True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 506: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy League
Aired: 2025-12-04
Duration: 02:08:00


=== Start Showing Porn (01:52) ===

[00:00:00]  The problem with females is an issue of loyalty.
[00:00:03]  The problem is that nobody's going to know what you're referencing until we get to the bottom of the business.
[00:00:07]  Everybody knows about that.
[00:00:08]  All males that listen to this know about that.
[00:00:11]  The problem with females is an issue.
[00:00:12]  It's an issue of loyalty.
[00:00:16]  What I like to do is I like to test them.
[00:00:18]  Speak on it.
[00:00:19]  I like to say, have you ever seen this YouTube video?
[00:00:24]  And then I'll just, I'll fucking put my phone up and we will watch that shit and be like, have you ever.
[00:00:29]  What YouTube is it?
[00:00:31]  Well, Milk Boys.
[00:00:34]  I show her Nelk Boys.
[00:00:35]  I show her this guy.
[00:00:36]  This guy really likes Asmund Gold.
[00:00:38]  Then we watch a couple of hours of Twitch streams together.
[00:00:41]  And then I just show her, start showing porn.
[00:00:44]  I just start showing women porn, females, on the first date, which, of course, no, no, you don't like this.
[00:00:50]  I don't like this at all.
[00:01:16]  Hello, hello, hello.
[00:01:20]  Welcome back from Thanksgiving time.
[00:01:27]  We took a little break, but we're back.
[00:01:29]  I didn't take a break.
[00:01:29]  I recorded episodes that were unreleased that were just me.
[00:01:32]  The brace tapes.
[00:01:34]  Investigating what I'm thankful for.
[00:01:36]  I'm Liz.
[00:01:37]  My name is Brace.
[00:01:40]  I'm producer Young Chomsky.
[00:01:41]  And this is Truanon.
[00:01:42]  Hello, everyone.
[00:01:43]  Hello.
[00:01:47]  You hear that?
[00:01:47]  That's the dribble of a ball.
[00:01:50]  Dribble ball is crazy.

=== Come Show Us (06:53) ===

[00:01:52]  They call it that, right?
[00:01:54]  What are you talking about?
[00:01:56]  You wouldn't get it.
[00:01:57]  You know, I just am saying if I had gone back, if I was going back in time, two options, Hitler or renaming the ball of hitting the ball with your hand against the ground.
[00:02:08]  What are you calling it?
[00:02:10]  I call it like, I don't know, something.
[00:02:12]  I honestly probably, I'd probably call it the Belden method or something like that, just to kind of get that in the history.
[00:02:19]  He's a brand ball.
[00:02:20]  He's belding the ball.
[00:02:23]  I know.
[00:02:24]  But there's a, but there's a sonorous sort of way of that.
[00:02:28]  Brace, before we start, even though this is a long episode, but you know what?
[00:02:33]  They deserve it.
[00:02:35]  I think we need to talk about the elephant in the room that we have not discussed.
[00:02:40]  You're no.
[00:02:42]  Oh.
[00:02:43]  No.
[00:02:44]  I want to.
[00:02:45]  We have not talked on the show about the Nussy thing, and I want us to talk about it very briefly before we start the episode.
[00:02:52]  Yeah.
[00:02:52]  Okay.
[00:02:53]  Let's talk about it.
[00:02:56]  We're not trying to get her on anymore.
[00:02:57]  No.
[00:02:58]  Okay.
[00:02:59]  I think the reason why we didn't talk about it is because we were like, I wonder if she'd come on the show.
[00:03:03]  Listeners, she will not come on the show.
[00:03:05]  You know what?
[00:03:06]  We don't know that.
[00:03:07]  Well, I don't think she's going to come on the show.
[00:03:09]  And I don't blame her.
[00:03:11]  Okay.
[00:03:12]  Also, I don't really know what I'd say.
[00:03:14]  But.
[00:03:14]  Well, I figured it would just be me and her.
[00:03:17]  Oh, yeah.
[00:03:18]  Yeah, I don't know.
[00:03:19]  I just feel like you'd be more comfortable with that.
[00:03:23]  But, but what, what?
[00:03:26]  Yeah.
[00:03:27]  Last night, or yesterday afternoon, part four of Mr. Lizza's.
[00:03:35]  That sounds weird.
[00:03:36]  Let's call him Crying Lizzo.
[00:03:41]  I don't know how many parts are in this series.
[00:03:42]  I gotta say, I don't care for the guy's writing.
[00:03:45]  That is something that has become very clear to me as I've been reading his dispatches.
[00:03:49]  I think it's better than hers.
[00:03:51]  Well, I don't think we need to compare.
[00:03:53]  I think it's on a different, these are two different things.
[00:03:56]  They're bad in different ways.
[00:03:57]  Yeah, they're bad in different ways.
[00:03:59]  You know, much very yin and yang there.
[00:04:02]  But his like the tortured metaphors about the bamboo.
[00:04:08]  I'm just like, man, just give me a list of what happened here.
[00:04:10]  I don't need to get into all this with you.
[00:04:14]  Not that exciting of a fourth drop.
[00:04:18]  However, he did finally get to the juicy RFK stuff.
[00:04:28]  As a longtime RFK watcher, Fray spelled in.
[00:04:32]  What say you?
[00:04:33]  You know, I have to be totally honest.
[00:04:35]  You didn't fucking read it.
[00:04:36]  I didn't fucking read the fourth one.
[00:04:38]  You didn't read it.
[00:04:39]  I read the first one.
[00:04:39]  You didn't see all the really gross sex stuff that he's into.
[00:04:43]  Are you serious?
[00:04:44]  There's really gross sex stuff in the Force of Space.
[00:04:46]  Wait, no, no, I'm serious.
[00:04:47]  Is there?
[00:04:48]  You didn't see this?
[00:04:49]  No, I wasn't logged in.
[00:04:50]  I wasn't.
[00:04:50]  No, no, hold on.
[00:04:51]  Hold on.
[00:04:52]  Can you, is there some way when you do a recording of audio that you can make it so that, but people don't know that I've been looking at stuff for a little while?
[00:05:02]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:05:03]  Yeah, I think we usually do stuff like that.
[00:05:05]  Oh, God.
[00:05:06]  All right.
[00:05:06]  I'm using my.
[00:05:08]  Are these the bullet points?
[00:05:09]  I mean, there was like some of it's like fantasy stuff, right?
[00:05:14]  I'm like, I don't recall.
[00:05:15]  Olivia explained that Kennedy had told her he wanted to bind, subdue, tame, possess, and discipline her.
[00:05:23]  And that these sexual proclivities for bondage and, quote, total submission carried over into the rest of their relationship in the way he maintained control in quotation marks over her by setting all the terms of their relationship and by his use of withdrawing his affection and attention as a means of making her more obedient and subservient to him.
[00:05:43]  She explained that many of her greatest regrets about the relationship were the way she crossed ethical lines as a journalist to regain his attention during periods where he cut off contact with her.
[00:05:50]  So wait, he's doing like red pills.
[00:05:53]  I hate how like every fucking media person has turned this.
[00:05:56]  Actually, this is a story about ethics and journalism.
[00:05:58]  Like, with this, and I'm like, no, it is not.
[00:06:01]  It is about RFK Jr. being freaky.
[00:06:03]  Like, that is the only thing that is interesting.
[00:06:05]  It is crazy that he's like, because this is something that was pretty apparent from the first little round of like sex that was released in part one of this.
[00:06:15]  RFK Jr. is being like, I want to you're a river, I'm a kayak, right?
[00:06:22]  Kind of thing.
[00:06:24]  Um, like, it was clear that he's like dominating.
[00:06:28]  How do you put how does one like continue with?
[00:06:34]  I just like don't.
[00:06:35]  How do you, how are you, like, listening to that voice and like keep the whole thing going?
[00:06:41]  I think there's I feel like he would do better on chat.
[00:06:44]  I mean, these, I think, many of these are text messages.
[00:06:47]  So, like, maybe he's like one of those.
[00:06:48]  But then they could they moved to video on this.
[00:06:50]  They moved to video?
[00:06:52]  Yeah.
[00:06:52]  Oh, and you know, I'm if I'm RFK Jr., I'm like using the oldest laptop I can find with the most smudged mic because he's a sort of smudged mic.
[00:07:02]  You know, not Mike, a camera, but you know, he's sort of, he's sort of elderly, no?
[00:07:06]  He's old looking.
[00:07:07]  He's weathered.
[00:07:08]  He's weathered.
[00:07:09]  And it's crazy because do you think that like sometimes like maybe Liz at some point was like, honey, do you want to watch Curb Your Enthusiasm 10?
[00:07:15]  She's like, that fucking show sucks.
[00:07:18]  That show fucking sucks.
[00:07:20]  But like, on a real level, and I don't mean this in any kind of way.
[00:07:30]  If you're a young woman in your 20s and you're being dominated by a guy who is 70 years old, like it's kind of an illusion thing, right?
[00:07:43]  Because you could probably break his hip by like, you know, slapping it or whatever, right?
[00:07:49]  Like, he's like, he can crumble.
[00:07:51]  I know he like takes whatever trend or whatever, but like, it's still like physically, like, I feel like a 12-year-old could beat the fuck out of RFK Jr. if it tried.
[00:08:00]  But isn't it always an illusion?
[00:08:04]  I guess so.
[00:08:05]  I don't know.
[00:08:05]  Is that a part of it?
[00:08:06]  If anyone ever was like, nobody has ever thought that they could even, women have never really been able to even have the illusion that I could dominate them in any way.
[00:08:18]  Except for indunking ability.
[00:08:20]  Well, that's the thing is, I dominate on the fucking court.
[00:08:22]  I dominate on the fucking court.
[00:08:24]  Do you see that pivot?
[00:08:25]  I do.
[00:08:25]  And the pivot.
[00:08:26]  And my pivot foot, it stays down.
[00:08:28]  And here's the thing.
[00:08:29]  I'll foul a bit.
[00:08:31]  Not that I call women that.
[00:08:32]  Not that I call women that.
[00:08:34]  That's terrible.
[00:08:35]  I will, dude.
[00:08:37]  You don't.
[00:08:37]  No, you don't.
[00:08:38]  You're doing it, dude.
[00:08:39]  You're flopping around all over.
[00:08:41]  No, no.
[00:08:41]  Yeah, I'm flopping, right?
[00:08:42]  I'm flopping my leg into a fucking navel.

=== Respect and Dominance (03:11) ===

[00:08:45]  But here's the thing.
[00:08:47]  I would never do that shit off the court.
[00:08:50]  But if you put me on the court with eight or nine females, anything goes.
[00:08:55]  And so here's what I do.
[00:08:57]  I'm going to pass here.
[00:08:58]  I'm going to pass here.
[00:08:59]  Nope.
[00:08:59]  Right in the middle.
[00:09:00]  Bonk your fucking nose with the ball.
[00:09:01]  I don't like the way you're going to be.
[00:09:03]  Globetrotting on them.
[00:09:06]  I'll globetrot a bitch.
[00:09:07]  All of a sudden, a mummy comes out of the court.
[00:09:09]  Stop.
[00:09:10]  No, but that's.
[00:09:11]  To be fair.
[00:09:12]  Look, Brace is doing a bit of a character.
[00:09:14]  Yes.
[00:09:15]  Because as you will see later on in this episode, I introduced him to Michael Porter Jr.'s amazing YouTube persona, podcast, content experience.
[00:09:28]  I don't even know what to call him.
[00:09:29]  How come he can be?
[00:09:30]  How come you let him be?
[00:09:31]  Well, I hit the mic.
[00:09:33]  I'm sorry, I'm getting too angry.
[00:09:35]  How come he gets to be like that, but you get mad at me for being like that?
[00:09:40]  Liz!
[00:09:45]  I control you!
[00:09:47]  Wait, no.
[00:09:49]  Fuck.
[00:09:50]  Wait.
[00:09:51]  Brace.
[00:09:55]  What did you think?
[00:09:57]  What?
[00:10:00]  What?
[00:10:01]  I'm just thinking of the RFK voice in my head, but I can't do it.
[00:10:05]  Yes?
[00:10:07]  We should get to the episode.
[00:10:11]  Can you introduce a little bit what we're doing today?
[00:10:14]  Yeah.
[00:10:15]  So we are talking, well, kind of talking, but it's really, it's an expansive conversation.
[00:10:22]  There was a pair of scandals, a twin tower of scandals that were hit by the plane of Kash Patel very recently.
[00:10:29]  He went through both, kind of like when you do a double headshot.
[00:10:32]  Yeah.
[00:10:32]  Fast and Furious style.
[00:10:33]  Fast and Furious.
[00:10:34]  Exactly.
[00:10:36]  And this, obviously, you've been despondent.
[00:10:43]  So despondent.
[00:10:44]  The integrity of the game, one of your most invoked things that you invoke.
[00:10:52]  But we've been wanting to talk about this for a while.
[00:10:55]  And we, and really more than that, we want to talk about gambling.
[00:10:59]  We want to talk about sports gambling, which I think is what this episode is mostly about.
[00:11:03]  It's mostly about sports gambling.
[00:11:05]  We didn't even get to some of the really funny stuff about the indictments.
[00:11:08]  I know.
[00:11:10]  But we were like, Liz was, this is actually what happened.
[00:11:14]  Liz was like, I don't fucking respect you as a man.
[00:11:19]  It was crazy.
[00:11:20]  It was, it just.
[00:11:21]  And I said it in RFK Jr. voice.
[00:11:23]  Can you do it?
[00:11:24]  I don't fucking remember you like that.
[00:11:26]  No, I can't do it.
[00:11:27]  I don't fucking.
[00:11:29]  What I got to do to get you don't know ball.
[00:11:37]  I don't respect you like a man.
[00:11:39]  No, wait, wait.
[00:11:40]  You had the COVID-19 vaccine.
[00:11:41]  It's a little, it's like a little treble or triple.
[00:11:44]  I know.
[00:11:44]  It's like.
[00:11:45]  You don't know ball.
[00:11:48]  Yeah, it is an awful lot.
[00:11:49]  Yeah.
[00:11:50]  It's got a little bit, you know what it also reminds me of is like the woman in the ads who has the cigarette.
[00:11:55]  She's smoking it out of her throat.

=== Niners And Hockey Bet Talk (07:14) ===

[00:11:56]  No, he totally.
[00:11:57]  I saw a guy like that in a restaurant when I was fucking nine, and I was like, he didn't spook you?
[00:12:02]  No, I put my finger in it.
[00:12:05]  No, but it was an Italian restaurant.
[00:12:06]  And I'm like, damn, no way he's eating noodles, right?
[00:12:12]  Because it could just pop out.
[00:12:15]  Different pipes.
[00:12:16]  No, no, that's all one pipe, my brother.
[00:12:17]  That's the different pipe thing.
[00:12:19]  His whole body is one pipe.
[00:12:20]  That's the thing of it.
[00:12:21]  That's what they don't want you.
[00:12:22]  That's fucking bam.
[00:12:25]  Liz, this is, and so, because Liz obviously, well, we talk about Aaron Rod in this podcast, too.
[00:12:30]  People don't understand.
[00:12:31]  Liz loves Aaron Rodgers.
[00:12:35]  That's so unfair.
[00:12:37]  Wait, are you to put you on blast like that?
[00:12:39]  To put me on blast like that.
[00:12:40]  Yeah.
[00:12:41]  Okay.
[00:12:42]  The real story.
[00:12:43]  I do love Aaron Rodgers, but like, no, now I feel embarrassed because I know you were making a joke, but like, I actually used to.
[00:12:51]  So Aaron Rodgers is like should have been drafted to the Niners.
[00:12:57]  Uh-huh.
[00:12:58]  And I was always, and he wanted to play for the Niners.
[00:13:02]  And I was always like, he would have been the most perfect quarterback for the Niners, all this stuff.
[00:13:06]  And so I always was like a really big fan of Rodgers before all of this, like his crazy Rogan turn or whatever.
[00:13:17]  And he became like such a different personality.
[00:13:19]  So it's funny that you were like making a joke about that.
[00:13:22]  But then I couldn't actually bullshit it because I was a really big Aaron Rodgers fan.
[00:13:26]  That makes you sad.
[00:13:28]  I know.
[00:13:28]  I love sports.
[00:13:29]  I like him now.
[00:13:30]  You love sports.
[00:13:31]  And this is the thing: and kind of all sports.
[00:13:36]  Well, there's, I know you do.
[00:13:37]  What sports you like?
[00:13:38]  Do you like, are you getting into hockey?
[00:13:40]  No, I can't get into hockey actually.
[00:13:43]  I need to go to a game and then I could probably get into it.
[00:13:45]  Yeah.
[00:13:46]  I don't follow.
[00:13:47]  I don't follow hockey.
[00:13:48]  I don't follow.
[00:13:48]  I don't really follow baseball.
[00:13:51]  Really?
[00:13:51]  That's a slow game.
[00:13:52]  Yeah.
[00:13:53]  But I just, you know, I don't really follow baseball.
[00:13:56]  But who's your teams?
[00:13:57]  Just to establish your credibility with our sports listening.
[00:13:59]  Oh, they're going to hate me, though.
[00:14:00]  But in my defense, I grew up in San Francisco.
[00:14:02]  And we like the best team.
[00:14:03]  Why would you not like the best at the sport?
[00:14:06]  No, but my teams are the Warriors, the Niners.
[00:14:11]  When I was a kid, I did love the Giants, obviously.
[00:14:14]  Obviously.
[00:14:16]  But I've also been watching a lot of Knicks because we're here.
[00:14:21]  But I watch like all NBA.
[00:14:23]  I watch all teams on, you know, for basketball.
[00:14:26]  So I'm like, I'm dabbling all over the place.
[00:14:28]  You took us, you took us to a Knicks game.
[00:14:32]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:14:33]  You took you to, I forced you to Madison Square Garden, but you both had a really good time.
[00:14:38]  Yeah.
[00:14:39]  I took my fucking shirt off.
[00:14:41]  Yeah.
[00:14:41]  Yeah.
[00:14:42]  You should not do that.
[00:14:44]  No, they said I could.
[00:14:45]  In fact, a lot of the cheerleaders I could tell were sending me cheerleaders.
[00:14:49]  I was a little surprised at that.
[00:14:50]  Wait, you don't know about that?
[00:14:51]  Yeah.
[00:14:52]  I don't know.
[00:14:53]  Wait, why are you saying that?
[00:14:53]  The opposite wasn't it?
[00:14:55]  Because I was like, this seems so fucked up and sexist.
[00:14:58]  Well, no, but I was just like, I don't know.
[00:15:00]  Isn't that a football thing?
[00:15:02]  You should look into how they're paid.
[00:15:04]  And then that'll fucking blow your mind.
[00:15:06]  And they make nothing, right?
[00:15:07]  Yes.
[00:15:07]  It's like they make like $25 a game or something.
[00:15:09]  It's like less than.
[00:15:10]  Yeah.
[00:15:10]  Yeah.
[00:15:11]  And their response.
[00:15:11]  Yeah.
[00:15:11]  It's really, it's really shocking and really bad.
[00:15:14]  I know.
[00:15:14]  It's, it's, which is crazy because I'm like, well, couldn't they just work for us?
[00:15:20]  In this room?
[00:15:21]  No, but like, couldn't we have a cheer squad or something?
[00:15:23]  Like, like, okay, like, Nick's, you're not paying these women.
[00:15:27]  Like, you're paying them $25 a game.
[00:15:29]  Why don't we double it $50?
[00:15:30]  Come work for us and just kind of be in here and back me up kind of in the studio.
[00:15:35]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:15:36]  Just like having a personal kind of band.
[00:15:39]  I had a good time at the game.
[00:15:40]  Yeah.
[00:15:41]  I had a good time.
[00:15:42]  I thought you did.
[00:15:42]  I ate a pretzel.
[00:15:44]  Ooh, that sounded like a child talking.
[00:15:46]  Why?
[00:15:47]  It's a game.
[00:15:48]  It's a game.
[00:15:49]  But it's not to me.
[00:15:50]  It's life.
[00:15:51]  Because the thing is, you love sports.
[00:15:52]  And I've always felt like we couldn't really connect on this because you, to you, ball is life.
[00:15:57]  To me, brain is life.
[00:15:58]  Right?
[00:15:59]  I don't need, you know what?
[00:16:01]  I love both equally.
[00:16:03]  Brain and ball.
[00:16:05]  Pause on that.
[00:16:06]  But to me, I'm like, I just, I want to like it.
[00:16:09]  I want to like it.
[00:16:11]  And I like, I do like that you really like something.
[00:16:14]  And I wish that I liked anything.
[00:16:16]  I think I also, as is very evident through this episode, I'm also very steeped in all of the, as our guest calls it, the lore of all the sports and sports media, of which I am like very, or used to be way more like active.
[00:16:32]  Are you not active?
[00:16:34]  I don't know.
[00:16:35]  In the same way that I'm like not very online.
[00:16:37]  There's rarely.
[00:16:37]  Liz was banned from banned from RNBA.
[00:16:41]  Yeah.
[00:16:41]  And for, well, Liz Corn LaFraud.
[00:16:44]  This is one of Liz's.
[00:16:45]  Like a lot of people don't know this, but like the Liz Lore is Liz Corn LaFraud because she was the first to figure out he is LaFraud.
[00:16:52]  He's the cap.
[00:16:53]  He's everything.
[00:16:54]  Like Liz has a bunch of those that she came up with.
[00:16:56]  And because of that, and because there's just her interactions with like several players and stuff.
[00:17:00]  He's got shooters.
[00:17:02]  Well, you just had a lot of negative interactions with basketball players online.
[00:17:06]  You know?
[00:17:06]  And like, and when Aaron Silver comes out and talks about all the abusive fans, whatever, but his Jewish brother, well, Adam, I guess, would be too.
[00:17:15]  But when Adam Silver comes out and talks about the abusive fans, they're mostly talking about Liz.
[00:17:19]  I know.
[00:17:20]  What's the meanest thing you've said to an athlete?
[00:17:22]  I've never said anything mean to an athlete.
[00:17:24]  Never.
[00:17:24]  In all.
[00:17:26]  But you're very passionate.
[00:17:26]  You've never been like, fucking die.
[00:17:29]  On the internet?
[00:17:30]  Are you crazy?
[00:17:32]  No.
[00:17:34]  I'm not interested in like antagonizing the athletes.
[00:17:37]  I'm here for the metanarratives.
[00:17:42]  It's about the balls you don't dribble.
[00:17:44]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:17:45]  It's about the games you don't play.
[00:17:46]  Exactly.
[00:17:46]  It's about the bets that you don't make.
[00:17:48]  Absolutely.
[00:17:49]  And it's about the poker games.
[00:17:52]  You don't win.
[00:17:52]  That you don't win.
[00:17:54]  Ladies and gentlemen, we have with us today Pablo Torre, and the interview with him will begin.
[00:18:01]  What's it called when the two fellows jump for the basketball at the beginning of the game?
[00:18:05]  The tip-off?
[00:18:06]  I'm not filming.
[00:18:20]  The theater of the mind.
[00:18:22]  Actually, I film all of our episodes.
[00:18:24]  Actually, the cameras are right up there, but they're up in the corners recording secretly.
[00:18:29]  What I didn't get about the gambling cheating website that Liz showed me is there was a lamp that was for sale that was a camera lamp, but they only had one model.
[00:18:38]  So, like, wait, was it the one that goes in the center?
[00:18:41]  Yeah.
[00:18:41]  The big.
[00:18:43]  Yeah.
[00:18:43]  But I'm like, if you were like a guy who was concerned about getting spied on while playing poker, wouldn't you just look up at the lamp and be like, you guys have the cheating lamp?
[00:18:52]  Right.
[00:18:52]  You have to have like multiple different kind of styles there just to throw people off.
[00:18:58]  Ladies and gentlemen, we, first of all, we'd like to thank Calci, Polymarket, DraftKings, DraftKings, Bet Duel, FanDuel.
[00:19:07]  Bet Duel is also a good site, though, that I endorse wholeheartedly.

=== Dante's Fat Dad (06:01) ===

[00:19:11]  Absolutely.
[00:19:12]  Wait, is it Bet365247 or whatever?
[00:19:15]  Wasn't that one of those?
[00:19:16]  That sounds like one of them.
[00:19:18]  I think that's one of them.
[00:19:19]  MoneyLinks, Goldfund, lots of gold websites.
[00:19:24]  She endorses all of these, actually.
[00:19:25]  Yes.
[00:19:26]  And we'd also just like to personally thank Kevin Hart.
[00:19:30]  Ladies and gentlemen, with that being said, contractually, we would love to welcome to the show Pablo Torre, host of Pablo Torre, Finds Out.
[00:19:39]  Here to actually not find out anything, but tell us about how much money we can make sports gambling.
[00:19:46]  Betting?
[00:19:46]  Gambling?
[00:19:47]  So I think that the distinction between the two might be more meaningful than we have time for.
[00:19:55]  Interesting.
[00:19:56]  I once talked to a guy who is, Bob Volgaris is his name, who is a successful NBA better.
[00:20:01]  Great name for a guy who swears a lot.
[00:20:05]  Bob Haralabob Volgaris has insisted to me previously that he is a better and not a gambler.
[00:20:14]  Sounds like something a gambler would say.
[00:20:15]  And I think there is something about whether you're reflecting accurately someone's skill in the description.
[00:20:21]  Interesting.
[00:20:22]  And the skill, of course, is subject to all sorts of lamps with cameras in them and phones with cameras in them and contact lenses with the ability to read infrared writing on the back of playing cards.
[00:20:35]  Yeah.
[00:20:35]  Of course.
[00:20:36]  Bob's a big analytics guy, though, famously.
[00:20:38]  Yeah.
[00:20:38]  Like he was.
[00:20:40]  Executive with the Mavericks.
[00:20:41]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:20:41]  He was able to, if I may, parlay his work as a Better into front office.
[00:20:51]  Into being hated by Luka Doncish.
[00:20:53]  Yeah, and then summarily kicked out.
[00:20:55]  There's so much lore here that Liz and I are familiar with.
[00:20:58]  I'm worried for you.
[00:20:59]  I know.
[00:20:59]  So, listen, I just want to get this out of the way.
[00:21:01]  I know Luca's fat.
[00:21:03]  No, not anymore.
[00:21:04]  I know Luca was fat.
[00:21:06]  There you go.
[00:21:06]  And now has, I'm sure, with the help of a lot of this wonderful medication, these peptide sort of things they have coming out of the East.
[00:21:14]  And of course, I'm sure his own workout schedule has now apparently slimmed down.
[00:21:18]  Regardless, though, I will say he's an excellent player.
[00:21:21]  What's funny is that Anthony Davis got really fat in the wake of this.
[00:21:26]  And so I do have a feeling that there has to be one fat guy on the Mavs for the battle.
[00:21:33]  Cosmic equilibrium.
[00:21:34]  Yeah.
[00:21:34]  But I will say, I did.
[00:21:37]  We did go to a game recently.
[00:21:39]  We did.
[00:21:40]  Boys came to a game.
[00:21:41]  We went and saw the Knicks Magic at MSG.
[00:21:43]  You had a good time.
[00:21:44]  I had a blast.
[00:21:45]  Oh, you were there too?
[00:21:46]  I was there too.
[00:21:47]  We were all there.
[00:21:47]  I was there.
[00:21:48]  And you with that?
[00:21:49]  And you with that?
[00:21:50]  It was the highlight.
[00:21:55]  Which is, by the way, an appropriate answer for the most die-hard basketball fan about a Knicks Magician.
[00:22:00]  It was a tough game.
[00:22:01]  To be honest, it was a tough game.
[00:22:03]  Look, in my defense, I was telling you, I bought those tickets before the season started and was under the impression the magic would be a lot more compelling than they have been this week.
[00:22:15]  In a genuine sense, I didn't like watching the German fellow score.
[00:22:19]  But he's great.
[00:22:20]  I know, but I just don't like saying Vogtle.
[00:22:23]  A seven-foot Wagner is not stirring in you the right time.
[00:22:26]  Every time he dribbled that ball and sunk a little basket, I became even my foreskin grew back to get one more centimeter.
[00:22:36]  But in a real sense, the thing that made me happiest was seeing Liz so happy watching basketball because he loves it so much.
[00:22:44]  And you were so excited to see that little fellow on the Knicks.
[00:22:48]  Jalen?
[00:22:49]  Jalen.
[00:22:49]  She loves Jalen.
[00:22:51]  She loves him.
[00:22:52]  But you loved him too.
[00:22:53]  I loved him too.
[00:22:54]  Did we have Brace rewrite the back of all the basketball character cards?
[00:22:57]  But she was like, look at him.
[00:22:59]  He looks, and I don't know if this is rude of me to say, but you mentioned it in a nice way.
[00:23:04]  You said he looked like a little dog.
[00:23:05]  I said a little bulldog.
[00:23:06]  Bulldog.
[00:23:07]  He has the demeanor of a little bulldog, which I like.
[00:23:09]  But I had a great time watching him, and I began to root for him because I could tell who he was because he was short.
[00:23:14]  And he takes over the game.
[00:23:17]  Well, and he is like a bulldog genetically engineered thanks to his father, Rick Brunson, in a way that is apparently unsustainable.
[00:23:24]  Is his dad like a former Nick?
[00:23:26]  Yeah.
[00:23:27]  Assistant coach on the team.
[00:23:28]  Oh, God.
[00:23:28]  This is a whole other rabbit hole in the middle.
[00:23:30]  Well, but also, this is little gossip.
[00:23:32]  So weirdly enough, the gal that I go see for Pilates was one of the like on the athletic in the athletic department at Villanova.
[00:23:45]  And so she's got, and she's a real character, like former Broadway dancer, big blonde hair.
[00:23:51]  She's great.
[00:23:52]  But she, so she trained, they started incorporating Pilates to within like a lot of basketball teams because it's so good for balance and core and, you know, all this work, whatever.
[00:24:05]  And so she used to train Jalen and Dante and all the Villanova boys.
[00:24:11]  And she was like, I was asking her about them and she was like, you know, they are just such nice Catholic boys.
[00:24:18]  She's like, they are so nice, but Dante definitely had a huge crush on me and used to call me a MILF, thinking I couldn't hear all this.
[00:24:28]  So it was so in his culture, that is the ultimate sign of it.
[00:24:31]  But can't you see little Dante being like so in love?
[00:24:34]  I mean, come on.
[00:24:36]  So Dante as a character, his dad, one of the great tweets of all time is Dante reflecting on how he is now playing basketball after his dad had bullied him into trying to play soccer and he like rebelled.
[00:24:50]  Of course.
[00:24:51]  And by the way, Dante spelled with an O. Sick.
[00:24:54]  Love it.
[00:24:54]  I'm going to give you a further discussion.
[00:24:57]  I'm getting the picture here.
[00:24:58]  It's great.
[00:24:58]  Big fan of these Catholics.
[00:25:00]  He's so sweet.
[00:25:01]  But yeah.
[00:25:02]  So I always think about them that way.
[00:25:04]  Oh, they're just good Catholic school boys.
[00:25:06]  I'm like, I'm sure.
[00:25:07]  Yeah.
[00:25:08]  I have a great segue that I'm just going to hand to you, Liz.
[00:25:11]  What's that?
[00:25:11]  But you have to do it.

=== Noticing Micro Trends (11:32) ===

[00:25:12]  You were at a game recently and you were looking at the phones of men, which frankly, I think breaks the social contract, sitting in front of you.
[00:25:21]  And you noticed something interesting.
[00:25:24]  I love that.
[00:25:25]  That's funny.
[00:25:26]  I was going to bring that up later, but we could talk about it now.
[00:25:28]  I was like, last week I was at Nugget Spurs, which was, despite Wemby's injury, way more exciting than it had any business being because the Spurs are really cute this year.
[00:25:39]  But there was like five guys in the row right in front of me.
[00:25:45]  And they all came in.
[00:25:47]  I don't know.
[00:25:48]  This is in Denver.
[00:25:49]  So they're kind of like Midwestern, big boys.
[00:25:53]  And they immediately all take out their phone immediately as the game is starting.
[00:25:59]  And they're just looking at how they're hitting all of their fucking parlays.
[00:26:04]  And they're talking to each other.
[00:26:05]  I'd never seen anything like this before, you know, like where they're just, the game is live in front of them, not even on a fucking TV screen.
[00:26:13]  And they're showing their boys, like being like, look, oh, hitting my points.
[00:26:18]  Oh, look at what Jamal's doing.
[00:26:20]  Like, I did this.
[00:26:21]  I did that.
[00:26:22]  All through the phone.
[00:26:24]  And your intuitive reaction was what?
[00:26:27]  To this?
[00:26:28]  Because I find that unnerving and almost hugely an issue for the sport that I otherwise do try to love.
[00:26:36]  Oh, I mean, it was completely like off-putting.
[00:26:38]  And yeah, it's like, it was both shocking and not surprising.
[00:26:42]  Do you know what I'm saying?
[00:26:43]  It just, so not to be on a soapbox immediately, but like I just think that basketball is fracking itself.
[00:26:50]  Like the big problem with NBA fandom is that we care about individuals more than teams.
[00:26:55]  And historically, that's been attributed to like player empowerment or whatever.
[00:26:59]  But the actual problem I think that's happening is that we are incentivizing, paying attention to micro events that have nothing to do with the actual game in the context of two teams playing against each other.
[00:27:11]  And I think that basketball is like running the risk of poisoning its own ecosystem by drilling for the money inside of these small, like buried things.
[00:27:23]  And it's like, it's like, it's not good for the long-term economic viability.
[00:27:28]  Forget about like the, I like it one way versus another.
[00:27:31]  I just think it's actually threatening to like the premise of why a sport is good.
[00:27:36]  Well, it's like, I completely agree with you.
[00:27:38]  And it's also, you know, I think that I think a lot about why it feels like the NBA has embraced all of the gambling stuff a lot more, I don't know, like readily or at least like outwardly than other leagues.
[00:27:56]  I mean, it feels that way.
[00:27:57]  Yeah.
[00:27:57]  Adam Silver wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in 2014.
[00:28:00]  Yeah.
[00:28:00]  Single over a decade ago.
[00:28:02]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:28:02]  We should make this all legal.
[00:28:04]  But even like the NFL, which has historically had such a huge ecosystem and culture of vetting, although it was very, it's very different, I think.
[00:28:13]  Like for some reason, it feels very front and center with the NBA.
[00:28:16]  Some of that has to do with the media.
[00:28:17]  We can talk about that too.
[00:28:19]  But I also think it has to do with the like analytics revolution, which really changed the NBA in a lot of different ways.
[00:28:32]  Where like there's sort of like two waves of it from like there's like 96 to like 2010, where you're going from like the box score era into kind of early advanced metrics.
[00:28:45]  But in 2010 to like 2020, basically, you know, so all this is kind of happening over the last 20, 25 years, where you have the kind of like second spectrum and like space optical analytics and hold on tracking.
[00:29:02]  What the fuck are you guys talking about?
[00:29:05]  So you're talking about literally analytics of like what the players are doing.
[00:29:09]  I'm talking about, and this is, I think, underappreciated.
[00:29:11]  Yeah.
[00:29:11]  So there is literally a company called Second Spectrum that has since transformed into this larger enterprise.
[00:29:17]  But the core of it, there were these things called sport view cameras before then.
[00:29:22]  And sport view cameras were in the much like this lamp above with a camera hidden inside.
[00:29:26]  There were cameras in the ceiling of every NBA arena.
[00:29:29]  And this technology was, once upon a time, Israeli missile defense technology, which is not a joke.
[00:29:37]  And it would scan all of the moving objects on the floor in order to create a live, essentially computer vision simulation of the action on a basketball.
[00:29:48]  And this started when?
[00:29:50]  So this was happening like in 2010, 2012.
[00:29:52]  I was going to like the Sloan Sports Analytics Nerd Conference.
[00:29:55]  That's the big one in Boston.
[00:29:56]  Remember, we looked at that first.
[00:29:58]  The idea of you guys there would be, it makes me happy.
[00:30:01]  Just the idea that it's in March, unfortunately, next year.
[00:30:04]  Oh, okay.
[00:30:05]  Yeah.
[00:30:06]  The point, though, is and to the larger evolution of that event, because not everybody, you know, unlike Brace, we can't all dunk.
[00:30:16]  Yeah.
[00:30:16]  And so those who want to get into sports, they fetishize the general manager, Moneyball, right?
[00:30:25]  Like you want to be Billy Mee.
[00:30:27]  You don't want to be Scott Hadaberg.
[00:30:29]  The other thing is right at the same time is the introduction of fantasy sports.
[00:30:33]  Yes.
[00:30:33]  Which is another component of this.
[00:30:35]  That is true because you're tracking players in that, right?
[00:30:38]  Yes.
[00:30:38]  He loves fantasy sports.
[00:30:41]  Team Cutie Sweetie.
[00:30:42]  I was going to say, what's your team name?
[00:30:43]  It's Team Cutie Sweetie.
[00:30:44]  What's your team name?
[00:30:45]  And they are.
[00:30:45]  Mine is Pablo's Part Filipinos.
[00:30:48]  I will say Andre Speardens is my avatar.
[00:30:51]  And Team Cutie Sweetie is in third place, I will say, in my league right now.
[00:30:55]  We're doing pretty well.
[00:30:56]  He is a cutie and a sweetie.
[00:30:57]  I know.
[00:30:58]  That tracks.
[00:31:00]  So it became much easier for the fans, for the layman, to track player movements and things like this.
[00:31:06]  Yes, and no.
[00:31:07]  It actually became, I would say this.
[00:31:09]  Analysts were really enamored with all this stuff, but there wasn't a lot of like.
[00:31:15]  There was no like obvious way for the league, like the league built this massive infrastructure for tracking all this stuff and didn't really know what to do with it, because there's only like so much of it you can really like put on the broadcast, because fans kind of tune out like it's not that interesting.
[00:31:34]  Yet I would say at this point to talk about all of these kind of like micro advantages or like micro probabilities of each possession.
[00:31:44]  It's like real nerd stuff, you know.
[00:31:46]  Yeah, so analysts and journalists really like embraced it, but there was almost like a surplus of data that had no place to go.
[00:31:55]  And so, if we're talking about what you know 2010 to 2020 right like in the right in the middle of this, you have the 2018 SCOTUS decision, right?
[00:32:03]  Which is, of course, which like opened up all of the, you know, all of all of the sports gambling.
[00:32:10]  And when that happened, suddenly this like probability infrastructure that the league had built had a place to plug in, which is to say a market.
[00:32:22]  And I think also everybody who was more than a casual sports fan had already begun to feel like they could discern something like a data-driven edge.
[00:32:33]  So everybody watching the game is like, and this is the thing about sports that's very funny to me, unlike politics, is that actually, if you're just a maniac who loves sports and you watch your team with a degree of just specificity and like micro intensity, you might actually know a lot more than the national figures who are just like very, very, you know, gas baggy about all of this.
[00:32:55]  Like you might actually be an expert by virtue of your own particular expertise.
[00:32:59]  And so when you combine that with the fantasy sports industrial complex and you combine that with the fact that data won.
[00:33:07]  Yeah.
[00:33:08]  I mean, the whole story of Moneyball, by the way, is simply that like, I guess we should consider what the numbers say as opposed to like gut and gut feeling.
[00:33:15]  Yeah.
[00:33:16]  All of this sort of is converging on a game, a sport that is also suddenly unleashed when it came to building markets for not merely big bets, like the kind that your bookie on the corner would make, would take from you, but micro, tiny prop bets, which are so obscure as to have never existed before because there was no menu.
[00:33:42]  But there was also no way to actually calculate those odds, right?
[00:33:47]  Until you had all of this data that was being tracked, which is only going to continue because, you know, there's all this like kind of wearable tech that they're trying to introduce or teams have introduced.
[00:33:58]  My favorite futuristic bet, by the way, is like who's heart rate is spiking right now.
[00:34:04]  Yeah.
[00:34:04]  Like betting on a panic attack, basically.
[00:34:07]  Yeah.
[00:34:08]  Well, wait, they're making NBA or they're having NBA players wear wearables.
[00:34:11]  Well, so some of this is like, but also, okay, so there's like another component of this, which is also sports medicine, right?
[00:34:19]  Which is that like there is a lot of reason to be tracking, to like be cultivating all this data.
[00:34:25]  And it has really changed the way, let me see how do I phrase this.
[00:34:31]  It's changed the way in which players approach their bodies and their careers, especially when you get up in the upper echelons of like of talent, basically.
[00:34:44]  And what that's worth, you know, obviously someone like LeBron or Jokovich is going to take care of their body in a different way than someone who's kind of like a journeyman in the NFL or the NBA, right?
[00:34:55]  Well, LeBron says famously that he spends a million dollars a year on just like his.
[00:35:00]  LeBron says a lot of shit.
[00:35:02]  He also has read the autobiography of Malcolm X and definitely enjoyed it.
[00:35:06]  Yes.
[00:35:07]  Yes.
[00:35:07]  Yeah.
[00:35:08]  Yeah.
[00:35:08]  But from a pure just like biometrics thing, I reported a story about this for ESPN when I was working there at the magazine a zillion years ago.
[00:35:16]  And yeah, you learn things like, oh, wow.
[00:35:19]  And this is like ahead of the Andrew Huberman, I suppose, sort of like, now everybody knows sleep is important.
[00:35:25]  Shocking.
[00:35:26]  Shockingly, but they were like NBA teams were strapping their athletes to sleep monitors, to heart rate variability devices, to effectively Ura rings before those were consumer products.
[00:35:39]  And they were essentially being monitored by their boss when they were at home.
[00:35:45]  And so there are problems with labor and management and like who gets access to your most intimate information.
[00:35:50]  That's all it's interesting because it's kind of coming from, you know, it's both about the health of the athlete, of course.
[00:35:56]  It's always about the health of the athlete.
[00:35:58]  But it's really about risk.
[00:35:59]  It's about performance.
[00:36:00]  It's about performance and about risk.
[00:36:01]  And these teams mitigating their risk level.
[00:36:04]  You know, you look at someone like Wemby last year who got shut down when they detected a blood clot.
[00:36:09]  It's like you're only seeing a blood clot in a shoulder if you're getting like, you're in that pernovo like every week or whatever.
[00:36:15]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:36:16]  Like that's not something that up until this point, we had technological access to that information.
[00:36:24]  We just, it wasn't there.
[00:36:26]  And so my whole point is like, it's not just that this stuff is for that all this tracking exists for gambling purposes.
[00:36:37]  But once the data is collected, it's almost like it needs to find like liquidity.

=== AI's Role in Sports Betting (06:14) ===

[00:36:45]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:36:46]  And like the gambling markets open that up by the pure fact of the data being created, I guess it's kind of, you know, it's a little bit backwards in the way of thinking.
[00:36:56]  But so like, you know, you're saying you, you know, it's not like you go and bet on the corner with the bookie or whatever.
[00:37:03]  I mean, you used to just bet on the future, which was the, you know, are they going to win or they're going to lose?
[00:37:10]  Yeah.
[00:37:10]  You know, what is the line?
[00:37:11]  Yeah.
[00:37:11]  Yeah.
[00:37:11]  Right.
[00:37:12]  And you can still do that.
[00:37:13]  But what you, you know, what you're really betting on is.
[00:37:15]  Those bros in front of you were not betting on that.
[00:37:18]  No, I mean, you're talking about these prop bets or these parlays.
[00:37:20]  What you're really betting on is a derivative product.
[00:37:24]  It's the financialization of everything.
[00:37:26]  You created these devices, these instruments that are artificial and do not exist in nature.
[00:37:33]  Yes.
[00:37:34]  And when I say, I mean, the thing that I'm really interested in, because we can talk about, I mean, there's obviously, you know, the addiction stuff involved and the suicidality involved, you know, with gambling as an addiction and all this stuff being targeted specifically to young men whose prospects are not great right now.
[00:37:55]  You know, in the country or whatever.
[00:37:56]  And there's like that discussion.
[00:37:58]  But I'm really interested in what it does to us as viewers of sports.
[00:38:04]  I mean, that's where I think that fantasy sports are an interesting comparison point because fantasy became an enormous industry and remains as such.
[00:38:14]  But also, it is unfortunately pretty boring to hear someone go on at length about their fantasy team.
[00:38:19]  Yeah.
[00:38:20]  And so the question is-I don't, I don't think it is.
[00:38:23]  This is why I never talk about TV Sweeties.
[00:38:26]  But I think there is an aspect of like, let me tell you about the dream I had.
[00:38:30]  Yeah.
[00:38:31]  Right, totally.
[00:38:32]  And I think part of what sports is promises and what, like, young, whatever, the, the, the dudes out there, what I think is actually really, really enticing about sports in special is that there is this larger unifying conversation you could tap into.
[00:38:47]  That has been for me in a very genuine uh and, and I think ultimately like American way, like sports was the passport to the rest of the country for me.
[00:38:57]  I'm a Filipino kid from Manhattan who has very little in common with anybody in Arkansas, but the fact that we can all talk about things that are happening, the outcome of games at a wedding in, you know, in Fayetteville, which is what happened to me not so long ago it's like oh, that's the promise of sports, the more that we are sort of siloed into a million little financialized instruments and not like the actual conversation around the sport itself.
[00:39:24]  I think that's.
[00:39:25]  I mean not to be so dystopian about it.
[00:39:28]  I just think that we are underrating that sports is meant to be collective, with a shared frame of reference, as opposed to.
[00:39:37]  I have this very hyper specific interest that no one else shares.
[00:39:43]  I think it's also almost even more granular than that, which is that you start and I saw this with these kids they're not kids with these men that were in front of me at this game, where it's like you start to only watch the game through what is kind of like hitting your slip and everything else, kind of like fades to the background.
[00:40:08]  So like you the, these guys were only watching for you know rebounds, because they got to see if they make their parlay or whatever, or they're only watching for this you know what i'm saying and you end up like if you kind of like take it a little bit further like you end up watching it's like how a computer would watch a game, because you're just seeing this game in front of you as a stream of numbers or probabilities, and like expectation versus reality or whatever and everything else that,
[00:40:39]  In my opinion, it makes sports interesting, like just falls to the background, you know.
[00:40:44]  And it's funny because I think that we like constantly obsess over whether AI is like thinking like us and we weren't thinking, you know what I'm saying?
[00:40:53]  But we kind of like forget the ways in which we are now thinking like AI, right?
[00:40:59]  There's this argument that like I've heard like Ari Emmanuel make it because he's like all over UFC and live sports.
[00:41:05]  And he's like, my bet in contrast, in response to AI is on live events.
[00:41:11]  And so on one level, I get that.
[00:41:13]  But to your point, what you're describing is a world in which the game itself is not actually the product.
[00:41:20]  Yes.
[00:41:21]  And I think that, I'm just like, to the extent that the, and again, I am somebody who attended this literal Sloan Sports Analytics conference, to the extent that the nerds won, I think that the story of tech in Silicon Valley is always unintended consequences.
[00:41:37]  You think you've made this thing very efficient and optimized.
[00:41:40]  Instead, you have ruined the last cultural big tent that's left in like American life.
[00:41:48]  And I think that's what sports is grappling with as people are on their phones just not caring about the actual thing you're supposed to care about when you're sitting next to people who magically might actually disagree with you about everything else in life, except for the fact that you're here to watch this game together.
[00:42:03]  And now you're not even really watching the game together.
[00:42:06]  Well, I think that's kind of crazy.
[00:42:08]  I think there's something else there too, because I was watching there was a, I think it was a 60 minutes interview with the Calci guys.
[00:42:16]  I can't remember the guy's name.
[00:42:18]  The young man and the young woman who started the company.
[00:42:23]  And, you know, it's interesting to sort of watch their demeanor during the interview.
[00:42:26]  It was fairly boilerplate, you know, like giving the answers that you'd expect, except there was a sort of viral clip of them stumbling around and answers to why Donald Trump Jr. was an advisor to them.
[00:42:36]  I believe he's also an advisor to Polymarket as well.
[00:42:40]  But it's interesting because, obviously, something like Calci, something like Polymarket, and extend that to the sports betting apps, these are, I think, would be pretty universally seen as like something that is not bringing well-being to the social fabric of America.

=== Leeching Economy Predators (02:07) ===

[00:42:59]  Right.
[00:42:59]  And to put it another way, they're a net negative on the way on most people who interact with them in any way and also the things that they interact with themselves, whether those are elections or whether those are whether those are most commonly seen sports.
[00:43:14]  It's interesting.
[00:43:14]  I was looking this up after, or sort of in preparation for this episode as well.
[00:43:18]  And most people actually seem to, this is a Pew research poll that was released right as in October, right as this big FBI investigation.
[00:43:27]  They had this press conference.
[00:43:28]  Obviously, they did conducted the poll before that.
[00:43:31]  But I think majority of people see gambling apps as like a negative.
[00:43:35]  But if you talk to any of like the proselytizers of these things, they'll say like, well, it's an opportunity to make money.
[00:43:42]  And I think that it's an opportunity for people to make money.
[00:43:44]  And I think that that is often positioned.
[00:43:46]  And you see this a lot in Silicon Valley, especially with a lot of the crypto stuff, the meme coin shit, as like, well, it's good because it offers people, it's like a job.
[00:43:55]  Like it's like almost like they, you know, people used to talk about job creators or whatever.
[00:43:59]  They still do to some extent, but you know, obviously pulled back a little bit on that.
[00:44:03]  They sort of talk about like these financial opportunities, but which are almost always just like these incredibly predatory financial, very complex scams or ways for people to perform scams on each other as something almost like sacrosanct or holy because obviously like they can they're making somebody money.
[00:44:21]  So it's good because it, if you make money, if something makes money, it helps the economy, which is also sort of a vague thing that we also really love.
[00:44:29]  That's also not true about gambling specifically.
[00:44:32]  I mean, there's like, there was a huge study too, I think it was in Brazil a little while ago, where sports betting has also taken a hold quite strong.
[00:44:43]  And because you're actually, you know, just on a pure kind of economic level, you're actually diverting so much money from the economy into a non-productive sector.
[00:44:54]  Like it literally is being like leached out of even consumption can be more productive because it's going back into the firms or whatever.
[00:45:02]  But this is like so, it's just leeching it out of the economy.

=== Non-Productive Gambling (04:10) ===

[00:45:07]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:45:08]  And that's not, you know, even getting, that's like a very, very pure, like, I don't know what I never talk about things as like that cold.
[00:45:15]  I was, I was talking to somebody about this last night, and it's like, you know, one of the arguments for legalized sports betting is that like, no, it's not in the hands of organized crime or whatever anymore.
[00:45:24]  But I'm like, okay, well, if $50 goes in the hands of FanDuel versus like, you know, the Gambinos, a road doesn't get built either way.
[00:45:33]  You know what I mean?
[00:45:34]  It's not like, it's, it's, you know, it seems, it seems like the Gambinos are very big on public infrastructure.
[00:45:39]  You know what?
[00:45:39]  I will say, from what I understand, a lot of sort of mafia jobs now, you're making like 75K a year.
[00:45:47]  Like you just kind of rough for like this whole this whole FBI thing has been big for the mafia.
[00:45:53]  They're back.
[00:45:54]  Apparently, in ways that we didn't anticipate truly disgusting at this length, they are back.
[00:46:01]  We should get into this, actually, because this is about gambling too, but we should talk about the more into sports scam to the sports betting a little bit later.
[00:46:09]  I also connected, I dare say.
[00:46:11]  I think all of this is more connected than anybody who is involved in professional basketball would like to admit.
[00:46:18]  Both the mafia and the poker and the sports betting stuff.
[00:46:20]  Well, so I've been saying to Liz for a long time, I'm like, isn't this all rigged?
[00:46:24]  You know, in this whole fucking thing rigged.
[00:46:27]  And then, of course, I'll clarify that I'm specifically talking about the sports that she in particular likes.
[00:46:32]  But I've always been like, isn't this all rigged?
[00:46:34]  Like, aren't they all kind of like doing bits and all this stuff?
[00:46:37]  And thank God, my best friend, Kash Patel, came out and gave a little press conference of some arrests made, I believe on October 23rd for two, I don't know why I pronounce it like that.
[00:46:50]  It's like the owl.
[00:46:51]  Yeah.
[00:46:52]  It's commercial.
[00:46:54]  One, two, three.
[00:46:58]  For two cases.
[00:47:00]  Operation Royal Flush.
[00:47:04]  Yeah.
[00:47:04]  Yeah, let's just glide on past that.
[00:47:07]  Straight on to Operation Nothing But Bet.
[00:47:10]  Now, Pablo, I'm sure the worst.
[00:47:12]  I'm sorry.
[00:47:12]  That's the worst.
[00:47:13]  Cool.
[00:47:13]  Cool.
[00:47:15]  Abandon me like that.
[00:47:16]  Nothing but bet.
[00:47:17]  I think it's good.
[00:47:18]  You think it sucks.
[00:47:19]  You think it sucks.
[00:47:20]  I think it's pretty good.
[00:47:22]  It's not.
[00:47:23]  The guy's going to be a good idea.
[00:47:24]  You are wearing an FBI jacket while you say that.
[00:47:27]  Well, we helped them do this, right?
[00:47:29]  We're trying to stamp out organized crime.
[00:47:30]  One of these was a intersecting cases with certain personalities, but one of these was a rigged poker game case involving three of the five New York Mafia families.
[00:47:47]  The Bonano, the Genovese, and I can't remember the other one, but the Gambinos?
[00:47:53]  Or am I just making that up?
[00:47:54]  I think you just made, I don't know if it was, maybe.
[00:47:56]  I can't remember.
[00:47:57]  Which other one shot Curtis Sliwa?
[00:48:00]  Oh, I thought that was the same thing.
[00:48:01]  I was talking Gambinos.
[00:48:02]  Yeah.
[00:48:03]  Well, hopefully not them then, because I don't want them making any money after what they did to him.
[00:48:07]  But and Chauncey Phillips, who I was astounded to know, what a last name, Billup.
[00:48:16]  You don't hear that too often, right?
[00:48:19]  You know?
[00:48:20]  But I love the name Chauncey.
[00:48:22]  I was going to say you went right for Billups and just went past.
[00:48:25]  Well, Chauncey, you hear that sometimes, right?
[00:48:27]  But Billups, you're like, what is this?
[00:48:29]  It is a great name.
[00:48:30]  It's a great name.
[00:48:31]  It sounds like an extremely fake person now that I think of it.
[00:48:34]  It does actually, like, it really sounds like a sports coach name.
[00:48:37]  Like, it really does.
[00:48:38]  Like, what else?
[00:48:39]  What other job do you have as Chauncey Billops?
[00:48:41]  Well, a player.
[00:48:41]  A player.
[00:48:42]  Was he a player?
[00:48:43]  Yes.
[00:48:43]  Player always wins.
[00:48:45]  Except in this case.
[00:48:46]  And then in Operation Nothing But Bet, there was a sports gambling scandal involving Liz's favorite player.
[00:48:59]  You're talking about Rozier?
[00:49:00]  Terry Rozier?
[00:49:01]  Yeah.
[00:49:01]  Scary Terry River.
[00:49:02]  Scary Terry Rosier.
[00:49:04]  Yeah.
[00:49:05]  I want to note something about these operations that I don't believe I've seen pointed out anywhere else.
[00:49:12]  Donald Trump's second term has brought racial tensions, I think, to the fore, right?

=== Osama's Gambit (15:28) ===

[00:49:18]  Haven't noticed.
[00:49:19]  Yeah.
[00:49:20]  There's a couple of things.
[00:49:21]  I've got my eyes.
[00:49:22]  Would you say more or less than the first?
[00:49:25]  I would say it's been building.
[00:49:27]  How about that?
[00:49:27]  Equally unacceptable.
[00:49:29]  And rarely do we see, and now it's like, you know, it feels sometimes like a prison yard, right?
[00:49:35]  Everybody's clicking up with the races.
[00:49:38]  In the defendants of these, in these cases, and the men arrested, we have, and I'm just, these are just examples.
[00:49:46]  Eric Ernest, great name, by the way.
[00:49:49]  Great name for a criminal, by the way.
[00:49:51]  Eric Ernest, who is black.
[00:49:54]  In fact, so black, I can't even say his nickname.
[00:49:56]  Shane Hennen, which is a, who is a, Pablo did a fantastic episode about, I got to tell you.
[00:50:03]  But I would describe as a Altoona-style tweaker, white man.
[00:50:10]  Jamon Jones.
[00:50:11]  Sugar Shane.
[00:50:13]  Which is also great.
[00:50:14]  Sugar's a great name for a white guy, too, because we all forget.
[00:50:17]  These names in these cases are impeccable.
[00:50:20]  Safty Brothers level.
[00:50:22]  Oh, yes.
[00:50:22]  I would say.
[00:50:23]  Very much so.
[00:50:24]  Really beautiful work here.
[00:50:26]  We've got Amar Awade, aka Flappy, who is representing our, I believe, Arab brothers and sisters.
[00:50:34]  I think Flappy is a really cute nickname.
[00:50:36]  Me too.
[00:50:37]  He's a really bad guy.
[00:50:39]  I know.
[00:50:40]  I knew who he was before.
[00:50:41]  You can be a really bad guy, and then you have to have a silly nickname.
[00:50:44]  That's true.
[00:50:44]  That's how you kind of like manage to get a bunch of people.
[00:50:45]  Yeah, like a tiny for a really big guy.
[00:50:47]  Yeah, classic.
[00:50:49]  Classic.
[00:50:49]  Or skinny if you're like, yeah, skinny.
[00:50:52]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:50:53]  Nelson Alvarez, aka Spanish G, who is Latinx.
[00:50:58]  A host of Italians, all of whose names are so stereotypical that it would sound old-style racist for me to even say them.
[00:51:06]  Osman Hoti, which, and listen, obviously I've been trying to make peace between the Italians and the Albanians for the years that I've lived in New York City.
[00:51:15]  The Albanians seem to be winning somehow, whatever war they're fighting against the Italians.
[00:51:19]  But you go to Arthur Avenue, you look in the back of those pizza places, there is not an Italian flag up there.
[00:51:24]  There is an Albanian.
[00:51:26]  We love the Albanian flag.
[00:51:27]  It's a badass.
[00:51:28]  We're currently doing the Albanian gang sign.
[00:51:30]  It's not a gang sign.
[00:51:31]  It's a country.
[00:51:33]  And you got to give credit to them.
[00:51:35]  The whole entire country did fall apart due to a countrywide pyramid scheme in the early 90s, leading to a brief civil war.
[00:51:43]  But Osman Hoti, aka Albanian Bruce, representing our Balkan brothers and sisters.
[00:51:48]  I don't know if you would accept that, but that's where he's from.
[00:51:52]  Anthony Schneiderman, and I don't have proof here, but hazarded a guess, hazarded a guess.
[00:51:59]  He might be Jewish.
[00:52:00]  And his Instagram, by the way, which is still up, not locked.
[00:52:02]  He has three kind of shitty looking Omikasi places, which he was the money launderer.
[00:52:07]  Okay, listen, it's not, I didn't give him his job, but he was the money launderer for this operation.
[00:52:12]  And I would say if you're the FBI, you're probably looking into the funding of those Omikasi places, one of which I think is in this neighborhood.
[00:52:20]  And then Sophia Wei and a bunch of Chinese people, many of them from Flushing.
[00:52:25]  And we have every race.
[00:52:26]  Not every race.
[00:52:27]  It's a real rainbow coalition.
[00:52:28]  Don't have here is the Slavs, but we'll get to you.
[00:52:32]  We'll get you guys.
[00:52:33]  And we don't have South Asians.
[00:52:35]  However, Hash Patel.
[00:52:38]  Right?
[00:52:39]  He's the cherry.
[00:52:40]  You can't count him.
[00:52:41]  But he's involved.
[00:52:43]  This is a post-racial America.
[00:52:45]  I love this.
[00:52:46]  It's a true New York story.
[00:52:48]  It really is.
[00:52:48]  Even though it expand other cities, I mean, or it moves into other cities, it does feel very like the New York City dream.
[00:52:56]  What other state has an Albanian Bruce?
[00:53:00]  Dude, what other state has an Albanian?
[00:53:02]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:53:03]  Like, I never met one before I moved here.
[00:53:05]  There's, and by the way, and I may be talking, there is, you can, if you ever want to see a uniformed NYPD officer blow lines of fucking cocaine at five in the morning, maybe hit up an Albanian casino in certain hipster neighborhood that is on the border of or in Queens.
[00:53:26]  Rhymes with Bridgewood.
[00:53:27]  Rhyme with Bridgewood.
[00:53:29]  But yeah, there's an Albanian casino that you can go to there that you can see the NYPD do Coke at.
[00:53:35]  But Tish, COVID-DISH.
[00:53:37]  But what is, so I don't follow sports so much.
[00:53:42]  What does this mean for sports, these cases?
[00:53:45]  Because there's one that's, it seems to be a mafia thing where they've got these rig card games.
[00:53:50]  The other one seems to be pretty serious too, which is this point shaving thing and these bettors receiving information about maybe if a player is going to be out or something like this.
[00:54:01]  You've been covering this for a little while.
[00:54:02]  You've been on this for a little while.
[00:54:03]  I've been living at the bottom of this rabbit hole full of unlocked Instagram accounts inexplicably.
[00:54:09]  Just like a lot of people just still out here posting.
[00:54:11]  Crazy.
[00:54:12]  A lot of people in this story are very online.
[00:54:15]  And you've said a couple of key phrases that I think help explain what the story is about.
[00:54:19]  Like the through line through the data and what you just said a second ago was information.
[00:54:24]  So much of this is about what is actionable, valuable betting information.
[00:54:30]  And it could be as simple as this guy ain't playing tonight.
[00:54:33]  Yeah.
[00:54:34]  And so one of the ways, one of the pipelines in the story, Damon Jones is a great character, by the way.
[00:54:41]  Damon Jones, who is currently identified most prominently as the guy LeBron James installed in a volunteer capacity as an assistant.
[00:54:51]  There's a scare quotes around every one of these words, as an assistant coach on the Lakers was feeding allegedly information about whether LeBron James was going to play in a given game.
[00:55:01]  And that was being filtered into the network of post-racial Americans that you just described.
[00:55:07]  And they would put money on them through a network of betters across the country.
[00:55:10]  So it's just information that's currency in a very real way.
[00:55:13]  But the other thing is like, why are people like Damon Jones or allegedly Chauncey Phillips or allegedly Terry Roger, why are they involved?
[00:55:23]  Like NBA players ostensibly are like at some remove from the sad and dark corners of the internet where gambling information gets traded.
[00:55:35]  And it turns out that the gap between actual NBA players and even superstars and all of these guys is vanishingly small.
[00:55:44]  So what's it doing to sports?
[00:55:45]  It's giving us a clearer picture of like how athletes and sports bettors slash gamblers and coaches all live, which is to say they live on the internet with the rest of fucking us.
[00:55:57]  We're all online together.
[00:55:58]  It's so sad, man.
[00:56:00]  It's so sad.
[00:56:01]  I watched an episode of your show and I think some, I don't know, these guys you have on, they all seem like they maybe worked in sports or something because they all seem a little mean.
[00:56:10]  But one of these guys, like, and you know, he was an older fellow he had on.
[00:56:14]  And he's like, you know, these players, they see the, they see the angry messages you send them.
[00:56:18]  I'm like, dude, don't say that on the fucking podcast.
[00:56:20]  That's just going to make me send toys.
[00:56:22]  You know, I read everything.
[00:56:24]  Athletes are so fucking online.
[00:56:26]  And by the way, and perhaps this should be unsurprising given who else is online of great power and stature in America.
[00:56:32]  But LeBron, pretty famously, is the most attuned to his mentions and Google alerts and clips.
[00:56:42]  He's like, and that guy, what I'm trying to say is no one is free from the brain rot that all of us are afflicted with on Twitter.
[00:56:52]  It's just everyone.
[00:56:54]  So what was Terry Rozier Terry Rosé?
[00:56:57]  Terry Rozier.
[00:56:58]  Terry Rozier, who had one of the great tweets, by the way, of all time.
[00:57:01]  Yes.
[00:57:01]  which was about Osama bin Laden when he discovered that Osama bin Laden was allegedly 6'7", was like... 6'7".
[00:57:08]  He.
[00:57:11]  He was.
[00:57:14]  Just cooperated in your sorry.
[00:57:17]  Keep going.
[00:57:19]  I have a neurodivergence.
[00:57:21]  So how does that make you feel?
[00:57:24]  Terry Rozier simply said, Osama should have hooped he was tall as hell.
[00:57:30]  But it's nothing but facts is what he's saying here, right?
[00:57:33]  Because Osama.
[00:57:34]  It's a different America.
[00:57:36]  I know.
[00:57:37]  Yeah.
[00:57:38]  Yeah.
[00:57:38]  A world in which Osama bin Laden just took people to the block.
[00:57:42]  And I've known because Castro obviously famously tried out to play baseball.
[00:57:46]  If we'd had a Osama situation, and he was out in the West.
[00:57:51]  If his family had taken him on vacation to the U.S. instead of Britain, totally different because he probably saw cricket and was like, I don't know, what is that?
[00:57:57]  I will say, 6'7, okay, that's tall.
[00:58:00]  But, you know, he's probably doing just, you know, he's kind of like a, you know, you got him on the wing.
[00:58:05]  He's not really like, unless Osama hits right as the small ball revolution is happening.
[00:58:10]  That's right.
[00:58:11]  Positionless game.
[00:58:12]  Maybe they move him to the five for a little bit.
[00:58:15]  Small ball five.
[00:58:16]  Yeah, there we go.
[00:58:16]  Bro, he's an athlete, dude.
[00:58:18]  I mean, I'm sorry.
[00:58:19]  He's a natural athlete.
[00:58:21]  Wingspan.
[00:58:21]  I don't know.
[00:58:23]  I'm sorry.
[00:58:24]  Wingspan was at.
[00:58:25]  He has, like, first of all, he has patience, obviously, but he also has an analytical mind, Nate Silver.
[00:58:31]  I mean, maybe people have called Nate Silver the Osama bin Laden of sports, but the, or of whatever he does.
[00:58:36]  Yeah, he's a huge poker player.
[00:58:37]  Huge and obvious gambling act, yes.
[00:58:40]  Well, I think he calls himself.
[00:58:41]  I know.
[00:58:41]  I'm not.
[00:58:42]  I'm not.
[00:58:42]  I know.
[00:58:43]  I shouldn't put words in Nate Silver's mouth.
[00:58:44]  I believe he's, well, I'd like to.
[00:58:46]  He's not listening.
[00:58:48]  But Osama, like, obviously, like, somewhat of an athlete, right?
[00:58:52]  Like, if what they're saying about him is true with all of his mountains and Tora Bora and all these things and hiking around, like, I'm sorry, most people couldn't do that kind of stuff.
[00:58:59]  So back to Scary Terry.
[00:59:03]  Terry, I will say, was doing something that fans have alleged players had been involved in for since the dawn of time, which was, you know, obviously this is aided with the proliferation of betting apps.
[00:59:21]  It makes it a lot easier, a lot more decentralized for people to track this.
[00:59:24]  Although it does seem like the league does know what the fuck is going on.
[00:59:28]  In ways that they don't want us to fully appreciate.
[00:59:31]  Of course.
[00:59:32]  But Terry was basically letting his boys know, you know, oh, I'm not, you know, like you said, trading information or, you know, like pulling himself out of games.
[00:59:44]  That's a big one, like what we call point shaving, where you're, you know, trying to hit an under, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:59:51]  Yeah.
[00:59:51]  So, Race, you mentioned before, like, how rigged is all of this?
[00:59:55]  I think the other thing that's happened to sports because of what Liz just described is that people are very understandably alleging that so much more is rigged than they realized.
[01:00:04]  And now it's impossible to rule it out just based on the available trend lines.
[01:00:08]  Because the thing that's happened, the whole hitting an under thing, is a thing that a player can rationalize if they want to be vaguely ethical about what they're doing.
[01:00:19]  How so?
[01:00:20]  Because they're not changing the outcome of the game.
[01:00:23]  What they're doing is saying, I'm just going to take myself out of it.
[01:00:28]  I'm going to shave at the margins my own personal performance.
[01:00:32]  It's always about unders.
[01:00:33]  Yeah.
[01:00:34]  Because it's not easy to control how much you suck.
[01:00:36]  It's less easy to control how good you are.
[01:00:39]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:00:39]  Like you're never going to be like, I'm going to do fucking five dunks or whatever because you might not be able to, you know, you're not brace level or whatever.
[01:00:46]  But like, yeah, you can be like, I have, because something that, something that John Tay Porter was doing, my two favorite things, faking sick and making money, but he would just take himself out of games and people would win bets, basically betting on that.
[01:00:59]  I mean, that's what Terry Rogier was also alleged to have done, both informed their friends, I'm going to take myself out of this game, take my unders.
[01:01:08]  Yes.
[01:01:08]  So I'm going to underperform whatever the sports gambling operators are saying is going to be my number to hit, whatever the line is for rebounds and assists and points.
[01:01:17]  And Jante Porter, same deal.
[01:01:19]  He was like, I'm not actually throwing games.
[01:01:22]  I'm just taking myself, Jante Porter, who's like a minor character out of the game.
[01:01:27]  And because there's a market for that, I'm not actually adversely affecting my team.
[01:01:33]  I'm just telling someone that I'm going to be less involved.
[01:01:37]  And that's how you rationalize this.
[01:01:39]  I think, you know, it's funny because so many people have been tracking this stuff.
[01:01:46]  Like fans have alleged this behavior.
[01:01:48]  with athletes for so long.
[01:01:50]  Like, oh, they're point shaving.
[01:01:51]  You know, at the end of games, you know, you can kind of see like, there's no way this guy's missing this many shots or why are you kind of like dribbling out or why are you fouling there or whatever.
[01:02:00]  There's so many ways to kind of control that, like you're saying, control the under.
[01:02:06]  And fans have alleged that for so long that, you know, I mean, I think that the, that like so many players are doing this.
[01:02:17]  It's not just the Jantes and the scary Terrys, who what we're talking about are like, you know, eighth, ninth men on a team, you know, like kind of like.
[01:02:26]  Outside of how many men?
[01:02:27]  Well, you say like, you know, you're always playing five guys, right?
[01:02:30]  And so when you say the eighth or ninth, it's like in the rotation, you know, they're, they're kind of like, you know, down the line on the bench.
[01:02:36]  I mean, Jante Porter, one of the reasons he got busted is because they were like, who the fuck is betting on Jante Border?
[01:02:40]  Which, fair enough.
[01:02:42]  Which, by the way, is how a lot of these things are getting flagged.
[01:02:44]  Because even Terry Rogier, who's a more notable name, people are still like, why is there so much coming on an under seemingly randomly?
[01:02:53]  Right.
[01:02:53]  And that's so to the extent that leagues are aware of this, gambling operators are in fact incentivized.
[01:02:58]  In fairness to them, they're incentivized to catch this stuff.
[01:03:01]  The question is whether this stuff, betting on unders, would have ever happened in the absence of legalized gambling.
[01:03:07]  Which, again, consult your local mob associated bookie.
[01:03:13]  They're not taking that bet.
[01:03:14]  Yeah.
[01:03:15]  Yeah.
[01:03:15]  And so you're incentivizing and ostensibly helping catch a behavior that otherwise would not have existed in a different era.
[01:03:22]  Well, and, you know, we should say this has been popping up.
[01:03:25]  I mean, since those two cases dropped, there was two more.
[01:03:28]  There was two pitchers in the MLB that just got hit.
[01:03:31]  For the Cleveland Guardians, who are also.
[01:03:33]  Which is a, yeah, the Guardian.
[01:03:35]  Yeah.
[01:03:35]  Well, there's a whole, there's a whole, there's a lot of lore there.
[01:03:39]  One of the problems is that, again, these guys just love to text.
[01:03:44]  So Jante Porter, for instance, one of the great text messages of all time was, I'm paraphrasing, wipe your phones.
[01:03:50]  You guys might get hit with a Rico.
[01:03:52]  Great text.
[01:03:54]  Wipe your phones.
[01:03:55]  Just like an all-time great, like warning you about a Rico charge.
[01:03:59]  And those guys all spoiler alert got arrested.
[01:04:03]  In this case, the Cleveland Guardians pitchers, the sort of micro bet they were doing was in baseball, you can bet on whether a given specific pitch is going to be a ball or a strike.
[01:04:14]  Yeah.
[01:04:15]  Which is crazy.
[01:04:16]  And so one of the greatest relief pitchers in the game, Emmanuel Classe for the Guardians, he would tank the first pitch of at bats and throw it into the dirt.
[01:04:27]  And he would text simultaneously during the game, according to the indictment, one of his guys in the Dominican about whether or not he had put down enough money on that thing.
[01:04:38]  And there are animated GIFs, there are memes, it's just all very documented, which is, again, darkly hilarious.

=== New Gambles, Old Platforms (15:27) ===

[01:04:46]  That is just in this level of sort of like clarity.
[01:04:51]  Wouldn't you why would you text anybody here in this?
[01:04:59]  How else would you do it?
[01:05:00]  Isn't there something you text like a third party?
[01:05:02]  That third party sends a coded message or something.
[01:05:04]  You know what I mean?
[01:05:05]  Well, maybe people are figuring out new things.
[01:05:07]  It's a fucking gift, you know, or you do send a gift.
[01:05:10]  Yeah, that's why I think that this stuff is so much more widespread than these indictments.
[01:05:14]  Because these are just the idiots who got caught, maybe.
[01:05:16]  Well, that's the kind of, I mean, I do think that that's the implication.
[01:05:19]  So we should say, you know, in the case of Scary Terry and with Jante, like the league looked into all that stuff and really wanted it from what it seems like, the NBA really wanted to keep a clamp on all this stuff.
[01:05:32]  Again, much like a casino, it is not incentivized to let anyone know cheating is going on.
[01:05:36]  So it seemed like, I mean, I'm curious your perspective on this because you've been following this since way before the indictments dropped.
[01:05:44]  Like, was the league blindsided by the feds?
[01:05:48]  Or what's the, because it, from an outsider's perspective, Adam Silver did not seem very prepared to talk about this when it dropped, what, like two days or something before the first game of this year?
[01:06:01]  It was opening, it was opening week, and it was before that first Friday.
[01:06:06]  Yeah.
[01:06:07]  I think it was the Thursday they dropped maybe or Wednesday.
[01:06:10]  The point being that I think the NBA got caught not being aware of what the federal government was planning to do, but they had known that the government was actively looking into it.
[01:06:22]  Right.
[01:06:23]  And so why did they drop it on that day?
[01:06:25]  Clearly, it was because Kash Patel wanted a big show.
[01:06:28]  Yeah.
[01:06:29]  That's also true.
[01:06:30]  He loves the splash.
[01:06:31]  Now, at the same time, this investigation had started years earlier under the Biden administration.
[01:06:37]  So there's also just that, right?
[01:06:39]  This did not originate with Kash Patel's personal interests.
[01:06:43]  That doesn't shock me.
[01:06:44]  But in terms of like what happened here with the NBA's knowledge of Jante Porter and Terry Rogier, Jante Porter got banned for life by the NBA pretty summarily.
[01:06:54]  Terry Rogier, though, is a different story because this is complicating, of course.
[01:07:01]  The Miami Heat traded for Terry Rogier while he was under federal investigation, but the NBA.
[01:07:08]  Which they would know.
[01:07:09]  And this is where it gets hazy.
[01:07:12]  And I don't know what the NBA officially has its position here.
[01:07:17]  But what I have reported is that the Miami Heat wishes they knew that Terry Rogier was being investigated by the federal government and the NBA at the time that they committed ultimately, you know, millions upon millions of dollars and a first-round draft pick to acquire him.
[01:07:35]  The NBA's position is we were doing our best to look into him, but we don't have subpoena power.
[01:07:43]  And so the federal government, this is my translation now, effectively made us look stupid because we didn't do anything about this only for Kash Patel to be like, surprise.
[01:07:55]  And so they are frustrated is my translation of their attitude towards what the feds are doing, making a big show out of something that they could not have been as aware of.
[01:08:05]  Now, how much did they want to know?
[01:08:09]  What did you know?
[01:08:10]  When did you know it?
[01:08:10]  How hard did you try to find out?
[01:08:12]  Right.
[01:08:13]  I think set a certain dosage of, a macro dose of cynicism around the NBA's prime directive, which is always make the PR crisis as small as possible.
[01:08:26]  Did they really want to know if they could avoid it?
[01:08:29]  I think that's part of the calculation whenever you're doing an investigation of yourself.
[01:08:34]  And that's what the NBA was effectively doing with Terry Rogier.
[01:08:37]  Yeah, I mean, I can see what they might want to do is just if they were looking into him, sort of scare him off from doing in the future.
[01:08:44]  Nobody gets caught, but it's sort of a warning without actually having to officially censure him or anything like that.
[01:08:50]  And it kind of goes away.
[01:08:52]  Yeah.
[01:08:52]  And that I can see being to Adam Silver's benefit.
[01:08:57]  I know very little about Adam Silver except that Liz does not like him.
[01:08:59]  I don't think anybody likes him.
[01:09:02]  He's got a wife and kids.
[01:09:03]  Excuse me.
[01:09:04]  The owners like him.
[01:09:05]  And that's who he kind of reports to.
[01:09:08]  I would say the pendulum has swung on Adam Silver.
[01:09:10]  So Adam Silver, at the outset of when he became commissioner, he did two things in 2014.
[01:09:15]  Number one was he orchestrated the transfer of power from Donald Sterling, owner of the Clippers, to Steve Ballmer, who have also separately been investigating as a related matter.
[01:09:27]  But this was Steve Ballmer basically riding in as his progressive savior out with the bad, in with this new era of this enlightened NBA that was measured, by the way, most directly against Roger Goodell, commissioner of the NFL, who was at the time seen as this law and order commissioner, this autocrat who was just punishing the black players in his life.
[01:09:53]  That was sort of the contrast between Adam Silver and Roger Goodell.
[01:09:55]  So Adam Silver.
[01:09:56]  Goodell also had all the CTE stuff that was looming.
[01:09:59]  Absolutely.
[01:09:59]  And was basically shepherding this truly like, I would say, dangerous and fatal product, peddling it to America's children.
[01:10:11]  That was the conversation around football.
[01:10:13]  A cover-up, a medical cover-up.
[01:10:15]  Yes.
[01:10:15]  And so there is a conversation actively around should football be illegal?
[01:10:20]  Should it exist in 10 years, only to discover now 10 years later, that football is ascendant and the most popular thing in America.
[01:10:28]  And the NBA, as opposed to being the progressive Enlightened League, is now beset with its own crime and punishment scandals that Adam Silver seemingly has very little control over.
[01:10:39]  Because the second thing he did in 2014 was write that op-ed in the New York Times that we referenced before.
[01:10:43]  Yeah.
[01:10:44]  Oh, that was right after being in commissioner.
[01:10:46]  Yeah.
[01:10:46]  That was the first thing.
[01:10:46]  Yeah, it was like one of his first big things that he kind of like did out, like as I am the new commissioner and this is what I think the future of the NBA is, was kind of the thrust of the piece.
[01:10:58]  Yeah.
[01:10:58]  He was looking for, by the way, as the traditional sources of money were drying up, were being disrupted by the internet, meaning like cable television money, the media rights deals, which were just like decades long and billions of dollars.
[01:11:15]  Adam Silver, to his credit, I suppose, his economic foresight was like, where are we going to go next once that dries up?
[01:11:22]  And he went to gambling.
[01:11:24]  They're now going increasingly to the Middle East.
[01:11:28]  They're looking at all of the places that the White House is also looking.
[01:11:33]  They're looking at crypto.
[01:11:35]  They're looking.
[01:11:35]  And so it's a familiar story that is less visionary than people, I think, realized when he took over and he was like hailed as this technocratic leader.
[01:11:48]  He is pretty common, actually, when you see him in the context of where we are as a country.
[01:11:54]  My thing is, is that I just don't know if he even likes basketball.
[01:11:57]  I mean, like, you watch him talk and it's shot.
[01:12:00]  We were just talking before we started recording about this really famous.
[01:12:04]  I mean, his immediate response to the federal indictments, like on national television, he was, it was like in the middle of an OKC game, like opening game of the season.
[01:12:16]  And he gave the worst fucking answers you would ever heard.
[01:12:18]  It was shocking.
[01:12:19]  It was like, bro, you're the one who kind of like okayed this, these questions, I'm sure.
[01:12:24]  You're the NBA community.
[01:12:25]  Why are you acting as if you have no idea how to answer these?
[01:12:28]  They were total softball questions.
[01:12:30]  He's had a fucking panic attack.
[01:12:31]  But he's just like the least charismatic person.
[01:12:34]  Have you seen Adam Silver?
[01:12:35]  I have.
[01:12:35]  I Googled him the other day.
[01:12:36]  Yeah.
[01:12:37]  He's a very like kind of like, ah, looking guy.
[01:12:41]  Well, not the only Silver that's like that.
[01:12:43]  But I mean, that's, that's, I guess I don't understand.
[01:12:47]  It's like his thing he came out and said after this was he was like, well, he was talking about in-game prop bets.
[01:12:53]  He's like, oh, these are bad.
[01:12:54]  These are bad.
[01:12:54]  And those seem to be like they will sort of be the sin eater for a lot of this, right?
[01:12:58]  Like, I don't know if they'll actually get rid of them.
[01:13:01]  They can't.
[01:13:01]  I don't think, I mean, they're the most profitable product for the company.
[01:13:04]  So here's what I understand about prop bets.
[01:13:06]  I love to gamble.
[01:13:08]  I have a whole theory of gambling I have made, and this is financial advice, but only to people who are really lucky and you know who you are because you can feel it inside of you.
[01:13:16]  Gambling makes money.
[01:13:18]  If you gamble long enough, the arc of gambling bends towards the money and you having it.
[01:13:26]  But I love to gamble.
[01:13:28]  I do not like sports gambling because what do you gamble on?
[01:13:32]  I like to play craps and I like roulette.
[01:13:36]  You like things that could be simulated in an AOL chat room.
[01:13:39]  Yes, but I like to play them.
[01:13:40]  I don't play a lot.
[01:13:42]  I don't gamble online because I genuinely do have extraordinary luck.
[01:13:45]  You know what I like about that?
[01:13:46]  Those are two community-based games.
[01:13:50]  Yes.
[01:13:50]  True, true.
[01:13:51]  And I like to.
[01:13:52]  Because you're with the people.
[01:13:53]  I don't like games of skill.
[01:13:55]  I like games of chance.
[01:13:57]  I have follow-up questions about your perceived luck.
[01:14:00]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:14:02]  Well, I've had a lot of unlucky things happen to me, but the way I was able to get out of them were from extraordinary injections of luck from what I can only think of as Almighty God, right?
[01:14:12]  I mean, who else gives it to you?
[01:14:13]  But think of it like this.
[01:14:14]  In every person, there is a certain amount of you have strength.
[01:14:18]  It's like an RPG or something, right?
[01:14:20]  You have intelligence, you have magic or whatever.
[01:14:23]  I have great luck and also great strength and great, of course, sex and like appeal and stuff, not physically being able to do it and intelligence and wisdom and all of these things.
[01:14:34]  But my luck skill is out of control.
[01:14:37]  I love to gamble.
[01:14:38]  I thought it was chance, not skill.
[01:14:40]  But having good luck is a skill, Liz, because it's about your faith in God.
[01:14:45]  And faith is a skill, which just you don't understand.
[01:14:50]  But prop betting to me, it seems like it's bad odds because you think that like you think you will always be, but like this.
[01:14:57]  No, you're right.
[01:14:57]  This is one of those things where you're like, oh my God, dude, I can make $300 if I bet $5.
[01:15:02]  And so you're doing that all the time.
[01:15:04]  You're never making $300.
[01:15:06]  And especially when they link it together, you have to do seven.
[01:15:08]  Parlay.
[01:15:09]  Parlay is crazy.
[01:15:11]  This is insane.
[01:15:11]  Anyone's doing this parlay?
[01:15:13]  This is what's, you know, just to bring it back to the data thing, because this is really important.
[01:15:17]  Like that wasn't possible until the kind of like big data revolution.
[01:15:24]  Like it was not possible to actually calculate these kinds of odds.
[01:15:29]  There was a reason why Vegas and these guys never took bets like that.
[01:15:35]  Mostly, I mean, you know, because it was no bookie could calculate those odds.
[01:15:41]  It was way too complex.
[01:15:43]  Now, suddenly, I can't remember which was the first to introduce.
[01:15:46]  I mean, I remember when I was looking into all this stuff, I mean, that I found out, but I can't remember if it was DraftKings or if it was one of the other ones.
[01:15:53]  But it was pretty early on that one company was like, okay, we've now got the parlay.
[01:15:59]  And they had figured out how to string together these like micro bets, which again are only possible from the kind of like data revolution feeding all of this sort of like new micro probabilities that are able to be quantified from this new tracking stuff, right?
[01:16:22]  Into like big data computing that they were kind of able to figure all of this out.
[01:16:28]  And it's all proprietary, obviously.
[01:16:32]  But your instinct about it being like a bad bet is totally correct because the odds are so obscene and they're making hand over fist on these bets.
[01:16:45]  And there's a reason they push them so much, right?
[01:16:48]  Well, that's how I think is like if someone's being like, you can make a lot of money here.
[01:16:51]  I always like, in any other context, you're like, you're trying to fuck me somehow, right?
[01:16:54]  Like you're trying to trick me.
[01:16:56]  And in this context, you're supposed to be like, well, maybe I can make a lot of money here.
[01:16:59]  Well, I think probably, I mean, unfortunately, a basic understanding of probability has never been more important.
[01:17:06]  Yeah.
[01:17:07]  Like now it's now has to be like a required, like, they don't want kids learning calculus, but they got to at least learn this.
[01:17:16]  No, and I think, yes, this is the most popular product among dudes, a parlay, because you put in the least amount of money to make the most.
[01:17:26]  Yeah.
[01:17:27]  And the issue, of course, and this is, I think, a key disclaimer that should be appended to every discussion around legal gambling.
[01:17:34]  If you are too good at this, they will not let you bet anymore.
[01:17:39]  Yeah, they get kicked off.
[01:17:41]  Like if your skill is actually substantiated by your winnings, they will bang you from the platform.
[01:17:47]  And that's just a thing that is legal and allowed.
[01:17:51]  How is that legal?
[01:17:55]  I don't quite know if this can be legislated into, I don't know if we can legislate protections that, as in, you must allow me to continue to bet.
[01:18:07]  Gamblers, Will of Rights.
[01:18:08]  Yes, genuinely.
[01:18:09]  As one of this country's most mysterious gamblers, like it is crazy that nobody is out there to represent us in Congress.
[01:18:17]  Obviously, several beautiful, Anna Paulina Luna has DM'd me quite a bit, not about gambling related matters, but other things.
[01:18:25]  It is crazy because it's like, if you're too, if you make too much money on this platform that promises you the ability to make money, you can no longer use the platform.
[01:18:33]  In fact, you might be blacklisted from the entire industry.
[01:18:35]  If you understand probability too much, they're less inclined to let you try and win money from them.
[01:18:41]  Couldn't that be like a title whatever thing about people who have autism?
[01:18:46]  Can there be a super PAC for gambling addicts?
[01:18:49]  I mean, I mean, there kind of is, but they would probably, yeah.
[01:18:52]  You know, it's funny because we were talking the other day and we were saying like, is any of this stuff ever going to get regulated?
[01:18:56]  Yeah.
[01:18:57]  And I was saying, like, I don't see a world in which that happens because to me, one, the constituency isn't there.
[01:19:04]  Like, you would need some sort of like mothers against drunk driving group to come in.
[01:19:10]  A DARE program of sorts.
[01:19:11]  A DARE program.
[01:19:12]  But like every institution, including the users, which is like a huge, you know, base, like, is incentivized to keep all this shit going.
[01:19:24]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:19:24]  Like, there is no.
[01:19:26]  Who's the John Benet Ramsey?
[01:19:27]  Yeah.
[01:19:28]  Who's the character that's not going to be Scary Terry?
[01:19:31]  Unfortunately not.
[01:19:32]  Well, I mean, this is Kash Patel called this, you know, the NBA's big insider trading scandal.
[01:19:37]  Basically saying, like, this is like the big gambling scandal that's going to rock sports.
[01:19:42]  But like, the way I view it, I mean, this is, and I'm mostly like, this is literally just me filtering Liz's complaints over the years about how sports and the sports media works.
[01:19:51]  It's like, okay, all sports leagues are completely in bed with all gambling companies.
[01:19:55]  All sports networks are basically just gambling shows at this point.
[01:20:00]  All like whatever, like sports blogs and shit are like fucking banned.
[01:20:05]  Obviously, Barstool, of which I'm a semi-employee, is completely owned.
[01:20:09]  I don't know if actually they are anymore.
[01:20:10]  Doesn't Barstool have its own?
[01:20:12]  No, I feel like they had.

=== Regulators And Social Platforms (14:54) ===

[01:20:14]  They had a sports book that has since dissolved.
[01:20:17]  I see.
[01:20:18]  They were involved with Penn Gaming.
[01:20:19]  Penn then went to ESPN to create ESPN Bet, which is also now dissolved.
[01:20:23]  Interesting.
[01:20:24]  Interesting.
[01:20:24]  ESPN is now busy with DraftKings just directly.
[01:20:26]  They were like, we should have a lot of people.
[01:20:28]  That's like, you know, that's like kind of when every company around like 2010s was like, what if we had our own Facebook?
[01:20:34]  Yeah.
[01:20:35]  And then they realized like, no, we should just be on Facebook.
[01:20:37]  But I guess what I'm saying is like, it seems like the sports betting companies just like are completely in bed with every single aspect from like a lot of people who are watching sports to the leagues themselves to all of like the intermediaries between the media.
[01:20:52]  And it's like, well, who is like, I think everybody has the sense that like this is bad.
[01:20:57]  On a society-wide level, this is bad.
[01:20:59]  And not only that, it's bad for the sports, like what you guys have been talking about.
[01:21:03]  But like, it doesn't seem like there's any actual will to do anything about that.
[01:21:07]  I think it's tough.
[01:21:09]  Well, maybe before we get into that, I do want to talk about the media aspect of this because I do think that's very important.
[01:21:15]  Much like the analytics story, like the kind of, you know, the sports media complex has both centralized and decentralized so much so that it's almost, I think it's like a part of all.
[01:21:35]  I think it's a much bigger part of this story than just DraftKings underwrites this, a lot of sports media.
[01:21:42]  You know, I think it's, it's, there's a bigger thing happening.
[01:21:44]  I always talk about Simmons because I don't know if I might talk a little shit here, but I mean.
[01:21:50]  But the way that he, how influential he's been at both, the companies he's built, but the ways in which he talks about sports, I think doesn't get remarked upon enough, which is to say that like, you know, with sports media, like all other aspects of journalism, so much of it has been shut down and consolidated.
[01:22:16]  You've got like two companies now.
[01:22:18]  You got ESPN and The Athletic, right?
[01:22:20]  That's like it, basically.
[01:22:21]  That's the New York Times one.
[01:22:23]  Yeah.
[01:22:23]  And that's, and then outside of that, you have just a complex.
[01:22:28]  I mean, there's others, right?
[01:22:29]  There's Barstool and there's the Ringer and whatever.
[01:22:31]  But these, you know, these are the big guys.
[01:22:34]  And outside of that, you have this complex of, you know, content entrepreneurs, basically, like in any other market.
[01:22:43]  Well, hello, too.
[01:22:44]  Like, you know what I'm saying?
[01:22:45]  Like, but that's really, you know, and that's across sports, you know, it's internationally.
[01:22:51]  It's, it's massive, you know, and this is a story that's kind of happening everywhere.
[01:22:57]  But what's, what's happened is that as this kind of, like all these social platforms that have arisen to let these like solo creators kind of do their thing, you have these like gambling adjacent personalities also filling the void.
[01:23:12]  And like to kind of like bring it back to Simmons, like the ways in which he's talked about the sports kind of goes hand in hand with that fantasy stuff we were talking about, right?
[01:23:22]  Which is like, it's always like, will this trade happen?
[01:23:25]  Or can player X, you know, hit Y points?
[01:23:29]  Can, you know, like he's talking about all different aspects that end up being prop bets like throughout his show.
[01:23:36]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:23:37]  And that has become a big part of the way in which he talks about and all the people around him talk about sports, which is like a kind of big parlay, you know, from one thing to the next.
[01:23:50]  And so it's like almost like the sports analysis itself has turned into its own prediction market.
[01:23:58]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:23:59]  Yeah, I used to actually say that like if you really want to, this is before legalized gambling, if you really want to get a take from someone, you should talk to people who put money on the games.
[01:24:08]  If you're actually interested in the prediction of like what's going to happen.
[01:24:11]  Yeah.
[01:24:11]  Because they have the courage of their convictions.
[01:24:13]  They're not just out here like slinging takes.
[01:24:16]  Now, to your point, I think the marketplace has shifted to a point where everybody has some amount of interest, money on the game, seemingly, in terms of what kind of content is being incentivized.
[01:24:30]  And with Simmons, like, I think he's almost, I think we're going to be nostalgic for actually his approach, which is to say he still cares deeply about the teams that he cares about.
[01:24:42]  That's true.
[01:24:43]  He's also like guessing the lines with cousin Sal, who is not a defendant, but an actual person.
[01:24:50]  Or is he a universal cousin?
[01:24:52]  The royal cousin.
[01:24:55]  But I think there's, it's like he can do both.
[01:24:57]  But I think what's happening now in media from a pure like, what kind of stuff are we getting and what are they talking about?
[01:25:06]  I think there are lots of people who just aren't incentivized to talk about this stuff in a way that endangers the money that they are receiving.
[01:25:18]  And so it is hard for me to divorce the style from the following the money aspect.
[01:25:26]  But if you follow the money, like here's my position.
[01:25:28]  My position actually is not we should outlaw gambling.
[01:25:32]  My position, like with the NFL during the concussion crisis, is simply, are we disclosing as scientifically precise and rigorously as we can what the actual harms are and what the actual odds are of the thing you think is totally worth your time and potentially your health.
[01:25:54]  Are you informed as a consumer as to what you're watching and what you're betting on?
[01:25:59]  And that goes hand in hand with regulation.
[01:26:02]  That goes hand in hand with an actual governing body that has teeth.
[01:26:10]  It's notable, by the way, that as the Calci and Polymarket stuff is emerging, the prediction market stuff, gambling operators like DraftKings and FanDuel have withdrawn from the regulatory bodies that they have been a part of.
[01:26:23]  They have said, we actually don't need you guys anymore.
[01:26:26]  And so the question of like who is watching the watchers along those lines is an open question.
[01:26:32]  But I do think federal regulation is essential.
[01:26:36]  And I think that research into like what's this actually doing to people's brains is also essential.
[01:26:43]  And then you make informed decisions about like, hey, I want to drink this liquor.
[01:26:49]  The NBA has an official liquor sponsor.
[01:26:52]  I'm like, okay, that's fine.
[01:26:54]  As long as we are regulating and age-appropriateifying what that product is.
[01:27:03]  And if at some point we discover that sports Sports gambling is more akin to crack than it is to Hennessy, then I am at that point totally open to saying we should probably just outlaw this.
[01:27:19]  But don't we already know some of that stuff?
[01:27:21]  Like there was just that big, I mean, this is not specific to sports gambling, but I do think that there's a little bit of a slip that sometimes we're all guilty of, where when we're talking about this stuff, we're sort of talking about gambling in the abstract as opposed to how it actually exists on the personal device that we all carry in our pockets, which is like, to me,
[01:27:42]  there's something like qualitatively different about what happens in a Vegas casino versus what happens on your phone, even though obviously what happens on your phone is modeled somewhat after the computer games that they, you know, all the shit that they have in the Vegas casinos.
[01:28:02]  But what I'm saying is like having a pocket casino with you at all times that's advertised to you in all these different ways, to me is like so different.
[01:28:10]  Whereas I feel like a lot of people have these conversations and they're like, you know, don't get me wrong, I don't think gambling should be outlawed, like as if it's this abstract entity.
[01:28:19]  Whereas like we also know, for example, there was just that huge story about, you know, all these internal documents coming to light about meta and the shit that I can't call it meta, I feel so stupid.
[01:28:31]  The stuff that Facebook knew internally about how like the 17 strikes rule or whatever it was.
[01:28:38]  Yeah, it's product where that its own employees were referring to its company as the tobacco company.
[01:28:43]  That it was saying like people are going to look back on this in history as if we were the tobacco industry covering up how dangerous our product is.
[01:28:55]  And I think if I could wish for anything in this conversation, because the abstract is a is a refuge for lots of people who want to defend gambling's legality, it is to speed run through like, so how lethal is this?
[01:29:12]  And if and if there is that study that says that we are in the sort of like net net way, if we are merely bleeding America's bros to death, then like I would, I would, I would like to act on that information.
[01:29:32]  Well, I think that it's hard to disentangle gambling or like the gambling stuff from like the way so many other scammy financial products that have been launched in the past like five, 10 years, like crypto.
[01:29:43]  I mean, so much of the like crypto shit, which also was really heavily like, you know, that was that Super Bowl that was like all crypto ads.
[01:29:51]  Yeah.
[01:29:51]  Yeah.
[01:29:51]  And then like zero the next year.
[01:29:53]  By the way, the Lakers building is crypto.com arena.
[01:29:58]  Yeah.
[01:29:58]  Shout out FTX.
[01:30:00]  The GameStop guy, by the way, owns the Charlotte Hornets.
[01:30:04]  The new GameStop guy?
[01:30:06]  It's like Gabe Plotkin, that guy.
[01:30:08]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:30:08]  That guy is now an owner of the Hornets.
[01:30:11]  So this is both metaphor, but also literally what's happening to the sport.
[01:30:16]  But, you know, before we were on, we were talking out there about how like it's like becoming more and more similar to like online slots, basically, or like the video poker or not video poker, excuse me, like video slot machines.
[01:30:31]  And I think like, to me, that's like so much of the NFT meme coin stuff was, which is like you buy something and you sort of wait there, and then hopefully you hit the button at the right second and then you make some money, but most likely it's got entirely rigged and you lose some.
[01:30:44]  And to me, it's like all this stuff is just like, I don't think, frankly, any of it is ever going to get really regulated or repealed because there is zero, like the government right now, this is like the sports betting government, right?
[01:30:57]  Like that is correct.
[01:30:57]  Donald Trump is a little bit more.
[01:30:59]  Our entire economy is a casino.
[01:31:01]  Yes.
[01:31:01]  Yeah.
[01:31:02]  So this is kind of what's left.
[01:31:05]  Yeah.
[01:31:05]  Like we talk about, I, you know, again, not to sound like the Atlantic, but like with the prospects of for young men, even though I will say more and more young women are now getting into gambling, which is really interesting.
[01:31:17]  Thank God.
[01:31:18]  What are they gambling on?
[01:31:20]  Shoes.
[01:31:20]  Whether I text you back.
[01:31:23]  No, but so, no, it's just interesting that it's like spread, you know what I mean?
[01:31:27]  Because that's typically not, you know, even who they're marketing towards.
[01:31:31]  But the pandemic really did create, I would say, excessive on the onboarding of that.
[01:31:37]  No question.
[01:31:38]  And the more you think about how are these things all similar, it's that these are things that don't exist in real life, but exist on your phone, and they can increase in value if the dice probabilistically lands the right way.
[01:31:52]  And yet no one is also thinking about who's controlling the dice.
[01:31:55]  And that's when, so I don't think that Kash Patel is being restrained in his description of this is the NBA's insider trading scandal nightmare.
[01:32:05]  I think there's lots that's left to be uncovered that is not in these documents, frankly.
[01:32:10]  But from a pure like you're betting on something that lots of other people have the actual edge on information wise, and they're winning and you're just losing money.
[01:32:23]  Yeah.
[01:32:23]  That is absolutely happening, both in the macro and the micro.
[01:32:27]  I think about trading cards.
[01:32:30]  So by the way, pandemic era, sports cards was, that was how I, in some ways, got radicalized as a sports fan.
[01:32:38]  I was collecting cards.
[01:32:40]  And now the NFT was nothing if not a virtual card that they could just invent out of nothing and just sort of assign in ways that I think are spoiler alert rigged, such that some people got very valuable things, other people got just like whatever, you know, nothing.
[01:32:56]  But that whole market of there is a thing people care about.
[01:33:01]  How do we create fake things and how do we charge people money for them only to sell at the top so that when this whole thing collapses, we're not the ones losing money?
[01:33:11]  Yeah.
[01:33:11]  That's a story of crypto, of trading cards, of collectibles, of laboo boos, of sports bets, of everything.
[01:33:18]  Right.
[01:33:19]  And yeah, the prediction market of it all.
[01:33:22]  Yes.
[01:33:23]  Who actually knows about this and who is getting rich before you even realize it?
[01:33:29]  Yeah, I don't.
[01:33:30]  think the regulators are coming to save us.
[01:33:32]  I know.
[01:33:33]  And it's, it's, Liz and I were talking about this the other day.
[01:33:35]  It's like, it's interesting.
[01:33:36]  There's no populist, like, I guess, messaging of like, we actually need to ban not just sports gambling, but a lot of things, which is maybe I can corner that market myself.
[01:33:47]  But like, it is like there is no, all of this sort of populist upsurge or whatever is, which is so funny because so much of it is about like, oh, you know, people are kind of being ground down and ripped off or whatever.
[01:33:58]  So our solution to that is to offer you all of these other products that will grind you down and rip you off in other ways, right?
[01:34:04]  I mean, with Trump's whole thing, it's like your fucking son is on the board of these fucking companies that are like just straight up.
[01:34:10]  I mean, this is, these are, it's like how people call lotteries like this or whatever, like the stupid tax or whatever the fuck they call it, the poor person sac.
[01:34:16]  Yeah.
[01:34:16]  Some sort of dismissive name like that.
[01:34:18]  Like a lot of these betting markets are like taxes, like that's just an extra tax for morons, you know?
[01:34:24]  But also, I mean, this is what I was kind of saying about not, you know, again, my joke on the Atlantic, but like this is what's left for people.
[01:34:31]  That's why there's no populist base for it, right?
[01:34:33]  It's like you don't have, like, there's no fucking jobs, especially for young men.
[01:34:38]  There are no jobs.
[01:34:39]  Even a college degree doesn't guarantee fucking shit except for debt.
[01:34:43]  And when you look online, like you have, you know, a couple options.
[01:34:48]  You can either, you know, moonshot there's, you know, your way to fortune through betting or meme coins or betting.
[01:34:58]  I mean, betting, right?
[01:35:00]  Or you could become a content creator, which is another kind of bet in another kind of marketplace, get famous.
[01:35:07]  Or, you know, that's it.
[01:35:08]  Those are the two things.

=== Playing Solitaire in a Casino World (15:18) ===

[01:35:09]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:35:10]  Or very.
[01:35:11]  And there's a lot of crossover between the two.
[01:35:13]  Right.
[01:35:13]  And I think what's crucial about the psychology of this is that these people, us, we are seeing specific discrete cases of people actually making money.
[01:35:24]  Yes.
[01:35:25]  So it's not like no one's making money.
[01:35:27]  It's just that the probability of it, again, the fluency of probability, it's just so low that you think that your friend who hit that parlay is going to be you one day, not necessarily even realizing how much they spent and where they net out in terms of like, what did you actually, at the end of the year, wind up making or losing, even if you won your, you know, 16 step parlay.
[01:35:50]  And if you're, again, if you're like the number one Charlotte Hornet super fan and you are God bless, if you are there watching and you're like, I have an edge here.
[01:36:02]  Again, like on a relative basis, you might be right.
[01:36:05]  It's just, I mean, what you said about the pocket casino thing is worth, because I'm not somebody with a definitive policy proposal for what should happen here.
[01:36:14]  Because I think regulation is important, but regulation is basically impossible to imagine.
[01:36:20]  Just not on the channel.
[01:36:20]  At this point, just not on the channel.
[01:36:21]  With this administration, it's impossible to imagine.
[01:36:24]  What all of these gambling operators, the sports betting operators, are doing is trying to get to giving Brace your roulette wheel in your pocket.
[01:36:33]  Yes.
[01:36:33]  That's the actual.
[01:36:34]  As little friction as possible.
[01:36:36]  Because as much as sports are popular, even more popular is the basic mechanism of press this button and you might get money.
[01:36:44]  Well, did you follow the whole scandal with Stephen A. Smith and this like the solitaire?
[01:36:51]  Sure.
[01:36:52]  Can you do you want to tell Brace about this and our listener?
[01:36:54]  No, it's not.
[01:36:55]  No, but this is a great example of what you're asking.
[01:36:57]  I'm not sure Stephen, but I don't, do I want to hear it?
[01:37:00]  Well, he got himself in a little hot water.
[01:37:02]  I mean, it might jeopardize your role as his speechwriter in the next administration.
[01:37:08]  Oh, I forgot about that.
[01:37:10]  But a lot of ESPN personalities signed up for what seemed, I am told, like a straight-ahead marketing deal.
[01:37:19]  There is a solitaire app.
[01:37:21]  And Stephen A. Smith, and this is the origin of it, Stephen A. Smith was caught in a perfectly symmetrical way to this conversation playing solitaire while covering, I believe, an NBA playoff game.
[01:37:34]  Not an NBA playoff game.
[01:37:35]  The most exciting game of the finals.
[01:37:38]  Sorry, sorry.
[01:37:39]  It was during the NBA finals, specifically.
[01:37:41]  He was on his, like the bros in front of Liz, he was watching his phone playing solitaire in a suit in the stands at NBA game.
[01:37:48]  And someone like Liz looked over his shoulder and captured this and posted it.
[01:37:53]  And it was very meme.
[01:37:55]  Why the fuck was he playing Solitaire?
[01:37:57]  Because it's fucking Stephen A. Smith.
[01:37:59]  That's true.
[01:38:00]  His mind is different.
[01:38:01]  He's not watching the game.
[01:38:02]  That's why he's so good at it.
[01:38:04]  Because he knows what's going to happen because he can do minority report on it.
[01:38:07]  That's what I do.
[01:38:09]  And so anyway, the point being that a solitaire app, game, decided to enlist Stephen A as a marketer for their solitaire app, haha.
[01:38:21]  And they got all of these other ESPN personalities to also do it in exchange for money.
[01:38:26]  Yeah.
[01:38:26]  And nobody, it seems, did the background research to see.
[01:38:31]  And by the way, I get it.
[01:38:32]  Like you're getting a marketing deal.
[01:38:34]  You're not like wondering, is this an Israeli-backed scam?
[01:38:37]  And of course.
[01:38:38]  It was an Israeli-backed scam.
[01:38:40]  It was that as well.
[01:38:41]  Well, how could they scam it with Solitaire?
[01:38:43]  So because they made it seem like you were just playing Solitaire like Solitaire.
[01:38:49]  But it was literally like there was a market maker on the other end on the other side of the street.
[01:38:54]  It was a big solitaire.
[01:38:56]  Betting money on rigged solitaire.
[01:38:58]  So this company had claimed, of course, we're not having you compete against bots that are going to win in the power.
[01:39:06]  So you might wonder, what is competitive solitaire?
[01:39:08]  Yes.
[01:39:09]  It's a bunch of people individually playing solitaire and being ranked.
[01:39:12]  A leaderboard.
[01:39:13]  A leaderboard.
[01:39:14]  And so the leaderboard was populated allegedly by bots.
[01:39:18]  And so people weren't getting a fair shake at the solitaire windfall.
[01:39:23]  They were getting scammed, allegedly, out of their money.
[01:39:26]  And so it is kind of this perfect nesting doll of all of these things.
[01:39:30]  Yeah, and it was literally like press a button kind of.
[01:39:33]  Yeah, all you did was, I mean, it's solid card.
[01:39:36]  I mean, it is.
[01:39:37]  I hate to, I hate to pimp a book too much, but that fucking Natasha Dow Schule book, Addiction by Design, where she talks about slot machines.
[01:39:46]  You gotta read it.
[01:39:47]  It's a great book.
[01:39:48]  So I've not read that, but the slot machine is a fascinating concept to me because at some point I learned that some people don't even want to win.
[01:39:57]  Yes, that talks about at length about it.
[01:39:59]  They just want to remain in what feels like this simalicum of a flow state.
[01:40:04]  This machine zone.
[01:40:05]  Where it's just like she calls it the machine zone.
[01:40:08]  I dare say that we are all living in the machine zone.
[01:40:11]  And that's why the book is so good because it's so much.
[01:40:14]  I mean, she wrote this about specifically about gambling, but so much of it applies and especially the stuff that they use that like the people who make these machines and it's beyond just like slots.
[01:40:23]  A lot of the book is about slots, but about video poker and a lot of these things too.
[01:40:26]  It's like all of these like techniques that they use are like the same ones that all of the apps, and I'm talking about obviously just like any app from like Facebook to whatever.
[01:40:35]  Infinite scroll stuff.
[01:40:37]  Exactly.
[01:40:37]  But also, especially the sports gambling apps, they use the same sort of logics that are used in slot machines to keep you like maximum time on device, to keep you from like leaving the machine.
[01:40:47]  And it's so like, it's so crazy because it's just replicated.
[01:40:50]  I mean, this is when you talk about like how all everything is sort of like a casino gambling now.
[01:40:54]  It's like really is everything replicates the logic of not even like a casino, like the dumbest part of the casino and like of the slot machine of just sitting there and like just hoping.
[01:41:07]  And you know that like there's something, even though I've won quite a bit of money on a slot machine before, but obviously on account of your skill.
[01:41:13]  Yeah.
[01:41:14]  My skill of luck that I have.
[01:41:16]  But actually, you know what?
[01:41:19]  I do know a guy who won $2 million on a slot machine.
[01:41:23]  But what?
[01:41:24]  Yeah, but I later unfortunately did get him fired from his job because I did make an Amy Schumer Holocaust joke, which he responded to and was fired from his.
[01:41:36]  You know what, though?
[01:41:37]  History vindicates you on that.
[01:41:38]  That's true.
[01:41:39]  That's true.
[01:41:40]  History does vindicate.
[01:41:41]  And it was a great joke, too.
[01:41:42]  It was a great joke.
[01:41:43]  Yeah, not just on the humor level, but also on the factual basis.
[01:41:45]  On the factual basis, too, I was right.
[01:41:48]  But it was really, it wasn't about.
[01:41:51]  It was long story.
[01:41:54]  But it's so crazy how all of this shit is just replicated further and further and further and further.
[01:42:01]  And now it's just like in every facet of like of so much of what we do, but also in this, Liz loves sports.
[01:42:07]  I love that Liz loves sports.
[01:42:09]  And she is, and I say this, you do get sad thinking about how much gambling there is.
[01:42:15]  Yeah, because I don't think, I mean, it's not just like on a moralizing level.
[01:42:21]  It's like, because I think this, you know, what makes like sports so thrilling is like the unexpected.
[01:42:29]  And actually, like every bet is quietly a wish that the world be less random, right?
[01:42:35]  Because what it is, is just an attempt to model everything.
[01:42:40]  And that makes me really sad because I think like, you know, what you're saying about everyone coming together and watching sports, I think that's true.
[01:42:47]  But also it's like, it's so exciting to watch what you can't, what you can't know.
[01:42:54]  This is where I will sound the most like McGruff the crime dog because I do think that the integrity of sports is paramount.
[01:43:03]  It is.
[01:43:03]  And that if you don't have confidence that this is being played fairly, then the whole thing doesn't make any fucking sense and we're wasting all of our time.
[01:43:11]  And as somebody who is truly who has not only loved sports, but made it his livelihood, the premise that we are actually just watching a rigged scripted event.
[01:43:25]  The WWE and cosplaying as journalists as opposed to actually being them, I think that that's not just depressing.
[01:43:35]  It is the end of the cultural institution of sports altogether.
[01:43:41]  Like you need people to believe, and to your, to unite both of your takes, you need the fan, the customer, to believe that the incompetence they're watching is genuine.
[01:43:53]  Yeah.
[01:43:53]  Your failure as an athlete, if it's not plausibly sincere, then none of this is worth watching.
[01:44:02]  And that's, that's, that is sad.
[01:44:05]  It is.
[01:44:06]  I mean, I think that like there's a big feedback loop that I feel like I've been trying to map not just here, but like in lots of other aspects of the economy.
[01:44:22]  But like, and this is what I'm kind of getting at is like how it's affecting the way that we watch sports, which is what gets me really sad is that like you have this, you know, it's like data models the game and then gambling monetizes the data.
[01:44:38]  Then in turn, the league tunes the game toward what the models and the markets reward, which we've seen, like in the way it's changed rules or the way that it incentivizes certain, you know, certain kind of contracts or the way it's partnerships or the way that games are called.
[01:44:58]  Like there's so many little ways that in which the league does this.
[01:45:01]  And that, in turn, like the models become like cleaner and more confident as they're being like reinforced.
[01:45:08]  And then the fans, like you start to treat these models and the odds actually as the real thing, right?
[01:45:16]  Because when reality diverges from the model, and we do this throughout, like the instinct is to say, well, wait, what's happening there in the real world is wrong.
[01:45:26]  Like the models are right.
[01:45:27]  You know, we see this in microwave, like think about with elections, right?
[01:45:30]  Where people are so confident in something.
[01:45:32]  And then, you know, something insane happens and no one believes it's true.
[01:45:38]  And so it produces this paranoia that you're talking about, right?
[01:45:41]  It's not just a nihilism, but a paranoia because suddenly you don't know what to trust and everything is suspect, including the unexpected, right?
[01:45:52]  And at that point, like the game itself effectively becomes a kind of like underlying asset for everything else.
[01:46:02]  And so like the emotional and financial action is actually in the derivatives on top of the game.
[01:46:09]  And you see this with players.
[01:46:12]  I mean, I think about this a lot and you've seen players come out and talk about this.
[01:46:15]  Like Halberton has talked about it.
[01:46:16]  Jaylen has talked about it.
[01:46:18]  They're mentions now.
[01:46:19]  Yeah.
[01:46:20]  I mean, but because the players are now being treated as basically assets themselves.
[01:46:25]  Like they're just financial instruments because they are.
[01:46:28]  Yes, they're not getting yelled at for fucking up a fan's parlay.
[01:46:32]  Totally.
[01:46:32]  And like they're just like a bundle of projections and prop and props like define how they perform.
[01:46:41]  Not actually what's happening in the game and all of the different considerations that go into that.
[01:46:46]  Right.
[01:46:46]  But like what numbers can effectively be pulled out, bundled together, packaged into a fucking asset.
[01:46:53]  And, you know, they just exist now as collateral for someone else's risk.
[01:46:59]  And these are like the fucking best.
[01:47:02]  Like these are athletic superstars.
[01:47:05]  Like it is just there's this real like dark inversion that's happening where like real humans on the floor are treated as like failed financial instruments when they don't cash out derivatives that are stacked on top of them.
[01:47:20]  And it fucks with my head when I'm watching this shit.
[01:47:23]  And it's just, how did we fucking get here?
[01:47:27]  It does feel subprime.
[01:47:29]  Yeah.
[01:47:29]  The whole thing kind of feels like it's teetering when you put it in those terms.
[01:47:35]  And I I don't know if you can undo that.
[01:47:41]  I know.
[01:47:42]  It feels like you have to push through it, but I don't know how.
[01:47:45]  I will say on the bright side, one thing I do think about, I do think that the Premier League has cleaned up a lot of stuff.
[01:47:54]  So we should say that in England, they have had legal betting for a long time and they have survived.
[01:48:01]  And they are perhaps.
[01:48:04]  Are we modeling?
[01:48:05]  Are we looking to, I don't like to think about this, but I do sometimes think of like England as the canary in the coal mine to us.
[01:48:16]  We're like, what's happening there is we're just like a few decades behind English.
[01:48:20]  Roke as fuck.
[01:48:21]  You mean?
[01:48:22]  Roke as fuck.
[01:48:23]  But you know what happened in England is that it became very socially looked down upon.
[01:48:29]  Well, I think there's something like how in Europe, like the cigarette boxes are like faces of death, basically, where it's like, you guys should just be aware that this isn't cool.
[01:48:38]  Sometimes it's like your dick will not work.
[01:48:40]  Yeah.
[01:48:40]  And I think there should be the equivalent of your dick will not work in the disclosures for what it's like to be a sports gambler or sports better, as it were.
[01:48:53]  But yeah, look, if you look at English soccer, you have deep-seated corruption.
[01:49:00]  Oh, yeah.
[01:49:00]  But also you have this culture that has survived in its intensity of fandom, the derivative-based pressures of the conflicts of interest that you've just described that the NBA is currently grappling with.
[01:49:14]  And you also have, yeah, just like petro states just owning teams.
[01:49:18]  See, maybe that's the solution.
[01:49:20]  We just need to have.
[01:49:22]  And VAR.
[01:49:23]  That's right.
[01:49:23]  What's VAR?
[01:49:25]  That's video refs.
[01:49:27]  Is that what they have there?
[01:49:28]  Video assisted, yeah.
[01:49:30]  So like you, was it a goal?
[01:49:32]  It is now a question to be computer visioned and opinions on that.
[01:49:37]  But I will say that the Premier League, which suffered, not just the Premier League, but just like soccer in general, which suffered its own sort of scandals about is it rigged?
[01:49:49]  Is it, you know, is there match fixing?
[01:49:53]  They invested a lot in professionalizing the refs and like kind of really changing the way that games were being like refereed just so to like really like impart this, you know, like that everything was above board.
[01:50:12]  I will say this, the NBA does not do that.
[01:50:15]  The refs in the NBA are a whole other NFT.
[01:50:19]  So no question.
[01:50:20]  See, the people allegedly related to the mafia.
[01:50:23]  I mean, the refs are such a, in terms of some good Catholic boys, by the way.

=== Referees: The Demographic Mystery (05:28) ===

[01:50:28]  Right.
[01:50:28]  The pipeline, and this is a separate thing.
[01:50:31]  Who becomes a referee in professional basketball is demographically fascinating.
[01:50:37]  Who is it?
[01:50:38]  It's this is, I have to do more reporting before I officially give you my typology of the ethnic caste system of referees.
[01:50:47]  It's a lot of dudes who went to Catholic schools who are from like the Tim Donaghy scandal.
[01:50:53]  There's one town in Pennsylvania.
[01:50:55]  There is just a lot in terms of the Tim Donaghy scandal, which was a corrupt referee and what he was doing to fix games, actually, to your greatest fear, Race, and who and what he comes from, the stock he comes from, is a bunch of, again, dudes that don't have a ton of oversight that are seen as like the last sort of like bulwark against corruption.
[01:51:19]  And I think the camera will turn to that movie.
[01:51:22]  We're just not there yet, but I think it's probably pretty imminent.
[01:51:26]  What the league needs to do is a sort of commissar system for referees where they have sort of like a, yes, they have the referees and they have their sort of chain of command or whatever, but then you also just have like somebody who can execute a referee sort of like on the spot if they're clearly like calling too many fouls on Jalen, for instance, which I did see at that game.
[01:51:45]  And the foul thing is interesting because he fouls every play.
[01:51:49]  That's a subjective term.
[01:51:50]  Oh, you're talking about the way that he gets fouled.
[01:51:52]  Yeah, he also flops on every play, which is a skill.
[01:51:55]  These guys, this is something I was interested in.
[01:51:57]  Because again, the only basketball game I'd seen prior to the one we went to last month was I saw the Harlem Globetrotters play when I was younger, and I loved it.
[01:52:05]  It was a fantastic show.
[01:52:07]  Like, kicked ass.
[01:52:10]  But the...
[01:52:11]  I guess they played the Warriors because it was in the Bay.
[01:52:14]  Who else would they have played?
[01:52:15]  Is it on their basketball team?
[01:52:16]  No, I think they probably played.
[01:52:19]  They beat the Warriors.
[01:52:20]  Okay.
[01:52:20]  They beat the Warriors.
[01:52:21]  I feel like they're always playing the Washington Generals.
[01:52:23]  Yeah.
[01:52:24]  I think they travel with you.
[01:52:26]  With the Generals?
[01:52:28]  No, probably not for that game.
[01:52:30]  I think this may have had an impact on your view of how good the Harlem Globetrotters are.
[01:52:35]  They weren't.
[01:52:35]  But I digress.
[01:52:36]  To be fair, the Warriors in that period in the 90s were terrible.
[01:52:40]  So it could have been.
[01:52:43]  But even if they, I would say the Harlem Globetrotters could probably beat the Warriors right now.
[01:52:48]  But certainly right now.
[01:52:49]  One thing they run those models, they are the models.
[01:52:54]  But when we went to that game, all these guys would like get fouled a little bit.
[01:52:58]  They go, oh, they make these.
[01:53:01]  Is this normal?
[01:53:01]  Like these guys get like jostled a little bit and then they make these exaggerated kind of loony tunes things where they like hold their foot and like dance around and stuff.
[01:53:08]  Well, now we're looking back to Europe because in Europe, this is how it's European.
[01:53:13]  Oh, well, fair.
[01:53:15]  In world football, performing the harm visited upon you is a key part of the game.
[01:53:22]  Interesting.
[01:53:22]  Oh, yeah.
[01:53:23]  And so now with the NBA being increasingly globalized, there has been a criticism, especially for like the European.
[01:53:30]  I guess that's not true because Jalen Brunson does this.
[01:53:32]  James Harden does this, but like Luka Doncic is slops.
[01:53:36]  We got to slop.
[01:53:38]  We got to slop.
[01:53:39]  Thank God.
[01:53:40]  Jokic flops a little bit more than he gets credit for, too.
[01:53:43]  I think that there is something to the skill of basically doing a slip and fall in front of a car.
[01:53:49]  Yeah.
[01:53:49]  Where it's like you are.
[01:53:52]  Basically about to die, until you get the foul.
[01:53:55]  At which point you get up and you're like, thanks, do they have coaches that like like acting coaches, who sort of teach them how, like my, I feel like they do in like soccer, I really feel like they do.
[01:54:05]  It's so funny, like it is really fun.
[01:54:07]  I will say the Brazilians have like perfected it.
[01:54:09]  It is shocking the lengths that they go.
[01:54:14]  It is operatic.
[01:54:15]  So in some ways I kind of enjoy it, even though it's like it's so funny to watch.
[01:54:20]  But what's funny about it with the NBA you're saying, and coming from the Euros, is that actually, like the Euro League refs the games so differently.
[01:54:28]  They're very physical.
[01:54:30]  They're very physical and but they also don't call as much and because there's, you know it's they allow a lot more physicality and so it was really funny during the Olympics.
[01:54:40]  This is why it was so great to watch, because they play the Olympics under Euro rules and they have Euro refs and so you're watching these.
[01:54:49]  Like European teams really excel under those rules and the Americans having to kind of adjust because they're not getting like you know, famously you had like Joellen Bead out there, who himself perhaps known for his great flopping um, but some of that is just his kind of bad knees I think that's my opinion speaking of he's a big boy, he has been.
[01:55:15]  So this was a story that Joellen Bead was taught how to fall this is what i'm talking about to protect his knees.
[01:55:22]  So, but he had he had some like again biometrically informed, physiologically sophisticated trainer teach him how to do like judo falls.
[01:55:33]  Yeah, that was framed.
[01:55:34]  This technique was framed as he's protecting his knees.
[01:55:38]  Everyone else was like this guy's being coached how to flop, and so this is they like bring, like nine year old French clowns to like soccer teams like the one that you ask.
[01:55:48]  Ball is okay yes, company is more difficult.
[01:55:51]  Um, but like and be like.
[01:55:53]  This is how you do it.
[01:55:54]  You know, do this I that, that's so.

=== Brock Purdy Flops (03:18) ===

[01:55:56]  Who I?
[01:55:57]  I have a question because we got to wrap up soon.
[01:55:59]  Um, who's the worst professional athlete in America right now Across sports?
[01:56:06]  Across sports.
[01:56:07]  Or you can do by sport if you want, but surely.
[01:56:10]  Like, who is like this guy who's like from?
[01:56:13]  Who could I beat?
[01:56:15]  I could probably beat a lot of dudes.
[01:56:18]  Pause.
[01:56:26]  Ooh.
[01:56:27]  Are you allowed to say this?
[01:56:28]  Yeah, of course.
[01:56:29]  I just gotta, I gotta, I gotta leave.
[01:56:31]  I'm plugging into my Cerebro helmet and surveying all of the mutants, all the activists.
[01:56:37]  That just fucking sucks.
[01:56:40]  You should just go with the hot take and be like, Brock Purdy.
[01:56:44]  And just feed the algorithm.
[01:56:46]  That's the kind of thing.
[01:56:48]  Liz is giving like grade A like sports discourse, Discord and Discourse.
[01:56:54]  You have no idea how much sports media I consume.
[01:56:57]  This is actually unsettling.
[01:56:58]  It is.
[01:56:59]  Is Brock Purdy bad?
[01:57:01]  Is the question for the next episode?
[01:57:04]  That's the kind of name of a guy I date in prison.
[01:57:08]  He purdy.
[01:57:09]  Exactly.
[01:57:10]  Brock Purdy?
[01:57:13]  We are taking a lot of name just for granted now that I think about it.
[01:57:15]  Yeah.
[01:57:16]  Well, I love how nominally this is all about nominal determination.
[01:57:19]  Who's your most hated players?
[01:57:20]  So I don't have a most, I don't think I hate anybody.
[01:57:24]  Okay.
[01:57:25]  All right.
[01:57:26]  All right.
[01:57:27]  Trump.
[01:57:27]  Yeah.
[01:57:28]  Anybody?
[01:57:30]  But I do think it's very funny to imagine someone who I don't like personally, but would have been the vice presidential candidate for someone who is in a number of substacks that are currently going viral.
[01:57:47]  Aaron Rodgers was considered to be RFK Jr.'s vice president.
[01:57:52]  And Aaron Rodgers is the quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
[01:57:55]  He claims he is married and there's this whole other subplot right now in which no one on his team has been able to identify the existence of this woman.
[01:58:07]  He's got a hidden wife.
[01:58:09]  It does feel like it is a very, and first of all, how have you not done an episode on this?
[01:58:14]  I have been, it's probably the biggest word in the word cloud that is my inbox.
[01:58:19]  Yeah.
[01:58:19]  Is Aaron Rodgers' fake wife?
[01:58:22]  And I just, I will confess this to you guys.
[01:58:25]  I think he's laying a trap for me.
[01:58:28]  I think he's waiting to be aware of.
[01:58:33]  A reverse mantai.
[01:58:34]  A reverse mantai.
[01:58:34]  Yeah.
[01:58:35]  The reverse.
[01:58:36]  The interesting thing about Rod, well, there's a lot to say about Rodgers, but because, you know, he had, he was dealing with beard rumors for most of his career, especially with Olivia Munn.
[01:58:47]  I think those rumors in sports are not as loud as you would think.
[01:58:52]  Okay.
[01:58:52]  But they are screaming in my ear.
[01:58:54]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:58:55]  Those rumors all of the time.
[01:58:56]  About Aaron specifically?
[01:58:58]  Yeah.
[01:58:58]  And there was like always weird shit.
[01:59:00]  I mean, some of that was with his like, his political turn, but like his relationship with his family was always like very fraught.
[01:59:08]  And there was like seem to be like, no, he never did.
[01:59:12]  Yeah, he would like not really talk to his family.

=== Girl's Sports Tip Line (07:24) ===

[01:59:14]  I don't know.
[01:59:15]  There was just some.
[01:59:15]  His brother Jordan was like a bachelor on The Bachelor and is now an ESPN analyst.
[01:59:22]  And so there's just, it's just, it is extraordinarily messy.
[01:59:25]  Should I deploy one of my stable to go after him as a honeypot?
[01:59:30]  The players and player adjacent people in sports media also is out of control.
[01:59:36]  I gotta say, I think we gotta keep them separated.
[01:59:38]  You gotta keep them separated.
[01:59:40]  I am not about the player revolution in sports media.
[01:59:44]  There's been a, I would say, if there is an opportunity to bet in a prediction market way on whether we'll have more or fewer athletes 10 years from now doing microphone talking stuff, I would say take on more.
[02:00:00]  I just think just because I think you think they're gonna write it into the contracts?
[02:00:05]  No, no, I think there's a I think there's just gonna be a market correction.
[02:00:07]  Like people are like, I think there's just too many.
[02:00:09]  They just suck at talking.
[02:00:11]  But here's the thing.
[02:00:12]  It doesn't, they don't need, it doesn't need to be successful for them to keep doing it.
[02:00:17]  We can't all be, I guess, if you're an athlete, they can't all be Michael Porter Jr.
[02:00:21]  Can we, okay?
[02:00:22]  We can't bring that up again.
[02:00:23]  I have to tell you.
[02:00:24]  I'll tell you, it's not the end.
[02:00:26]  It's just the beginning of Michael Porter for me.
[02:00:28]  So this is because this is how, of course, like.
[02:00:30]  I was so excited to send this to you.
[02:00:32]  I, how do I say this in a way that is not?
[02:00:39]  Is he like, is there a law against people who are like simple from playing sports?
[02:00:48]  Like, is there, can there, like, is there a legal limit for a guy before they're like, you can't play?
[02:00:57]  I'm going to tell you, having covered sports for now 20 years, that if anything, there's the opposite.
[02:01:03]  It pays to be, to be stupid.
[02:01:05]  I think it's, it's actually a psychological advantage.
[02:01:09]  I was actually going to, this is, what is, what is the thing?
[02:01:12]  I got, this is, I might just play this right now because I, I, I actually, it's something that I've been mulling over a lot just in my own life.
[02:01:22]  But I always, when you're talking about testing these girls, yeah.
[02:01:25]  A couple things I do to test a girl early.
[02:01:27]  There you go.
[02:01:28]  Is there you go?
[02:01:29]  Well, you got to do your research first.
[02:01:31]  If, if she's ever been with somebody that I know or I'm cool with, I'm not about to ever wipe up a cent.
[02:01:37]  Just because, like, I'm not trying to be on the court and I give you a bucket or something and then you're talking, you're over here talking about, that's why I hit your girl.
[02:01:43]  Like, think about that.
[02:01:44]  That's that's.
[02:01:44]  So there was one girl I really liked one time, actually, but she had used to talk to a dude in the league.
[02:01:49]  And I was like, I just can't do it because if I, if I'm, if I'm cooking him or whatever, and then he's just allowed to say, that's why I hit your girl.
[02:01:55]  You know, if the right thing to do is go directly to that person and just be like, yo, what's the situation with this person?
[02:01:59]  But, bro, that's like.
[02:02:00]  And then they'll be like, that's like fighting words.
[02:02:02]  That's why I hit your girl in the middle of the game, bro.
[02:02:04]  That's that, that's wild, bro.
[02:02:05]  That's going to be a bit.
[02:02:06]  That's one thing I do.
[02:02:07]  And another thing I do is like, I need to see a little bit about their beliefs.
[02:02:10]  So I'm not saying I'm a misogynist or anything, but I'll throw on some and see how they react.
[02:02:16]  Yeah.
[02:02:17]  Well, I was just going to go on, or I'll bring up like conversations and play like devil's advocate just to see how this girl thinks about certain things.
[02:02:26]  Okay, wait.
[02:02:27]  Can I say three things that are amazing about that?
[02:02:30]  One, they bleeped Andrew Tate.
[02:02:31]  Yes.
[02:02:32]  They did.
[02:02:32]  That's what he was saying.
[02:02:33]  He was like, I show him Andrew Tate to like see the reaction.
[02:02:36]  I love a guy who's saying, I like, you got to do your own research and I'm just going to play devil's advocate.
[02:02:42]  Yeah.
[02:02:43]  That's like Sarah Rodgers, by the way.
[02:02:45]  That's related to Aaron Rodgers.
[02:02:46]  I'm like, no.
[02:02:48]  I will say two things that I've observed.
[02:02:50]  Number one, I think your audience deserves to know that he was talking to at least one Nelk boy.
[02:02:54]  He was talking to Steiny.
[02:02:55]  To Steiny.
[02:02:56]  To Steiny.
[02:02:56]  Yeah.
[02:02:57]  Excuse me.
[02:02:58]  The second thing, Albanian Bruce, Flappy, Steiny.
[02:03:03]  Although Steiny, unfortunately, we do have to claim him as he's an Anthony Schneiderman in this story.
[02:03:10]  He is.
[02:03:11]  The second thing is Michael Porter Jr. is dressed like Nicholas Cage and Conair.
[02:03:18]  Correct.
[02:03:19]  Correct.
[02:03:19]  That is correct.
[02:03:20]  He seems to only wear white beards.
[02:03:22]  That sort of does seem to be his adopted uniform is the wife beater.
[02:03:26]  I really enjoy the clips that go viral every three months where he says just like the worst thing that you could possibly say on any given topic.
[02:03:37]  But I think that what we need from him now is for I want him to talk about the Olivia Nezi story.
[02:03:46]  I think that Michael Porter Jr. would have a great, have great insight.
[02:03:51]  They got to take these sports pundits or these athletes turn whatever sports broadcasters out of sports and put them into politics.
[02:03:57]  There should be a foreign exchange program.
[02:03:59]  Yes.
[02:04:00]  Also, they should let you guys play sports.
[02:04:02]  I'm like, I'm like, Freaky Friday.
[02:04:03]  They should do a few things.
[02:04:04]  That's right.
[02:04:04]  That guy in the Pentagon press office should have to cover the nuggets.
[02:04:10]  Yeah, exactly.
[02:04:11]  But also, like, have you ever thought about, because you're like a sports journalist.
[02:04:14]  Have you ever thought, like, I could fucking do that, dude?
[02:04:17]  Like, you've seen like a play and you're like, maybe I should.
[02:04:20]  If you're asking if I've ever summoned the confidence to do what you do so easily and dunk a basketball, the answer is unfortunately not.
[02:04:28]  We'll get you there.
[02:04:30]  Pablo, thank you so much for joining us on this episode.
[02:04:34]  Liz, I will tell you, I felt like I can't talk.
[02:04:37]  She feels, she just, she talks to me about sports and just say, uh-huh, that's amazing.
[02:04:42]  As it should be, as it should be.
[02:04:44]  I know, but it's nice to have somebody here that she can talk to.
[02:04:47]  You know what?
[02:04:48]  I'm glad to be here to hang out with you guys and also be watched by the camera inside of the slide.
[02:04:53]  Oh, yeah.
[02:04:55]  Where they can find you?
[02:04:56]  YouTube.
[02:04:57]  YouTube.
[02:04:58]  Pablo Torrey Finds Out is a show where I use journalism to solve sports-related mysteries.
[02:05:03]  It's also a podcast if you don't care for video, much like this show you're listening to right now.
[02:05:09]  Pablo, thank you very much, and we'll see you on the court.
[02:05:14]  Let's see if I need a sign off.
[02:05:31]  Is this the weekend?
[02:05:34]  It's Tuesday.
[02:05:40]  For our listeners who can't tell, because they won't be able to hear it.
[02:05:44]  There's some crazy ass music coming through the walls.
[02:05:47]  This happened in our old studio, too.
[02:05:48]  Remember the old studio, guys?
[02:05:50]  Yeah.
[02:05:51]  Yeah, I don't want to talk about that.
[02:05:53]  This has been a long time.
[02:05:54]  Because of the incident.
[02:05:56]  This has been a long one.
[02:05:58]  We should wrap it up real quick.
[02:05:59]  We should.
[02:05:59]  We should wrap it up.
[02:06:00]  I'll tell you this.
[02:06:03]  If you like this show, if you don't like this show.
[02:06:06]  Which one?
[02:06:07]  The one that we are doing this very second.
[02:06:09]  Okay.
[02:06:11]  If you hate me, if you like me, if you love me.
[02:06:14]  Hit the tip line.
[02:06:16]  Hit the tip line.
[02:06:17]  No, don't hit the tip.
[02:06:17]  No, but do hit the tip line.
[02:06:19]  We do have a tip line episode coming up.
[02:06:20]  Oh, yeah.
[02:06:21]  And we do need some good tips.
[02:06:23]  But no, I just can dunk.
[02:06:27]  And I know a lot of you out there have seen me do it.
[02:06:30]  I don't think you need to say it.
[02:06:31]  Others have already said it.
[02:06:32]  I know others have said it, but like, it's just something that comes up.
[02:06:36]  Deborah Lipstadt wrote a book called Denying History.

=== Hit The Tip Line (01:21) ===

[02:06:39]  And obviously, I disagree with much of almost all of her political opinions.
[02:06:43]  But that book about her, I believe, court case against Zwigler or Zweigler, whatever his fucking name is, The Holocaust And Ire In Canada, I think was really impactful for me, at least in understanding my own the truth of me dunking and the falsity of the haters who do to me resemble deniers.
[02:07:11]  this is terrible it is and it is there should be a crime It should be a crime.
[02:07:16]  But uh, but I'm just gonna say, in whatever venue you can find, if somebody says that I can't just correct the record about anything, about anything, about anything um, but with that being said, it's so nice to be back, it is.
[02:07:34]  I'm Brace, I'm Liz, I'm producer Young Chomsky and this has been Drunan.
[02:07:39]  We will see you next time.
[02:07:41]  Bye-bye.
[02:08:00]  Come on.