Coming up, the Olympics, the Oscars, the fall of college football, lots of weird topics next. We're also brought to you by the Ringer podcast network, where we put up a new rewatchables. On Monday night we did Roadhouse, which might be the greatest action movie of all time. It's at least the funniest action movie of all time. Me, Chris Ryan, Kyle Brandt. I think we went two or three minutes longer than the actual movie.

We had a blast.

We had so much fun. We put the entire video up on my YouTube channel as well, YouTube.com Bill Simmons, where you can find entire rewatchable episodes, clips, videos, walk and talks. I did a walk and talk today about the Patriots. I was so upset. I read these couple terrible articles about the Patriots today. It just feels like we're turning into the early 80s Patriots, where we have an owner who spends less money than just about everyone else in the league, an unproven coaching staff. We don't have a quarterback. It looks like they might trade down, which is just the classic early 80s, late 80s Patriots move of just trading backwards and picking up multiple picks that you blow. It's really depressing. And then we also had the Red Sox, who have been cursed basically from the moment they said the words, let's trade mookie Betts. Well, they tried to bargain basement the starting rotation. They got Lucas Giolito, who led the league in home runs allowed last year, always looking for guys like that. And he made it about two weeks into spring training, and now his elbows hurt and it looks like he's out for the year.

And the Red Sox have been just a comedy of errors. It's getting to the point where I'm starting to wonder, should Bob Kraft and John Henry just trade teams? Just do a trade? In the late 70s, we had John Y. Brown and we had Irv Levin and they flipped teams. And Irv Levin got the Braves, which became the Clippers, and John Y. Brown got the Celtics. They just literally flipped teams like they were trading like cars or something. And I'm wondering maybe Kraft and Henry should think about doing that again. I am in a vulnerable place with Boston sports right now. I just watched the Cleveland Cavaliers come back from 22 down with nine minutes left and beat the Celtics. And I'm trying to decide whether it means anything or not because on the one hand, awful loss tnt, the winning streaks over all of the highs from Sunday, just beating the living hell out of the Golden State warriors, that fades away immediately. Then you look at the other way like this is the NBA in 2024, you can have a 22 point lead with nine minutes left, and it's a three point lead with four minutes left because all of the guys on every team can just make threes and waves of them.

And the Celtics fell asleep. I fell asleep watching it. I was doing emails. I'm kind of vaguely listening to Iron Eagle get more and more excited, and I look up and it was 97 80. And I'm like, wait, what's going on? Had to rewind. But I think every celtic fan, there's a fear inside with this team, and it's baked in from what happened in the playoffs in 2020, actually.

Really?

2018. I know it was a totally different team, but the inability to score down the stretch in 2018 in game seven, especially 2020, in the bubble, then you think, like, 22 against the Heat, then the warriors, just how hard it was just to get baskets when you really needed them, and 23 last year, then they make the trades. They have this incredible offensive team, right? I think heading into tonight's game, they have the fourth best net rating and the fourth best point differential of any NBA team ever. They're making threes like crazy. And when they're up ten, when they're up 15, they look like one of the best teams of all time. But deep down, you're thinking, well, what's going to happen if we're on the road and we blow a ten point lead? And now that's a one point game with three minutes left? Do I completely trust this team? Do I completely trust the coach? And the answer was, you know what? I'm really starting to trust this team. I'm not going to have those dark thoughts anymore. And then you watch tonight, and you watch everybody standing around on offense, and they're jacking up shots, they're falling asleep on defense.

Then they kind of rallied the last couple of minutes. They had a couple of nice plays. Joe Mads, I was proud of him. He called a play for a high screen with white and kp. That led to a backdoor pass to holiday for a layup. And then it's like, here we go. Tatum's going to walk it up. All right, here comes a bad shot. And it's just. They lapse back into their old habits. They fall asleep on defense, give up a go ahead dunk. And then the last play of the game, I think there's 18 seconds left. Joe Mads has two timeouts left. And I've been turning the corner on Joe Mads. I was feeling really good about him, even, like, to the point where his plus 400 for coach of the year on Fando. I'm thinking that's not a bad bet. This team might go 66 and 16. So I'm like, Joe's going to call timeout. I know he is. Let's do it. Call the timeout. Set up a really good play, Joe. Just do it. No. Tatum walks it up. Tatum dribbles in the Garland seven times, does a couple of spin moves.

Jared Allen comes over to double team, doesn't matter. Tatum ends up with a 45 degree angle fallaway and gets bailed out with a call on Garland where they show the replay and Garland doesn't touch them. And now, you know the game's over, and it is. And they lose by one. And coming out of that game, here's my question. Did you learn from this one, Celtics? Did you learn not to fall asleep up 22? Did you learn your shit actually does stink sometimes? And he came out of that warriors game and thought your shit didn't stink. But you know what? It's still going to stink. It's still shit sometimes. We're going to play like shit. And are you going to learn about the last minute stuff about calling a timeout to set up an actual good play that the Tatum just walking it up and then dribling into five guys? Maybe that shouldn't be the last play of the game when we need a basket. This is a work in progress. Jason Tatum just turned 26, still young, still figuring out, still putting it together. I think. I believe in this team. But you watch games like tonight and you're like, what did that mean?

I think they're the best regular season team, but I still think Denver. Here's why this matters. Ultimately, Denver executes at the end of these games better than anybody. And that's going to be the case in the playoffs. It's going to be Murray and Jokic surrounded by shooters with Gordon doing little sneaky back cuts toward the rim. And they're going to get good shots over and over again. And in a seven game series, you got to beat them four times. Can you execute better than them down the stretch? The answer is probably no. This is why I think Denver's going to win the title again. I don't think anyone is going to out execute them. And the Celtics have a chance here down the stretch to prove that beyond the advanced metrics and beyond the point differential and beyond how good they look when they're up 20, what's going to happen in games like tonight when they have to execute? One of the answers we got was tonight. It wasn't great. So there you go. That's where my head is at with the Celtics and Boston sports right now. I know you didn't ask. My apologies.

Coming up, we're going to talk to Matt Bellany about the Oscars because there are so many Oscars subplots I can't resist. I'm actually genuinely excited for the Oscars this year. So there's that. And then my friend Casey Wasserman, who is in charge of the 2028 Summer Olympics. We had the Paris Olympics coming this summer, so I wanted to talk about what is going on in Paris. What does LA look like four years from now? What is it like to plan our Olympics as it gets closer and closer? And then he does a lot of management agent stuff. Where are we with college sports? Where are we with the nil? Are college sports going to exist in ten years? What's going to happen in the arenas? Ticketing representation. It's basically a future of sports with Casey and it's really good. So I think this is a good pod. Let's bring in our friends from Pearl Jam. We're taping this on Tuesday afternoon. Our guy Matt Bellany is here. You can read him at puck. You can listen to his podcast, his town, and you can listen to our Oscars coverage on the big picture with Sean Fennessy.

We're not stepping on Sean's toes. I want to talk about the Oscars as a show that meant everything back in the day that used to be watched by as many people as the Super bowl and then felt like it not just hit a hiccup, it was like a full fledged baby burp belch. And I think the rating dipped at one point to like 10 million. Now it feels like people, they care. Do they care because of the movies that are involved? Because people can be in crowds again, Covid's behind us. They've just trying to make the show fun again. They have Jimmy as the host. It's kind of like the oscars are back. How does this play out on Sunday? What happens?

I think a couple things are going on. First of all, award show ratings have been ticking up this year and last year as a function of coming out of COVID and it's like celebrities came out of their groundhog hole and are poking their heads around finally and people are noticing. Secondly, the one consistent thing over the 95 years of the Oscars has been that when the movies are seen by more people, more people tune into the show. And the problem that they've had over the past decade or so has been that the big movies in contention have not been popular movies. They've been niche, little award style movies. And this year we've got Oppenheimer, which is almost certainly going to win best picture, a movie that most people have seen, and Barbie as well.

Yeah. So you don't think Nomadland maybe not the same kind of impact?

Maybe not. I mean, that was the year that the Oscars probably would love to forget. That was the train station Oscars. Remember that?

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

I think I blocked that out of my mind.

Oh, I watched every minute of it. It was like the perfect storm of awful venue Covid restrictions. And then they hired Steven Soderberg to produce the thing, and he basically went Gonzo on them and decided that best picture would not be the last award of the night. They were going to instead make it best actor because they thought Chadwick Boseman would win. It would be a nice moment to have his widow stand up there. And then he didn't win. Anthony Hopkins won. It was just an amazing confluence of events.

Yeah. If we weren't in a Covid haze, that would go down like people remember the Uma, Oprah, Letterman, and some of these other Oscar things that actually, if you go back, weren't that bad. That train station oscars is the absolute nadir of the it.

If you think about it, the oscars have had quite a five to seven year run there with the best picture mix up and announcing the wrong winner. And you thought that would be the worst thing to ever happen on stage. And then literally four years later, someone gets punched on stage.

It's the curse of moonlight. And what was the other movie? La, la, la. Since then, all hell has broken loose.

Yes.

All right, I have ten burning questions for you about the Oscar.

Oh, wow. Okay.

You did a great podcast this week, by the way, with what's his name? Michael Schulman.

Michael Schulman of the New Yorker, who.

Wrote a very good Oscar book, Oscar wars, which I would recommend. But you guys talked about all the campaigning, all the stuff that I love, like Bradley Cooper just kind of losing his mind and lying on his back in water.

That will be the image of this year's campaign. Bradley Cooper naked in his underwear in a freezing river, floating on the COVID of New York Times magazine. For some reason, he thought that was a good idea.

And then you talked about how Leo campaigned so hard for Lily Gladstone that he forgot to campaign for himself and didn't get nominated big either.

Forgot or self sabotaged. I mean, you expect everybody wants an Oscar and will campaign to get it. Leo has an Oscar, so maybe he just said, I'm too cool for this. It's a flex. I'm just going to get her a nomination and that's my win. But I suspect he thought he would float in there and get a nom just like De Niro did, and it didn't happen for him.

And you talked about the Robert Downey just playing the politician game to the foe, shaking hands. You had a couple of good anecdotes in the newsletter about it, but this feels like a Downey time. That leads me. I have ten burning Oscar questions for you. We're going to rip through these. I'll start with Downey. He's a heavy, heavy, heavy like you can barely even gamble on it. Favorite. He's a beloved Hollywood guy. He's a beloved Hollywood story. I was watching back to school on.

Oh, man, love it.

Channel, whatever. Just scouting him for the rewatchables and it's just, he's like the number four lead in back to school in 1986. He was on SNL 40 years ago. He was in less than zero and he hit rock bottom. Came back, he went to jail. Yeah. Just all these things. He probably shouldn't be alive. And now it'll all culminate with him winning an Oscar that I'm not positive he was the best supporting actor, but I think people like Robert Downey and it's like, it's time. Let's get him one.

So much of the supporting actor wins are about, a, who you are and sort of your stature in the business, and b, how well you work the community during the campaign season. And we saw it last year with Jamie Lee Curtis, who absolutely was everywhere and was just happy to be there. Hooray for Hollywood. I'm a nepo, baby. Call me what you want. She luxuriated in the Oscar campaign and it ended up being great for her and she won. Downey is a version of that, except he's even more charming and he gets up on stage and you just want to love the guy.

Yeah. So people, they're checking and all the ballots are just, they're going through and they're like, oh, man, Robert Downey. I love that guy. They're doing the Chris Collinsworth Robert Downey. Oh, man, what a career. But Gosling and Barbie has a real case. I think that was one of the most decorated performances of the year. He's like ten to one on this weird gambling set I'm looking at. De Niro is 16 to one for Flower Moon. Downey is a runaway favorite. And by the way, every year there's a shocker with especially in one of the supporting character.

I think it might be in screenplay. I think american fiction could pull that out for adapted screenplay favorite now?

No, over Oppenheimer at this site I'm looking at right now.

Oh, interesting. Oh, then that means it's surged in the last few days because Oppenheimer was the favorite and then Barbie perhaps could get in there. They made it adapted when a lot of people thought it should have been original. But I think core Jefferson for american fiction could win there. I just don't think, I mean, Gosling got out charmed, I hate to say, you know, handsome man, good looking and charming and he just got out charmed by Downey. And he tried, too. He did the media appearances, he did the handshaking. He was game for all this stuff and it just didn't work.

Downey has never won. It'll be an emotional speech. I'm here for it. It's going to be a great moment. My guess is that it will be the first of the major awards they give out in the show. They usually do that 20 minutes. Yeah.

And they're doing a thing this year where they are having previous winners present to the acting categories, not just one person, but they're going to bring out like three to five previous winners to kind of go over the nominees and kind of talk about them. They did this like 15 years ago and it was really effective and for some reason they haven't done it since. I think it's tough to get a lot of people to show up, but they're going to do it this year. And imagine people talking about Downey and him getting up there and I'm sure he has a personal relationship with a lot of these actors that are going to be there.

What if he came out as the guy from Tropic Thunder and it's like, I still think this is funny.

He got nominated for that. He got nominated. They should have Stiller. They should have Ben Stiller to be one of the people.

Oh, that would be good. Yeah. Second burning question, how many Oppenheimer awards are we thinking like this runs the slate in a crazy way? Does this become like we remember it like Titanic and some of those other ones that just won like crazy amounts? What happens?

So that's an interesting question because that used to happen a lot where there was one movie that everyone coalesced around and it just kind of ran the table. That happens less often these days, the Academy tends to spread the love around and they say, okay, well, we didn't love JoJo Rabbit, but let's give it screenplay. And we didn't love the actors in all quiet on the western front last year, but let's give it some technical awards this year. I think Oppenheimer could buck the trend and win seven, eight, maybe even nine awards because it's got the actor. If, let's say, killian Murphy beats Paul.

Giamatti, director, movie actor. There's three picture locked.

Yeah, picture and director are locked. Could be actor and supporting actor and that would be four. And then you start getting into, is Nolan going to win adapted screenplay? There's a chance he could do that. It's probably going to win cinematography. It'll probably win editing. There's a chance. Probably not. Costume design, I bet that goes to Barbie or poor things. Makeup and hairstyling will probably go to maestro for the nose. Just giving Bradley Cooper that ridiculous nose.

Lie down again. Lie down. Here's a pool of water for you to lie down in.

Original score. Almost certainly Oppenheimer will win. The music in that is fantastic.

So you're up to like nine already.

I know. I'm getting up there. I'm getting there. Production design might go to Barbie. Sound will almost certainly go to Oppenheimer, possibly zone of interest. It has that weird sound effect in it and it's not really up for a lot other. We're looking at like eight or nine.

Perhaps be a fun one to bet on. Well, this leads to my next burning question, because the Oscars never goes chalk. We're talking about the six majors and we're like, oh, that's going to happen. That's going to happen. There's always a surprise. There's always one like, whoa, where'd that come from? And I can't figure out where it gets wacky this year. And I was thinking if Oppenheimer swept and just was like, running the table on everything, is there an Emily blunt out of nowhere, best supporting actress, where divine Joy Randolph has won everything. And out of nowhere it's like, oh, my God, Emily Blunt won. That was the only one. I was thinking that would be the mind blower, but it seems like she's got it locked.

Yeah, I don't think so. I think it'll be in one of those less sexy categories like adapted screenplay or production design, where there are movies that have that as a highlighted feature, like Barbie or poor things, and people think it's going to win. But if the voters just start checking the boxes for Oppenheimer down the line.

It's possible.

See that? It's possible. It is the biggest one. This may be in your ten burning questions, but the actress rate is my biggest.

Let's do that. Now. I had that written down. So this is the most fascinating award of all the awards. Lily Gladstone, who's like, depending on what site you go to, she's like -150 -160 Emma Stone is plus 120. And then Sandra Holler is 18 to one. And I actually think, though, it's pretty good value because I thought she was amazing in that movie.

There is a Sandra hooler.

Sandra Houler.

Yeah, hewler, I believe.

You know, I'm bad with the german name. So if Emma Stone wins, that's two best actress awards for her, which puts her on a whole other, like, you're just talking last 50 years. Hillary Swank, Jody Foster, Francis McDormand as three, Sally Field, Meryl Streep. It just elevates her a whole other level. Plus she produced poor things, which is not going to win best picture. But it was in play, at least for a split second. But then Lily Gladstone, I don't know, the way people talk about Emma Stone and poor things, it seems like it's one of the most memorable performances of the last five, six years. Right. Like how brave it was. And people are like, yeah, they use.

That term brave, which basically means, yeah.

She got naked a lot.

She got naked a lot. And it's not just naked. It's like very aggressive nakedness. And it's a sort of fearless performance. This is a truly fascinating one because it has a lot of the things about the Oscars butting up against each other with Lily Gladstone, you have the representation issue. This would be the first native american actress to win in the category. She plays a very sort of strong willed, kind of sort of quiet and very forceful character in the movie. However, she is arguably not the lead actress in that film. It's arguably Leo as the lead, and she is the supporting to that. She's not in the movie as much as some of the other contenders are.

Well, the movie is 7 hours long, so that's, her usage rate is still.

High, maybe minutes in the movie. She's more than some of the others, but not in percentage wise. But they chose to put her an actress, and I think it was a smart one because it was saying something about the movie. And then you've got that coming up against Emma Stone, which, as you said, is this fearless, like, gonzo performance by a big star. The Academy loves to anoint these stars and say, yes, you are going to get that kind of accolades from us. And I think that Emma Stone has that juice in the industry where people want to support her and they like her. Yeah, they like her.

I think she's going to win. I actually think that's a good bet. Gladstone was the favorite. But yeah, man, it's hard to think of Emma Stone from Super Bad and easy a when she was a younger actress, I was like, oh, I like this person. There's some potential. There should be a two time Oscar winner. Yeah, I guess Hillary Swank is the most unrealistic two time Oscar winner ever because she dated iron Zering on season eight at nine two and karate kid three.

Don't forget about karate kid three and.

Was in kid three. I call it kid three. I don't even call it karate kid three, but yeah, Emma Stone two in a row would be nuts. All right, here's the next one. Will Barbie get shut out?

No, absolutely not.

Is there a Barbie situation where they're just losing? Let's say twelve of the 14 awards or however many nominations, like the batting percentage is too low and people get pissed off.

That I think will be true because most people coming into the Oscars this year think it's a battle between Oppenheimer and Barbie in most of these categories, when in fact it's a battle between Oppenheimer and either poor things or killers of the Flower moon or american fiction. Barbie is not the all category contender that many thought it would be. We saw that with the nominations where Margot Robbie was shut out. Greta Gerber was shut out for director. So there is weaknesses. There have been weaknesses with Barbie for a long time. It's not going to get shut out because it will almost certainly win best song. The Billie Eilish song has know sweeping everything else. It got the Grammy in the same category and it has really distinguished itself as the front runner here. I could also see it getting production design because that has been the.

Sense.

Yeah. Production design and costume design, I think are the two where Barbie is the presumptive favorite. Now, poor things is a contender in both those categories and it could upstage it, but I don't think so.

Yeah, the dialog around Barbie was interesting because to me, and it was a very well done, clever movie, but to me it was like more in the superhero, back to the future type of very popular, really well done movie. And those movies usually don't win oscars. Yeah, we have a 50 year history of that.

Those movies typically are not directed by indie auteurs. And that was the difference here. If this movie had been directed by Sean Levy or even a more commercial director, we would not be talking about in the awards context. But Greta Gerwig co wrote and directed this movie. It's got a message to it. It has the backing of grossing $1.5 billion. So it does line up there. I just don't think it's going to be. It hasn't been taken as seriously as some of the others. And we'll see that with the wins.

Back to the future at a message, I guess.

Don't date your parents.

Don't date your parents. And you know what's pretty good? The were kind of crazy. All right, next, ask her question.

By the way, are you on board for a back to the future reboot? There's been talk.

I'm okay with it because for two reasons. One, the old one is 40 years old now, but two, you could go back to the go the 90s. I'm surprised nobody streamed it as a streaming tv series. Almost like Quantum Leap. Cross back to the future.

I think it's a Spielberg thing. He has to sign off on whatever they do with that franchise, and I think he thinks it's sort of sacred. I mean, Zemeckis and Bob, I'm not.

Against that thought, by the way, but.

They'Re doing a Broadway thing right now. I saw it on Broadway.

It's fun.

Here's the question. Why doesn't somebody just rip it off and just do a movie where somebody goes back 35 years? It's not like Back to the Future. Invented a time machine.

You mean Peggy sue got married?

Well, yeah, but a better version of that. I think it'd be fun to end up in Seattle in 1992. Like, what's going on here?

Yeah.

Next burning question. Will Leo go? I don't know why I care, but you brought this up on your preview pod, and I was like, actually, that's going to be really interesting. If he actually goes to support the movie in Lily Gladstone, I hope he does.

You know why? Because he was everywhere during the campaign season promoting her and standing up for her. And for him to not be there when she wins, shitty. It would be a shitty know. It's like Tom Cruise last year, he didn't show up for the Oscars even though he was a nominated producer. He went back to South Africa to work on Mission Impossible and bailed on the Oscars. And then his sound team won and got up there on stage, and he's been out there talking about, know, the artisans for Top Gun are the real stars. They make this movie happen. He wasn't there to stand up for them when they won. And that's a shitty.

Hmm. Well, from a star standpoint, Leo, potentially Downey, Emma Stone, Bradley Cooper, who are other De Niro, who are other A listers and a plus listers that we even think are going to be there.

Well, I know.

Do you count Margot Robbie as an A lister now? Because.

Totally.

Yeah, she is, right?

Oh, absolutely. She's an A lister.

There should be an announcement. It should be like when you get a million subs on YouTube and they send you something. When you're an A lister, they should just send you an a. I think.

Margot Robbie is definitely an know because she produces as well as stars.

Yeah, I think she is.

Matt Damon won't be there. That's a big exclusive on the town tomorrow. I'm giving you a preview. Matt Damon is shooting and will not be.

Could. He doesn't care about any of this stuff.

No, but it would be nice if Oppenheimer wins best picture, if the entire huge cast could get up there on stage and he's in the movie.

Next burning question, what does this do for.

You know, that's an interesting one, because obviously this guy does not like the kind of accouterments of stardom, does not like the Hollywood system, hates doing press. I think he could get much bigger roles than he does. And he tends to work with the same kind of filmmakers. He loves Nolan and he know british television and he doesn't do the kind of movies that he cited early on in his career as having done and regretted, like Red Eye. Remember that movie? He was the villain in Red Eye.

First of all, I was going to joke about this, but then you stepped on it because I was going to be like, hey, Kelly Murphy, don't be so precious. You're in fucking Red Eye. Settle down.

No, but he's disavowed that movie. He said that he was bad.

Red Eye is good. I completely disagree. That's a good cable movie. Settle down, Killie Murphy.

I agree. So I don't think we're going to all of a sudden see him as the next James Bond or something like that. I just don't see him going that route. But obviously you win best actor, you have more choices and your price goes up.

Yeah, it's a weird one. Could it go the Adrian Brody route where in three years it's like, whoa, he's in that movie. What the hell happened?

But I don't think he would do that movie. I think he will just be pickier about what he does and maybe get.

Don'T be too picky, Killian. Ride the wave, man. Do a couple of good ones.

Well, Nolan has not said what he's going to do next. The joke after Taylor Swift announced her new album on the Grammys is that Nolan's going to get up there during his best director speech and drop his new movie and say, oh, by the way, I'm directing the next James Bond movie. Or know directing my new script about time travel, XYZ. And he could say killian Murphy would star in it. So we'll see what Nolan says.

That's a quickie burning question. So you remember like the Titanic Oscars and it was like the James Cameron Oscars. Sometimes Schindler's list, 93, it was the Spielberg Oscars. He did it. It feels like this will be the Nolan Oscars. This was the most commercial director we've had for the 21st century, basically. And now he's figured out, I mean, commercial, good director, where the stuff he's doing, people want to see it. It also makes money and then it crests with Oppenheimer. I think that's how we're going to remember the Oscars, is Oppenheimer and Nolan.

Yeah. There's a chance, if he also wins screenplay, that he will give three speeches during the show.

I didn't think of that.

Which would be a lot. A lot to hear.

By the way, he's favored. Isn't he favored? Oh, no, he's american fiction past him. So it's him versus american fiction for screenplay.

But that's an open could, if Oppenheimer sweeps it, could sweep up screenplay as well. The big question I have for Nolan in his speech is, is he going to acknowledge the Barbenheimer phenomenon and the role that Barbie played in his movie doing as well as it did? Because I don't know how he feels. I mean, he's talked about in interviews and how it was great for cinema and great for movie theaters that people got excited to see these two very different movies on the same day. But when it comes to his Oscar speech, the thing that people are going to replay over and over, is he going to say like, yeah, we probably wouldn't have grossed a billion dollars if it weren't for the toy movie, right? Well, if you said TikTok, TikTok videos.

Toy movie. If you had to say, let's say he wins for the film and he wins for director, is he the number 120 1st century director. Now we're 24 years, right? It's him or Fincher in the finals. And Fincher didn't have anything like Oppenheimer.

No, I mean, I said it on the town. I think this might be apex mountain for him. I mean, I know, know, relatively young.

Guy, but pull off that Oppenheimer to have that many people see it and go see it again and the experience of it and how long it stayed in theaters and how he pulled out some really great performances. And I thought the movie was a.

Little bit, this is his 1993, when Spielberg went from commercial, beloved, bankable director to Schindler's list, comes out the same year as Jurassic park, and all of a sudden he, the Oscar winning, legendary Steven Spielberg, auteur and King of Hollywood. And that's what Nolan will be if this wins best picture.

Really memorable movie, 15 minutes too long, the two screenplay stuff. So we could have core Jefferson, who's been on this podcast, friend of the pod, potentially winning an Oscar for the first movie he's ever written, which, that's going to be emotional. But then Payne, who has the holdovers for best original screenplay, and he's already run two screenplay wins. But what happened here?

Well, he didn't write it. David Hemingson, another writer, wrote this script, and Alexander Payne liked it and decided to direct it. So he is. He's. There's only two movies in this category, original screenplay, that were not also directed by the writer. It's the holdovers in May, December. And I think that that hurts in this category. I think if there's a favorite, it's probably anatomy of a fall.

That is.

Oh, it is the favorite.

Okay.

Which was co directed by Justine Triet. Sorry. Which was co written by Justine Triet and then directed by her. If there's a shock, I think it would be that past lives win original screenplay. You keep hearing this love for Celine's song and past lives. It did really well at the Spirit Awards, which is for independent movies, not the Oscars, not a lot of overlap, but this is really the only place to honor past lives. And it was one of those movies that just kind of kept popping up throughout award season. They didn't do a huge campaign for it. And if it pulls off a win in original screenplay, that would be a huge deal for Celine song. This is also her first movie.

I was shocked that Greta Lee didn't get nominated. That was, to me, like my most shocking snub, especially like Annette Benning and Niad, Carrie Mulligan and Maestro. I just thought she should have had one of the spots. And it's weird because I thought she was pretty bad in the morning show, which we talked about in the prestige tv pod. And it was weird that she was like best actress caliber in this movie. And then on the morning show it's like, what are you doing?

Don't even get me started on the morning show.

Yeah, well, I'd like to get you started. Some other time.

Some other time. I'm happy to guest on whatever pod you've really.

I'll bring you on. Yeah, you can go to nuts. All right. Two more quick questions and we're done. 91 year old John Williams is nominated. Does he go?

Yes, I think he does. He did not go to the nominees lunch, which they do this lunch where everyone gets up on stage and they do a big class photo. He did not go to that. And I talked to someone there who said that at his age he did not want to get sick or something that would cause him to miss the actual oscars. I think he does go unless he's sick and we don't know about it. He knows he's not going to a, it's a courtesy nomination. Indiana Jones was not the most beloved in the series, but it's John Williams and it's John Williams doing Indiana Jones. So he's going to get nominated. I do think he goes.

The move is whoever's presenting that award. You say John Williams last and then you say to the crowd, by the way, John Williams is here. He's 91 years old standing o then you announce it because he's not going to win. It's incredible that he's 91 and still doing movies, though. All right. Oscar ratings. These were the last 310.416 point. 618.7 in 2014, 43.7. So we've fallen by, I don't know, 60%. Are we in the year? How do we even measure it? Does the fact, like what's happened in sports where the ratings are now up in all the sports because they're kind of the out of home ratings as part of it, where do we land with the Oscars? What's your prediction?

I think up for the reasons that we talked about that when there are popular movies in real contention that the audience goes up.

So give me a number. What is it?

If I had to guess right now, I'd say 22, 23. I'll be optimistic and say 23.

I'm going to say 25.5. Oh, yeah. I'm going big. I'm going up. Price is right. I'm just like, fuck it, Bob Barker. I'm going up.

Okay.

I think it's going to be a big rating because of Oppenheimer and Barbie. Yeah.

And the interesting thing is I had someone pull the numbers on years when there was a sweep, meaning like a movie that was anointed like a titanic or the third Lord of the Rings. And you would think that the ratings would come down because people, there's no suspense. People kind of know what's going to win. But that was not the case.

Yeah, they like dominance.

People tuned in for the anointment. They liked the fact that this big, huge movie was winning all the awards and then winning best picture. It's not like you and me who think of it as a sport. They just want to see their favorite movie get some awards. And I think that is something that could happen this year because the fervor around Oppenheimer was so big and it was global that people will be like, oh, the oscars are tonight. I want to tune in and see Oppenheimer get some awards.

So we recommend Emma Stone, who's like, plus 120 best actress. And then you like the possible, the screenplay of past lives, which is like nine to one right now.

I know.

That's my original screenplay. That's a good one. I like that I'm doing that one.

That's my money pick. And if I win, I am on record. Now, I want part of your winnings.

Okay, I will cut you in. I'm going to cut you a vig.

Because you and Kimmel dined out on coda two years ago, and I was also in very early. I want a little credit for that.

I could not find the version of that this year because from the get go, it just felt like the favorites were gigantic across the board. I mean, that's the Oppenheimer effect. Oppenheimer literally blew up the oscars.

The real huge flex is that Oppenheimer started the season as the front runner and never wavered. There was never a real challenge. There was some talk, oh, zone of interest has fans and Barbie has fans. No, there was never a real challenger to Oppenheimer. And I don't think I've seen that kind of all season dominance since, like, slum dog millionaire in the mid 2000s, where that movie came out at the festivals and was like, okay, best picture, move on. And it just doesn't happen that way. The front runner is always in trouble at some point. The head of neon, one of the distributors, came on the town a couple of weeks ago, and he said, the last place I want to be in award season is front runner because you are attacked. And then there's always the backlash. And there was never a backlash this year.

Kind of like the 2018 Red Sox just dominating from April all the way through October. Weird. I didn't wear a dodger hat. Yeah, I didn't think of that.

You thought of that. I did not think of that.

Matt Bellany, you can hear him on the town. You can read him on puck with his great newsletter where our friend John Iran just joined puck to do some sports stuff, too. So congrats to him. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on.

You too.

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Call win 800 gambler. Visit theringer.com rg minimum three leg parlay required. Refund issued as non withdrawable bonus bets, which expire seven days after receipt. Max refund $5 unless otherwise specified restrictions apply. See terms at sportsbook fanduel.com all right, I'm here with Casey Wasseman taping this on Leap day. I'm not sure when it's running, but wanted to catch up with you on a whole bunch of things. First of all, how's the ringer going? I know you own the know it's.

Fun have been the great investments of all time. Drama free. I'm really thrilled that money you got me when you sold the company was awesome.

Yeah. You're still waiting for it.

I'm actually excited to do this on leap day because I know your rule for leap day, which is no rules.

No rules.

No rules. I know that's your dream company.

Yeah. I always wanted the purge on leap day. There's a bunch of reasons you're here, but the biggest is you're running the Olympics in 2028 and we have the Olympics coming this summer in France. In France. The Summer Olympics. So what have we learned? This has been how many years now for you? Five? Six?

Well, we started bidding in 2014. We got the games in 2017. So we're on year whatever. Eleven.

Now of your 14 year, 14 year journey?

Yeah.

So what have we learned? What's the biggest positive since you embarked on this, and what is the thing you're the most nervous about?

I would say the biggest positive, which we believed, but continues to get validated, is the power of this country's passion for and willing to spend and support big sporting events and big global events. So we have more revenue today contracted than Paris will generate in total. And we're four years from the game. So the revenue has done what we thought. When you start a project like this and you have to generate $7 billion from zero, right, and you can only spend what you generate, you don't know. And it hasn't been a long time since the Summer games were here, and it's a different world. But having said that, it has been really great and really validating, and people are generally excited and engaged about what it means for the Olympics to come back to this country, especially in a city like LA.

So you're starting and you're like, here's our bid. I'm going to be able to pay for this.

Yeah, we are.

And you actually paid for it.

We are the only country on earth that provides no public support for its Olympic movement. So the USOPC, the ngBs, athlete training, support for Olympians comes in two places, american universities, which maybe is a subject we'll get to when we talk about something else. And private support, donors, sponsorships, philanthropy. There is no public funding. And so, by the same token, our Olympic Games are privately funded. And so there's good and bad to that. The good is we get to do things in a rational, business driven, economically minded way. The challenge is, which is the part that keeps me up at night, is the Olympics in LA will be the largest peacetime gathering in the history of the world. It is a level of complexity and scale that is unimaginable.

Well, why is it different than 84? Like, what's changed?

Well, we'll have the biggest sport program in ever. We have more tickets to sell than ever. More countries in the Olympics. The scale of the Olympics keeps growing and we'll have the most ambitious sport program ever. And in 84, the Coliseum. Now we have the Coliseum. And sofa 84 was gymnastics was a poly pavilion. We have now crypto and intuit and Honda center. And the form. Right. We have all these things that didn't exist. So the scale of our venues and the infrastructure here is stunningly different than 84. And the size of the Olympic Games has grown. And so all of those things make it big. It is the operational equivalent of seven Super Bowls a day for 30 days.

Jesus.

And so the scary part is we will spend 85% of our budget in the last 18 months. So our budget we are break even of 6.8 billion is what we believe revenue and expenses is sort how we manage the business. We will spend 85% of that $6.8 billion in the last 18 months, which means you better know what you're about to spend because you don't have time to course correct if you go over budget. Because once you start, you kind of have to finish because July 14, 2028, that torch is showing up at sofa.

Yeah.

Whether we like it or not.

So the things you've figured out so far, Olympic village is at UCLA. Where was it last time?

Olympic Village was split between UCLA and USC because neither had enough dorms. UCLA has built a tremendous amount of dorms. Now 90% of students live on campus. And given the scale and complexity of security to protect the village, you can't split the athletes anymore. It's too complicated.

Got it. So Westwood gets shut down. The UCLA kids are gone for how long? Like six weeks.

It's funny, people always ask, why is your opening ceremonies July 14? It's the earliest opening ceremonies in the history Olympics. It's because very simply, we have to have time to get into the dorms when the students get out, and we have to time to get out of the USC facilities before USC gets in because they start in August. UCLA ends in June. And so we have a window of time for the Olympics and Paralympics. That's about 40 days that we can operate. And so there won't be summer school, to be fair. But unlike 84, there won't be competitions at Polypavilian. We need the whole campus just for athletes and athlete training for both security and transportation.

So you have that. You have things you had the last time. Rose bowl.

We have the Rose bowl, you had the forum, the Dodger Stadium, the forum.

The Coliseum, but now you have Staples center, you have Intuit, the Ballmer Clippers building.

Correct.

You have Sofa, which is 80,000. So what's in Sofa?

Sofa right now is opening ceremonies. We're thinking about moving an event there, but that will get solved over the next 60 days because as things happen around the city, if things where we're going to do things may get used for other purposes from a temporary perspective. So we have to create the solutions. We think those solutions will be better. But certainly opening ceremonies, the parade of nations, what you assume is the opening ceremonies will be at Sofi, and if we can pull off an event there, it's going to be pretty spectacular.

Who got the basketball?

Well, Steve already went out and said it, so basketball is very likely to end up at into it.

Oh, he spoiled it.

He kind of spoiled it when they announced the all star game. And then he called me that. Really? Did I screw that up for you? And I go, I mean, it's mean you can pay me back later.

So Sofi for opening ceremonies and maybe one more thing, basketball into like where's the surfing and all that stuff going to be?

So surfing is either going to be in Huntington beach, which is where they do the US Open surfing. The only two places with waves on Southern California are really there. And then down in. Yeah, trestles is the best wave. It's got a lot of operational complexities because there's not parking. You have to cross over the train tracks. It's the best wave between the back of house and the wave is pretty complicated. So we're working through that. Golf will be a riviera.

Oh, look at that. What was the hardest sport to figure out where to put it and how to do it?

Hardest sport is sports. You wouldn't think about things like modern pentathlon, which is an event that has five esoteric events that they demand operate on the same day. So it's a swimming pool and a shooting range and a track and a thing. So you've got this weird collection of venues. Equestrian.

So OJ's old house.

Yeah. Equestrian, because you have to have all the disciplines in the same location.

Yeah.

So eventing, which operates on a golf course, and dressage and jumping, which operate in an arena, but you have to have backup house for all the stables and all that stuff. There's not a lot of places that have all of those facilities in one place. So there's some of those sports that are more complicated than you think about.

Because what was that one, that short cycling. That was a fun one in London, thankfully. You need like a little special dome.

Right at whatever it's called now. Dignity health, where the galaxy played. There's actually a veledrome that has 3000 seats in it that is as good a veledrome as there is in the world.

And where's soccer going to be?

Soccer we will do likely, definitely semifinals and finals at the Rose bowl. Yeah, I'm not sure we'll do all the preliminaries there because I'm not sure we can take advantage of the capacity so we can do it at other MLS venues in and around the state.

And tennis is where?

Tennis also at dignity health because there's that 10,000 seat tennis stadium. It's actually the only tennis stadium in southern California other than indian wells. But indian wells in July is a little hot.

So we don't know where track is yet.

Track is the Coliseum.

Okay. Yeah. So old school.

Old school. How about this?

Home of Carl Lewis.

Fun fact for the Olympics, the most expensive thing we will build is a temporary track in the Coliseum because after the earthquake in 94, they took the track out.

Yeah.

The track is so big for an Olympic footprint because it's not just the running, it's all the field events and all the long jumps and the triple jumps and steeple chases and the hammer throws and all those things. So the scale of the track is huge. It will go 14 rows up into the coliseum. So row one would be actually row 15 if you're at a USC football game.

So how do you figure out, like, the marathon route? Is it the same as it was the last time or does no change?

It's actually one of the things we're starting to think about now. There's two versions of a marathon, point to point, but then you have to shut the city down.

Yeah.

And a little complicated. We'll stay away from your neighborhood, don't worry.

Thank you.

Or you do loops. So in London, they were the first one to do, essentially know, five, four and a half mile.

Yeah.

And so you get a ton of fans and create an environment that's really energized as opposed to a point to point where you don't feel that energy better for viewing, not as exciting a course. So we're sort of moderating between what's.

A better result for LA and what does LA get to keep when you're done? Because I remember in London that was a big thing about they built this thing and then afterwards you get to keep it. What does LA get?

The good part is we're not building anything. So on some level, what they keep is a couple things. One, we're investing in youth sports in the city. So all youth sports, through wrecks and park in the city of LA is subsidized by us, so that it's only $5 for any kid who wants to play Rex and park. So that is the biggest investment in youth sports in the history of this country in one city, and we desperately.

Needed it in the LA area.

Correct. And until we started funding this program, there wasn't an adaptive sport program offered in the city of LA. So we will host the Paralympics too. And there wasn't a single adaptive sport program offered at Rexon park when by statistically, 10% of the population has a physical impairment. Jeez. So that's a huge benefit. And then just like 84, if we can create a surplus, that surplus, because we're a 501, stays to benefit the city forever. And so the real legacy is the economic legacy, post the games, the economic activity during the games. And when you have an event of this size and this scale, it's a great line in the sand to get the city motivated and focused on being at its best when the world comes here.

Is there anything you can learn from the World cup? When some of the World cup games are here in 26?

Yes and no. Certainly, just for some perspective, a World cup pot of games in LA is, let's say it's six teams and four games. It's 180 athletes and four games.

So you're learning nothing.

Now, there's some security issues, some operational issues, things like that, that will be very similar to what we do on a singular basis. So we can learn from that. But the World cup is a big event, but it's in twelve cities. We will sell more tickets in one city than all twelve cities combined. And we will have ten x the number of athletes in one city that the entire World cup has. So it's at a totally different scale. One of our 35 events is a World Cup. I remind people, like, when the US Open of golf was in LA, we have a US Open, a men's and women's golf as one of our 35 events.

Right? All right, transportation, how do we fix that? Because when I was in London, everyone could take the subway or whatever to anything. Nobody used their cars to go anywhere, and there was a ton of walking. LA is way more spread out.

So there will. Obviously most Olympics operate on busses and public transportation, so we will do that. We'll borrow 5000 busses. One of the biggest complicating sort of organizational things we have to do is borrow 5000 busses to provide busses for media, fans, athletes, officials, volunteers. Those busses go in dedicated lanes. So that's a very traffic relieving thing, because instead of going to Dodger Stadium with 30,000 cars, you have 5000 busses or 2000 busses going to Dodger stadium for a baseball game. It's a different stress on the system. Plus, one of the things we want to do, given the infrastructure investment here, is allow anybody with an Olympic ticket to use the metro for free. Because we want to show people that once this thing is built, you can go from Westwood to downtown LA in 20 minutes. So why don't we use it as an opportunity to teach people how great the system is and get them used to using it and used to using public transportation.

How much did the Olympics have to do with all the stuff that they built on? The very stuff.

Very little.

It was happening concurrently.

It was happening. They actually got the funding before from a ballot measure. And what we did was our bid was not contingent on being done. If it's done, we benefit from it, but it wasn't required for us to deliver the games.

Okay. The city is in worse shape, I would say, with the homeless crisis and all these other things since we got the bid. When did we get it? 2017. I mean, the COVID error did not help with that. But what kind of shape do you think the city is going to be in in 2028? Because right now it's not great. Yeah.

And look, I get asked a lot, what are you going to do about homelessness? And I answer is really twofold. One, our responsibility is deliver the Olympic Games responsibly. And our job is not to fix every problem in the city of LA, but as someone like you who lives here and cares about the city, if we haven't done anything by 2020, we've all failed. Yeah. Especially when you think about what drives the economy of LA. It's tourism. 50 million people come to LA every year. If people don't feel safe and comfortable coming to LA as tourists, whether it's to come to Hollywood Boulevard or Disneyland or universal studios or Santa Monica beach, or to museums or whyver they come here, and that goes down to 40 million, LA is probably bankrupt as a city. So we have to get this city better. And again, going back to what I said, the Olympics out there is a great opportunity to make sure our city is at its best. Because think about look, next weekend, whenever this airs, is the Academy Awards. There's homeless people on Hollywood Boulevard right now. They will not be on the red carpet when Tom Cruise walks down the red carpet or whatever superstar walks down the red carpet.

And if they were, that wouldn't be a good look. We're going to have Super Bowls and all star Games and World Cups and Olympics and wrestlemanias and all these massive events here. We have to be at our best because we're competing for those events and we're competing for those. And as people who live and care about the city, we have to get that right.

What can you learn from Paris in five months? I know you're going to go there for the Olympics. What are you looking for? What are you trying to translate for four years later?

So when we got the games in 2017, what we thought was we would get two free looks, if you will, in Tokyo and Paris. I was in Tokyo for ten days and didn't leave my hotel. So fair to say I didn't get to see a whole lot of smell learning and not a lot of learning. So it'll be the first chance for our staff and all of us to see in the context of planning for a game, as opposed to when we were in Rio, we were bidding for games for what we're going to have to deliver. Good and bad. They're doing things differently. The city is different. It's a government entity that delivers the games. But having said that, the scale they operate is close to ours. The complexity of a big city, the complexity of politics, the complexity of being respectful to residents and all the things that exist and have to continue to exist while the games are going on, and to make the games an incredible experience and a positive experience. So there's a lot to learn operationally. There's a lot to learn when you think about security, taking care of fans, how do you manage transportation, how do you manage athletes and making them feel at home?

So it's a lot of learning because it's our only chance to see it at scale. One of the challenges everybody has with the Olympics is because it operates at the scale it does. There's nothing that compares to it. So you can't really practice for it. Like the first morning opening ceremony is Friday night in Paris. Saturday morning, half a million fans, 30,000 volunteers, 5000 coaches and athletes will all leave essentially the same place at the same time, to go to the same place at the same time, and you cannot practice for that. And so that's a great thing for us to watch and see. Not that it's the same in Paris as LA. But it's a great opportunity to watch.

Have you picked what luxury hotel all the basketball players are going to be staying at? Thankfully, they have to all have suites.

Basketball in Paris until the semis is not even in Paris. It's in Lille.

Right.

So the basketball teams, if they're staying in Paris, will have to train to Leo. And because of noise issues in France, if you play a night game, the train stop running at 08:00 p.m. So they'll have to spend the night in Leo.

Uber.

And then I don't think Uber is getting them doing back from Leo.

I mean, by the time we get to 2028, Team USA is probably going to be like the number four favorite.

I know. God's on Canada. Getting a medal in Canada will be.

Like -300 that's frightening. All right, did we hit everything? Because I want to move on to other stuff. Any other Olympic stuff we need to hit.

Look, I think.

Do you feel like the Olympics matters as much as it did when we were kids?

I don't, but I think if we're honest with ourselves, the Olympics in Paris is the first real full scale Olympics in a truly great global city since London. Not putting anybody down, but you went to Sochi in Rio, right? Then you went to Pyongchang for a winter game.

The time differences were just.

And then you went to Covid games. So really, it's been a long time since people have seen what the Olympics can be. And I think that the combination of that and Paris will actually reignite a lot of excitement. Now, four years is a long time, so you can't maintain what you used to be able to maintain an excitement, but I think it will resonate with people in this country that, okay, we're next.

Well, I really want to thank the. When did the Paris. When is it?

It's starting like July 26 or eigth or something.

It's great for the ringer. It's like just the most dead content time ever.

The doldrums of the sports.

Oh, my God, there's a base for nothing. Yeah, you're like fantasy football. Just like, oh, wait, there might have been a basketball trade, and now we'll have real stuff. I'll be interested because I think the time zone stuff really hurt here. Plus, it's not like the old days where you can hide a result. You can't hide anything now. People know immediately.

And I think one of the things you'll see this year when we watch on tv that NBC is not going to pretend like it's live anymore, which is what they used to do in primetime. What they're going to do is treat it like a reality show. So reality tv is the magic's in the editing and telling the story of what you know is happening. And I think what you'll see in primetime is not pretending like, oh, let's go to heat one, because we don't know that this upset happens. No, we know that upset. So the 3 hours of primetime is going to be reality like storytelling to create the drama and the story, to produce what the event doesn't mean. At three in the afternoon, we might not watch the swimming live in. Yeah, but you'll still watch that night because of the way it's packaged. Even though we know the result.

Paris will work.

Paris will work. It's the most beautiful city in the world, and it's going to be absolutely spectacular.

Yeah. And for the most part, what is it, 6 hours ahead of the east coast? Nine ahead. So if they stack it correctly, and.

They'Re going to, because obviously NBC is the most important economic partner of the Olympic movement, and so they will optimize the big events at times that for the east coast, for sure, and sometimes on the west coast, they're really important times for us to be able to watch.

I'm like 50 50 whether I'm going or not. I mean, I haven't asked for a credential yet, which is probably a problem. But the basketball, that quarter finals, that was, I think, the most fun I've ever had in a basketball day, where it's the four games in a row, all the best guys.

It's like the best of the final four times, too.

Well, and now we have, all these countries are better. It'll be like the final eight teams will all at least have one awesome guy in them.

And with Wembiayama, can France actually create some magic?

And, you know, they'll stack this for sure. They'll be stacking. It'd be like 2002 Lakers level officiating for France.

And I bet they end up in a pretty good group, so to speak.

All right, we'll take a break and then a bunch of other stuff to cover. All right, so one of the reasons you want to do this is you had a lot of thoughts on what's happening with college sports. You're in the agency game, you're in the management game. You've been watching this from afar. You're in the middle of it, and it just feels like wild. Wild west is not a strong enough word right now for what's going on, and now you're heavily involved with UCLA. Like the PaC twelve fell apart. Where does this go? What are the next ten years look like to you?

So I really think we're at the fork in the road. First of all, let's not be shy. The Big Ten and the SEC look a whole lot like the AFC and the NFC, and that's not an accident. And the fork in the road is, does college football become its own entity and keep all the money? Or does college football monetize its rights differently and use the massive increase in revenue that would generate to fix the system?

So fixing the system, paying players, what is the fix?

Look, paying players as employees is, I don't think, tenable for universities. So if you're a university president, the second you pay players, as you know, they will have a union and they will have representation. So now you're going to have a collective bargaining agreement for students, you're going to have a collective bargaining agreement for teachers, you're going to have a collective bargaining people who work in the university. And if you're a university president and you have to lose $100 million a year to do that for the athletic.

Department, you're just going to give up sports.

You will give up sports. You will maybe license UCLA, will license the name UCLA football to the Rams. The Rams can go operate UCLA football.

Interesting. And pay the Rams would own UCLA football.

Well, if you're a UCLA and having a football team is important and you can't lose $100 million anymore, what else do you do? The truth is the arms race isn't just on nil, which is clearly, especially with the ruling in Tennessee. Absolutely. Now, the wild, wild west is an understatement. It's facilities, it's salaries of coaches, it's assistant coaches, it's infrastructure, it's travel. The expenses around the teams are stunningly different than they used to be with no controls and no system of managing those things. So now in the college football, you have no salary cap and unrestricted free agencies and no contracts.

And the coaches have no ability now to keep players, unless they, correct. Are the perfect home for the player.

Correct. Because if they don't do what's in the best interest of the player, which almost certainly isn't necessarily always in the best interest of the team. Yeah, they leave so John wooden sitting freshmen and telling Kareem, you're not playing because. Or go back to a more current version. Pete Carroll. Pete Carroll had that run of quarterbacks, right? Carson Palmer, Mark Sanchez just all down the list. And he convinced those guys to register a year and sit a year before they played.

Yeah.

Now, Matt Leonard, he won, what, three Heisman trophies with it. In this day and age, that never happens because if I'm not playing, I'm leaving. And that's not good for the sport, and that's not good for college sports.

It's also not good for building character.

It isn't. And persevering or anything and putting my Olympic hat on. Our Olympic movement is trained at american universities full stop. And if football breaks away from the system and keeps all the money, UCLA doesn't have any sports other than football. They all become club sports, and that's pretty much most universities in the country.

Well, so you got to explain that part, because part of the benefit of football is you have to match the scholarships, at least on the women's side.

So title nine obviously means equal spending on both sports.

So if I'm spending how many, 90 scholarships on football or 70, whatever it is, I've got to match that on the women's side.

Correct. And it's not an accident. The team USA, our Olympic team, has more women athletes than men, and they win more medals than the men. And it's a direct result of what you just said, because our women have a disproportionate investment to other countries around the world, our women's sports. And what you are seeing in the rise of women's sports today is a direct result of that.

And the flip side of it is like something like lacrosse, which my son's playing. And I was amazed by how few colleges have lacrosse because that's another like 30 part. It basically doesn't exist on the west coast in college sport.

Correct. Because so many Olympic sports are on the west coast. We've got the swimming and the diving and beach volleyball and all these Olympic sports that are the history of really Cal, Stanford, USC and UCLA and a lot of these west coast teams that the Midwest and the east coast schools don't. So, and the football really subsidizes everything else. So if you take today, college football generates about $3 billion of revenue pre the new deal tv deal, it's probably worth six or seven if the NFL is getting 13 a year. That incremental three or $4 million really keeps everything afloat or makes everything disappear if they keep all that money.

So you think it's possible we're headed toward a new world where way more club sports, way less like NCAA team sports, club sports.

Or it's going to look like Ivy League school. No scholarships, no special privileges, none of the other stuff. It's not club or intermurral, but it's not big.

So it's like Ivy League or NEScAC or one of those.

Correct.

So higher. Higher level d three.

And I'm scared because I don't think it's what college sports and college athletics is about. And I don't think that's the best result for everybody.

I don't think so either.

It's a really scary proposition.

I mean, look, some of the stuff that was happening before was also crazy on the flip side, right? Like coaches being able to sign deals, then leave schools, and they recruited kids. Those kids are stuck there.

I hated that stuff 100%. And the system is not fixed. And the NCAA tried to solve a problem and made it worse by opening pandora's box for nil. And what has happened now? And by the way, talk about goofy rules, going back to your point about coaches versus players. So, Deshaun Foster at UCLA.

New UCLA.

Correct. Football, a booster can buy. This happened at the University of Utah. Booster bought every player on the football team a pickup truck. But if Deshaun Foster. It's raining. Gives his quarterback a ride to the dorm, that's an NCAA violation. The quarterback can have a Ferrari that someone gave him, but if he drives, the coach, drives him to the dorm because it's raining, that's a special privilege and that's an NCAA violation. I mean, we have a system that is so disconnected from reality and so not solving the problems it was trying to solve, that it's substantially worse and almost a runaway train. And now where we are, and I give Charlie Baker's the head of the NCA credit. He understands this. The solution requires federal legislation. But we have a federal government that's as broken as ever been. They can't even agree on its budget.

Right.

So now we're going to get them to agree on federal legislation to fix college sports. It's almost inconceivable that it can happen, even though that's the only fix that there is.

And then that turns into a political issue between the two sides versus them. Just trying to figure out. Correct.

And don't underestimate people acting in their self interest. So if you're a senator from Georgia, you kind of, like, this isn't the way it is because University of Georgia is pretty good.

Right.

Do you really want to level out the playing field for everybody?

Right.

People act in their own self interest, usually.

But if you're in like you want.

You think it's a good solution because you save college sports and save amateur sports. So it's a very tenuous position and I don't think it's ever been more tenuous and more at risk than today.

This is why we need a sports star. I've been talking about this for 20 years. Hey, Dominic, you with the amount of money that's in college sports and professional sports, which you just said the NFL is making 13 billion revenue plus all the merchandise, all the other stuff, college sports just for their tv deal is going to be like six 7 billion. But then you think all the way through, it's a nine figure billion industry, at least just six sports. So why wouldn't we try to have more oversight over that to try to help it?

We should. And by the way, it's a way bigger because sports is first about people's fan and fandom and connection and love.

It's like the toy store. So we don't think of it like.

Correct, but it's a way bigger business than the music business or the entertainment industry. It's not even close. Yeah, on a global basis and on a domestic basis. And it's something that would serve a lot of interest if we did have some version of a sports star that could help create an environment that solves some of these problems that are otherwise left to their own devices, unsolvable by the institutions themselves.

Plus, it'll be funny watching the sports commissioners answer to a sports r. It's the super commissioner. It really would be that guy get paid.

Given what the commissioners make today, can you imagine what that guy would get paid?

Probably if he's doing a good job, he's probably worth like 75 80 million a year. So when does this come to a head?

Look, I think it's coming to a head now. I think in the next twelve months something has to happen, whether it's because if the ruling in Tennessee now essentially you can explicitly pay for play.

Yeah.

Whereas nil is theoretically not pay for play. You pay for theoretical value of the name, image and likeness of an athlete. Now you can explicitly pay someone. The court ruled that it is today, it is okay until it gets challenged further to really just pay someone to play. And I think you were on the edge of the point of no return.

Complete anarchy.

Complete anarchy.

So you could basically say, you know what? I want another UCLA men's title. I'm just going to go get the top five guys in the ESPN top hundred. Money is no object. And you could just get them correct.

And it is legalized cheating. Let's call it what it is.

Yeah. I like the old days when it was like more nefarious, under the radar cheating and nothing and everyone pretended they didn't cheat. I feel like the wheels are coming off all over the place because it felt like we were more village in on pds and stuff for a while. And now I personally don't think we are. That's where the Olympics will be really interesting because you know this better than most people. The Olympic drug testing stuff is pretty intense. It is really intense and you're not going to be able to get away with some stuff there. But I think the drugs have gotten so good and some of the career arcs and some of the things we're saying, it just doesn't add up to me. And I'm just really interested to see what happens in Paris.

I would tell you, a friend who I will not name once said to me, failing a drug test is failing an IQ test.

Well, with all the ways we have to subvert now.

Correct.

All right, so let's say I know you're heavily involved with UCLA. The Pac twelve basically goes to shit and they're asking you for advice. What are you telling them?

I'm telling them they don't have a choice. And by the way, to USC's credit, USC said, we're not going to the big ten without UCLA. The dollar difference from the end of this past year to the start of next year in tv is almost $50 million to UCLA, day one. And USC. If you're running an institution, especially UCLA, which is a public institution, you don't have a choice. You don't have $50 million showing up out of nowhere for nothing, especially at a time and place where you're running a deficit in the athletic department, which most athletic departments are, the sports marketing landscape of college sports has changed dramatically. The uniform and shoe deals have changed dramatically for the teams. The expenses have gone up radically. You have to take that action. It's not the old days of there's not that much difference between the haves and the have nots. You're now in a place where the difference is stunningly large, and so you have to be a part of an environment that allows you to do that. For all the controversy and all the angst it caused people, we really didn't have a choice.

I don't know where any of this goes. This is the first time as a sports fan, and we're both old now, but I think when we were younger, you're more naive. You just feel like everybody knows what they're doing. And then as we get older, you're like, oh, they're fixing some stuff now. Things are headed to the right place. And now I look around like it was interesting hearing Adam talk about it at all star weekend about youth basketball and how he's kind of doesn't really have answers for how to fix this. And these non american players are coming into the league and they're better schooled, they're better taught, they have a better sense of team, their skills translate to more systems and offenses. And he just feels like we're at a disadvantage now, which is crazy.

And it's true because we have a system that coddles those players from a young age.

Coddle to super coddles, right?

Shields them from dealing with the things you need to learn to get better and develop. And now the college system is so broken, you don't even have two or three years there to. Even if you're being a youth basketball player, didn't put you on the right track when you got to Duke or you got to UCLA or you got to Michigan State, those coaches knew what they were doing and they got you ready for the NBA, and they really did the work to get you ready. Now, whether they go to the colleges is irrelevant. And if they're there, they're there nine months because it's the shortest amount of time they have to be there before they can go to the NBA. And so no one's going to tell them what to do in that nine months and sort of break them down and build up the skill sets they need to be successful to compete against. We're just talking about it before we got know the quality of international players. It's stunning in the NBA.

It's truly stunning when they're coming in more, just more game ready. And that's just like when I talk to people in the NBA. The point that they feel like fans don't fully understand is the lack of practice time because of the game schedule. So Adam's complaining on the one hand about this whole infrastructure that's leading to players that aren't quite ready yet or whatever. But on the other hand, in an 82 game schedule, when you don't have the ability to practice, you can't take a young asset and develop them on your team if they're not playing, which I think Kaminga is a really good example of this with Steve Kerr, how he had to handle that. Kaminga's in year three now. He's finally just starting to play, but it came to head a bunch of times he was unable to play him because they're trying to win a title. I don't know how you fix that hard.

And the teams, the flip side is you have these teams who take Oklahoma. Right. And Shay, who we're fortunate enough to represent because he was in a place, he got traded from the Clippers and he was a place that there wasn't that pressure that the warriors have.

Plus he got to play with Chris Paul for the first year.

Correct.

And they had a decent team, learn.

How to be a professional. And Oklahoma City does treat their players well and they do have good coaches and they do let them develop and grow and now know maybe one of the two favorites for MVP. And it didn't happen overnight. This is year five or whatever it is. It takes time to get. I mean, Jokic and Doncic have been in the NBA a long time. Five, six, seven years. By the way, people forget Michael Jordan didn't win his championship. What was it, six or seven years in like, this takes time.

Yeah. That was seven years for him, right? Yeah. Edwards is kind of a fluke, but I think he's such a great athlete. But the fact that he could just kind of waltz in and at age 22 be as good as he is and be as ready.

But that's in this NBA. I think that's the exception, not the rule anymore.

Yeah. Well, he's probably the biggest american athletic freak we have. I do worry. Like, it's funny thinking about. Because there was stuff about who's going to be on the Olympic team, right, in 24 and they've announced a bunch of names. There's a couple left and you see like, oh, Curry and LeBron, they're playing and those guys. LeBron's 39, Curry is 35. And you start thinking, who's the signature american guy in their 20s? Even Shay is canadian. Correct. So you have Tatum, you have Booker, and you have Anthony Edwards. But I do worry a little bit about who's going to be the face of the league when these guys are gone. I know this is like a first take topic, but in some ways it makes me feel good for a celtic fan, as a celtic fan, because they kind of need Tatum to win the title and elevate up a level 100%.

Because he's playing at that level, he doesn't get recognized that level probably today.

And the finals would finally help him. So managing NBA players versus artists, musicians, other sports, are all celebrities the same when they hit a certain wealth kind of talent success level or is everybody completely different from each other. Is it like having kids where you can have seven kids and the kids are all different?

It's more of the second. They're very different. I do think in a company like ours, more likely than not, the core traits of those clients are more similar, because I always think it's not an accident who you represent and who you don't. The way we do business is the way we do business that appeals to some people and maybe not others. Talent is talent. What makes them successful is what also makes them, in many ways. You don't tell talent what to do. No different than my agents are talent. And what makes them successful agents also makes them hard to manage, too. There's a skill set in that. And so my view is all we can do for clients is promise one thing, that what we tell them is what we believe is in their best interest. We don't have another agenda here at this company because my name's on the door, and I wouldn't sacrifice our reputation for some short term game that we didn't believe was in the best interest of a client. That doesn't mean we're right, and that doesn't mean they're supposed to agree with us, but it means that our advice and our perspective in service of clients is what we believe is in the best interest of their career and the nuances of.

And they have to trust you.

They do. And if you don't have that trust, it doesn't work either way. Now, the difference with sports and music and entertainment is the support system in sports is unique. The teams really do support the know when Shay is in Oklahoma, they handle the travel, they handle the hotels. They handle the food during the season, they have a pr team with them full time. They have trainers. They have, uh, when Cole plays on tour, we build a support staff for them, and we are part of that support staff. And then it goes away and they go back on tour and you rebuild it. The structure of sports does provide a lot of support to the talent in ways that other talent doesn't get in such a permanent way. So if you're on a movie set, you have support for three months, and then you have no support when you're not on tour and you're not working. We're the support system.

It would seem like movie and tv need agents the most, because you have to find, what's my next job? What's my next job? Should I take this? What do we think of this script? Hey, this director's doing this. How can I get in there? Whereas, like, somebody like Shay, he's going to sign a max deal and then his deal is going to be up and then he'll sign another max deal. As long as he's good, you can do the management part of him, but his salary is pretty set.

And the thing I think what you and I probably love about sports is it's about the scoreboard. It's actually about what you do. Yeah. And in entertainment, there is no scoreboard. It's harder to have that.

And if you have a loss, all of a sudden, you could be out of the loop.

Correct. And so the managing of a career, and again, coming back to having what's in the client's best interest and thinking about taking the right steps to get to the result, which is what you have to do in sports. You don't want to short that. Short that process and take shortcuts, because in the end, it won't be sustainable. So managing career in music entertainment is fundamentally different, and as you said, much more important, managing career in athletics. If they're a great athlete, they know what they're doing and they know essentially where they're doing it and to some extent, who they're doing it for. What you're doing is taking advantage of that talent in every other area, right. In the other entertainment music space, you're doing all of that and you start over every day because the movie's over, the tour is over, the album's over, you got to start over and you got to create what's next. And the success isn't guaranteed. Shay taking care of himself and being healthy, he's going to be playing basketball for a long time. That's not what we're.

His weird game. He doesn't even shoot threes. Herky jerky. It's unbelievable. Do you find there's a common trait with successful athletes, musicians, actors, with how they hand the people around them the circle they have. And I don't know. I don't even know if this is true, and maybe a study would refute this, but it seems like the smaller the circle of people you completely trust, the better off that person is going to be. And the wider the circle and the more kind of chaos in it, it seems like a little more dangerous. No question.

And I think the point is the people you surround yourself with, usually a reflection of how secure you are and comfortable are you with yourself.

Yeah.

The bigger the circle, probably the more validation you need from other places and the more people you telling you what you should do or how good you are helping you. And if you're secure in yourself and you feel comfortable at yourself, you don't need a whole lot of that. And there's enough chaos in their lives every day. The chaos outside of their work is a really bad thing. And so I think it's really important to your point, to have a small group of people, whoever they are and whatever they do that are there because they support you and only are there to support you and don't have another agenda. Their livelihood isn't dependent. And you see that, and you see the stars who have sustained success almost invariably have a very small group of people who have been with them for a very long time.

And how small is that group, do you think?

I mean, in some cases it's one or two or three, including an agent or a manager, never more than four or five on a sustained basis. Because in the end, you're busy, you've got two kids. How many friends do you really have time to have that you really do.

Trust to talk to every day?

Yeah, it's not a lot. And so you don't have time. And if you have that many friends, they're actually not as close to you as you think they are, and you probably don't know what else they're doing.

It's been interesting watching Tatum, because Tatum, he gets drafted in 2017, and the first seven years of his career have just been just amazing to watch. He came in super polished. He was always good at handling the media and saying the right things. He's an unbelievable role model. But his mom is pretty legendary in celtic circles for how amazing of a parent she is, and everything runs through her. She's the gatekeeper. That's it. You have to go through her. And it's just like, man, I wish more people just saw it this way. You need that one person who's like, that's the person you do.

And because what she does for him is his success, his livelihood, depends on how much he's able to focus on his craft.

Yeah.

And so she's taking all the noise and distraction away from him in a singular person, as opposed to if it's ten people, that creates more noise for the athlete or the star or the talent, when it's one person and he's not worried about what she's doing or.

Who she's saying to what, because he.

Trusts her completely and he can focus on what he does, which is, at this point, maybe one of the. Be the two or three best players of his.

Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty neat. Well, I'm sure there's all kinds of methods to this, but I'm always amazed people don't just study the ones who have succeeded the best with know and even LeBron over the. He. He had a couple different incarnations and it seems like he landed in the right spot around somewhere near the end of Miami where his team kind of cut down a little bit and then that was it. And from that point on really became a master with how to handle all this stuff.

They are, and they are with him completely and fully and they allow him to be and do what he does.

Or there's the Durant model where it's just him and rich, right? And that's it. There's just two of us. We're doing everything together. We're doing all our business on the side together, 100%.

And that's why they've had success.

If we're going sports, going up, down. Like you were big in on soccer pretty early last, I would say really? Ever since I've known you and globally and just, you were always kind of thinking that way, trying to snap up soccer players in all these different countries. What's coming, what have you been kind of diving into as we hit the mid 20s? We're in the mid two thousand and twenty s now.

It's crazy. Soccer is going to continue to grow, and that's not just MLS in this country, that's soccer globally, which will continue to benefit from the interest in soccer in the United States. I think you're going to start to see, just like the NFL is playing a lot of games in Europe and overseas. I would be shocked if the Premier League and the big leagues in Europe don't start playing a lot of games in the US. They should. I imagine they will.

So you think they do that to try to grow interest and have somebody in Detroit be like, my favorite team is Liverpool because they play here three times a year.

Correct. And I think what you Americans like to watch the best, and today the best football soccer in the world is in Europe. And to have summer tour games over here where not the best players play and they don't really play their best game does not actually serve the long term interest of the sport because they come and they go and they're really just a marketing, a vacation tour. And look, you just saw it with Messi when he went to Asia. He didn't play a couple games. There was almost a riot. He was there, he was on the bench, but he didn't play because he didn't want to play. He didn't want to get hurt. They don't want him to get hurt. He wants to play him for the MLS season and take advantage of what he is and who he is. But if you had Chelsea play Liverpool in New York City, that's a big deal.

And it's an actual Premier League game.

Correct.

So kind of what the NFL is doing where they have the games in Germany.

Exactly. And Adam's taking games to Paris and to the Middle east. And that matters. Taking the best of who you are to really important markets. And the most opportunity for football to continue to grow in the world is probably in the states economically. And obviously now it's in fashion to say, but the continued rise of women's sports is going to be meaningful. And finally, the economics are starting to catch up with the influence and the power and the importance of those athletes.

Well, this will be the Caitlin Clark question, right? When she becomes a pro, whenever that is, what does that do to WNBA? Because that'll be the. And people. No, no. We've had a bunch of great players, believe me. I ride with Tarase. She's the best.

Right.

But they've never had anybody who can come in and just be like a casual fan. Talking point.

Correct. People know who Caitlin Clark is who don't know anything about women's basketball.

Well, and also, you're in a situation where the women's college hoops for March madness will be bigger than the men's. And we'll probably. I would say that final four Friday night, if Caitlin Clark's in it, and a couple of these others. Exactly. I would say that rating is going to be like a borderline NFL rating.

And I'm surprised because I think it would be spectacular if they put the women's and the men's final four in the same city together and just have a four day basketball extravaganza.

I mean, that would actually help the men's more than the women's, but the.

Women could sell out every one of those stadiums now that they play the men's final four in the women are superstars. The basketball is incredible and it would be great for everything.

Yeah. The thing for me is the basketball is actually fun to watch now, I didn't enjoy it as much 25 years.

Ago, but it is.

The slashing kick has really helped and the players are coming in with crazy skills. But Chuck and I talked about on our podcast when we did it about how the continuity of the teams is the biggest thing for me. The fact that I watched Caitlin Clark last year with almost all of the same Iowa kids right now, she's playing with them. I was like, oh, there's their center. I remember her just having familiarity with players. It's one of the things that's killed college sports.

Exactly right. And you see the value of it when you look at that and you realize what you're missing in the men's game in basketball, that you don't have that anymore.

So you talk to all these different commissioners that you're friends with. What is their biggest fear? Like, does Roger Goodell have fear anymore? It feels like they've come through every single crisis. The ratings are the best they've almost ever been. He's got actual american stars under 30 who are going to carry the league, right? He's got Burrow, and he's got Mahomes, and he's got Josh Allen and Herbert. And maybe one of the guys from this class. It seems like they're in the best shape. Plus the concussion stuff. Feel like they've made a lot of fixes with that. That's helped. So if you're Goodell, what are you scared of?

Well, I think the second you get complacent, you should be scared. So I don't think they're ever getting complacent. Going back to what we said before about college football, I think their biggest competitor is college football.

So that was interesting with this college Football playoff. John Aran just wrote about this for puck about they put on the Saturday in December a little fuck you scheduling against the NFL, which was always like, hey, that's our day. That's Saturday. And college football is like, we're in there. Which the, you know, they're like Sicilians. They'll be like, okay, are we going? We're dropping the gloves now.

So I think college football, if I were Roger, obviously lots of things will keep him up. The transition to the next wave of what media rights deals look like, even though he's got a great, probably nine year run or whatever's left now, and they have monetized them incredibly well. But having said that, I think he's really focused on international, clearly, and he's leaned into that way harder than I think people give him credit for. Playing a game in Brazil operationally is unbelievably complicated, but it's smart to do what he's done in Europe and Brazil and Australia and all the places he's going. And college football, I think for two reasons. It's something to keep an eye on. One, if you have 64 teams playing called big boy college football. First of all, the talent base that the NFL gets for free just got cut in half.

Yes.

You have 110 schools essentially going to 65. Their free talent development pipeline is now cut in half. And the second piece is college football is a really powerful media enterprise and monetized and executed. If there was a commissioner of college football, how valuable would college football be compared to the NFL playing the same exact sport with very entrenched fan bases that have the alumni connection? That's a little bit different, like we.

Just saw with Michigan.

Correct. I mean, is a Friday night football game between Michigan and Texas or Alabama and USC, that's pretty compelling compared certain NFL games. And not that they're going to touch the NFL, but if you're looking at the landscape, the second highest rate sport today on tv is college football. And so it's an interesting place to be in.

So the NFL could drop their age requirement for the draft and they could.

Look, I think what the NFL can be thinking about is not to diminish the competitive nature of what college sports is, but to actually to use the power of football to really save amateur sports in this country, which is the.

Same spot basketball is in.

Correct.

But football has more clout.

Football has more clout. And it is the money trained in college sports that could create the opportunity so different than basketball, where the money trains at the NBA, the money train in college is football. It's probably 90% of the economics and the NFL using its influence and power to lift up everyone else at a time when we put flag football in the Olympics, which means now internationally and for girls, they can play football, which will become a d one sport very soon. The opportunity for them to really save this incredible 50 years of title nine and preserve it forever based on the power of football is actually, I think, a pretty incredible opportunity.

Take one more break. Let's talk about some media stuff, because those are also people you talk to streaming all the platforms. The rise of Netflix. Netflix is now doing live stuff. Amazon is in on football. That worked. How do the network.

Network?

By throwing lots of even more money than they were prepared to spend at some point. There's a tipping point. Right.

There is. The question is, what does it mean to be a network? So in ten years, just because NBC has the purest representative of their network on their streaming platform, which is Peacock, ostensibly, in ten years, are Peacock and NBC in LA, Channel four the same thing? Is there really a difference? Right.

That's basically what happened with Showtime and paramount. Right. Showtime just kind of became paramount.

Correct. And so I don't think that's inconceivable. The power of sports, which is clear.

Is.

Predictable and unique in a world where very little else is in the media world. So if you want to reach a certain demographic who cares about football, you buy NFL rights or college football rights, and once you have them, no one else can have them. So you don't have to guess what people like. You're not creating a sitcom and spending $100 million and hoping it works, and if you have it, no one else can have it. And that's powerful and important. When leagues, leagues, just like media companies, have been b to b companies, leagues sold their rights to three or four people. And those three or four people sold their carriage to three or four cable companies. And essentially cables were versions of geographic monopolies that if you wanted to watch, you had to use spectrum here or Comcast here or charter there. All of these entities are now going direct to consumer. And sports is a really valuable piece of the puzzle because it's the one thing that you can directly connect with consumers and you can get what you know they want. And so the question is, does it ever come to a place where the NFL can monetize its rights better or a league can monetize its rights better by not selling its rights and being monetizing its rights for its own account?

So that's. WWE tried to do that 2013, right? It just built its own network, and it was like, yeah, we're just going to have everything here. And then the rights became so expensive, they were like, well, wait, let's do that instead.

And the question is, in 2013, the cable bundle, the fees were still pretty strong compared to where they were. Maybe you went from 100 million to 80 million, you're going to 40 million guaranteed homes. At that point, the question becomes, what is the monetization? So I think the real first opportunity to think about this, the NBA is going to get a great tv deal because it's a really powerfully important product. And the timing is great. And the collapse of the regional sports network, the timing that may actually benefit the NBA in its rights negotiations. But at some point in the next five years, someone's going to decide, there's a part of our business that we can monetize directly, and it's more valuable than selling it to someone else and having that direct relationship with our customers. And so I think we're there. We are. The problem is the intransmediation companies are still willing to spend, in some cases, maybe excessive amounts of money to protect their world so if you think about Paramount today, what CBS or paramount owes the NFL is more than the enterprise value of the company today.

Somebody just told me that two days ago, and it almost made my brain melt.

I mean, I think they owe the NFL fucking crazy $5 billion. And I think today the enterprise value of the company is $10 billion.

Right. Not great. Not great, Bob. It says Tony Romo voice. That's not good, Jim. That's tough. Here's the. I haven't talked about this on the pod before. I think the part people are missing with these streamers, specifically Netflix and Amazon, is the intelligence they're getting for the games that they can give to the leagues. And I don't see how NBC, CBS, ABC, even ESPN can compete or Fox can compete with what Netflix can learn about your customer base. And that was like, I think the job Google did with Sunday ticket, that's another one. I totally agree. What they do with Sunday ticket versus DirecTV, where it's like, yeah, we're showing your games. Hopefully we won't break. And then YouTube gets it, and they're like, hey, so here's what we found out, all right? We studied 270 markets. Here's how many hours people watch. Here's the male female breakdown. Here's how often they come back. Here's who watches straight through. And if I'm Goodell, I want that more than the money.

Almost 100%. And the protection that the sports leagues have that traditional entertainment companies don't have with relation to Netflix and Amazon. Netflix and Amazon went to school on everybody, and then they just started doing it themselves.

Right.

For years, we learned, okay, jokes over. We don't have to pay you anymore. We could just spend the money for ourselves. We learned everything, and now we can monetize.

Would you follow some of the Amazon stuff, what they did with the Black Friday game? Yeah, I don't even know if a lot of it has been totally reported, but just the ability to customize ads specifically to what's in your algorithm, it's like, oh, Casey loves paper. Throw him the paper towel ad versus the NBC. It's like, here's your ad. Everyone else is getting the ad.

It's really powerful. And their ability to monetize that, as long as there's multiple competitors competing for those rights on the streaming side, the leagues are going to be beneficiaries of it.

Which makes me think Amazon, Netflix, Google, YouTube ten years from now. I don't know how the networks compete with it.

I agree.

They just have too much intelligence.

And traditionally, in business. When technology disrupts entrenched players, usually disruptor buys the legacy company, right?

So, like YouTube, Google buys Paramount.

And in the day and age we're in, they would never be allowed to. It's this weird thing. And so they can just go. They have different economics, different capacity, different monetization opportunities. Given the data you're talking about, they can't go buy, don't. Apple doesn't need to buy ESPN, right? If they want to go spend inordinate amounts of money to have a service on Apple to serve their customers, even if it's non economic to everyone else. Their economics are different and their opportunity is different. And having said that, you may end up in a place in ten years where all sports are on streaming platforms because it is the highest opportunity to.

Monetize those rights, especially with the product placement. And even, like, I was just on Chang's eating show on Netflix, which was really fun, but they're going to eventually have the ability to put some of the products he's using, and you're just like, what's, you know, there'll be a thing that pops up. And I'm sure all that stuff's coming over the next couple of years. Like, oh, man, I really like that pan he's using. How do I get that? Oh, press one button. Oh, there it is. Now I have the pan.

I'm sure you love it. With YouTube tv, it's so easy to find a game. Yeah, you and I are degenerate sports fans. It's hard to know where to find a game these days.

Well, especially mean the baseball playoffs are the worst. It's like, all right, I'm going to roll through my seven possibilities for this baseball game, but basketball is becoming just as hard to figure out whether it's NBA tv, TNT, ABC, ESPN.

And I think that's one of the things that will get resolved as Adam goes into this new deal, is they've learned a lot of that and that discovery and consistency, which is what the NFL, one of the things they benefit from the NBA as they engineer this new deal, can actually structure for. And so that, you know, on Thursdays it's always x and there's only two or three choices, and otherwise, all the streaming games are on this platform, local and national. Like, I think that's a result that actually is better for everybody.

Well, the NBA has a different problem, which Derek Thompson talked about on my podcast a couple weeks ago. There are all these people that are huge NBA fans that don't watch the games that much, and they like the circus around the games. They like listening to podcasts and watching shows about the games and going on social and watching highlights and being like, oh, I saw the Wempanyama highlights last night, but they didn't actually watch the spurs game. And that's the difference between basketball and football right now. Football, you're sitting there actually watching the game. And I don't know whether it's fantasy gambling, whether football is just more fun to watch, but I think people like me that are actually sitting there on a freaking Wednesday night watching Bulls calves. I don't know if there's a lot of us.

I think the question is not whether a lot of you, but how do us, because we're both those weirdos, but how do NBA and Adam has been super thoughtful and aggressive about this, create products for the ones who aren't us? So that, oh, you know what, I watched that highlight. So you know what? I want to watch the last three minutes of the Cav spurs game.

Right?

And how do you do that?

Did you see there was a Wembanyama dunk that became the most viewed clip in the history of the NBA. It was like 159,000,000 clip or whatever. I forget what the number was.

It's the disconnect between the ratings and the reach of the NBA. The ratings are one thing. The reach and penetration of the NBA globally is pretty powerful. They're not measured in traditional rating.

Well, we saw it with our kids. I mean, our kids are around the same age, but we're watching how they're consuming media and we're like, oh, baseball is in trouble. This is bad. They're not really sitting around for 8 hours on a Sunday.

You know, it's funny. I'll call my daughter and say, I watched a game. Did you see that play? And she goes, yes, I saw the highlight on Instagram.

My son does the same thing.

I'm like, oh, okay.

Yeah, I had, when Max Drew said that 60 footer, and I yelled at my son, hey, you got to come down and watch this. He's like, I just saw it.

It's crazy.

Somebody snapped it to me. Exactly. Whatever that happens, what do you think about all the gambling money and that whole thing? Do you think we are where we are? Does that go another level? Because it seems like all the sports have now embraced it. It seems like it's part of the dialog around the games.

Look, you and I were kids when Jimmy the Greek was on the air, and that was a crazy thing.

I loved it.

Me too.

He's one of the many reasons why I love gambling on stuff.

Phyllis, George and Jimmy, the best. Look, it is definitely all in my son, who is not a huge sports fan. He and his budies will call me, which I can assure you I don't answer their questions. Yeah, they want to come over to the NBA trade day. Which of your clients are getting traded at? I'm like, I'm not telling you. You and your degenerate friends are going to get me arrest.

What's okay to do, dad? Exactly.

But that's what gambling has done. You're betting on who's getting traded. It's crazy.

Yeah, the awards have, which sadly, I'm not allowed to bet on. But even like the futures and the conference odds and I was on a text chain the other day about Denver Celtics was five to one. That would be the finals right at the start of the year. I think it was nine to one. And we were like, is that good value or not? So now we're doing text about, okay, round one, Celtics. Like they're going to win that round three, who's the biggest threat? And we're just trying to figure out what the ods are. I'm like, it's 930 on a Tuesday morning. This is what I'm doing.

But someone told me. I don't know if this is true, but someone told me. I was talking about security in relation to the Olympics. I go the NFL with all the security had a streaker. But did you know that you could bet on if there was a streaker and apparently the guy bet on a streaker and he streaked?

What?

I don't know if this is true, but apparently that's a great story.

That's a great story.

So you got to go dig into that.

What did you feel about. I know you probably looked at the Clippers arena, right?

Did you get the look?

Is this the future of sports type of arena?

So look, what I give Steve a ton of credit for is he is, as we know, an incredibly passionate basketball fan. When I sit next to my games, you're always the first text to make sure safe, right? He wants it to be a temple of basketball and to make the sport the most important thing. And so he is doing everything he can with all the resources and technology and line of sight. He has to do that. The question is, can he retrain fans to engage with that? And I give him a lot of credit because it's going to be spectacular. I don't know what happens when he turns the lights off on the concourse or people who, darn it, a Broadway show know that means that it's time to go in. The game is going to start. I don't know if everything being a grab and go is good. I don't know if certain if tvs being off in the concourse is good to force you to go and watch the game. It's genius idea and I hope it works because it actually will benefit for a long time to come. And I give him credit for doing it because frankly, until now, as you and I have talked about, as we've gone to a lot of basketball games together, for all the money and all the fanciness, once you sit in a bowl, almost every arena is the same.

And he is the first one to say, you know what, I'm going to do something different because I want the Clippers to be the most important thing, not everything, and the Clippers to be the most important thing and built it.

For basketball, which the last team I think that did that was Indiana.

That is one of the better in.

The NBA because you have the corners, I think so bomber matched that but also figured out the lower level, some sweet stuff, how to build the noise so that it pushes toward the court.

And I love that. And I think he took some learnings from european soccer, from what LAFC has done with their supporters group in the end zone, with what going to basketball game at Cameron is like with the energy and the passion. I give him a lot of credit and I hope it works.

I really want to see how the Lakers respond to it. That'd be the other thing because Staples center, that's like 24 years old, but there's this whole era of these buildings that were built for NBA and NHL from like mid 90s through, I would say like maybe 2005 that seemed really modern when they were built and now seem just kind of.

It's like the days when they built baseball and football.

Three rivers and Cincinnati when we were growing up. Exactly. Concrete kind of mausoleum. Oakland.

Now it's inconceivable.

Yeah, just these big circle of concrete.

And Bo Jackson running across an infield on a football field.

Well, I'm hoping that ballmer maybe will inspire some of these other teams to think like, oh, we'll steal this, we'll steal that.

And I hope he does because it's going to be great for the sport and I think the energy and he's clearly got a great basketball team this year. If it works, it's going to be truly spectacular and to your point, change what arenas are like going forward.

Well, before we go we got to talk just because Nathan's probably listening. Future of getting in and out of stadiums, which I know that was a big passion. Nathan, he had a little company around it. And we have the Olympics coming. What does it look like to enter a stadium by the end of the 2020s, by the time we get to the Olympics?

I think radically different than it does today.

Radically different.

I do. Look, everyone talks about privacy and security, and I actually was out of the country, and I came back to the country, and when you go to customs now, they use their iPhone and take a picture of you. You don't even pull out your passport anymore. So they have all of our. Let me tell you, our facial recognition is there.

It's a wrap.

So, look, what you want to do is create the safest experience and the most fan friendly experience and the fastest experience. Correct. And right now, we're not doing all of those three together. It's really safe, but it's a brutal experience, and it's not fast. We can create a fanfare experience, but it's probably not safe. And so we have to solve for how do you expedite that process? But more importantly, the underpinning to all that is if you're a sports team, you don't know who's in your building, where they got their tickets, what they paid for the tickets, and what they do when you're in your building. So it's hard.

There's no digital footprint for where the ticket arrived from.

Well, think of it this way. Every airline knows who's on their planes, what they paid for their tickets, and they treat you differently based on those things, because the value of a customer is different on your experience. And so if you go to 40 clipper games and take a sandwich in a brown paper bag, you probably should pay full price for your tickets. If your buddy goes, if house goes to three games and takes ten kids every time and spends $1,000 on merch and food, he should probably get his tickets for free. We don't know that today. And that's an opportunity for teams to better serve their customers, to generate more revenue, to be a better customer service experience. But that starts with how do you get in? How are tickets sold, and how are those processes managed? And we have to evolve, because what it does today is actually not producing the best result for anybody.

So you're talking about, I go into a clipper game, they know it's either my ticket or I got it from a friend, but I have some sort of digital footprint with them, and they know when I go, it's like, oh, that's Bill. He's going to buy a bottled water. He's probably going to buy peanuts and he might get a hot dog if he hadn't eaten yet. Those are going to be his three things. But that's it. He's not going to buy any merchandise. He's not going to buy a beer. He's kind of like a lower level spender.

Yeah, well, look, no different than when you do the doom scroll on.

Yeah.

And you buy something stupid because they know that that's what you like. Or when we all go on Amazon every day, I probably reorder five things I don't need because I said, hey, last time, you things, you might need some of these things. Well, we're good with those things. Why aren't we good with it at an event, by the way, when you sat down, if they know that every time in the first quarter you have the peanuts and the beer and the hot dog, what if they just brought it to you?

Right.

That would be a great experience for you.

Or they know that I went three times and I did all this stuff, then they're like, hey, man, do you want to come again? Here's, we're going to actually almost like how casinos work.

Exactly.

We're going to comp your tickets. So you come correct, by the way.

Because we know when there's a Saturday night game against New York or Boston, you're always.

Yeah.

Hey, by the way, Bill, New York's coming next week. Here's four tickets.

Oh, that's true. Like for the transplants. Hey, the Celtics are coming, right?

So the lack of knowledge of who's in our venues and what they're doing is, I think, one of the great last big upsides for all of sports and all of teams and all of actually live events.

So it's like a driver's license almost. And when you go in, I'm like, NBA customer number 57 32. It's like, oh, that guy's here. He was in Boston three weeks ago and that said that on his footprint. Now he's at this clipper.

No different than when you go on open table, make a reservation, they ask you if food allergies. When you get to the table, you're like, yeah, I'm allergic to peanuts. Right. That's all good stuff. The one thing that the digital age has done is should create this perfect customer service and experience. And yet going to a game today is just like it was in 1985. Pretty much.

All right, last question so if 2028 goes great, does that mean we could just have the Summer Olympics every four years? Who else wants it?

Well, if that's the result, I can assure you it won't be me doing it every four years. That is a certainty.

Who else wants it? Do people even want the Olympics anymore? Unless you have all the infrastructure like that we have.

There are cities that do. So Brisbane already has 2032.

Yeah.

The 2036 bidders are going to be a group of people that you would think would spend whatever it takes. It's going to be India, right, somewhere in the Middle east, right. You're going to have those kind of places bidding. So for them, it's going to be.

Like what happened at the World cup.

It elevates them to the world stage in a different kind of way.

Okay. Casey Wasserman, good to see you.

Good to see you.

All right. Thanks to Casey Wasserman and Matt Bellany. Thanks to Kyle Creighton and Steve Saruti for producing, as always. Don't forget YouTube.com slash Bill Simmons. Subscribe, get videos and clips and all kinds of things. I'm going to be back on this podcast on Thursday.

Looking forward to it.

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