsome guy. There was something memorable about it. Striking face. Those eyes and the mustache and the hair. He looked haunted and driven in a way that was... So I didn't know anything about it, but I remembered that picture. And when I read this script, of course, Robert Towne was a seminal figure for me growing up. If you liked Chinatown or if you like movies in general, you're going to know who Robert Towne is. And to get a chance to meet him and play such a legendary figure,

that was irresistible to me. Also, my dad was a big sports guy. My grandfather was a big sports guy. And I was the feelings guy. So this was an opportunity for me to get their attention too. And you were in Dallas when you were growing up, right? So they're watching Cowboys games and you're just storming out of the house to go do plays in the garage?

Correct. That's right. I'm doing Kabuki theater, trying to get my dad to come outside to see the show. He was actually a sports bookie. What? Yeah, and a loan shark. He was a pretty wild dude. So there was always sports on all the time. And the challenge for me was I drew a connection

between sports being on and the power going out occasionally. So sports didn't seem like such a reliable interest to me. He was not a great bookie in a profession that should be a lock. Yeah, seriously. A bad bookie is a rarity. I think he just had too much fun with people. He was more interested in the social aspect of it all. And also, he was a gambler. So he had jackpot-itis. He was always looking for his pet rock or the big win. So he was always starting shady companies.

He had this company with Lou Brock. He bought the rights to... Remember that old umbrella hat? Yeah. So Lou Brock was, I think think playing for the Cardinals at that time and so he had red and white ones manufactured that were endorsed by Lou Brock called the Brock umbrella so there were sports figures in our life growing up and my grandfather set state records in high school track, high school boxing, high school football. So there was a lot of interest in sports. And again, I was like, you know, the runt of the litter.

I was short, wiry. I couldn't compete at football. You know, I got scared of the baseball when we got to middle school and those guys started peppering in theirs. I could draw a walk because my strike zone wasn't huge. But beyond that, wrestling became my sport. And wrestling is a solitary experience. It doesn't have the same cach you know, cachets, uh, football, Friday night lights and that kind of stuff. So I was always on the fringe of that conversation in my family. So when I had an opportunity to marry both without, without

limits, it was a no brainer for me. When that movie came out, it's, it hits that nostalgia point, right? Cause he's, he'd been gone for like 22 years at that point, but still had everybody from that generation remembered him. And he was kind of this mythical figure. There's questions about how he died, all that stuff. And people were ready for a movie like that. I thought the Olympics and the movie does a great job. By the way, I'm doing this blind.

I haven't seen it. I probably saw it nine months ago, but I've seen it a bunch of times. The movie does a great job. By the way, I'm doing this blind. I haven't seen it. I probably saw it nine months ago, but I've seen it a bunch of times. The movie does a great job in the 72 Olympics of explaining why he doesn't medal. Because the fundamental flaw with the Pufantin story is this guy is basically the tiger, Michael Jordan, but then he doesn't even medal in the Olympics. But the way they construct that whole scene where it's like, he basically gets, you know, he's, he's cut off at the worst point of the race.

And by the time he's able to rally, I just thought like from a sports movie standpoint, that's a really, really, really great scene. I really like it. Well, I'm glad,

you know, I was hoping that Robert would do two things at the same time. If you know sports, one of the other things, you know, is sometimes there's no rhyme or reason for why somebody can't deliver in a moment. Sometimes the most clutch person

who you are dying to be up in that situation in the ninth inning, they just don't deliver. That's one of the things that's most exciting about sports. If they delivered every time, then we wouldn't have the thrill of them meeting our expectations.

So part of me is the humane approach to competing and quantifying these things, athletics and stuff. What happens when the person who is the best, who actually is driven the most, who has the perfect mental appetite, fails? How do they go on with their lives if they've built their entire sense of self around- Well, especially when they're like the chosen one. And then all of a sudden it's like, wait, you didn't even meddle? Yeah, precisely. And also he had talked shit about everybody. He was like

ready to go. So to me, that's a fabulous story. The heartbreak of him dying is he was on his road to redemption. He was on his journey of recovery.

Whatever it takes for people who executed that caliber to recover from such a vicious blow as that. That's one of the things that's fascinating to me. Coming back the next year, turning the page, playing golf, playing professional golf, and shanking one into the gallery and putting some person's tooth out, and then having to drop the ball because the upcoming putt is going to be worth $240,000. That's crazy compartmentalization. The things that you have to do mentally, because your body can already do it.

The amount of effort that goes into being a professional athlete is about training your body to do things so your mind doesn't have to take over. So what happens when you're in a game like golf, when all you have is time to think? Right. And he had the four years between the Olympics where he's just... That's it. That's it. He was just thinking. Just thinking. So he had to reorganize his sense of self in that period of time. And then he dies tragically. It's a really incredible story about an incredible, incredible life. I was actually in Oregon recently and drove through Coos Bay and I was, there was no small part of me that wanted to be able to walk into, you know, um, I don't know, an athletic store and have people go, Oh my God, it's Steve

Brie Fontaine. That's not happening right now. There's no, like I would have to get out ID and say, I'm not, you know, his father or his grandfather, It was 20 years ago. I showed them. But there was this huge, gorgeous mural that had him in three different stages of his life that I got a picture in front of. So it's still near and dear to my heart. There's a pretty sneaky, large memorabilia thing with him on eBay. There's certain posters. Oh, is that right?

Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. He's kind of like a god in the track circles. I think because he's so mysterious. Well, one of the kids when I showed up in Eugene was wearing a stop-free t-shirt. It was amazing. Well, and then some of the stuff he stood for in the 70s

and really pushed is stuff that is really relevant now. It's happening right now. I mean, college athletics and making sure that the NCAA is not the only beneficiary of this huge commodified world. He was at the forefront. But the irony is he was also at the forefront of Nike becoming a kajillion-dollar industry. He's basically the test case for these sneakers, which that's another amazing part of the movie. He's basically trying out Nike running sneakers that launches this massive thing.

Well, who would have known that Nike would have gone to take over college athletics as well? But at that time, he was fulfilling his promise to be able to make some money while he was an amateur athlete. And there was a company that needed him to endorse their shoes. So that was an amateur athlete. And there was a company that wanted to, that needed him to endorse their shoes. So that was the big problem is how could he maintain amateur status,

get into the Olympics and still make enough money to live and train. It's an awesome movie. How much training did he do for that? I mean, cause you not only have to be in crazy shape, but you also, the technique has to be like kind of flawless, right? Yeah, you want to look like kind of flawless, right? Yeah.

And you want to look like him for sure. Because there's a couple of sequences where Robert wanted to use stock footage of the Olympics and our footage. So it's intercut between me and him. Wow. And if it wasn't spot on, yeah, that would have, a whole bunch of red flags would have gone up. But we trained about probably eight weeks.

Me and Patrice Donnelly, she was an Olympic hurdler and was also in Personal Best. Personal Best. Yeah. A movie that's way ahead of its time. Way ahead of its time. And she was crucial to me because she'd done both. She'd operated at a high athletic level and she'd been in a movie. So what people, the athletes that we had running, and we had some phenomenal distance runners

running with us, they didn't realize that the way that you go about constructing a scene is you shoot one angle for about an hour, and then you spend about an hour changing the camera to another angle. When you're running, because they're running about four-minute mile pace at that time. When you're running a four-minute mile pace, and you do, say, eight intervals of 200 to 400 meters, and then you have an hour off, if you don't know how to manage that time, you're not going to make it to the third setup. You're going to be cramping up like nobody's business. So she knew that. And she was like, you're never in our training running more than

800 meters. What we're going to do is train 200 meters again and again and again. So you know how to manage the days. and we spent i think probably three weeks concentrating on all the running stuff and well the thing is like if you got hurt if you had like a stress fracture if you had a pulled hamstring that they're shutting the shooting down and it was driving me crazy because i'm i'm competitive and uh i had been training so much i wanted to see how fast i could run and she was like, you do not get to run. That is,

that is, so when it was over, I took my, yeah, what was it? I ran a 525 mile. That was my best. That's good, right?

I don't know. I mean, for a normal person, yeah, for an actor, that's unbelievable. So then you get some luck Almost Famous happens yes

another situation where so Tom Cruise dropped out of Without Limits Brad Pitt dropped out of Almost Famous after developing it for like what

five six months some period of time yeah they had worked together for a while this gets back to our point before about five, six months? Some period of time, yeah. They had worked together for a while. This gets back to our point before about trying to develop a skill set that's useful for your entire career. So if you can be a utility player and come off the bench at some point, take somebody's job because you have enough flexibility and your instrument is prepared and ready to go, you're going to get more of these kinds of jobs. And Watchmen was another example. Keanu Reeves

was supposed to do that and dropped out. There was a play that I did that Phil Hoffman was planning on doing. And it's just a feature of the profession that if you're equipped for it, you can capitalize on it. And so the, I, I'd never played guitar before. Um, and of course I told Cameron,

don't worry. I, you know, uh, just like him without limits. I was not an Olympic runner, but I figured it out enough. The storytelling,

I promise will for the, for most people. Yes, there will be some guitar players who see this and know that I'm a fraud. But for most of the audience, they'll believe that Russell Hammond knows how to play guitar. And so that was actually much harder training than Without Limits. The physical toll of without limits was uncomfortable, but the mental grind of trying to, like as an adult to learn guitar so that you look like somebody who's expert

at it. I mean, I could have played a piece of shit guitars for sure, but somebody who's supposed to be great at it, that was very complex. But I had Peter Franth and Nancy Wilson there to help me in addition to obviously Cameron. That was another situation where, like with Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro, I just kind of put my head down and pretended that I was supposed to be there

because it was too intimidating to be. When I was in high school, I parked cars. And my claim to fame at the 15th Street Fisheries in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was that I once parked Peter Frantham's car. So 15 years later, he's helping to change my guitar strings. Because I'm so tense, Bill. I'm breaking guitar strings on nearly every strum. Because I'm just trying to figure it out, you know? And, um, so he had a great deal of patience and, uh, he's just a great guy actually. It's my favorite 21st century movie. And what's interesting is, no, it really is. I think it is

for a lot of people. I, I, I think it's really incredibly rewatchable. I think it's, I don't know, it just hits all the things I like, but what's, you know, the Brad Pitt piece of it, I actually think

he might have been too famous for the movie at that point. I think the fact that we're kind of discovering all the people in the movie was really helpful for the actual movie, right? I mean, Jason Lee

had been in some stuff. Kate Hudson had been in a couple things. You'd been in a couple things, but not like in that kind of movie. right? I mean, Jason Lee had been in some stuff. Kate Hudson had been in a couple things. You'd been in a couple things, but not like in that kind of movie. So it was like, these were all these people that were now in my life, you know?

I think it's a great, great point. I really do. Because it was about them discovering themselves too. So you want to have some kind of opaque quality as an audience. Yeah, because Brad Pitt at that point, he's so famous that

I'm always going to be where it's Brad Pitt playing Russell Hammond. And Russell Hammond was this new thing. But the stuff that Cameron does in that movie where he dwells on this fucking entire Rolling Stone experience he has covering all these bands, oh no, when we go to this place in San Diego, it's got to look like this. And the backstage has to be this way. And the guy working the door, like he's kind of a freak. How does he remember all that shit? He's a writer and a reporter. And I can guarantee like he's, this his entire life.

But everything, he would remember like albums, the posters that he had in his bedroom. Who the fuck remembers that? Those were his props in the movie. Yeah, all his albums were his albums, right? They were his albums. Remember his posters? All that stuff was his.

He's a total outlier. I don't know if you've ever had the chance to speak with him, but could not be a sweeter, more affable, curious, loving individual. But his mind is on a different level. His capacity to not just remember stories, but appreciate why they're valuable. That's the thing that makes so many of the moments in Almost Famous, I think, indelible is because he captures what's valuable about them. What's valuable about Russell being on the roof

and on acid and saying, I'm a golden god, is not Russell's experience. It's the fans experience. Right. That's the, they got to be there for the, and you'll see the shots go to the fans. That's the part that's hilarious.

Their response to him is the hilarious part. That's Cameron remembering it and curating it at the same time. And I, I just, I have unending affection for him. Jim Miller did a really good podcast about the making of the movie and all that stuff. And it was, it was so clear to everybody interviewed. And it just like had so much affection and admiration for the movie and just,

just like a sense of gratefulness that happened. And then now you have 20 years of your life where people are accosting you about it. Like me at the Kimmel wedding. I'll take more of it, trust me. I've had the other version as well. There are college students now who are discovering this movie. And occasionally,

I'll get somebody kind of giving me a side eye on the street. That guy looks like he maybe once could have been... And it's because they were just introduced to Almost Famous and they loved it. Yeah. But the character of Russell is inscrutable too. He's unknowable. I don't look like him anymore.

Well, it's an incredible hair mustache combo. Was that your own hair or was that a wig? That was my own hair. I'm proud to say. One of my greatest career accomplishments. My own mustache. Now, it was stylized by a professional hairstylist,

but that was my hair. Well, I'll tell you this. With my kids, my daughter's now 16, my son's 13, but with my daughter, it was like, all right, how old before we spring almost famous on her? I think we did it when she was six. It was like, whatever. Because she loved music and she was immediately in. So she knows you as Russell Hama too, but it's like, I'm with you. That next generation thing. That's why when you go on Amazon and you go on Netflix, it's always there near the top. There's a reason for it. It's because people keep watching it.

They know. Those streaming services, they know what they're doing. They're putting stuff in position that they know people are going to click on. They got good algorithm. Yeah. Well, in a couple of those scenes, where'd you film the concert scenes? It was like in Detroit or... I forget. It was like a 5,000-person theater, though, and you guys were actually playing

or pretending to play, right? Well, there was... I want to say it was a place called the Palladium in LA, but I could be wrong, that had 1,500. They actually filled it up had 1,500, that they actually filled it up with 1,500 extras. And I've had some interesting experiences performing, but it became abundantly clear why rock stars can become insane. Even pretending to be a rock star,

knowing that I can't actually play the instrument i'm about to pretend it to play when we walked out and there was a blackout and there's like little flashes here and there and the music starts in the black and then the lights come up and the audience goes bonkers i'm getting chills thinking about it right now you better believe every one of those people thinks they're a living God. Because also, they created it. They created the music. They created that moment.

They're curating this ecstasy for 1,500 people, 15,000 people, 100,000 people, whatever it is. It would be really hard to compartmentalize that. Well, you can see why so many of them end up doing substances or developing alcohol problems or that, because how do you match the rush of that two hours? You can't. And I've been on stage. I've done plays on Broadway. I know what the rush of the live experience is,

but it's so different from, as I said, curating a moment of ecstasy. I think Jason Lee's character says something like that in the movie, I'm going to turn them on or something like that. If I don't turn them on, I'm going to make sure they get turned on. So that ego, that arrogance, that ownership of your capacity to bring life to somebody else, that's the total head case there. I don't know how anybody manages. It's incredible to think about Peter Frantham. Because I remember when Frantham alive, I came out and the, uh, gnarly pressure he must've been under at such a young age.

He could not be a sweeter person in the world, present, honest, affable, capable, still wicked as shit on the guitar. I saw him last year in the garden. Um, and, uh, so that to me is a total outlier because in that moment of pretending I wanted to say fuck yeah I am a god right well it's interesting that for years

one of the best ideas for a movie was like a deep dive into a band and the dynamics of a band but nobody pulled it off and now the documentaries have taken off this century, we've seen some really good music documentaries about that dynamic. Which ones would you recommend? The Eagles one is unbelievable. The history of the Eagles part one. It's basically,

and the Eagles were one of the bands I think he modeled Stillwater after. Definitely. So, so, but that whole dynamic of Fry and Henley, I think he took for Russell Hammond and Jeff Bebe. Right. Like that whole, like, wait a second, I thought I was supposed to be the guy,

but you're becoming the guy. I don't like this. And that, you know, that ego pull, which you see in sports too, you see with basketball teams. You'll see it with a young team that has two superstars

and there's that little tug of war, whose team is this? But it did that great And about how music journalism was kind of evolving and criticism and could you be as critical of bands anymore? There's all these different relationships and the Lester Banks character, even though Hoffman's in like three scenes, it's so important for that theme. It's just, it's a great movie. I think it's timeless. I honestly think, especially because it's set backwards, that movie's going to live for 100 years. It was impression in the way that it talked about rock journalism, for sure.

And actually, cultural criticism, I think. Yes. Mainstream cultural criticism where leading newspapers would give space to long-format criticism that wasn't about a numerical value for the art or it wasn't about a thumbs up or thumbs down it wasn't a review it's critical analysis i think he became increasingly aware that that was going to be difficult because um uh the the avenues weren't making space for it anymore. I remember having a conversation with a Time magazine critic, Richard Corliss,

and he was lamenting the arrival of the thumbs up and thumbs down. The notion that something had to either be worthy of your time or unworthy of your time, that we could commodify everything to whether or not it was a $10 event you should spend your time on or not, and take this person's advice. And if you find somebody whose general aesthetic comports to yours, then keep relying on them, rather than it all being a source of conversation and contextualization. And this is a way for all of us to relate. Even if it's not successful, the ability to describe why it's not successful is, I think, a healthy part of having a thriving culture. problem because the outlet that we're on or the distributor that we use also happens to be owned by the company that owns the magazine that is going to do the review on it. So there are a

number of ways you can get some sort of mainstream, authentic criticism, long-format criticism, I think have become narrower and narrower. Yeah, and Twitter hasn't helped. I do feel like that's why... You only have 140 characters. Not even 140 words. 140 characters. Or 160, whatever it is. Right. Yeah, whatever it is now, plus the screenshots of things different people wrote, you get no nuance at all. I honestly think that's why podcasts have, one of the reasons it's, they've kind of gained steam because there's

actual nuance in a conversation versus stuff that can get screenshotted. Well, it is nice that there is typically, whether it's a teenage rejection or rebellion or a social rebellion, there, there's always some kind of correction. So if there's a short format platform that becomes popular, you can guarantee there is some 17 year old out there thinking, you know what? Forget this system, man. I'm going for only two-hour conversations, okay? And we're getting into nothing but gray areas. You will not be able to leave. That is a great feature of humanity. And actually, one of the things that's notable about Almost

Famous, and one of the reasons why I think it'll keep returning is it's about burgeoning adolescents. And every generation goes through that. Every generation has to crash down the doors of the reasons why I think it'll keep returning is it's about burgeoning adolescence and every generation goes through that. Every generation has to crash down the doors of the, you know, generation just ahead of it. And, uh, we all get to arrive into adulthood at some point.

So there will be an endless stream of kids who, who I think can, uh, relate to doing it under the circumstances that Cameron did. Well, or at the very least, fantasize. It also has an all-time Hall of Fame ending.

It's a spectacular ending. If you're flicking channels and you're close to the end, it's like, alright, I guess I'm in again. But I also like that it's... I think one of the reasons I love it so much is it's really about loving something. That's ultimately what the movie is. That last scene when he's like,

what do you really love about music? And your character says, turns his chair around, everything. That's what the movie's about. It's ultimately like these fucked up people, all they care about ultimately is this music and this connection they have with each other. That's why the movie's going to live on for 100 years.

Because I think there I think, um, you know, there's not a lot of movies. There's great movies. Like I love boogie nights. I don't know if boogie nights is going to be around in a hundred years, you know? All right. It's slow.

It's grizzly. There's dark stuff in it. I don't know what the next generation is going to think of that, but almost famous. I think it lives on, um, the morning show you're doing now, which you won an award for.

Yeah, man. Uh, you won, you won an Emmy. Thanks for, man. You won an Emmy. Thanks for bringing it up. I appreciate it. This is you unleashed in this show.

It's like they basically were like, they put a chef outfit on you and they were like, Crudup, just cook. Here's some utensils. You go. You do your thing. Explore the studio space.

And it just seems like, I know everybody's been the studio space and it just seems like i know everybody's been saying this but it just seems like you're having an absolute blast on this show and it's really fun to watch well i appreciate that the the the truth is playing him was much more nerve wracking for me than um than uh anything i've experienced certainly on film in a long time just because the complexity of his thought and the speed with which he delivers it is um a challenge i there i don't think that quickly i don't speak that quickly i don't know how to manage the heightened circumstances that somebody like him manages with the kind of aplomb that he does. So my attempt at playing him was just like a sweaty effort not to get fired. I knew the character was badass when I read it.

I thought the inscrutability of his motivations in this environment was going to be fascinating because we're trying to upend the power dynamic. So if we don't know where he sits in the power, it's going to make it difficult for people to figure out where he fits in. It's going to be harder for him to be manipulated by people. It's going to be harder to tell whether or not he has any kind of personal stake in it. And all of those things will work to his advantage in this ambitious kind of chaotic restructuring

of the power dynamics. That being said, I don't know many people who speak the way that he's written. So when I read those monologues, part of the thrill for me was trying to figure out what kind of person would actually think that's an okay way to get through life. I've just, okay, Bill, that's a great comment you made. It makes me think about polar bears. There's two different things about polar bears.

Like who really, you know, with the level of confidence and dexterity. And he's always super present. He's never playing too far in the future, living too much in the past. He is in the moment. And so for me, what it took as an actor was just to grind out understanding the text. That's just spending weeks after weeks saying it again and again,

trying to uncover different twists and turns where he thinks this story is in that, and then executing it on the day while, you know, Mimi is doing some kind of complex camera work and stuff. And, um, uh, it, it, it was a bit of a high wire act for me. But yeah, again, to get a chance to do something like that at this point in my career was absolutely phenomenal. It is phenomenal. I've been really enjoying it. It's also a show they had to reinvent twice, right? They had to reinvent it before they even started filming it because the circumstances in the country had changed to the point that it had to be reflected in season one.

And then now you start filming season two and all of a sudden there's a pandemic. So in that first episode, there's like this New Year's Eve party from like a year ago. And now all of a sudden you got a, I guess fast, I haven't seen the second episode yet,

but it's got a fast forward. Well, and that's what they get for trying to write a show about hitting a moving target. Right, newsworthy moments, right. That really is what morning news shows have to do every day is pivot to unforeseen circumstances

and deliver it in a palatable way that's also entertaining. And so consequently, they're saddled with that, particularly during such a tumultuous time in America over the last three years. In order to maintain that attention to their ambition, they had to rewrite stuff all the time. And a conversation that involved around the Me Too movement,

the Time's Up movement, it was evolving so rapidly that I think what they wanted to do was humanize the voices that were trying to navigate it in real time as well. When things started to shift so alarmingly in March, it became pretty clear that

A, it was going to be difficult for us to continue filming, and B, the world was changing again and the writers were going to have to attend to it. And I can remember getting the first episode of season two and reading a man sneezes at the end. Just the hair on the back of my neck stood up thinking about, oh God, we're already telling this story while we're still in the midst of it. This is going to be harrowing. And it was, it was pretty strange to go through all of these

various protocols that the epidemiologists had put into place for us to safely hopefully make it through the season, and then play characters who weren't yet aware of the oncoming tsunami. Right. They were like, hey, is the water going out right now? They were still at that stage in their understanding. Meanwhile, for us to get on set, we had to be tested twice that day. So one of the things you're asked to do as an actor is to be as...

You don't want to be self-conscious as an actor, right? You want to be able to channel the story and the characters of the story. And when you're told that you have to be self-conscious all the time in order to not get yourself or somebody else sick, that's a very strange thing to manage both at the same time, being unselfconscious. And of course, Corey is not a self-conscious person at all. Right. He's an irrational confidence guy. Yeah, precisely. And I'm a very self-conscious person.

So the complexity of doing those two things at once was certainly, yeah, formidable. Yeah. With Corey, they need scenes where he's at a charity golf classic just talking shit and blasting 380-yard drives and trying to make bets. We just need him in more rational confidence situations. No, you want him winging in the 40 foot putt. Yeah. I want him at a poker night, just taking everyone's money and laughing his ass off.

Well, you have certainly met a lot of the guys that I've modeled for you on it because because he's a gamer, and he's somebody who's interested in displaying the full extent of both his intellectual prowess but his capacity to operate under pressure. He wants to be in every clutch situation. In fact, I secretly think that's maybe one of his motivations to pursuing a level playing field is he hates the fact that he might not be succeeding in the most difficult environment possible because not everybody gets a fair shot at doing it. And he hates the fact that his agency and privilege

that comes from being born the way that he is has actually given him a leg up. He wants to show that it doesn't matter who his opponents are in any circumstance, whether it's ping pong or managing a network. He has the singular belief and confidence in his own dexterity and ability that he wants on display at all times. Did you have a network executive say to you, hey, did you model Corey after me? Who was his own irrational confidence executive who just thought Corey was modeled after him? I did not. But I know that my agent has fielded calls from several high-profile people who imagine themselves as being a Corey acolyte.

And we're curious as to whether or not I modeled it on them. But I didn't model it on anybody. I modeled it on Carrie Aron. Her writing for the character I thought was fascinating and unique. There's a whiff of the lawyer in Spotlight.

There's a whiff. That same kind of thing to him. Do you know the story of Eric McLeish, the guy in Spotlight? No. By the way, awesome movie. Yeah, great movie. Tom McCarthy is a phenomenal filmmaker. And everybody who's in that is just spectacular. But when he sent me that part, and I've known him in and around New York for 20 years or so. So he sent me, he said, would you be interested in this part? And I read it and I was

like, that guy seems like a douche, man. I don't really want to play that guy. And he goes, no, let me tell you this story. So this guy, shortly after the news came out, he started to go into work and have panic attacks and would have to go into the bathroom and throw up. And he got to the point where he couldn't go into the office. And his wife said, you should see a psychiatrist. And he goes to a psychiatrist. And within a short period of time, reveals that he had been preyed upon and molested as a young man.

And so in his mind, he thought he was doing the one thing that would actually give the families of the victims some kind of relief, payback. You know, listen, the laws are against you. The police are against you. The community is against you. The church is against you. You're going to get 25 grand in a sit down with the bishop and that's the best you're going to get. So to his mind, he thought he was understanding the system correctly and making sure that the

victims were provided for in some way. So when it came out and he was sort of painted as the bad guy or enabler in some way, I think it was incredibly confusing to him. Um, and also in this article that I read, um, he not long after he was in therapy, divorced his, um, his wife and married his therapist. And, and then, and she said, well, I can't treat you and be in a relationship with you. Um, at which point she broke up with him and he sued her for malpractice. So Tom tells, yeah, Tom tells me all that stuff. And he says, but I'm not going to give you any dialogue to support that. You just have to know that that's what's happening underneath. That's the kind of person. And for me, that was an incredible expression of the tentacles of this kind of abuse.

It really screws with your sense of self-esteem. It screws with how you trust people, how you believe in people. And you end up putting yourself into situations that are, are, um, your entire life, uh, are just riddled with, um, bad possibilities. Well, that's an awesome movie. You've been in some good stuff. It was good to see you. I know you have a hard out, uh, congrats on everything with the morning show. And, uh, I'm glad we finally did this. Me too. I look forward to the next time, man. All right. Take care. All right. Thanks to Derek and Brian and Billy Crudup. And thanks to Kyle Creighton who produced this podcast. We'll be back on Thursday. Football and probably more football and then some way. So I don't have.