The Future of ESPN: An Interview With Jim Miller

Jim Miller is the author of multiple best-selling books and the creative force behind the Origins podcast. In this bonus episode of MarketFoolery, host Chris Hill chats with Miller about the future of SNL, ESPN, Origins, and more.

Saturday Night Live's long-standing success has been due in large part to the loving and whip-smart attention of Lorne Michaels, but what happens to the show if and when he leaves? ESPN has faced just a bit of a rough patch recently, and some of the channel's recent moves could really help or hamper their future success. Also, Miller shares an inside look at the origin of Origins and a bit of a sneak peek at where the show is headed over the long term. Tune in to find out more.

A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on April 20, 2018. 

Chris Hill: Hey there! I'm Chris Hill, coming to you from Fool global headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia with a bonus episode of MarketFoolery. If this is your first time listening, thanks for checking out this podcast. Normally, MarketFoolery is me and one or two of Motley Fool's analysts, and we talk about a few stories from the world of business and investing. But for this episode, I wanted to share the complete conversation I had this week with Jim Miller, unedited. 

Hey, speaking of unedited! I just wanted to say a quick word about yesterday's episode with Tim Hanson, a version of which was inadvertently published, and it included some pre-game conversation between me and Tim. If you were among the small number of listeners who caught that version, I must apologize, because it turns out I dropped a couple of f-bombs. Thank you, by the way, to the listeners who quickly hit me up on Twitter and said, "Hey, did you mean to publish that? I don't think you did." So, we pulled it down immediately and we published the correct version, but still, about 2-3% of our dozens of listeners got the unedited, uncut version. Again, I understand if that was a surprise or a shock, and I completely understand if the language was offensive to you personally, so, I'm very sorry about that. 

I'm guessing some people were, maybe, a little upset by what they heard. Then again, it also appears that there were some people who were delighted by what they heard, based on the comments that I got on social media. From Jim Taylor, who wrote, "Love the unedited pre-show planning conversation. Best MarketFoolery ever." Scott [...], "You guys should do a raw episode like that once a quarter at least." From Brian Bishop, "Kicking off podcast with a few minutes of a hot mic and some f-bombs. It's a bold move, cotton. Let's see if it works out." And from Greg [...], "I would love to hear more of the pre-episode meetings."

I appreciate that. Brian, you can pretty much never go wrong quoting the movie Dodgeball, so, thank you for that. Despite the enthusiasm and the support, you really shouldn't expect to hear that again. We will be doing more bonus episodes this year, but not like that. Let's get to this bonus episode, which is Jim Miller.

Yesterday, producer Dan Boyd and I went to Jim's hotel in D.C. He was in town for a couple of days. And I'm glad that he was able to make some time for us, because he had a bunch of things going on. We talked for half an hour, and I could have talked with Jim Miller for two hours, at least. He's smart, he's a great writer, a great storyteller, and he's curious, which is one of my favorite qualities in a person. 

Jim, if you're unfamiliar with him, he has written best-selling books about ESPN and Saturday Night Live, among others. He created one of my favorite podcasts, which is Origins. Season one was about the hit HBO show Curb Your Enthusiasm. Season two was about ESPN. We talked about that as well, along with a whole bunch of other topics. So, here's my full conversation with Jim Miller.

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My wife said, "Hey, this weekend, there's a local organization that's collecting a bunch of books, and I want to start to get rid of some of the books in our house." We have a lot of books. "So, just start thinking about books that you want to keep it." So, last night, actually, I was looking at the bookshelf and I saw Live From New York.

Jim Miller: Did you get rid of it?

Hill: No. [laughs] No! I was like, "Oh, no! I'm keeping this one." I remember getting that. I got it as a gift. It was either Christmas or my birthday or something like that, and I didn't know anything about the book, and I'm a fan of Saturday Night Live, so I just thought, "Oh, this is nice!" And then, I started reading it, and I just plowed right through it.

Miller: Oh, that's great to hear.

Hill: I was actually telling Dan on the way over here, one of the things I always tell people about that book, whenever I'm like, "Oh, if you like Saturday Night Live, you should read this book," is Lorne Michaels and how he just hovers over the entire universe of Saturday Night Live. And how, one of the things I love in that book is how you have people who say, "Well, Lorne Michaels might tell you differently, but the way I remember this is XYZ." And then you have other people who are more divided. It's their version of, "I don't give a damn what Lorne Michaels tells you, this is how it happened." So, I guess my first question is, are you at all surprised -- because, that was nearly 20 years ago, you started working on that book -- are you at all surprised that that show is still as relevant as it is, and that he, in his mid-70s, is still overseeing the whole thing?

Miller: I'm not surprised at all, because I think that, as Lorne's career has expanded -- people remember, he was involved with 30 Rock, he's done lots of movies, he has Broadway Video, which is a big major media enterprise. Saturday Night Live has always been the favorite child. It's not a level playing field. In fact, he's executive producer of Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, and they're all produced inside 30 Rock, but there's no question where he spends the majority of his time and the majority of his focus. 

I think that, as long as Lorne is there and dedicated to SNL, SNL will be relevant. And in fact, I expect Lorne to be there until the 50th anniversary, and he will be 80. My money is on him. He's not going to leave. I would bet that he'll be there for that 50th anniversary special. What he does after that, I'm not sure, but I can't imagine him going back, in part because he loves it so much and he has figured out a way, sometimes through happenstance and sometimes through just strategic decisions, to understand how to remain relevant. Look, the show went on in 1975. If you were just to be constant in that kind of milieu and in that kind of period, that show would be long forgotten. But you can watch, over the course of the timeline of SNL, the things that he does and the things that happen on that show that, not only just because the cast is regenerating itself, but just, in terms of some of the structural components of the show, like digital shorts all of the sudden, like, another way to extend the viewership, he's been a master at that.

Hill: One of the things we talk about at our company and on our shows is about CEO succession, and how difficult that is for companies to pull off well. Lorne Michaels is going to leave such a massive vacuum when he finally decides to hang up his spurs.

Miller: It's one of the big questions in the building. I think, look, there are a couple of scenarios, which is that Lorne is so inextricably linked to the DNA of SNL and what it wants to be that a lot of people think, how can there be an SNL without Lorne? He was gone for five years, from 1980 to 1985. And if it wasn't for Eddie Murphy, there wouldn't be an SNL right now. It was difficult. And that's no disrespect to Dick Ebersol and Jean Doumanian, who were executive producers during his absence.

I think there's another school of thought, though, that says it has to continue. The hard thing is, because Lorne wears so many different hats, and because he understands the show as intimately and intensely ... look, the bottom line is, I think personally, the only person that could take over would be Tina Fey. I think it would be great to have a woman doing that. I think that Tina encompasses all the qualities that would be needed. The question becomes, she has such an amazing career, she has now Broadway and she has movies and television shows and everything else. Would she want to do that? I think NBC would have to offer, literally have lineup of Brink's armored cars with cash, just to even start the conversation. Not that money is the sole determination, but they would certainly have to --

Hill: It helps, though.

Miller: -- incentivize her... yes, I heard money helps. But, I just don't think of anybody else out there that has the combination of qualities. It's more than just running a show.

Hill: Let's talk about ESPN.

Miller: I've heard of it.

Hill: [laughs] There are obviously a lot of things about ESPN the business that are important to the Walt Disney Company (DIS -0.83%). But it seems like, at this moment in time, the two most public-facing ones are the streaming app -- and, maybe this is one of those situations where the profile of this other enterprise is bigger than the actual business impact, but I'm curious to get your thoughts on it, and it's the new morning show, Get Up! with Mike Greenberg and Michelle Beadle and Jalen Rose. And, I think the combined salary of those, which has gotten a lot of attention, fairly or unfairly, is somewhere in the neighborhood of $15 million.

Miller: A little bit less.

Hill: When you think about --let's just start with the app -- how important is the over-the-top streaming capabilities? How crucial is that for the business of ESPN?

Miller: I'm sure your listeners are familiar with it, given their financial acumen, but let's start with the fact that over a period of four years, ESPN has lost about 12 million households. And these are households that are averaging about $7.70 a month. So, if you multiply that, it's actually some real money. And I think that the critical question for ESPN and also Disney is, how do you compensate for that? Because prior to that, from 1995 on, remember, when Disney bought Cap City's ABC, ESPN was this little gem off to the side. And they were able to engineer seven years of 20% increases compounded. People forget what the word compounded means. It's just ridiculous. And with that money, Disney bought Pixar and --

Hill: Marvel.

Miller: Marvel, and yada yada yada. The only problem is that, I don't think, from a strategic planning point of view, they understood though that that windfall, or that economic equation, wasn't going to continue forever. So, all of the sudden it's like, "Wait a second, college kids are graduating. They're moving into apartments and they're not calling the cable company. They have Roku, they have Apple TV, they have all these things." So, you started to see that decline in the base. 

So, the short answer is, OTT is a vital artery for both ESPN and ABC. They have maybe $5 a month coming in for ESPN+, and they need to get subscribers to it. And in order to get subscribers, you have to say, what's your value proposition to them? And their value proposition right now is to come up with unique content that's going to make one pay it. I mean, look, we're paying Netflix (NFLX -0.62%), we're paying Hulu, we're paying this, we're paying that. We've gotten into a very big à la carte world, which we thought we wouldn't have years ago, right? It was just this big bundle, and we didn't have all these other offshoots, and we were just paying one thing, and we were complaining about it. And now it's like, wait a second, when the Lord wants the answers to your prayers, he punishes you, because it's like $12 here, $15 here, whatever. So, while $5 may not seem like a lot, it's another charge. 

ESPN, I think, it's not a do or die proposition, but because it's visible and because OTT is such an important mechanism for the future, I think they have to make it work. And I think you're going to start to see some highly marketable acquisition rights that are going to be dedicated to ESPN+. So, it might be, let's say, something like UFC. And it's like, "Wait a second, I'm a UFC fan, I want that. Oh, that's not going to be here? OK, you know what, I'm going to sign up there." That's the hope. And they should deliver that.

The other part of your question, I think, is equally as interesting. When you think about ESPN, more than $12 billion revenue going to Disney every year, it's gigantic. They still have 8,000 employees -- well, technically not now, since the reorg, and you have technology reporting to Burbank. But, I think that Get Up! is one of those things that has happened to ESPN, where because it's so visible, because people like you are talking about, "Wait a second, look at all these salaries. It's three hours a day, five days a week. 15 hours of programming," look, they can't afford for it not to succeed, because one of the things that ESPN has to say to future talent, let's say there's somebody that they really want at Fox, NBC or CBS, two years from now, and this is a person who wants to have their own show or whatever. ESPN needs to be able to look them in the face and say, "We know how to do this in this day and age. We know how to create a show, we know how to market it, we know how to distribute it. You know what? You're safe with us."

Greenberg is good at what he does. Michelle is good at what she does. Jalen is good at what he does. So, you have to make that show work. I think that it's kind of been unfair that people have focused so much on the ratings early on. I think a show like this, it's not born like a beautiful baby right away on day one. You have to get it on its feet, you have to massage it, you have to think about what works, you have to work on the rhythm between the three of them, just from a pure producing point of view. So, I'm tempted to give it more time. 

But I do think, by the beginning of the football season, this needs to be operating on eight cylinders. I think the audience has every right to expect that. I think Disney has every right to expect that. And I think that they probably have until the end of the Super Bowl, in terms of runway and margin for error. Then, if by some chance it's great, great. And, if by some chance it's not by the end of the Super Bowl, then, somebody has to do some major thinking, some major decisions.

Hill: As a Walt Disney shareholder, how should I feel about James Pitaro, the new head of ESPN?

Miller: You should feel like there's much stronger connection between Bristol, Connecticut, ESPN's headquarters, and Burbank. John Skipper, I think he was a loyal employee to Bob Iger, but I think he was a bit of a rebel. I think there were certain things that Skipper disagreed with, Skipper and Iger didn't agree on, and I think the biggest one there is the NFL. 

ESPN has a $15.3 billion deal with the NFL that's coming up in a couple of years. I believe I'm on terra firma suggesting that Skipper wouldn't have just blindly said, "OK, let's do that again." ESPN now has the fourth worst schedule, right? I mean, when we were growing up, every single team in the NFL had three great stars, at least. Two or three great players, marketable players. There's just not enough great product at the NFL. 

And at the same time that there's not enough great product, they've expanded it. So, Thursday Night Football, which I think is one of the worst inventions since liquid Prell, it's the epitome of greed, and the NFL owners should be ashamed of themselves, because not only is it deleterious to the schedule, but the recovery time for the players, the burgeoning rate of injuries, it's a big bowl of wrong. But, at the same time, they've done it, and they've gotten away with it, and there's Fox paying enormous amounts of money for it. 

So, I think what ESPN is saying is, "Wait, we have Monday Night Football, we're paying $2 billion a year," technically $1.9 plus $100 million for the wildcard, when they get it, "and we have the fourth worst schedule. And that's for 17 weeks of programming. Give me that $1.9 and I'll do something else for 17 weeks. I may not get exactly the number, but here's the real key," which, actually, not to brag, but I broke it in a story for [...] Reporter, ESPN now has distribution agreements that are wholly independent of them having the NFL. So, it used to be, in the late '90s and 2000s, that they were able to garner those monthly subscription rates because they had the NFL. Now, they can actually get that money without having the NFL. Now, that's not to say that certain cable companies wouldn't grab pitchforks and start protesting. But, in terms of the actual language, that's not there anymore. That's a big, big signal to them that they have margin for error and they can be a little bit more creative. 

So, to get back to your question, I'm sorry to be long-winded about this, Pitaro is not going to take on Iger about that like the way Skipper would have.

Hill: In terms of the rights that sports have been able to command from television networks, do you see that continuing to rise the way that it has? Because people have talked about and written about the sports media rights bubble, and it still hasn't popped yet, but at some point, some network is going to completely pass.

Miller: It's one of the great paradoxes, isn't it, Chris? It'd be like me saying, when Amazon hit $100 a share, "Now, this thing has to ... I mean, there's just no way ... "

Hill: [laughs] "How can this go any higher?"

Miller: "How? It's $100 a share, and they're not making any profit!" I, of course, listened to that, and didn't buy any Amazon for my kids college fund, thank you very much. But, the truth is, there is this weird disconnect, which is that we keep on lamenting, and the networks continue to lament, the rising acquisition cost, but there it is. Look at the last NBA deal. It's enough to make you Bolshevik. How was ESPN able to pay that money, and Turner? But at the same time, look at the NBA numbers. And, not to mention the fact that, look, ESPN has 8,760 hours a year to produce. So, at some point, something like baseball's tonnage, it's just great because, four games a week, and three games a week, and whatever, it's like, you just have these live events which further distinguish yourself in the marketplace. 

They've spent over $20 billion on college football in less than a decade. Those Big Ten deals are crazy. And Fox did, too, and Turner spent a bunch of money. And what CBS spent on NCAA and Pac-12 and everything else. So, everybody says it's crazy, but at the same time, what was that joke at the end of Annie Hall? His cousin thinks he's a chicken, and everybody says, he's crazy, right? Yeah, but we need the eggs.

Hill: We need the eggs. [laughs] 

Miller: So, the question becomes -- I think the end of your question is kind of provocative, which is, is there going to be a network that's going to just say "no más?" And I think to a certain degree, CBS and NBC have decided that they're not going to just go blindly for everything, that they can't. Fox seems more willing to do that, although I think their debt threshold is changing. But, as long as that happens, as long as you have all these bidders -- and by the way, you have, now, Silicon Valley coming in, Facebook's starting to do it, Amazon paid for Thursday Night Football. So, in a way, it doesn't even matter just what the four or five competitors are saying, you have these other people that are driving the price up. So, I'm not sure it stops.

Hill: I'm curious, since you mentioned Bob Iger, as you and I are sitting here, earlier this week, Netflix reported their earnings. Their stock continues to rise. And now, Disney's market cap is somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 billion, and Netflix has, in relatively short order, they haven't completely caught up to them, but their market cap is around $130 billion. To what extent, if any, do you think that matters to Bob Iger? To what extent, if any, do you think he's looking at Netflix and watching them creep up, and views them as not just a threat but maybe a primary threat?

Miller: Well, I don't think he's doing it from an eager point of view, but I do think he has fully appreciated what streaming means to the audience. I think it's something, it means to the customers, he wants to be in that business. He's trying to do things to move to that kind of world. He understands that it's here to stay. I think some of his critics may have said, "Why didn't you see that earlier?" But, I think in fairness to Bob, he's arguably one of the great media executives of the past quarter-century, what's he's been able to do since Eisner left. 

So, no one can bat 1,000, no one can anticipate everything. But I think, he isn't going to just sit around with his arms folded and let Netflix ride off into the future, particularly given what we all know, which is that kind of formula, that kind of recipe in the marketplace, is something that the customers have already decided they're good with. They like it, it's comfortable. I was on the treadmill this morning, and on the menu in front of me, there was an option for Netflix. It's not just a TV where you have a little button on your treadmill and you raise the channel or you can go lower. There was Netflix. I mean, that's the way it has seeped into the fabric of our daily life, and the way that people are just used to binging, and they love having it there. Look, they raised their prices $1 a month, nobody noticed.

Hill: Nobody cared.

Miller: It was like, "Are you kidding me? Who cares?" By the way, I don't know if Iger sits around fretting about market cap so much, because, as you know much better than I, in the marketplace, the stock market, there are some crazy market cap stories that, all of the sudden everybody goes, "Wait, why didn't I short that? The market cap was $300 million!" I mean, that's part of the legacy of the late 90s and the crash around 2000. I'm not sure if he pays that much attention to that, but he does pay attention to the business model.

Hill: Pretty soon, the Supreme Court is going to issue a ruling on sports betting. If you're ESPN or Fox Sports, what are you hoping for, what are you preparing for?

Miller: It's like renting a tux, and you're looking at your closet and you have your tux ready, you have the shirt pressed, and you're like, am I going to wear it or not? There are certain companies that already have it on, and they're tying their bow tie, just to push the metaphor a little bit more. I think ESPN has had a somewhat tortured relationship with gambling. It used to be that you couldn't even mention spreads, then they started mentioning spreads. Scott Van Pelt himself on his show was very adept at it. Every once in a while, I love, it's so delicious, where Al Michaels late in the fourth quarter of a Monday Night Football game, there would be a field goal, and he goes, "Yeah, a couple of people were interested in that."

Because you saw the spread dissipating. I think it's probably coming. I mean, I'm not trying to predict the Supreme Court, but I think that, given what's happening in the rest of the world, and that's a topic where I think there is some knowledge that we gain from the rest of the world and how they've been able to engineer this and put some safeguards on that are desperately needed, I think that a lot of companies now are preparing for it. And it's going to be like the wild, wild west when it happens, man!

Hill: I very much enjoy the Origins podcast.

Miller: Oh, thank you!

Hill: I'm curious if you could share a little bit about the origin story of your doing a podcast as opposed to -- I'm sure your publisher was like, "No, don't do a podcast, write another best-selling book for me."

Miller: Publisher and agent.

Hill: What is the story there, and how did you get connected with Cadence13?

Miller: The answer is Cadence13, because I was approached by several companies to do a podcast, and I looked at the world and that platform, and there were a lot of podcasts. And I'm not good at publicizing myself. It's like, "Jim Miller's podcast. Who am I talking with this week?" And if you look at Richard Deitsch, it's like a machine, he tweets like seven times a day about what he's doing. I just have a hard time with that. I admire Richard, I wish I could do it. 

But, when I was approached by Chris Corcoran at Cadence13, which was then DGital Media, he said, "Look, what do you really want to do?" And I said, "I love telling stories about beginnings, origin stories." In fact, my favorite part of all the books that I've done is those moments at the beginning where you have ordinary people who create extraordinary circumstances and companies. That happened with SNL, that happened with ESPN, that happened with CA, and, to a certain degree, my book on the Senate, a lot of the senators talked about the beginnings of their career. all of the sudden, they decided to run for dogcatcher, and the next moment, they're there. So, those Gladwellian tipping points, where something happens, and all of the sudden -- do you remember the game when we were growing up, Chutes and Ladders?

Hill: Sure.

Miller: Right? It's kind of a portrait like that, because all of the sudden, you come up on something, and it's fantastic! And then the next moment, it's like the bottom drops out, because you weren't expecting that, and all these things. So, chronicling those stories. So, basically what I said to Cadence and to Chris Corcoran, I said, "If I could do that as a podcast, if I could take those kinds of stories," because there's a lot of stories like that that I come across, and sometimes people even pitch me, like, "This could be your next book." And it's, like, not big enough for a book, but at the same time, it's delicious and there's some great arcs to it, and a great journey behind it. 

So, I'm very fortunate. They really support your creative vision. I think one of the great things about Cadence is that they want to help you do what you want to do. And that creative freedom, coupled with their knowledge of -- I had never done sound recording and editing. There's a guy named Chris Basil who's my producer who, as far as I'm concerned, walks on water, because, I produced some television and I write, but sound engineering and sound recording, and that kind of stuff is just a different world. He's so good, he's so smart, and he's been a great partner. And I'm devoted to him, because I think he deserves a lot of the credit for helping Origins become what it's become.

Hill: That's how I feel about Dan, by the way. He walks on water.

Miller: Dan looks like that. Dan looks like that kind of guy.

Hill: [laughs] It's interesting, because earlier this week, I saw on Twitter, this week is the anniversary of the launch of CNBC, and they showed the opening clip where Bob Wright, who was then the head of NBC, was essentially introducing the Consumer News and Business Channel, that sort of thing. And it's such a humble beginning, if you think about what a machine CNBC is right now, and how it is essentially the go-to place for television business news. But, I think that's one of the things that's interesting about origin stories, is not just how in hindsight, it's easy to say, "Of course that was a hit." But if you go back to the beginning, it's like, "No, it was actually a little ragged around the edges, and there were plenty of people doubting it, and it didn't really look all that great."

Miller: I gave a speech last week, and I showed the very first night of ESPN. It's basically a middle-aged white guy sitting in a chair in the middle of nowhere in Connecticut. It's like, "How many of you are going to raise your hand and say that's the most successful media story of all time?" And the graphics were beyond primitive. And how that becomes something else, I think it's just fun to trace the pedigree of that. 

Hill: First season was Curb Your Enthusiasm. Second season was ESPN. Any chance I can get you to share a little bit about what's coming in season three?

Miller: In a word, no. Only because --

Hill: I didn't think so.

Miller: No, only because they would take me out back and shoot me. But, no, the truth is, one of the things that I've been doing over the past couple of months is putting together a slate, where we're going to have much more frequency and regularity. There was a learning curve in terms of how long these things took, and I also was busy working on a movie. But, I'm really excited about this year. 

And I will say this, not to be cagey, but, one of the things that I'm excited about in the slate coming ahead is, it's going to be as diverse as I had hoped Origins would be. We're going to have a music chapter, we're going to have another television show, we're going to have something about politics, we're going to have something about news, another thing about sports. So, it's this buffet that's kind of my interests, either because of stuff I've worked on in the past or because of stuff that I'm just interested in, and so, we're going to be touching on all those things. And as soon as I'm allowed to talk about it, I promise I will.

Hill: There are plenty of people, and I'm one of them, who, at the end of the day, done with work, kids are in bed, that sort of thing, want to relax, I'll listen to one of your podcasts or flip through one of your books.

Miller: Thank you.

Hill: What do you do for fun? What do you do to just kick back and relax?

Miller: I'm trying to learn how to do that, I'll admit.

Hill: [laughs] Are you one of those people who only needs four hours of sleep a night?

Miller: I'm not one of those people who only needs four hours of sleep a night. I'm one of those people who gets only four hours of sleep. It's one of my goals to learn how to sleep more and learn to unwind. I have a tendency to work pretty late. And that's a problem. My biggest problem is, I used to be able to read a lot, just, stuff that I want to read. And I don't get as much time to do that as I'd like, or as I used to. 

My youngest child is unfortunately going off to college, and I've officially started the mourning period. I'm not looking forward to it. I would say, the only silver lining in a big dark cloud, to be selfish, is that I have a tendency to put my children's needs above my own, and my schedule revolves around them, so now, with them out of the house ... [laughs] no, I really want to be a smart architect about time management in a different way. But, I love the idea, this concept of relaxation, Chris. It's a very interesting concept. I think I want to get into that.

Hill: Well, I think you just gave me a sneak preview of coming attractions, because my oldest kid is just finishing up her first year of college, so I have, maybe, what, if I do the math correctly, another six years before my youngest goes off to college.

Miller: Somebody said to me, "How do clichés become clichés, Jim?" I said, "They become clichés because they're true." And "time moves fast" is the biggest cliché in the world. And wait a second, I thought I was just taking her to her first day of first grade. It blows me away. By the way, I don't even feel old enough to have my last child going off to college. But, yeah, it tortures your mind, it twists you into a pretzel on a variety of levels. And all I would say is, I'm jealous of you. Enjoy every single day of it. It's coming fast. But the good news is, in all seriousness, it's not like they move out of the house and then they go to a different planet, and it's like, "Oh, if only I could talk to Venus or visit Venus." They're still going to be talking and texting and Venmo-ing.

Hill: Yes.

Miller: There is that. But, it's all good. It's all good.

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Hill: As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. That's going to do it for this edition of MarketFoolery. This show is mixed by Dan Boyd. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening! We'll see you on Monday!