Curry Survives, Trae Melts Down, and Ant’s Crazy Shooting with Kirk Goldsberry. Plus, WWE President Nick Khan Stops by
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So there you go. Coming up on this podcast, I'm going to talk to Kurt Goldsberry about the playing games tonight, Tuesday night, some awards stuff, some best shooter stuff, some playoff stuff. And then after that, Nikon president, WWE, he comes on at least once a year. We talk wrestling. We talk UFC boxing and a bunch of sports media stuff. So that's the podcast. First, our friends from Pearl Jam. Yeah.

All right, taping this a little after 10 o'clock. Just watched Golden State hold off Memphis in the playing game. It was a fascinating one. Kurt Goldsberry, I love the playing game. 8-9 is great. Super fun. We get a blowout. We get a fun game. We get some Trae Young trade rumors coming out of the first game and then the second game. Memphis, a team that I was not a huge fan of, who I think is now 12 and 18 in their last 30, put up a spirited fight.

There's a couple moments of this game where I was wondering if Golden State was actually going to blow this and be in this bizarre scenario of losing to San Antonio, losing in overtime in the last day of the season, then blowing this Memphis game at home. And now all of a sudden fighting for their lives just to play OKC, who just won 68 games, but instead they escaped. Now they play Houston. What was your big takeaway watching this game?

Oh, it shouldn't have been that close. It was a frustrating game for both teams, honestly. And Steph Curry, I mean, two giant threes. You know, I think he's bookended his season before the season, that masterpiece in Paris. And now to wrap up the regular season and secure the playoff spot for his team, two just classic Curry threes when they needed him most. It was an incredible moment.

But a real frustrating end, too. I mean, Draymond fouling out there. Jimmy Butler throwing the ball away. This team, oh, they should have put him away earlier, in my opinion. But they got it done. Now they have this fascinating series coming up with the Houston Rockets, Bill. It's one of those weird subplots of this entire Warriors run dating back to 2013.

abject sloppiness at the worst possible moments in crunch time. And they somehow won four titles and go down as the most, you know, one of the most memorable teams of this century. And yet at the end of games, they're up three.

And I'm watching it just expecting something stupid is going to happen. Curry's going to dribble the ball off his foot. Somebody's going to lob a pass across court that's going to get picked. A dumb foul. Like it's for a team that fancies itself on high IQ stuff. And they do have, you know, an unbelievable basketball IQ. They sure do dumb sloppy things at the worst possible times. It's really, really, really odd. I don't get it.

Yeah, they're always among the league leaders in turnovers. And they've been loose with the ball this whole era. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Loose with the ball. A little loose.

little loose with the ball. Uh, but yeah, the Draymond foul was like, dude, the time is on your side at that point in the night and they just give them the free throws. Uh, the refs didn't help either. I'm not going to say it helped either team, like the phantom foul on Edie and pods pods had a great block. I thought it was clean. Um, but

But this is the result I think we all thought was going to happen tonight. I think the Warriors securing the seventh seed. And a little Houston matchup. Well, let me big picture on Golden State, a team that I was really bullish on. And this will be, this is now prison of the moment, Bill. This is my time of year. This is when I really shine overreacting over and over again and trying not to overreact. But I think Golden State's lineup stuff is a little alarming.

For a team that I thought really had a chance to win two, three straight rounds, Kaminga is now just out. Not only is he out, but you look at the box score today, Curry led the team in rebounds. That doesn't see my deal. They got killed on the boards. Edie's size, I thought, what did Edie finish with? 17 rebounds. Edie's size really bothered them in this game. And it still feels like a team that's kind of

grasping for stuff. And if Jimmy wasn't awesome in that first half, I think this game could have slipped away from them. But the big question for me, I was on Zach's pod on Monday. I didn't even realize that Kaminga got benched in that last game. I thought he was hurt because why wouldn't they play him? They need somebody like him. This game was just a Kaminga game. This was an athletic, physical. They needed his rebounding. They needed size. And they still buried him. So I guess he's just out. I don't get it.

Yeah, it's remarkable. I know I was listening to you and Zach too. It's great to have Zach in the network. But it was noticeable tonight. I mean, Golden State's old. You have Draymond, who's old, who had sort of...

banged up his neck the other day. Old guy injury. When you have like neck injuries, it's an old guy thing. Steph has a bandage on his hand, uh, his shooting hand. And Jimmy, I obviously was limping around after that Clipper game. Uh, this is an old team. So it's another reason why I expected to see coming again tonight, uh, just because of the depth. He's a young player. He's another body, but again, Bill, like you said, no, Jonathan coming, uh, uh,

early in the game, the bench actually saved them early. Memphis came out hot and post and Gary Payton, both I thought sort of gave them a fresh burst of energy. But yeah, what does Kaminga have to do to get some run out there? Yeah, I guess you could say Butler played 39 minutes

And maybe they just don't want to play Butler with Curry and Kaminga. And I think the lineups were, the plus minus stuff with those three together were pretty bad for most of the season. And maybe they just made a decision if we're going to play Draymond. He played 30 today, but he's a foul trouble on Butler 38.

that's just not a lot of room left for Kaminga. But then you look at the rest of it, like Heald played 12, Peyton played 19, Looney played nine, Post played 21 and was pretty good. I just, for this specific game, if I'm Memphis, I'm like, hey, that's great. Please don't play Kaminga because he's somebody that could carry some offense. I mean, when you have 75 points for two guys,

And, you know, Peyton is your third leading scorer who just had wide open shots the entire game. Not great. I don't, you know, on the one hand, first round's great for Golden State because of the breaks between the games, right? It's the same thing for the Lakers. The older teams, first round is where you want to be, where you might play Saturday, Tuesday, Friday, Sunday. You just have all the stuff. But on the other hand...

It just feels like some of the teams in the West are still going up, whereas the Warriors have kind of leveled off and now are completely dependent on having big games from Steph and or Jimmy. And they're going to this Houston series where they're going to be able to throw just a shitload of dudes at Curry. And we already saw it with Amin Thompson two Sundays ago and try to wear him down. They also have a bunch of wings to throw at Butler.

which brings back the Kaminga thing. But it feels like Kaminga is now in the attic with the Christmas ornaments and we're just not going to see him again. Yeah. And I think he's going to be an interesting figure to watch in another way too, because Houston's one of the better rebounding teams in the league too. And, you know, when Draymond's your big and,

You're not getting a lot of rebounds with Post out there. And you just start to wonder, are they going to have to put Kaminga in just to match the athleticism and the physicality of this Houston team? Yeah, because why wouldn't Houston be able to do the same thing that Memphis just did with Edie and Jackson when they put their double big lineup? I would think that would be a nightmare for the Warriors. The other thing that's interesting with that matchup, I believe, is

Dylan Brooks and Fred Van Fleet, nobody stopped Steph Curry, but those two guys have both done a great job defending Steph relatively speaking for the last five to seven years. Van Fleet in the 2019 finals and Dylan Brooks for years on this Grizzlies group.

Not to mention, as you said, Ahmed Thompson, I think Stefan had one of the worst games I've ever seen him have on April 6th. One of 10, three total points. The only three points he got bill were on a 34 foot three bomb. Uh, he never got anything going. Um, he may a doka was essentially calling him a cry baby to his face. It was just a nightmare game. Right. Uh,

And so I'm really fascinated by this matchup on a lot of fronts. And the question for me is, can this aging set of great players, Hall of Famers, match the energy and the physicality of Ime Adoka's fleet of young bloods who are just dying for this moment? Wow. And it's, this is,

Houston, Golden State, just a classic old school NBA playoff matchup. The young guys against the older guys, right? It's not like Golden State's washed up, but they're older and their guys have a lot of playoff years, a lot of playoff memories, but it's, you know, this is the 87 Celtics against the Pistons. This is the 91 Bulls against the 91 Pistons. Like we've just, we've seen this over and over again over the years, the 00 Lakers against the 00 Blazers, um,

And in this case, you know, I thought Houston would be favorite in the series because they're the two seed. They have home court in game seven. They just kicked their butt a couple, uh, 10 days ago. What do you think the odds are in Fandul because they came out and now you've dabbled on the gambling side a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. I've been corrupted by Amy Howe a tiny bit to look at the odds. We, we, we, I think Fandul is going to have the Warriors as slight favorites. Am I right? Yeah.

Well, you're right that they're favorites. It's not slight. They're minus 200. Dang. I think that's too much, Bill Simmons. I think that's going to move. And we did, Russell and I did the live Clippers Nuggets line on Sunday. And it was way higher than now. It's like, I think the Clippers are favored now. But before the Nuggets were like minus 160. That Rockets line is going to drop because all the dudes that they can throw at

Curry, home court, youth, the fact that Curry's banged up. The fact that Jimmy hasn't played this kind of level of basketball over and over again in a couple years where you're just like, hey, Jimmy, we need you now for 39, 40 minutes a night. And the lack of that third scorer.

I don't know who I'm picking yet. I'm going to wait till Thursday. I really want to analyze it. But to me, this series is an absolute toss up. And I think the double big lineup and all the people that could throw a curry are real advantages for Houston. I assumed it was going to be this matchup all day. And I'm with you. I don't know who I'm going to pick. Um,

I'm tempted to pick Houston because I'm sick of everybody just telling me Golden State's going to walk away with this series like it's going to be easy. And I know that's not going to happen. I know that's not going to happen. And I don't think those odds are correct, but...

Yeah, I also could see a world where Golden State goes down there, steals game one or game two, and is feeling really good about their chances back in the Bay. I don't know. I just think those odds are a little wrongly priced. I think that Eme Adoka is going to have these guys ready to do what they do best, which is incredible defense. Incredible defense. Physicality. Rebounds.

And rebounding. Some punishing post-up stuff. Maybe a couple, maybe, maybe somebody starts making a couple threes from the corner that you wouldn't totally expect. Yeah, the ceiling of their team is pretty high. I just don't know if they can hit it. They held Golden State, Bill, to 90 points in one of their, what did they play, five times this year because of the in-season tournament? Yeah. In one of those games, Golden State only scored 90 points. You know, that's a pretty remarkable stat. I think Golden State

needs to score 100 to win. I think they're like 1 in 10 when they don't score 100 or something like that. So if Houston's defense is able to clamp down on this Golden State offense, the Rockets have a chance, a good chance to win the series. It feels like we've had a lot of Warriors-Rockets over the years.

And it also feels like Steven Adams has played the Warriors in a few playoff series over the years. Dylan Brooks said, like, there's weird history between these two teams and some of the players, which makes no sense because Houston's such a young playoff team. But if I was a Houston fan, I would look at tonight's game and be like, that's our blueprint.

Big size on the boards. Try to play up and down and as chaotic as possible. Try to get them into where they were getting sloppy on offense. Use your athleticism. Try to wear these dudes down and hope at least one or two of your guys can get a little heat checky. You know, because if you catch the Rockets on the wrong day,

when it just looks like a rock fight for them for the last seven minutes. You're like, what's going on with this team? They're in a little bit of the same position as Golden State with they're not positive who their best five is to close the game. It kind of depends on the situation. That always makes me nervous when I get to the playoffs. I kind of like to know who's my five.

Right. That's like the best thing about the Celtics and some of the best teams is the Cavs. Okay. See, they kind of know who their five is. But the other best thing that Golden State has going for them, how much would the league want a Golden State Lakers series in round two?

I wouldn't want to be Minnesota or Houston from a, Hey, like I'm just going into those series and be like, guys, we're probably not getting a ton of calls over the next two weeks. So just how are we going to handle this? Are we going to be cool with this? Cause that's probably how it's going.

It crossed my mind many times today. And the great thing about that, too, for the league is it guarantees that either LeBron or Steph is in the Western Conference Finals, too. So if they get to round two, you know either one of those glamour franchises and superstars is going to be in the Western Conference Finals. So, yeah, that crossed my mind, too. Well, how about if the Lakers beat Minnesota?

and it's Houston, Golden State, and the other side, that's also a complete no-lose for the NBA because Houston Lakers would be an awesome series that has the same kind of bad blood all over the place, including Ime, who got kicked out of a game for calling LeBron a bitch, which was amazing. Brooks, who has tried to make his decade's mission to be LeBron's rival to very little success.

And then Steven Adams, who's always willing to bang into somebody. But that's just such a weird matchup. Yeah. The Rockets going double big and the Lakers don't have bigs. The Lakers don't have like real bigs. Rui, LeBron. Right. They just have bulk. Masquerade it. They have bulks. Yeah.

Yeah, it's interesting. Bigs in this Western Conference playoffs are a big piece of the puzzle. I think, you know, the Hartenstein acquisition changes Oklahoma City's ability to play big this time around. Obviously, Joker is...

is in there. But, you know, I think the Western Conference, there's three incredible series and let's probably expect that one eight series to not be that great. Yeah, I think that's that might be an NBA TV exclusive. Do they still have the NBA TV series? They do, right? The OKC versus whoever.

Yeah. That might be squandered. OKC Dallas, I think you just shoved that over on NBA TV or maybe it's on Tubi. OKC Memphis, by the way, should be Vancouver, Seattle. Think about that. That would have been pretty crazy if that would happen. OKC Memphis would be a fun series because the thing about Memphis, I don't think they have any title aspirations whatsoever, but they are fun to watch. Oh, for sure. The high scoring games, the other team is always going to have two guys in the 30s.

Yeah, I hope our man John Morant is back and ready to go on Friday. I think he turned his ankle pretty bad. I have a really bad memory. Or the Ewing theory might have to convene. Who knows? Well, they did seem to play well. Bane had a great game. Bane almost helped. He almost stole this game. He was making it seem like every shot. And the ones he missed were like these torturous misses that would go in and out. He looked great. But yeah, Memphis played pretty well, I thought. And I think...

OKC isn't going to have a problem there. But if John Morant gets to play OKC, I think that would be really entertaining, actually. I can't say it was the greatest Jaron Jackson performance. And I really agonized. I ended up leaving him off 13-mile NBA, making way for a couple other guys. And it was...

I just saw too many of those where it's like, he's good, he's solid, but you're also forgetting he's out there for large chunks of time. He's not

He's impactful, but not totally. And I don't know. That was a game where I feel, especially with like Golden State, as small as they were going, it felt like he could have kind of dominated that game. And I just, I think the situation is what it is. Yeah, he settles for threes too much. Well over half of his shots, again, today against that smaller team were behind the three-point line. You know, when he was sort of running that offense last year in the absences of Bain and...

Moran, he was doing a lot more driving and a lot more playmaking. That didn't exist tonight. It didn't exist tonight. And I'd like to see him be a little more aggressive against some of these matchups because he's so talented. He can finish with both hands near the rim. But yeah, I still think they're going to win against the winner of, I would pick them to win against the winner of the Sacramento-Dallas matchup. What are your thoughts on that one?

I think it needs a sponsor. Is there a dysfunctional product that could be the sponsor? Dallas and Sacramento, two of our most dysfunctional franchises. Oh my. Whatever that product is. Maybe, is it like a, it's probably some sort of pharmaceutical product. Or maybe it's

Maybe it's like a CBD thing because you have to kind of get a little buzz on as you watch the dysfunction. But yeah, I have no idea that you could tell me Dallas is just ready for the season and I believe it. Sacramento is always a roller coaster ride. And both of them had really, really, really abnormally strange seasons. Like the Sacramento, the firing Mike Brown, going to Christie,

that just giving up on Fox a year early for reasons that remain unclear, bringing back the Levine to Rosen combo. And I don't know, it feels like two teams that I think are going to look a little bit different next season, whatever happens. Yeah. I have no idea what to make of either team. I think I'm,

I'm pretty sure that Sacramento's got enough to win this game in advance. It would seem like it, right? Yeah. I said on Zach's pod, I wonder if it's a one, two, three Cancun situation for Dallas. Like we just got booed for two months. Like let's get ready to call it a vacation, but I don't, I don't trust Sacramento either. Are we still lighting the beam in Sacramento or did we decide of going 500 for six months? Maybe it's not being worthy anymore.

Oh, they're lighting that thing. Oh, they're still lighting it? Okay. Yeah, they'll light it up, I think, tomorrow night. I think they'll light that thing up and then hop on a flight to...

Let's take a break. I want to bring in Saruti, Orlando Magic fan, to discuss the bizarre Atlanta-Orlando game we watched tonight. So quick break right now. The Bill Simmons Podcast is brought to you by Fandle, our friends. We're coming down to the stretch of the plan, heading into the playoffs, the best place to get in on all the action for all the best games, Fandle, America's number one sportsbook. With Fandle, there's so many ways for you to play. They've got all your favorite bets, player props,

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or visit rg-help.com. This episode is brought to you by Uber Eats. Summer is almost here and you can now get almost anything you need for your sunny days delivered with Uber Eats. What do we mean by almost? Well, you can't get a well-groomed lawn delivered, but you can get chicken Parmesan delivered. I love chicken Parmesan. A cabana, that's a no, but a banana, that's a yes. A nice tan, sorry, nope, but a box fan, happily yes. A day of sunshine, no,

A box of fine wines, yes, Uber Eats can definitely get you that. Get almost, almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now. Alcohol in select markets. Product availability may vary by region. See app for details. All right, so Rudy is joining us, the Ringer's Ironman. Just had a child, but loves the NBA playoffs and so wired from Cole Anthony Knight that he had to join us.

Was that a better Orlando win or a more fun Atlanta loss for you? Yeah, it was all good. I was just feeding the kid and I was just like, you know, I might as well just stay up and hop in the Zoom record. I'm wired. I got to be honest with you. I don't know that I'm happier about winning the game or that I just don't have to watch Trey Young play basketball against my team anymore. That was... It was disgusting. And maybe I'm super sensitive to it because they played the Hawks a couple times here down the stretch. But it's...

he's yelling at the ref for calls that he's getting during the game. And it just feels like, as a guy who just likes to watch, enjoys basketball, because there's a lot of people being like, what's his future this summer? He would undoubtedly make the magic better. And I just can't, I can never talk myself into it. So I'm happy about the win, but I'm mostly just happy that I don't have to watch that anymore. Wow. Goldsberry, if I heard that correctly...

That was Cerruti saying that win was a double win because Trae Young was so annoying in that game, Orlando might not trade for him this summer. So we won twice. That's how I interpreted that. Dude, I've never seen a player taunt a ref. Like with the ball, he was like going to pass it to him and he spun it back to himself like a big brother to a little brother. And that's when he got tossed. That was great. Yeah.

It's a tough one. Well, it's one of those things that'll go into the offseason now and it'll be a narrative. And I think he was going to be in trade rumors anyway for a bunch of different reasons. And, you know, I remember Paul Pierce hit this point with the Celtics when the mid-2000s things weren't going great. And then he had that thing with the Indiana where he showed up for the press conference with his head bandaged. And it was like, oh man, is he trying to get traded? What's going on here? They ended up keeping him. But we've seen different players hit

this specific point. And it does feel like fork in the road now for Trey. He was 2018 draft. This is seven years. You know, I, I don't know what you get for him. You, you start is like, is jaw. Yeah.

Is it like a jaw type of level for a trade? Is it a level below? Is LaMelo too high? Do you try to do your version of that, the Jante Murray, like some picks and an asset? Just get out of it? What would you do, Kirk? Jalen Suggs. What do you think, Cerruti? Jalen Suggs. Oh, God, no way. He's hanging up. I mean, I'm not going to go like Dallas Mavericks fan level on that, but I would stop watching the team if they traded Jalen Suggs for Trey Young. That's, I mean...

No way. I mean, that is the Mavericks level just for the record. It's you can't trade a guy who and I know you're just where this is like a hypothetical, but like a guy who's like kind of the heart and soul of like the energy of the team for a guy who I just don't know what trade is like. I, you know, obviously at the conference final a couple years ago, and I think he's really talented. He led the league in assists this year. Obviously, maybe there's a situation that works for him, but I can't. It's just like a basketball fan be like, yeah, I can't night in night out for that. I just can't. It's it's

it was uncomfortable to watch. I mean, that's why it was so great because Anthony Black, a couple of times, who had a great game, by the way. He did. Anthony Black, Cole Anthony, and Wendell Carter carried Paulo and Franz. I mean, more Franz a little bit. I mean, Paulo was good early and then got the cut above his eye, so who knows. But those guys were awesome. But it was great to see the action of Anthony Black kind of got Trey tossed from the game. And I don't know, man. I'd rather root for dudes that just kind of

I hate to be the old man, but play the game the right way. But like, that's just, I don't want to watch. I don't want to watch foul baiting. I don't want to watch. I don't want to watch somebody yelling at the ref the entire game. And, you know, I guess that the Magic would, they need another elite guard. They need somebody. They need to get the ball out of Paulo and Fran's hands all the time. They leave those guys on islands to like at the end of shot clocks and they just do them a disservice all the time. That might be a coaching thing though. I don't know. I don't even know if that's a roster thing. Like, it would be nice if the offense evolved even a tiny bit.

I'd love Cole Anthony, who is basically carrying them at parts of the game. Why does he come in with two minutes left in the third quarter if you go up this massive run and now the Hawks are back in the game? Questions I have after the game, but he ended up doing it anyway. But yeah, I can't do it with Trey. Kurt, you're in the front office. Everybody gets together and you have the Trey Young conversation. And the problem with the Trey Young conversation, the stats are there.

And the conference finals thing is the thing that screws it up because you can't say good stats, bad team guy, because he made the conference finals and you probably have to go back and really look through, well, how'd they make the conference finals? What happened? And then you have to really analyze that goofy Sixers series, which was, you know, the end of Ben Simmons's career. It was a shortened season. And how do you,

How do you judge, was this just a fluke or are we not giving him enough credit because he was one of the four teams left in a playoffs?

I don't know what the answer is. Yeah, I think he deserves a lot of credit for that run. I mean, what we saw him do in the Knicks series and like getting becoming that villain and becoming a guy who's capable of winning those big games. There was a little bit tonight where I thought he was going to get it going in that third quarter. So Rudy, where they opened it up and finally got your team running up and down the court. And he was at the forefront of that.

And then, yeah, like it's not ethical hoops. Like he, the, when the bonus light comes on, he totally changes into the worst, most annoying player with all due respect to Chris ball somehow is taking it to another level. When the bonus light comes on, Trey young shines even brighter. Um, but there is some value there. There is a team that would take a chance on them. Uh, maybe it's somebody like Portland or Sacramento. I don't know. Uh,

I don't like the player. I think what the Hawks have that makes it really interesting is they have this incredible defense waiting to be there with these wings, with Risha Shea, Jalen Johnson, obviously Dyson Daniels, Okongwu. They have this fleet of young athletes that are ready to shine. I don't feel like Trey fits into that. So I'm among the other... I believe that he will be mentioned in a lot of trades this summer. Yeah, and I just wonder...

Who the team is. So, Suridi, Anthony Black and a contract. No? You're hanging up. Yeah, I'm not even taking that phone call. Before the Luka thing, there was some talk about maybe the Lakers sniffing around late kind of LeBron thing. I never believed that. I mean, Sacramento can never be ruled out with their last 12 years track record. You can't rule them out. San Antonio would be the wild card for me.

I know. For people who aren't watching this on video, Kirk just made a face and leaned backwards in disgust when I mentioned that. I think that's the problem, dude. Like when you talk about it with Cerruti's team, it's like there's this visceral reaction. When you talk about it with my team, there's this visceral reaction. Yeah. It might get to a point where if you feel like you can get him for 50 cents on the dollar, like, you know, his contract's not that much longer. I don't know.

Yeah. Isn't that, isn't that kind of what happened though? A couple of years ago where like it was Russell Westbrook and it was like, well, you know, would like a bad team just take a flyer on him just to kind of be interesting. But there aren't that many teams. I mean, the Sacramento is probably the one, but there aren't that many teams that are just like, Hey, we're so bad that we just need to be interesting. So let's just take a flyer on Trey young. It feels like you talked about a bill. Like there's just a lot of talent in the league. A lot of these teams are, you know, headed in the right direction. Even like, you know, the wizards and the Hornets, like why would they, why would they do that? Um,

There isn't just that team that's like, hey, let's just do this because we have nothing else going on. And there really hasn't been teams like that for a few years now, it feels like. Yeah, plus with the apron, everything's harder, like moving contracts, you know, everything. Suri, did you want to make the case for Orlando in round one against the Celtics? I was texting with our good buddy, Kevin Clark, and the thing I said was,

I don't think they have any shot in the series, but I weirdly think that they could win two games. I feel pretty good about that. I think it could be a six-game series and it'll be tough for the Celtics, but I just don't think... I don't know how the Magic score with them. I mean, I don't know how... If the Celtics play defense, yeah. Your best chance is almost on the road in Boston where the Celtics just seem to fall asleep every home game for whatever reason. They'll probably steal a game, one or two, and then who knows? People might start losing their minds and say some irresponsible stuff, but...

I can't imagine everyone's locked into the magic all year long, but the offensive laws that they go through, it's uncomfortable to watch at times. You're just like, how is this? I think Zach mentioned it. I forget if it was you or whoever, but it's just like,

Can we just get some sort of offensive coach in there to figure some things out? Why does everyone that comes to Orlando, like KCP, what was he, one of seven, I think, from three? I mean, Paul and Franz were 0 for seven or eight combined. It's just like, why does everybody go there just immediately? And it's not even like, some of them are open shots. They're just missing open shots. And I, you know,

As much as I like to think, I think they were 2-1 against the Celtics this year. A couple of those, Tatum wasn't around. Listen, it's a couple years of Orlando having good games against the Celtics. My dad, of course, who's always skies falling in his text sometimes as we get to our playoff time, he really wanted Atlanta to win because he's like,

Orlando makes me nervous. Sorry. We've had trouble against them over and over. Now, this is with Suggs. Suggs was always a big piece of that, is the difference. Atlanta is a great... When Alabama plays an FCS team in the first week, that's a perfect first-round opponent. You get warmed up a little bit. You don't really get beat up. The problem with the Magic is you're going to get beat up for...

five games or so, five or six games, and it might kind of hurt you later on in the playoffs. That's certainly a team that isn't going to be awesome bruise-wise in round two and round three, but I just can't see the magic without Suggs, the scoring situation. I can't see it happening. Plus, it seems like the Celts are happy. Kirk, Celtics sweep, plus 126 on FanDuel.

4-1 is plus 168. And Cerruti's two-game prediction, that would net you plus 610. Celtics 4-2. Wow. That's a pretty good price. A lot can happen in these games. People forget how few sweeps there are sometimes. I think that the case for the Magic winning one is like what they did to the Hawks three-point shooters tonight. They had four made threes, Bill. That's like only out of the 1,200 NBA games we watched all year long, only...

Um, I think 13 times that a team, either team make, uh, four or fewer threes. So Orlando has been the best three point defense in the NBA all year. Um, they've suppressed attempts and makes at a very high level. Um,

That said, I think, you know, the Hawks are not the Celtics. The Celtics and Missoula have a way of going from good to great against every defense. And it's terrifying. But the case is they will sort of force Boston into, you know, and you watched them all year. If Boston has a below average three-point shooting night, if they hit 26% of their threes, they're beatable. Yeah.

And I think if Orlando can get some better scoring, if they have Cole Anthony playing like this or Wendell Carter Jr. playing like he played tonight, they could steal one game. I think this is a five-game series, but I wouldn't surprise if it were four or six. I would say it's a five-game series in my head.

It's also an interesting big brother, little brother dynamic with the Jason Tatum, Paulo thing. Both Duke guys, they're friendly. I think Paulo was asked about it after the game, and he said the ultimate compliment or whatever would be just playing well against him. It's a guy who I think a lot of Magic fans hope Paulo...

that his career steers towards the Jason Tatum. Like he's never going to be that defensively, but at least just kind of like the, you know, the, the caliber of player, the, you know, MVP first team on BA is like that thing. Uh, it's interesting storyline to watch. I, I just, I just watched Apollo too many times. I just go, God, like I, I understand the criticism about the, the, um, like the shooting and the shot selection at times, but they just leave them hanging out to dry. So he's asked to do so freaking much all the time. And like, that's why when Cole comes in and gives them like a secondary ball handler creator, uh,

Like, and Cole was pretty inconsistent. He was awesome tonight. If they just had a guy that can, I don't know who that is necessarily. I wanted it to be Malik Monk in the offseason. Who can just like ease the load. Here we go. Gonna keep asking me. Ask me, I don't know. Who knows? Let's see how this series goes and how depressing it is. Jonathan Kaminga? He's available. Yeah. It's just interesting dynamic to watch those two Duke guys going at it. What's your Tatum plan for this series? Well,

I would just throw, I mean, Isaac and just hopefully you could just bother the heck out of him. Isaac's been, he hasn't been as consistent this year as he was last, although he played a lot of games. So I guess he stayed healthy. So credit to him. But I would do that. Maybe a little bit of Franz. I mean, they're certainly big. They've got the size to, you saw it tonight. I mean, they...

The Hawks are a different team, obviously, than the Celtics. But man, it's hard to get good shots against them. And Kirk said it. They're the best defensive three-point shooter. They're the worst three-point shooting team on offense, but they also defend and don't let teams make threes. So they're kind of old school in that way. So that's the path. It's just, can they just get the Celtics to not shoot well and play good three-point defense and hopefully they can get some shot variants on offense? Four for 21 from three. Iconic.

It's a box score right out of the early 2010s. All right. So Rudy, I guess we're natural rivals for the next two weeks. I look forward to it. All right. Thanks for popping on. Later. Kirk, you did a shooting column on the ringer.com. Yeah. A great website. And you gave out the shooting excellence awards, including the Wardell Award for Best Shooter of the Year, Steph Curry, which is the number one award in the world.

you know, the most important. That's like your best picture, basically. Is anyone ever going to win this award other than Steph Curry? How did you frame this in your mind mentally? Could somebody win it when he's still playing? Could somebody come and take it? And if somebody did take it, who would that be?

Yeah, it's like the batting title in the Ted Williams era, right? Like, this is just feels like this is going to go to him. But, you know, in the piece, I looked at some potential young players coming along and there's some surprising names that, you know, there's the Devin Bookers of the world that you think of. But, dude, I'll give you a name that is really relevant for the playoffs, who is suddenly an incredible jump shooter. And that's Anthony Edwards, who is combining...

uh, volume and efficiency and age. I would throw that in there at a ridiculous level. And some people are in the season sort of lamented that the fact that this hyper-athletic, uh,

you know, highlight machine was taken so many threes, but he's good at it. And so he comes to mind as somebody who like it or not could be the best shooter in the NBA in four or five years. If he continues this trajectory. I mean, I don't know if you saw the stats, but like very few players in NBA history have had more than 300 threes in a season. And, and now he's on that list.

And he creates a lot of them, and specifically with his step-back bill, which is a very difficult shot that only players like Luka and Stefan and Harden have really been able to do reliably well. He's actually hitting that at a rate that's better than all those guys. And that really caught my eye this year. So Anthony Edwards...

could take the torch in a weird way. I would not said that last year, but doing the research for the piece, I was like, it's undeniable that this guy is ahead of schedule as a jump shooter. I looked at his stuff long and hard because I was debating. I gave him a test drive for that last first team all NBA spot. I gave him a test drive for fifth spot MVP. So I was looking at all the stats and

First of all, he won the three-point title this year for three-pointers made, which Curry has owned. If Curry's healthy, he just wins that every year as long as he plays 68 games, 65, whatever. Edwards hit 320. Malik Beasley at 319. Curry at 311. And nobody else had over 266. But

I don't think people realize how many threes he takes and makes. People like us realize it, but I don't think, if you ask the average person on the street who made more threes this year, Steph Curry or Anthony Edwards, I don't think anyone would say Anthony Edwards. So you have that, but he also took, he made 415 free throws, which was sixth. He took 496 free throws, which was fifth.

So he's moved into that kind of late 2010s James Harden. Harden was the all-timer for this, but threes and free throws. Yeah. A little bit of that. But then he's also doing all this other stuff, including the defense and the athleticism. And I just, I was really, really happy with where we landed in this Ant journey. And now we have this Lakers series where we're going to find out, can he go up a little bit of a level here?

Yeah. And that's, it's, it's a perfect stage for him to, to, to, to check in and see if where he's at, because there's a chance that the, the wolves will win this series and he's going to be just the, the, the, the star of the show on, on some of the biggest stages in the first round of these playoffs.

Um, and you know, when he came out of Georgia and was the number one pick, I didn't think that he would be the best shooter in sort of his cohort of early twenties players. I didn't think that was going to happen. I always thought it was going to be an athlete. Um, but he's great. And then the other name you mentioned that I don't think people quite realize how great of a shooting season we just had was Malik Beasley. And if you look at just the catch and shoot stats,

It's better than any Klay Thompson season except for one. Malik Beasley, it's not an exaggeration to say when you look at the volume of threes he's taking and the percentage he's making, it's like having Klay Thompson out there. In fact, it's like a better version of Klay Thompson for most of Klay Thompson's career. And I think that helps explain what's happened in Detroit. Because he's doing it at the end of games too.

Yeah. And he doesn't even start, which is why he's a six man of the year candidate. Um, but he finishes a lot of games and he gives Cade Cunningham a, just a great spacing weapon. Um, but it's also just a, uh, you know, Malik's been a great catch and shoot guy in the league for a while. Yeah. One down year in the Lakers. Um,

But this is not, this is, he's taken it to another level. So he's another one that sort of popped in this awards and it gave him the best catch and shoot guy. Cause I don't think people realize, and we'll see that in a big series too with the New York Knicks. Yeah. To bill is, is can he continue this under the bright lights? I couldn't believe that he wasn't the favorite for six million of the year. I voted for him. I voted for him over Pritchard. I watched, I obviously watched the Celtics the most. I thought Pritchard had an excellent, excellent season off the bench, but Beasley,

you know, the Celtics could survive whether Pritchard was good or not. He could go one for eight for three points and it just wouldn't matter.

The Pistons couldn't survive Beasley having a bad game against a good team. Like they actually really, really needed him. He was probably, you know, Durin is their second most important player, I think, because of all the rim protection, rebounding, the alley-oop stuff that he gives them. And Beasley's probably, it's probably 2A Durin and 2B Beasley. But with the shot, and I've talked about it before, but the shocking thing was how they would run offense for him in big spots at the end of games. Like they,

they really would come out of timeouts and be like, we're running this play and you're going to like the same way you would treat Clay Thompson. So to me, it wasn't close. I thought I, I didn't think it was close. I thought he was clearly six man of the year. Yeah. Anybody doubts go to basketball reference and look at clay and then look at Malik. Um, there've been only nine instances of a player hitting more than 39% of their threes while also hitting more than 300 threes in a single year. Curry's done it six times.

Clay has done it one time. And then this year, Bill, Anthony Edwards and Malik Beasley both did that. So I think that was a stat that was like, oh my God, yeah, there's more threes than ever. Nobody wants to hear me complain about that anymore. I get it. But we're seeing the emergence of more of these great shooting campaigns. And this year it was Beasley and Edwards. Yeah, he, you know, one of the things that screws up the six man stuff when you look at it

is some guys will have these games as starters and their stats will jump way up when they're the starter. And then when they're the reserve, the stats are different. You can look at all this stuff with the splits.

Beasley, it didn't really matter. He was just as impactful no matter how many minutes he got when he brought him off the bench. He started 18 games. Stats were like four points better, but it wasn't dramatic. And he was... He didn't have... Pritchard had that one game where he had like 45 against Portland, right? Yeah, that's the thing. Nas Reed had a couple of those where he started and had big games. Beasley was... You know, he averaged 16 points a game. And I don't think he played... Did he play...

I'm looking at it now. Sorry. 27.8 minutes. I don't know. Shot 41.6 from three. Took nine a game. Like that's, these are crazy numbers for a six man. It's one of the better six man seasons we've had. So any other shooting seasons stand out for you?

Well, relevant to this weekend, I'm going to say Tyler Harrow has had a breakout year, but he's mastered the floater, which is really interesting and kills a lot of drop coverage. And he's just the best at that. The floater sort of replaced the pull-up jumper for young guards. You know, Chris Paul's generation would always pull up at the elbow off two feet.

Tyler Harrow and John Morant's generation is definitely running towards the basket, throwing up the floater. The stats back that up. And this year, nobody has been better than that, than Tyler Harrow. And I think in the Butler absence, if you look at the Miami Heat's numbers over the last 15, 16 games, their numbers jump off the page. And

I think whoever wins that game in Chicago has a really good chance, Bill, of taking the eighth seat in the East from Atlanta. And I think Tyler Harrow and the Heat. I forgot we're not done with Atlanta yet. We have them again. We have them again no matter what. We were saying goodbye to them for the year, but now we're going to have them again.

And both Chicago and Miami are playing above that 9-10 level right now. And so I think whoever wins that game is going to have a lot of momentum going into Atlanta. And I could see that being Miami. And I could see Miami going into Cleveland and stealing a game. By the way, I noticed the same thing with Miami because that line, I think it's like Chicago by one. I loved...

I loved Orlando tonight and I also like Golden State, but they were favored by like six, seven. It's not amazing to be like, I think the two favorites are going to win. Tomorrow's a harder match of games. And I really liked the Chicago thing. I think they're fun to watch, but the same thing, you made the key point with Miami. The numbers are pretty good for them.

Just his last 15 and bam, I think finally looked like bam and had a couple of real kick-ass games, but in jet, you know, a couple of times they played teams that are trying to tank stuff like that. But, um, I, I just would be surprised if they lost tomorrow. I'll say that.

Yeah, me too. I think I'll go a step further. You have Spoh, you have these guys that have gone very far in the playoffs, still on that roster versus the Chicago group that you can't say that about. So I feel like I am picking Miami. You know, I like Chicago again. I think they're playing better than, than, than the nine spot right now. Giddy's hurt and playing, which that part makes me nervous where he's like questionable, but he's going to play it. I don't like that.

Yeah. And then, yeah. So I love that. But I was here. What else in the piece is interesting? By the way, the other one, I refuse to make a pick. But if you actually forced me to make a pick, I'd probably take Sacramento. Yeah. I don't feel great about it, though. The last thing from the shooting piece that I think you'll enjoy is the best shooting big man in the NBA this year. Yeah. You'll remember a couple of years ago, Carl Towns claimed to be the best big man shooter of all time.

That wasn't true? So did we debunk that? To those of us who watched basketball before 2000. There were other good shooting big men before Towns. Oh, Dirk Nowitzki. I forgot. Oh, yeah, that's right. The MVP who won a title. But Nikola Jokic, among his many feats, is literally the most efficient jump shooter in the NBA among...

all the people that took 400 jump shots this season, which I forget, 98 players. So of the 98 players that took at least 400 jumpers, nobody's more efficient than Nikola Jokic. But he also, that doesn't include that he was like 42% from three? That includes the threes. It includes all jump shots. And I think that is an astounding fact. I know you and Ryan are debating the MVP votes, but

I didn't know that going into that. I'm not debating anymore because we had to mail it in today. Oh. Yeah. And you ended up with Nikola, right? I'm going to save it for Thursday's pod. Okay. But you bet you... I mean, some of the stats with him, like that shooting stat you just mentioned, there's like nine different things you could say about his season from either using counting stats or advanced stats that are just dumbfounding. I mean, nobody had...

I'm pretty sure nobody had been in the top five in points, assists, and rebounds per game in the same season. And he's in the top three. But he was also second in steals. And then he also shot 42% from three. And then he was also like, it was like a 19-point difference when he was on or off the court offensively for them. It's just like, you start going through this stuff and it was like, he did eight things that just don't happen ever. Yeah.

That's I think the last one you said for me, I really think the MVP vote comes down to how you look at the word value and valuable in this context. And for me as a stats guy, those on off differentials with with with the Joker are so extreme.

That is, it proves to me that way I think of value. And again, I think this is a year where we have really unique two candidates. Both are deserving. Two, by the way, yeah. A plus candidates. This is not a, I have to talk myself into an MVP player.

Yeah. Yeah. But, but, but, but I always come back to, and I think you alluded to this with the two through 12 thing, but yeah, like when Nicola is sitting down for the Denver nuggets, they're immediately a lottery team. They're immediately a lottery team until he takes off the towel and stands up and goes to the scorer's table and comes back into the game. And then they're a playoff team again. It's, did you, did you vote for the ringer? 100? I can't remember.

Should we make a list or should we stay? I didn't do it. It's too tense for you? Well, I sent my last list and it's interesting. So 100 players. I obviously took it seriously and really tried to rank everyone correctly and put time into it. OKC had seven of the top 96 for me.

They had number two, 17, 18, 62, 65, 79, and 96. Because I put Kaysan Wallace in my top 100 because I think he's unbelievable. Denver had one, 41, 60, and 78. And Jamal's not even in the top 40 for me at this point just because he's been so erratic this year. Even when he starts playing well, then he gets some dumb injury again. The league is so deep, you start comparing him to...

Somebody like Desmond Bain tonight, who's had a really good season and showed up when it really mattered. But anyway, the point is, I thought that was interesting. This one jumped out at me too. I had seven Houston guys in my top 100. 31, 43, 72, 73, 81, 83, and 95. It's not nothing. And then you look at Golden State, six, 28, 40, and we're done. Three guys. Right.

So that's not everything, but it is kind of instructive when you start looking at talent in a big picture of guys, teams compared to other teams. And one team has seven top 100 guys, the other team has three. Now, granted, one of them is number six.

It's one of the themes for me this season, too, Bill, is like if you look at the top four teams, top two on both sides, there's something in common is they're all pretty young. I think the Boston Celtics have a couple of older guys in Horford. Yeah. And Drew. Yeah. But like when you look at the absolute core of the Cavs, the Celtics, but also obviously in the West, the Rockets and the—

And the Thunder, it's a young man's game, dude. It's a young man's game. And in these playoff series, like where I can see myself talking, talking myself into the Rockets beating the Warriors is like, dude, there's just these young bucks who have a lot more energy or a lot more resilient. Like when Jod turned his ankle and like for an older player, that's probably the game, right? You can't come back from that. It's like a week. Yeah. Yeah. You're coming off on the wheelchair.

Yeah, those are the moments. And I think there is a case for depth being more important than ever right now in the NBA. And I think the Rockets have that and the Warriors don't. But yeah, I think that's an interesting way to look at these playoff matchups, too, is who has the most depth. And what you just said about the Rockets is another reason I'm going to talk myself into taking them, I bet. Yeah, I mean, they're bringing in Tari Isid for...

17, 18 minutes a game. And it's just like, it's like you're unleashing him for those minutes. And it's like, oh, let's put him and Thompson together. Watch this. Yeah, I don't know what I'm going to do. I hate any series taking the team that doesn't have the best player. The Warriors clearly have the best player. And then when you saw how Jimmy could flip the switch tonight with all the time off between the games, but

The fact that Steve doesn't seem to really trust what his roster is makes me nervous. Because I felt like he had a handle on it three weeks ago. It really did. I felt that Laker game when they beat the Lakers a couple weeks ago. And I was like, oh, this team knows who it is. They know who their guys are. And now we're heading into the playoffs and I'm not sure they know. So I guess we'll find out. We'll find out, man. Kirk, I kept you up too late. We're going to go.

Unless you got any University of Texas updates for us. No, I mean, it was great to see the Longhorn Corey Joseph back on the television screen tonight. I haven't seen Corey Joseph in a while. There's our update. There's a Corey Joseph update. But yeah, Bill, thanks. And I can't wait for these playoffs to start, buddy. All right. Great to see you. Your beard's looking as good as ever. Nice little salt and peppery. Really nice. Thank you, brother. Good to see you. Thanks for staying up with me.

All right, my friend Nick Khan is here. He is the president of WWE. They have WrestleMania coming up. Do you want to hear my WrestleMania 40 years ago story? Please. I didn't have a lot going on. No girlfriends to be seen. And the fact that they had a WrestleMania pay-per-view with Hulk Hogan and Mr. T was in the running for biggest thing that happened to me in 1985, maybe not related to the Celtics or Boston team. Couldn't wait.

Felt like there was a real moment where wrestling fans were kind of shoved to the side. We were kind of at the kids' table. We were the booger eaters. We weren't taken seriously. And then all of a sudden MTV and Hogan, and it's like, no, no, no. Now it's our time. The wrestling fans matter. But you were also a wrestling fan, so you remember it. By the way, WrestleMania I was so big. You watch it, I assume, on closed circuits.

We somehow had cable in Connecticut because I was going to high school in Connecticut. Amazing. We somehow were able to order it on cable and watch it that way. But I don't think everyone had that option. Some people had to go to weird closed circuit places and stuff. Yeah, I was closed circuit LA Sports Arena because at that time we were living in Los Angeles as kids. So what was the crowd the most fired up for at the LA Sports Arena? You know, look, the Hogan, Mr. T, with Snooka in the corner.

against Orndorff, Piper, and Bob Orton in the corner was huge. But that Andre the Giant moment, there's something about that. I think it was $15,000 body slam challenge or body slam match with John Studd. That felt big also. - Yeah, the closed circuit era is so hard to explain to young people. I saw Duran Leonard won,

I saw... 1981. I saw Hearns Leonard, the Boston Garden closed circuit. So that was what, November 1981, something like that? Yes. Um...

Saw that in the garden and just about everybody was rooting for Hearns and I was outraged. - But by the way, think about it, like we would pay tickets to go watch TV in an arena. - Yeah, on like a really crappy screen and it wasn't even, it wasn't like it is now. Like if you did like a watch party now. - It's great, it's great now, but it was a blurry screen back then. - Do you guys do that? You have watch parties now? - Yeah, we have a lot of international watch parties with Netflix for the upcoming WrestleMania. We did a deal with Cosm, if you know Cosm.

Of course I don't. - Right, Cosm is sort of like a sphere-like bar and lounge. It's in a few select cities, including Los Angeles, Atlanta, WrestleMania will be there, it's already sold out, but it's a great viewing experience. So we do them, and we do them domestically as well. - Well, I want to talk about WrestleMania in a second, but since the last time you came on, we actually finished a Mr. McMahon documentary for Netflix.

It was a multi-year odyssey. I still can't believe it ran. Six episodes, six hours, a big history of WWE. Vince was prominently involved. You guys were, Vince was gone at that point, but, yeah,

The whole situation was pretty weird, and I think pulling it off was one of the craziest achievements I've ever been involved with. I still can't believe it actually aired. It felt like it was dead seven times. A lot. A lot. By the way, it's a testament to you. It's a testament to Netflix to get that done. Obviously, in getting it done, the latter part, which you just referenced,

was quite bumpy, you know, for everybody. But it got done and it seemed to get, you know, quite high viewership numbers on Netflix. So what was the response like internally? And like, you're in charge of WWE, you're doing this giant documentary that's, you know, it's warts and all of a pretty controversial guy who's involved in a big legal proceeding. And did you get people going like, why are you doing this? Why hasn't this been killed? Well, look,

- Episodes one through five, it was all fine. - Yeah. - And then, you know, episode six obviously had a lot of, you know, tawdry allegations in there. So, you know, the most important thing at the company was, hey, this is not for us to spike it. That's not what the deal was, and the deal that was struck with Netflix was prior to me joining WWE on a full-time basis. So it was sort of trying to help everyone stay calm who was watching it, and hey, we'll get through this thing

and get to the other side of it, which hopefully now we are. - What kind of feedback did you get from people on it? - It went everywhere from, hey, it was phenomenally done like you did with Andre,

the giant documentary on HBO Sports to, oh my God, this thing, it's not true, it's not factual, this and that. There were people who loved it as an objectively told profile of a person and people who were close to the subject who didn't like it, which I understand and I would think you understand. Yeah, it certainly ran the gamut of emotions. I was really proud of how it was done and I thought it was the hardest thing

I've ever been involved with just to make. Especially when the story kept changing. My compliments to you. There were a lot of bumps in there. There were a lot of, you know, it was not easy. And you stayed steady. You got through it, as did Netflix. And, you know, here we are. Yeah, you know, these things are documents. I feel the same way about the Celtics thing we're doing right now, where it's like, you know, you hope that 20 years from now people will watch it. It'll be some sort of snapshot of what happened. Were you happy with the way the Celtics one turned out?

I really was actually. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's different because these big ass documentaries spread over a bunch of years. Like they, they, there's a certain level of expectations that come with them now. And you kind of have to,

exceed those. People just assume they're going to be infomercials or they're not going to be good and they're prone to not want to watch it over a while. You almost have to convince them, no, no, this is a good one. You should watch this. So I'm proud of it though. Look, for whatever it's worth, I too thought it was phenomenal. I put it up there and HBO Sports, as you know, you're one of the co-creators of 30 for 30, but HBO Sports was the sports documentary home for everything prior to 30 for 30. That bird versus magic

documentary that Ezra did 10, 15 years ago, whatever that was. I thought that was the best basketball documentary I had seen. I put this one up there with that, and I also loved Once Brothers. I'm not suggesting... Oh, thank you. Yeah, we did that one. I know you did. Yeah, that was a fun one. Loved it. I thought it was a deep emotional story, but the Celtics one, it was not told simply through

the lens of a fan. - Yeah. - Which I think, I don't wanna say was difficult for you, I wouldn't know that, but I know you're a huge Celtics fan, so to be able to tell the story objectively, you know, warts and all was impressive to me. - Yeah, we wanted to do, like just have an interview with 100 people,

tell the story of the city as it intersected with the team. And, you know, I think in trying to do these and we felt that same way when we did the Vince one, you don't just want to tell the story. You want to also be levitating above it, trying to actually say something. I think that's when it gets hard. And like in wrestling, there's been so many documentaries at this point, just about everybody's been done and they've been,

kind of varying degrees of quality. And the ones that seem to resonate the most, there's like two different audiences for it. There's like the diehard wrestling fans who like, like dark side of the ring and all like the nitty gritty stuff. And they're just going to eat those up. And those are basically for them only. And then the question with the wrestling stuff is how do you,

How do you get our wives to watch? How do you get our kids to watch? How do you get a much bigger audience for it than just the people that are gonna watch it anyway? - Totally, look, it's sort of the same thing we try to do weekly with WWE. You're gonna have the hardcore fans who watch no matter what, and they'll either love it, hate it, or they're somewhere in between, and then you try to broaden the audience, as I think, or at least I hope that we have over the last number of years, to get people like your son

back into it. He's out again. We got to talk about this. Well, I thought he was coming to WrestleMania. He is, but he's, you know, all the stages he's in the state, the stage now where the next stage will be like age, what? 24. When all of a sudden you come back hard.

So he's in the I'm too cool for this now? Yeah, we're going to have to, you might have to pile drive him. We'll have to have a private conversation with you and me on the side with him at WrestleMania. No, he's excited to go, but he's not on it like he used to be. He's above it now. Yeah, he's too cool for it now. I understand. But the thing is, he's not too cool. That's the thing. No one's too cool for wrestling. It's the cycle of being a wrestling fan. So now he's here, and then eventually he'll be back here. I know I've mentioned it before, but WrestleMania, I think it was 2016 in Dallas.

So your son would have been nine years. - That was the wheelhouse, yeah, my son was nine. That was the wheelhouse for him. - You were sending me videos from your hotel room of him doing, Ben, your son doing all the wrestling moves on your guy's hotel bed. Now my son, who you know, Sonny, is nine. So I get to experience that firsthand in seeing him, my son, do all the things Ben was doing nine years ago. - Well, and then Sonny also, when we saw him,

he deceived us on what the WrestleMania was gonna be. So you've already trained him to swerve. People trust little kids with information. We thought we were getting inside info for how WrestleMania was gonna play out, and what he told us wasn't true. I really respected it. - Well, by the way, there's a precursor to that conversation. He said to me, "Hey, if Bill Simmons asks me "what's gonna happen in Royal Rumble, do we trust him? "Do we tell him?" I said, "We trust him, but we don't tell him."

And he said, okay, then I'm going to tell him Cena's taking the whole thing. And I said, okay, great. He never said any of that, but I'm just kidding. I wouldn't believe that. But that's what happened. He told us Cena was winning Royal Rumble.

And we were like, wow, Nick Khan's kid. He's got to get that kid in line. He told us the wrong thing or he told us the right thing and then it turned out to be the wrong thing. Listen, someone in this room and to the listeners, there's only two of us in this room, told me years ago, hey, keep in mind, everybody tells somebody. It's the Jacoby Trust Triangle. The Jacoby Trust Triangle. So we had to keep it tight that Cena was not winning the World Rumble. So that was the biggest decision you guys have made with a character.

in the company.

I don't even know since when. This was somebody that you protected for 20 years. You never turned him over. He was always a good guy. Even as the crowd, he's polarizing and is 50-50. But that was the cool thing. But he always tried to stand for something. He was a role model. It helped. The thing I always heard was the merchandise made it so much easier to just sell a bunch of stuff because there was always this next generation of kids coming. And then you finally turned him right near the end out of nowhere. So here's what I thought was interesting about that whole process.

Number one, John Cena's merchandise still off the charts. Wow. Top of show at every event or almost every event. The sort of collective decision to make that heel turn. Yeah. Triple H, Cena, Dwayne Johnson, Cody, everyone immediately on board with the whole thing.

So had they pushed Cena to do that before or no? Not since I had been at WWE and not since Triple H had been, you know, in charge of creative. So I don't know, you know, 10, 15 years ago, you know, perhaps, but certainly not in the last five years. Cause when they did it at WCW with Hogan, that was kind of a form of desperation. Like he was really Peter Hulkamania had petered out with WWE and then was petering out with WCW again. And they flipped it at the perfect time and just,

By the way, that is one of the greatest heel turns in the history of wrestling. But as you just articulated, it sort of had to be done. Cena on his final run with us, you even saw the fans prior to the heel turn, the ones who were saying Cena sucks and we love Cena. There was no more Cena sucks.

It was 98% overwhelmingly positive reaction to John Cena for at least the last couple of years. So to do it when, again, Triple H and Cena and everyone else decided to do it, I thought was phenomenally effective and really smart. Yeah, because we went to the show in LA the day before the fires, which seems like it was seven years ago. Yep. And you guys had your first Netflix show.

Cena, there was a popularity with him that it felt like a little nostalgia tinged with, we kind of know this is the end. And it was probably the most tied into him

that I felt like I had seen a crowd in a long time where people were like, we love this guy. We know we can see the finish line now. And it was one of, that was the two legacies from that night were that. And then Hogan just got booed out of the arena, which I can't imagine you guys ever thought would happen. Right? Yeah. Look, it was also rock showed up that night. Right.

Travis Scott with Jey Uso, if you remember him coming through the crowd, doing sort of the yeet thing with Jey. I thought there were a number of moments that resonated. But yes, Cena sort of announcing, it had been announced, but sort of physically announcing like, hey, this is it. This year is going to be it. And you're not going to see me again in the WWE wrestling ring. You'll see him across our stuff.

you know, well past the end of this year. But to turn, if that was January 6th, Elimination Chamber was March 1st. And that's when the big yield turn was over the course of seven weeks, you know, massive, massive turn. We always talk about wrestling. It's like the NBA where you have like draft classes or eras or generations and the talent kind of ebbs and flows. And I can't tell. I think that the company right now seems like it's as successful as it's ever been.

Right. And it seems like wrestling, at least for you guys, the WWE version of it is the most successful it's ever been. I don't know how much of that is how you've handled the behind the scenes the last five years, you and Triple H and some others.

Or is it just a talent boom? Obviously, it's both, but what's the seesaw? Like being smart behind the scenes versus like, if you had this much talent, it's probably going to happen anyway, right? Like, what's the seesaw? I think, look, to me, it always comes down to the talent and the creative. That's what drives WWE. So if you think about it, Roman Reigns went through some illness and came out on the other side of that positively.

CM Punk had left the company, as you know, 10 plus years ago, and it seemed like he would never return. He returns. Dwayne Johnson hadn't wrestled. You know, he showed up at the SmackDown premiere on Fox if it was 2019, 2019 at what was the Staples Center, but he hadn't done anything, you know, long term with us in a long time. Cody Rhodes had left to go elsewhere.

And Seth Rollins sort of elevated himself on his own. Just a handful. Rhea Ripley, you know, pops. Liv Morgan comes along. So there's something definitely special going on with the talent right now. But if you look at- And Roman's crew, I think, was another one. That was one of the best crews ever.

That's another 50, 60 years of wrestling, Cruz. You know, like the four people, the five people, and it's like, oh, these guys might turn on each other. Oh, no, they're fine. No, they might turn it. Like, that's the legacy of wrestling. - The bloodline, to your point, it goes up there with DX. It goes up there with the Four Horsemen. It goes up there with any of those great factions that you said, oh my God, this is special, and you know it's not gonna last forever.

But as long as it did last, it was phenomenal, phenomenal content. NWO before they started letting everyone in. NWO, it was 58 numbers. It became like the Soho house. It's like, wait, is there anything special about being in this place? Full Soho house. Everybody's getting in. It's like, oh, there's Virgil. Scott Norton, Vincent, not Virgil and WCW, but yes. Yeah, that was pretty rough. They kind of lost the narrative fast. Yeah, no, it seems like this is the best run, but you still needed the main guy.

And it felt like the big thing this decade was just getting Cody Rhodes and get it, first of all, stealing him from your competition, but then also seeing that you could build him as like the face of the company, which I gotta be honest, I didn't see. I thought he could be like one of the guys. I didn't realize he could be

the center of everything, which I think he is. - Yeah, I think what's really amazing about Cody's story to me is he saw it before anyone else saw it. - Yeah. - And to ask to be let out of his WWE agreement

I guess it would be eight or nine years ago. It's a classic bet on yourself moment. Classic bet on yourself. And by the way, to your credit, you leave ESPN. You don't have to bring me into it. I'm just saying. It's a bet on yourself moment. These things, when people bet on themselves and it works out, and as you know, it doesn't work out.

for a lot of people. There's a lot of people who asked out at WWE and you sort of never heard from them again. A lot of people who left ESPN, you may never have heard from them again. You went, you built something, you monetized it, and now we're doing the podcast from your home. You know, eyeball test here, 24 bedrooms, this house. So that's a nice accomplishment. And for Cody, back to Cody. You know, he leaves. He doesn't like the Stardust thing. He thinks he can do much more than that. He leaves, he hits the indie circuit.

So whatever he was making at WWE at that time, he left that guaranteed money to go on a night-by-night basis. He took a full bet on himself. He went, he started part of another league. And then you sort of saw him fade out over there. And it's something that we talked about at WWE. It was like, well, this is interesting. It used to be, hey, this is about the wrestlers. This is about empowering the wrestlers. This is Cody's, one of the co-founders. And then that narrative shifted.

And that's when we decided, when we knew contractually we could make the call, to make the call and say, hey, why don't we get together and have a conversation? The deal was done in minutes. And boom, he returned WrestleMania 2022 at AT&T Stadium just three years ago. Right. And a year later was in the main event of WrestleMania 2023 at SoFi.

To his credit, he's never really talked about what happened with those guys. Yeah, he doesn't talk a lot of shit in a negative way, which is something I admire about him. He moved on and he's in a better spot. It felt like it probably got a little credit grabby over there. That was just knowing nothing, just from reading and following the breadcrumbs and reading stuff like Meltzer's newsletter and weird shit like that, where you're just like,

Ah, it seems like there's a lot of people in this kitchen right now claiming that they cook the pot roast. You know this drill. I saw you do it at Grantland. I saw you do it when you replicated Grantland at the Ringer.

Everyone knows who the founder is. You don't sit there saying, I this, I that, I this, I did Spotify, me, me, me, my, this. The people who do that, I've never really seen them succeed. I feel like the actual leaders, they're the ones, they'll take credit when something's a disaster, which you should as the leader of a company. When something is success, give credit to everybody else. It doesn't matter. Compliments are currency. Another Dave Jacoby.

James Babydoll Nixon too. That's one of his mantras. Babydoll, one of the all-time great characters in the modern history of the media business. Nice compliment. Nice currency. We're at the Masters. It's just a slew of, it's like watching the anchorman fight with all the anchors except nobody's fighting. Everybody's trying to get along but it's all these different people with competing agendas being like,

Hey, what's going on? Everyone's friends all of a sudden. Do you miss that? Do you miss being an agent? Does Babydoll smoke at the Masters? It's like a chimney. That's amazing. He was on fire. Do you miss being an agent, though? Listen, I loved being an agent when I was an agent, but when I decided to stop doing that five years ago, that was the end of that for me.

I have had the good fortune of sort of being a friend of court to a number of former clients if they need advice or want advice or just friends who may want advice from time to time. I'm always happy to get it. Or you'll just hire former clients. Just put them on camera. Put them in. Or like CM Punk, who for some reason you were always kind of involved in. That was one of those where I was like, Nick's nuts. Like this guy's...

this guy's a cancer. Like you can't let this guy. And it's been, seems like it's been great. By the way, it was so obvious to me that he wasn't a cancer. I had in having been an agent, assume I had dealt with some personalities that were not the easiest, you know, from time to time sports media. I can't believe that. That's part of the job. Um, I had always found it to be a gentleman. I always found it to be honest, responsive, uh,

And I felt if he was that way outside of the company, if given an opportunity to come back to the company, he would be that way. And he said that he would be, and he's been a gem to work with. I think, because I certainly feel this way about myself back in the earlier days, I think when people have trouble

dealing with somebody who's not good or doing a bad job or has no like and I for some reason back in the day I would take that really personally it would make me upset I would try to fix it I would get all wrapped up in it and I think as you get older you're like you know what most people are terrible and once you kind of realize that it's like I just got to navigate around it'll be fine once you realize that it's it's a different

Different way of living. And for whatever reason, it took me until my mid-40s to realize it. I think there's a constant through line in it, Bill. I think for the supremely talented people, punk, yourself. Oh, thanks for putting us together. Sure. Yeah, two of the greats. Two of the greats. Thanks. Two of the greats, right? Yourself, Triple H. The biggest challenge is to deal with mid-level management. Or lousy mid-level management. Yeah. Correct, right? You would, I said...

referred to at one point as like the khaki brigade the blue shirt and khaki police the blue shirt correct those are more the mid-level coming in like coming in to sit in on a meeting and have some bad ideas and screw everything up right and tell us the lead with the lakers you were young and creative and had ideas and many of them were great ideas and when you come up against no different than than phil i.e uh cm punk

and you come up against sort of bad mid-level management, they can stifle creativity and stifle ideas. And when you're young and you've got a little bit of chip on your shoulder, which I think most people who end up successful do, it can be stifling. It can cause a lot of anger.

Yeah, if you take incompetence personally, it's probably not a great way to be. It's, by the way, think about it. It's a chapter in the book I'll never write. When you say most people aren't great, it applies to every profession. Yeah. You know, servers in restaurants, executives at networks or buyers. It's the same thing. Like club coaches in youth sports. Same thing. That's why when you find somebody that's actually really good, you treasure it.

- No question. - It's like, wow, this teacher my daughter has is amazing. I'm so happy this person exists, you know? - It applies to everything. I'm with you. - Yeah, no, it is true. Yeah, so it's been, I think CM Punk probably got a little older, maybe put some stuff in perspective, tried a couple things, had a couple failures. - All of those cliches apply when you said you finally, like, my words, calmed down on it in your 40s. I'm sure Phil, I'm sure Triple H

As he got older, you have children, you get married, you realize sort of the don't sweat the small stuff thing that maybe you may have sweated years ago. And it seemed once Phil and Triple H reconnected in my brain, it was going to be magic. And boom, he reappeared or he, you know, surprised everyone at Survivor Series Chicago a year and a half or so ago. And it's been magic since. And one of the other big things you did was splitting up WrestleMania. Yeah.

which I'd like to credit you at least partially with that one. I don't know. You, you might deserve all the credit, but that was one of those things. That was an idea that was sitting there for years. It was, it, the event was so long. You just, you almost needed like a, an IV. Yeah.

You see for eight hours, my son would never move. He was in that stage. You're like, I'm not going to the bathroom. I'm not going anywhere. And it was just these terminally long shows and the audience would die over the course of the show. If the number one sport in the United States, as you know, is the National Football League and they effort to have three-hour games and a three-and-a-half-hour Super Bowl, and yeah, of course, they're

There can be overtime and longer games and all this stuff. Yeah. And why shouldn't we effort to do the same? So, you know, seven hours, eight hours of wrestling of WWE in one night is a lot. Well, especially the crowd is...

Dude, they're on a roller coaster doing the thing. They're excited. They're intense. Like, you know, do you have breaks? It's really anything longer than four hours I think is really hard, right? It's really hard. This is also our first one, at least in the last five years, that's not on final four weekend. That was another thing. This is why I get mad with the NBA. You actually looked at the schedule.

and we're trying to figure out weekends, that would be advantages for you guys. - Totally, even look, we've done the American only holiday weekends, if you think about it, Fourth of July.

there's such a lack of sports on that people and it's with no disrespect intended we'll actually watch the Nathan hot dog eating contest yeah but why wouldn't we do a WWE event on that weekend so we do and Labor Day weekend even though there's early college football why wouldn't we have a big if people like oh well you can't get butts in seats well sure you can internationally yeah it's obviously not a holiday there and now that everyone can watch on their phone it

It doesn't really matter what day it is as long as it's not a cluttered sports calendar. I think you saw college football get into a little bit of a mess with their playoff system going right around the NFL games and coming out at compelling NFL weekends. Hopefully they reconfigure that, but it's something we put a lot of time and effort into. The good news, it's the only mistake college football made. They've nailed everything else. It's been perfect with having these giant, ridiculous conferences and teams that are 3,000 miles apart.

When kids are supposed to be in school flying cross-country. It's tough, right, when it's fragmented. It's ridiculous. Any of these sports. Makes me mad. The NBA is not fragmented. There's a league. The NFL, WWE, we're not UFC, not fragmented. There's a league. It's what even on the boxing side caused such destruction. Four different, you know, sanctioning bodies, interim champion, who's actually the champ, all these different weight classes. It's all chaos. Yeah. Until there's sort of a central...

you know, holding a counter central boss, if you will, it's going to be tough to get any of that in line. It's one thing I love about UFC. It's fast, dude. It's so much easier to follow for casual fans like me. I just want to watch the pay-per-views. I watch every pay-per-view. I love UFC. I'm not going to watch 52 weeks a year. I'll listen to Ariel's podcast. Sometimes I'll, I'll read some stuff occasionally, but for the most part of fully admit, um,

a little better than a casual fan, but I'm a casual fan, and it's so much easier to follow when there's not 95 fucking belts. - By the way, look at what Dana and the Fertittas created. If you ask them, they'll tell you, we took everything we liked about boxing and incorporated that, and all of the other nonsense that we hated, we made sure,

to get rid of that. So even if you haven't watched for a moment and you order a pay-per-view and you're like, oh, the number one contender's fighting the champion, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, number three is fighting number eight. And I know what the featherweight division is. Cool. Totally. Yeah. Totally. They nailed it. And that's to their credit. Well, so baseball did this almost out of necessity where they were like, we have a major problem. We have to fix this. And there's other leagues...

Football is just a monolith at this point. They can do whatever they want. They're going to go to 18 weeks, you know, whenever they want, it's going to work. And basketball is the one that it feels like is going to have to start to get a little more innovative with the schedule and everything. You, you always look at stuff like, why not? Why can't we do this? Like, all right. I get that we did it that way, but yeah,

Why wouldn't we do it this way? I don't understand why people that run big things like that don't all just think that there's such a fear of, oh, well, that's the way we've always done it. We can't move from that. That's what the fans are used to. I don't feel that way at all. Do you? At all. Like one of the dilemmas in baseball, which was sort of fixed with the pinch defense

the pitch clock, the pitch count clock. You didn't know, in Los Angeles, if you went to a Dodger game, was it gonna be a three hour affair? Was it gonna be a seven hour affair? - Would you ever have taken your son to a Dodger game with the old rules, your nine year old son? - No. - It's like, you make me home at 1:30 in the morning. - Brutal. How do you go to a nighttime game on a weekday that starts at seven o'clock? Why would you even do that? It's so hard to get in and out of there. By the way, my first year as an agent, which was in 2006,

Somehow I met the Baseball Hall of Fame. I don't think we've ever talked about this story before. And that's Cooperstown and I went there and they said, "We're not making a lot of money. "What do we need to do to fix this thing?" I said, "Shut down this whole Cooperstown operation, "move it to Vegas."

Never heard from them again. Never heard from them again. But to me, it was like that was what they should have considered if they wanted it to be a year-round engagement. But again, that's the way they had always done it, and that's the way they wanted to keep it. That's a tough one, because on the one hand, every baseball fan makes the pilgrimage to Cooperstown once.

But you don't do it 10 times. Fun. Yeah. By the way, travel it. Do something with it. Yeah. But don't do what you're currently doing. No, it feels, you're right. There should be a big version of it. But you guys, the WWE Hall of Fame was an idea that's sitting there forever and that hasn't happened yet. Well,

that's happening this Friday. By the way, see, you disrespect Triple H. Triple H is being, oh, the brick and mortar Hall of Fame, you're saying. I want the actual, I can walk into it, I can go around, there's videos, there's, I mean, maybe you could be the ones that finally did the Pantheon idea that I've always wanted to do with the levels. If you're five level Hall of Fame and you get to the top level and it's just like Hogan, San Martino, like all the great greats. Who's your Mount Rushmore for wrestling?

Should we wait until my dog starts barking? We can bring him in, whatever you want to do. Hogan has to be in it. Sam Martino. John Cena. Ric Flair. Yeah, I get that. Cena's probably the shaky spot. I think Hogan and Flair have to be in it. No Austin for you.

It's a pretty brief apex. Yeah, it was a shorter run. You're talking five years, you know? I think Rock potentially, but Rock is another one where the actual apex wasn't long enough. Like, if you're going Hall of Famer,

The career has to be part of it. Like Flair and Hogan, how long they lasted was amazing. Even Sam Martino wasn't as long as those guys. Who do you think it is? Flair, Hogan, for sure. Yeah. And then as you just sort of articulated in a different way, the final two are tough. Cena deserves some sort of recognition. You're talking about a 20-year run. Yeah. What Roman's done the last couple of years. Roman's thinking, yeah, I mean, he's definitely in the conversation now. Tremendous. And then you think back, you know,

Sam Martino was just before me, but you would read in Pro Wrestling Illustrated, oh, he held the championship for this period of time. Superstar Billy Graham came along and this and that. But definitely Flair and Hogan. I would put Austin somewhere around there just because of the impact he had. I think if I'm remembering correctly, he retired at like 39 with injury and all of those things. Rocked left early to go pursue a different career.

and was doing movies like the tooth fairy and yeah, it was in the get shorty sequel, you know, paid, played like a buck. Didn't have his extra five years when he was just kicking ass, like basically Hogan's late eighties. I think the two, the two biggest apexes were Hogan and stone cold. Oh my God. I'm not just saying that as like a WWE Homer, I don't know. WCW never had anything like that. Oh,

And by the way, Rock obviously went on to monumental success once he left. His feud with Hogan

I mean, with Vince. Oh, it was incredible. When that really hit, it's like there's been, there's nothing like that. It was can't. It rejuvenated the entire company. Can't miss TV. And you think about it, you had Austin, Hogan, Rock, Triple H, DX, Mick Foley, and oh yeah, you had Undertaker, Kane, and all those other guys as well. Just an amazing, amazing bench. That all-time

That all hit at once. Well, the other thing with Hogan and Stone Cold, it's the only two times they shifted the actual popular culture, right? Hogan, definitely in the 80s. And he's part of this whole patriotism boom that's like Sly Stallone and Schwarzenegger. And like, we're Russians are the bad guys. And we were like big USA. Like he was right in the middle of that. And then Stone Cold, right as we tried to cover this in the Vince doc a little bit,

Um, right as something was shifting in America and people were just getting edgier in general. And he just felt like he was one of the people, him and DX felt like they were at the forefront of something. NWO was like that too, but he was at the top of it of like, it's okay to be the antihero. When you think about like him as an antihero, which hadn't really happened in wrestling before.

I mean, there are pieces of it in different guys, but nobody had been like, I'm going to just own this. And I would have been a heel 10 years ago, but now everyone's rooting for me. Then it moves into the Tony Soprano. I was just going to say that. That's kind of what TV became in the 2000s. He was like the first one. He was the precursor. So when everyone says, well, Tony Soprano was the first anti-hero that you rooted for. No, it was 100% Stone Cold. Correct. It was Stone Cold. It shows you WWE was ahead of the game. And sometimes, you know, Paul Levesque and I will sort of

you know, semi joke, like life is WWE, WWE is life. It's our product is great when it's reflective of the times, which you just articulated through Hogan and the Reagan, you know, era with Arnold and sly and all that. And then in the Clinton era with the proliferation of cable news and information and what was going on in the white house at the time and the Jerry Springer show and this, then people, uh,

There was more of a populist movement where people who hadn't had a voice before were starting to have a voice. And I think, to your point, DX and Stone Cold both reflected that. Nailed the time. Do you feel like you could argue now there would be a moment to tap into that, but where the UFC seems to be the one that's tapping into this side of the universe, right? You could see all the people that were at UFC the other night, and it's...

It's been this side that was one of the reasons Trump won the election again. But this whole movement basically against the far left. But wrestling has avoided it this time around. - Yeah, wrestling's avoided, but it was interesting 'cause two weeks after, two weeks give or take, after the Netflix Raw Intuit Dome premiere, you and I were both at the UFC fight at the Intuit Dome. In the heart of LA, you and me there,

And it's as many, you know, LA is probably as left as it gets at this moment in time. Yeah. Place was sold out. And remember the main event, you know, fell apart, you know, a couple of days beforehand, boom, Dana and the UFC moved quickly. They put in, you know, another opponent. No one asked for a refund packed house. Yeah. Huge crowd, huge gate. I think their product appeals to everybody. Just like the WWE product appeals to everybody. It just happens to be that the CEO of UFC is close friend, uh,

of the president. - And the UFC definitely has an attitude of we don't judge. We don't judge over here in the UFC. Come in. If you like watching people in the octagon, welcome aboard. - By the way, that's how Los Angeles used to be. It used to be if you've been married 10 times,

don't worry about it, move here. Yeah, like Jerry Buss. We don't judge. The Lakers owner does his own stuff. We don't care. Correct. Who was the producer on Karate Kid, Weintraub? Oh, yeah. Who had like two wives or something like that. Well, we had Simpson and Bruckheimer. There's like a million of... Yeah, but I think this guy in particular, there was an HBO documentary on him. He had like two wives at once. Wow. Not like, hey, get divorced and this. And by the way, it was like, hey, that's your life.

I still feel that way. I have nothing to do with that. You have nothing to do with me. Live your life. And somehow LA shifted a little bit outside of that. I think UFC stayed consistent. If you like our product, we want you. And that seems to be a good winning hand. So TKO right now has UFC and WWE.

and PBR and IMG. PBR is professional bull riding. IMG and on location. I'm just talking from a combat standpoint, but you don't have the boxing piece yet. But then, I mean, the last time you were on the pod, we talked about this and this is your favorite sport. And it feels like just me knowing nothing from afar. It feels like there's a boxing opportunity slash momentum for something, for somebody to corral

at least a big piece of it, and you talked about it last time. Are you any closer? - Well, I think you caught the announcement. Dana, myself, our partners, Turkey, I'll Shake, to create a new boxing promotional company a couple of months ago. - I did. - Yes. - But nothing's happened with it yet. You could announce whatever, but you still need

To me, it's like, okay, they're going to do this. That means they're going to acquire something, but you haven't acquired the something yet. No, nothing to be acquired. We're going to grow it organically. But I'd look for, if we're mid-April now, I'd look for a big announcement on that in the next four to six weeks as to what our first card's going to be and who's going to be on that card. So this is all going to be one-off stuff, not something that potentially has a chance to be UFC, WWE? No, we want it to be UFC and WWE-like.

But you'll see an announcement with more to come. I don't mean to intentionally be cryptic on the whole thing. You can be as cryptic as you want. But we have a plan. Because I saw the first thing and I'm like, all right, they're just kind of planting a flag, but nothing is actually happening. But now you're saying something's going to happen. That's the thought. That's the hope. We'll see. What are the opportunities in boxing right now?

I think, look, other than cohesion. Yeah, exactly. It's been proven, you know, with the UFC, people like to see a good fight. They just have to know, as with the UFC, who the fighters are. It's same with WCF.

with WWE. If you get invested in the fighters in UFC, which they've done a phenomenal job of doing, UFC has, if you get invested in the wrestlers in WWE, more likely you tune in, more likely you show up. It's the same thing in boxing. If, you know, Max Kellerman, who you and I have both known for a long time, used to say if you pull up to a four-way stop sign, on one corner, a guy's putting a golf ball, the other, a guy's throwing a football, the other guy's shooting a basketball, and the other two guys are fighting, what are you gonna watch?

You're going to watch the two guys fighting. He said, but the problem with boxing is you pull up to that same corner and it's Tiger Woods in his prime putting the golf ball and it's Jordan in his prime shooting the basketball and it's Mahomes throwing the football and it's two guys you've never heard of fighting. Then it's a different choice. That's the issue with boxing.

It's a series of one-off events where as soon as the fight ends, it's Dana White says it often, it's a going out of business sale. Let's charge you the most we can for one night. Let's give you the least in return. No good undercard fights. No reason to sit in your seat.

other than 10 minutes prior to the main event. And hey, if the main event's bad, then if you feel that we stole your money at home on pay-per-view, no big deal, that's on you. If you do it the opposite way of all of that, then you have a chance of actually building a product that has some sort of viability.

The Saudis, I think, have shown a little bit of the blueprint because the cards are better. And the card they had in, what was it, February was awesome. Even though they had, you know, one fight fallout last minute. They had to fly out of shape. Bacoli, my guy. Hey, you're sad. You're sad. Bacoli got knocked out. Listen, Bacoli got paid. He took one hit. His trainer's like, we're done. And, you know, we escaped. Now, here's the good thing about what Turkey is doing there. It's bringing Bacoli back. Yeah. Right.

Right, that's what you should do. If you step in on a fight on short notice and you lose the fight, give the guy another chance. You don't have to be 30 and 0 for it to matter. Right, well, that's what we grew up with.

Of course. Everyone fought everybody. You and I didn't know Marvin Hagler as the WBA middleweight champion. We knew him as the middleweight champion. And he fought Hearns. And he fought Duran. And he fought Leonard. And he fought some of them again. And the best fought the best. It's the same with Ali Foreman Frazier. I think it's somebody like Ken Norton. He fought everybody. Everybody. Yeah. He fought Ali three times. Think about that. By the way, he also fought...

It was Foreman Lyle and then Foreman Norton? Or was it Cooney Norton where Cooney destroyed Norton? That was the end of Norton. That was the end of Norton. Yeah, that was like 1980 range. And those are all heavyweights, obviously. Not the Hagler group, but the other group we're talking about. Like, just have the best fight the best. It's that simple. It's what the Saudis have done. It's what the UFC and Dana White have done. If it can be replicated in boxing, hey, you have a winning hand. That sounds pretty enticing. How is Netflix...

changed your business, the scope of it? Number one, their default is yes on anything that you ask for. It's, yeah, sure, we'll get on it right away. I always say this about the executives I like the most. I don't have any of their office numbers. You call them sell to sell. It's sort of like with you. I call you, hey, I'll call you right back or give me an hour and pick up and we have the conversation. Do you even have an office number? No. Yeah, same. I

I don't have one. So they're phenomenal. It's also their power of their brand, and I know this is going to sound really naive. I didn't realize globally that it's the same interface that it is at home.

So, you know, sometimes if you travel internationally, you're like, where do I find the NBA game? And you're looking and you can't find it. It's the same avatar that you have at home and your kid's avatar and your wife's avatar. And you click into it and it shows you, hey, here's where you paused and watching all the other things. It's the same exact interface. So I like the user accessibility. We certainly love 300 million plus subscribers. That's just households, by the way. So assume that's 700 million.

million plus people and you've seen our international ratings go through the roof in a number of different countries because again, easily accessible. - Were you surprised that you, it seems like every week you're trending as like the number one TV show for 36 hours.

I'm always pleasantly surprised by that. I was surprised by that. Here's what I said. I feel like in anything, in your business, in our business, like the clock resets at midnight for a reason. You know, no matter how good or how bad the day was, the day's over. Yeah. And you have to go and replicate it again and try to build something even bigger the next week or the next show. It's the same for you in what you do. Same for us. So, you know, we're proud of that. But every week we're sort of anxious to make sure that it stays that way. Yeah.

Yeah, I think talking to the Netflix people, I think the pleasant surprise for them was people watching it, like the people in Europe waking up. Sometimes that's coming on, they're asleep, but waking up and watching them getting these pockets of viewership from when either people woke up or pockets of viewership from people they didn't expect would get up early to watch it or stay up late and just watching how the different parts of the world interacted with it.

Um, I know that there's some, some areas that they were probably hoping maybe you had a star that you could develop that would be exciting for that specific area. Yeah. Look, it's part of our recruiting for the last year or so. It's, you know, you can't just pipe out American content globally and internationally. So, you know, if you look at Axiom, who's on the NXT roster, he's a

Spaniard born in Spain. When he showed up at our show in Barcelona unexpectedly two, three, four weeks ago, whatever it was, crowd went crazy. People like their own and that's good. Even if you look at the collaboration we're doing with TNA and Joe Hendry, he shows up at our Glasgow show. People love that. Obviously, Drew McIntyre, main roster for us on the Glasgow show. People love that.

So it's the, the unique aspect about WWE is for our talent. It's as much about marketability as it is ability. Yeah. If you can, if you're marketable and you have charisma and you have the it factor, we can sort of help with the rest. And then yes, every so often you'll get someone who has both John Cena, Roman Reigns. Well, there's a line you don't want to cross and which has been crossed a couple of times where it's like, we really want to get this part of the world going and,

Watch this, and then if the person doesn't have the chops, it gets a little dicey. Yeah, look, the height of what can work, and this is the obvious one, when you had Bret Hart and Owen Rest in Peace and the faction with British Bulldog and all of that, and you would see even the Montreal Screwjob, if you will, that was in Canada. Yeah.

It's unbelievable.

Just phenomenal, phenomenal content. So if you were going to create stars from scratch, you could pick any part of the world. I would assume India and Brazil would be two big ones. Throw Mexico in there. And Mexico. Okay. Those would be your three. For sure. So anyone listening from those countries, get your shit together. Hit Bill on Instagram or Twitter, whatever it is, since I'm not on any of those platforms.

and send your audition tape to him and he'll really start smart. Stay off social media. Not great. Better. What are any other big predictions for the year for WWE?

So our deal with Peacock is coming up in 11 months. They've been phenomenal partners. Again, WWE, as you know, was on what were called pay-per-views, became premium live events. They were on WWE Network until 2020 when we did the deal with Peacock. And they have a bunch of your library. A bunch. They've outperformed our expectations. We'd like to think we've outperformed...

their expectations and now we'll sit down together and see if there's business to be done moving forward. Is it better to even have stuff on a streamer like that versus, like how do you, your YouTube, you guys were one of the first people to blow out a YouTube presence and now you have, what, 15 years of

YouTube videos at this point, one of the biggest channels anyone has? Like is it just sometimes the way YouTube has grown and skyrocketed, does it just make more sense to double down on that? - Well look, we love YouTube. We have 110 million subscribers. - Oh my gosh. - 10th most subscribed to YouTube channel. That's not sports channel, that's channel. So you have ahead of it, you know, Coco Melon, Mr. Beast, some Indian music channels, but nothing sports oriented.

So we're number 10 there, which is phenomenal. We're also on CW, which is a broadcast network. We're also on USA Basic Cable in the United States. We're on Netflix streaming globally. We're on Peacock streaming domestically. We want our product to be available to everyone everywhere, depending on how they like to receive it. Isn't that funny how different that is when...

Like when they launched the network, what was that, 10 years ago? It was in 2014, yeah, 11 years ago. I think that was when I did the pod with Triple H, right around there. And it was the right move at the right time to do that. And it was like, we're going to go on demand. We'll own our rights. People will pay for this. We'll make more from it this way. Now the mindset is completely different. We want as many people to see our stuff as humanly possible. And we want to be tied to platforms.

where anyone can see our stuff. - To totally look at it, first of all, in 2014 when WWE went to WWE Network, which just so we're clear, obviously I had nothing to do with. - Yeah, you were. - And that was a brilliant, brilliant decision. The biggest scam that I've ever seen in television was the fee that In Demand, Dish, and Direct would take for pay-per-view.

So just to plug you in anywhere from 30 to 60% of a WWE event, of a boxing event, of UFC at that time. And then WWE got out of that business and UFC got out of that business and took it exclusively to Disney. It was an all-time big.

Maybe the biggest VIG ever. Now Apple probably leads the way with VIGs where they get 30% on apps. 30% on apps. Big person. These guys were taking a vigorous 50 to 60%. Yeah, at least. And in demand was all the cable companies together. It was like a legal consortium that would just come down on you. And if you said, no, I don't want to do it at that fee, great. What were you going to do? Then you wouldn't be able to show what you wanted. Totally. So streaming also fixed that.

and it got you out of the volatility of, well, what pay-per-view numbers are we going to do this weekend? What are we going to do this weekend? What are we going to do this weekend? So you knew with consistent subscribership, you could actually plan for a publicly traded company on what financials would be coming in. I want to talk about the TV business in one second. Yes, sir. Do you feel like you have a rival? Because two years ago, you could make the case. Last year, it seemed like no. Now, it just seems like you guys are...

all-powerful again and AEW is not a rival in the same way. Their kind of moment

I have no dog in the race. I don't really care. But it's just from afar, it seems like their moment came and gone, and they're just firmly number two now. Well, look, we're always the underdog at WWE. We always feel that people underestimate us, that we're looked down upon, and we like it that way. Bet against us. We prefer that. And allow us to show you what we can do. Short our stock. Go ahead. Yeah.

I don't know about that. You can literally do it. Go ahead. Bet against us. Bet against us. You know, if you look at the stock price now, it's far in excess of what it was when we all started together five years ago. Yeah. And, you know, we're quite proud of that. At the same time, we got to keep, you know, re-earning our keep.

on a daily basis here. So we feel like it's a good moment, but we still feel like there's a lot of room for growth in terms of the other wrestling promotional company. They have a lot of talented wrestlers and we're happy about that. When contractually, you know, they're available to be, you know, talked to and have conversations with, assume a number of them will come over and nothing but respect for the father who finances it and owns the Jaguars and all those other things. That was very pleasant.

Look at you. That's it. So magnanimous. I'm 50 now. So different than when we were much younger. Yes. Well, your biggest issue is sometimes you don't want too much talent because you only have so many spots to put people and

you end up just kind of wasting people. - Look, that's something we won't do. We won't sign-- - I think that happened in the past though. Maybe before you. - Perhaps, but we won't sign and bench people. We sign people who we want to use. - I'm not saying bench people, but you sign somebody and then within a couple weeks, they're barely being used because you have too many people. - No, I'm saying if another entity signs and benches people now, that's not something we would do. - Oh, 'cause that is a thing that happens.

That's what I've been told from time to time. Not us. - Not awesome. From a TV standpoint, you're one of the world's most astute media watchers. And we always end up talking about ESPN when we do this stuff. But since the last time we talked, Netflix is in sports in a huge way, as you personally know. Amazon's in. We had this whole basketball deal shake out and it feels like everything is moving toward streaming stuff.

And the networks are kind of holding on for dear life and overpaying to keep up the fight. Most notably ESPN, which I think has had a really rocky couple of years. And for what they paid with basketball, especially ESPN,

There's probably going to be some repercussions with that in other parts. And it seems like they've moved behind like big talent contracts, a couple of big right fees, and then try to cut costs elsewhere, almost like a movie where you're like, we want to get our four guys for the poster and we'll get a really good director, but maybe we can...

save money over here? What do you see the future of the networks that you used to work with? - I think, look, Netflix was saying years ago, we're not gonna get in sports, we're not gonna get in live, and I think anyone who was following it who had a reasonable point of view knew that was just a temporary position, and obviously Netflix knew that.

They went in with the unscripted shows, the after shows live. They went in with the Chris Rock comedy special live. And I think they saw the power of it. So much so that when Gabe Spitzer got hired to run sports, I don't know that they had any sports rights. And all of a sudden they wake up with the Mike Tyson fight and WWE and NFL games and their own hot dog eating contest. And hey, more and more is coming.

And that's my understanding. So immediately overnight, they become an impact player. I thought they did a phenomenal job with even with the halftime show for the two NFL games. They go all in. It's one of their superpowers. And Amazon does the same. Totally.

And you saw Amazon again, this sort of a tease. Amazon went into tennis in the UK and parts of Europe early. Let's see if we can do it. Let's see what it looks like. And then boom, hey, we're going all in with the NFL. And then boom, the big NBA deal. So you're seeing, you know, the power of live, you know, the power of sports, you know, you're at the top of the heap in the media business in terms of your knowledge about all of that.

What about what happens when more folks get into it? You saw YouTube with their Sunday ticket deal. So I think for the traditional buyers, they need to have run smart businesses. At the same time, they have to be competitive.

and they can't expect that, hey, years of doing it one way, well, this is how we've always done it, as you said earlier here today. It's how we've always done it. Why would we do it any differently? If the universe has changed, you better change with it. If not, you're gonna be left behind.

So we'll see who gets left behind. Well, they missed on UFC for a while and then belatedly got into it, and that's been okay. Although those rights are coming up, right? Well, think about it. HBO Sports years ago... That's the biggest miss. Yeah. Ari Emanuel set up a meeting for Dana White and the UFC with HBO Sports when HBO Boxing was still booming. And for whatever reason, I think it was ultimately the UFC's decision not to go there. UFC, it was...

HBO wanted to produce the events. Dana wanted to make sure he controlled his own production. The deal didn't make. And you've seen what the UFC has gone on to do. HBO Sports doesn't exist anymore.

So at one point, as you know, they had Wimbledon years ago and I think other tennis tournaments. Then the Kings of Boxing. Boxing, hard knocks, documentaries. They had a foothold of something. Correct. And then I think they sort of got comfortable. And by the way, if you ask the folks at the NFL, some of the folks at the NFL right now, what's your biggest concern? They'll quietly tell you to make sure that we never think like Major League Baseball thought in the 70s, which is, hey, we're the number one sport. Right. So.

Lucky us. It's sort of what do we keep needing? What do we have to do to make sure that we stay number one? And like you said, hey, there's an 18th game coming. And hey, let's take the combine out of Indianapolis. And hey, in Philly for the first time, six, seven, eight years ago, whatever it was, let's take the draft on the road and let's monetize that.

Everything they do is constantly evolving that product. I think it's the same thing with the UFC and their business model. I hope that WWE is perceived in the same light. Sometimes if we get it wrong, if Triple H and I talk or Lee Fitting or Chris Legental, other senior executives at WWE, it'll start with, hey, I think we fucked this thing up. It'll be one of us saying that. And then, okay, how do we fix it moving forward?

And the most important thing is to identify the problem and realize you have a problem. If you're trying to avoid it or you're trying to say it's someone else's problem, by the way, much like the last presidential election, and you and I are not overtly political, but what I saw was one person saying, I'm going to take care of you. I'm going to look out for you. And another party saying, don't vote for this guy.

Right, and with no message at all. I've just never seen that work. Yeah. I don't believe... Vote for us because you can't vote for him. Absurd. Like, how do you make that decision? You and running the ringer, when you bring talent over here, it's let me tell you what we can do together. It's the same thing at WWE. It's not, don't go with the other guys. Maybe it works on one or two deals, but it doesn't work long term. You got to figure out what that problem is and change the messaging. What is ESPN five years from now?

Look, I think it still continues to exist in a meaningful way. The sub loss has obviously hit them hard, but I think they've actually made some good moves with a lower subscription audience. So as you said, they fixed their NFL talent issue. They fixed their NFL relationship. At least that's my perception. I think I would agree with that. Yeah. And look, they went in on

retaining their NBA rights, the finals being quite meaningful to them. They don't have their first Super Bowl, if I might. A lot of college football. A lot of college football, right? They went all in on the SEC. They went all in on the playoff and the championship. They went all in on certain talent, as you just articulated.

And hey, it's sort of reflective of the U.S. economy, if you will, relatively speaking. The middle class there got squeezed. The people making a lot of money made more money. And hey, if you want to make entry-level money, there'll be a spot for you. Again, relatively speaking, reflective of the U.S. economy. It's a weird one because I think that thing that's changed from maybe 15 years ago was the sense of like, we also want to do great stuff. Like there was a bar for...

We at least a couple times a year want to be looked at as a place that did an awesome thing or like, you know, inspired somebody in some way or did some piece of content that could really impact people. And I don't know if they still feel that way. Look, I think as soon as budgets shrink, those tend to be the first things to go. Yeah. Well, I think they've just kind of...

we're, we're showing games, we got games and highlights and that's kind of what we are for the most part. And, you know, they'll still do some other stuff, but maybe, maybe when to have ambition like that, when you have a company in the size of that, I think, um,

Maybe it's too hard to juggle everything. Yeah, it could be that or it could simply be, you know, hey, we had 100 million subs at one point. What is it now? Fifty four or fifty five. Isn't that crazy? It's crazy. But as soon as the bundle went away and people actually, you know, had a choice in terms of what they could subscribe to. I don't think it's a reflection on ESPN. I think it's it was bundled in and people sort of had to have it when they didn't have to have it. The people who still wanted it kept it.

So if you're dealing with smaller numbers, those then tend to be the things that go first. If you have a surplus year, you got to be careful because next year may not be as good. For this WrestleMania coming up, coming off of the success of WrestleMania Philly 2024, we have WWE World, a partnership with Fanatics.

Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, all day event. The two night WrestleMania, which we talked about already. We have SmackDown on Friday. We have Raw on Monday. We have the Hall of Fame standalone show Friday night after SmackDown. We have the Undertaker one dead man show. It's sort of one man show, if you will. Right after SmackDown.

WrestleMania Saturday. And then we have Tony Hinchcliffe roast of WrestleMania after WrestleMania Sunday. And then, by the way, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, we also have an after party with our partners Medium Rare at the Fountain Blue. You'll see WWE stars there. You'll see other celebrities there. It's all day, all night. That's coming off of the success. We think all of these will be successful. All indicators are they're going to be hopefully phenomenally successful. And then next year, we got to go build something bigger.

That's just the way it is. So you think for ESPN, it's the grind of, you know, where Amazon and Netflix can just parachute in and out of stuff that they want. ESPN has a 365 day responsibility still at this point to have stuff. And I think they have way more competitors than they used to. I remember when FS1 got there, you know, in 2013, it was like, here comes FS1.

And ESPN's attitude was like, how dare you? And I felt the same way. I was like, we're going to crush these guys. Come get us. Now there's seven, eight different people with real money coming at you. And it's really hard to stay on top. Look, I remember the FS1 thing. ESPN was so dominant. Well, you remember the FS1 thing because you made a lot of money.

just parlaying the two networks. - Those were the clients. - For a lot of people. - Those were the clients who made a lot of money. - You remember that as the heyday. - Those were the clients who made a lot of money. - It was like Nick Khan, the greatest year in Nick Khan's life. It's like, oh, you're like at a school auction getting the two drunk parents bidding, do I hear 20K for the trip to Mexico? 22! - Listen, I was just right place, right time. What can I say? But ESPN was so dominant that it was okay, we're gonna keep our 11 o'clock SportsCenter.

And we're going to bring back Keith Olbermann to put him on ESPN2 to make sure, just in case you're thinking, I don't want to watch SportsCenter. We have something else to offer for you. And oh yeah, we got Grantland Programming. And what was the name of your unsanctioned NBA show, The Great Basketball Show? The Grantland Basketball Show. The Grantland Basketball Show. We did 10. Right. So it was like even unsanctioned, we're going to have high-end content here. And again, I would say the first 50, 30 for 30s,

if you will, like amazing, shockingly, like just the quality off the charts. And then over time, like there were only so many. We had some stinkers to be fair. Early on? I mean, I'm so happy everyone remembers them all finally. Maybe the Colts one wasn't as good as. No, I wasn't going to name names. I'm just saying. I thought you winked at me and said, let's name names. I think people, it's like anything else. As the years pass, people remember the best 10 or 12 and think,

How about when you have to spike the Marion Jones one? No one talks about that. Oh, there you go. Yeah, I don't know. So the WB, all that stuff, any predictions? What do you mean? Any predictions for anything? What do you mean the WB? I don't know. You always have the Warner Brothers. Oh, yeah, Warner Brothers discovered. They're trying to work around the fringes now. They didn't get NBA, but now they're... I can't tell. There was a big piece about them this week. Yes, I read it. I read it.

Just a weird, it was one of those, I have a lot of information going in all these different directions and the reader is just going to have to figure out what to make of this. But the basic premise was Warner Brothers stuck between these two worlds, this world that used to exist and this world that's about to happen, kind of feeling like that maybe is a strategy. I thought that was pretty interesting. Yeah, I think. I don't know if I agreed with it.

I think like any company, you know, maybe they made a couple of mistakes, you know, here and there. But I think they now see that.

And if they can figure out, okay, what's the programming to bring in post-NBA, that it's tough, right, when there's so many mouths to feed. TNT, TBS, Max, HBO, oh, TruTV, oh, this, oh, that. Like, it's a lot. And those are still generating revenue, so you think to yourself. Which one is Dr. Pimple Popper on? I can't remember. Dr. Pimple Popper, I don't remember which one that was. It's one of those. Yeah. Well, I still love DirecTV, so I see it on the grid, you know. Yeah.

You still have DirecTV? Yeah.

Who do you call when something goes wrong? It's brutal. Do they even have people working? Listen, it's brutal. I tried to order the Terrence Crawford, Errol Spence boxing match off of DirecTV. They said I was at my pay-per-view limit. I called someone, spoke to someone overseas. I said, what are you talking about pay-per-view limit? How is there a limit? I just want to spend money on your service. Am I up to date on my bill? Yes. Then how is there a limit? And what am I ordering on pay-per-view that would put me past that limit? There's no UFC on DirecTV pay-per-view. There's no WWE.

It's a mess, but I still have it. And YouTube TV and Apple TV. I can't wait to explain DirecTV to my great-grandkids 50 years from now. Yeah, so they used to come in. They would put a dish on top of our house. They would give us a receiver. If you canceled DirecTV, you would have to mail the receiver back or it would cost you $500. Nobody would answer if there was an issue. I can't wait to... Bill, how about this part of it? It's a documentary. So we...

we connected on me coming on your podcast. What if you said to me, show up somewhere between 8 a.m. and noon and hopefully I'll be there, which is what the cable companies and DirecTV said. They'd give you this window. - 8 at noon, how about like 8:00 to 3:00? - And at 11:59 you'd call and be like, hey, my guy hasn't shown up yet, what's going on? Oh, we're so sorry, we have to reschedule for 10 days from now.

You wouldn't allow your doctor to do that. You wouldn't allow your accountant to do that. Can I just put you on hold for one second, sir? Please don't, no. Please, no. Don't put me on hold. How about when they'd hang up on you after a while? And then you're just starting the process over again. Starting the process over. One of the happiest days of my life was moving to streamer stuff full-time and not having DirecTV. Yeah, by the way, again, like the in-demand dish direct VIG that we were talking about,

Football. Too much hubris, too much arrogance with their product. Because they have football. Correct. They felt like they could do anything they wanted. Correct. Instead of, by the way, as you know, it was a big brag in like 2000, 2001. If you had DirecTV, you were like, you were the guy. It was like one of the first things I ever splurged on. Correct. Yeah. I don't have cable. I got satellite. I can get all the football games and then I get all the basketball games. Yeah.

And they took full advantage of the consumer, as did the cable companies, the traditional cable companies. We'll be there between eight and noon. We'll be there between noon and five. Like it was a joke. The whole thing was a joke. And then, hey, someone came along with a better product and, you know, ate part of their lunch. Who buys, who becomes the next agor successor? Who takes over? Who's your money on?

I would say 60% chance insider, 40% chance outsider. So I'm a little more- Interesting, because they have the four, it's really three candidates coming from inside. Matt Bellany wrote a really good piece for Puck, our guy Matt. I read it. About- Also very rich, like you now, Matt. Oh, he's loaded. It's crazy. He's on TV shows now. He's doing great. Yeah, he's a scripted actor now. Yeah, he's on the studio. But he had a whole piece about, could Disney go after Sarandos?

Which A, I was really jealous of. Great idea. I don't know how I, I'm just so mad that I didn't come up with that. B, really interesting idea. Like if you're going to do an outsider, why not do like a maverick outsider? And one of the things I was wondering was like, would I even want that? Would you want your successor to be somebody who would actually be a little more cutting edge maybe than you are? And maybe somebody that could reinvent some things and

modernize your company in some different ways. I don't know. I thought that was fascinating. And then if you're Sarandos, would you want to do that? Are you already in the Disney of now?

Do you even need to leave Netflix? Think about his career arc. You remember when they split, what was it, Netflix and Quickster? Yeah. Quickster almost ended his career. Almost ended his career. But then quickly they realized, like we were talking about, no, we made a mistake here. We better change this and we better shut that down and we better hyper-focus on the fact that people aren't going to be really renting DVDs for that much longer. Yeah. And they nailed it. Yeah.

And then early on, okay, let's put on the Kevin Spacey show and Orange is the New Black. Let's cater towards, you know, the critics, if you will. Sarandos came out and said, we need to be HBO before HBO becomes us, which he corrected six, nine months ago in the New York Times Q&A, where he said, what I should have said was, we need to become HBO, CBS, the BBC, and all of these other things before they all become us. And to his credit and Netflix's credit, they did do that.

There's something for everybody there globally, not just domestically. So when you turn around and you're like, another Menendez Brothers documentary? Yeah, people watch it. They also realize, I've always thought a lot of people lie about their taste in things.

Even if it's anonymous polling, people lie. I think to me that the first sign I saw, you remember like in the late 90s, early 2000s, the radio ratings were done off writing it down in a notebook what you listen to. So you'd see classical music on FM radio, smart talk on FM radio. And as soon as the rating metric shifted to the PPM, the portable people meters, and they could actually tell what people were listening to, no one was listening to classical music.

No one is listening to smart talk. But when you're put on the spot of like, hey, Bill, do you like smart talk? What are you supposed to say? No, I like dumb talk. Right. Oh, yeah, of course I like smart. Do you like classical music? Yeah, I love classical music. Netflix realizes like people like all kinds of programming.

I think Bravo realized it years ago also with the Housewives franchise. MTV realized it. Yeah, a couple ones got it. By the way, think about Jersey Shore. It's first season. People not in LA. LA, you could always say what you're watching. There's no such thing to me as a guilty pleasure. If you like something, like it. But in other parts of the country where that kind of programming is looked down upon, people are like, oh yeah, I watch Jersey Shore. I just don't admit it. In LA, you admit it. It was great TV. Listen, algorithms don't lie. They don't lie.

The algorithms are a window into your soul. It's like, do you like true crime documentaries where somebody got kidnapped and they couldn't find the killer for three episodes? I do. By the way, think about it. You're going to love this Gabby Petito doc. Totally. She's a blogger and she disappeared and her boyfriend might have done it. Great. I'm in. I'm in. How about Netflix did another OJ documentary? Yeah. They're just running back. I watched it.

I'm ready for Bundy again. They haven't done Bundy for five years. They got to come back. Bundy is a sitcom. So by the way, how about the Dahmer scripted series? Yeah, we're back. Tough to watch on an airplane. They brought back Manson. Tough to watch Dahmer on an airplane. The hooking up with the mannequin thing. I don't know. I think I'm good with Dahmer for a while. Manson, I was like, I gave it a, you know, I like Manson stuff. Yeah. But it was one of those. It was like, all right, I don't know if,

how much I learned from that. But yeah, they're rerunning the hits now. - Did you like the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Manson storyline in that movie? - I loved that movie, so yeah. - Love. - Yeah. - Love. I feel like people didn't love it the way I thought they should have loved it. - You know what happened? I was just talking with Fennessey and Chris about this. COVID happened. It came out, it had its whole run through 2019. We were at Sundance. We did a live rewatchables of that movie.

maybe beginning of February. Yeah. And then it was about to have this whole run with the Oscars and, and, um, all the way through and it just would have moved. And then COVID happened and COVID messed everything up. That really did. Like convert, just people didn't have the same conversations about anything. So I always felt like that was weird. Cause it's, it has been five plus years since that movie came out. Phenomenal. Now they're making a sequel.

I just read that the other day. Fincher's going to direct Tarantino written movie. When was the last time he wrote a movie that he didn't direct? True Romance or something after that? There's probably something since then. It's pretty rare.

I just watched True Romance with our 13-year-old daughter for the first time. Oh, Jesus. We skipped a couple of the early scenes. Yeah, that's when you have to really know the movie and fast forward. The early Gary Oldman stuff, you got to skip a little bit. But after that, even the Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper scene, you can watch it. Yeah. With your kids, it's no problem. Bathroom Bra with Tony Soprano and Patricia Arquette is pretty brutal. Pretty brutal. It's a great movie, though. Amazing, amazing casting. All right, thing you're most excited about for WrestleMania this weekend, if you had to pick one thing.

What's gonna happen in Cena, Cody? Where does that go? - You think that's the number one, I haven't watched wrestling all year, but this is the one thing I should care about storyline? - I think it's very close with Roman, Punk, and Seth. Because with Roman, Punk, and Seth, there's an argument that's to be made as to why each person should win.

And, you know, do you see Roman getting pinned when he got pinned last year by Cody? You know, how's that going to turn out? Roman's still at his peak. He's not on the back nine, not even close to it from our point of view. How old is he now? What happens? Roman, I think, is 36. Oh, my God. 36, 37. Oh, wow. He's got, yeah, he's got at least five peak physical years left. No question. He takes phenomenal care of himself. It's sort of like the Floyd Mayweather thing. Floyd never got fat.

Never drank, you know, always kept himself ready to go, which I always respected. Roman, Cody, these guys who keep themselves in that top sort of physical shape. Just eating almonds.

Amazing. But the baseball people, and I'm not a huge baseball guy, would tell me, hey, the stats show you past the age of 39, that's the furthest you can go as a prime athlete before the drop. And then you see Tom Brady and what he did and the time he put into maintaining where he was. Maybe LeBron. We'll see with him. But these guys, they're such aberrations. You can't even...

By the way, we got lucky with this Golden State loss the other day. So WWE WrestleMania does not go up against Lakers Golden State this Saturday. Right, you have Lakers Minnesota instead. Yeah, I'm coming Saturday. I'm going to be at the Triple Threat. Yeah, I'm glad you're going to be there. Who wins the NBA Finals this year? I sure hope the Celtics. OKC is going to be really good. There's artists nobody believes in us building with them. The Clippers are excellent.

Cleveland's really good. There's like five teams that could take it this year. It's unusual. Is Celtics-Lakers still the best, the highest rated? The wet dream of all time for the league. I was looking at the matchup. Although, Knicks-Lakers would be bigger. It's not going to happen this year, but I think if you had New York-LA-Lake,

The Knicks not having one since 73 and then generations of Knicks fans, that's probably bigger. Lakers make it to the championship? No. Who makes it from the West? No. OKC, maybe the Clippers. I'm not going to rule out the Lakers, but Clippers are in there. Lakers. OKC is a heavy favorite. How about Clippers with the hot hand late? Unbelievable. Amazing. I can't. I know all the Clipper fans are just nervous that the rug's going to get pulled out with Kawhi again, but they've been...

They've been awesome. And then, you know, you can't count out Denver just because they have Jokic, but I can't see them winning three rounds in a row. But it says they're in a spot a little bit like you guys where they just have a shitload of talent right now. You just have these matchups where you're like, cool, Clippers, Denver. Sick. This is like, you know, four of the top 25 guys in the league are in this series. Who's the best player in the league right now? You know basketball obviously far better. Jokic. Can't be stopped. Jokic is the best. And not afraid of anybody. SGA, Giannis.

Tatum, Luca. Tatum's sick. Luca's sick. All right, well, I'll see you in Vegas this weekend. Thanks for coming over and doing the ride. Thanks for having me on. Good to see you. I love this mansion. This is at least 45,000 square feet minimum. That's my take. Thank you for having me. Always good seeing you. Appreciate it. All right, that's it. Thanks to Nick Khan. Thanks to Kurt Goldsberry. Thanks to Gahow and Jesse as well. Thanks to Saruti.

And we will be back on Thursday. I have a fully fledged action-packed podcast for you. So I'll see you on Thursday.

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