Are Sports the Most Valuable Commodity in the World? with Pablo Torre

I don't know if you're like me. I'm like, I guess I'll read Mr. Beast's leaked manifesto now. Oh, and I'm like 100% It's yes, absolutely. I'm studying YouTube thumbnails and being like how Far can I take this and maintain my dignity? You know It's it's let me just tell you dignity is the first to go What whatever face you think you'd like to make is not the face you'll be making a thumbnail for this video I'm Charlie Wurzel and welcome to Galaxy Brain today, we're gonna talk about sports But we're not gonna talk about the actual sports themselves Not the things that happen on the field or on the court or whatever But the culture around sports Because as my guest notes sports are this Unbelievable a tension. Oh hack, right? There there are few things that can reliably attract an audience as much as live sports We sit down together and we watch the Super Bowl We have these sports that are passed down in our families this kind of cultural heritage that gets us to sit down for the World Series or the World Cup or the NBA Finals what have you right and Because they can reliably draw eyeballs and because we're all competing with each other for attention in truly Every facet of our lives Sports are extremely valuable you you may have noticed that in the past 10 15 years nation states and billionaires are buying up sports teams or or presenting sports leagues funding sports leagues and This is all because sports Is a really powerful product to rehabilitate someone's image? They are a way to ingratiate themselves. They're a way to make you know a nation state appear Soft or or more westernized or what have you? There are these really valuable products and as such There's a lot of stakes to it, right? And so my guess this week is public Tory public Tory is a longtime sports journalist He was at ESPN for quite a while and in 2023 he launched public Tory finds out which is his fantastic podcast and YouTube show and What Pablo is so good at is Investigating these deeper thornier honestly sometimes really complicated issues inside sports everything from economic disputes to labor issues to Going through Department of Justice filings and he finds this way to make them Extremely interesting and that is because as he tells us he's actually a student of the internet he is someone who studies creators of all kinds and figures out the little hacks and interesting ways of presentation that they use and Finds ways to put them into his journalism. He's essentially creating a Magazine for the YouTube generation and his theories on Attention and the internet are extremely interesting and now my conversation with public Tory, but first a quick break Pablo welcome to galaxy brain. I'm thrilled to have you here on our our podcast experiment I'm happy to be the subject of yet another experiment that I have apparently unwittingly entered into But good to see you Charlie the the little tagline that that I've tried to come up with to just organize this show in some kind of way is You know, I write a lot about the internet about Information and so it's it's paying attention to where we pay attention, right? And you gave a talk at Yukon recently that As I listen to you sort of unfurl your grand Pablo Tory finds out theory of sports and coverage and your work and what you're trying to do there In the way that it revolves around attention the way that sports revolves around attention kind of broken my brain Open in the good way not the normal internet bad way and I wanted to have you kind of try to lay that out a little more For all of us here like why are sports important from this attentional perspective? Yeah It's It's the lens I see the world through now as I also like hunger for any amount of audience slash attention slash Discoverability Funnel slash all the buzzwords we use to describe getting someone's time someone's brain and sports is up into the right I mean, that's that's this. That's the crazy and scary and favorable part to people who work inside of sports Everything is fragmented everything is siloed inside of your own algorithm, which is entirely personal as you know as well as anybody and yet in that deeply broken landscape there is a one kind of big tent remaining Broadly speaking and it's sports and you could go to all sorts of reasons why the live nature of events the general hereditary sort of nature of how we Care about things passed down to us from our parents our ancestors You could simply give it the credit of it's the one place left in Mainstream culture such that there is any mainstream one In which you can walk inside of a building and sit next to somebody who otherwise shares nothing in common with you and yet Will yell directionally at the same thing for the same outcome And it's just a rare thing to have sports be this big green arrow as everyone else is managing their decline And so for me sports started off. I mean as my passion because I just love sports and I worked at ESPN full-time for about 13 years and The show public torii finds out that I host I wish I had this level of sort of grand theorizing at the outset But I really began to sort of reckon with its undeniable As I started to wonder why aren't I more Subject to the wanderlust of someone who has lost his life And it's because a sports is where I'm getting attention sports is where attention is directed and also sports has always been to me this weird liberal arts education That can allow you to be inside of that Field of vision for people that otherwise have zero shits to give about the stuff that I'm otherwise trying to tell them And I think I think too what's what's so What that helped connect for me right is this notion of why people freak out when politics and sports collide right because you make you made this point that It's basically like an you're hijacking someone's attention to something right? This is an audience that maybe didn't come here to hear your theory on x y or z and yet it's been trojan horse in And it's just like a It's just like a It's just like a It's just like a It's just like a It's just like a It's just like a It's just like a Trojan horse in via this product that people are so culturally attuned to and I think that that makes it so So valuable I mean is that sort of the that's the kind of the now become like a guiding framework for the show Basically like I'm gonna you know put the cheese on the on the broccoli or whatever and you're gonna you're gonna eat it Yeah, I mean that's look that's the that's the metaphor that I've been clinging to recently as I'm here to melt cheese on broccoli cheese being sports broccoli being any number of the issues I've dealt with whether it's effectively carbon credits and Silicon Valley billionaires coming into sports and creating and orchestrating allegedly these schemes to get around the rules of Fair play and integrity in the NBA. That's the Steve Ballmer Kawhi Leonard aspiration investigation that has sort of consumed my life or it could be you know I'm here to talk about most recently in the case of this weird thing. I'm into now with Phil Mickelson the golfer I'm talking about you know, are we gonna reopen this oil pipeline in Santa Barbara through the lens of Phil Mickelson tweeting or rather Texting a group chat of investors in sable offshore this weird company Things about Donald Trump's alleged 14-inch cock that being a direct quote from texts that we obtained Anyway, the point being Inside of all of these things is this yes this this larger bigger story hiding inside of it And you know, I reckon with it when I was at ESPN because ESPN's audience, of course They came for the candy. They came for the dessert and when I would inject so to speak that was the accusation. I was injecting politics into their sports it was meant to be this how dare you invade our comfort zone and When I was at Yukon giving this talk, you know the night before I was at a dinner with Tommy Smith and John Carlos the most famous sort of podium visual in Olympic history Raising their fists in the air Recalling what an impact that had now gosh that was it was Mexico City in the 60s and 68 We're talking about that still and the reason why is because you hear the booze People didn't want that shit and I'm not in any way saying that I am akin to Tommy Smith and John Carlos But the premise is people are there to watch sports and something else happens and now their brain Effectively is broken too and what do you do with that? Why is that powerful? Why is that? Increasingly in this era of American politics and culture such that it exists anymore Why is that kind of the only place where you can kind of sneak into someone's feet? So to speak because otherwise we're just getting the shit that we expressed that we wanted already Well, and I feel too that it just the way that all of that intersects with with power is is Again, like I said, it broke open my brain because you know, I look at Billionaire owners and I look at you know, obviously Steve Ballmer is one of them of Microsoft fame and fortune, but you know, there's there's a lot of people coming out of Silicon Valley who are injecting their money into Sports in this way and I think it's very easy for us all to look at it and say the thing Oh, these are fans, right? Like they they they want to do something with this money But looking at it from this attention and power way not to say that it's all always nefarious that it's all always Duplicitus and this horrible motive, but it's like you're making an investment in a team in whatever but it's also this attentional product right whether it's What you're putting on the jerseys in terms of your you know, your your sponsors and you know The the ads and things like that you can generate but also just this idea of I can get People to care about things by putting it into this into the storage of ours. I thought that that was just a It was it was sort of a different way to format this for me because I Spend a lot of time thinking about tech billionaires and a lot of time trying to you know Suss out what they're doing and in some ways It's very very obvious when Elon Musk buys Twitter, right? What he's trying to do here like it's right in your face but I think what what your framework has helped me understand here is this is this notion that like this is actually happening everywhere all the time It's sort of just a truism of you know living in in the world right now. Oh look, I think about the billionaire as a species in sports through this lens of We've never had more of them and on some level that's entirely explained by the fact that sports values are going up Franchise values are going up the NBA just tripled its rights deal as media is sinking and they welcomed Amazon into the fold And they get to all that stuff right that's an economic proposition But it's always been deeper than that and it's never been more clearly deeper than that And this is where we can sort of like cross streams here a bit and like just think about FTX like to me FTX when I was seeing the story I'm like, of course Yes, this is a tech story But then I'm seeing what he spent his money on for marketing and I'm like wait a minute You got Tom Brady. You got Steph Curry. You got the Miami Heats naming rights deal He put FTX logos on the chess plate of the wild and major league baseball. He was bidding I mean if you and I read both books The Zeke Fox and I read the Michael Lewis and I talked to both of them for an episode of my show And it was entirely just through the lens of sports Because that to me as much as we want to talk and we should talk by the way about Saudi Arabia and the Middle East and where money is being reapportioned because attention has been disrupted We're now looking towards the Middle East for like reliable revenue streams as cable television has fallen apart Domestically is managing its own decline domestically as much as that is sports washing in the more sort of traditional sense Sam Bankman Fried also was doing the same thing. He was buying this relatability He was buying this recognition and in sports. There's a history of it I mean sports gives you as a billionaire the currency not merely of you know, whatever the The money that you have access to you also have this currency of cultural Visibility and also Relatability like suddenly Steve look it was so what's so funny dude is for me to talk to people who covered Steve Ballmer When he was just the Microsoft CEO managing the monopoly The alleged monopoly and the trial therein of the United States profusely on stage and absolutely some things have not changed the sweat the you know all of that stuff and his Talked to people who covered it at the time, you know, his reputation is so until I would say like this reporting I've been doing into him visa the aspiration and the Clippers and Kawai Leonard His reputation was that of a bully was that of someone who was this sort of just like I don't know strong arming Executive who had of course Microsoft as a lens you saw him through meaning he was Goliath and weirdly when he sets the record for the most expensive franchise ever purchased in the NBA and He becomes the owner of the Clippers and he rescues it from Donald Sterling who was of course this recorded avowed racist One of the easier decisions of like if I have this guy around income Steve Ballmer and Immediately he's this white knight and he is this to the point of being court-side cheering He becomes rebranded his sweat gets rebranded as that of a superfan he is just like you and In that way, I think two things are true as you say one is the dude actually loves basketball That is undeniable. He really loves and sweats over the games Simultaneously, it's been the greatest thing in terms of the laundering of his image That he could possibly do such that when I'm now trying to figure out how do I Report around and report the case against what he's been doing that he doesn't want people to know about in the NBA One of the obstacles has been but wait a minute. He's one of the good guys It's shocking and I'm like, but he's also the dude who was going around You know According to the United States government going around the rules around fair competition when he was running fucking Microsoft And so why is this surprising? It's because sports has this capacity to change how we see even the most Like consistent principles across and when you're doing it for a team you're doing it for a city You're doing it for a fan base for generations of people, right? There's this like yeah, this rescue Proternalistic idea of it. It's such a it's such an amazing way to contextualize what what these guys are doing But I want to I want to talk a little bit about your show in another context because outside of what you're choosing to focus on and this You know this broader framework of the way that attention in power works and that sports is this this lens for it You've also been doing something that I have found as a journalist Incredibly fascinating which is playing with form trying to get people's attention on stories in a more logistical way, right? Like how do I present these stories? How do I tell them and something that you wrote in a Substack post about how you were doing your your bill Belichick reporting which people should go follow this because it's an amazing blend of this this high low really important stuff about Things that may not feel very important, but you talk about Using a YouTube genre of the unboxing video as this way to try to think about the story Can you can you tell me a little bit more about like how how you how that clicked in your brain and how you employ that? Sometimes to tell the stories of the reporting that you've gathered. Yeah, so so far in our conversation I think if you're not familiar with me, you might be wondering so where's this cheese you promised You're talking a lot about these like highfalutin issues Where is the cheese and I think that was always the thing that I wanted to be very true to it's like I have fun reporting I mean the thesis very bluntly and very lame Lee is Journalism is fun. It's fun for me to do at its best. It's fun to consume you share on your group chats all that stuff We know this as journalists at our best like that's the promise of why we like working this insane It's gossip sometimes right like and then it can be and it can be and right and like it should be actually at its best It should feel kind of rude like wait a minute We're not supposed to know this but now we know it and it's changed how we think about this thing like someone as As many people have reminded me like the basic definition of journalism might just be you're reporting something that someone doesn't want You to know as opposed to public relations, which is of course the opposite anyway What I did when I was launching this show and of course starting a podcast as as you can relate starting a new thing Is one of the more kind of fundamentally depressing exercises? Because you're like alright, how do I get this funnel to be as big as possible? I have to learn how to use words like funnel and not even think about it anymore True. I mean genuinely just like and so you're led to study You know, I don't know if you're like me I'm like I guess I'll read mr. Beast's leak manifesto now. I'm like trying to 100% It's yes, absolutely. I'm studying YouTube thumbnails and being like how far can I take this and maintain my dignity? It's it's let me just tell you dignity is the first to go What whatever face you think you'd like to make is not the face you'll be making a thumbnail for this video Yeah, can we both just do this for a second? I know just like you know exactly Just just just take care of me Ah, no look at the the thing that happens is you study the people who have figured this out who are like native to this world so to speak and are successful at navigating its incentives and The genre that I have always been mystified by that I began to study closely is the unboxing video and An unboxing video it just feels crazy that I get to introduce it to anybody on the internet But in case you don't know it's a genre of video that is most exemplified by someone named Ryan of Ryan's toys and Ryan who like me is a sort of like vaguely Asian Character making like NBA max contract money for years and years his parents apparently set up a camera and At the table he would get to basically open up a series of presents inside of which there were toys Hence Ryan's toys very straightforward And I remember first getting a sense of like wow Ryan is killing it on YouTube He has zillions of I mean just truly a staggering and again depressive amount of views and Also a lot of money that comes with it, but more deeply. I was like why is this specific genre so? Addicting or perhaps more generously. Why is it so? Appealing to lots of human beings as just a format and I started thinking about it I was like either this is the end of everything in which case We're just watching a child open gifts and play with toys and this says everything about the era of you know vicarious capitalism that plagues all of us that is sending us into the apocalypse and that is still viable argument I think yeah, I'm gonna say don't don't count it out still still still on the board But the other way of thinking about it is there is something to the vicarious Surprise and enjoyment of watching someone else do something that you're kind of wishing you were doing yourself And so inside of that format you get this authenticity of in Ryan this surprise and delight and Frustration sometimes you're basically seeing someone else relive Christmas morning over and over again And I think the key word there as much as anything is surprise And I think about surprise a lot because in our feeds algorithmically by design, of course We are getting fed things we've already expressed a desire for and For me if I may know like connect dots that typically aren't connected The thing that Ryan's toys reminded me of is I was like really banging my head against the wall Like what should I be doing with this show? How can I be? trying out new things it reminded me of Opening a mailbox to get a magazine that I subscribed to in the magazine there is in the back somewhere potentially 8,000 words as I like to say these days like 8,000 words by John McPhee on oranges Who asked for that? Right like nothing about my habits as a magazine subscriber was like I need that guy writing about oranges and yet there it is Somewhere in the front of the book. There was a of course lighter fare There were celebrity interviews blah blah blah. There is a profile somewhere in the middle like the premise of a magazine was effectively You trust us to surprise you and so when I thought about like YouTube I was like what's a way to blend this stuff and the thing I settled on was What if the toy was journalism? What if on YouTube instead of a printed product? I put on a desk in front of my friends who are my actual friends a box inside of which there would be Documents or a folder inside of which there would be these tax forms or in the case of Bill Balachek Sometimes like a literal wrapped gift inside of which was a thumb drive On which there was like leaked video of his 24 year old girlfriend like it's just that process of getting to watch someone actually open something up and Genuinely be caught by surprise and have to react and then getting to I don't know Give that to people I'd see if that felt infectious. Yeah, I mean Ryan's leaked emails, right? I mean, it's just it works. It works so well, but but I think that's the thing like when when we are You know journalists trying to figure out how to how to do this craft We're always taught down the line by people right like tell it to people like you tell it to a friend in a bar Right like you get these sort of like these maxims that yes that float around and then you know you proceed One proceeds to Tell it in a very structured formulae quay, right? You are literally doing that gathering gathering people and I and I think that I think too this is something that I think a lot so much with the algorithms and what to what you were saying Which is like taste is so important now Like curation and taste like those words can get lost and sound like they have no meaning But what it really means is that that you know that idea of you were not expecting this and it's I think a Real way we talked about this somehow in every episode we've taped so far But like it's a way to build trust right like if you have good taste It's a way to build trust and if the media could use anything right now. I think it's that right? It's it's this notion of trust. It's also the thing I found myself talking to like journalism students about because I have no I mean genuinely it's like you get called to a class sometimes and you're asked to like give your whatever your advice and I don't have many good specific pieces of advice I'm happy to like explain anything that I do and reverse engineer it and explain that but in terms of like advice all I can tell them is Your sense of taste is The most important thing for you to be able to explain Both to yourself and to others so that you can understand why you like the things that you do and how you could possibly do and collect And point people towards more of it It's just and that's and by the way Hard for me to not think of magazines, but like that's the premise of editorial authority at a magazine Yeah, there's an editor who has the ultimate power to green light something to put this in the book or to not and Your desire to pay that person monthly revenue Subscriptions which are still by the way perhaps somewhat counterintuitive Lee Still the thing we're chasing Everyone's still looking for subscription but Lee revenue In that way sight unseen I trust you to deliver me something that will validate your taste and therefore my own entrusting you That's the whole game still and it's so underrated It's underrated because what we're supposed to be doing or Incentivize on some level to be doing is giving people more of what they've already said they wanted right like oh you clicked on this I'm gonna feed you more of that I'm gonna follow you as Closely as I can across the internet such that I find the biggest crowds and give them more of the thing that are already searching for and that's Just not Actually what I mean look I? Will say in the strategy of like what to put in this metaphorical magazine right like and this is just my personal theory and God knows I I'm sure I'm messing some various strategies up, but like you do want to occasionally if occasionally Talk about things that are popular. I'm not here to say like only make your weird art But there's a way to do this is sports thing. Yes. This is why you buy a sports team You want to have like the venue right and sometimes? Buying the sports team is figuring out a way to tell a story that involves Taylor Swift or whatever right or Sydney Sweeney's jeans or whatever it is because people know who that is they care about it correct I absolutely think that's the case. I wanted wanted to hard pivot here because I want to Use our time well here, and I want to talk about something a lot of your work lately has been focused around Gambling the problems, you know that have arisen the scandals that have arisen in the major leagues in professional sports but I also I also wanted to get your thoughts on the nature of how everything feels like a casino right this idea of of legalized sports betting in our society and The ways that I think I basically think that professional sports is You know it's it's one of those places is it's a canary in a coal mine, right? Like it's showing it's showing us a problem that is embedded in so many different levels of society You know I one of the things I wanted to ask you first off was that? This is interacting so much with the actual business that you are that you are in right that you your peers are in yeah gambling and and and sports journalism are kind of fused you have even said you've Gone through an unconscious uncoupling with draft Kings which was I think you know there was a business partnership there But can you tell me a little bit why you stepped away from that and and also just like what this? Pressure feels like to have this industry which is playing a real role in the actual sports in the consumption of it, but is also Injected itself into the actual editorial journalistic layer as well Yeah, so I'm happy to do that from the micro with me personally as well as the macro so yeah me When it comes to just like my experience through sports media I worked at ESPN and so when I was at ESPN the dream this has been the dream for I think Not just me but many journalists. It's like I would love to be a rounding error for somebody I would love to be a thing that doesn't have to make money get supported because it's a good thing to have and I get To do my good work as funded by someone for whom money is actually not the concern And so at ESPN I go back to that point because the whole thing there was ESPN Of course had direct business relationships with the leaks But they cared or at the very least at the time that I did that I worked there They really did make a show of investing in we're gonna also fund serious journalism We're gonna create this firewall in between that is familiar to any media company of a certain size In which there are business relationships and also the people in the newsroom who are protected from the compromise that those business people Are ostensibly always trying to push on the journalists So that is sort of my origin story when it comes to what's it like to work for a larger corporation? That is being funded with lots of money that seems like a dream And so sports gambling as cable television has declined and ESPN's business model has radically changed, right? The rounding errors are less frequent now harder to identify inside of ESPN itself Sports gambling comes along the gambling operators like fan duel like DraftKings DraftKings was the partner that I launched the show with and so In that way there was this promise of We're gonna give you money We want to have a media side of our business and we're not gonna get in the way and I will say that for my Micro personal experience they never got in the way They didn't tell me what to cover what not to cover and that was great And so I have no complaints in terms of like here are my sob stories about being funded by DraftKings They just didn't get in the way I did lots of weird journalism and investigated things but I should also acknowledge that Part of what my show became was never a natural fit for a sports betting company And so the question became like both a self-interested Lee Who's the best partner for me in terms of branding and being able to develop audience and funnel and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Probably not DraftKings admittedly, but then it was if I do want to be a show that investigates things and Gambling is the story of the business of sports in 2025. It's intensely weird for me to Constantly be managing that conflict of interest and so I just need separations from that And so that was sort of the story of me wanting to find a new partner and we're now licensed by the New York Times and the athletic and that's cool, and it's been going on for about two months and You know, that's another experiment that I am enjoying and is very different in that key way the reason though that Sports gambling is this thing that feels like it's not just practically seeping into everything licensing and Advertising and funding so many things Which it is just objectively like any sports fan any consumer of anything can tell that can hear the ads can see the commercials can see LeBron James doing ads can see Kevin Hart can see ESPN creating various partnerships It's also this larger thing that you've described which is it is Not just symptomatic but like driving the casino that is the American economy To the point where I remember doing an episode in July Investigating the NBA gambling scandal and its connection to poker and This was three months before the federal indictments came out Announced by cash Patel behind this podium and he's you know very proud of this thing that it actually started under the Biden administration years earlier But I digress it's just you know sports the funnel That's all that's that's that's that's have everybody here to celebrate it the point being that when I was doing that July episode I remember too much to recap here, but a key Sort of vector of my curiosity was NBA Twitter and how it seemed to learn things about what the federal government was investigating Before even the public was told by the federal government or any journalistic institution was aware And I remember just falling into this rabbit hole into which we found a guy who was not only big in sports betting but big in meme coins and It just felt like this again unlock for me where there was truly like I think was like a bio on discord where it was like gambling crypto meme coins where identified as like this holy trinity of three things that this Subculture was really into and I'm like why is it that sports betting feels like it's not just part of a Venn diagram But like a poker chip on it's like poker chip stacked together Like that's the Venn diagram just like overlapping circles so neatly and I'm like why is this and of course you could throw poker now obviously in there too It feels like it's a I mean not to be so grandiose about it But it feels like we're living at a time in which lots of young people were promised things They were not delivered perhaps because of the generations that continued to wield power in our government economy, etc the boomers and the way to like shoots and ladders your way to the American dream is gambling on shit and In that casino premise I think you just see again a through line across all these sectors of American life now sports being one that has so naturally taken to it because My gosh, here's an unlimited menu. I mean literally ever expansive cheesecake factory sized menus for anything that you can bet on That can involve any sort of alleged edge that you can get your hands on and it feels to me like it's easy to make like a like a a pearl clutching moralistic argument and I actually think that the gambling situation especially since it's legalized is very complicated It's already wound its way into the fabric of our society. It's very difficult to figure out exactly how one would Regulate it. There's there's this notion By this guy Matt Glassman at Georgetown He wrote this this this great post about the gambling society in America and basically says, you know The closer that any kind of gambling gets to a slot machine the more dangerous it is right because it's like there's no skill involved There's this randomization. There's a house. It's not people, you know betting against each other all these different kind of theories about it and basically that the way that sports gambling works on the internet has taken a Kind of diverse style of of wagering and gambling and brought it sort of lower down into that slot machine Territory right, but I think when we talk about what the gambling is doing like I think it adds this layer of Chaos and distrust to all the things right like I think about sports media and and I think that you know It's easy to see as a consumer of it in my side that a lot of listeners feel like they're being treated like idiots, right? Like oh, you know, yeah, there's this big scandal on the horizon You know we're gonna talk about it a little bit and then we're gonna go like straight into the you know the Fandall Parley or you know You're gonna have like the the ticker where it's got the you know Bet logo on it or whatever it is and so you have this way which it's like kind of eroding or at least giving people that ability to doubt Whether or not these institutions are being covered or covering the sport with with the right way Then you have which I'd love to hear you speak to like how worried are you about the credibility of these leagues? Right, you have you know the scandal that's come out with the Guardians You've got the NBA stuff which you've been all over with billops and reser I mean it has this this feeling and You know consuming what you're putting out there that I'm like I feel like we're on the verge of These leagues losing some of the credibility that like you can't put that toothpaste back in the tube. How do you feel about that? Yeah, I think it's Existentially important and I don't mean because I think wow every NBA supers are gonna start like throwing games I mean from where we started our conversation honestly like what is valuable about sports and this is where it's hard not to sound like a Boomer ironically, but integrity of competition and fair play are so truly unironically essential to why sports matter if you don't have the confidence that the product the Product is the less romantic way of putting it But the game if you don't have confidence that the game that you care about is on the up and up and that the incompetence you're watching is Ernest is genuine failure and the opposite genuine success then The whole premise of why you care about it is in fact eroding is in fact being corrupted And you need to see this through a moralizing high horse kind of lens Just see it from a capitalist perspective. That's the advantage of your product live sports feel real AI is simulating everything it is Giving you less reason to think that anything is genuine and in sports. I've always said sports are fascinating and so for me Irresistible because it feels like humiliation is on the line in every sporting event Someone cares deeply Someone's ego is at risk someone might get embarrassed and turn into a meme or worse That happens in everything in sports And if there is some loss of confidence that the stakes are not actually that that it's not genuine Humiliation that it's not genuine defeat that I think you're you're really risking the supremacy culturally of the product and I also think When it comes to like what a league is supposed to do by the way like of course a league's foremost Motive is to shrink the PR scandal And so when it comes to anything when it comes to any investigation that they undertake the goal is how can I make this? Seem like less of a problem than it might be in reality, right? And that is familiar to any corporation in America It is certainly true in sports as well for all of the incentives that are obvious I think it's poetic that when Adam Silver came to power in the NBA and he became commissioner He did two things of note in his first year The first thing was orchestrate the transfer of power from Donald Sterling to Steve Ballmer with the Clippers That was a massive scandal that he personally shrunk down to a victory And then that fall in the New York Times he writes an op-ed it is just him He has no co-byelines for anyone else no other commissioners no other executives at the NBA and he says it's time to legalize gambling And so I try to find the guy who did this we're all trying to find the guy who did this Um, and it turns out that the hot dog costume may well be you know pick your favorite NBA mascot, right? Like that's what you're sort of like gesturing at staring into the camera hoping that no one quite realizes that Maybe you didn't realize what all and this is where it feels like tech maybe you didn't realize all the unintended consequences and I think that for sports and I'm with you like I think there's a I mean look It's very complicated to regulate as always. It's like was that really mean there's a whole like granular Series of reforms shrinking the menu of prop bets making it so you can't bet on obscure players on and on It's a sub another interesting conversation But the thing I wonder if sports realizes is Is you know and this is where the oil stuff sort of recurs for me the pipeline language I wonder if the leagues realize that They're basically fracking their products Because what they're doing is saying we can go deeper and find more money by mining this same thing Going deeper into this sort of like subterranean layers of what we think sports fandom is and we can create these individualized economic engines that Didn't used to exist before But in the process do something dangerous speaking to the larger like what's different about the product? They're creating a series of individualized hyper specific sometimes microscopic sporting interests Routing interests that are not the same as I care about this team or even this star player and when you do that I think you're just changing what the product is The product at its best in the way that it's become culturally supreme is there are all these teams all trying to win a championship It's pretty simple In the world that they're building now the product is different They're convincing people to watch these games not because of the teams involved or the quality of the players But because there are these other things to root for and in a world in which we're worried And the MBA is worried existentially about this That in basketball Individual stars have become even more popular and important than the franchises Then you're actually doing something even more mutated than that That can long term feel like you're fracking something and poisoning potentially the entire well that you're supposed to be profiting off of it is like put that way feels to just sum up the the mega problem the hyper object problem of Like kind of everything now that feels just so Like tech enabled right like I cover this stuff and I do not want to always just say like you know Be the guy who has a hammer and only sees nails in you know the algorithmic internet But I just think that there's this way That it is this these technological tools they decrease friction right like gambling is going to exist It's going to exist in these ways All they do is just decrease the level of friction here until you can you know pick this thing up and do those micro bets on you know What's going to happen in the next 45 seconds? And in doing that like that's the the fracking element right and and it's like it's the ethos that a lot of these These companies and and that you know this You know style of 21st century capitalism rewards where it's just like Extract as much as you can scale as much as you can get it and you have to get it now Otherwise, you're an idiot And there's just no there's no long game right there's just no long term. It's not all it's not a lot It's really not a long game. I mean that is that is a great articulation of my frustration here Is that when you think about what is being disrupted? And I think about this by the way We've mentioned a couple of industries already where it's like very funny to think about cable television being disrupted Only to be replaced by something that is now trying to be a version of cable television Like where it's just funny like dude. I'm I'm like, you know There are zillion different ways that you can point to Silicon Valley, Elon, whoever is saying like we're going to We're going to reinvent this thing only to accidentally invent a bus Right a cable network a way for people to I mean We're realizing over time And this is where it's the oldest I will sound but it's like sometimes things were that way for a reason And the thing of like what I've really figured out here as my big brain founder sort of like Psychology has led me to move fast and break things in the service of is this apparent revelation that wait a minute I can make more money doing it this way And then the question that never gets answered until it's too late is But what if it ruins the entire equilibrium that allowed you to disrupt that system in the first place? And then it's like well now the game's over and we're fucked right so thanks, dude really appreciate your insights Oh, man, so so so paulatory finds out he's a boomer, right? That's that's what I what I found out today in this conversation with you charlie is that I am the machine I rage against Aren't we all man? Oh This is this is a uh, this has been fantastic paul. Thank you for coming on galaxy brain Thank you for making me more depressed and somehow uh more excited than I was you know 45 minutes ago That that's my music man. That's what I that's what I'd like to do. That's it if you can walk away With the thousand yard stare, but then you also kind of want to go make something that and I did my job there you go vision accomplished Redeem your lab books on free bet spins or even cash in for real money That's satisfaction from lab brooks and for extra satisfaction. Here's the teas and seas. Let's rock Is to get lab bucks Idle money lies in your current account picking crumbs out of its belly button wondering should I eat them? 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Thank you again to my guest paulatory If you liked what you saw here new episodes of galaxy brain drop every friday You can subscribe to us on the atlantic's youtube channel or on apple or spotify or wherever you get your podcasts And if you enjoyed this, please remember to support our work and the work of the other journalists at the atlantic By subscribing to the publication at the atlantic.com slash listener That's the atlantic.com slash listener Thanks so much, and i'll see you on the internet You This episode of galaxy brain was produced by nathaniel from and edited by claudina bade It was engineered by dav grine Our theme music is by rob smurciak claudina bade is the executive producer of atlantic audio and andrea valdez is our managing editor So you want to start a business you might think you need a team of people and fancy text kills, but you don't You just need go daddy aro. I'm walton goggins and as an actor. 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