Transcript of A Cooper Flaggasm, NBA Trends, Lorne Michaels Stories, and a Celtics Pyramid With J. Kyle Mann and Susan Morrison

It's the Bill Simmons podcast presented by FanDuel. The NBA season hitting full stride. Don't foul out on your chance to win with America's number one sportsbook. Bet on fun markets like live quarter player props and partless. Plus, enjoy our new NBA player prop pages, your one-stop shop for player props that include FanDuel's exclusive performance trends. Tracking the last five games for top markets. They even do that. The app is safe, secure, and easy to use. When you win, you'll get paid instantly. So download the app today. Bet with FanDuel, official partner of the NBA, The Ringer, is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit rg-help. Com to learn more about the resources and help lines available. Listen to the end of this episode for additional details. Must be 21 plus in President's select states. Game Problem, call 1-800-Gambler or visit rg-help. Com. The Bill Simmons podcast is presented by FanDuel Sportsbook. We did this big docuseries for Max and HBO that premieres on March third, Monday. It is about the Boston Celtics. It is about eight decades, how they intersect with the NBA and the city of Boston and America and all the great players and robberies and feuds, and we're all really proud of it.

So Monday, March third, it's coming. In the meantime, I have a little pyramid for you. Celtics Pyramid. I narrowed it to 15 players, and we're going to do it right now. Here it is. 15 players. The catch is, it has It has to be the Celtics version of them. This isn't like Kevin Garnett. I'm not taking Kevin Garnett's whole career. It's just Kevin Garnett on the Celtics. Anyway, pyramid. Top level, one guy, Bill Russell. I have him as number three all-time guy, 11 to 13 titles, the most important on-and-off-court NBA Star ever. Relevant. Greatest winner in the history of sports, also relevant. He's at the top. Next two, Larry Bird, John Havlecheck. I don't need to make the case for Larry Bird. I have him as the sixth best guy ever. He started MVP's three titles. But here's a fun Larry Bird fact. Mvp from 1980 to 1988. Fourth, second, second, second, first, first, first, third, second. That's over nine years. Larry Bird was amazing. I think he even would have been better now. John Havacek in the running for most underrated NBA superstar of all time. Eight titles, 25,000 points, played 16 years, which is like playing 25 years now.

I don't know how he did it. His three-year peak peak, 27, 9, 8. His four-year playoff peak, 27, 9, 6, was one of the most clutch players of his era, if not the number two clutch guy behind Jerry West. The greatest thing about him, all-time Swiss Armyknife guy, had this whole career as a six man. He could play guard, he could play forward. Whatever your team needed, he could do it. Then eventually, he ended up as a forward during the last couple of titles. But there's never been a career quite like that where you're just winning when you come in, you're winning when you leave. Then the next level, so Bob Coosy, if I had to do him Mount Rushmore, he would be the fourth guy for that. Six rings, one an MVP, best non-center of the first 15 years of the league, the first fun, entertaining player in the history of the league. That's relevant. First great point guard ever. Relevant. Ten first all-MBAs, two second all-MBAs. He was just a dominant player. By the time he retired, he was basically the babe Ruth of the league when he retired. Then he passed the torch to his teammate Russell and Elgin, Wilt, and everybody else.

But that's the top four. The other two on that level that I would put Dave Kalentz, who was one of the most important players of the '70s, won an MVP, won a couple of titles. The '70s Celtics or the '70s Knicks, those were the best two teams of that decade. He was the most important player, him or Havlechek, at least, for this entire Celtics run. So he's on there. Then Sam Jones, who's another underrated all-time guy who didn't even really get to start because the league was so stacked. They had eight teams, nine teams. He was coming off the bench behind Bill Sherman, who was also awesome, didn't get to start till the last two-thirds of his career, but is one of the great clutch players in the history of the league, even now, and made all kinds of crazy shots. We covered some of them in the documentary. So Russell, then Bird and Havichek, then Coosy Collins and Sam Jones. Then these next four, pretty easy. Kevin McHale, who is one of the 40 best players of all time. I think if he doesn't hurt his foot, maybe even can climb up into a potential, I don't know, in the '20s.

I don't think it's out of the realm that he could have been in a KGB Barkley area, but was never able to recover from all the playoff games they played. But best low post player I've ever seen, him and Hakeim. Paul pierce. The title changes everything for him. If they If the KG trade doesn't happen, who knows what happens with the second part of Paul Pierce's career. Instead, he belatedly develops into this awesome playoff guy, crunch time guy down the stretch. He just has this whole second career. Also really durable and an excellent score and went head to head against LeBron a lot. His team's won against LeBron at not a super young point in LeBron's career either. So he's in there. Jason Tateam, who I think right now I have him fourth level and I have him ninth overall, definitely has a chance to leapfrog a couple of these guys pretty soon. I think, especially if they won back-to-back titles this year, I think he has to go into the top six at that point Bill Sherman, who was the best two guard in the league for the first 15 years of the league, warrants mentioning just first-team All-MBA year after year.

Good score. Also, weirdly, I think people seem to think he was the toughest guy from that He just cold cock people. I didn't like the way you set that pick of me. I'm just punching you. So I'm putting him in there. Then the final level, the last five, Kevin Garnett, who was only with the Celtics for six years, but that '08 team. And then the first half of 2009, they make the 2010 finals. They almost make it again in '12. And a beloved Celtic, too. I think the most popular Celtics since my dad has had season tickets now since the '73, '74 season. Bird was the most popular. I really think the next two were probably Callens and Garnett in some order. I don't know who was ahead of who, but in terms of just beloved by the crowd and the fans, Garnett has to be up there. Tommy Heinzen only played for eight or nine years because this was the smoking-drinking era. I think they were just having cigarettes at their timeouts, but was an awesome, awesome forward. Big score, rebounder, came through a couple of times in the playoffs, outplayed some forwards out really good, like Bob Pettit.

So he's in there. Robert Parrish, 13 years, I think, with the Celtics, maybe 14, three titles. Wasn't on that Kareem level as a center, but was on that second level. I think he even had a second team on the VA, so he's on there. Jojo White, another guy, really underrated from the '70s. I had him in the pyramid when I did my book in 2009 and had his most famous moment, other than winning two titles, was the triple overtime game, which is one of the great performances by a non-superstar that we've ever had in the finals. I think he played 60 of the 63 minutes I went to that game. I barely remember it, but there was the famous image of him just sitting on the court at the end because he was so wiped out. But he was just a top 10 NBA player for six, seven years. Then Jalen Brown is my last guy. I think he belongs. You win a title, he wins finals MVP. The durability with him, the fact that in the 2020s, this team is just relevant year after year because of the Tate and Brown connection. I think he has to be in there.

So toughest cuts for me, Paul Silas, Dennis Johnson, Cedric Maxwell, Ray Allen, Don Nelson, Casey Jones. Red Ryeback as the coach. That's all I got for you. That's my self experiment. Coming up, going to talk basketball with Kyle Mann, and we are going to talk Lorne Michiels with his biographer. It's all next. We're also brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network. I put up a new rewatchable on Monday night. We did Crash. We are going to do another Oscar winner this coming Monday night. You can watch that as a video podcast on Spotify. Check out our Ringer Movies YouTube channel as well. That's also where Sean Fentacy will be going live with his Big Picture crew right after the Oscars on Sunday night on his Big Picture podcast, which is also available as a video on Spotify, by the way. We're also brought to you by FanDuel Sportsbook. 30 on 30 lives on our profit boost token, which we're doing every Friday the rest of the way, I except for March Madness. You can bet on any 30 plus point score you want on Fridays. I tweet out my pics. I love this because I love just looking at the matchups, how many teams, if you played four games in five nights, any of that stuff, and just try to guess who's going to go off.

Be sure to claim the PBT, place your 30 on 30 bet for Friday. Just look for 30 on 30 in the FanDuel Sportsbook app. Don't forget about theringer. Com. Don't forget about Celtic City premiering Monday night, March third on HBO and Max, and we're going to have it every week for the next nine. Buckle up because it's a really good one. Coming up on this podcast, I'm going to talk to Kyle Mann, our old friend from The Ringer, about Cooper Flag. It's time. It's late February. We got to do it. We're going to talk about a bunch of NBA trends and some other stuff as well. Then Susan Morison, who wrote the definitive Lorne Michael's biography that came out last week. I loved it. I just made her come on. We spent an hour and just talked about Lauren. I had a great time. That's the podcast. First, our friends from ProJab. J. K. O. Mann is here from The Ringer. How's I've been on in a while. Missed talking hoops of them. I was waiting to pull the Cooper flag ripcord with him. I was waiting to pull the Cooper flag rip cord with him.

Then this week, Jim Bayhime compared him to Larry Bird. I was like, All right, let's officially have the combo. I've been watching.

That was what tipped the scales. You couldn't do it anymore.

I was going to wait till we got to March Madness, but now it couldn't even make it out of February. He's gotten better every week. The highlights have been fun. The game situations have been fun. It's crazy that he's only 18 years old and is the all-around guy that already seems like he's becoming a Duke. I think people are raising their ceilings of him. I hate the word generational. It feels like it's getting thrown around too much. I think a better word is just unique. There's just not prospects like this anymore who are as good on both ends and as additive all over the place. I'm trying to debate how excited to get about this because, as you know, these are my type of players. I'm just trying to make everyone better. I'm just super competitive. How How can I fit in? These are my favorite guys. So how excited do I get, Kyle, man?

Well, first I was going to add, you're talking about Jim Bayheim. Whenever I watch broadcast that he's on, he always sounds to me like an uncle who just ate Thanksgiving dinner, and he's just leaned back. He's groggy? Making groggy comments about the game. He just makes me laugh throughout the games. I'm glad he's on there, though. He's good. Well, you're talking about your preferences and players and things. What you're describing is winning. I mean, who doesn't like to win? I know you like to win, Bill. I do. I do, too. You're talking about the difference between generational and unique. I think what sets Cooper apart is we have seen, I'll say the buzzword toolsy guys. We've seen guys who check a lot of boxes in our two-way players, but I think Cooper, who does check those boxes, and we can talk about him more in detail, something that is unique about him is that I think that he has those things that you don't normally see as an an 18-year-old. He's carrying one of the heaviest loads in college basketball. I had it pulled up here. His usage this year is 30. 5 %. Whoa.

Yeah, and his assist usage is 0. 83, but he's also averaging almost 20 points per game. So you're just like, how is that? So that just tells you that he's watering a lot of plants, and he's watering his own plants. He's doing everything for them and still being really efficient at it. But the thing that sets him apart, I think, with that wide foundation is that And I wrote about this on the Ringer not long ago in a profile I did on him. I'm getting Coopered out because I've talked about him so much in mid-college, but he has the potential to evolve, I think, into a heavy load carrying superstar at the next level. I think some things need to happen for that to pan out for him. But I think that's what makes him unique. And you're right, I think he could go on to any team and he could be like a Scottie Pippen type to a superstar, which I think is the most likely scenario for him, but I totally wouldn't rule out him becoming somebody that does who you just depend on as your hub for everything because he could evolve in so many different ways.

Yeah. If you're creating a stretch forward/forward guy for the whatever, however we play basketball now, it would probably look something like this. Maybe you'd make him an inch taller. What is he? 6, 7, and a half without sneakers?

I think he's 6, 8. Yeah, from what I understand. Okay, maybe he grew.

Yeah. Maybe you'd add an inch there, but he's got the long arms. But this is everything you want for somebody somebody next to some big man who could have his hands around the rim and do all that stuff. When you try to compare them to people, Bird is the obvious one that everyone keeps Bayheim Day just because it's a white guy who does a lot of stuff. There's more Tatum with me than I think maybe, and maybe there's a Duke parallel with them, too. But the way the Celtics use Tatum now as a point forward who can defend all these different positions on defense, I feel like that's going to be flags Destiny, the difference is when Tatum came into the league, we knew he had a chance to be a special player, but there were so many things that still needed to happen with him. He was a scorer. He felt a little Durantis, but there wasn't any semblance of the passing game that he has now or the defensive level that he's gone up to or even how much better of a rebounder he is. Flag's already doing all those things, and I just don't know what he looks like when he's 25, because I assume he's just going to keep working on his three-point shot, and eventually, he'll just be like a 40 to 45 % three-point shooter.

I assume he'll add a couple of low post things. I assume he'll get really good at passing out of double teams. But for the most part, to be this close to a finished product at age 18 from a skill standpoint, that's what's so unusual, I think.

Yeah, it's really, really well-rounded. You mentioned, the bird thing is funny just because Cooper, I think, as you know, grew up with a heavy Boston connection.

Well, that's the thing. Yeah, he got indoctrinated in the '80s Selt's highlights from his great mom. One of the great moms of the last 40 years is showing him highlights.

Have you ever heard clips of his mom talk?

Yeah, they would be like driving in the car, watching a DVD player, and she had Old Celtic games because she wanted them to play like that.

Yeah, those old portable DVD players. It's funny because he has this heavy boss and connection, and I'm sure you would rather be good now than be bad and try to get flag. It's a worthy trade. But I mean, if you want to compare him to Tatum, I think they have body differences that are really affecting the way that they play. Tatum came into the league, I think, as more I know a guy who leaned towards being a shot creator. I think he has a lower center of gravity, and he's a little bit more of a wiggly athlete. He has really big, broad shoulders and got downhill a lot and things like that. Cooper, I think, is not quite the wiggly ball handler that Tatum was at the same age. But I think the thing that is so promising is when you watch him and you watched him at like Mount Bird and you watched him when he was growing up, A, he played as a big guy who would be in the middle of the floor and would make those decisions that you and I have talked about on this show a myriad times, where he will get in the middle of the floor, he'll take a quick snapshot of where the spacing is on the floor.

And he was really, really good at making those short roll, like collective passes or come off a pin down. What was really funny is that like, Montbird used to run this very bird-esque pin down on the block for him, and they still are doing it at Duke a little bit because he's lethal in the middle of the floor right now. So I think if you look at the way that he's able to read the floor in that sense, and then you see him fledgling and blossoming as a ball handler. Like I said, Tatum is ahead of him, but I think Cooper is way ahead of Tatum as a processor of the floor at the same age.

Couldn't agree with that.

And if you look the gap between those two things and you see where Tatum is and you see Cooper's brain, his skillset, and you say, Okay, well, what's the difference there? And this is the argument I made in the piece. The distance there is just his handle. I really do believe that's all it is. And if you look at the way... You're talking about his mom, you're talking about his basketball family. If you look at the way he has corded challenges in his career since the time we followed him, every indication is that this guy is a maniac worker. He went to Duke a year early. He left Maine a a year early after two years there where he was just dominating. Actually, it might have just been a year. He's just way ahead of schedule by design, and he's just an insane worker. So I expect him to bridge that gap and improve his handle.

That's the number one thing with him. That's the thing you read from literally everybody who passes through his life in some capacity is maniac competitor. They say that over and over again. The older I get, the more I feel like, whether it's football, basketball, name of sport, that's the number. If you really want to be truly great, that's the number one quality that everybody seems to have. Just maniac competitor, maniac competitor wants it so bad. Oh, he's not that great at this yet. He's just going to keep going and going until he can go up a level. I'm with you. If you were going to use him as a point forward. I don't think his ball handling is good enough to do that in the NBA right now, but he's 18. But it's one of those things that I could just see him. He's like, I got to work on this. I'm going to absolutely be a psycho and work on this constantly. All right, I got to work on catch and shoot threes. I'm going to just shoot 10,000 of these until I get it. I just think that's who he is. All the best guys ever, and not that he has a chance to be that good, but all the best guys ever had that.

If you're adding that, whoever gets them. I'm I'm already worried about the lottery because there's a couple of teams where I'm like, oh, man, I just don't want him to go there.

Which ones?

I don't want him to go to a bad team where we had this NBA infection that we've had for 50, 60 years where we take these great talented players and just stick them in bad situations. What happened with LeBron in Cleveland the first couple of years? Or he's on the worst possible team. It turned out great for him, but you just lose a couple of years. The best case scenario is what happened with Bird. There's no scenario like that this year in the NBA that could happen. But Bird goes to the '79, '80 Celtics, and they already have good players. They go from 29 wins to 60 plus, but they had really good players in that team, and he just elevated all of them. I don't think Portland could get in there, but I think Portland is a team that if he was on a team like that, that would be really interesting. Philly. If somehow Embiid came back, if they were able to stay in the top six. San Antonio would be the dream of all the teams, putting him next to Wemby. I can't think of a better sidekick for Wemby, assuming Wemby is going to be all right next year.

They have a couple of bites at the apple. But when you start talking about just throwing them on Washington Washington. I don't know how many of the guys in the Wizards are even going to be in that team in three years. You really want to build around him in the right way.

That'd be a crazy collection of athletes, I would say, over the short amount of time. If they picked up Kulabali and then picked up Saar and then picked up which is Jerry's on, sorry. But I think adding flag to that. The only thing I would say that I think is a little bit of a twist. You mentioned LeBron, and I think LeBron is in this category, is that some players, when they come into the league, I look at them and I think there's a lot there But the conditions and the context of where he goes is really, really going to affect how he develops. Cooper, I think, is a context. Some guys are. They're just culture-setters. You've got Duncan. This This is like, hallowed, get struck by lightning type thing I'm going to say here. But Steph, LeBron, those are the types of guys who just have winning habits they demand the most of everybody. I had a funny conversation with a friend of mine, and he'll know that I'm talking about him when I say this. But he's a physician, and he does surgery. And he was telling me whenever in his operating room, he said he sets the tone to the point, the level of excellence, to the point where the stupid people and the lazy people don't want to be in the room with him because they know they're going to be accountable.

And I just started laughing. And I was just like, that's what great people do. If you're going to be in the room with them, you know you have to elevate your game. And I think that Cooper is that type of guy, but I think you're right, man. I think he's willing to fit into any scenario wherever he goes, and the shooting is going to come along. That's the only other thing I would add, too, is if you go back, and people should go watch this, we've known Cooper for probably four years in the mainstream. You can go watch his games from when he was a freshman and a sophomore in high school. He was shooting like set shot in the driveway three-pointers. The distance that he has come in the three or four years since we've known him is remarkable. He was just a run-around deer block shots guy when he first came on the scene. And he's become a full-fledged handler in college in a tough conference. Well, the ACC sucks, but tough competition.

It's interesting because one of the guys that he reminds me of, he has nothing in common with physically, really, but it's KG. Because KG was seven foot one. Their bodies are completely different. I think KG was probably a better athlete. But the way as a help defender and a rim protector and just how he's moving a second before the play is moving, and he always seems to know where shit's going, that's the KG quality. That was one of the things that made him so special. He doesn't have the same size, he doesn't have the same arm length, and he's not as a scary competitor, but he's fierce like KG was. I think that's another guy who is a good comparison for him. We were doing the Celtic Stock, and we had so many stories from these people that played on those '08, '09 teams where they were just like, the guy was a lunatic. We have these random scrimmages. And beginning of October, four weeks before the season started, and he's caked in sweat and screaming at everybody. And there's just certain guys like that. That's why the fit is going to be so important.

I don't know. New Orleans, that one would worry me because they've been a tortured franchise for 50 years. It just seems like people go there and bad things happen. Utah is a weird fit just because of the players they already have. Toronto is with the the one I was looking at where they have some interesting offensive players and a couple of Barnes. I don't know what Barnes is still, but they have some talent. Could that be a place where he could go in and he just becomes this centriical force? How much is what happens over these next month here, the AC tournament and March Madness? Does it affect anything with him and how people are going to feel about him?

I don't think so. I really don't even know what would have to... He'd have to just totally crapped the bed or something. There are certain prospects that get to the point where you're not having positive generating, diminishing returns is the word I'm trying to think of. It's watching him at this point is just not... There's not a lot of point to it because I've seen enough.

Yeah, right. You've sent in your verdict already. Is he the most short thing guy you've studied since you started doing this with us?

I think that he is probably He's probably the most... You mentioned KG's active mind. I wasn't scouting back then. I was a kid. But he probably has the most driven personality other than I would say Wimby is the only other person that I can think of, that when I watch them, I'm just like, there is singular focus in this person, and you can tell that they're bright. I just think, and this can transition into some of the broader things about the league and the way it's going, I think, but he just has this curiosity about him that I would not not bet against. I don't want to overstate when we talk about his handle and things like that. It's not like he's a yackety-sack disaster. It's just he has a couple different areas where teams are trying to bait him into going, and he's getting smarter and smarter about not taking the 8. And there are some ways I pointed them out in the article that he can specifically, I think, set his man up to create driving lanes for himself and create more advantageous situations. But you mentioned which team he goes to. I just don't I wouldn't worry about that.

So you say it doesn't matter.

Because you can go so many different directions with him.

The team you have five years from now, maybe nobody's on that team from right now anyway. Yeah, because Wemby was a short thing except how tall he was and the history of guys over a certain height. Even though he was a short thing and he checked every box, he wasn't a short thing because it's just hard when you get that big. We have the history of it's too complicated. It's always in the back of it. Every time he would land on a foot, anything, you're always nervous. Luka, to me, at least for me, was the surest thing, just kept watching what he did that year overseas and how sophisticated his offensive game was. I thought Anthony Davis was a sure thing. I was incredibly excited for Zion. I thought, holy shit. But there was always that fear factor with Zion because he was so in the air all the time. Those guys always make you a little nervous. Anthony Davis was like, this guy's definitely going to be on a really good team at some point in his career. You see it at Kentucky. Now, it took longer than we thought, but those are the guys, at least recently, that I think jump out.

Am I missing anyone?

You're right about Luca. I'm trying to think of... I'm sure there are other ones. I mean, these are just the high points. Well, because you look at somebody like John Moran, you're like, all right, this guy who can't shoot from the outside.

He's an electric athlete, but he's in the air. He's banging bodies all the time. There's things that make you nervous. If I'm taking a guy like this, I want it to be I know I'm going to have this guy for 12 to 15 years at the highest possible level. For that not to happen would have to be a legitimate fluke. It's not a legitimate fluke if Wembenyama hurts his knee or his foot or anything, because we see that with centers. But Anthony Davis, to me, it seemed like, man, really hard to come up with a scenario where he's not awesome.

Yeah. The Luca one you pointed out is a good one, too. I think that one should be in the group, too. He has some similarities in terms of the way... I always try to watch guys who run away from stagnation in their development towards the NBA because Luca, every single time, and the people around him played it really smartly is that when he was at a certain age, the challenge... They were always ahead of the stagnation. They were like, All right, we see that he's going to stagnate here, and they just kept moving him up. I think what happens in that situation is you just develop... The later you delay problem solving in your development, I think the worse off you are because problem solving and decision making are the most important thing to help you adapt to the speed of the NBA. And I just think you see some guys... Chris Paul came in the league, and his size always was a stimulant, I think, for him as a problem solver. Whereas you look at somebody like these high school college guards who are big bullies on the playground who get to the NBA, and suddenly they can't bully anymore.

You just see them be for the first time in their career like, Oh, shit, I got to think about this in some way. And you see them get bowled back by it. I just think that Cooper is so ahead of it on that front.

Chris Paul was a short thing to me as a point guard. There was no way he wasn't going to be really good. And Durant was another one from that era that if you actually watched that whole season and watched just how easy it was to get whatever shot he wanted and how unusual the player was. It was like, there was no way this guy is going to be awesome. Where I usually get in trouble are the guys who have the athleticism, but it's hard to tell what the motor is or what the competitiveness is or situations like Dwight Howard. It's like, the guy's 18. He's got a Donna's body. I have no idea. Would you bet your life? Lebron was an easy one. In '03, all you had to do is watch him in high school twice. He's like, there's nothing like this right now. 6'8, eight and a half, athlete like this. This is going to be insane.

It's hard to not hold it against guys too, because you'll watch players who are 18 years old, like you said, and you're like, How competitive is he? I don't know. You start to feel a little wishy-washy about it. I think to myself, I'm just thinking, well, thank goodness no one was judging my career when I was 18 years old because I was just a total shithead and had no clue what I was doing.

You could grow out of it. But there are red flags, though. Like Ben Simmons, that LSU season, and then him just ditching the team with a few weeks left, and it was like, that didn't go great. Whereas if it was somebody like Cooper Flag or if KG had gone to college, there's just no way they're not finishing the season and being a complete psychopath the entire season. There's stuff you can learn. To me, Flag is as sure of a thing as I can remember. The best thing about him from an NBA standpoint, you can just see what he's going to be. There's such a clear position that now exists in the way the league is that I would just assume somebody's going to end up using him a lot like the Celtics used Tatum. He's going to have the a lot. He's going to bounce around depending on what the matchup is. He can be a little bit of a Swiss Army knife the same way Tatum is. Can he be a crunch time guy? Maybe. Is he going to be better off as a completely overqualified, number two? I think he's better than that.

But yeah, if that's your worst case scenario for him, it's going to be really great. All right, we're taking a break. We got to talk about a lot of NBA stuff here. This episode is brought to you by Audi, the all-new, fully electric Audi Q6 e-tron. A huge leap forward featuring effortless power, serious acceleration, and the most advanced tech of any Audi ever. Experience technology that puts you center stage, the panoramic digital stage, plus an optional screen for front seat passengers. That sounds fun. Perfect for watching the latest sports documentary. Maybe I made it. The Q6 e-tron is not just the new EV. It's a new way to experience driving. Learn more at Audi USA sht. Com. Always pay careful attention to the road. Do not drive while distracted. Sometimes in basketball, 30 points can be worth more than 30 points. You can get a 30% profit boost from The Ringer with FanDuel's 30 on 30 during Friday's NBA Slate. We are teaming up with America's number one sportsbook to give you a 30% profit boost. You can either pick a player to score more than 30 points or better in our new exclusive 30 on 30 special markets like any game.

Back yourself out. Go nuts. I tweet out my pics on Friday. I really like these. I like trying to guess. I do the matchups. I look at how many people played four games in five nights, all that stuff. Try to figure out who's just going to go off, and then you just get to root for it. Whether you want to ride with my pics or make your own, look for 30 on 30 in the FanDuel Sportsbook app or head to fanDuel. Com/bs for your chance to score a bigger payout this Friday. Remember, you can find out how much 30 can be worth. If a FanDuel is 30 on 30. You must be 21 plus in President Succe States or 18 plus in President DC. Opt In Required, bonus issued as non-retrable, profit boost tokens restrictions apply, including any token expiration and max wage or amount. See terms at sportsbook. Fanduel. Com. Game problem call, 1-800. Game, or visit rg-help. Com. So I asked you any NBA trend stuff that you've noticed this year? You're a big style of play, comparing stuff to history guy as am I. Anything you've noticed this year that jumped out?

You're like, Well, this is something.

Yeah, this all ties ties together to what we were talking about with Cooper, and I think it factors into player types and things like that. When you're looking at the way... The two teams that I think before the season, your pick for the finals was OKC Boston, right? Oh, yeah. I think if you look at the way, and I think this will tie to Jimmy's fit with Golden State, too, which I know you want to talk about, this spatial sense and flow. We know that in the past, really since video and analytics became really, really ubiquitous and easy to access. I think that the league made a leap forward. I don't even think that's speculation. I think the flow of information just iterated really, really fast. Things were more... The scouting reports got more and more complicated from game to game and more detailed and things like that. So you've just seen the flow of information take a leap up. And I think if you look at the way, I know you're keenly aware of this, but when you just... I noticed this in the finals, whenever the Celtics players, I remember I was watching.

There are a lot of people on Twitter who are... We have people who are the former NBA people, the people who I think are actually qualified to analyze mid-series adjustments in detail. There's not a ton of them, but we have some on Twitter. And you were watching the details and you would go down through there and they'd say, okay, there's this, this, this, this, and this rule for this, this, this defensive coverage. And I'm just looking at it and your head starts spinning and you just think, how in the world could someone on the court, keep all that information in their head to the point where it's reactionary. And I think that that is something that is setting OKC in Boston, aside from just being smart transactionally, something that is setting those two programs apart is I think that they are curating people just better than anybody else. I think you're getting good basketball players, but if you look at the types of guys and you're like, why is Payton Pritchard popping? Why is Sam Hauzer popping? Why are these guys working? What is it about Al Horford that's allowing him to... Why is it that Derek White has found a home there?

I just think that overall, if you look at organizations and how they are evaluating people, I think that that is a huge advantage in the NBA today, just because of what we were talking about in terms of the speed of the game.

Yeah, the discipline of we know what types of players we want to put together, and we're never deviating from this. The Celtics had this last year with like, Percet. They really like Braset. Incredibly popular teammate, good athlete, whether he's an NBA rotation guy or no. But they end of the year and they're like, We're not playing anybody who can't make a wide open three if the ball goes to them. So then they're testing out different guys this year. Jordan Walsh gets a cup of coffee. They started playing my guy Jaden Springer. They just came to the decision, Everybody in Florida needs to be able to shoot a three. That's what we're riding with. So then they end up with Tori Craig. And then smart guys who all of them can guard somebody or at least not get completely embarrassed in space. None of them need the ball, need to be like ball stoppers because they already have two semi-ball stoppers with Tatum and Brown.

You could sustain one or two of those guys, right?

Yeah, you can have one, two. And even those guys are trying to get better at it. That's it. Then OKC, it's pretty clear what they're trying to. They're just getting fantastic athletes. They the ability to go bigger or smaller depending on who they're playing. They want guys who can fit with Shay because as great as Shay is, he's another one who is... I don't think he's the easiest guy to play with sometimes. He's the ball a lot, especially when he's feeling it. You got to have guys who aren't going to be like, All right, now it's my turn to shoot. They don't have any... It's my turn now. They don't have any of those guys. It's Shay's team, they all know it. Chet, as such, he's another one who's just so additive. Going back to the Cooper discussion from before.

I think Chet Cooper have a lot in common, actually.

He's He's just there to help and chip in, and he takes nothing off the table. Then Jalen Williams is now their wild card, and that's the guy, I think, when they get to the playoffs, he's going to decide serious for them because you're not going to take out Shay. But you can limit him a little bit. You can make it hard for him. You can send doubles at him. You can do all the stuff that teams are trying to do at Tatum over the last couple of years. Eventually, you're going to need the Jalen Brown guy to step up and make some plays, and you're going to need the side guys. That's Especially, I don't know if you saw them fall apart against Minnesota in that second game and down the stretch in OT. But I still feel like until you've done there and you have the scars and you've lost a couple of those and you have these guys who have just been through a few of those. I still never going to 100% trust it. But then you have a situation like the 2015 Warriors where it's like, I don't trust it. And then they're hoisting the trophy.

But anyway, back to your point. I think you're right. Those two teams that I think Cleveland, I think, deserves credit for understanding who they are. Even that Hunter trade, I thought was such a good trade. They needed this specific thing. They went out and got it. All of their guys complement each other. And to me, those are the three. Those are the three with Denver as the wild card for the top four.

Yeah. Sometimes you get lucky in a superstar like a Joketch, you just sit him in the middle of your planetary diorama and everything falls into place around him. And Jokuj takes spare parts. If you handed a professional drummer a really crappy drum kit, he knows how to make it sound good. I feel like that's Jokić. Jokić can repurpose things that maybe one man's trash is another man's treasure. But I think with these two teams, specifically, when you think about the slugging percentage of how many decisions there are within a given NBA game, and you think about the difference, the margins between a small decision, and I think a Taking and vacating space is an enormous thing that can tank whether or not a team is working, like with the Celtics or with with OKC, if a guy doesn't have an instinctual feel for, all right, they're loading up on Shay in this situation, X player's head is turned, I'm going to go here. And that takes an activeness of mind, I think. But then the other thing is just how... And vacating space is the other thing, just getting the fuck out of the way, as we've seen, is knowing when to do that.

But I think in terms of guys getting better, too, I think it's gotten super detailed down to the point of they know what it takes for a person to have a permanence of a concept, and they know how to do that whenever they're working guys out. And guys who aren't reflective people, you're talking about knowing who you are, they're just not going to be as apt to grow as fast as other players. So I think it's gotten really psychologically detailed, even in that point. And I I think you're absolutely right about it does come down to knowing who you are. It's amazing how many teams across the league don't really know who they are. I made a joke last year about the Bulls. I was like, the Bulls were like Bruce Willison, the sixth Sense. They were dead, and they had no idea. You'll look at some teams who just are just sunk cause following these paths that are never going to end up being a masterpiece. And I think that's a really key part of it.

Yeah, Golden State is a good example of knowing who you because the Brandon Ingram trade was sitting there for them for-They were like, No. Whatever season. They were like, This is the guy that doesn't work out for us. He needs a ball. He's a little bit of a ball stopper. Him playing without the ball wasn't awesome. Kerr had him in Team USA didn't work out great. I don't even think he played the last two games. But they held the fort, which ties into we want to talk about Jimmy. Bringing in Jimmy and keeping your fingers crossed that he's going to behave stuff. But knowing that there's a hoops IQ element with him. But then now there's this whole low post and space and Steph pulling guys away. Basically, you're able to play four on three a little bit with Jimmy as your low post guy, as weird as that is. They've never really had a low post guy like that since, I don't know. Durant, if you count him as it, but he's a medium post guy. David Lee going way back. I guess you could throw him the ball.

I would say David West.

Little bogey, maybe. There's a tiny bit of bogey, a tiny bit of David West. But Butler, it's been, and we're taping this before they play tonight, but it's been really fun to watch the different space that they have now. Steph's stats have immediately got better. It's already had an effect on him. And the more I love the trade when it happened, we were really bullish on it. I bet on the Warriors when I was at the Super Bowl to make the play-off, some fandel. The more I'm staring at it, there are some Rasheed Wallace '04 parallels, Where both of those guys, neither of them had actually won a title, but gotten really close. Both of them were just unbelievably talented. Both of them wore out their welcome at the road place. Both of them were a non-sexy asset because of what had happened, but they were still assets. Then it's like, what if we can take this and move this here into this culture with these people? What does this look like? It's very hard to pull those trades off. We've seen a A lot of people try to pull off the 2004 Rashead trade.

They might have done it. This is a team that had no championship ceiling at all, and now they're a team that we have to at least mention.

Yeah, there's a sweet spot of distressed asset and talent that you could bet on in the right scenario. You also just have to have the culture to sustain something like that. The Warriors have proven over and over again that they can. But I think the big thing, I was looking at some of the through, I guess it was seven games. There are seven three-man lineups that Jimmy is a part of that have a plus 20 net rating, and only one of them is actually negative. He's in one lineup that's negative 0. 5 or something. His impact on it has been immediate. And I think you hit it where, talking about Duran in the post, I think the big thing is that Steph has not had a switch partner for a while. He hasn't had a guy on the floor where if you switch this, this is going to create an issue because you think about Wiggins had his little run there where he was doing some things, and they've had scores here and there, like pool, they could put him in an action for that season, and he was making lemonade. But I think that he has...

That is the starting point. Really, since Iguida or Durant, I don't think that they've had a guy that could punish a switch as consistently as Jimmy does.

Iguida is a good one for that because some of the defense that he brought to the table is some of the stuff Butler is doing them, too. I'm really intrigued by them. And Lakers are another one. I think he's going to fit in easier with Golden State than this Lakers situation. I've already gone on the record. To me, they're a legitimate contender. But it's a pretty dramatic trade for midseason. The history of the league is it's really hard to make a trade like that halfway through the year and then actually have it lead to you making the finals or better. There's some examples, but not somebody as talented as Luke is. The league is so much more fun than it was a month ago because Golden State was not fun to watch. I hated watching the Lakers. Now you have these two that it just feels like we haven't have teams. I think Memphis is really interesting because Ja will have these games where he's like nine for 25, but he makes the two biggest shots of the game. He's not making threes at all. He still He plays the same reckless offensive game that always works out for him.

He hasn't really evolved from that at all. But he's still like, they're down six, down a point, or down one with six seconds left. I just feel like he's scoring. He's one of those guys. In a playoff series, I'm not positive I'd want to see them, and I also don't think they could win the title. So I don't know. I think the lead got really interesting, and I was not interested a month ago. How about you?

Yeah. Well, I was going to say a couple of things. The Luka trade, I guess I haven't even got to talk to you about it at all. I was at the Calipari return game, which I thought was going to be the biggest story that night. We were sitting there in the postgame presser, and somebody showed me their phone. I was like, what? I didn't believe it seriously for the rest of the night anyway. Everybody's beating that one to death. But on Ja, he definitely is the separator for them in that sense. I do think that he suffered a little bit from defensive officiating shifting recently, the The way that they... Oh, good point. And that speaks into what's... I think that's what has made Boss and an OKC really effective, too, is the fact that they just have this circular chain link that really doesn't have any obvious gap in it, because even if you are bigger than them, they're so laterally mobile and strong that they can prevent players from playing as big as they are because they move so well. Because a lob threat, one of the ways to stop a lob threat is to physically get in in front of them.

Don't let them jump. I think that's another big thing that has really made an impression on me in terms of how to view the league is, A, I think strength is... We had that time where the game spread way out and offensive players ruled the day. I think being skinny was something you could get away with. But I think the more that they've allowed defenses to exist, the more I think players like the Celtics have, like your Drew Holidays, your lower secondary body guys, I think, are having an impact again.

It's fun to think of teams even 5, 10 years ago and how they would have competed in the league now, the way how deep everything is. Because I do think the league is just better. I think that the teams are deeper in a way that that whole model of the mid-late 2000s, I'm not sure. The 2070 Warriors would still be awesome. But you go to that 2019 Raptors team that won. I know Kawhi was awesome, but he wasn't as awesome in the last two rounds is I think when we think about it and we think like, oh, my God, playoff Kauai in 2019, it was like, all right, the last two rounds not quite as good. They got a really good Van Biet one series. They patched it together. They had some really good competitors. But I look at that team now and it's like, would that team... Would you pick that team ahead of Boston or Cleveland in a playoff series from what we had this year? I wouldn't. With Gasol and Kauai and Siakam, I think Ananobi missed the playoffs. Van Biet, Lowry, I just I think that's the third best team in the East.

You go back and you look at some of these, like that Bucks team that won in '21. I don't think that team could win now. I don't think that Phoenix team that made the finals, built around Booker and CP3 and DeAndre Ayton and Bridges and Cam Johnson. That team is not making the finals now. There's no way. That league is just better.

Wasn't the West pretty devastated that year, too? I mean, not to- Yeah, there's some bad luck. Yeah, it all blurs together. But yeah, I'm trying to think back.

The Murray injury was a big one that year.

Well, the league ebbed and flow between the helio thing, spike to the moon, obviously, for a while there. And we've talked about this a lot where I think that we've shifted away from that model I don't think works as well anymore. You've seen the shift with the way Cleveland is playing this year. They went from ball. They are a really good example of a team that was maybe probably miscalibrated a little bit in the way that they were so ball screen dominant with Donovan Mitchell. And I would look at that team over the past couple of years and just be like, if they would just play through, they're big. Now, Evan Mobley had to get better. I think that's a key part of the equation, but allowing those guys to move around them, I think they're a good example of the way the league has shifted lately when you look at the way they've succeeded.

I think people think I'm doing a bit in trying to reverse Jinks Cleveland when I talk about how good I think they are. I think that team is really good. I think it's going to be really hard to win a seven-game series against them, especially when they have a game seven. The biggest thing that's changed. Everyone's talked about how Mitchell, when they gave him the contract, and he's just pulled back enough that it's still his team, but other guys get to shine. Garland's healthy, but Moby is the big difference because I feel like his three is going in now. Last year, I was like, Please shoot that. You're not making that. There's no way. It's going to be an ugly line drive. Now, he's shooting with confidence. It's a team that has four of the best 50 guys in the league Mitchell's in the top eight. Moby is probably in the top 20 to 22 at this point. Then Hunter as a fifth guy is nuts. I got to be honest, everyone's already given the six-man award to Payton Pritchard. It's weird. You have to watch him because his stats are better than Ty Jerome.

Part of the reason they're better is because he's had games where he played in place of Wade or no Jalen Brown. They just let him go off and I have 29. So maybe that's why he should win. I think Ty Jerome is been the best bench guy in the league, especially in these big games. He's like, swinging games. Pritchard will have games against certain teams when he just looks like an undersized guard who can't do anything and teams are attacking him. Ty Jerome looks like, is this guy a $100 million player? What is he? So I just don't think that sixth Man of the Year is over yet because I think he's been playing great.

Has anybody ever won Most Improved and sixth Man of the Year in the same year?

Wow, the double It's a double-dip.

How much of an argument would he have for that, do you think? Because is it did he improve or is it that he got into a context where he's properly seen? Because I think he's improved. He's obviously worked in his game. I don't think that's ever happened, has it? I'm trying to think of the double-dipping on the major awards. We had a Rookey of the Year MVP before, right? Will did that.

Okay. Cade's the favorite on Fandil, and I think that's justified.

For most improved?

Yeah, the leap that he made. Now, This is like, usually, most improved is either one or two things. It's either I was here and now I'm here, or it's like, nobody was even fucking talking about me last year. Now I'm here. Cade becoming a top 10, top 12 guy in the league, which I think he is. You've seen it during this win-streak. You saw it last night. That's probably the winner. But yeah, Payton Pritchard, he's plus one, seven. Oh, Beazley. I forgot about him. He's three to one. And Ty Jerome, I drove 50 to what a fando. Is there a better sub than him? I guess they have Ahmed Thompson as a six-man candidate. That's a weird one. I feel like he's a starter, but what do I know? I guess Beazley is a good choice, too. My point is, I don't think Pritchard has that award locked up by any means. Beazley has been amazing for Detroit. If he'd played like this on Milwaukee last year, they might have been able to survive until Giannis came back. The defensive player of the year, Moby, is the favorite for that one, too, which some of this stuff is going to play out.

Then Rooky of the Year, which is just grizzly. Right now, Castle is the favorite, but this is among the worst Rooky of the Year Canada Sea classes.

Are we in Martha Carter-Williams territory?

We might be. Well, that was tough because he just had fake stats on a team that stunk. But yet I still like this rookie class. Where do you stand on it? You obviously did a lot of work on it last year for us. You happy, unhappy, medium, unclear? Where are you?

I think it's spun forward in the way that we thought it would. It was a draft class, a high school. It always is driven by the high school class because if they could draft them, they would, but they want to use the college buffer to kick the tires and see what happens when they go up, level up in the competition. You saw some shift. I mentioned, like, Isaac Collier was a guy who was ranked really high in the class, somebody out in LA. I assume you got to see some. Sometimes you see shifts there that happen. Like Reid Sheppard obviously ascended in that year and got drafted. But overall, we knew that that class lacked a generational, foundational type of superstar. So I'm not super surprised. I expected that to spin forward into Summer League, which it did. Summer League was just like, There's some guys here that we like. No, overall, not terribly surprised.

Are you surprised by Shepard, though? Because you were pretty high on him, at least being a bench guy right away, right? I'm amazed he's not playing at all for Houston. I don't really know the reasons.

Yeah, you can make the argument. You'll hear people talk about how much time do they have. Eme, obviously, it's a high bar for a rookie to play for Eme. He wants to win. That's his mentality. You look at them and what their goals are in the short term. Reid just doesn't really fit them right now. I think the big thing is he really needs to play. I was surprised they brought him out of the G League so fast. I've heard some people talk about the quality of the G League right now, which is a riveting position.

Quality being bad?

Yeah, that it's down right now.

It seems like it's the worst it's been.

Yeah. I've been shocked by the shooting. I didn't expect him to shoot so poorly, but I don't know. You would think that if he was doing the things that he does well, that he would get to play because you keep hearing people make that argument about that. But Dillingham, too, I thought would come on a little earlier, but I think we've seen some signs that he's going to be okay.

Some signs the other night. I'm all in. I haven't sold any of my Dillingham I like that. He seems like a great teammate and a real competitor, too, which I like.

Yeah. You know what I realized after we had finished the draft work last year? I was like, nick Van Exel. I kept saying he just- That's a good one. I said he was in the nick Van Exel's spiritual lineage, and I was like, that's perfect. He's the guy. Maybe you don't lean on him heavily because you could fall down and kill yourself. But here and there in spurts, he comes in and he's obviously really talented, him and Ant. I don't know if he's going to solve Minnesota's problems or anything that, but I still have a belief in Rob.

Who's your favorite non Cooper flag college guy right now?

Oh, boy. Let me pull up my list here. I mean, of the... Let's see, the guys at the top.

I'm fascinated by the other Rutgers guy, and I know he's either going to break hearts.

Ace?

I'm fascinated by Ace. I don't know what he is. If I was a GM, I think I'd be afraid to be like, All right, this This is my third pick. I'm going all in on this guy because there's a chance it just is not going to translate to the NBA in the right way. But there's another alternate universe where it's like, this guy seems legitimately unstable. What is this going to look like if he just figures out a couple of things. His offensive... The shot making is just really unusual. I don't want to compare it to Durant because that's sainted ground. But there's some stuff he does. I don't think he'd be fun to play with, at least not yet. It just seems like the ball's going to him. He's shooting. He's one of those guys. But there's some shot making stuff with him.

Wow. With Durant, the thing that always kills me is with people when they talk about him, the dribble shooting is the thing that set him apart at his size. The difference is you just don't see guys that can handle and shoot it like that. But then later down the road, we saw Michael Porter Jr. Come along, who obviously had a lot of... I think he's more like MPJ, personally, because MPJ at the same age was very similar in that he had this gigantic mallet that was very useful in every single situation. For MPJ, it's continued to be useful, but every single situation was a nail for him because he had this thing that he could just rise up over people and hit shots, and Ace has that. Now, my comp that I've made is that I think that Ace is like, he could be a Jane McDaniels type with the MPJ shot making. You think he could be that good defensively? He's a weak side disruptor, and I think that the defense could come a long way. I think that he's still learning the game. You talk about problem solving in the way we were earlier.

I think he's on a new frontier, so it's going to be really interesting. I would not lean on him to be a decision maker for me, like going to the basket, things like that. There's not much proof that he's going to be somebody that can pass out of a situation where he gets loaded up against. But you're right, his shot making is crazy.

He's He's an extension pink slip guy. You take him and you're either it's going to work out and you're getting a four-year extension or you're going to be on NBA TV in a year. It is a risk-reward pick, but I am fascinated by him. His teammate's really good, too. I mean, his teammate is way more traditional. This is the guy we've seen succeed in the NBA over and over again. I don't have a lot of takes on him.

On Dylan?

Yeah.

He fits more what we were talking about before, that sturdy, lower body type He's a big guard. He's a great finisher in the lane. He's really crafty.

Yeah. He's going to be a really good NBA player. I don't know if he's going to be an all-MBA guy, but he'll be good.

Yeah. There's one guy that I would be fascinated for you to watch just because I want to hear your opinion on it because he has a lot of the traits you like.

The foreign guy?

Well, Jegor Dimmon, earlier in the year, I texted you. I was like, You got to watch this guy run ball screens. He still is fun to watch, but he slipped a little bit because of some of his scoring issues. But the other guy that I would say is Eric Queen from Maryland, I think you should watch because he is a very, very... He has crazy hand-eye coordination for his size. He's a really smart, handsy defender. He can pass the ball, but he has this slow-mo. I said he has some... This is a dangerous one. I hesitate to say this, but he has some de-how qualities to him.

Where he's a little- I missed de-how.

He's a little laze fair, and that every once in a while, he's 6'10, he'll just drive baseline and rifle a left-handed pass through a tight window to somebody on the money. He's somebody really fascinating that I'm curious to hear your take on when you get to watch him.

I got to say I've been impressed by Duke, just the team that they have. They have a bunch of guys that I could just see on NBA teams down the stretch, but I admittedly have not watched. I mean, one of the wrinkles for me is I've never watched women's college basketball during the regular season before, and I've actually watched women's college over men's college a couple of times, which has been really surprising to me. I feel like I'm not as versed on the men as I usually would be at this time of year. But I have watched a bunch of Duke and For them to not at least make the final four, final two, I just feel like something really bad would have to happen during a game. They just go ice cold. They just seem really complete.

They have a guy on their team that I think you would like named Seon James, who is built like Drew. He's a big... When they moved him into the starting lineup, they played Auburn, who has been the favorite for the year. They played Auburn at home, and they moved him into the starting lineup, and their season just changed. He's a smart player. He can guard multiple positions. He's somebody that I expect to be pretty instrumental to whether or not they win. Lebaron Phyland is another one, too, that I would throw out that I really, really like a lot for Alabama. But I'll wait until you to pull around and we can- Yeah, I'm just starting.

We finally have more time to watch stuff. Hey, so I want to talk Seltex a little bit because we got the big documentary Seltex City coming on March third, Monday on Max and on HBO. You follow the history of the League. You trying to intersect it with the guys we're watching now. Is there anybody from all the different Celtics areas that you would love to have seen in 2025?

Oh, man, that's a great question. Bird, you can't count Bird. Yeah. I remember when I was making that Indiana Travel video last year. I think I was texting you about, I was going back and watching some of the Indiana State footage, and I was just thinking Bird absolutely would have translated to today. No problem. Just because you went to talk about spatial intelligence. I mean, over the decade, decades. I think Ainge is a pretty fascinating player. When he was younger, just seeing the way that he was able to... Just obviously a really smart player. Dennis Johnson, I'm a big fan of, I think in the era of ball pressure, he would have translated. I'm trying to think of this.

Do you mean- How about Mikael? Because I feel like Mikael is now a unicorn that will never happen again because whatever version of Mikael happens in 25, that guy's just shooting threes all the time. It started to happen to Mikaela near the end of his career. He started stretching them four more. I just don't know if a low post guy would ever have that arsenal of moves anymore because it would just be banged in your brain to shoot threes and clear space, get out of the way for other people. I don't see it happening again.

He's somebody that I think would probably... This reminds me of our conversation when we were creating the all-time fun team. He's somebody that I think would have probably been the fulcrum of a big guy-driven offense with movement around him just because- Like a little Schengen on Houston, tiny bit? Yeah, because if you had the right guards around him, he was such a dominant one-on-one player. He He would have been pretty... Schengen is an interesting... Where would you compare Mikael and Schengen as passers, though, I think?

Mikael became a better passer because he played with Bird. It was that osmosis thing. I think if Mikael is on another team, he's probably like 1. 1 assist a game. But I think when you play with somebody who's just always making extra passes, there's no way you don't start doing it. It's one of the great things about basketball. Yeah, I guess you would have had... Mikael would have been a center. You would have put shooting all the way around him and just tried to get him on the low post with space. That would have been a good one. The types like the Parish types, those guys now, they're just valued completely differently in the league. Because back then, you owe every team needed one or you needed a center to guard the other centers. Now, those guys are like 15 to $20 million players. Or you'll see a team like the Lakers. They're just like, I guess we're just not going to have a center. Or it's somebody like the way the Celtics use Porzingas and Horford as these stretch fives with size that, ideally, you can play them off the ball and then have them come flying in on the paint.

It's just there's not a lot of Paris types now. Detroit probably plays the closest to what an old, older era team plays like, right?

Yeah.

They have size and rebounding, and they're tough and nasty. They have a couple of shooters, and then they have one really good offensive player, and they just It's like a 1991 type of team.

Yeah. We knew this in the past few years was for the player type that Kade was and where he was in his growth, they tweaked some things to help him out. I kept calling it the crowded elevator Cade was just like, there are just too many people on the elevator. Can you please get off? The other one I was going to... In making this documentary, did you feel any burden? I'm not trying to interview you here, but did you feel any burden to represent somebody that was maybe not properly represented in the younger generation? Because I think of a Havlicek, if you look at his stat lines, so balanced throughout. Was there anybody that you felt like a burden to be like, we really should focus on this guy to bring out, to shine a light on his legacy.

Yeah, we had a few of those. Havocech is definitely one who was an incredibly important player to the league in the '70s, especially. It's one of the legacies to Russell in the Celtics, but also as the ABA is getting more and more fun, he's one of the few stars they had left. Reggie Lewis was a big one. We hadn't really seen that. We have a lot of Reggie stuff, and the last third of the series. I just think he's one of those that came and went. People remember he died, but they don't remember how good he was and how important he was in the Celtics. That was another one. Then there's moments as you go through where you're to explain the impact of somebody. Coosy is a big part of the first episode, how important he was to the league, that the league just wasn't entertaining. They didn't even have a shot clock for eight years, and it was just It was just a bunch of... You've seen some of the old videos. It's brutal. It's just a lot of big guys, and it's a lot of set shots and running hooks. Then Coosy comes in, and he's easily the most fun player in the league.

He's the most fun player in the league, probably for the first 15 years of the league until Elgin, and Jerry West and Oscar get going. The way he ran fast breaks and just some of the old footage. It's impossible not to enjoy the way those teams played. It's so different. It's the same sport, but it's no correlation to what we're watching now. Everything's about three on two, three on one, two on one, four on two. Can we get a layup? Can we get a layup? Can we get a layup? That's the driving force. Now you're in the same place and the guys are splitting out to the corners and Coosy be running and he'd be doing over-the-head tosses to somebody in the corner. It's just completely different. So, yeah, there is some pressure with some of that just to explain, Hey, here's why this person was special for four minutes.

Yeah, the context is just so infuriating whenever you hear people talk about the history of the lead, because talking about Coosy, people just drive me nuts because they'll go back and use the lens of today and watch the way he's dribbling. The officiating of dribbling is one of the things that single-handedly changed the way the game is. It just blew the walls down. I had a clip of Doug Mo.

You're talking about the carrying.

Yeah. It was so strict. Your hand had to be directly on the top of the ball. I made a video at this one time. You just watched over the decades, the hand went from the top to on the side to totally on the side to under. Now, I think it's been a good thing. I think it promoted self-expression, which is what the league marketed itself on and exploded. But I just think Coosy is one that is funny to watch. If you imagine a game where you had to dribble the way that he did, it was pretty creative. Granted, the league wasn't, I don't know, integrated or anything like that. It definitely was that.

So you had the dribbling thing, you had the sneakers, the fact that they're playing and just these rinked-day converses. Then it was really, really physical. People were just like, it was more like hockey. They called them cagers the first 15 years of the league. It's It's a different sport. The other thing with the assist, they're scoring all these points. You only got an assist if it was the guy is catching the ball and laying in or the guy is catching it and shooting immediately or they didn't count it.

I've heard old guys complain about that.

Oh, my God. They must complain about so many different things, the equipment they had, the money they didn't make, all the statistical rules against them. But yeah, and then we try to use the Celtics lens to look at the league and the sport and how it changed and how it intersected with America in all these different ways. It is hilarious how the footage changes over the years. Even you watch the stuff from the '80s. We have a big part about the Boston Philly series in 1981, which is probably my favorite series ever. But that becomes... It's just a UFC fight. It's like a 10-man UFC fight. There's no spacing at all. Every time somebody goes to the basket, they're just getting clobbered, and it becomes this hybrid of rugby, basketball, and UFC by the fourth quarter. You wouldn't really see that. We see elements of that sometimes with the big, tense games, but not like that. There will never be another series like that, I don't think.

Yeah, it's interesting. I was watching some games. I think I was trying to watch something for Jerry West one time, and I was just amazed at the way he and Oscar Robertson would... A, I was amazed at the pickup point. I think that is that has really evolved now with the threat of the deep three-point shot. Teams just pick up way higher than they did in the past. Oh, yeah, you're right. You'd watch legitimate stars with the ball, like a Jerry West, who today, if Jerry West dribbled up the floor, he would be a threat from, I would say, 28 and in. I mean, he legitimately would take those shots, and you would watch him dribble literally to the elbow before he gets contact, and he'd pull up for that jumper. And I wonder if some of that is what you're talking about, just the clogged lane so many times that that shot was just available. I mean, Oscar Robertson did that a lot, too. But I think the pickup point is something that has really, really changed over the decades.

Yeah, that's how the '85 Lakers won the finals. They just packed it. If you watch some of the footage from that, Danny Angel, DJ, they're not just wide open from three, they're wide open from 18. The Lakers are so packed. They're just not letting McKeel and Bird beat them. They're just like, take those 18 footers all day. The Celtics didn't know how to respond. When you watch it now, you're just like, why didn't you guys move back? You would have just had wide open threes. You would have made one out of every three. The points per possession would have been more, but nobody really thought that way. There's a lot of good stuff. I think for the basketball junkies, I think they're going to be pleasantly surprised. We were able to pack a lot of stuff in this thing. You believe in the Pistons yet, by the way? I forgot to ask you about them.

I think they are on the path towards that young teams need to be on, which we've talked about in the past. Whenever you have a young team, you have a coach, you have your startup CEO who comes in and is just trying to make everybody feel good. And then you're like, all right, we're going public. We need a real CEO, and you go get the person. And I think they did that. So I think we're in the phase of they're going to be entering the playoffs, and then it's like Orlando did. You enter the playoffs, you get the data, read back on that, and you say this is... Because the playoffs define everything. You always talk about fourth quarters in the playoffs, and it's like, those things come back, and this is what we saw, this is what happened, this is the map towards what we need to do. So that's where they are in the process right now for me. So we're going to see what the way teams play them, and then that's going to inform the moves that they make. So they're on the path. Detroit fans, they seem to think I hate Kade.

I don't really understand that. But they're on the right track.

It's a tough one because... And Marcelo never wavered on Kade, but last year- Neither did I.

I don't understand it.

But I think He was a different guy than he was this year. Everyone's admitting, really, from the last couple of months, anyone who listened to any of our stuff or any of the stuff we were doing, it was like, something's really good is happening with Kate Cunningham here, and it keeps going and going and going. The veteran shooters they put around them, I think, is a good model for how to build a team. It's interesting, though. Right now, they're sixth. They have a chance to bump to four or five If I were them, I'd want to be in that sixth spot, and I'd want to play the Knicks because I think they could give the Knicks a shitload of trouble. They're a really tough, physical team. If they're not the best rebounding team in the league, they're in the top three. I just would want to see them in a playoff series. It's probably a year too early. It's probably like what Orlando was like last year. It was like, Oh, watch out for these guys. Then they shoot 20% in a game seven. But when you can rebound and you have veteran shooting and you have one guy that you can go to in the last five minutes, I'm taking you seriously.

So I knew they were going to beat the Celtics last night. No Jalen Brown, third game and fourth night. It's a bad matchup. Celts are stuck in the second spot. That felt like a loss, but it's still a really nice win for Detroit. They've won eight straight. I'm taking them seriously as at least a first-round upset thread. I think you have to think of them that way now.

Yeah. They're in that position where they may not be They eat the Knicks, but they're in the position to really take a bite out of them as they enter the next round, which is... They're definitely not going to be a pushover. I think you're right about they had the guys that were athletic, Asar and Jalen Duren. Duren is somebody that I was really high on. I couldn't believe the way he got stolen in that draft. He was somebody that very obviously fit the archetype of somebody that could switch, and he's just super athletic. So a poor man's band type of archetype guy. And in the shooting, a lot of the times, that's the simplest answer. You a downhill guy, just add some space around him. It seems like it's not rocket science, but Pistons finally did it.

I mean, their top five net last 15 games, plus 7. 6. If you're in the top five for a 15 to 20 game stretch at this point of the season, I think you have to be taken seriously. Anyway. All right, Kyle, man. You'll come back at some point when we're in the March Madness Throes. But it was good to see you as always.

Likewise. Good to be here.

All right, Morriseon is here. She works for the New Yorker. She wrote a big biography on Lorne Michiels that came out last week or this week? Last week. Last week. How long were you working on it? Because it felt like this was almost a decade's worth of work.

It was just about a decade. Yeah, just about a decade.

How did you convince him to do it? Because you got some... I mean, you spent an entire week behind the scenes in an episode, Joan Hill hosted last decade. But also, it just seemed like you got a lot of Lauren time, which is pretty unusual.

I did. I recognize how unusual that was. I think it's worked for me. Well, basically, after the 40th anniversary 10 years ago, I started thinking about the show and the enormous impact of Lauren himself. Nobody has been more responsible for what makes generations of Americans laugh, what we all think is funny. It was a huge legacy. I knew Lorne a little bit because I worked for him briefly in 1984 on The New Show, which was his one spectacular public failure, his attempt to do SNL in primetime. I was just a kid. I was a munchkin then, but I had a front row seat to this interesting situation. I made a lot of friends there. Even though I switched to journalism, I kept in touch with all those people. I would see Lauren maybe every 8 or 10 years, and we always said hi. I knew Lauren wouldn't say yes to having a book written about him. What I did is I wrote a proposal, send it around. I was surprised by the interest it generated. There was a big bidding war. I signed a deal with random house. I had not promised them Lauren's involvement.

Then I wrote a note to Lauren and I said, I'd love to come see you in your office. I went to see him and I said, Lauren, I just signed a deal to write a book about you and the show. I don't need anything from you because I'm connected in your world. But if you would like to talk to me, it'll be a bigger and better and richer book, which your legacy deserves. The truth is, he looked like he was going to faint. He was surprised, and he doesn't like to be surprised, as you know, if you've read the book. But it was incredibly polite as he always is, and we chatted about this and that for a while. He said, Let me give it some thought. A few days later, I followed up and we met for a drink in a bar in a hotel. I thought we were going be negotiating. That it would maybe be like, Well, this and that. But as often happens with Lauren, people say that sometimes you sit down with Lauren and he starts a conversation and you're like, Wait a minute. I missed the previous conversation. You'll just leap ahead.

That's what happened. We sat there, he was drinking his Belvedere on the Rocks, and he just started telling stories about his childhood, about his parents. I realized, Oh, he's going to do this. I didn't have a notepad or a tape recorder, so I would run the Ladies Room and write stuff down, so I didn't forget it. He asked nothing of me. There were no terms. There was no deal. I think he liked me. He respected the magazine. I think he knew there was going to be a book written about him. It better be written by me than some entertainment business hack who was going to turn something around really fast. Then I just started visiting him in his office a couple Friday nights a and we would have these leisurely talks. It was very civilized and really fun and talk to everyone else in his world. The real charm of it for me was that I didn't have to deal with any publicists, and that can really be the back-breaking part of a project like this. I think that once word went out that Lauren was talking to me, all these people just said, Sure.

Everyone loves to talk about Lauren. After we had done that for a year or so, then I realized, Okay, if I'm going to write this guy's biography, you want to avoid it being like a death march through the years, 1986 turned to 1987, turned to 1988. I'm a magazine editor, so I wanted some of that up close in the material like you have in a magazine profile. I said, How about if I just come to the show one week and just stay at your elbow and watch everything so I can convey to people the magic and the insanity of how this show comes together every week. I related to it a little bit because it's not completely unlike the way we put together an issue of The New Yorker. We have a weekly deadline, a lot of crazy ego-maniacs. He let me. I was able to sit there through all these very intense, usually confidential meetings, and got to see all the complicated levers that he has to push and the egos that he has to solve. It was I sometimes said to my editor, this book could be published by Harvard Business School. I mean, it's a funny, interesting book, but it's a real management Bible, too.

I was shocked that he let you hang by his side for an entire show like that, especially if they're having pretty candid conversations about, Joan Hill was the host that week, and the psychology of getting a host to either buy into a sketch or sometimes him not wanting to promote a mid-nineties. Lauren didn't want to promote it, even though Jona Hill had this movie he directed. He's like, We don't do directors. We only do actors. But all the little tidbits you got from that, I just couldn't believe he allowed you in that inner circle. But do you think part of it was because he knew the book was coming out so much later than that episode that it was okay? If he had done it and it had just all run a week later, I think that would have been weird. But seven years later, it seemed okay because there's a lot of other stuff in there, too. They're having problems with Leslie Jones that week, and she's hitting that point where she's probably outgrowing the show and everybody's realizing it. But you had all this stuff in there that after seven years, it seemed more benevolent than maybe in 2018.

Well, the first thing I'll say is certainly Lauren, neither Lauren nor I knew that it was going to take that much longer. Oh, interesting. Okay. The book took this long just because it took this long. I interviewed hundreds of people. I have a demanding day job. I did it on the weekends. But still, I don't think Lauren's that strategic. I don't think he's thinking like, Oh, this will be some years. I think he just felt like he... Again, it was a great honor for me that he just trusted me. I did say to him at the beginning of that week, I said, I know how this goes. If somebody blurts something out that's really controversial or disgraces themselves or some confidential thing happens that you would like to be off the record, let's check in at the end of each day and you can tell me. That's the way at the magazine, we would maybe deal with it if we had a journalist visiting a meeting or something. But he never did. He never said, Oh, when so and so blurted out blah, blah, blah. Let's erase that. Oh, interesting. He never did. But again, I think it's that he respected me as a journalist and knew that I wasn't out to hang anybody or burn the place down.

I'll tell you the truth. There were a handful of things, particularly It was Saturday night, the party after the show where people were wandering around a little blitz, blabbing things. Just because I'm a good journalist, but I'm also not out to nail anybody. I think I probably protected a couple of people here and there. But the book is really true to what happened and to my experience. As I said, I felt honored by being trusted that way.

Well, because if you go back to the '80s and there was that great book that Hill and Winerad wrote about the first 10 years of the show. As they're finishing that up, Woodward comes out with the book about Balushi. They talk about in the Saturday Live book that came out about the 10 years, there was a chill with those guys because they felt like they were burned by the Balushi book. They'd given Woodward all this access, and then he just steered the book toward basically the cocaine downfall of Balushi. They basically made it seem like Lauren scaled back right at the end. He hasn't really done anything since. I was wondering, did he feel like... Because you even I have a quote in the book about basically he's like, The less talking you do about how well you're doing, the better off you are, which I thought was interesting. But then at the same time, he's letting you do this book.

Yes, it's true that he has always had a policy that there isn't much to be gained by talking to the press. You can be quoted out of context. All these things can happen. They did feel burned by Balushi. I'm sorry, by Wired. A lot of people, including Jim Balushi, told me that they felt that they had been misquoted in the Woodward and that things were taken out of context. That happens a lot in this business. I'm not in a position to fact-check Woodward's book, but I was really careful. I've been working at the New Yorker for 30 years. I was really careful in the research. I had a fact checker check everything. I think that there was a level of comfort with how I was going to be doing it. But you're right. I think that the only reason that he went went against his usual dictum, which is nothing to be gained by talking to the press, is that it was right after the 40th. The 40th anniversary, as you remember, it was a beautiful show. It was very emotional. I think Lorne was a little softened by it. I think he felt it that they were celebrating the 40th and Phil Hartman was gone and Balushi and Gildas, and so many people and Tom Davis.

I think he thought, God, it's going to be even a smaller group at the 50th. I think he was, for the first time, really thinking about his legacy. I just happened to get him at the right time. I definitely felt that he was reflective in a way that isn't maybe his norm. You've interviewed him, you've talked to him. He's not naturally that interior person. I think that it was just good timing. I'll say I think he's a little bit superstitious, which I love. When we met that first time in his office, I told you he knew me from the '80s, but I told him something he didn't know, which is that when I was 16 during the first season of the show, I took the Metro North train in from Connecticut and was in the audience for one of the Elliott Gould shows, which was magic. It was one of his favorite shows from that season. I think there is something that sparked something in his brain. It felt right to him.

Yeah, I felt that same way when he let me do the pod in his office. I think he knew I love the show. It meant a lot to me, and I had a lot of history with it. What struck me when I interviewed him, first of all, his recall is amazing. I was really surprised by just how specifically he could remember stuff going back to the '70s and '80s, like it happened yesterday. But the thing that you mentioned earlier about how this book could be almost like a business class for management, that was that his sense of how to direct people, how to nudge people, the different points of a career you hit, knowing what the shelf life is of a relationship with somebody and whether they're going to leave or actually whether they're going to stay under the umbrella and just stay there or they're just going to go and are they going to come back? It seems like he's probably put more thought into this than just about anybody because a lot of people have managed successful companies. Not a lot of people have managed a successful company that also has to do with all the things that come with Fame, and managers and agents and the temptations and whether you stay loyal to the infrastructure or the show or you leave and you do something else.

It just felt like he had put an extraordinary amount of thought into it. That was one of the things I loved about your book is it's really in there. You really feel like all these different examples of like, it's time for them to go or they're going to find out the hard way that they shouldn't have left. It just seems like It's like one of the legacies of Lauren, basically.

Yeah. I mean, one of the things Chris Rock was a great source, very smart guy. And he said, think about it, this guy has been hundreds, if not thousands of people's boss. And if that doesn't make you an expert on human behavior, what does. He's almost like a shrink. He's seen so many people go through this weird crucible of change. You think about Bill Hater comes from Oklahoma in his early 20s. His only job had been working as an assistant on Iron Chef. You see these people, and then they become famous overnight. Lauren says he's the world's expert on watching people get famous. Very often, he's fully aware there's an asshole phase. You become a big jerk for a while.

What is the thing? If it lasts more than 15 minutes, you just stay an asshole or you had some quote like that.

Yeah. He knows how to shepherd people through this. But in terms of the management approach, I think it's largely intuitive. I remember Judd Apatow hearing once about how when he was a 25-year-old or 26-year-old young showrunner working on Ben Stiller's Fox Variety Show in the '80s, which was a great show that got canceled right away. He was terrified. He didn't know how to manage people. He was hold up in his office reading Management for Dummies, trying to learn how to do it. Laura never did anything like that. I think a lot of it is intuitive. He's got great EQ, but also, and this was the fun part about researching the book, I mean, sometimes I think he's almost like a young character out of Dickens or something. Every stop along the way, every bad job that he had, he nonetheless learned something important from it. You can see him going through the first 30 years of his life, gathering the little individual skills to becoming a producer and learning how to deal with medicine.

Well, and especially his interactions with stars. Yeah, just like, Oh, I learned this from Flip Wilson. Oh, I learned this from Lily Tom, and he just takes it.

Exactly. Yeah. The other thing that's unusual about him is that not only is he good at dealing with those kinds of incandescent creative egos or narcissists. But at the same time, he's a guy who has the mellow confidence to be able to deal with the suits. A lot of, like Conan O'Brien said to me, In the Game of Thrones of Show business, Lauren will be the last one standing. If you think about the number of administrations of NBC ownership he has outlived, Mike Sure, The SNL writer who's now created a lot of different shows. I quote him talking on a podcast once about what it's like to work for GE. Ge owned the network for a long time, and he quotes the network or pretends to quote a network saying something like, Gee, how come our laser guided missile department is doing so much better than our fart joke division? You're working for people who are basically making toaster ovens. He knows how to ride it out when those people turn into pests.

Yeah, you did a good job because there's a couple eras with that where he just trusts the infrastructure and that there's going to be a people above him. If he could just to hold on to the steering wheel. The thing he says over and over to people is, you just got to stay in the air. You just got to keep it going. How do I stay on? Because the most famous stage for this was probably the Don Omer era, the mid '90s. Yes. He's trying to get rid of the show, and Lauren could have escalated it, turned it into nuclear war, and maybe he gets bounced, but he just held the fort.

That's what happened, what Konan did with The Tonight Show, when he made this social movement out of team Kumpo.

Which Lauren hated.

Yeah. To me, Lauren, that was exactly what you don't do. What you do do is you just keep your head down and ride it out. And the stay on the air thing, again, to look at the lessons that he garnered along the way. In the '60s and '70s, when he was working in LA on variety shows, he was on laughing, but he knew that the cooler show was the Smothers Brothers. That's for Steve Martin wrote and Rob Reiner. And he wished he were on the Smothers Brothers. But then the Smothers Brothers basically allowed themselves to become martyrs. They wouldn't let up on their Vietnam stuff. They had Pete Seeger on singing Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, and the President called Bill Paley and got them taken off the air. Lauren, I think, always felt like, yeah, they did great material, but they didn't get to stay on the air. If you're not on the air, you're nowhere.

Yeah, you have a couple of good stories about the shelf of the moment you have. One of them was the Smothers Brothers, where it's like they were cool, and then you fade, you turn into something else. He could feel it probably happened in the early '80s when Letterman became the cool show, which you talked about, too. Yes, that's SNL is all of a sudden a little late, and Letterman is now the new person. One of the great things about this book, I knew so little about that five-year stretch when he wasn't on SNL. Just grabbing all these different ideas and things. Really, none of them worked out other than just getting Broadway video to buy a bunch of IP from the show, which turned out to be really smart financially. But all the creative stuff, none of it really worked out.

Yeah. He thought his TV life was over then. He thought, Oh, I did my TV thing. Now I'm going to have my Mike Nichols moment. He always wanted to make a film like The Graduate, and he thought that was his destiny. His grandparents owned a movie theater. He grew up besotted with the movies. What's interesting is that he was working on an adaptation of pride and prejudice. He had bought the rights to Don DeLillo's... Oh, gosh, the one that Noah Baumbach just made, White Noise. These are really high-brow pictures. They weren't like Animal House, which is what you might have expected him to do, going to be a Bafo Comedy Direction. That didn't work out. The only thing he did during those years that brought him pleasure is he wrote Three Amigos with two of his best friends, Steve Martin and Randy Newman. He described that to me as the one time where he just felt like, This is what I always pictured it to be like. Like George S. Kaufman staying up all night with the Marx brothers, drinking too much coffee and fixing the third act. I think he realized that he doesn't want to sit alone in a room with a typewriter.

He wants to be brainstorming with his friends. He likes a clubhouse. His whole life, he's been looking for a tribe. That's what made him go back to SNL in 1985.

But it also, you laid out, part of why he went back to SNL in 1985 is it didn't seem like he totally knew what to do. Oh, yeah. This was the one thing that he knew he was good at, and he had tried all these other things, and it just never totally fit.

Yeah. He was horribly in debt. He lost his own money on the news show. He had a mortgage, his apartment. The idea of Lauren in financial distress depressed was something that he... It almost reminds me of Scarlett O'Hara, I'll never be poor again, because when he was 14, his father died suddenly, and his whole life changed, and there was a financial uncertainty. His mother was depressed. He He was one of those guys with catastrophic thinking who lived his whole adult life to make sure that never happened to him again. When he was presented with the offer to come back and save SNL after five years away, first, he didn't know what to do. His pride felt a little wounded like, Oh, is that just going backwards?

Well, we should mention the show's probably dying if he doesn't come back.

Yes, they were going to yank it. They were going to cancel it.

He's got that guilt trip part of it, too.

It was, Save your baby or we're going to kill it. He asked for advice from two mentors, and he always had a lot of mentors in his life in the same way that he would go on to be everybody else's mentor. The first one he asked was David Geffen, who was his first agent way back in the day. Geffen said, Lauren, you should not go back and take that job in New York. You've done that. Someone who wants to be you should do that. I love Lauren's response to that because it was very honest. He said, Well, I always liked being me. Yeah, So then the second person he asked much more sage, an older man, Mo Austin, who was the chairman of Warner Brothers Records, Mo was much more clear-eyed. He said, Look, you're great at job. You love New York City. There are very few big entertainment jobs in New York City. It's a perfect fit. You should go back. And I think the penny dropped and Lauren realized, yeah, I'm good at live television. And Jim Downey, one of the longest serving head writers on the show, has a great way of summing up what he thinks Lauren's strengths are that make him so good at live TV.

He said, Lauren's a guy not that great at term papers, really good at tests. In other words, the hard deadline is necessary for him. With movies, he could noodle around with rewrites and never actually get to the end of it.

Yeah, I like that part of the book.

As he always says, the show goes on because it's 11: 30, no matter what.

Yeah, I liked how you laid that out that some people, their weakness is they can't stop tinkering with something. It could be anything. It could be a magazine feature you're editing. It could be a documentary. It could just somebody that never feels like it's done and they can't make final decisions. But when you're on on Saturday, 11: 30, one of my favorite things about your book was that process between dress rehearsal and you laid out everything that happened in that Jona Hill show from dress rehearsal right to when they go live when Lauren turns into a different human and he's just like, All right, here's what we... It's the one time all week where he has to make decisions.

People have told me, and I'm pleased, but people have told me that when they're reading that section of the book, their heart starts pounding. When you're in that room, and think about it, it's not a big room. This is the ninth floor office. Every square inch of the carpet, people are on their... Kneeling on their knees because there isn't even room to sit down Indian style. Everyone's crammed in there. It really is like a scene. They're about to go into battle, and you can feel the tension. It's thrilling. That's obviously what drives the adrenaline and the magic in the show, that tension. Because many people have critiqued it over the years and said, Wait a minute, why don't we just pick the actual seven sketches on Wednesday? And then we don't have to have this whole hunger game as rigmarole. But I think Lauren knows that keeping that creative tension and the competition, that that is good for creativity.

Well, one thing that was, and I never really thought about it correctly until I read what you wrote, but I never thought all the factors. I would always think like, he'll just pick the seven funniest things. But the stuff he's weighing about, is this cast member in the cast too much? Did the audience respond in the dress rehearsal? Or are we going to have the right amount of energy in this part of the show. He's on some different plane that it seems like only he can see this, which makes me wonder how anybody can take that job after him, even though he's 80. But how do you come in? There are all these other factors beyond just what's funny, what's not funny. Now, maybe somebody would just approach it completely differently and be fine, but I just hadn't thought about it before.

Yeah, it's Steve Higgens calls it like five-dimensional chess. He's thinking, Do I keep the host happy? Do I make sure... Like the show I was at, I think one of the reasons that one of the sketches got canned is just because it was these huge movie theater seats. They were just too damn hard to get in and out of the doors. So like, Next. It's like $20,000 down the drain the moment they say, no, thanks.

Exactly.

Or does someone have time to get the prosthetic head on? There's so many things that all week, this probably is a decisive management voice. One of the things that's so cool is that all week long, Lorne is soliciting opinions from everybody, and not just the writers and the cast, but the costume assistants, the pages. He wants to hear from everybody. He likes to think of it as an egalitarian enterprise that everyone is as necessary as everybody else. I know that sometimes in meetings, even, he has a sheet of paper and he'll jot down every time someone has spoken because he wants to make sure everybody in the room says something. Then so he's metabolizing all those points of view all week. Then there's a moment after the dress rehearsal when he walks up this little cinder block staircase. It's like the least glamorous place in the building up to his office. I just thought of this now. It's almost like, do you watch Severance? You know how they go in the elevator and then they go… It's like he goes up the staircase and he becomes the other guy. Then he's in his office. And suddenly, he's not thinking about what everybody else says.

It's just him.

The whole week is about him peaking for that hour leading up, making sure he's fresh.

He becomes Superman, and then he's the decider. Everything that comes out of his mouth, it's him, it's him, it's him, it's him. It's him. It's him. It's him. To see that transformation, it's really interesting.

Well, one of the great things about that week you spent with the show was the show that's in dress rehearsal and then the sketch that gets bumped is this Beavis and Butthead sketch that they couldn't figure out. Then they ended up doing it with Ryan Gosling last season. It's one of the best shows of the decade. It's like, holy shit, that's the same sketch. It was dead for five years and came back.

I know. I remember I remember thinking, Louis O'Kerrion, the amazing makeup and prosthetics guy, he worked all week on those heads. Lauren wasn't completely getting it. First, he said, Oh, I feel like it's just cone heads Ducks. Then he also didn't understand why Jona kept being in profile, which he thought looked really awkward. Then somebody had to say, No, in Beavis and Bud head, you always see him in profile. But it just wasn't really gelling. But yes, kudos to the staff that they hung on to that.

They must have 10 of those a year where they're like, I can't believe he didn't pick that one. Let's just save it and circle it back.

Well, I saw it in dress, and I'll tell you, it was a whole lot better when Gozling did it.

Right. Yeah, there's reasons he didn't do it.

But another thing that was fun to learn, I didn't know that the Cowbell sketch existed before Walkin, and that they did it. They tried to do it when Norm McDonald hosted. And yet you can see, can you imagine anyone but Walkin doing that now? No.

Right. Well, going through the years, one thing I appreciated was he was really, really grateful for some cast members that popped up at the right times. The guy that he really effusively praised was Dana Carby, who I still feel like is the most underrated star of the 50 years. I do, too. He doesn't get mentioned in the Mount Rushmore, but he should. He was basically... Lauren has these different quotes. He was like, This guy was a machine. This guy could do everything. We We were able to ride him for the late '80s, basically. It seems like he felt that way about Ackerman. He felt that he wasn't there for Eddie Murphy, but Eddie's in there. Will Farrell was like that. Was there anybody else that he talked about where it was just clear Lauren was like, This is a Mount Rushmore guy for me or lady?

I think Phil Hartman, definitely. All of these people you just mentioned, they're actors. They're really in it. Somebody described Ackroyd as the guy who zipped himself into a character and disappear into it. Very different from the way Balushi performed, which is he's always a Balushi-esque character.

He's a force of nature. Well, you had that great thing about Ackroyd, about how if they needed to do the sketch in three minutes instead of three and a half, he would talk faster to make them move it along.

That's right. I think that among the women, I think- Kristen Wig has to be, right? Kristen Wig, definitely. One of the things that's amazing about Kristen Wig, and when I started watching rewatching the shows more carefully, you see that what she does that's different from a lot of comedy performers is her acting, everything she does is so small. She does so much with less, just little movements of her eyes or Even if you look at her Denise character with the forehead, it's so subtle.

Hater said once to me that the unbelievable thing about her was every single character she ever did was slightly different different than there was no like, Oh, I'll do this, and I'll just have a wig on. It was like each thing was slightly different than the other thing. She was just inventing new people each time, which they were like, How does she do that?

Yeah, no, I think definitely. I think Kate McKinnon And then it's a great actor. I think Jan Hooks was just incredible. She also tends to... I mean, of course, she got it too soon.

She got shoved under the rug. Yeah, I'm with you. I did my all-time cast, and she was the one... That was one one of the toughest cuts for me because I just feel like for four or five years, she was amazing and could do anything. I also like the people that can sing and perform and do sketches and do characters. There's some total package thing that I think only a few of them have really pulled off.

One of the things that I loved getting, because I hadn't really gotten it until I spent a whole lot of time there, is that the thing is that all of them, at the end of the day, they're just theater kids. They're all people who did Guys and Dolls in high school. Even like Lauren, there's a bit in the book where Lorraine Newman described how once she was with him in the '70s and she just had a bad breakup. Lorne launched into that song from West Side Story, Forget That Boy. I have two daughters who are theater kids, so I'm very familiar with this type. But all of them, I remember seeing Colin Firth interviewed once about how much he loved doing the scene in Abba where he's in the jumpsuit and the platform shoes because everybody was an actor, they just want to do that. It was also very interesting to hear Lorne talk about But just to see with all of them how the audience is always projecting onto SNL. They want it to be a political show or an anarchist collective or whatever. But it's really show business. It's just show business. That's why often when you see these scenes shot backstage, you'll look down the hall and you'll see a couple of showgirls, a man dressed as Abe Lincoln and a llama.

It's like that scene. I don't know if you're as much of a Beatles nut as I am, but in Hard Day's Night, there's that scene in the theater where John Lennon is going down the stairs and he runs into a showgirl with a headdress. Yeah, even the Beatles, it's just showbiz. There's something I love about that.

We're going to take a break and come back, and I want to talk about Lauren as Confucius.

Okay.

All right. Lauren as Confucius, which seems to be a recurring theme with everybody who's been in his orbit. He just dropped shit. I took down some couple of things from your book that I screenshotted. He was talking about Balushi taking Chevy Chase's overnight Fame the Hardest. He said there's a certain person who, if they're not famous by 26, they're going to burst into flames, which I thought was like, Yeah, he's probably seen that, too. These people that come on the show when they're so anxious to have it all happen. But it seems like he seems to feel like, except for the rare exceptions like Carvie, you almost need two years on the show before you can become who you are. What did you find out when you're researching the book? What's the arc of a cast member to actually be really good on this show?

Well, I think he really likes and respects the ones who come in there and survey the scene and figure out, Okay, this is how I can be effective here. Plenty of them, and again, they're young. There's no orientation. There's no instruction packet. It's sink or swim. You have to figure out, Okay, who can write for me? Who can I write with? How am I going to get on the air? The ones who can sort that out are the ones who are really going to make it.

Yeah. Well, then there's someone like Kristen comes in, and she's just immediately, you could tell- She just knows how to do it. She's going to be on the show for seven years.

There are a few shortcuts. This with Billy Murray. When he started on the show in the second season, he had a good first show, and then he just disappeared. People didn't like him. Audience didn't like him because they thought he was a Chevy replacement, and he wasn't so cute as Chevy. But he was playing second cop parts. Lauren and he devised this idea that Billy would come on the show behind a desk and just address the audience and just say, Hey, I'm not cutting it here. I don't know. What's the matter? People, Are you like me? And he talked about his dead father and everything But that did it. He connected with the audience. They really liked him, and he was in. That began this tradition of one of the time-honoured ways that new cast members get their footing is to go on weekends and update as themselves and say their name into the camera. I mean, think of Adam Sandler when he did his first Thanksgiving song. He was not really thriving so much on the show, but then he came in, he was himself. He looked like himself. He did his A funny little song.

Everybody knew, Oh, I know that guy now. The week I was there- Eddie Murphy did that, too.

It's Rahma Duhl-Muhammed. The first time he did that, that was it. He took off.

That works. The week I was there, Melissa Villaseñor had one on update and that she broke through. There are a lot of different shortcuts. Some people are just so good at it. Look at Tina Thompson, who's been there forever. I think he recognizes it as a good thing. Lauren Lauren will often say that people's agents and managers are the menace because they'll suddenly start getting like movie offers and they'll say, Hey, get out of this place. You got to leave. It's time to leave. Lauren does a lot of sidebar conversations with these people. What he says, another one of his co-ends, is let them build a bridge that's strong enough so they can walk across it and walk away.

Yeah, that was another Lauren Confucius thing.

Yeah. There are so many of them. Some of them, what I love is some of them actually can't figure out what the hell I mean. Writers and cast spend years talking about them. The one that a lot of people mention to me is something he would say, Well, there's people who build a house, and there's people who buy the house, and you have to figure out which one you are. Everyone is like, What the hell does that mean?

What does that mean? But if I'm both?

I don't feel no.

You had the This is another one. We just talked about Chevy Chase. He said, The idea that you could feel things for somebody and then you run out of it, I realized some people burn out of relationships. He said that about He said that about a family member, but he was talking about Timmy Chase. Sometimes the professional relationship, it just is what it is. It's supposed to be four, five, six years, and then it's over. It's like real life.

You You have to walk away. Yeah. I think it was when he started the show and had the original Not Ready for Primetime players, they were just supposed to be in the background. Nobody was supposed to become a star. No one was supposed to become famous. When suddenly, Chevy was famous and he was on the cover of New York magazine, that totally messed up the ecosystem. It was a loss of innocence, to use one of Lauren's favorite terms, and everyone got jealous.

The fame back then, too. It's 30 million people watching the show, potentially on a Saturday night. It's just a different level.

It was very painful for him to see this tribe, this family fractured. But when Chevy did go, it was painful as it was. Again, this was one of these lessons that he had to internalize. He realized, Okay, this is going to happen again and again and again. He inured himself to it. But he also realized that like George Steinbrenner or like any sports team, you have to keep bringing in rookies. You have to seed the team. That's something he learned the hard way. But that's how he's kept it going for 50 years. They're always a new people.

I think that's one of the reasons I connect with the whole structure of this show because it's a lot like sports.

Yes.

You have to constantly think about like, All right, this person's taken off. I probably only have them for two more years. Now I got to develop a bench behind them. Another thing that I loved, I should mention this three minutes ago, but his hatred of agents, and managers and how just their agenda doesn't align. All they're doing is just trying to get whoever the most amount of money possible. They don't care about career, they don't care about relationships, and how he tries to navigate that. But it's one of the few things he can't hide his contemp for, which is these people.

I think somewhere in at least one place, he says in the book, Agents are morons. The thing they all hate more than anything is when agents get tickets to the show and they're getting the audience. People have told me, because they're so jaded. You want to be real fans. You don't want an agent. You'll look up at the balcony and you'll see a bunch of CAA agents send their dates asleep.

They're half asleep.

More stuff. But about this Steinbredder thing, I found myself wondering if this had something to do with your affinity for the show. Lauren, he is a sports guy. He loves the Yankees, goes to the Knicks, he's a big hockey guy, and he uses a lot of sports metaphors all the time. He uses a lot of baseball metaphors. When Will Farrell was talking to me about Lauren's style, he said, Lauren, he's like a baseball manager. He knows you got to keep the highs not too high and the lows not too low because it's a long season. A lot of people use sports talk to talk about how the show works. The other thing people say is that the closest thing to SNL on television, because it's live, is sports.

Yeah. Well, yeah, it's a It's a live sporting event. You had stuff in there about how a compliment from him is rare. So when you get one, it means something. But the cast members that succeed the best, I've talked about this, it's like a basketball team where when you play basketball, ball. It's not just about, Oh, clear out, I'm going to score. You're trying to make other people better. You're trying to connect with people. You're trying to move without the ball and set pics. Those are the people that always do best on the show. Here's another Lauren quote, The trouble of the thankless job is that no one thanks you. But you could put this shit in like fortune cookies.

I know. Wow, that's a great marketing idea. The paperback.

He talked about why he's devoted to the show. When it takes every ounce of my strength to get it on, and there's nothing but resistance, and nobody seems to give a fuck, then I want out because you can only give up your life for something greater than you. So far, it's been worth it. Now he's 80, and he's still giving up his life for the show. But there's other reasons for that, The moment he's not running SNL, you're not getting your calls returned in quite the same way. There's a power that comes with the show that I think he's aware of.

I think it's so much his whole life and his whole personality. I don't think he's going to leave there unless it's on a stretcher. He always says that if producing is done well, you leave no fingerprints. That's true. That's why he's been behind the curtain all these years. But at the same time, his fingerprints are on everything. Every one of them has absorbed his gospel and his sense of values about the show, and not just about the show, but about how to live their lives. In addition to all of his comedy rules and axioms, he teaches them how to live, how to live in New York, how to order in a restaurant.

He's paying for new teeth for cast members and all kinds of things.

The gifts he gives are so... People have told me, Oh, he gave me this really great luggage or Simon glassware, and you feel like he's ushering them into the good life. I was with Jim Downey once when he opened this box. It was an Hermes big orange box. It was an Hermes sweater for his birthday. He was so intimidated by it. He googled it and saw how expensive it was. He said, I have to get a safety deposit box for this. Right. He wanted to wear it.

He had a story that you have in the book that I'd never heard about when Ray Charles was on the show. He was going to be reunited with all these people that he had done all this great stuff with. And he's like, Are you excited to see them? And Ray Charles said, Most of them owe me money. He wasn't excited at all. And he's like, All right, I'm going to tuck that story away, too. Exactly. Down the road, these special relationships I allegedly have might not be so special 20 years from now.

Yeah. I mean, again, that's to keep the highs not too high, the lows not too low. There's a way in which all these people, they are his family members. He's recreated the family that he lost when his father suddenly died when he was a child. But it's also business. I mean, he walks this very fine line.

Right. Well, and also when he stopped doing SNL after the first five years, you have a thing about, the phone's not quite ringing the same way. There's some Conan O'Brien stuff in this book that I've believed and felt for a while that you really got into. Not like in a New York Post, page 6 way, but it was that he was the one person. He did the show and he moved to LA, and he left Lauren out of it, which has been atypical for everybody who's passed through the universe. It seemed a little chilly. Could you feel that when you were reporting it?

I did feel that. I thought there was so much regret surrounding it. I wanted to jump in and say- On both sides? I think so. I think there was real pain. I mean, Conan is always the first to say that if Lauren Michiels hadn't looked at him at one point in said, You. He would never have had this. And think about it, but Konan wasn't even a performer. He was a writer. He could get a writer like this and give him this huge platform. The thing that's so sweet about it is, I think there's I think there was a bit of a road not taken aspect of that for Lorne, because he started out as a comedy writer who maybe wanted to perform. And Lorne exalts writers.

But became a really fun performer on the show in his own weird way, which you covered nicely. He became a character somehow.

Right. I think the Lorne character is this big a character as Church Lady. Yeah. He gave the keys to the kingdom to Conan. I think Most people in the business feel that Conan in his camp made a tactical error when they did not insist that Lauren be made executive producer of The Tonight Show in LA.

But they also broke the rule where he found out from somebody else, not them, which seems like the one way to really cross Lauren.

I know those guys. I went to college with Konan. I know Jeff Ross, his manager. I do think they have some regret about it. They were very young. They were very caught up in it. These big shots of NBC were saying to them, No, you don't need Lauren Michael.

You're going to do it in LA. You don't need Lauren. He's in New York.

It was this activist NBC management at that time who didn't really... They wanted to elbow Lauren off the stage. But as Jeff told me, and I quote him in the book saying, You know what? We didn't jump in front of the truck for Lauren, so why should Lauren have jumped in front of the truck for us? Lauren would never have admitted having his feelings it's heard or that they should have done it differently. But everyone in his camp feels like it was a faux pas.

Well, and I said this at the time when all that was happening because we were doing podcasts about it. I just don't think what happens to Konan happens if Lauren's He was too powerful and he meant too much to MBC. The whole Lena, it just wouldn't have happened. I think Konan is protected.

It was a disaster. But the beautiful thing at this point is, Konan is now king of podcasts. He's just doing so great. I'm so happy that Konan has landed where he has. He and Lauren are in very good terms. It was great to see Konan at the anniversary show. I think there's a lot of real Real honest, ongoing affection between the two of them.

A couple of other things that I loved. When he brought Rob Lowe in for Wayne's World, he likes to hire people who have just had a flop because they work twice as hard. Who else would think like that?

Absolutely right. It's true. Who would have thought of that? No, because that was right after the sex tape. Rob Lowe was in disgrace.

Konan said about Lauren, This is to you. A lot of people, myself included, think that Lauren has a secret, and Lauren has made a career out of letting people think he has a secret. I think Lauren's real secret was to communicate to me, You have to figure out this show. He's basically saying, I actually don't think Lauren has a secret, but he'll have a really good thought starter that you can then take and run with it. That's how I interpreted that, right?

I think so, too. But I think also it's that Lauren has, unconsciously or not, cultivated this mystery and power that makes Does everybody want his good opinion, want to do good work for him. That is the secret. It's this power that he holds over these people.

That they just trust his take on If he's really passionate about one thing, they'll trust him.

Yeah. I mean, Jon Hamm told me that there isn't a day that goes by where he doesn't think, What would Lauren do? He curbs the impulse to pick up the phone and call Lauren and ask him over when it's really important. But a lot of these people live their lives that way.

You had a lot in the book about the imitation game with Lauren, which has started like, God only knows since the '70s and how aware Lauren is of it and how many different iterations they were and all these different... The writers would have their thing, and then Bill Hater would have his thing, and it would just go on, and Carvie, and all that stuff. Lauren just seems like he's fine with it, right? Because you make fun of the boss. That's what happens.

One of the funny things Lauren said about it to me, he said, Yeah, it's the most American thing there is making fun of the boss. And then he said, Of course, they don't really do it much in Canada because nobody's that successful there. But yeah, see, that is consistent with another one of his many theorems, which is the infinite monkey theorem, which is how he views the essence of comedy writing. It's that old joke about you put a thousand monkeys in a room with a bunch of typewriters and eventually, one of them will write Hamlet. There was a '60s comic named Stanley Myron Handleman who changed that joke to say, Put the monkeys in the room with the typewriters. I went back a couple hours later, and they were just fooling around. Lauren thinks that there's this incredible wisdom in that, and that that's what you do with comedy writers. That's why you have them writing all night long when their defenses are down, when maybe they're drunk.

Their guard is down.

Fatigue is your friend, he'll say. Because you want them to be at their goofiest. You don't want to be too self-conscious when you're writing comedy. You want to really... It's like pure id, I guess. I think he recognizes that all that time they spend making fun of him It's like lubrication for comedy. It loosens them up. Paul Appell even said, It helps you deal with the fear, the fear of Lauren and the fear that you're not going to get on the air. It makes you just loosen up. Again, he's smart enough manager of people to know that if that works for them, fine. He also told me, and I wish I pushed harder on this, he said that he does this, too, that he's a really good mimic of the people of the show. He just does it at home.

But never really- Oh, interesting. Just to family members?

I guess. That's volume two.

When do you think he realized that he was just going to be on the show and this was it? Like, what year? It was somewhere between probably late '80s, early '90s where he just, All right, this is my life. This is what I'm doing.

Well, I think a real turning point came after 9/11. Because the whole '90s, the mid '90s were a terrible time for him with almost getting fired by Don Ulmire. Then the show picked up steam with all the great political debate stuff that Jim Downey wrote and everything. Then 9/11, it was the moment that I think the show emerged as an important American institution And a New York institution, too, simultaneously.

It brought it back to its roots.

It was the first time in my life that America seemed to like New York, right? Yeah. And New York suddenly was trying to bump that again.

Even me, I hate New York. I remember rooting for the Yankees in the playoff, hoping they'd get one for the city.

The way he conceived of that moment with the firefighters and Mayor Giuliani, pretty disgrace, and had Paul Simon sing that song. He just had this producer's knack for navigating that moment, doing something that was so beautiful and profound and also funny. I mean, as he says in the latter part of my book when he's talking about doing the COVID show, the show has to show up, and you have to demonstrate, remind viewers that there's a decency to the show. I think that it was that moment that the show and Lauren himself just were... It was a Hall of Fame moment. They weren't going anywhere. They've never really been under threat since then.

It's interesting because when they missed the moment, which I think you wrote in the book, though, after Trump got elected, the way they started the show, it just didn't work. I didn't think it worked in the moment. I think people behind the scenes didn't feel like it worked. Now, I don't think anybody looks back and thinks, Oh, what a great moment.

Some people told me, Oh, I love Kate McKinnon singing that song. But I I thought it was wet. I thought it was…

It just didn't work.

Some people liked it. But again, the reason I thought that was interesting is because it showed how finely calibrated his ability to deal with the millennial sensibilities on his staff are. He knew he had to give them something. They wanted to do this. He didn't like it, but he let them have it. It reminded me, a funny anecdote that I love in the book is I'm walking with him through the Leader district. We passed the Mean Girls Marquis. That's the show he produced with Tina Faye. He was disappointed because his friend Margaret Trudeau was in town, and he got her tickets for that night. He was angry because the lead actress had called in sick that day because her dog had eaten glue and she had to take the dog to the vet, so she wasn't going to be in the show. Lauren just shook his head and he said, If it was Patti Lepone's dog, it would be dead. He The idea that... Because he's a real showbiz guy. The show must go on. The fact that his friend, Mark Crudeau, was going to have to see an understudy, didn't like it.

A couple of other things. You were talking about Ian Beats when she came back for the anniversary show. He's saying, Oh, her career didn't go the way maybe she thought it was going to go. He said, You were like so many others who started the show, Beats, Michael said, didn't understand heat. They didn't understand that you're hot about two or three years, and if nothing else happens, you go to the back of the line again, which it seems like he was painfully aware of with himself, too, right?

That's just what... Yeah, he learned that after the first five years. Again, he's just like this guy. He's got this lesson book that he and he remembers. Think about the rest of us and so many people we know, we repeat our mistakes. We do the same thing over and over. He doesn't. He somehow learns from his mistakes.

What's the most fair criticism you heard from him from the people who were interviewing, that was a recurring criticism- Of him? About him. Yeah.

Gee, let me think. I think that there are people who just feel that sometimes his aloofness can actually be cruel and cold. There are definitely people who feel that way. There are the same number of people who say, When my wife got sick, he called and fixed the insurance. It's It's both.

He paid for funerals. He paid for Michael McDonahee's funeral, even though O'Donahee, even though he didn't like him.

But I do think that that icy management thing, which there's the book deals in it. I think mostly that peaked in the '90s. You have Bob Odenkirk moaning about why the hell is this guy in charge and everything. But at the same time, Odenkirk and Lauren are now good friends. What there's a lot of in Lauren's life, the way people in 12-step programs make amends. Lauren gets a lot of letters from people 30 years later saying, I can't believe I was such a jerk when I worked for you. Now I know how hard your job is because I've had to be a director or manage people.

Well, you're dealing with the ambitious people in their 20s and 30s. I look back at some of the stuff I did way back when I'm like, God damn it, why did I do that? I'm sure they have a lot of those moments, especially a pressure cooker where it's hunger games every week. Everyone pitted against each other. He said, You have this near the end. You can't spend the last half of your life watching the first half of your life, which is how he felt about nostalgia. Is that one of the reasons he's still working at age 80?

I think that's true. I think these anniversary shows mean a lot to him, but he isn't on a nostalgia trip. He is really in the moment. He's never like, Oh, those were the days. It was better than. I I think he probably thinks that the utility of all the fanfare over the '50th is to get more viewers for the '51 and '52 season. He's always charging ahead. He's thinking about the next cast. Earlier this season, I was talking to him about how this current cast is really big. It's a big cast again. It's too big. He said something like, Yeah, well, it always takes two or three years for the new cast to settle. It just struck me that as he's about to settle 50th. He's thinking ahead. He's thinking about making the cast work. I think that's part of the secret of it. He doesn't look back. Again, why it was all the more special that when I talked to him right after the 40th, he was in this rare sweet spot of thinking about the past and the future and his legacy. I think there's a lot of warmth in him that he's letting come to the surface a a little bit more now.

That is lovely.

Well, the biggest thing that's helped him is that there hasn't been a kick-ass threat competitor to come in. I always thought Netflix... I just can't believe Netflix hasn't challenged him yet, but I think it's because Sarandos loves the show so much. He just doesn't want to challenge Lauren.

Serandos loves the show. Sarandos is one of those guys who sends him a Father's Day greeting. But it'll be interesting to see, right? Sarandos is behind this new Netflix's first foray into late night television with the John Mulaney show coming.

And Comedy, too. They have this whole Netflix as a joke week out here. The one thing that's missing is an SNL type show, but I just don't think they're doing it until Lauren leaves.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think at this point, there's so many issues of respect and karma that nobody's going to try to nudge him off the stage that way.

Well, congrats on the book. I had you for an hour. I could have gone longer.

It was really fun.

I thought it was so enjoyable because I'm so fascinated by him. But the management and perspective on success and loyalty and all that stuff, I just thought it was really cool. I love the way he laid it out. The behind-the-scene stuff with that Joan Hills show was just awesome. As a diehard SNL person, I thought it was so interesting.

Well, and once I got to really know all those personalities, just to see somebody... I just did Lawrence O'Donnell's show, and he said it was like the office, like a workplace comedy. Just seeing the way he would manipulate Colin goes this way and the way he would get Jona Hill to not to shut up and the way he was just like. It's really interesting to watch.

Well, congrats. Go get the book.

Thank you.

Thank you. Good to see you. All right, that's it for the podcast. Thanks to Kyle Mann and Susan Morison. Thanks to Kyle, Gehow, and Sourudi. As always, don't forget, you can watch this as a video on Spotify. You can watch it on YouTube on the Bill Simmons' YouTube channel. You can watch all of our rewatchable stuff on the Ringer Movies channel. We have Celtic City Get ready Monday night, March third, HBO and Max, Episode 1, a nine-week journey about the Celtics and basketball in America and Boston and life. That's happening. Enjoy the weekend. I'll see you with Rosillo on Sunday afternoon. We're going to tape, I think, right after the Denver Celtics game, which should be a barn burner. Enjoy the weekend. See you then.

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