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When it comes to music and gaming, it seems the two can be interchangeable — at least according to legendary producer Zaytoven. Raised in the Bay Area — though many mistake his trap bona fides for an Atlanta upbringing — the musician has grown to be much more than just a production wizard, identifying as a DJ, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist in addition to his legendary beatmaking.

It’s in this experience playing piano, organ, drums, and keytar that Zay finds a similarity between the two worlds of creating music and playing video games. Both stem from the ability to manifest what’s in the mind to his own two hands, the same way he was able to craft OJ Da Juiceman’s 2008 smash “Make Tha Trap Say Aye” featuring Gucci Mane, and eventually catapult and influence the careers of artists like Migos, Usher, Future, and Chief Keef. While working with all the elites in the rap game comes with its accolades, Zaytoven remains humble as ever, creating music simply for the love and not for fame. The only place he’s not humble is in his ability to wreck shop in some classic fighting games.

Uproxx spoke with Zaytoven about this and more, including being unbeatable on Mortal Kombat and passing down the love of gaming to the next generation.

What was the first game you ever played?

A Nintendo. My uncle got me and my cousin a Nintendo for Christmas and Super Mario Bros. was my first game. That’s probably still my favorite game to this day.

What are your fondest memories from those days?

I remember being real competitive. When Super Nintendo came out, when I was heavy into Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. Street Fighter was my game, you can’t beat me in that. I’d be ready to fight if I lose in Street Fighter.

For real?

What? I remember almost getting into fights over that game if you feel like they’re cheating. You’re not going to beat me in this game.

Is there nobody that’s beaten you to this day?

Well, I went to Gary Vee’s office back in November. They had a gaming setup, I was playing Mortal Kombat and nobody could beat me. I was beating all of them, I feel like I’m still the GOAT. [Laughs]

How do you feel music and gaming coincide?

To me, doing music is almost like learning how to play the game. Learning different moves, learning all the different tricks on the drum machine, mixing it in the studio, it’s almost the same thing. It’s a lot of colorful lights, a lot of learning how to do stuff. You’re going to keep doing it until you feel like you’re the best at it. I tell people the reason I don’t play videogames now is because playing with my drum machine is like playing a video game.

Do you feel the same joy from both?

Definitely, that’s why I continue to make beats so many times because it’s like playing a video game to me. I definitely still get joy.

How old is your son?

He’s 14 — Lil Zay. At that age, that’s all they do. Man, I’m not even close to being good. He doesn’t show any mercy, he beat up on me so I don’t play anymore.

What games is he playing?

They play all the games, I don’t know all the names. Madden, NBA2K. He plays Fortnite and GTA. Let me ask my daughter.

I hear kids are making bread off Fortnite.

Zaytoven’s daughter (Livvi): Yeah, there’s this little kid that made three million dollars off a competition.

I don’t know anything about all that. But that’s why I let him keep playing, just in case he does start.

Is there anything you’d like to see happen in the gaming world?

I’d like to see us as producers and artists battle each other. They’re doing it already online but I’d like to see when you set up something where I battle another producer, playing a certain video. Set that up!

Something like VERZUZ, but gaming?

Yeah exactly. For me, it has to be Nintendo. It could be an older game like Tecmo Bowl, Mortal Kombat, Double Dribble. See I might be too old, they don’t even know about that.

I love what you did with G Herbo’s PTSD Deluxe, how was going to Chicago three times in 30 days?

Man, I fell in love with Chicago. I’d never really been to Chicago. I was out there hanging out with G Herbo, my buddy JB, and Mikkey. We’re out playing basketball, we’re in the studio every night. I enjoyed the city. I had a good time, that’s my first time meeting them really. We bonded and had a good time together, then we started making dope music. G Herbo’s dope and such an old school … he’s super raw. That’s what made me keep coming back to work with him. The man rap, he can rap someone under the table. I was trying to give him a little Zaytoven soul.

What’s your favorite song you did with him?

It’s not even released yet, we have so many unreleased songs. “Friends & Foes” is definitely the one we knew “this is it right here.”

“Spam 2 Lamb,” that’s my favorite song. The first song we did, the song that made us lock-in.

What are you working on next?

I’m working on all different types of projects. Me and Young Scooter have a project dropping called Jugging On Zay Street, which is super hard. I’m working. I have my own rap artist I’m working with by the name of Coe Mook, he’s from Alabama. I also have an R&B artist named Tiffany Bleu, I’m working on putting their project out in the next month or so. I’ve got a lot of music on the way.

Since the release of Megan Thee Stallion’s Suga earlier this year, her track “Savage” has become a viral hit and the song’s remix with Beyonce earned Megan her first No. 1. The rapper has given a rendition of the number for a variety of performances but this week, Megan chose to breathe new life into the song.

Megan has been a judge on HBO Max’s new series Legendary. The show explores the world of ball culture and asks contestants to bust out their best voguing moves. For the series finale, it was Megan’s turn to take the stage. Dubbed the “avenging angel,” Megan took the stage with feathery wings and a bedazzled bodysuit. Joined by a group of backup dancers who were competitors in the series, Megan delivered a club-ready remix of “Savage” and even tried her hand at voguing.

In other Megan news, the singer recently headed to the desert to give a performance of “Savage” and “Girls In The Hood” for the BET Awards. Megan and her crew navigated ATVs to a remote stage to give a heated rendition of her popular tracks.

Watch Megan Thee Stallion perform “Savage” on Legendary above.

Suga is out now via 1501 Entertainment. Get it here.

Megan Thee Stallion is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

By now, you must’ve come across at least some of your friends on social media wondering if something is cake. And by “something,” we mean literally everything — is this article cake, what about the news that the Washington team is finally changing their name? Is that cake? Because coupled with last week’s Supreme Court ruling, it feels a little too good to be true. What’s the deal with cake and why are your housemates approaching you with two knives in each hand and treating you worse than when they suspect you have the coronavirus? From what we can tell from tracking activity online, it appears that sometime last week the “is it a cake?” meme really started to pick up steam on Twitter after BuzzFeed’s Tasty posted a compilation video of realistic items that were cut into and revealed to be cake.

A bright red Croc, a roll of toilet paper, a potted aloe plant, a sudsy bar of soap, a lotion bottle, all things that arguably shouldn’t be cakes were revealed to be, in fact, cakes! Which has led many across social media to question life itself. Yes, 2020 is so depressing that a simple video about silly cakes has sent people into a spiral of existential questioning that has taken over Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and probably Facebook (we’ll check with our weird Uncle). The meme is a slight callback to an earlier 2000s Portal meme known as “The Cake Is A Lie” which dealt with false promises, so the internet has always had a troubled distrust of cake it seems.

The clip posted by Tasty originates from the Red Rose Cake & Tuba Geçkil Instagram account, which is run by Turkish National Culinary Team Captain Tuba Geçkil, a “cake and sugar” artist who specializes in realistic cakes. Geçkil has made a Sonic the Hedgehog cake, a cake shaped like Bob Marley’s face, a Koala bear cake, a cake of Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter, a cake version of Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” a… packet of raw chicken? They’re truly mesmerizing! Check out the Red Rose Cake and Tuba Geçkil Instagram if you want your mind blown, but if you come away wondering if 2020 is cake, that’s on you!

Check out these tweets below to see just how weird this cake meme is becoming.

The first week of the NBA bubble has gone, at least so far as we know, fairly smoothly. Teams are practicing, players are fishing and golfing and gaming, and for the most part it appears that everyone is following the rules so far — admittedly, with a very long way to go.

However, on Monday, we got word that our first quarantine break had happened, albeit not purposefully, as a quartet of ESPN reporters broke the bad news that Rockets forward Bruno Caboclo had “inadvertently” broken quarantine and was now going to have to isolate in his hotel room for eight full days.

It’s not a great start for Caboclo, as the rules of the initial quarantine period have been pretty clear throughout this process. Hopefully this will remain just an honest mistake and not have any greater ramifications on Caboclo, the Rockets, or the NBA bubble as a whole. It also serves as a pretty solid deterrent for anyone that has been considering breaking contain, as they’ve all already spent two days quarantined in a room and knowing at least eight more days of that would be waiting for them (plus possible missed game checks) is a pretty strong reason to stay in line.

Netflix’s Bandersnatch made waves for multiple reasons, including how it overwhelmed viewers with an alleged trillion permutations in a choose-your-own-adventure format. The fallout from the movie’s popularity also led star Will Poulter to quit social media (“in the interest of my mental health”), and some speculated that he wished to shut down online abuse regarding his “ugly” costuming to play a 1980s computer programmer.

Months later, Poulter unexpectedly departed from Amazon’s Lord of the Rings TV show. Variety initially reported that “scheduling conflicts” were involved, which seems logical and straightforward enough, but of course, people speculated some more because the Internet’s gonna Internet. Well, Poulter spoke to NME after it was announced that he’s doing another interactive project (The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope), and he clarified that, yes, he really did have scheduling issues:

“Unfortunately, there’s no particularly interesting story, other than the fact that there was a last-minute change to the schedule, which meant that there was a clash for me and I was unable to do it.”

There you have it. Poulter didn’t leave an epic saga because of Twitter or because Amazon allegedly locked writers in a room to prevent spoilers. Poulter further told NME that he maintains the “utmost respect for everyone involved in that project,” and he can’t wait to watch the final product. Still, the NME piece did begin this quote: “I’ll always pick the option to run away and hide, to avoid confrontation.” Those words hold a completely different context, but the speculators might continue to read into that one.

(Via NME & Variety)

With much of today’s entertainment focusing on digital platforms in light of the pandemic, comedian and rapper Zack Fox teamed up with iheartcomix for his new Twitch series Released!. For the series premiere, Fox tapped Phoebe Bridgers to join him on a journey through outer space.

The show is reminiscent of late-night Adult Swim episodes with crude animations and off-the-cuff dialog. But Bridgers felt right at home, joining Fox in her signature skeleton costume and preparing to play a show at a “goth prom.” On their journey there, Bridgers performed music, unpacked her latest album Punisher, and undertook a quest to make the perfect punch.

Along with performing a few tracks like “Kyoto,” taking a ride in a flying space car, and chatting with a brash, animated dog, Bridgers spoke to Fox about the meaning behind her albums’ title: “Say you’re hitting on someone at a bar, and then their friend comes up and starts talking to you about Jordan Peterson or some sh*t and you’re like, ‘Please get me out of here.’ But they don’t release that they’re punishing you. So, I guess I’m self-conscious that I do that.”

Watch Bridgers on Fox’s Released! above.

Punisher is out now via Dead Oceans. Get it here.

Released! premieres Sundays at 7 p.m. ET on Twitch. Watch it here.

A lot of things will look very different when the NBA restarts later this month in Orlando in the Disney bubble, as games will be played without fans — although other NBA players can attend — and all games will take place in the same arena throughout the postseason.

For a group of athletes that are so tied to routine, the bubble will be an exercise in patience and a test of how well they can adapt to a completely different routine that will emerge in Orlando. Players will all arrive to the game via bus from the hotel, and according to ESPN’s Nick DePaula, will have to dress for the game in full uniform and warmups at the hotel, rather than having the typical tunnel walk in their well crafted outfits.

For many, the tunnel walk has been a chance to show their personality through fashion, as players have started taking their pregame fits very seriously — and many teams have outfitted specific areas for photographers that offer the best lighting and backdrop for pregame pics. As P.J. Tucker told DePaula, getting dressed at the hotel is going to feel more like he’s gone back in time to his AAU days, not like he’s in the NBA.

“Getting dressed at the hotel now will feel like an AAU tournament,” Tucker said. “It’s AAU Nationals, it’s the Nike Super Showcase and one of those [tournaments] that we used to play in back in the day. I’m not feeling it. It just doesn’t feel NBA to me, but it is what it is.”

Tucker said dressing up for games was part of what made him feel like he was going to work, and this will certainly be an adjustment for him and others — although, have no fear, the NBA’s sneaker king is still going to be showing off his incredible collection even in warmups.

Before he joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe, James Gunn worked with Troma Entertainment, the schlock factory known for titles like Ferocious Female Freedom Fighters and Killer Condom. And Tromeo and Juliet (which Gunn co-wrote), and Dumpster Baby, and Chopper Chicks in Zombietown, and… I could do this for a while. Point is, anything goes in Troma movies, so it must have been a kick in the pants for Gunn to be told “no” for something as non-controversial as making Velma gay.

In response to one of his Twitter followers demanding a third live-action Scooby-Doo movie (Gunn wrote 2002’s Scooby Doo and 2004’s Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, and directed the original), the Guardians of the Galaxy filmmaker responded, “With the original cast? That would be one incredibly long life-span for a Great Dane.” He was then asked to “please make our live-action lesbian Velma dreams come true.” He tried.

“In 2001 Velma was explicitly gay in my initial script. But the studio just kept watering it down & watering it down, becoming ambiguous (the version shot), then nothing (the released version) & finally having a boyfriend (the sequel),” Gunn tweeted, adding the neutral face emoji. A kissing scene was filmed between the always-great Linda Cardellini’s Velma and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Daphne, but “it got cut,” the Buffy star said back in 2002. “Hopefully they’ll add it into the DVD.” Narrator voice: they didn’t.

If only Gunn had made a Scooby-Doo (or Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street) movie during his Troma days. It would be explicitly gay, and extremely explicit.

One of the elements that helped make Lil Dicky’s semi-autobiographical FXX show Dave “one of the best new comedies on TV” was its array of superstar cameos from across the world of hip-hop. Featuring guests like Benny Blanco, Justin Bieber, Macklemore, Trippie Redd, and YG, the show is stuffed to the gills with the sort of authentic cameos that make its world seem more real. In a new interview with Music News & Rumors, Lil Dicky shared his favorite cameo — and explained why he didn’t think it would happen until it did.

“Young Thug, no question,” he admits. “I mean, I hate to pick favorites, but I can’t lie. In terms of just the happiness level that I felt when Young Thug was on set. I’m such a big Young Thug fan, and prior to that moment, I didn’t even know that he knew I existed. When I was told that Young Thug was coming, I actually didn’t even believe it. I thought it was hearsay. And then when he came, it was just… I couldn’t… I was so happy.”

He elaborates on what makes it so hard to nail down cameos from stars like Young Thug, “It’s really quite a complex maze. It’s not as easy as it might seem to get these celebrity cameos. There’s a lot of moving pieces, and, like, one guy’s available one day, and then, all of a sudden, he’s not. It’s very difficult. Sometimes, you just have to get what happens on that day, and you need someone to come.”

Considering Young Thug once opted out of his own video shoot, Dave’s nervousness was — for once — well-founded. However, Dicky and GATA, his best friend, costar, and real-life hype man, describe the moment as a confirmation that they “made it.” “Justin Bieber is the biggest star in the world, but I had met him, and I knew that he liked me as a person,” Dicky says. “Young Thug, I had never met, and I didn’t even know if he knew who I was. I remember he said, like, ‘Man, you’re on your shit now,’ and, like, I’ll never forget him saying that.” GATA agrees, “That’s like having the modern-day Lil Wayne pull up to your video shoot.”

Dave was recently renewed for a second season. Stream the first season on Hulu.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

The McGirt v. Oklahoma decision that came down from the Supreme Court last week was a landmark decision in treaty law and for the rights of Indigenous people of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Oklahoma. In the most basic of terms, Justice Gorsuch made it clear that the United States made treaties with Indian nations that were still the law of the land no matter how state or local governments acted, or still treat those Indigenous communities.

Very briefly, the only reason you have a place to live in the United States is due to individual tribal nations either being wiped out through genocide by American’s westward expansion and/or through treaties signed that allowed the United States to take over land in exchange for assured reservations along with funding for education, health, security, and food on those reservations “for as long as the grass grows and the water runs.”

Over the course of the last two centuries, those treaties — literal laws that only Congress can terminate — have been eroded by bad actors from the White House on down to local governors or mayors with greed and no sense of humanity. One of the biggest examples of this atrophy of land and rights was the Indian Territory the Five Civilized Tribes were promised at the end of the Trail of Tears. Over the almost 200 years since that horrific event, federal, state, and local governments have done everything they can to take as much of that land (and rights) away from the people who were forced on that walk. Now, the Supreme Court has stepped in and put a stop to it.

This is all a lot for the average person to get a handle on, we know. Treaty rights with Indigenous nations are barely mentioned in U.S. schools much less what they mean today. So, to help us better understand what’s happening, we reached out to Rebecca Nagle, writer, activist, and podcaster of the hit show This Land, to talk us through the broader implications and what this means for Indian Country.

Nagle will be releasing a full-on follow-up to the McGirt v. Oklahoma case on This Land later this week. You can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

How did Oklahoma get to this point where so much treaty ceded Indigenous land was taken away, and why was it necessary for the Supreme Court to step in?

Yeah, so it seems kind of odd that tribes and states would have really different legal interpretations of the status of land. A lot of times states don’t follow federal laws when it comes to respecting tribal lands. It’s actually not that unusual. And so, what the Supreme Court said is — and I think Gorsuch did a really good job of being really clear in the way he worded the decision — that we as a court can’t say, “okay, well, the state of Oklahoma has been violating federal law for so long at this point we should just say that that law is moot” you know? Gorsuch has this really great line in the decision where he said, “We don’t do that in any other area of the law, why would we do it for tribes?” which is what courts often do with tribes.

So, I think the real significance of this case — not groundbreaking in a sense, it doesn’t create a new area of law — is that the justices of the Supreme Court are being very clear that when it comes to Indians, its job is to interpret the law and treaties to mean what they say. And, in the past, that was more often not what the courts did.

Right. I think for people outside of Indian Country, there’s so little purchase on the levels of legalities when it comes to tribal nations where you kind of got to start by explaining what a treaty is and then you’ve got to explain what the Allotment Act or Dawes was then Termination, and etc., etc. It’s exhausting. So, what does this then mean for people in Oklahoma right now?

I think the irony of what we’ll see in the coming months on the ground is that it’ll become evident very quickly that Oklahoma’s warnings about how this is going to cleave the state in two and all these like the sky is falling down arguments, are pretty overblown. We’re just not going to see those things happen. I think that the people’s lives who will be most directly impacted by this shift in criminal and some civil jurisdictions are tribal citizens ourselves.

Where I live right now is not restricted Indian land. Until yesterday, if I, say, broke the law in my house, the federal government didn’t recognize my tribe’s authority over me and now it does. So if there’s a state-level change anywhere, I think it’s going to be internal for tribes. And I think it’s going to mostly be a good thing.

So, it’s not this “the land is going to be transferred back” narrative that some people are trying to push?

You know, we have had this century of a slow bleed land loss since Allotment. But it didn’t stop there. I mean, land loss is still real. We’ll have to see how this process changes with this decision. But when people have restricted land and it’s sold to a non-Indian or even just passed down to their children where it then goes into the probate process, it can be lost to Indian Country because of misfiling.

This is what’s happening in 2020. Tribes were still losing their land in the eyes of the state government and in the eyes of the federal government. So, I think really what this court decision does is it shores up the sovereignty that we have fought all this time to protect so that we can increase the foundation on which we can really build a better future for our tribes. That looks like healthcare for our citizens. That looks like preserving our languages. And, yes, it’s a lot of the stuff our tribes have already been doing, but with recognized reservations, we have more power to do that.

Absolutely. And I have personal experience with this. When my father passed in 2009, the BIA sent me a letter saying that his will was not executed correctly according to BIA rules and so they took away all the land I was meant to inherit on two reservations. And now, I have none.

Yes. The Allotment system is kind of my soapbox. I think we talk about these moments, like the Trail of Tears or about the Indian Wars and the massacres, and the violence of those moments cannot be overstated. But then the United States figured out how to do the exact same thing without guns and arrows but with paper. And, if you look at the legacy of allotment, I would argue that it’s just as devastating if not more. We’ve never recovered from that history. I mean, it’s ridiculous that the laws that were set up to separate Indians from their land are still functioning in a lot of places.

Looking out at the broader world of Indian Country, you have similar situations when you look at the Fort Laramie Treaty which enshrined basically half of what is now South Dakota to the Lakota. Of course, like Indian Country in Oklahoma, that land was slowly chiseled away. Do you think the Lakota now has a better case for getting their federally promised land and rights back now?

I would imagine that there are tribes that woke up today who have treaty rights that have not been recognized by state and local governments that are having that very conversation. I’m not privy to those conversations. But I think that Gorsuch’s opinion left no space for ambiguity. He said explicitly that this decision was just about the Muscogee Creek nation and that’s what it applies to. So, he was very narrow in the way that he wrote it, but he was also very, very clear about his rejection of some of these long-standing assumptions or arguments that come up all the time in federal Indian law.

There’s this one powerful quote that he says towards the end of the opinion, he uses this kind of language where what’s presented in this case is this familiar argument that local governments make about tribal land where it’s like, “Yes, that’s what the treaty says. But you can’t really expect us to follow a treaty that was executed so long ago” and Gorsuch very plainly writes, “no, the role of the federal court is to interpret the language of the treaty, to take it at its face value that actually it does what it says, just like we do with any other text that Congress writes, and we interpret it based on that text.”

He even points out in another section that in any other area of statutory interpretation we assume that the statute means what it says, but somehow we make this sort of weird acceptance for federal Indian law. He has this really great line where he says, “that would create the rule of the strong, not the rule of the law.”

Basically, at a time often when Native people were recovering from genocide and death and just trying to survive the States were able to pull one over on us for a long period of time, and that would be enough to erode the meaning of the treaties. Gorsuch just completely rejects that idea. He uses very strong language in several places to call that argument to task for not really following the letter of the law.

It feels like a landmark decision.

I think that this decision will be quoted a lot. I saw somebody joking on Facebook that they want to get a tattoo of the decision. I think people in Indian Country are super excited about it. I think as we see court cases moving forward, this decision is going to be in briefs. I won’t be surprised if it’s quoted in other decisions. I think that Gorsuch wrote some strong language for tribal advocates to use, but at the same time, he was very, very clear about what this decision applied to and it just applies to Muscogee.

It’s an interesting time as we’re seeing Columbus statues fall, protests at Rushmore, and, seemingly, the end of the R*dsk*ns. And now this massive win from the highest court. How does it feel experiencing these social movements that are going in such a positive direction for Indian Country?

I think, one, we absolutely have to credit the moment of awareness about race in the United States that the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have created. We have to acknowledge that labor and that work to kind of create this moment that a lot of people are waking up to the idea that a lot of the long-held racist policies and cultural symbols in the United States are wrong and need to change. If it wasn’t for the conversation that black activists forced around the police killing of George Floyd, I don’t think Dan Snyder would be talking about changing the name of the Washington football team, you know? So, I think it’s really important for that credit to be given because I think that that credit is due.

I also think that the past week has been really interesting for Indian Country being on the national radar. We got the news of the Washington football team, and then it was Trump at Mount Rushmore, and then we got the really incredible news about the Dakota Access Pipeline, and then it was this Supreme Court case. It’s sort of like, I think, the biggest news week for Native people that I can think of in a long time.

You know, we break through the news cycle a few times a calendar year. If you look back at 2019, it was when the Covington high school students mocked the Native elder Nate Phillips and it was when Warren tested her DNA. That was kind of it. We had Standing Rock, which was one of the first times that mainstream media paid attention to a modern movement for Indigenous rights since Wounded Knee and the American Indian Movement. So this is a once in a generation moment where non-native people are like, “Oh, wow.! Yeah, Indigenous people are still here. They’re still fighting for this stuff.”

It’s really important for people to realize that even when these things aren’t making headlines, all of the work that Indigenous people are doing in the court, in their communities, on the frontline, is still happening and it’s still worthy of people’s attention and concern.

This case is actually a really good example of how that works. I have been writing about this since 2015. I can’t tell you how many people told me while making this podcast, “Oh my gosh, the implications for this case are so big. I can’t believe I hadn’t heard about it. I can’t believe nobody’s talking about it. I can’t believe it’s not getting more media attention.” And I think what’s undeniably true about yesterday is that if the tribe had lost, it wouldn’t have made the national headlines that it made because it would have only impacted Indians, and it would have just been tribes losing at the Supreme Court again and that would be it. But because it impacts a bunch of non-native people — or at least that’s the perception — it’s now worthy of national news.

That’s a really good way to put it. So, let’s talk a little bit about the This Land podcast. The show was sort of built around talking about the court cases and legal issues that lead to McGirt v. Oklahoma. Now, there’s a conclusion. So, what’s next for the show?

So, we are working on the update episode. I actually just spent most of yesterday and this morning doing interviews and collecting tape for that. It’s going to come out at the end of next week, probably next Thursday or Friday. It’ll be a full update because there’s so much that’s happened in the case. It’s a wild ride from the Supreme Court granting hearings to oral arguments postponed because of the Coronavirus, and then they happened online for the first time in the court’s history. Then we got this landmark decision. And so, it’s not even just the about decision, but just everything that’s happened on the way to that decision.

Awesome. So, I guess my last question is how are you going to celebrate?

I know, it was funny, I was just texting with some of my friends about that. It’s been such an emotional 36 hours. You know, I’ve talked to people who aren’t even a member of one of the Five Tribes, and they just sort of read it and wept. It is really emotional. We’re so used to … We know that the law’s on our side. We know that we are in the right. But so much of the time, that doesn’t matter.

I think Dakota Access Pipeline is a great example. That pipeline was illegal. It wasn’t only that there’s no way that the pipeline won’t poison the Standing Rock tribe’s water. There’s actually a legal way route for them to do that. That company had to follow a process. They have to do an environmental impact study. They have to consult the tribe. But even if the tribe says no after all of that, Congress is still given the power over tribes, over our treaty territories, over our reservation, over things like water rights. We have so little and then even that is not respected. Even those laws are not enough. And even the laws that are not enough are still not followed.

I think there’s an irony to the victory in that I think we have to frame it as basic. All Gorsuch said was, “this is what the law says, and guess what guys? Our job is to follow it and to make people follow it as a court.” But I think we’re so used to that not happening that it’s really emotional for it to actually happen, and to happen in this way that is sort of uncompromising and unflinching, which is the way that Gorsuch wrote that opinion.