Episode 905 - Bill Simmons
Marc:Lock the gates!
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuckineers?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:What the fuck publicans?
Marc:What the fuckocrats?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast, WTF.
Marc:Welcome to it.
Marc:Thank you for joining me.
Marc:If you're new to it, welcome.
Marc:Make sure you go check out the archives over there on the Stitcher app.
Marc:You can go back and get them all.
Marc:Well, all the 900 and some odd things.
Marc:But anyways, my point is welcome.
Marc:I am broadcasting from the new garage and I'm happy to say that the garage has been christened by tears.
Marc:It happened.
Marc:I don't even want to mention the guest because it actually didn't happen on mic.
Marc:It happened afterwards, after a conversation where it got a little emotionally overwhelming, but...
Marc:But tears have been shed here in the garage, and that's good.
Marc:It needed that.
Marc:That's sort of like breaking the champagne bottle on the ship's hull before it backs into the ocean.
Marc:Now we have coronated.
Marc:We have blessed.
Marc:And this garage seems to actually have a bit of magic of its own.
Marc:This is an old house that I've bought.
Marc:And old houses tend to have magic if they've been around a while.
Marc:I'm not going to say there's a ghost in the house, but there might be.
Marc:There might be.
Marc:Things have been moved.
Marc:Things have fallen down and broken.
Marc:So as long as I can breathe properly and no weird chasms to strange worlds open in the house, I think I'm okay with the ghost.
Marc:Maybe we can negotiate some sort of...
Marc:way of living together this house was built in 1908 folks 1908 and it's still solid still beautiful getting a lot of emails you know what let me first tell you that bill simmons is on the show today bill simmons a podcaster a writer you can get all his stuff at the ringer.com he had me on his show now i'm having him on mine we were often mentioned together in articles about podcasting at the beginning and
Marc:We're very different.
Marc:We have different focuses.
Marc:You know, he respects me.
Marc:I respect him.
Marc:For me, a guy who knows nothing about sports but understands the passion, understands it.
Marc:So that's coming up soon.
Marc:People are emailing me asking me.
Marc:how the cats are adjusting to the new house.
Marc:Are you fucking kidding me?
Marc:They've never been happier in their life.
Marc:They're not like, my old house, folks, honestly, was 929 square feet.
Marc:This new house is bigger.
Marc:I'll leave it at that.
Marc:It's bigger.
Marc:And these cats, they've made it.
Marc:They don't even think about going outside.
Marc:That's how comfortable they are.
Marc:They can each have their own room if they'd like.
Marc:They can sleep in different places.
Marc:But Buster Kitten is still kind of a fucking asshole and persists on beating up Old Man Monkey and Old Lady Fonda.
Marc:I don't know what to do.
Marc:I'm not getting another kitten so he can have somebody closer to his own age to play with.
Marc:But...
Marc:But that's what's going on.
Marc:They're very happy.
Marc:They're eating.
Marc:They're healthy.
Marc:And they seem better than they were at the old house.
Marc:Maybe that old house was possessed by a lot of emotional baggage and memories that weren't so great for the cats or myself.
Marc:Maybe... I'm telling you, folks, I'm not regretting leaving the old house.
Marc:And that's a lot to say because a lot happened there.
Marc:I was very comfortable there.
Marc:But I'm really...
Marc:I'm really in this and I'm having a hard time.
Marc:I need to put some time into putting this room together.
Marc:And knowing me, that could go on for years.
Marc:Like I went through a wave of, I moved all of my stuff from my house over here.
Marc:And spread it out as best I could.
Marc:Really, I need more stuff.
Marc:I don't want to get just any stuff.
Marc:I need more stuff.
Marc:So that's going to start to unfold over time.
Marc:I don't know how long it'll take.
Marc:And I don't know how long it'll take to get everything in this garage that I want.
Marc:But I do know I'm happy to be here.
Marc:The other thing I wanted to talk about is that I neglected to mention that last week...
Marc:What night was it?
Marc:Last Tuesday that I did a show with Dean Delray.
Marc:Dean Delray put on a show with a bunch of rockers.
Marc:It was an evening of comedy with me and Dean and Joey Diaz and Bill Burr.
Marc:And then there was a band and that band, including me sometimes, including Bill Burr a little bit, but Scott Ian, Nikki Sixx,
Marc:um rudy sarzo michael devin josh z played guitar steve gorman played drums billy rowe played guitar in the album here's the thing the album that we did was all of powerage that was the night for we did a stand-up comedy show and then they played powerage straight through and with a couple other songs and i got to sit in on down payment blues which
Marc:as some of you know, was the original theme song for this podcast until we started to get panicky about it and we pulled it.
Marc:But I also use it on my old radio show.
Marc:It's one of the best songs ever.
Marc:Down Payment Blues by ACDC.
Marc:And I got to play that and it was pretty exciting.
Marc:It was me, Scott Ian, Billy Rowe,
Marc:um josh z dino singing uh mike devon michael devon on bass and uh and steve gorman on drums and i was uh i was i was elated it was fucking great man it was fucking great i guess i'm just reporting that i had a good time would that be is that okay is that okay i i had a great time i'm gonna i've decided to have more good times in my life
Marc:But, you know, I don't want to sound too chipper.
Marc:God forbid.
Marc:I do want to make sure everyone knows I am going to be in Europe next week.
Marc:My shows in London, Oslo, Stockholm, Amsterdam and Dublin.
Marc:Get tickets.
Marc:Go to WTF pod dot com slash tour.
Marc:Also, I wanted to give a shout out, as they say in the game.
Marc:to the woman in my life, Sarah Kane, who has an opening.
Marc:This is one of the reasons we plan the trip like this.
Marc:She has a big opening at the Timothy Taylor Gallery in London next week on April 18th.
Marc:So now it's my pleasure to share a conversation I had with Bill Simmons.
Marc:Many of you are fans of Bill Simmons.
Marc:Great podcaster.
Marc:Great writer.
Marc:Everything is available.
Marc:Both his writing and podcasts are available at TheRinger.com.
Marc:And also the documentary Andre the Giant premieres on HBO tomorrow, April 10th at 10 p.m.
Marc:He produced that.
Marc:And it was his concept, and it was a hell of a story.
Marc:I enjoyed it a lot, and I didn't know about Andre.
Marc:And as a guy who's involved in wrestling in a peripheral way, I needed to know more about Andre the Giant.
Marc:So it's a pretty touching documentary.
Marc:So this is me talking to Bill Simmons.
Marc:I don't really do podcasts.
Marc:Turn it so faces.
Marc:That's good.
Marc:Yeah, that's better.
Marc:Can you see me all right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You don't really do podcasts?
Marc:I don't.
Guest:Why not?
Guest:How come you're not part of a... We should talk about this on the pod.
Guest:We've been on going for five minutes.
Marc:Oh, you've been taking this?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:All right.
Marc:I don't know how you do it, but that's how I do it.
Marc:I didn't know we started.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I just turned it on.
Marc:You never know what's going to come up.
Marc:No, I don't.
Marc:Sorry about the noise.
Marc:I'm trying to make tea here.
Marc:I've got the last vestige of the kitchen I once had in there is this boiling pot.
Marc:Spoiler?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:The cool thing about this garage is it feels like I could be in any state in America.
Guest:We could easily be in Minnesota, like on some ice fishing lake or something.
Marc:Sure, man.
Marc:If that's what it takes, if you need to picture that, to make this feel more comfortable being a UFO.
Marc:Yeah, we could be anywhere.
Marc:It is a classic sort of a type of, I'm wary to call it a man cave, but it is a type of sort of post-hippie man cave.
Guest:I am, since you were in my office, I'm really happy with my poster game.
Guest:I did some poster upgrades.
Guest:I'm really happy with how the symmetry of how they're arranged.
Guest:I'm just really proud of it.
Guest:I got a couple good ones.
Guest:An old Springsteen 1975 Capitol Records.
Marc:Are you a big Springsteen guy?
Guest:I really was.
Guest:Did we talk about that on yours?
Guest:We didn't talk about a lot of stuff.
Guest:We have a lot left on the- But did you listen to my Springsteen?
Marc:Did you listen to my Springsteen?
Marc:I did.
Marc:And how was that as a Springsteen fan for you?
Marc:You can be honest.
Marc:You can be honest.
Guest:Now, for me, it's weird to hear Bruce talk about himself because his songs are so personal.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it's almost like you partly think you know- Right.
Guest:all the answers but and then he has answers that you don't think he's gonna have and it's disorienting it's almost like if i heard my wife on your podcast and she was telling you things that i didn't know and i almost like take it personally that would happen you know it probably would she's she's very excited that i came here it's happened with other people before like brothers of people yeah spouses of people oh yeah people who have known people for 30 years like i didn't know that yeah because there are weird little details about your life that why you know even if it's your spouse i mean how's it going to come up
Guest:He's very transparent and like the live, the three set, the three album box set or whatever it was that came out in the mid 80s.
Guest:Yeah, I like that one.
Guest:And it's got a couple of those stories that he tells.
Guest:He's like, when I was growing up, my dad.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And basically the theme of everyone is his dad hated him, but then it would take a car accident or him not getting into Vietnam for his dad to actually realize that he's okay for five minutes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you just feel like crushed for the guy.
Marc:Well, yeah, what struck me about him was just like how hard he is on himself.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And how dark it kind of got.
Marc:And I'm not a fanatic for him, but I felt like I look back at it as one of the great events of my podcast.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Going out there.
Marc:I'm sure it was.
Marc:And just being around him.
Marc:But I'm not like a guy who's, I've never seen him live, really.
Marc:I've never been fanatic, but that helps.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:And I read part of the book.
Marc:But like when you're around him, you're like, there's a weight to him.
Marc:You know, it's real.
Guest:i saw he was the second concert i ever went to yeah and the first one i went to was bob seger who also was long oh yeah that was 1980 and the second one was bruce and he kept playing encores for four hours yeah it was the stereotype but it really was the case of like we're at like the three and a half hour mark and he's like coming out again where'd you see him it was in hartford i think it was the hartford civic center yeah
Guest:And the crowd was like, oh my God, two more.
Guest:All right.
Guest:He just outlasted the crowd.
Marc:He wore out the crowd.
Marc:It was pretty great.
Marc:So I watched the Andre the Giant thing last night.
Marc:You did?
Marc:They sent it to you?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, cool.
Marc:I watched it.
Marc:So-
Marc:Let me understand something.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because being not as sports-oriented at all, I think you probably are responsible in some way for sportscasters and sports radio now to be more broad-based.
Marc:I think that you, because of what you've done, like now if you're on the road or something and they're sending you to a radio show, they're like, it's sports, but they don't talk about sports.
Marc:I think that's your fault.
Marc:I'll take it.
Marc:It's a...
Marc:I take it as a compliment.
Marc:Well, you know, you kind of reconfigured what a sports guy can do in a public medium.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because I've done a lot of sports.
Marc:Because you walk in, you're like, they look like sports guys, but they're like, hey, what's up?
Marc:You know, let's just talk about whatever.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I don't think that happened before you.
Guest:No, I came at a really weird time.
Guest:It was very early on in the internet.
Guest:I mean, super early.
Guest:I know, but that's like that.
Guest:And it was just that people, the way they wrote and talked about sports, it was one way.
Guest:It was everybody had their two newspapers or their one newspaper in the local town.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:USA Today.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then sports radio was just starting to really come into its own, but not really.
Guest:And that was it.
Guest:Everybody did it the same way.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's just complete shop talk.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My whole thing was I was on my own for four years just writing for this site that I had created and trying to figure out what worked and didn't work.
Marc:When you were on AOL?
Guest:When I was in Boston, yeah.
Marc:Well, let's go back.
Marc:I wanted to start with Andre because it was an interesting choice because I know you did that you sort of masterminded the 30 and 30 on ESPN.
Marc:30, yeah.
Marc:And that, like, I have to assume that you were gone by the time they did OJ Made in America, right?
Marc:I was in there for the early stages of it, actually.
Marc:Because that seems to be the sort of, like, what you were headed towards.
Guest:Yeah, and we knew it at the time.
Guest:We felt like after we had done volume two and gotten that going...
Guest:and i remember the guy that i created with connor shower yeah we're driving back we we were at some million dollar arm so you're screening but you're still working at yes oh yeah this was like 2013. yeah that's when they started making the oj doc that was when we were thinking about it and the big thing for us was we we hit at this point with 30 for 30 where everybody just liked it yeah and it wasn't always great yeah and
Guest:And you kind of know that.
Guest:And people know the great one.
Guest:And we're like, yeah, that was like a B minus.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:So some of them didn't work in your mind?
Guest:No, it's like anything else.
Guest:You have some great ones.
Guest:You have some good ones.
Guest:And you have some.
Marc:But the premise was you would do sports like real documentaries and use real filmmakers.
Guest:You use real filmmakers, but more importantly, use stuff, concentrate on stuff that had happened in the last 25, 30 years.
Guest:That was the big inefficiency when we launched it, which was HBO's doing Joe Louis and Vince Lombardi and all these old guys.
Guest:And it was like, we want to do the Fab Five.
Guest:But by the time the OJ thing, we started talking about it.
Marc:You got to move it all up to date because you're almost an old guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, it's funny is we had...
Guest:we had wanted to do oj in the first series and it was it was still too close and it was like for you can't do that story in an hour so we ended up doing was and you can't do it just about sports no so we ended up doing if you did a documentary just covering oj's sports career a new one that would have been insane people would have been like what is this what about the part where he murdered people so we did a whole thing about the day of the car chase yeah
Guest:and it was an hour and it was all the different things that happened on this day and that was in the first volume that was really all we could have done with that story but then after five years it's like hey how do we blow this out and the initial idea was three parts five hours oh and then it turned into what 10 parts no it was five parts he ezra probably ended up at seven hours but he took it i mean i i was there when he sent us the treatment and then we pushed it to you hired ezra
Guest:Yeah, because Ezra had worked for us on the Big East.
Guest:He did the Big East documentary.
Guest:He's just really talented.
Marc:He's great.
Marc:I talked to him about the OJ thing.
Guest:I still have his treatment.
Guest:It was two paragraphs.
Marc:Oh, really?
Guest:It was like three parts, five hours.
Guest:This is what I want to do.
Guest:And it was like, yeah, okay.
Marc:This is what I want to do.
Guest:I want to take on race in America going back to the beginning.
Guest:Well, it was race.
Guest:It was celebrity.
Marc:Celebrity, yeah.
Guest:It was sports.
Guest:And then it was also a legal case.
Guest:And initially, the first multi-part one we wanted to do was Tyson.
Guest:And I was always fascinated with Tyson Week, like Shark Week.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was like, Tyson Week, Monday.
Guest:And just tell it that way.
Guest:And by the time we actually got around to seriously thinking about it,
Marc:he he was like too available and too yeah he's out there he's doing broadway plays writing books and it just didn't make sense he used to hang around at a cigar place across from the comedy store on sunset yeah just like yeah he's available he just seemed like we it just didn't seem that special as it did in like 2009 or 2010 right and that's when when people's opinions of him were rightfully tainted but there were still a lot of people that had normalized him
Guest:Oh yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But I mean, I mean what Ezra did with the OJ thing, I think it's the best documentary ever.
Guest:And I also think like, it's really hard to follow that.
Guest:And I, I, you know, I'm friends with him and I, I'm waiting to see what he does next.
Guest:He's so smart.
Guest:He understands like whatever he does comes under the shadow of this amazing achievement.
Guest:And that's really paralyzing sometimes.
Guest:but you weren't there for the follow through of it I mean I wasn't I was there from when we got a greenlit when he went off and started working on it but the thing with the good thing about people like Ezra is they just kind of go off if somebody's really good at doing a documentary yeah and Jason Hare for Andre's same thing
Guest:they just kind of disappear and it's almost like they go into witness protection and they dive into the footage they read everything yeah they live and breathe it and they become obsessed with it and that's i think that goes for a lot of things but especially documentaries the good ones are like we we had this problem with the first volume of 30 30 where we do certain people yeah and it was just part of one of seven things they were doing right it's not gonna work
Guest:It's got to be like, this is all I am doing all the time.
Marc:Yeah, and it's a solo journey because so much of it is found footage and organization and creating a narrative.
Marc:Interviews.
Marc:Who do I interview?
Marc:Who's good?
Guest:I'm sure it's the same thing when you do a stand-up special.
Guest:It's like-
Guest:You can't do a stand-up special as one of the seven things you're doing.
Guest:You're all in.
Guest:You're testing material for weeks and weeks.
Marc:You're writing constantly.
Marc:At night.
Marc:You can do other things.
Marc:It's not as all-consuming because I don't have to book out a few hours during the day.
Marc:Yeah, I guess that's true.
Guest:But it's the number one thing in your mind.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I'm booking out a few hours a day to talk to myself.
Marc:Get on the mics with me and figure out where I'm at.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Work some material.
Marc:It's really hard to do a documentary because.
Marc:I love it.
Marc:I don't watch enough of them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's frustrating because I did so many that I can watch them now know exactly what's right, what's wrong, what they should have done.
Marc:Where the turn happens.
Marc:We're like, oh, it's getting sad now.
Guest:Well.
Guest:Now I don't know what to think.
Guest:Well, true.
Guest:No, but the biggest mistake people make is they keep too much.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And people, the directors fall in love with what they did.
Marc:So first of all, were you pissed off that you didn't get to follow through, be there for the whole OJ thing?
Marc:Or did that you left him in the middle of it?
Marc:No.
Marc:ESPN?
Marc:No, it was already on its own.
Guest:I was not pissed off about that.
Guest:Because it was Ezra's thing.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Our job was to get the series to the point where we could do something like that.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And to recognize somebody who's as talented as him and to give them the chance to do it.
Marc:And that was the last of you in ESPN.
Guest:Yeah, pretty much.
Guest:When I was leaving, he was working.
Guest:I mean, we'd heard a couple different stories from when he was kind of preparing it and doing the interviews and stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I knew it was going to be really good.
Guest:I didn't realize it was going to be great.
Guest:Anybody who realized it was going to be, or claims they thought it was going to be that good is lying.
Guest:It was Ezra going from one level of his career to another level, which happens right around, usually, I don't think he's maybe in his late 30s or mid 30s.
Marc:Is there actually a chart where the age syncs up?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I think he had done enough projects that it was like- Because I was way late on that chart.
Guest:I think both of us were.
Marc:Just starting to tip up now there.
Guest:No, but I think you hit a point where you kind of know what you're doing.
Marc:Yeah, right.
Marc:And I think also he had that, like he must have had that moment with himself where he knew it was getting bigger and he could manage it and it was worth following it.
Marc:It must have just started to open up to him at some point where he's like, this is all layering up and I'm covering all this stuff and there's no reason to stop.
Marc:There's no reason, right?
Guest:The other cool thing is it's the best documentary subject I think you could really ever do, at least for sports, because it wasn't really about sports.
Guest:The bad thing is I think it's convinced a lot of people like, oh, what's the, you should do a, this will be like the OJ thing.
Guest:And it's like, this was like a special topic that hit so many different things and went so many directions.
Guest:You can't replicate this.
Marc:It always happens with executives.
Marc:They're like, they just, they so easily go like, no, just do that.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Make it four hours.
Marc:OJ was four hours.
Marc:That was great.
Guest:Guess what?
Marc:Documentary should not be four hours.
Marc:And this was an exception.
Marc:But so the Andre the Giant thing, this was like something you've been working towards for a long time.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, when we came up with 30 for 30, it was on the original list, and the WWE wasn't ready to outsource anything, especially him, because he's one of the biggest stars they ever had.
Marc:But this is interesting, because now you're kind of doing it at HBO, who you have a big overall deal with of some kind, and this is your first documentary with them.
Guest:It was one in 2015.
Guest:It was the first one I wanted to push for.
Marc:HBO Sports, and this is a wrestling show.
Guest:Yeah, but it's not really about wrestling.
Guest:It's about a giant guy.
Guest:No, it is.
Marc:Right, but it's about the form.
Guest:Who knows he's going to die.
Marc:Yeah, no, I get that.
Marc:But the form is wrestling.
Marc:It's not football.
Marc:It's not basketball.
Marc:It's not soccer.
Marc:And I'm certainly no longer in a position to say that wrestling is not a legitimate sport.
Marc:Yeah, I know.
Guest:But people get mad.
Marc:No, but I'm on a wrestling show.
Marc:So I've had to learn, you know, I certainly have respect for the form, but it's fundamentally about, you know, a spectacle and entertainment.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But so it didn't really matter.
Marc:You still as a sports guy, like it's important.
Marc:Andre's important.
Guest:Yeah, because I felt like when I was growing up, he was one of the biggest stars we had.
Marc:But were you a wrestling kid, obviously?
Guest:I was.
Guest:I got into it probably when I was around 10.
Guest:10?
Guest:I was the only child, so I was ready to get into anything.
Guest:What year was it?
Guest:We're talking like 79, 80, somewhere in there.
Guest:I remember Andre Killer Khan broke his ankle.
Guest:Were you a latchkey kid or did you have people around?
Guest:What is a latchkey kid?
Guest:Like by yourself in the house?
Guest:I was there in the days.
Guest:I really was.
Guest:It was a different era.
Guest:I used to walk home from school.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Let myself in.
Guest:What state are we talking about now?
Marc:Massachusetts.
Marc:Like what town?
Marc:It was Brookline.
Marc:Where in Brookline?
Marc:Chest on Hill.
Marc:Oh, okay.
Marc:Up off Route 9?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But it was a different area.
Marc:You walked home from school.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like how old are you?
Marc:I'm 48 now.
Marc:I'm 54.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So, right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You didn't have to be afraid.
Marc:Sometimes it's snow.
Marc:You walk home in the snow.
Guest:We did the blizzard.
Guest:It was just, we were out.
Guest:The blizzard is 78.
Guest:You just go out and have your parents see you in eight hours.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:We used to go to the dump and look for Sports Illustrateds and Playboys.
Guest:Did you find them?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Sometimes.
Marc:Where was the dump in Chestnut Hill?
Marc:The Brookline dump.
Marc:It was a long walk.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Whatever the Chestnut Hill dump was.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was like, let's go find some stuff.
Marc:What were you doing?
Marc:You were the only non-Jew in the world of Jews up there?
Guest:I actually, I will say I went to a lot of bar mitzvahs in the seventh grade and did not really fully understand it.
Guest:Yeah, it was a different time.
Guest:Your parents left you alone.
Guest:Oh, the Chestnut Hill Mall was incredible.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:They had a toy and hobby.
Guest:They sold the hockey cards and the basketball cards.
Marc:Oh, that was your place?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:My best friend, Reese, I've written about this.
Guest:We used to steal change from the fountain to buy cards.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:So we would hold each other.
Guest:I think I was taller than him, so he would hold me and would reach in and grab quarters and then go buy hockey cards.
Guest:But yeah, those were the days, man.
Guest:Now it's like you can't, your kid's going anywhere and it's like you have Obama.
Guest:Yeah, you got full security.
Guest:How's Zoe getting to school?
Guest:Your grandmother's taking her and then they're picking her up at 315.
Marc:How far is the school, though?
Guest:It's like 20 minutes.
Marc:Well, like in Chestnut Hill, you could probably walk it, right?
Marc:Not a big deal.
Marc:There's a lot more walking.
Marc:Yeah, I remember that.
Marc:It was fun because you'd have your friends and sometimes you'd just walk.
Marc:Yeah, and just keep going.
Guest:There was more playing.
Guest:It would be like, oh, the guy in the next street, there's him and he's got his two brothers.
Guest:Let's go over and play hockey all day.
Guest:And now I think it's moved more toward video games, Instagram.
Marc:They can relate to people that have seen them.
Marc:Yeah, kind of.
Marc:Can they?
Marc:In a lot of ways, yeah.
Marc:But you don't get the feeling, you don't get the sense their vulnerabilities, the humanity of the person, the competitive nature when you're doing an actual game is different than a video game.
Marc:I agree.
Marc:When you're bullying somebody, you stop.
Guest:Bullying's harder and easier.
Marc:Well, it's easier now because you don't see the guy about to cry.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Back when you were just a shitty bully as a kid, you're like, oh, no, he's about to cry.
Guest:Hey, buddy, I'm sorry.
Guest:Hey, Ben.
Hey.
Marc:Yeah, the Instagram... I was a bully and I've been bullied.
Marc:I want to say I've done both sides.
Guest:I think everybody's been on both sides of it.
Guest:The Instagram, that whole world is really... I have a 12-year-old daughter, a 10-year-old son, so watching how they interact and...
Guest:Fortunately, my kids both have people skills, but just the little games with Instagram is really crazy.
Marc:I have no idea.
Guest:I don't have kids.
Guest:With the girls, and if somebody's not in the group picture because they all went to the mall, their feelings are hurt.
Guest:It's this whole more elaborate way to hurt other people's feelings that you really have to be careful of.
Marc:I can't imagine what it's like to have kids and have to explain to them something.
Guest:I will say that I had Closterman on my podcast the other day and we were talking about the parkland kids.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And how, how sophisticated they are.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Very.
Guest:With their kind of children of social media who are actually the first ones that understand how to harness its powers.
Guest:And yeah,
Guest:you know mobilize yeah and also want to do that organize you know i don't know yeah it's kind of fascinating because this assumption that millennials are just these useless self-involved they're not they're really smart i have a lot of them that work for me they work really hard and they're really smart and they're just different than the generation that came before them but your generation was different than your parents and
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:This is what happens.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But the fact that they organized in real time with each other to do something politically relevant.
Marc:It was sort of like, oh, maybe there is hope.
Marc:There's this glimmer that maybe there is hope.
Marc:and also the way they handle trolling and stuff where it's a first generation somebody comes at them and they'll just cut the person's knees off almost like a comic at the comedy store where they're like oh you're gonna heckle me yeah boom and they raise the stakes yeah yeah my i'm i'm gonna i can't handle the trolling i'm too sensitive for it like i really am like i really like you know it's so you get heckled even now and it's heckling's different if i'm on stage i can eviscerate somebody yeah
Marc:But just the sort of anonymous nobody on Twitter.
Marc:Because you can't really defend yourself because you're going to get into a clusterfuck.
Marc:They've already won just by you reading it.
Marc:Yeah, as soon as you respond, it's over.
Marc:But in a club, you get a laugh or you just knock them out.
Marc:It's a different dynamic.
Guest:How long does it take to learn how to cut their knees out?
Marc:Some guys don't do it at all.
Marc:You know, some guys don't you know, it's not important to them to to sort of nurture that skill.
Marc:I think it's important.
Marc:I did it innately to because, you know, crowd work is fun.
Marc:It can be funny and you have to be able to defend yourself.
Marc:But some some comics are like, God, it just they they won't engage with it.
Guest:I'm always amazed, and it's something like, obviously I worked with Kimmel a long time ago.
Marc:He can handle himself.
Guest:When we were launching the show, yeah, and he could, but it took him, I don't know how many years in act one to learn what to do when a joke didn't work, which was Carson's greatest skill.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Carson was that weird beat.
Guest:He was the funniest when a joke failed.
Guest:That's when it became funny because he he rode with whatever and he made fun of the audience.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Kimmel, it took a while.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Just to get the reps of, oh, that didn't work the way I thought.
Guest:And they reacted this way.
Guest:I'm going to twist this and still make it and still save it.
Guest:And now he's the best at it.
Guest:Well, all those guys.
Marc:Yeah, I think he's very good because he can sort of really handle, like, trolls.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:Like, online and stuff, he's very good at handling trolls.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like, because they kind of creep me out.
Guest:Yeah, he is very aggressive.
Marc:with all of it which i think is an interesting way to play it and also he's very emotional now he's sort of grounded in an emotional place and he's being very honest so let's go back chestnut hill you're uh uh like uh an only child yeah so where's your mom and dad i think he said only child like i was like in the like a weirdo yeah in the like army or something well they kind of they kind of freak me out a little bit because i always assume i'm freaked out by only children yeah
Marc:I always assume that, and I'm always proven wrong, that there's an inordinate amount of pressure on the only child in a sort of subverted way from the parents because you're the only shot they have.
Guest:Yeah, I think that's part of it.
Guest:And I think there's a little narcissism that kicks in because kind of the world revolves around you to some degree.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I just watch it like what...
Guest:my daughter and my son like watching them interact that it's so important that you kind of learn you have to learn it's it sounds like a cliche but you learn how to share yeah you learn you learn how to get your feelings hurt yeah like they're super mean to each other and then it's fine and they just you develop kind of a thick skin and you didn't
Guest:Well, you're an only child.
Guest:Everything is new.
Guest:And especially back then, you don't have the internet or anything like that.
Guest:And you're learning how to interact with people either at school, family functions, or when you're out, or just from TV.
Guest:And shit like that.
Guest:And TV had a huge impact on...
Guest:kind of every thought I had growing up, because I watched a lot of TV, and I felt like those characters were my friends.
Guest:And your parents, where were your folks?
Guest:My parents, they got divorced when I was nine, and eventually, like two years later, my mom moved to Connecticut.
Guest:So I lived with my dad for a couple more years.
Guest:What'd he do?
Guest:It was like Kramer versus Kramer.
Guest:He worked in a school system.
Guest:He eventually became a superintendent for a long time.
Marc:Oh, yeah?
Marc:Main guy?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Overseeing the whole system?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Massachusetts?
Guest:Superintendent.
Guest:Not just an intended, a superintendent.
Marc:Was he a Massachusetts guy?
Marc:Yeah, he was.
Guest:Did he talk like one?
Guest:He's been there almost 50 years now.
Guest:Yeah, it's funny.
Guest:He's got this...
Guest:He can't say certain letters anymore, which is like a Boston thing.
Guest:Like L's and R's are really tough.
Guest:It's just the L's are gone.
Guest:Like the Portland has this guy, Damien Lillard, and my dad won't even try to say his name.
Guest:He just calls him like Dame.
Guest:The guy in Portland, Dame, Lillard's like, no chance.
Marc:Both your folks are around still?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That's nice.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So, all right, so you're in Massachusetts for a little while, and then your mom takes you to Connecticut.
Marc:How old are you?
Marc:Yeah, so I'd go there in eighth grade, which was tough.
Guest:Going back and forth every other weekend to see my dad in Boston.
Marc:On the train?
Marc:Still going back?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:By yourself?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you could do that.
Guest:Buy the New York Post.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Have a book.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Get some roast beef sub, take the train, and try to get there in time for whatever the Friday night Celtic game was, because Larry Bird was playing back then, so.
Guest:We had season tickets, so I was like, a lot of it was like, oh yeah, I'll go back this weekend, then Friday game, Sunday game, I'll get to see two games.
Guest:And then eventually I was able to drive when, you know, back then it was 16, what is it now?
Marc:I don't know, I was 15 in New Mexico, it was 15.
Guest:So when I got my license, I could just zoom back and forth and go back for games.
Marc:From Hartford to?
Guest:It was like, it was Stanford.
Guest:Two and a half hours, Stanford?
Guest:Two and a half, which I always tried to make in two and probably should have died.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:At some point, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I drove those roads so much.
Guest:I miss New England.
Marc:The Marin, man.
Guest:The Marin was like, remember that video game pole position?
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:It was like, tugging the turns.
Marc:Oh, yeah, because that was the quickest way.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So, all right, so you're running back and forth.
Marc:You're taking the train by yourself.
Marc:And then, like, so it's all sports with you all the time?
Guest:I love to write.
Guest:So I was always, I love sports and I like to write.
Guest:And eventually it just kind of collided when I was in college.
Marc:Yeah, you started what you like.
Guest:I started, I had a column the senior year, the last year I was in high school.
Guest:I went to Holy Cross in Worcester.
Guest:Worcester.
Guest:Worcester.
Marc:Is that a good school?
Guest:Is that a good school?
Guest:It is a good school.
Guest:But when I went there, it was very sports-heavy.
Guest:And they still had... They were kind of weeding out the scholarships as I was there.
Guest:But when I was there, it was very sports.
Guest:And a lot of the guys there were guys who were good in high school.
Guest:And there was a big intramural scene.
Guest:It was just different than...
Marc:Why that school?
Marc:You applied to that?
Marc:You got a scholarship?
Marc:My dad went there.
Marc:Oh, he did?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you were a legacy?
Guest:My dad and two uncles.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And I really wanted to go to Georgetown.
Guest:I didn't get in.
Guest:Oh.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:So this is the one you got in?
Guest:Every time I hire somebody from Georgetown, I always get excited.
Guest:I'm like, I hired a Georgetown person.
Guest:I just hired somebody with the jersey.
Guest:What was it about Georgetown?
Guest:Look at me now.
Guest:Georgetown.
Guest:Now they're working for me.
Guest:Yeah, I got a Georgetown person.
Guest:No, it's tough though.
Guest:I wanted to go there because they had great basketball and I liked Washington.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And I just kind of got my heart set on it.
Marc:Washington in terms of the city?
Guest:Yeah, the city just seemed cool.
Marc:Were you interested in politics?
Marc:No, not at all.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You just liked Washington.
Guest:When I went to college, I wanted to be- It's kind of like Boston.
Guest:I wanted to be a sports agent.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:I don't remember if I settled on it, but I ended up doing poli-sci.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, that was my first one.
Marc:So you didn't do well in high school?
Marc:You did all right?
Guest:No, I was one of those high SATs, but didn't have good study habits person.
Marc:Yeah, smart, but not motivated.
Marc:Did you get the teachers to tell your parents that?
Guest:Yeah, he's a gifted writer.
Guest:I just wish he worked harder.
Guest:There's a lot of that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It would be nice if he turned assignments in on time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, so in college, it all kind of fell into place.
Guest:Did you write for the paper in high school?
Guest:I did the last couple years, but it was different.
Guest:I didn't know what I was doing.
Guest:In college, it was like I saw the column I wanted.
Guest:I went in.
Guest:I badgered the guy to let me try.
Guest:I wrote the first issue the first year.
Guest:Gave me a column.
Guest:It was called The Ramblings.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I wrote that one, and it was good.
Guest:And from that point on, I never missed all four years.
Guest:I had a column.
Guest:every time, and I used to, on Fridays.
Guest:Was it weekly or daily?
Guest:It was weekly, the newspaper came out on Fridays, and I would go to the cafeteria to get food on Fridays, and I would see people reading it, and I was like, yeah!
Guest:You know, it's just, it's like anything else, you're like, you know, when you're good at something, you really, when you feel, especially like somebody like me, I'm an only child, I don't know what the hell's going on, and I'm like, I know I'm good at this.
Guest:And you just kind of, that's like, I want to do this, and you get caught up in it.
Marc:It's sort of like the Andre story.
Guest:like what else is he gonna do he's a giant what else are you gonna do yeah it is a little like that yeah it it wasn't a huge campus but it definitely started to have an impact and i started feuding with the guy who ran the uh college was named father brooks yeah so i was calling him father crooks in my column and uh and who's the other guy oh it was like father markey i was calling him father malarkey yeah because they were they were getting rid of scholarships i was calling father crooks and father malarkey
Guest:So you're starting shit.
Guest:I was starting shit and I got called in once and I was like, this is good.
Guest:Let me get paid for this.
Marc:The power of journalism.
Guest:Yeah, it was good though.
Guest:It was fun.
Guest:And at some point I just realized I think I could do this and get paid for it.
Marc:But taking a position like those things, were you taking a position politically on campus?
Guest:Were you actually, other than just calling them names, were you... Yeah, it was... Back then when you wrote sports comms, it was a lot more abstract and you would have more fun with it.
Guest:Now it's very first person, here are my feelings.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Here's my take.
Guest:But didn't you do that?
Guest:Back then...
Guest:I did some of that, but back then, part of the art I read in the column was to try to mess around with it and come up, try to say what you were saying, not in the way people would think you were gonna say it.
Guest:So I created characters for them and did that whole thing.
Guest:But you seem to like to start shit.
Guest:Yeah, sometimes.
Guest:I would like to start shit when it's justified.
Guest:To me, it's like there's two types of people who do this, especially now.
Guest:It's the people that start shit just to start shit.
Guest:I think a lot of local sports radio hosts are like that.
Guest:But I think when you start shit, if you really believe what you're saying, it's a little different.
Guest:And I always try to, whenever I'm writing or talking on podcasts, to me, it's gotta be genuine.
Guest:And it's always how I feel.
Guest:I might be wrong.
Guest:I might not have all the facts that I needed when I made the assessment.
Guest:But I genuinely feel that way.
Marc:So your style started to unfold in college or not quite yet?
Guest:No, in college it did.
Guest:I was trying to write a little bit from the fan perspective.
Guest:and meld that with some other things.
Marc:Who did you like reading, like journalistically?
Guest:It was all kinds of people, but this- Hunter S. So when I was in Boston, they had these, we just randomly had a couple of awesome sports columnists, Ray Fitzgerald and Lee Montville.
Guest:And they did not write the typical sports column.
Marc:Who were they writing for?
Marc:What paper?
Marc:They wrote for the Boston Globe.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And the columns that they wrote were basically thoughtful, a little bit from the fans' perspective.
Guest:They weren't stuff like, Carlton Fisk is a coward and needs to go.
Guest:They didn't write that stuff.
Guest:And so it was a little bit of that.
Guest:Roger Angel and The New Yorker, the way he wrote from the fans' perspective was a big influence.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't know if you ever read a book.
Guest:William Goldman wrote a sports book with Mike Lupica.
Guest:William Goldman's the famous screenwriter.
Guest:And he wrote from the fan side and Lupica wrote from the reporter side.
Guest:And it was about this year in New York sports and Goldman's fan columns.
Guest:I basically just started ripping off like that style in college.
Guest:I was like, that's, that should work as a column.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And no one was doing that though.
Marc:Nobody really, not really.
Marc:It was just part of an experimental book in a way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then the other thing I was sprinkling a lot of pop culture because it was working for Dennis Miller.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So Dennis Miller was the weekend update guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I would watch the weekend update and you would have like just these random obscure pop culture reference jokes that I just thought were like the funniest things of all time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I remember there was that one about blah, blah, blah.
Guest:It's like playing Stratego with the Lander sisters.
Guest:And I was like, I get that.
Guest:That's a great joke.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You pop in on it.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Work those in.
Marc:You still feel like you had to be a little smarter than the average knob to get him.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, like the thing about Dennis, you know, he wasn't necessarily my cup of tea, but you had to be impressed with the lyricism and how many references he could get in.
Marc:And then sometimes you're like, I don't even know what that is.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I got to go look that up.
Guest:I got to learn something to do.
Guest:Well, and then when somebody gets it, I remember I used to do this one-liner thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was basically, it was a column of one-liners, which now would basically be, I guess, Twitter.
Guest:You wouldn't even need to do it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And one of the lines was about the three-part Hawaii Brady Bunch episode when...
Guest:The mask when he found the weird magical- Yeah, the Tiki guy, Vincent Price kept the kids in a cave.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He kind of kidnapped them.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then Mr. Brady and the Bradys, they found the kids.
Guest:They freed the kids.
Guest:And then they kind of felt bad and they invited Vincent Price to the luau.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I was just like, why the fuck did they invite him to the luau?
Guest:He should be in jail.
Guest:He kidnapped their kids.
Guest:So I did a throwaway line in that.
Guest:And then at a party that night, a couple people were like-
Guest:Vincent Price, man, that was some good shit.
Guest:I was like, oh good, somebody got it.
Marc:So you just kind of don't know.
Marc:So you kind of like, you like the attention, but also you land in jokes.
Guest:Yeah, you don't know what's working.
Guest:Because the stuff that really landed was the actual columns and if you took a take on something and you read about Mike Tyson.
Marc:Right.
Guest:what Holy Cross was doing in their sports or whatever.
Guest:But the little throwaway lines, I always noticed people would mention those.
Guest:And then when I finally- The grabbers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then when I finally had my own website a few years later, I started, one of the things I knew I wanted to do is a mailbag, which I hadn't really seen done successfully as a sports column.
Guest:And it was completely 100% ripped off from viewer mail.
Marc:But it was email at that time.
Marc:Yeah, it was like... At the very beginning.
Guest:It was like, send me... Yeah, early email.
Guest:I was writing for an AOL only site.
Guest:And it was, you know, here's my AOL address.
Guest:Send me an email.
Guest:I might answer it in my mailbag.
Marc:Right.
Guest:But it was ripped off from Letterman.
Marc:Sure, but Letterman didn't invent that.
Guest:No.
Guest:But I grew up as a kid in the 80s.
Guest:I revered Letterman and sent him viewer mail things and watched every Thursday night hoping he would pick mine.
Marc:Never did.
Marc:But so, okay.
Marc:So you do undergraduate at Holy Cross and you're studying political science.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Poli sci.
Marc:But you're just doing mostly you're preoccupied with writing.
Marc:You do okay in college?
Guest:I finished with a 3-0, which was a miracle.
Guest:That's pretty good.
Guest:I had a 2-5 after freshman year, and my dad wasn't.
Guest:Lost it.
Guest:Did you get along with him?
Guest:With my dad?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, God, yeah.
Guest:That's good.
Guest:Yeah, he's my buddy.
Guest:I actually made him, as my column evolved, he became a character in the columns, pretty much.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Did he like that?
Guest:I think he did, actually.
Guest:I think he kind of enjoys it now, especially because he's retired.
Guest:I have him on my podcast sometimes.
Guest:He's like stereotypical old, crusty Boston fan who's strangely hopeful but upset about stuff.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:I have my dad on, too, but it doesn't always go.
Marc:It depends where he's at emotionally.
Guest:It's tough because you're always going to enjoy your parents more than anybody else is going to.
Marc:Yeah, because my parents are genuinely, as endearing as they are, they're a bit disturbing.
Guest:Well, that's what the one I want to have on is my mom, and she refuses to come on because her pop culture choices.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Her favorite movie ever is Sex, Lies, and Videotape, which is- That's a weird one.
Guest:Isn't that weird?
Guest:My mom's super weird.
Guest:That's pretty good, though.
Guest:Yeah, my mom's got a lot of weird hobbies.
Guest:It's like Soderbergh's first movie.
Marc:I know.
Guest:She's just like, it's the best.
Guest:But she has a lot of takes, and she would be unbelievable on a podcast, but knows it and refuses to come on.
Guest:She's kind of my great white whale right now.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Getting my mom out of my pocket.
Guest:What other things is she like into that's odd?
Guest:She's obsessed with wine.
Guest:Right now she's watching- With wine?
Guest:She watches all English shows on like Netflix and Amazon and Hulu, like anything that's English.
Guest:But then weirdly went to like subtitle shows and she's like, I just watched this amazing Italian drama.
Marc:And I'm just like, what are you talking about?
Marc:What did she do while you were growing up?
Marc:What was her job?
Marc:What was her world?
Guest:Well, initially she was a teacher slash social worker.
Guest:And then eventually just got remarried and became a mom.
Guest:And then after I went to college, had this whole run as like the manager of a jewelry store in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Guest:And I don't know, she's had a lot of lives.
Marc:Doing the older lady business thing?
Marc:Yeah, well, she wasn't that old at that point.
Marc:Eventually got older, but yeah.
Marc:And did that marriage last between her and the next guy?
Marc:well a while yeah 30 years he's your stepdad yeah yeah yeah huh like that guy yeah all right i like everybody do you come on you don't you don't you can't is this where you're trying to get deep on me no i'm not trying to get deep i'm just curious i just i i don't come from that i don't come you know like you might the story's like i know that divorce is my parents get divorced when i was 35 so i didn't have to deal with that
Marc:Other than in sort of hindsight or as a grownup.
Marc:But I've talked to a lot of people that it affects them one way or another.
Marc:It doesn't or they don't think it does.
Marc:But step parents, I can't imagine.
Marc:It must be just weird and difficult.
Guest:I'm fascinated by kids of divorce.
Guest:And I have a couple friends now who are divorced who have kids.
Guest:And I've talked to them about it because I was like, here's what happens when you're the kid of a divorce.
Marc:You can tell them.
Guest:Yeah, I was like, you're going to play your parents against each other.
Guest:You're gonna learn how to, you're gonna learn two things.
Guest:You're gonna learn how to lie to your parents.
Guest:You're gonna learn how to lie to them to make them feel better about things that they, it feels like it might hurt their feelings if they found out.
Guest:And then you're gonna play them against each other to get what you want.
Guest:And it really turns you into like kind of a devious person.
Marc:But not, it's just instinctual.
Guest:yeah well you're you it's weird because especially if you're an only child you're like in the power seat yeah yeah of course which is ridiculous i was like nine when my parents got divorced yeah um yeah divorce depending on when somebody gets how old you are when your parents get divorced i think it hits people different ways but i would say between nine and ten is probably the single worst age and does this advice help your friends are you finding
Guest:A little bit.
Marc:I just can't imagine when the next guy comes in.
Marc:How old were you?
Marc:12, 13?
Guest:What I've learned looking back is that being a stepparent is the most thankless job there is.
Guest:It's got to be the worst.
Guest:It's just brutal.
Guest:You're dealing with all the shitty parts of having a kid, but they don't look like you and they're not half of your DNA.
Marc:And he didn't have kids?
Guest:No, he didn't.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:And then the kid, like, it's got to hate you right out of the gate.
Guest:Yeah, it's tough.
Guest:It's tough.
Guest:But it's fine.
Guest:I had a really good experience.
Guest:I think a lot of people probably could not say the same.
Marc:Yeah, the competitive element of it or, like, you know, whatever.
Guest:Like, it ends up being, like, did you ever see the movie This Boy's Life with Leo and De Niro?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You end up, like, with the De Niro stepdad that's just hitting you with a belt.
Guest:I mean, that's, like, that's your worst case scenario, but...
Marc:Yeah, where the mother enables it because... Yeah, the mother's like, I'm just so happy to be married again, do whatever.
Marc:Fucking nightmare.
Marc:You didn't have to live through that.
Marc:No.
Marc:Oh, good.
Marc:No, not at all.
Marc:All right, so you went to graduate school?
Marc:I did.
Guest:For journalism?
Guest:I did.
Guest:I wanted to... This is a really weird era, and there's only a couple movies that have captured it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Where, like, Reality Bites and Singles and Kicking and Screaming.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it was like, before the internet...
Guest:in the 90s that all these kids graduated from college and they didn't 100% know what to do.
Guest:Like the ones that want to be more artistic.
Guest:And it's like, I think I want to be a stand-up comic.
Guest:I'll go to LA and I think I want to act.
Guest:All right, I'll go to LA.
Guest:I hope I meet somebody.
Guest:And with writing, especially if you're trying to write about sports,
Guest:You're really, your only path was to go to a newspaper.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the thing with newspapers is people are newspapers for 25, 30, 35 years.
Guest:Forever.
Guest:And you go in and it doesn't, it's not a meritocracy.
Guest:And I spent probably three years.
Guest:After graduate school?
Guest:After graduate school working for the Boston Herald.
Marc:So you did two years in graduate school?
Guest:One year of graduate school.
Marc:Master's in journalism in one year?
Marc:Did you double up or was that just a program?
Guest:It was like an accelerated program.
Marc:Oh, and then, so then you go do what you think you need to do.
Marc:Get a job at a newspaper.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This is great, I'll have a column in two years.
Guest:And then the world doesn't work that way.
Marc:And then you're like, what the fuck?
Guest:And I just had just a series of bad breaks.
Marc:What was it like going in with the old guys?
Marc:Did you have heroes there at the time?
Guest:Not at that newspaper.
Guest:The Globe had a couple that I probably would have liked more, but it wasn't.
Guest:It was just rough.
Guest:It was like an Aaron Sorkin show.
Guest:It really was.
Guest:It was like just fucking crazy.
Guest:And at some point I just realized that I just was going to go crazy if I stayed because it just would have taken so long and kind of gave up.
Marc:And you just got other jobs.
Guest:And I was like, I'm gonna freelance, and then you don't get a freelance thing for three months, and then it's like, ah, I'm gonna work.
Guest:How are you gonna make a living?
Guest:I saw a bartend at this restaurant that's opening up.
Guest:Where was that, Boston?
Guest:It was in Charlestown.
Guest:Charlestown.
Guest:Yeah, and then did that, and all of a sudden a year goes by, and I haven't written anything.
Guest:And that's when I started my site, because it was like,
Marc:But were you boozing?
Marc:Were you getting sad?
Guest:I was.
Guest:No, I was doing the whole thing you do when you work in a restaurant.
Guest:You stay up late.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You get to know people from other restaurants.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You get to know like everybody who's in town.
Guest:Drinking after hours.
Guest:Oh, after, after, after hours.
Guest:Like you're up till 3, 3 3 in the morning, smoking cigarettes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Waking up at- Doing the snooze the next day.
Guest:Doing some blow?
Guest:No, never did that.
Guest:It must have been around.
Guest:I can't say I'm so innocent with that stuff.
Marc:Cause I bet it's a different era too.
Marc:When I was at restaurants, it was everywhere.
Marc:It's like the crazy chef.
Guest:It probably was, but people knew that I was still traumatized from lead bias.
Guest:So maybe nobody didn't offer it for me, but I gotta say though, it was a great year.
Guest:And I feel like everybody should work in a restaurant in their twenties for a year.
Guest:It should be almost like going to grad school.
Marc:Was it like a home-owned restaurant, not a chain restaurant?
Guest:Yeah, it was like a one.
Guest:It was this restaurant.
Guest:It had this probably 16-seat bar in the front.
Guest:Regulars?
Guest:It was like neighborhood regulars.
Guest:But it was cool.
Guest:And then at some point, you look around, you're 27.
Guest:You're like, am I really going to give up writing?
Guest:This is it?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Tried to get it going again.
Guest:And how'd you do that?
Guest:Is that when AOL came in?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So they had this site called Digital City.
Guest:It was all these different little cities.
Guest:So this is like the beginning of the internet.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Kind of.
Guest:I had only had AOL.
Guest:I had only had email for a year.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So 96, I got email and I had AOL.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:AOL was like- You didn't have a choice really.
Guest:yeah i didn't know what else to get and there's only a couple other ones right in retrospect it had been on for people had had emails since like 92 91 i had no idea i had no idea this whole world existed but i remember when i got it yeah so they had these digital city boston things and there was a guy it was digital city boston yeah and there was a guy called the movie guy yeah and he wrote movie reviews and his picture was on there yeah and i was like
Guest:Oh, I wonder if they want a sports guy.
Guest:So I just started badgering them.
Guest:And then they finally gave me a column like in the spring of 97.
Guest:They built like this little site for me.
Guest:I edited it myself, did all that.
Guest:And I was Boston sports guys.
Guest:And it was like, I think it was $50 a week the first three months.
Marc:And it was just, how many were you writing?
Guest:I was trying to write, I think, three times a week maybe, but I had a whole plan for what I wanted to do.
Guest:I wanted to do like, I knew I wanted to do Mailbag.
Guest:I knew I wanted to do like a 30 best sports movies ever column.
Guest:I knew I wanted to write about the, I do a running diary of watching the NBA draft with my dad, which was like timestamped.
Guest:So I had some plans for the first couple months.
Marc:That were actually repeatable.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Refillable.
Guest:A couple gimmicks that I thought would work and then some,
Guest:you know just have a little more attitude just kind of appeal to younger audience because at the time i just felt like i felt like all the people in boston were not appealing to me right like they were they weren't writing or talking to people in their 20s who like sports and i was like there there has to there's a show or a writer somebody out there that's going to connect with these people
Guest:And that was you.
Guest:It took a while.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it was so early in the internet.
Guest:Like, the first year and a half, you could only read the column on AOL.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, I'd have buddies at work who couldn't read it.
Guest:So I used to copy-paste the column and mail them to my buddies.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then they would mail it.
Guest:And then all of a sudden, this little...
Guest:mail chain of the column was out and it was like people and then people kept asking to get on the list and all of a sudden i had this list of like i don't know 700 people or something and i'm sending it out and then one day somebody mailed me my own column like you should check this out my name is my fucking column um yeah
Guest:But that's what it was like in the 90s.
Guest:I mean, it was like the wild, wild west.
Marc:When did it start to take form?
Marc:When did you start to be able to get some metrics on it outside of email?
Guest:The big thing for me, it was funny, there were two things.
Guest:One was that sometimes that AOL main page would run a thing.
Guest:So it would go from, I'd be writing from 5,000 people to like 2 million with one column.
Guest:Like, whoa!
Yeah.
Guest:Hey, that was cool.
Guest:Cause they put it on the front.
Guest:They put it on the front.
Guest:And then the other thing was to get a keyword.
Guest:So I had a keyword sports guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And cause I'm such an idiot.
Guest:I thought the keyword was more important than just like maybe getting sports guy.com, which would have been a much better way for everybody to get it.
Guest:Because you were still in the AOL thing.
Guest:Yeah, I was like, AOL, it's my little universe.
Guest:But by 2000, you could feel things opening up.
Guest:And the biggest thing that happened in sports was Peter Gammons, who was the biggest baseball writer at the time.
Guest:He decided to make his column ESPN.com only.
Guest:It was not available in a newspaper.
Guest:You had to go to ESPN.com to get it.
Guest:That was the first time people like my dad and my Uncle Bob were saying,
Guest:So I type in ESPN.com, and then does it pop up?
Guest:So you could see everybody going through the process of it.
Guest:He was bringing them into the internet.
Guest:Yeah, and that's why I was like, the internet's going to happen now.
Guest:Because of that guy.
Guest:And there was a trade.
Guest:I've told this story before, but the Red Sox traded for Pedro Martinez.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In 97, it was the first year I had my site.
Guest:And the trade happened probably like in the morning, like 10 o'clock range.
Guest:So I wrote a column about it.
Guest:I got emails about it.
Guest:Was working on another mailbag for it.
Guest:And like this whole news cycle happened.
Guest:And then the globe comes in
Guest:you know, 18 hours later, it's like Pedro Martinez has been traded.
Guest:It's like, yeah, we're all over here.
Guest:We've already been talking about it.
Guest:And that's when I really felt like newspapers were in trouble for the first time.
Guest:They were just late.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, it was late in like a really embarrassing gap kind of a way.
Guest:With that kind of stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's like that happened.
Guest:What do you think?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you react.
Guest:And now the internet is with Twitter 20 years later.
Guest:It's like this happened.
Guest:Boom.
Guest:And it just never ends.
Guest:For better and worse.
Guest:For better and worse.
Guest:But then ESPN hired me.
Guest:And when they hired me, I knew- Out of AOL.
Guest:Yeah, that was spring 2001.
Guest:They had me write a couple pieces, a couple guest pieces, which each time I wrote them, they really took off.
Guest:And I knew at that point they were going to hire me.
Marc:And was that an exciting day?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, for a couple reasons.
Guest:One was I was like 31 at that point.
Guest:And I don't think I had made more than-
Guest:42,000 a year or something.
Guest:And I had a girlfriend, I wanted to get engaged.
Guest:And I was like, wow, this is... Meanwhile, I signed one of the worst contracts ever.
Marc:But it was a job that meant security.
Guest:The number was big, but they owned my ass for three years in all these different ways.
Guest:And I was just so happy to sign anything.
Marc:And at that time, so could you tell how big your following was through AOL at all?
Marc:You didn't really have a sense?
Guest:I could tell stuff was happening in Boston.
Guest:So like the Celtics, that last, the fourth year I had my site, I could tell people in the bars and stuff like that.
Guest:But it was local.
Guest:Referencing you?
Guest:Yeah, no, just like people like, hey, are you?
Guest:And people from different teams who work for different teams reaching out to me and things.
Guest:So it was clear something was happening.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But then at ESPN, when I joined ESPN, it was really the only sports website that mattered.
Guest:So I joined this page that had some great writers, like David Halberstam, Ralph Wiley, Hunter Thompson was right in there at the time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:All of them were kind of from a different generation.
Guest:They're all great writers, but they weren't writing for the internet.
Marc:Did you read Hunter?
Guest:I read all that.
Guest:I mean, when I was in college, I read all of those.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But so- It's a good first person.
Guest:It started taking off.
Guest:Good first person.
Marc:Oh my God.
Guest:The Las Vegas.
Guest:I like some of his features too.
Marc:Oh, I do too.
Guest:The short stuff's great.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So like at that time, like you're writing, you got hired ESPN, you're in big company, you're getting popular, right?
Yeah.
Marc:But the internet still wasn't in, like you didn't see it as huge yet?
Guest:No, to me it was like, I was still looking at it as like a gateway to do something else.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I always wanted to create like a TV series.
Guest:Maybe this will lead, I'll create my own TV series.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Or maybe I'll get to write for Letterman.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It seemed like a step to do something else.
Guest:I didn't see the potential of it.
Guest:You wanted to write for Letterman?
Guest:It didn't seem stable.
Guest:In 2000, 2001, you tell people you wrote for the internet and they were always confused by it.
Guest:They were like, you wrote for the internet?
Guest:Do you get paid?
Guest:They're asking those questions now.
Marc:I think they still are.
Marc:It's come full circle.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I think...
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:It just, it just didn't seem like the greatest bet.
Guest:Well, how did the relationship with Kimmel unfold?
Guest:Cause I wrote about him.
Guest:He did this roast.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Did the shack roast and he was really funny.
Guest:And I did a column about the shack roast and I wrote something nice about him in it.
Guest:And then he emailed me.
Guest:And we started talking and we became friends.
Guest:Did he read your column?
Guest:Yeah, he read it.
Marc:But I mean, like all the columns, not just the one about him.
Guest:Yeah, he had been reading my column for a few months.
Guest:And then I mentioned him in the column.
Guest:He's like, oh, I'm emailing this guy.
Guest:And so we became friendly and we started talking.
Guest:And right around that same time, it was summer 2002.
Guest:All of a sudden, ABC was courting him to do that show.
Guest:And he's like, I'm going to tell you something you can't tell anybody.
Guest:And I'm like, who the hell am I going to tell?
Guest:I live in Boston.
Guest:He's like, I think I might have a chance to get this late night show on ABC.
Guest:And I want you to move out to LA and write for it.
Guest:And at that point, I'd been on the East Coast my whole life and just...
Guest:He flew me and my wife out.
Guest:We went out.
Marc:Did you marry the girl that you were engaged to?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Well, she was a little worried about LA because she was East Coast too.
Guest:Where's she from?
Guest:She's from New York.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But we get there and there's this big feast.
Guest:He's throwing this charity feast for the Italian thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we go and it's like, I'd already met as executive producer and we go and we show up.
Guest:My wife has her little concerns about LA and there's this one of those big slides that they have at like carnivals.
Guest:And going down the slide is the guy who's gonna executive produce the show and three of the juggies from the man show.
Guest:And they're like,
Guest:And at that point, I was like, I'm done.
Guest:I know she saw that, and she's never going to want to move here.
Guest:But we moved here, and it was great.
Guest:I haven't left since.
Guest:But you didn't stay in television.
Guest:No, I didn't.
Guest:I worked for him for 18 months.
Marc:And what was the two... Is your decision to stop?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I...
Guest:i really loved it i love being part of a show i loved all the people that work for it i love like launching something like i thought it was i really believed in jimmy like i really genuinely felt like he was special yeah and i felt like he had a chance to do a special show right and i was a child of letterman and he was too and i just felt like it'd be so cool to help launch a show that becomes something
Guest:He's really gotten very good.
Guest:And yeah, he really has.
Guest:And the first, I don't know, we probably like about nine months in, we did this thing with Mike Tyson.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Where we flew pigeons with him with Jimmy's Uncle Frank and I was the writer assigned to the show and the guy is supposed to edit it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we were on this roof in Harlem and I just felt like I would have rather written about it than done a TV segment.
Guest:And from that point on, I was like, I just felt like I had unfinished business with the comm and the internet was getting bigger.
Guest:And I was like, did I, I'm writing for somebody and I'm getting like two jokes on a night or one joke or a couple ideas and meanwhile, like I could be the lead of this website and really maybe have an impact.
Marc:So wait, they'd offered you what?
Guest:They were trying to get me to come back from probably about a year in with Jimmy.
Guest:But we talked.
Guest:I talked to him about five or six months and I was telling him, you know, how I was feeling about everything.
Guest:And we had like a really good, I mean, he's just a really good friend of mine.
Guest:And he wanted, we saw both sides.
Guest:I didn't want to leave the show yet, but I also felt like I was missing out on this thing that I could see.
Marc:The internet.
Guest:Yeah, the internet and also like having an impact on it.
Guest:I think most people's reaction was, why the fuck did you leave what you had?
Marc:You had like the best gig in sports.
Marc:And you just got a sense or you just saw it from the momentum of how many people were paying attention?
Guest:Yeah, it was more a sense of watching what was going on the internet and feeling like...
Guest:people weren't writing the stuff I would write.
Guest:I just assumed when I left, just other people would fill whatever voice I could say.
Guest:Just everywhere, yeah.
Guest:And it really felt like there was... I was like, I could really have an impact, I think, if I come back.
Guest:I think I'd put more thought in the column.
Guest:It's also hard to...
Guest:You know, when you go from, like, you're absolutely nothing, doing nothing, to all of a sudden, you're building a huge fan base.
Guest:Like, it freaks you out a little bit.
Guest:You start, like, second-guessing everything, and you're getting really criticized for the first time.
Guest:It was a lot to deal with.
Guest:Like, just...
Guest:what's happening i went from i'm the same guy i'm living in the same apartment i was before but now people in like australia are reading my column like what the fuck is going on yeah you liked it i liked it and i didn't like it yeah i actually didn't i i there were things i liked there are things i didn't like uh-huh so what why were you like rumored to be so difficult to dspn
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I'm sure I was in the early years.
Guest:I think I was.
Guest:I think I was.
Guest:In what way?
Guest:How does that manifest itself?
Guest:Being immature.
Guest:But was it pushed back against authority or what?
Guest:Yeah, it was a lot of stuff.
Guest:I was very concerned they were going to fuck with my calm.
Guest:And for the first six months, they did.
Guest:They really did.
Guest:They took jokes out.
Guest:They took segments out.
Guest:They took...
Guest:They just basically watered down the calm just enough that the outside world couldn't totally notice, but I could.
Guest:And it really bothered me.
Guest:And it was just, I got in this mode of just leave me the fuck alone.
Guest:Let me write this.
Guest:Was it one guy?
Guest:It was a bunch of guys.
Guest:It was just the way they worked.
Guest:I was nobody.
Guest:And they're like, they're not going to change their rules for somebody.
Guest:But what happened was...
Guest:my comms started to take off in 2001.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I didn't really know that, but they knew it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And all of a sudden, I got enough leeway and all that stuff.
Guest:But I would still battle with people.
Guest:There's a million things I would do over again, especially now that I'm in a position of being a boss.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I've been in that position all decade.
Guest:And I look back, I'm like, God, I would have...
Guest:hated being the boss of that person from 2001, but you just don't know any better.
Guest:And then when I went back, I had a whole plan for what I was gonna do in 04.
Guest:I had a really good year in 04.
Guest:What happened?
Guest:I was just, I knew what I was doing.
Marc:When did Grantland happen?
Guest:Grantland wasn't for another...
Guest:2011.
Guest:Oh, really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that was within ESPN?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:My contract was up at a time when I just had a lot of leverage.
Marc:So at 2004, you caught on and then you were just solid and you were making good money at ESPN.
Guest:I caught on, but the internet caught on.
Guest:So the Red Sox, who hadn't won a World Series yet, they were taken off as, you know, that whole season, that whole journey of what was happening.
Guest:I was writing about them the whole season.
Guest:And then by the time they started coming back against the Yankees, and I was writing, I was at the games, I was writing about it.
Guest:And it felt for the first time like,
Guest:And whatever I was writing was like genuinely important and people around the country were reading it.
Guest:It was the same thing like how I felt about the Boston Globe people 20 years ago.
Guest:And there was, I think after one game I called, the editor in chief called me because I didn't want to write again.
Guest:I was so burned out.
Guest:I was up to like five in the morning writing pieces.
Guest:The editor in chief, John Papanek, he called me and he was like, you can't stop.
Guest:You gotta keep going.
Guest:Everybody is reading you right now.
Guest:You gotta keep it going.
Guest:This is what you wanted.
Guest:And he gave me this sports movie speech.
Guest:I'm like, yeah, everybody's reading.
Guest:But I was so drained and tired.
Guest:But it really was a rush.
Guest:It was like, this is what I wanted my whole life is to matter like this and to have people read my shit.
Guest:And so that was just the beginning of the good run all the way through.
Guest:It was fun.
Guest:I got to do a lot of good stuff.
Guest:I had a couple of contracts that come up and each time I wanted to start figuring out how to use ESPN for all the...
Guest:potential it had.
Guest:It was the biggest sports monolith that existed, but they also had all these pieces to it.
Guest:When I went back in 04, one of the things I was supposed to do was write a baseball movie for them, which I did.
Guest:And it was about to get made, and then the guy who ran ESPN at the time was in an owner's booth with George Steinbrenner, who was a character in this baseball movie, and he was like, we can't fuck with our partners.
Guest:And they scrapped the baseball movie that I had spent my whole summer writing.
Guest:But at the same time- Did you get paid for it extra?
Guest:I got paid for it.
Guest:And I did this animated series that didn't work.
Guest:But I was just trying stuff because I was like, this company's-
Guest:you know is just there and it has money and it has resources and reach yeah and it's gonna try to do movies and tv and all these different things and like this is cool so when i re-signed with them in 06 uh heading into 07 part of it was like i want to get more involved with
Guest:Production?
Guest:The entertainment side.
Guest:They had this group called ESPN Original Entertainment.
Guest:A couple months later, I sent them the memo for 30 for 30, which the name was in the title.
Guest:The premise for the most part was there, and it was basically centered around HBO is this monopoly on sports documentaries.
Guest:Why?
Guest:Why don't we have it?
Guest:We're the worldwide leader.
Guest:Why are we giving this up?
Guest:Our documentaries, we're putting so many out.
Guest:Nobody knows which ones are good and which ones aren't.
Guest:they have to be under a brand so people know that it's a certain thing and here's a gimmick we can use.
Guest:I laid most of it out and Skipper and Walsh, the people who run the company, both of them were like, this is great, why don't you develop this?
Guest:And my friend Connor Schell, who was like, now runs content for ESPN, but at the time was pretty low down on ESPN Films, I forwarded him the email and I was like, check this out.
Guest:And he was like, this is cool.
Guest:And he came up with the one wrinkle of instead of four people doing it, how about what if all 30, what if we went outside and got all 30 filmmakers to do the 30?
Guest:And then he flew to LA and we had this awesome marathon meeting in my little guest house in the back of the first house I bought here and we sketched out the whole series.
Guest:And then we fought to make it for, I don't know, the next year and a half until it finally happened.
Marc:And he became a TV producer.
Guest:dead i did and at the same time i was writing my basketball book which was like it was my second book my first one did well but i felt like they had screwed it up put the columns yeah it was a red sox book and why they screwed up they didn't release enough of them i was going to these book signings and they they had like 25 books and there was 300 people there and i was like this sucks um
Guest:So then when I did the basketball book, I was like, I want to make this the biggest basketball book, the biggest NBA book.
Guest:It was literally 700 pages.
Guest:So I had that coming out at the same time 3030 was coming out and my contract was up.
Guest:So I used that as the leverage to do this site, which ended up being Grantland that I had always thought would be cool.
Guest:And I also had my podcast at the time too, because I had started doing a podcast in 07, which we talked about on my podcast.
Yeah.
Guest:and they had no other podcasts that were really resonating.
Guest:But they probably didn't get it, right?
Guest:They knew something was happening with mine, because mine was getting a lot of people within like a year.
Marc:But wasn't one of your problems, was it they just couldn't figure out how to monetize it?
Guest:They couldn't figure out how to monetize it, but they knew it was something and they knew it was the space they needed to be.
Guest:So when I had that last contract, I was like their lead columnist.
Guest:I had their lead podcast.
Guest:I had 30 for 30.
Guest:And I had this basketball book that had just hit number one.
Guest:So they want to lose you.
Guest:They didn't want to lose me.
Guest:It was just the perfect lining up of events.
Marc:But you couldn't have foreshadowed it.
Marc:It was just the way things.
Marc:No.
Marc:You didn't have some master plan.
Guest:No, but I will tell you, though, when we knew that 30 for 30, when we found out when it was going to be, I really believed in it.
Guest:I really thought it was going to be a thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And my book was coming around the round time.
Guest:And at some point early in that year, I was like, wow, this could be good for me.
Guest:My contract's up.
Marc:This is lining up nicely.
Marc:It's a great feeling to where you can play something.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was like, wow, this wasn't 100% intentional, but man, this is really nice how this is lining up.
Guest:Where you have a negotiating position.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:That's undeniable.
Guest:But I had the year before, I thought I was going to get fired.
Guest:So that part was funny too.
Guest:Why?
Guest:I was really battling them.
Guest:They were messing with my column again and they canceled the Obama podcast.
Guest:Oh, that's right.
Guest:I'm still not 100% over.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, that was tough because I had a chance to get him before he even became president.
Guest:What was their excuse?
Guest:Their excuse was it was at a point in the election where they didn't want to affect it one way or the other with an ESPN thing.
Guest:If I had him, then I'd have to have
Marc:Well, they probably didn't want to affect their fans.
Marc:Who the hell knows?
Marc:I mean, like that doesn't make sense.
Marc:Like we want to sit this one out because we'll probably, you know, but I mean, I could see they just didn't want to politicize the platform.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I'm saying what their garbage answer was.
Guest:I'm not saying.
Guest:The reason was actually they didn't want to get political and they were probably worried this guy was going to win and people were going to point to his pin.
Guest:It's like one of the reasons he won was he did this podcast.
Marc:Yeah, and you don't know, like they don't know their audience in that way, but you can make assumptions.
Guest:I was so mad.
Guest:We did...
Guest:So then all of a sudden they did something with both politicians later that year.
Guest:And they didn't even give me a heads up that I could have a chance to do the Obama thing.
Guest:And Rick Riley did something with, he filled out a bracket or did something with one of the candidates.
Guest:And I was so mad.
Guest:I had a Friday column due that week.
Guest:It was a picks column and I hand it every week.
Guest:And I wrote this whole column about John McCain helping me with my picks where it just skewered John McCain.
Guest:And I knew they wouldn't run it, but I handed it in to fulfill my contractual agreement for that week.
Guest:But knowing that it had no chance.
Guest:But it was made up, right?
Guest:It was all made up and it was like John McCain, he smells like bologna.
Guest:I just, I really went after.
Guest:It was a fuck you.
Guest:It was a fuck you and I knew they wouldn't run it.
Guest:So it was not going great.
Guest:And then Skipper, who was running content at the time, not ESPN, we met at some, we met at this, they just built LA Live, the ESPN building.
Guest:We met at this creepy conference room on the fifth floor.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I really felt like, not only did I feel like I was getting fired, I felt like I was going to get assassinated.
Guest:Like it was like one of those things that nobody around, I was like, am I going to get killed?
Guest:And we just kind of hashed it out.
Guest:And he was, you know, for a long time, the best boss I ever had.
Guest:And we just, I was like, here's what's going on.
Guest:He's like, oh, I didn't even know that.
Marc:Isn't that weird that when you have those chance meetings with the people that are really in charge, you realize just how insulated they are by underlings?
Marc:Yeah, because they're delegating everything.
Guest:And it's something that I'm really wary of.
Guest:To save your own ass.
Guest:Yeah, it's something I'm really wary of.
Guest:I want to always know what's going on with people underneath me, even if it's like...
Guest:the lowest level people but sometimes you just don't and you don't know and things can go a little out of control and you come in too late to it right so so yeah so another lesson yeah there's another lesson so within a year i went from thinking i was going to get assassinated to getting this giant contract extension they were going to hire a gun to take you i didn't know i was like why isn't anybody here am i getting killed
Marc:And then you renegotiated and you got Grantland.
Guest:Got Grantland, which was not named Grantland yet.
Guest:And I didn't know what the name was, but I knew what I thought might work.
Guest:And you were the editor?
Guest:Yeah, I found all the people.
Guest:And it was at a time in the internet when everything was immediate, fast, fast, fast.
Guest:What year was that?
Guest:This is year gone 2010, end of 2009 and 2010.
Guest:And it was a lot of, you gotta get stuff up, gotta get fast, gotta get traffic.
Guest:And a lot.
Guest:And meanwhile, I was writing these columns on ESPN that were like 6,000 words and they were the most read columns.
Guest:So I was like, this can't be true because people are still reading my columns.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So I thought there was a chance to...
Guest:create a site that had all kinds of things, kind of playing a little off what I was doing with my columns with sports and pop culture, but also some good long form writing, some wackier stuff.
Guest:And really the biggest thing for me was, I felt like there was a lot of good writers out there that people just weren't seeing.
Guest:There was a talent thing that I think I could see.
Marc:There was no curation.
Guest:No curation.
Guest:And I think,
Guest:i think i could see it because i'm a writer i think it's like how with comics you probably you can you always when somebody you feel like they're in your corner that probably means they're good yeah and i would look around i'd be like why doesn't that person have a job yet right wow wow that's weird they're using that person wrong i would use them this way and i just started kind of trusting my instincts with that and writers i liked and people i liked and
Guest:if I put them under one umbrella, what would that look like?
Guest:And people were not happy when we launched Greatland.
Guest:It was really- Why, because it wasn't sports-centric enough?
Guest:People were like, fuck you, why do you get to do this?
Guest:That was the attitude that first year was.
Guest:From who?
Guest:Just the internet, the internet that hates everything.
Guest:They were like, fuck you, Bill Simmons, for doing this?
Guest:Yeah, why are they building a site around a writer?
Guest:Why are they doing this?
Guest:It's a vanity project.
Guest:And we were trying to create this site that just did good stuff, that didn't take shots at other people, that tried all kinds of different things and would also have a podcast component and eventually some other stuff.
Guest:It was a big ambitious internet thing.
Guest:Yeah, but it was within ESPN.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that was another thing that made people suspicious.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then I got Closterman, and we used a couple big writers for freelance pieces, which made people think, oh, they're like the Yankees.
Guest:They're spending crazy amounts of money.
Guest:We were not spending crazy amounts of money- On writers.
Guest:At all.
Guest:The thing we were doing was finding young people that-
Guest:really had not caught the wave of their career yet, but we were going to help them get there.
Guest:And we weren't spending a lot of money.
Guest:And there was this perception that we weren't, which was, oh, this was so frustrating.
Guest:I just had to keep my mouth shut.
Guest:And it was successful, right?
Marc:Yeah, it was, I think, by about two.
Marc:Some guy wrote for Grantland that really just unloaded on me on one piece.
Marc:But it was very well written.
Marc:It bothered me, though.
Marc:Oh, really?
Marc:Yeah, I can't remember his name.
Guest:We wrote a flattering thing at the ringer about you, I remember.
Guest:Yeah, no, this was way back.
Guest:Oh, it was about your podcast.
Guest:Or something, yeah.
Guest:I remember that.
Guest:So by the time we launched Grantland, our staff loved you.
Guest:And that's when I was like, I might have to take Marin out.
Guest:Like, and just have him murdered.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I'd better have to bring him to the assassination room at ESPN.
Guest:At ESPN, yeah.
Guest:I was like, no, fuck this guy.
Guest:I have the best podcast.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:But yeah, so it took probably a year and a half.
Guest:But the big thing was we found so much talent.
Guest:And talent's going to win, obviously.
Guest:And we had so many good people.
Guest:And then it's almost like putting together a football team.
Guest:And it's the same thing right now with The Ringer, where you try to survive the first year.
Guest:And the second year, you figure out who you are.
Guest:And then you start adding a couple more pieces.
Guest:And all of a sudden, it's like, eh, you get a cornerback.
Yeah.
Guest:Oh, now I got a right tackle and all of a sudden your team's good.
Marc:It's really cool.
Marc:It's the coolest thing I've ever been involved with.
Marc:Well, what happened with ESPN and Grantland?
Marc:How did that all come unglued?
Marc:That's like an hour long answer.
Marc:But it was a successful site, but it was still at a time where it wasn't completely clear how to make money from a site.
Marc:Right.
Guest:It was funny.
Guest:They never mentioned money to me ever from a budget, like these costs are right and too high and that stuff.
Guest:We were really responsible with what we spent stuff on.
Guest:We were this boutique site that did not belong in this giant infrastructure that ESPN had for a variety of reasons.
Guest:The biggest one was their sales force
Guest:which is super successful and should be this way, is used to selling things in bulk.
Guest:And they're used to being like... To big companies.
Guest:Yeah, we got $50 million from Kia.
Guest:We got $38 million from Miller Lite.
Guest:They're not used to chasing money, and they certainly weren't going to sell the mid-rolls in my...
Guest:in my podcast or anything like that, but at the same time would not have allowed me to use Midroll, who both of us use, which would have just made us money.
Guest:The last year I was there, my fourth year, I had one of the biggest podcasts, and I think we were making $750,000 total for the whole podcast network, for everything.
Guest:We had, I think, nine of the 10 biggest podcasts at ESPN.
Guest:So when things started going south, they're like, well, your budget's high.
Guest:And I couldn't get a head count the last 18 months I was there.
Guest:We couldn't grow, which makes it really hard to just keep doing great stuff.
Marc:And they were still adhering to the old paradigm.
Guest:Yeah, they were like, look, here's what your site brings in.
Guest:I'm like, yeah, but my site should be bringing in twice as much as this.
Guest:We're doing well and we matter.
Guest:Skipper had told me all along, try to create Rolling Stone in the 70s for the internet.
Guest:And that's what we were trying to do.
Guest:And we were in year four.
Guest:We didn't have a web designer.
Guest:We had, I think, two copy editors.
Guest:I had a video audio staff of four people.
Guest:And meanwhile, we're cranking out
Guest:Podcasts left and right and videos.
Guest:It was not sustainable.
Guest:And that's what I was trying to tell them.
Guest:We had 50 people at the peak of Grantland and I have 90 people at the ringer in two plus years.
Guest:It just wasn't sustainable.
Guest:And so we were fighting about that.
Guest:But then I had other issues because I was on the NBA show and I didn't want to come back for the second year at all.
Guest:And they talked me into coming back and it turned out to be a disaster.
Guest:What show is that?
Guest:It's the show called NBA Countdown, which is- It's on ESPN?
Guest:Yeah, it's like comes on before and after basketball games.
Marc:But I had a point like in 2000- So you're there with the other three guys?
Guest:Yeah, one of them was my buddy, Jalen.
Guest:But yeah, it's just, they do it in the most missionary position, stale way possible.
Guest:And you just kind of wait and take turns to speak.
Guest:And I really thought I was gonna be a more creative show.
Guest:It was like my worst nightmare to be on a show like that.
Guest:Or just like-
Guest:Great point, Jalen.
Guest:And here's the other thing about Charlotte.
Guest:And it's just like, just shoot me in the head.
Guest:But when I was there in 2013 and 14, I literally had five jobs.
Guest:And I was burning out big time.
Guest:Like losing your mind?
Guest:A little bit, yeah.
Guest:I look back now, I'm like, what were you doing?
Guest:I don't even remember stuff.
Guest:That's what happens when you're that overwhelmed all the time?
Guest:I literally don't remember stuff.
Guest:Somebody emailed me this interview I did with George Girvin, the Iceman, who's like the 32nd best player ever.
Guest:And I talked to him for 40 minutes.
Guest:I have no recollection of it.
Guest:I don't even remember what year.
Guest:I was like, how am I in this?
Guest:It was like seeing, it was like I had a drug problem and it was all.
Marc:Yeah, if you don't have, if you don't make any space for it to relax, you can't.
Guest:I was running Grandland.
Guest:We were doing second volume of 30 for 30.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was doing my column, which obviously I have to research and figure out.
Guest:And you wanted Peabody, right?
Guest:Yeah, we wanted Peabody for 30 for 30.
Guest:That's a big deal.
Guest:I'm doing my podcast.
Guest:I never got a Peabody.
Guest:Yeah, go ahead.
Guest:I'm doing my podcast and then I was on this NBA show like 50 times a year.
Guest:And it was just too much.
Marc:So you're about to pop.
Marc:Wasn't great.
Guest:Wasn't great.
Guest:And then how did it all end?
Guest:I spent a lot of time thinking about it and I realized after the fact I was really traumatized by the whole thing because...
Guest:Like, they reached a point where I really loved working for that place and I really wanted it to be better.
Guest:And I put, I guarantee I worked harder than anybody who was there at trying to do stuff.
Guest:And it was just so weird to be resented by that in some circles.
Guest:The strangest thing that happened was,
Guest:Magic left the, right before I started doing the second season, Magic left the show.
Guest:He left Countdown.
Guest:He owned the Dodgers.
Guest:He didn't have time to do it.
Guest:Wilbon had left the show, which was its own messy thing.
Guest:And Magic left.
Guest:And I was heartbroken because he was one of the reasons I came back.
Guest:Spending a year with Magic Johnson was amazing.
Guest:He was an amazing guy.
Guest:And I was just trying to wrap my head around it.
Guest:And then the next day, somebody from ESPN leaked a story to a sports blog that Magic left because it had been becoming my show.
Guest:And there was a power struggle between me and him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like, I love magic.
Guest:I was like, when that happened, when people are leaking stuff that you work with to try to damage you, that's when it goes to a whole other level.
Guest:And I just couldn't wrap my head around it, because I was thinking, all I'm doing is killing myself for this company.
Guest:Like, when I finally left, I had so much vacation time accrued from the last few years that I got this giant check
Guest:In like December 2015.
Guest:I was like, what the fuck is this?
Guest:And it was like 20 vacation weeks or something for the last few years.
Guest:It was crazy.
Guest:Nice.
Guest:But when I got suspended, it definitely turned, which was its own issue.
Guest:When was that?
Guest:That was September 2014.
Guest:I went after Roger Goodell on a podcast.
Guest:It's funny because this is another example.
Guest:I was doing so many different things.
Marc:Did you know it was going to happen?
Guest:Did you know you were going to cause shit?
Guest:No, I knew it was going to put them in a pissy situation.
Guest:I didn't think it was going to blow up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was one of those things where I did a podcast and then Jalen and I immediately spent six hours in the electrical closet filming all these basketball videos.
Guest:And we were just, phones turned off, the whole thing.
Guest:And the pod went up and it started to become a thing.
Guest:And by the time I got out, it was like all hella broken loose.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it was one of those things where when you're working too many hours and doing too many things, you get sloppy.
Guest:And I should have listened to that podcast.
Guest:I never listened to it.
Guest:Two of the people that worked for me were like, should you listen to this?
Guest:Hey, are you sure you want to listen to this?
Guest:I'm like, no, it's fine.
Guest:I trust you guys.
Guest:And I never listened to it.
Guest:And if I had heard it, there's like two things I would have taken out that might have made it a little more.
Guest:I wanted to keep everything I said, but I think I could have.
Guest:Finessed it better?
Guest:I could have finessed it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I didn't.
Guest:And that night, the guys were in his pants screaming at me.
Guest:yeah um he was in a lathered up state yeah i hope because of what i said on the podcast um but um but yeah it was it was uh it was really strange and then everything turned and and then like so like you leave espn and then hbo was just there right there ready to go
Guest:Yeah, well, so what happened was after I got suspended, people kind of were reading the tea leaves and I knew I wanted to go and I was trying to figure out what to do and I wasn't sure what I wanted to do and I was also really burned out and I was really mad about how things...
Guest:I just didn't understand why things had to go from doing so much good stuff from 2009 to 2013 to all of a sudden it had become adversarial.
Guest:I just couldn't believe things had flipped like that.
Marc:But did you know fundamentally that what you had created with Grantland was a successful model and that the only thing that was really stopping you was the infrastructure of ESPN?
Guest:Yeah, and it wasn't even a stopping thing.
Guest:We were fine.
Guest:But I think if you want to grow and if you're ambitious, one of the issues with ESPN is it's really hard to think on your feet with jobs and how to fill stuff.
Guest:Everything is a process.
Guest:And if you need a designer, it's like three months.
Guest:If I need a designer, I just hire a designer.
Guest:I have a designer next week.
Marc:Well, yeah, but that's sort of like the difference between the internet and newspapers.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Guest:I felt like the four people that I took from Grantland to try to figure out what the ringer was were people that I just worked really well with and I thought had a good sense of kind of the same sense of talent, but I knew that I was gonna be much busier this time around.
Guest:I needed to have an inner circle that I just didn't have to worry about.
Guest:That was the biggest thing I learned at Grantland.
Guest:It's like your inner circle has to be there.
Guest:So with the HBO thing, it was like,
Guest:I knew I wanted to do a podcast type interview show, and I knew I wanted to do sports documentaries and stuff, because I love doing that stuff.
Guest:And then we had to rush the show, and the spirit behind what I wanted to do with the show
Guest:I actually, it's funny, it was a little similar to the Kimmel thing 15 years ago.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Where I felt like the opportunity was like, all this stuff's working on podcasts.
Guest:Why can't this work on a TV show?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which was what?
Guest:And the reality, just interviews.
Guest:I felt like I had had, at that point, nine years of interviewing people and I felt like I was getting pretty good at it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I felt like,
Guest:this is an inefficiency on television, these awesome interviews.
Guest:Why does everybody just point to Charlie Rose?
Guest:There should be all types of interviews.
Guest:And the reality is now I look back, I'm like, I was already in the good spot.
Guest:You and I, we have podcasts where we can interview people.
Guest:The interviews that you and I can do in this format are just going to be better than any TV interview.
Guest:I mean, I had my own issues with the TV stuff.
Guest:What do you mean?
Guest:Well, it's just like, I knew this going in.
Guest:I'm like, I'm not Jon Stewart.
Guest:I'm not a performer.
Guest:I'm not a stand-up.
Guest:The interviews have to carry this.
Guest:This has to be a really smart show.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And it drifted toward a show that I'm still not sure what happened.
Yeah.
Guest:The show I wanted to do is... What happened to the inner circle?
Guest:In that case, maybe not a good one.
Guest:But the show I wanted to do, and it's 100% my fault.
Guest:Because if you don't have the right vision for something, or if you think you know what your vision is and then it drifts into another place, you can either stop it or... How did it drift, though?
Marc:Unfortunately, fundamentally, with the...
Marc:a visual medium that requires people to engage their eyes and their ears i know uh you know the continuity like you know because like with what we do here you can almost do this passively yeah i know in terms of take it in so like you know when you got to do a song and dance you know with in a medium that requires song and dance uh and you're not a song and dance man i found this out the hard way
Guest:I think there was ways to do it.
Guest:I think it could have been once a month.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think it could have been loaded with interviews.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And maybe it moves, pivots three times and has stuff.
Guest:But I wasn't thinking that way and neither were they.
Guest:I really felt at the time that interviews, the way we were doing them on a podcast could work on TV and you quickly find out, nope.
Marc:Well, now there's like, you know, Netflix is as a platform is doing long form interviews with God, you know, with the legends with, you know, with Letterman.
Guest:You know, it's interesting though that I, I, so they ran that first one.
Guest:I love Letterman and Obama.
Guest:I didn't watch it.
Guest:I think I would have listened to it if it was a podcast though, which goes back to my point of like, I just fucked up.
Guest:I haven't watched it.
Guest:what's fun about watching two people talk but when you're in the car when you're working out or like I'm sure a million whoever's listening to this right now I'm sure they're in their car I'm sure they're at their desk or at the gym or walking their dog they're walking all this stuff painting something and when you're actually in front of a television you know it's got you especially now in the second screen era
Marc:Right.
Marc:And with someone like Letterman, you just want to see him be quick.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I'm not looking to him for in-depth interviews.
Guest:Really, though, I don't have any regrets.
Guest:And my whole thing is you just got to trash it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It can't work every time.
Marc:But that show went away, but you're still in business with them in a big way.
Marc:I am.
Marc:We have a couple cool things coming that we haven't announced yet that I'm excited about.
Marc:So The Ringer, that became the focus.
Marc:You still are partners with HBO, and you've created a podcast network.
Marc:You're putting up three new podcasts a day.
Guest:We're putting up like six.
Guest:We have like 24 shows now.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The Ringer's...
Guest:Once the show got canceled, threw myself more in the ringer and kind of waited to see what was going to happen with HBO.
Guest:Because I think they were also getting the AT&T merger, all that stuff.
Guest:And I think from a production standpoint, there was a wait and see thing there for a little while.
Guest:But now it seems like I think they're going to...
Marc:be a little more active.
Marc:So as you've evolved with the internet, starting with AOL and then moving into ESPN, then finding your way to Grantland and actually creating a platform, basically.
Marc:So now you're at the ringer.
Marc:Now, whereas Grantland wasn't making money, this is some sort of partnership where you have a lot of stake in it and you're making money.
Marc:You're not just getting seed money from a big company.
Guest:No, we didn't do investors like that.
Guest:We...
Guest:It was really important to me, especially after my last experience, to spend the first couple years making decisions based on what was good.
Guest:And...
Guest:just betting on talent that we liked again and taking chances and trying to figure out what a website is in 2016 17 and 18 when things are so fast when when we were innovating the site in 2015 and the start of 2016 facebook was like the big traffic driver right we didn't trust it we just felt like
Guest:what happens if they change the algorithm?
Guest:Everyone's screwed.
Guest:We have to have a site that has people come to the main page.
Guest:We have to have a podcast network.
Guest:We have the ability to promote everything.
Guest:And over the last nine months, it really fell into place.
Guest:And it was much harder than Grantland.
Guest:Because Grantland, we still had the checkbook.
Guest:Especially for the first year where I could be like, I like that writer.
Guest:Let's get them.
Guest:And they had people doing stuff for us.
Guest:Yeah, we're talking...
Guest:First four months I had my podcast, we're doing it in my guest house.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Andy and Chris, Andy Greenwald and Chris Ryan, they do this podcast called The Watch, pop culture podcast.
Guest:They're coming over to my guest house and doing it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And people are just walking through my house and it's like my kids, like a burglar could have walked in and taken one of my kids.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:People, they wouldn't even flinch.
Guest:They'd be like, oh, you must be with the podcast.
Guest:Like, yeah, that's where I am.
Guest:They'd throw them in a van.
Guest:And it was just grassroots trying to figure out everything on the fly.
Guest:How do we have healthcare?
Guest:How do we do benefits?
Guest:Where's our office going to be?
Guest:Really building a business with a big business.
Guest:The hardest thing, I can't even tell you how hard it is.
Guest:And how scary it is when you don't really know how to do a lot of it.
Guest:But don't you hire people that know how to do it?
Guest:Well, that's the thing.
Guest:We had a good inner circle.
Guest:And I had the Grantland people that were running the site that are just great.
Guest:And you got them now back.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I knew I trusted them.
Guest:I knew at least we're going to find writers and we're going to build a culture.
Guest:The biggest thing we wanted this time was...
Guest:the culture has to be like lights out.
Guest:You just have to have great people.
Guest:Like we have great people, like really good character people that look out for each other and you can kind of feel it.
Guest:That stuff, once people, the relationships build, that stuff spills in the site.
Guest:And now like digital video and stuff like that, all this goofy stuff we're trying.
Guest:And, you know, 2018 is like the best time ever to be a content producer.
Guest:It's not just all the TV streaming and all that stuff, but it's,
Guest:all these different digital platforms and all these different ways you can reach people right away.
Guest:And it's whoever has the best idea, I think has a, has a much better chance than maybe they did 10 years ago.
Marc:The Andre doc is very good too.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:How much of a part of the process in terms of editing and stuff, were you there for all of that?
Marc:Were you giving creative input?
Guest:I mean, yeah, I think if you're doing it correctly, the director is all in as we discussed.
Guest:But they also need a friend and a sounding board and somebody who can gently talk them out of stuff.
Marc:Was he a wrestling fan?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:yeah he was but they get lost in it and they hit a really dangerous point and they need at least one person who they trust completely pull them out well who says to them like i know you love that france footage but if we just take that one part out like just try it it might not work and they need a friend they hit a point where they just need a friend
Guest:comics i feel like they've been out on the water too long they really do they don't see it clearly anymore and it becomes and i identify with it because when i did my basketball book it was so big and it hit a point where i was the only person who could see how it all fit together and i really needed somebody else and it just was too hard and it was just me and i ended up with a 700 page book and it should have been 500 do people love the book though
Guest:It seems like they do.
Marc:It actually does seem like... I mean, there's a million things I changed already, but... I know, but it's one of those things where if you put that much of your heart into it, it's got to have a pretty hardcore following.
Guest:My thought was the normal move would be to do two books for 350 pages each and get paid twice.
Guest:I'm like...
Guest:Fuck that.
Guest:I'm doing one awesome book.
Guest:And now I'm like, I should have done two books.
Marc:Could have spread it out.
Marc:It would have been nice.
Marc:And how much do you feel in your heart and soul that is there any... Now that you're doing these documentaries, or this is your first documentary for HBO Sports, is there a good healthy amount of fuck you to ESPN in this?
Marc:No.
Guest:What's weird about ESPN is everybody...
Guest:I think pretty much, I don't want to say everybody because there's a couple of people left, but most of the people that I had issues with or I feel like just ran my course with, shall we say, are gone.
Guest:And the people that are running the company now, I really like.
Guest:And some of them are my good friends.
Guest:The guy I created 30 for 30 with runs content.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:That's how it works.
Marc:People move up.
Guest:Yeah, people move up.
Guest:Old guys go out.
Guest:I actually am buying ESPN stock these days because I think it's the most rational,
Guest:higher level group they've had in a while it's a really complicated time but they're a little more equipped too i think the leadership they had before they just were people that just didn't get where shit was going like they didn't see like something like grant land we were a digital studio for them inside their company that was trying all this shit yeah and they looked at us like like it was ah this fucking thing and it's like this thing is like the future of where the internet's going yeah
Marc:You should be like, hey, what else could you guys come up with?
Marc:And they just didn't see it.
Marc:Well, that's funny because it's not unlike that thing that run in you had with the main guy who's insulated is that a lot of people at those at those sized companies, if they're working, they just want to keep shit the same.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, and a lot of times it has to crumble in a very dramatic way for shit to change.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I think.
Guest:The ESPN thing's complicated, what's happened to it.
Guest:And that's why I think it's actually in really good shape now.
Guest:They miss some stuff, but the biggest thing was they really underestimated the cord cutting thing.
Guest:And they planned out their business for this decade, at the beginning of this decade, thinking that they had this amount of money coming in from cable and from satellite.
Guest:And when it started going backwards, I was there, and I know this for a fact,
Guest:They didn't know what was happening.
Guest:And I have this great email that somebody sent, like the research thing, and they were trying to figure out, I think it was 2013 or 14, why the subs had dropped.
Guest:The subs are what they call like the cable and the whatever.
Guest:And it was all these different reasons.
Guest:And one of the reasons was World Cup fatigue.
Yeah.
Guest:It was after the World Cup.
Guest:It was like, we think that maybe people are... It was because it was why ratings had dropped.
Guest:It was like, we think one of the reasons is World Cup fatigue.
Marc:Tired.
Guest:And then much later in the email, it's like, another possibility is something called cord cutting.
Guest:It was like watching those commercials on YouTube from the 1970s about watch out for child molestation.
Guest:This is like this thing called cord cutting might end up being a problem.
Guest:And I was like, yeah, I think so.
Guest:It's going to be a major problem.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But they're rallying.
Guest:In five years, they'll be in OTT.
Guest:Disney will have a whole OTT service that every family is going to buy because every Disney movie is going to be on there and every comic book movie.
Guest:What, it's going to have its own platform, you mean?
Guest:Yeah, they're forming this whole, and ESPN will be under that.
Guest:What people don't understand until you have kids is...
Guest:the ipad and streaming services become like your virtual babysitter yeah you gotta have like as soon as your kid's old enough to be able to maneuver an ipad it's like you're out of jail it's like i'm gonna go in the other room i'm gonna go in that room yeah and they don't care no they're like they're just like pressing buttons but as soon as that happens yeah you know we well we hope that it all ends up okay for those kids
Guest:We'll see.
Guest:I'll tell you though, going back to those Parkland kids, it was the first time I was like, this generation, this might be a generation that really makes a difference and is just thoughtful about stuff and mature enough in a different way.
Guest:This is what Chuck and I talked about when we did a pod two weeks ago.
Guest:The guys coming into the NBA now
Guest:are these like polished guys and they're good interviews and they handle their business well.
Guest:And you're like, how the fuck you're 19.
Guest:How are you like an adult?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it just seems like that's starting to be what happens with this specific generation.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:They're maturing fast.
Guest:I think maybe because of the internet.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because they're adapting to the pace of things into the tech, you know, not just the tech, but to, you know, how to behave like a machine.
Marc:It's good.
Yeah.
Guest:i do go out there and act like an ambitious machine be polite see you're like me i do worry and i really i'm fanatical about my kids i'm so worried that they're not gonna have social skills my kids have really good social skills right now but i always like trying to get them with people and interact with people and when you meet somebody shake their hand and it's stuff that you're starting not to see anymore
Marc:Well, I think that's probably, that would be the liability.
Marc:I wonder how that really pans out.
Marc:Where they're perfectly polite and they know how to behave, but how much experience do they really have with engaging with people?
Guest:Do they have a sense of humor?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:you can have a sense of humor digitally but be the worst hang in person yeah person and like with my son like i i was letting him watch south park when he was like eight yeah all those shows like he watched atlanta with me last night like i want him to have sense of humor i don't care if he's 10 like i want him to know what's funny and not funny now how's he getting how's he going he's fucking hilarious oh good he's so good atlanta's good show atlanta's a really good show really good show there's beyond comedy that thing
Marc:It's the show that I look forward to the most.
Marc:Yeah, it turned out me too.
Marc:My girlfriend turned me on to it and I was sort of like late coming to it, but I liked Donald a lot, but I just didn't watch it.
Marc:And then I watched the first 10 like in a day and now I'm like on it.
Guest:It's funny watching with my son, because I'm really hoping he's going to laugh at a couple of the subtle parts that I would hope he laughed at, and he did.
Guest:I'm like, oh, man, I'm doing a good job.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:Doing a good job with this kid.
Marc:You're doing a good job with everything, man.
Marc:Oh, thank you.
Marc:And thanks for coming over.
Guest:By the way, this was... I never do podcasts.
Guest:I'll probably never do another one.
Marc:How was it?
Guest:You were going to tell me why.
Guest:Weren't you going to tell me why?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I always felt like I had my own podcast, and it was like, if I do one, then 20 people are going to want it, and then I'm just doing the same podcast over and over again.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I just always felt like I have a podcast.
Marc:Why would somebody want to hear me on another podcast?
Marc:Well, it was funny because when I started at the beginning, especially I think it was more of the comic-driven podcast.
Guest:Right, you had to do quid pro quo.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And it actually helped, I think.
Marc:I think it helped everybody.
Guest:I think what podcasts... I mean, podcasts have been amazing in so many different ways, but...
Guest:how they've brought life and humanity to the comic, to the comic industry.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Not just a bunch of weird nighttime monsters.
Guest:Well, it's turned, it's turned into this like 10 years of therapy sessions with comics on each other's things crossed with some really funny stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's such a great medium.
Guest:And, and it was always the case.
Guest:Like, I don't know when you've grasped it, but the first time I did one, I was like, this makes sense.
Marc:this is cool so we do this interview and then people get to it yeah this is so logical yeah and it was great i like i like the idea that you could stretch out by yourself and with people that i didn't have to be funny that i didn't have to uh to you know and that i could talk to people about me yeah yeah it's how it started we didn't talk about you that much in this one i'm over that that was the first hundred thanks for coming thank you
Marc:That's it.
Marc:That's the show.
Marc:I want to thank Bill for coming.
Marc:I thought that was a great conversation, engaged and nice.
Marc:And I also, I think I'll be doing one more intro in here before the end of the month, and I'm going to be on the road in Europe doing my A Few Parts of the World Tour.
Marc:You can get tickets and venue information at wtfpod.com slash tour.
Marc:Get tickets for London, Stockholm, Oslo, Amsterdam, and Dublin.
Marc:Also, the guitar thing.
Marc:I'll get it going.
Marc:I'll get it going.
Marc:Give me till the beginning of May to get the amps up and going and get the guitars out here.
Marc:These things take time, but give me a month.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Boomer lives!
you