The Bill Simmons Podcast - NBA Tournament Chaos and Top-10 Player Arguments with Justin Termine, plus Michael Rubin on Changing the Collectibles Industry

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons is joined by Justin Termine of Sirius/XM NBA Radio to break down the wild final night of the In-Season Tournament group stage including the Kings comeback win over the Warriors and whether Golden State is in big trouble, plus some sports radio debates like Tatum vs Booker and who wants Zach Lavine (01:40). Then, he chats with Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin on how AI will impact merchandise, modernizing the sports cards market and more (54:00). Host: Bill Simmons Guest: Justin Termine and Michael Rubin Producer: Jonathan Kermah Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Coming up, the in-season just gets better and better. We're going to react live to everything that happened tonight next. This episode is brought to you by Prime Video. You know me, I can't go a day without sports. I really can't. And now Monday nights are all about hockey. That's right. There's a new exclusive home for streaming Monday night NHL hockey, and it's on Prime.

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Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit rg-help.com. We're also brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network. Put up a new Rewatchables on Monday night. It's American Pie. Me, Sean Fennessey, Chris Ryan. This is a complicated movie that gets weirder every year we get away from 1999, but it also made a crap load of money, which is why we decided to throw it into, wait, how much money did that movie make month? Still trying to figure out how to do my voice on that. Yeah, so American Pie.

We might keep the theme of that month going for a couple more weeks into December, so stay tuned for that. Coming up on this podcast, our guy Justin Termini is going to join us. It's late Tuesday night and we're going to react to in-season tournament craziness. A really fun basketball night. Adam Silver got to hand it to this dude. We're talking about that. And then after that, Michael Rubin, the head of Fanatics, who comes on every two plus years to talk about, uh, business stuff, sports stuff,

just innovation, things that he's seen in the future. So, um, he is on and that's going to be the podcast. That's a good one. First, our friends from ProJet. All right, taping this. It is 10 o'clock Pacific time. Justin Termini, our friend from, what is it? Sirius XM NBA Radio What are we calling it these days? Boom, you hit it right out of the park Sirius XM NBA Radio

Come on, 4-7 Eastern Time You know with Eddie and myself I thought you were on the West Coast Somehow you're on the East Coast But you stayed up This was one of the Great, random, regular season NBA nights

That I think we've ever had. And it's November 28th. This is usually the most dead time of the year. This is when we're thinking about trades and we're trying to blow teams up or saying like, should the season start on Christmas? All these little narratives that we have in the first two months of the year, they're gone because the in-season tournament has worked. It's been awesome. How much have you liked it? Bill, that might be my favorite part is because we're fielding calls from people all day and we're looking to create a subject matter. And people are calling in on like the Russell Westbrook comments right over the course of the last couple of days,

or they're calling about the pop of it stuff, or they're calling about, you know, trying to trade, you know, Zach Levine. I don't like the player movement type of stuff. I'm over it. I'm sick of it. Now we're talking about basketball. Like Eddie and I will pop on the mic here on Wednesday, the day after all these tournament games, people will actually want to talk about the games. So I love it. And you know, from listening to the times that we go back and forth, I'm not afraid to crush the NBA, even though I'm on NBA radio when I think they deserve it, right? I'll get on them for load management. I'll get them on, I'll get on them for the player movement. I can't say enough about them hitting a home run with this.

I love it. Yeah, and there's some tweaks that they can do that we can talk about. But for the most part, the questions I had going into it, I think you and I saw it the same last summer. It was like, all right, this sounds cool on paper, but why should I care and why will the players care? So fast forward to tonight, we had the Celtics doing a hack-a-shack on Andre Drummond in the fourth quarter of 32 points so they could try to game the point

differential thing so they can get in there. The point is everyone cared. Everyone was into this. The players were trying to win. This Warriors-Kings game that we just watched that I can't wait to talk about felt like a game seven of a playoff series. The crowd was going nuts. Both teams were really trying. The Warriors had to win by 12 just to make it. It didn't matter. It had all the intensity, all the stuff that we've really kind of missed from the regular season with some very rare exceptions. And we had it just for six straight hours. And it was great. I just loved it. I was so happy. Yeah. I'm the same way. I'm not a huge soccer fan, but I care about the World Cup because I see that a lot of people care about it. So I just want the players to care about it.

I got into this just because the players cared. We're talking about the Celtics where they go out there and they do that hackadrum and thing. Then they go back in the locker room and I'm seeing reports that they were celebrating the end of that Nets game, right? So if the players care about it, then I'm going to care about it. Then the fans are going to care about it. And that was the interesting part is like, they're worried about a Toronto Nets game at the end of November. I'm concerned about a Toronto Nets game at the end of November.

Then I got to keep my eye on the Knicks score. I got to keep my eye on like Minnesota, Oklahoma City, just because the different outcomes, games that maybe I normally wouldn't care about. And all of a sudden, you find yourself caring about it. It's funny because TNT did a good job, Bill, with the different little boxes at the top. It almost felt like the NCAA tournament where you're just not focused on your team. You're focused on everything taking place at the same time with all the games taking place at the same time. I loved even the way it was presented on television. I had the three TVs going. I had the Nets game going, needed the Nets to win, needed to make sure they didn't win

by too much. I didn't bother. I don't know if you did the same thing, but for the most part, I knew what I wanted, but I wasn't going to go nuts about, oh, the Nets, they're plus 13 right now. Like whatever, the chips are going to fall where they may. I think, you know, if you're talking about tweaks for how this could have been better, and I really want to talk about some of the games in a second,

but it felt like as the tournament went on over the course of a couple weeks and people started to realize how important the point differential was, the first time I really noticed it was the Orlando-Boston game. Orlando had their guys in near the end and they were trying to score. And I was like, whoa, this is a part of my brain I had never accessed before during the regular season. And I was like, this is something.

Then you really felt it today with the pouring it on late. I think if it's five games, I would go five groups. I mailed you my idea. Five groups instead of six. So you have six teams per group. There's five games per group instead of four. And then I think the point differential is a little easier to figure out. I think if you're going to nitpick with what they did tonight and this month, there was a lot of three-in-one teams. And then it comes down to these teams in the fourth game.

The Celtics win the lottery. They play this Bulls team that's already ready for the season to end. They blow them out, and it was an advantage that they had that game at that specific time. So I think five games might even that out. Other than that, I'm really happy with the format. Is there anything else you would change? I agree. I love it.

I would have Orlando. I thought it was unfair for them that they didn't know what they needed. So Boston knew what they needed to win by. So I think you got to have every team play on the last day and probably play at the same time just so they know what to do because I thought that gave Boston a little bit of a chance there. Almost like football. When football, we were there

and have all the division from the conferences, they all just play at the same time so there's no way not to try. And they do that like the last day of the NBA season as well. All right. The baseball season, just so no team can kind of alter it based off what the end result is elsewhere. So that's an idea.

And I like your idea as well, because what you emailed me, it had a lot of teams like in the same division, right? So I'd love to see like Boston, for example, going up against Philadelphia, going up against New York, because then you get the rivalries that are like historic and they're in the same conference. So year after year, it's like, oh, Philadelphia got us last year, but we carry that over into the next season. Same thing with the Lakers. Like, am I supposed to care about Lakers, Oklahoma city? Probably not. There's really no connection there, but I would care if it's Lakers Clippers every year. I would care if it was Lakers Golden State, Lakers Sacramento. So I love the idea of maybe making it the same divisions every

single year, the same groups, and have it done by maybe the divisions. Yeah, just quickly, I had it by region. So it was Boston, the New York teams, Philly, Washington, Toronto was group A, and then it goes through. And then you have to kind of cross over with a Miami, Orlando, Charlotte, Atlanta, New Orleans, Memphis. So you're grabbing from both conferences. But for the most part, if you just look at the map, it's pretty easy to see which six teams to cluster. And I'm with you. I think it should be the same teams every year. It adds the fact that even we had Sacramento and Golden State in the same group was important because this is one of the questions I want to ask you tonight. Is that the best

rivalry right now? If we're just talking about sheer entertainment with history and baggage of previous series and proximity, that might be the number one rivalry. In my head, I want to go, oh, it's Boston-Milwaukee, but it's like, I don't know.

The characters have changed so much in the Boston-Milwaukee. Most of the players are different than they were a couple years ago. But Golden State-Sacramento feels like it has continuity, right? I mean, location. You got the stomp last year from Draymond. You got a series that went seven games. They play a fun style. So I'm definitely not going to argue against that.

I mean, you could make the argument Boston, Miami. If the Curry on Sacramento piece, they have to get over this monster that has just owned them for the last few years. It's got a lot going for it. Yeah, big brother, little brother. The two in the Eastern Conference, I wouldn't even say Milwaukee. I'm not really scared of Milwaukee

even though Milwaukee's gotten a little bit hot here as of late. Their defense has major issues. I don't even think that's been rect little bit hot here as of late, their defense has major issues, major issues. And I don't even think that's been rectified. They barely beat Portland the other day. They barely beat Washington the other day. They gave up 124 tonight with no Jimmy Butler to Miami. No Jimmy Butler, no Tyler Hero.

Kyle Lowry looked like he's Oscar Robertson. So I don't even know if I consider that the biggest rivalry, even though the Lillard and Drew thing's going to be a ton of fun if we see that in the postseason. Heck, we could see it here in the midseason tournament if both advance to Vegas. But I would say like Eastern Conference, Boston, Philadelphia might be a little bit more of a rivalry. I was thinking of that one. The problem is Boston's won every time.

Yeah, so maybe Miami is just because that goes back and forth. I like the history of it, right? So it's like Boston, Philadelphia, along with Boston Lakers are the two best rivalries in the sport. So I include that in kind of when I'm talking about the rivalries as well. Yeah, if you're going to read some rivalries, it's probably Boston, Miami, just because they've had big series a bunch of times now.

Golden State, Sacramento, I like the longevity of that one. And for whatever reason, the matchup is perfect. It's like watching those welterweight fighters who just have the perfect styles to fight each other. Golden State-Sacramento even has Monk. Monk's like a little bit of a Curry imposter with his offensive game when he gets going. And Fox has a chance to be a first-team

All-NBA guy this year. Although, I guess there's like four or five guards that could say that. But we got to talk about the Warriors really quick before we keep talking about this tournament. That was a devastating loss for them. I mean, devastating. And it's a season that's been threatening

to go the wrong way. The Draymond soap opera. I mean, yeah, I'm sure you've spent more than enough time talking about that. But they completely fell apart down the stretch. And they were up five with the ball with I think like 80 seconds left. Dumb turnovers, second chance points for the Kings.

And then they end up with like a 35 footer to win it when they couldn't even get a good shot. I thought Draymond was just bizarre down the stretch. Clay Thompson over Moody or Looney over Moody when Moody was really good. There was some weird coaching stuff. And that was the first time I thought to myself, oh man, like Golden State might be a playing team. And even the playing might be lucky for them. What was your take watching them? Well, so I had Golden State as my seventh seed prior to the season beginning. I wasn't a big fan, and a lot of it was because of their lack of size. It wasn't because I thought that Clay or Wiggins was going to be thrown off a cliff. I do agree with you with the coaching

decisions with Moody down the stretch because he was really good, and then all of a sudden he's out of the game. The part that's got to be concerning about this loss on top of some of the stuff you mentioned is where's Andrew Wiggins been all season? He's been nowhere. He gave you the best game that he's given you by far. That was by far his best game tonight. You still end up losing, and you could also make the argument it was the best game that Klay played. I mean, 20-11.

Klay's got like one 20-point game, so that might be the best game you got from Klay and Wiggins, and you still end up losing it. You blow a big lead. So they're in a lot of trouble, and I know that you are doing the list here on the ringer that you were mentioning. We were texting back and forth. I won't get it away, but you were doing the top 100,

and you got Curry near the top of the list. The difference between Curry and I think some of the other guys at the top of the list are he doesn't have that sidekick, right? Like Giannis has Lillard. Embiid's got Tyrese Maxey. Jokic has Jamal Murray. Tatum's got Jalen Brown, if you think it's him. Maybe it's Borzingas. Like everybody, Anthony Davis and LeBron have each other. Devin Booker and KD have each other. It's a huge drop-off from Curry to either Wiggins or Clay. So he's got no sidekick. Yeah. Draymond is, I guess, technically the second best guy in the team. And he's hit the point now, you saw it tonight, where he took this elbow.

It felt like he flopped a little bit to try to get a flagrant or something. They didn't call it. And then he was so mad. He did this crazy karate chop foul thing on, I think it was Malik Monk. And then stared at the ref, and he'd already gotten a technical. And it's like, are you really going to get thrown out of this game? Like, I feel like he, and I thought it was interesting. Kenny Smith kind of called him out on the show tonight before the game.

And that's somebody they work with where he's just like, man, you're not 22, 23, 24 years old anymore. Like, you know, you're a veteran and it seems like your behavior is getting more erratic. But I think this, just that soap opera alone is really concerning if I'm a Warriors person. And that's before you get into, is Klay kind of semi-washed? And then the other piece of Wiggins, should you be shocked when Wiggins has 27 points in a game?

But that's where we are right now with him. Now you are if he has 15 points. If he gets six rebounds, you're kind of shocked. And you know, because you're a Celtic fan, he killed the Celtics on the glass back in the NBA Finals. You don't understand it. And then with the Draymond stuff, like, yeah, Kenny's saying, like, it's too late to be apologizing.

Now you just got to change your behavior. The thing I get a kick out of with Draymond all the time, Bill, is he's always talking about, like, well, I'm here for my teammates. I'm going to stand up for my teammates. I'm not going to let them down. All right. So we came to the defensive of Klay Thompson and yeah, it was clearly overboard, but he lets down his teammates every time he puts himself in that position to get suspended. He did it last year in the series against the Sacramento where he misses a key game. He did it in the finals in 2016. He put him in a

situation here tonight where really he could have been ejected. I wouldn't have had an issue if they ejected him because not only did he do that karate chop, but after the official blew the whistle, he then takes another swipe at Monk and then stares down the official. So like if they threw him out, he's putting his team in a bad spot again.

So I think he's actually very selfish, to be honest with you. The bigger issue for them is I just, there's other teams in the West I just think are just definitively better at this point. Minnesota, Denver when Murray comes back, Phoenix with the way Booker's playing now. And if they can just keep Booker and Durant healthy together, I like that against Golden State. Oklahoma City, especially if they trade one, two, or three of their 700

picks and try to add one more guy to what they have. Sacramento's dead even with them. I'm not crossing off the Lakers. I know they sucked last night, but you know they're going to figure it out. And then New Orleans is the wild card just from a talent standpoint. New Orleans has more talent than Golden State. I think Curry's, I had him in the ringer 100. I think I had him third. It's not going to matter if nobody else on your team is in the top 50. And that's kind of what we're looking at. New Orleans is loaded with talent. Even when you look at guys like Dyson Daniels and when Trey Murphy comes back, these are like kick-ass dudes. And I look at the Warriors and you just think those back-to-back drafts, Wiseman, whatever.

It's the COVID draft. But then the year after, Kamingo over Franz. It's just kind of the combo of those two just going 0-2 on those picks, basically, which it feels like they did. Devastating. You can't come back from that. I mean, we talked about it over the course of the last couple of days because LaMelo, who just unfortunately got hurt, he's been going off.

And you could have had him instead of Wiseman, right, in that COVID draft. And then you got Franz Wagner, who they passed up on. I mean, Shengun, I don't know if you want to blame him for that, but Shengun's awesome. He'd be perfect there. Well, Shengun's the best player in the league now. I think you have to blame him a little bit. He's rising right up there. He passed the Jokic 2.0.

I know. So, like, you've got all those guys that they passed on where they made mistakes in the draft and then they're just missing the two most important things I think that it takes to win now. And I've heard you talk about this in the pod before. One is just, it's no longer like a big three. It's a big two, right? You need a combination.

And we already mentioned Curry doesn't have that second guy. And then the other thing is look at all the teams that have won recently. The Lakers back in 2020 did it with size. The Bucs did it with size. Now, Golden State didn't in 2022, but last year Nuggets did it with size. Why is Orlando winning right now? Well, they're doing it with size.

Like, you got to be big, and they just lack size. I mean, it's Kevon Looney and what, Dario Saric? That's not going to cut it once you get into the postseason. In a league that's gotten bigger and bigger every year. In 2022, the more I look back at it, it just was fluky. There was a whole bunch of things going on that that runway for them. And Wiggins was playing way bigger than his size and was rebounding in a real way. And they were able to patch together.

And Curry was so great. And they were able to grab the title. But I don't think that 2022 team in this current season playing a team like Minnesota, like these teams, there's size everywhere. And if you don't have it, I've been saying this for the last few weeks, it's the thing that jumps out to me over and over again.

If you don't have size and length, I watched with the Clippers yesterday, they got beat by Reggie Jackson and DeAndre Jordan, but the Clippers just seem small. Even trading the Covington and Batum, who aren't deal breakers. They're ninth men, but at least they were

two long guys that had some size. Now you watch them, and they just seem small everywhere. I don't think that's... To me, the Clippers are DOA. I don't see any recipe for them to be a Final Four team. They can't guard point guards. They can't guard anyone like Jokic and beat anybody like that.

So what are they? Bill, if you can't beat the Denver Nuggets on your home floor without Jokic, Aaron Gordon, and Jamal Murray, who are their three best players, and let's be honest, I think Michael Porter Jr. went three of 13 in that game last time. So he was horrible. So you really lost to them on your home floor

without their four best players. So if you lost to them on your home floor in one game without their four best players, how the hell are you supposed to beat the Denver Nuggets in a seven-game playoff series where you actually have to go travel and play in Denver where they're impossible to beat. They have no chance.

LA's hopes are over. Meanwhile, they don't have their own pick until 2030. So it might be the biggest mess in the sport. Well, you see they're 7-9. Three of the wins are against the Spurs, and one's against Portland. And they're 3-9 against everybody else. And this is a team that's had Paul George and Kawhi the whole year. There's been no injury stuff with them yet.

They've played. They've gotten 16 full games out of both of those guys. And they're 7-9. Their schedule hasn't even gotten hard yet. I think that trade, I went all in on how dumb I thought that trade was. And it actually might even be a little bit worse because Russ will be the fall guy. They'll get rid of him over the next two weeks.

They'll be like, yeah, we got to hit our chemistry right. And they'll keep making excuses. Eventually, the ax will fall on Ty Lue or Lawrence Frank, and they'll keep blaming people. But the reality is something you and I always talk about on our shows. Once you're letting the players make transactions for you, you're screwed. When has that ever worked?

It certainly didn't work with LeBron when he forced the Lakers to trade Westbrook that time. Why are you listening to your players? This is not a recipe for success. If the Celtics listen to Tatum, who loves Bradley Beal, they'd have Bradley Beal instead of Porzingis and Drew Holiday, right?

That's how they would have used that giant cap figure. But guess what? Tatum respects the organization. He wasn't going to push for it, and they were smart enough to be like, dude, let us handle this. But he wanted Bradley Beal for two years. Would Bradley Beal be good on the Celtics team? No. You can't listen to your players.

No, they might have given Harry Giles $100 million too if they were listening to Tatum. They still might. Don't ruin it. But yeah, I mean, look at the other LA team. It's like they go out and they get Russell Westbrook, even though they could have made smaller moves. Then they move away from Russell Westbrook and they go on a run last year just because they got players that actually fit a role. And you have to have different guys that fit a role, right? No matter what the field is, I mean, it could be broadcasting.

If you're teaming up, like I work with Eddie, right? If I worked with another guy that was just like me, the show wouldn't be as good. Even if the guy was really talented, like you got to have guys that like set picks. You got to have guys that are willing to dive after. Stop it. Yeah, well, I mean, I didn't mean to. It's a little bit later on the East Coast. That's probably the reason.

I know you're groggy. I'm delirious. But you got to have guys that fill different roles. And they got four guys that need the reason. I know you're groggy. I'm delirious. But you got to have guys that fill different roles and they got four guys that need the ball. It's not like you could have four great players and it'll work together if there are guys that like John Havlicek, Lee Thompson, Steph Curry, Jokic, like guys that don't need the basketball, guys that touch it. Halliburton. Halliburton. But these guys and everybody needs the ball in Los Angeles angeles plus they have no size so it was a disaster but the thing is we would have we we said that when they made the trade so what are you gonna do they all four of these guys succeed when they have the ball and now you have them all

together what do you think's gonna happen yeah so i can't be a complete hypocrite now i didn't think it would work but i also said i didn't mind them going in and making the hardened move just because i didn't think they could win the championship before. So why not just do this since you were already all in? Who cares about two extra picks when you're going to be a disaster anyway if these guys end up leaving? So I did say to do it only because I didn't think they were good enough before and now they're certainly not good enough either. So they lost a couple extra picks. So you're going to take the loss on that one. We're going to take a break and I want to play a little game called Sports Radio Arguments.

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Before he rocked that Super Bowl ring, he rocked that super soup strainer. Grow a mustache for Movember. You'll do great things too. You won't win the Super Bowl, but your fundraising will support mental health, suicide prevention, and prostate and testicular cancer research. And if you don't want to grow a mustache, you could still walk or run 60 kilometers, host an event, or set your own goal and mow your own way. Do great things this November. Sign up now. Just search Movember. All right, coming back. So our eight games are really good, by the way, for this in-season tournament. Knicks-Bucks, Celtics at Pacers, Suns at Lakers, and Pelicans at Kings. So I guess if you're talking about,

oh, it'll be so much fun if there's not one of the actual contenders into it. That's basically the Pacers. The Pelicans are a fun young team. Oh my God, look at them. It's New Orleans. But you also have major stars, right? You have Giannis and Dame.

You have all the Celtics guys. You have Durant and Booker. You have LeBron and the artist formerly known as KD. You have Zion, Fox. Like there's stars everywhere. So this is perfect for them. And then next week they'll have the quarterfinals, which will be even more fun than it was tonight.

And then we'll go to Vegas for that. I know you're going to Vegas, right? I'm sure for the semis. I'm not going for the semis. I'm going for your podcast on Wednesday night prior to the semis. Yeah, and then I'm going to leave. No, I'll stick around. I'll stick around for the games.

Well, the semis are going to be awesome. And that's, you know, the only thing I can compare it to is I went to the Olympics in 2012. And there was a quarterfinals where it was just four games in a row of, you know, do or die Olympics games with basically all the good players in all the countries. And it was awesome. And then semifinals, same thing. It was, you know, two games to get to the gold medal games in a row and it was fucking awesome. And I'm hoping if the, if the players are going to play as hard as they did tonight, I think this Vegas thing will be a home run. Plus, you know the All-Star game.

The All-Star game kind of sucks. We have to go. There's a lot of corporate stuff. The players are just kind of moving around. You're setting up a booth there. And it's not really about basketball. It's about the circus around basketball. This is going to be about basketball,

but then it'll have the same vibe of all these people who love basketball who work in the industry they'll all be there I think it's going to be really really cool yeah I'd leave before the all-star game so I don't even go to the game I go to all-star weekend but I'm not into the game for obvious reasons it's horrible and I'm going to go to all these like I can't wait to get there

it'll be interesting though because you go out to Vegas for summer league and it's a heavy Lakers crowd they still got to win one more game over Phoenix in order to get out there But I'm interested to see what the environment's going to be out like there And if LA does get there, it's going to be a heavy home crowd for the Lakers Just because clearly LA's just right down the road Well, that's a nice matchup for the Suns because This Lakers team, they're just missing too many

glue guys, right? They haven't had Vanderbilt all season. They lose Gabe Vincent pretty fast. It just seems like they're mixing and matching. They have a lot of trouble defending other teams' wings. LeBron can't play wing anymore. He's basically a power forward at this point.

Their team isn't really set yet. The Suns are now... They had this little Durant run at the start of the year. Now Booker's been awesome for two weeks. That leads me to my first sports radio argument, which you had with Eddie, which is Tatum or Booker. I'm doing my ringer top 100, and I got to the sixth spot, which is where I had Tatum. And I started thinking, is Devin Booker better than Tatum? But then I thought about the playoff exits and Tatum, the fact that what a great

rebounder he's been. I mean, he's an unbelievable rebounder for his position, right? I think he's third in the league for rebounding out of all non-centers. And I do think he's gotten better every year and he's added stuff. And I like where he is. But the Booker thing, it's an argument.

So I'm sure Eddie was on the Booker side. Where were you on Tatum versus Booker? I was on the Tatum side. Now, speaking of elimination games, I got the numbers right here because Eddie and I just had the argument. Booker at eliminations games, he's played in three of them. He's averaging 14 points on 31% from the floor. Tatum, I think, was somewhere up around 26 points per game. He's had

a 51-point game. Booker's played last year against Philadelphia in Game 7. Then he had the 46-point game against Philadelphia or Milwaukee on the road the year they went to the finals. Booker's never even scored 46 points in all three of his elimination games combined. So that was one argument I used against Addy, is that Tatum's been better in a bigger spot. And then clearly you got the rebounding, you've got the defense, heavy advantage to Tatum in both those categories, even though Booker has improved dramatically defensively. I want to give him credit for that. Booker's a better playmaker, I think, at this point as well. And ultimately, Eddie's big argument was efficiency, and I do

view Booker as the better scorer. I don't know how you view that. I do view Booker as the better scorer, but if you look at effective field goal percentage, which accumulates everything across the board, Tatum actually has the advantage there. So I do lean Tatum, but if you look at effective field goal percentage, which accumulates everything across the board, Tatum actually has the advantage there. So I do lean Tatum. But if you're making a list of the 10 best players in the sport, in all likelihood, you got them back to back with Tatum maybe one spot ahead of Booker. Yeah, I had the list I handed in. And we're running our, we combine all the rankings of different voters. But I had Jokic, Giannis, Curry.

I didn't bead four over Luka. Luka had five, Tatum six, Booker seven, SGA eight, Durant nine. And then I had Jimmy Butler as my 10th. You have LeBron as your 10th, right? You still have LeBron as a top 10. I had LeBron 12th. The defense with him, I just care about defense. It called me nuts, but I just factor it in.

And that's why I like even Tatum over Booker. I like the fact that Tatum, when he really dials it up, he's an excellent defender, but he can play different positions. He can help you on the boards. And that's just enough for a slight edge. But LeBron in that Philly game last night, the whole team wasn't playing defense, but his guy over and over again was shooting wide open threes. And I do feel like LeBron slips into DH mode a lot. So is it the difference between being a top 10 guy and a top 12 guy. Everybody's so afraid to criticize

LeBron and they should be because he's played more minutes than anyone in the history of the league. I'm just measuring him right now against all these other dudes, game after game after game. If it's a playoff game, he probably moves up. But if you're just talking about regular season, top 100, I can't have him in the top 10, but you had him. I got him at 10. He's an abysmal defender, okay? He doesn't care about it at all. And you care about defense. I care about defense as well.

But one other thing I care about is I care about Bill the regular season. And Jimmy Butler doesn't care about the regular season. True, he sat out today. You know, he sat out tonight in a mid-season tournament game, okay? And he's yet to play, by the way. The rule, I want to give the NBA a lot of credit. Even both Clippers, Paul George and Kawhi, have played in every single game so far, okay? And he's yet to play, by the way. The rule, I want to give the NBA a lot of credit, even both Clippers. Paul George and Kawhi have played in every single game so far, okay? So Joe Dumars' push, hey, get everybody out there. It's an 82-game season. It's worked

for a lot of guys. Jimmy Butler's had three back-to-backs. He's yet to play in one of the back-to-backs. One of them was rest at the beginning of the season, then it was a personal issue, then it was this ankle issue that he had. So I care about the regular season and like you watched it growing up, right? Bird kicked your ass for 82 games in the regular season. Then he kicked your ass again for what? 20 playoff games. Magic Jordan kicked your ass. 82 games, not 70 games, not 50, 82 games.

They kicked your ass for 20 more. You're so old school. Look at this. Jimmy Butler doesn't do that. So I can't put him up there on the list. That's my reason against Jimmy Butler. Bird did it, and then he was wearing a back brace during games by 1991. I had Butler

10th because I wanted to keep some connective tissue to what happened last year. The fact that he dragged that Miami team to the finals last year and beat Boston and ran through Milwaukee, I'm just not going to let that go. You have to be a top 10 guy after that.

So I just couldn't knock him out. Anyway, Tatum versus Booker, they're around the same age. KOC and Berno did a great thing on their pod today about the MVP odds. I heard it, yeah. Yeah, Jokic is the obvious bet and Jokic is going to win

if he plays 70 games, I think, because he's just so overpowering. But Booker was 26-1 when they did the pod, and it's a good... If you're talking about long-shot bets, I'm not allowed to bet

on the award, neither are you, but if you're just talking about long-shot guys that could rise up as the season goes, I do think he's a good candidate for that. No doubt about it.

I mean, cause what are they want seven straight games since he's come back. So like they're winning when he's out there on the floor, I think he's already missed eight or nine games. So that might be the argument against him. And he's carrying the team by himself in games. Like he's hitting all the check marks. Like I remember on Austin Rivers,

who also does a podcast for you guys said that Booker was the better player than KD. And he said it was without question heading into the season. I feel the same way. Now, KD's been awesome. He looked like he was maybe cooked in that first game of the season. And I remember even you talked about it. I talked about it as well in that first game where it was Phoenix and Golden State.

He's been awesome since then. Certainly deserves to be in the conversation on the periphery of the MVP. But to me, Booker's the better of the two players. But you're right with Jokic. You're doing your list, and to me, it's like, you could say Steph's better than Giannis, you could say Embiid's better than Steph, whatever. I got Tatum ahead of Luka, because I don't like the heliocentric way that he plays. I don't think he can win that way. But the gap between Jokic and everybody else, there's no argument.

That gap is huge. I heard Scalabrini, who does a show in the morning with Isola on our station. I've heard it. So just hopefully not too much of it. But anyways- My coffee hasn't kicked in yet, so it's a little incoherent, but I think it's the non-coffee. Exactly. So yeah, if you don't have coffee, it's fine to listen to. But once you get your day started, you got to move on. Either way, he said like the gap between Jokic and the rest of the league bill is as big as, and I happen to agree with this, as big as it was when LeBron was in Miami and the rest of the league then. Like he said that I think last year at some point.

That's a great point. So like 2012-13 LeBron compared to Carmelo as the number two MVP candidate in 2013. Yeah, I think that's fair. Because I think what makes Jokic... Man, I can't believe we're talking about Jokic. And it's only the 30-minute mark. People would have thought this sooner. I think what makes him...

I mean, there's a million things that make him special. He's so fucking consistent. And that's what Magic and Jordan had, especially as we got into the late 80s and the early 90s. It's just game after game. It's the same. It never wavers. He's always, always, always the best guy on the floor,

doing the most things, keeping his team around. And sometimes he scores more. Sometimes he passes more. But you'll watch, you pick a guy and you might catch them on the wrong night and they're just not that good. Like you might catch an Embiid night where it's like, ah, Embiid doesn't have it tonight. You just don't see it with Jokic. It's just, he's almost like a hockey player. He just skates around and fucking gets his shots on goal and that's it. Yeah. You almost had a throwaway line a couple of weeks ago

where I think you were coming in or out of break, and you said, like, he might be the greatest offensive player I've ever seen. I don't know if you remember saying that, but... I think he is. Yeah, I mean, I agree with you, and people, while you overreact, I protect the legends. Like, I went at JJ Reddick with the whole, like, Bob Cousy thing a couple of years ago.

Like, I protect the legends. I love the history of the sport. That's one of the reasons I was initially hesitant like on the on the in-season tournament but Jokic in regards to like being able to get his own and make people better and that's what I look I don't look at like when Daryl Morey's saying oh the greatest offensive player ever is James Harden I don't look at it as offense is scoring I look at it as number one is making everybody better. And that guy makes everybody better to the same level that Magic did it, to the same level that Bird did it. He's on the upper tier of doing that.

Well, so I thought it was interesting when he's not in the game, like yesterday, he doesn't play in the Clipper game. And the team still kind of takes his identity and they're still unselfish and they're still doing the same stuff. That's what Bird and Magic had that more than anything. Next sports radio argument. Has the ship permanently sailed on Anthony Davis being a top 7-8 guy? It probably should

and I think the distinction probably came maybe yesterday, Bill, because think if we're talking about some of the former greats, right? Like Magic Bird, Jordan, you can throw Kobe into the list. If the backup two-guard says about Kobe Bryant, all the guy does is flop, what is he going to go out there and do? He's probably going to put up a pretty big stat line. Right, he's going to take it personally. Or he's going to have, at the very least, even if Paul Reed doesn't say that or somebody say it about Kobe, those guys are going to say, you know what? I'm going up against the MVP from last year.

I'm going to be super focused on this game. I'm going to have it circled, right? And even if I fail, I'm going to take more than 14 shots. I'm going to be aggressive. So Anthony Davis talks crap about Jokic and the Denver Nuggets leading into the first game of the season. And Jokic hands him a triple-double, hands him a loss. Then he's got an opportunity to go up against Embiid here.

Embiid's the other great big. And Embiid doesn't even have to play four quarters. He exits after three quarters. He gets a triple-double. So this guy's supposed to be like, I picked him to be the defense player of the year at the beginning of the season, Anthony Davis. Yet he allows Jokic, he allows Embiid,

both to record triple-doubles and severely outplay him. It's massively disappointing. And the other way you look at it is like LeBron basically handpicked him to be his guy, right? Can you imagine if he handpicked Embiid, if he handpicked Jokic to be his guy? He'd have multiple championships out there in Los Angeles. And that should tell you the difference between Jokic and Anthony Davis and Embiid and Anthony Davis and Giannis and Anthony Davis. A couple of years ago, I think Rich Paul said, well, if Anthony Davis played on the 2019 Bucs, they would have won the NBA championship. Anthony Davis not capable of being the best player on the team. The guy gets to be the sidekick of arguably the greatest player of all time. And he's still like frustrate you

immensely. Imagine if he had to be the guy or imagine he was the sidekick to somebody that wasn't LeBron. It would be even worse. So yeah, I think that ship is kind of... So what do you think? I think it's sailed. Yeah, it's sailed for me a while ago.

And there's always a lot of hype that comes with this is going to be the year or this is his moment. It just feels like we're doing this year after year after year. The durability thing. He hasn't really gotten hurt this year. Remember the pivotal in the finals,

it seemed like he was having his moment against Miami in the bubble. And he had that huge game. I can't remember if it was game three or game four. And there was a couple of days off or a day off or whatever it was. And it was all the Anthony Davis stuff. And I remember doing it on my podcast. It was like, it's happened. He's here. This is it. This is our next great big guy. He's having his moment. He's putting his stamp down. And this is where we are headed going forward. It's the Anthony Davis era. And then the next game, he sucked.

Do you remember that? I think it was game five. Yeah. And it was like, we had just spent two days being like, this is it. This is happening. And then he just kind of no-showed the next game. They ended up winning anyway, I think, the game after.

But I remember thinking, that's not a good sign. You know, whereas compared to Giannis heading into game six of the 21 finals, it's like, oh, Giannis, can he do it? He plays the greatest game of his life. It just feels like every time there's been a chance for Davis to have that moment, right? To have his Oscar movie, to have his great season, something's always gotten in the way. And at some point, you are who you are. He's going to be 31 later in the season. And I don't know if he has the competitive intensity that the great, great, great guys have. I even think Embiid has it way more than Davis does. Once that Harden trade got settled, Embiid is the most locked in. He's more locked in than he was last season. I love the way he's playing.

This is the best Embiid's played in his entire career. He's playing like This is the best he's looked, right? Entire career. He's playing like Jokic, like the style, right? Yeah. You see, he had, what, 11 assists through three quarters yesterday? He's averaging over six a game. I think it's a combination of, hey, I don't have to play with Ben Simmons, who needed the ball.

I don't need to play with James Harden. We're now running the offense. No more soap operas, no more moodiness. Exactly, and a little bit of the Nick Nurse system as well. We need to play with James Harden. We're now running the offense. No more soap operas. No more moodiness. Exactly. And a little bit of the Nick Nurse system as well. So all that coming into play at the same time and Maxie emerging, it's led to him being the best of his career. But on the Anthony Davis thing, you have to be consistent. And I wouldn't get on his case if he didn't have the talent.

And we wouldn't get on his case if they weren't hyping him up. Like LeBron earlier this year, Bill said, well, he's one of the great Laker bigs. Well, if you're one of the great Laker bigs, exactly. No, he's not. Because if you are, that means you're in Shaq's category. You're in Wilt's category. You're in Kareem's, you're in Mikan's. And he clearly doesn't belong in that conversation. And then like you got Darvin Hamill after a game, I think he calls him Wilt Davis every now and again. So like, you're the reason we're getting on his case because you're comparing him to Wilt, you're comparing him to Mikan, you're comparing him to Shaq. And if you're going to compare him to those guys and you're there, then I from the outside, you from the outside can go like, well, you're

not living up to what everybody is saying you are. And I don't want to play center. Even the stuff he was saying this year about, well, we got Christian Wood. Now I don't have to spend as much time getting switched on the guards. Nobody else complains like this about being a seven-foot guy in a league. That's the biggest advantage if you're athletic that possibly anybody has. because I thought the Lakers were going to be really good and I'm not ready to write them off by any means. I still think they're going to get there. They'll figure it out. You know they're going to make a big trade. They have a lot of different pieces. They have a couple of rookies that I think people like.

They still have a pick. They have some contracts they can put together. Whether it's a Zach Levine type of trade, I think that would be a major mistake. Just to go get somebody else who we have no idea if the guy can come through in a playoff series, but could they be the Caruso team? It's going to

be them or Philly. I would say it would be probably the two biggest candidates who have stuff to trade. I think the ship has sailed for me to answer my own question. Oh, my next sports writer argument, would you trade for Zach Levine? Well, I hope the Lakers do as somebody that's not rooting for a LeBron. Somebody who's not a Laker fan. Yeah, exactly. Same thing with like Philadelphia. If you're rooting against Philadelphia, I want them to trade for him because like, think

about Philadelphia, the way the ball is moving, the offensive hierarchy where you know Embiid's your number one guy, that is clear. You know that Tyrese Maxey's your number two guy, that is clear. You know Tobias Harris is your number three guy, that is clear. And it kind of all, you know, trickles down from there. You bring in Zach Levine. Do you think Zach Levine is going to think that? No, he's not going to think he's envied, but do you think Zach Levine is going to say, I need to take a backseat to Tyrese Maxey? Uh, I don't think like he would necessarily, they're not going to do that. I don't see them doing it exactly. So I don don't see them doing that and I don't think that they should do

that. By the way, what is the Zach Levine team? I was going through all the rosters. What do you think about Orlando? For example, where they got a... They wouldn't do it. Orlando's made their bones on defense and we haven't seen that guy play defense.

To me, it's a team... It's like a Charlotte, right? Where they have the Hayward expiring and maybe you wouldn't have to give up that much. Maybe it's like a Bradley Beal type trade where the other team just wants to get out of the contract and you can kind of throw them with Lomelo and see what it looks like.

But you go through all the rosters and it's, could Utah be a potential team? I don't know where that gets them. It's just so funny. We're like, Zach Levine trade? Where's it going to be? And I always, anytime I hear somebody say that, I'm like, have you gone through all the rosters? Cause somebody has got to have the 40 million or so to give back. They have to have the pick. It's got to make sense for them. It's got to be a team that's willing to take a chance on a guy who's never been in a winning situation ever, who doesn't seem like he wants to play defense, who seems so unhappy tonight. That Bulls team was the most unhappy. I had a couple of friends in that game. They were

like, oh my God, this Bulls team was miserable. So you're trading for somebody who's in a miserable situation. Why? You're the best player on the team. Why is your team miserable? I would, that's a stay away from me. No, I agree. Like of DeRozan, Levine and Caruso, he's the guy that's going to be the hardest to move. You'll get the least probably four because of the contract, because of the knees,

because of the defense. And, you know, he's got that tunnel vision, right? Where he doesn't make anybody better. We're talking about Jokic as the best player in the sport. Why? Well, not only because he can get his own, he makes everybody better.

Why is Curry, you know, one of the great players of all time, not only because he can get his own, he makes everybody better. Why is Curry, you know, one of the great players of all time? Not only because he can get his own, he makes everybody better. You know, Zach Levine doesn't make anybody better. Now, in fairness, like if he was in Miami, if he was in, you know, Boston, if he was in Golden State, would he have been developed differently? Would he play differently? Would he be viewed differently? Yeah, probably to some extent, he probably could win there. But, you know, he doesn't make anybody better. That, to me, is not a winning player, especially at that money, plus the no defense. So I wouldn't take a shot on Zach Levine, no. Heat culture? Heat culture.

They could turn him around, guaranteed. But, again, they're going to ask for him for free, because you're not allowed to. They don't have to give anything up, right? We'll take Damian Lillard. You have to give him to us, but you're not allowed to, they don't have to give anything up, right? We'll take Damian Lillard. You have to give him to us, but we're not going to give you anything in return as long as you understand that. Well, remember that Jovic was a big prize for them in the Dave Lowered sweepstakes. By the way, he hasn't been seen since.

You can watch him in the G League. He was one of their big prizes. All right, last one. Will Hal Burton become the best pacer ever? I'm putting this on a platter for you because you texted this to me. I tweeted that out a couple of times. You look at like, so, you know, Mel Daniels, if you want to go back to like the ABA days, right?

He's got a couple of MVPs. He's got a championship. So if you want to include that, like you can certainly make the argument for Mel Daniels. I don't know how you view the ABA stuff and whether that should count. Like, so you want to count him? Maybe you can make the argument no. I think it's not the most – it's not like he's playing for the Lakers. It's not like he's playing for the Celtics.

It's not like he's playing for the Heat or the Sixers. His competition is Reggie Miller. So you tell me, can Tyrese Halliburton be Reggie Miller? What, four or five All-Star games? Reggie Miller never made a second-team All-NBA. Halliburton can make a second-team All-NBA this year. So if you think he can be Reggie Miller, which I think he can be, then I think he's got a chance to be the greatest pacer of all time

if he sticks around. What do you think? I did a book of basketball pod on Reggie, and I pulled out some of the stuff I did. Yeah, third team All-NBA three times in the middle 90s, which was probably one of the weaker talent stretches in the league. 25,000 points, five All-Star games. His three-year peak was 22 points, three rebounds, three assists a game. Now, slower pace, all that stuff. Two-year playoff peak was 24 points.

He was a 50-40-90 guy twice. Statistically, it looks pretty good for the era. And he was way ahead of his time with the threes. But the fact that he never made even a second team all NBA is pretty alarming if you're talking big picture stuff. And that was why I always had Ray Allen ahead of him because I always felt like Ray Allen's best season was just better than Reggie Miller's best season. Like if you go to the 05 Sonics

or the 01 Bucks, he just had a higher ceiling. And then he was able to reinvent himself the second part of his career. To me, I'm like Ray Allen over Reggie in that. I think Reggie's still top 75 to me. I don't think it's going to take much for Halliburton. If he stays there 10 years, he stays healthy. He could make first team all NBA this year. He's another guy whose hat's in the ring. And I think he's a guy bringing it back to the end season

that he could, that could be a really special week for him. You know, like if they beat the Celtics on Tuesday, you're in the semifinals. There's a lot of people,

you know, we all watch, we watch all these games, but the normal sports fans have not watched a lot of Pacers this year. They have one nationally televised game. So it should be on more watch all these games, but the normal sports fans have not watched a lot of Pacers. They have one, they have one nationally televised game. So it should be on more and that'll give them that. Like they're already going to have another one. Cause they're going to be in this

mid-season tournament. They're going to play a nationally televised game. Then they get to go to Las Vegas. They'll play more of them. And like on the, on the Reggie thing, like I, you always get the comparison, not just to Ray Allen, but to clay. I think Reggie's the third guy on that ladder, behind Clay and behind Ray Allen. I think he's third. And then you also talk about like... Well, I'll tell you the thing with Reggie. This is what we talked about in the Book of Basketball pod.

And why I would defend Reggie, even though I didn't seem like I was just now. His superpower was he carried himself like he was as good as whoever the best guy was in the other team. And he carried himself like that, whether it was Jordan, whether it was Kobe, pick a guy. If Reggie was on the other side, Reggie's like, I'm as good as that guy. And he really believed it. And that's how he played. And that's how he carried himself. And it was effective. And you look at some of those Pacers teams

that kind of overachieved, you know, they had big wins, big upset wins. And part of it was how he carried himself, especially at the end of the games. And that's something that doesn't, if you're looking at basketball reference, it's just not going to come up there. You know, you kind of had to watch it and see it.

And I, that's a really special quality. So I would defend him on that. But I just think if you're never a top 10 guy in the league, that's a tough one. Yeah. Well, speaking of basketball reference, that's what I was going to say too. I like the idea you had to be there because it's the same thing with Russell and Wilt. If you just look at basketball reference, you're going to go, oh, well, Wilt over Russell, and you did a pretty good job in your book as to explaining why, and then you get the guys like Bob Ryan who were around to see it, and they can go more in-depth with that,

but someday we're going to look at basketball reference, we're going to see like, oh, well, Russell only made like, what, four first-team All-NBAs, I believe, and the reason for that is because they could only have one center. I don't like the idea that they're changing this thing up.

And that has to do with Halliburton as well. So Halliburton now, he could make first team or second team, but does that necessarily mean he's the third best guard? It doesn't necessarily mean that. So it screws up. Remember the forwards in the 2000s? We had this issue where there was KG and Dirk and Duncan. Yeah, you just look at the guards right now.

We'll end on this. Curry, is Luka a guard? I always forget. Is he a guard or a forward? I guess he counts as a guard in the NBA, right? Yeah, he's dribbling the ball nonstop, so he's a guard. Curry, Luka, SGA,

Booker, Anthony Edwards, and haliburton are are all in the mix exactly so like you could like so they're going to be a higher seed maybe or a higher like vote on the all nba just because there's no guards or uh you know it's just we're gonna we're not gonna have like any centers or we're not going to have any forwards. Like it just, it messes it all up. I like to be able to- Oh, and De'Aaron Fox. That's the other one. So Fox deserves to be in that conversation. I just like to be able to say like, you know what, Bob Cousy was the best guard or one of the two best guards 10 times in his career. Chris Paul

only did it four or five times. You can't do that anymore moving forward. So I guess we started, Bill, the podcast with me saying, I like this new initiative by the NBA, right, with the mid-season tournament, but then I'll go back into curmudgeon form and say I hate that change that the NBA made with the way we're going to vote on all NBA teams. Well, our guy Shangoon really loses because he's behind Jokic and Embiid

and maybe even Bam Adebayo. He might not even get all NBA and he's the best player in the league. So I don't know how that happens. Yeah, we could put all centers in the top. I don't know how that happens. Yeah. We could put all centers in the top five, you know, first team,

all centers. Did you see the stat that Joe Missoula is one of the only two coaches ever after a hundred games to have a 70% winning percentage? Somebody sent that to me and I had to call a timeout cause it shocked me so much. So I called a little timeout. Joe Miss, 71 and 29 lifetime. Yeah.z, 71-29, lifetime.

All right, Termini, are you with Eddie Johnson tomorrow? I am. Eddie took the day off today. We brought in Sam Mitchell, or I think as you referred to him at one point, Mike Woodson. Mike Woodson, Sam Mitchell, they're very interchangeable. But yes, Eddie is going to be back on the show here to break down the midseason

tournament. All right. Please give him my worst and tell him to settle down on the Sun here to break down the mid-season tournament. All right. Please give him my worst and tell him to settle down on the Suns. Justin, good to see you. I'm very nervous about Phoenix making a run here to the mid-season tournament. He's going to act like it's winning an NBA championship if they win, Bill. So let's keep our fingers crossed it doesn't happen.

All right. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, Bill. We're supported by NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube and YouTube TV. Don't change your team when you change your town. Get NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube and YouTube TV, where it's easier than ever to keep up with all your favorite teams on Sunday afternoons. Now you can get the mid-season price starting at $174

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Lowest price on YouTube TV with base plan terms and embargo supply. No cancellations. All right, I'm here with Michael Rubin. We do this like every two years, every two and a half years. Yeah, I thought you loved me more and wanted me every year, but I'm on your two and a half year cycle.

I got to become more important to you. Well, I want it to be special every time you're on. I'm always interested in what you're up to because it feels like you're at the vortex of all these different sports things that I care about, but just it's sports fans something. It's not quite Amazon, but it's all these different pieces of things that I care about as a sports fan and you just keep adding. Every time you add, I'm like, oh, that makes sense. Well, right now we've taken a lot on. I think as a company, Fanatics has an incredible opportunity. We feel like we're just in the early, early innings of this game, which seems crazy. I mean, people look and they're like, oh, Fanatics has become somewhat of a big company. We feel like a entrepreneurial baby company just getting going. Today we're in three business. We're in what we call Fanatics Commerce, which is really a merchandise business. That's where we started. We have Fanatics

Collectibles, which is primarily the trading card business. Then we have Fanatics Gaming, which is our online sports betting and iGaming business. All three businesses are pretty early on and we got a lot to do. Is this one of those things where you're nailing the merchandise side and then you're like, all right, what else can we add? What else is out there? Or is there some master plan that you can't totally reveal yet? Well, there is a master plan that we can reveal. And I'd say we're nailing nothing so far because we need to be better at everything that we do. You know, look, our vision is how do we give the digital sports fan anything they want in one place? So what's our dream? In five years or 10 years from now, you go to the

Fanatic Sports app and you can do anything you want there. You can buy your merchandise, you can get your collectibles, buy them, trade them. You can bet on sports. You can get tickets in one place. You can watch live sports. You can do it all in one place and really give that digital sports fan anything they want in one place. I think we're 20% into that journey so far, 15% of that journey. You know, our most, our, our business, we've been in the longest is Finax Commerce, which is the merchandise business, but we have so much to do in that business as well. We, I still think, you know, maybe we're a third of the way into that business. What have you done that you wish you were better at on the merch? Cause it seems like the merch size. I wish we were better at everything, but look, look, from my perspective, um, everything you do, you need to be unrelenting to be better at. And I think

as we get bigger and we have more scale, we recognize the opportunity to be that much better. So what are the things I really want to do? Number one, I think what we've done in the merchandise business is the same thing that had been done better. What we haven't done is just broken through from an innovation perspective. So I think- What does innovation mean? Yeah. From a product perspective, when we deliver incredible products to consumers, they react and they buy. And so when we put really special things out there, the customer responds, they react. We need to do a lot more of that. I'd say

the licensed sports business historically has been an evergreen business. People want to buy jerseys. They want to buy t-shirts. They want to buy hoodies. They want to buy hats. You know, what we see is when you design incredible products, then there's incredible demand for that. So an example would be just a few weeks ago, we had a Princess Diana Mitchell Ness Eagles jacket, and we did that in a limited drop. I think we had 2,400 units of it and it was gone in 10 minutes. And it was so much fan demand for that, for that jacket. And then you say, okay, well, what are the other things I can do? And so my point is we want to drive the business through innovative product.

We had a, so you're talking instead of just concentrating on scale stuff, that's also cool, and maybe there's only 2,000 things of it. Yeah. If you look at Nike's business, they have a big business, but they do a lot of really innovative things. I'm wearing Travis Scott shoes today. Every time he drops a shoe, that's a shoe that there's tremendous demand for. So I think- So you think that could translate to, so if there's like the Red Sox win the World Series and there's 500 t-shirts. Well, you could do multiple when, when the Red Sox win the world series, certainly we're going to have the more traditional t-shirt and hoodie and hat. But the question is, do we do a special edition Mitchell Ness jacket drop in a special edition hoodie drop? And do you do a collab with someone who makes a tremendous amount of sense in that

market? So there's a lot of interesting things you can do. I think from a consumer experience, you know, today we own, you know, a lot of people don't know this, but, you know, we have, in addition to the Fanatic site and the league sites that we operate, we also are the majority owner of Lids. You know, we make today the Nike merchandise in the NFL and in Major League Baseball and in NCAA starting next year. But we want to keep expanding the assortments, broadening what we do. I think, you know, to be honest, I wear one type of clothing. I don't, you know, I like to be a little bit more fashionable now.

I don't always find things that I want from what we sell. So we need to have more culturally relevant, you know, product that we're selling. I just had somebody at my house an hour ago who was talking about doing a really interesting collab with Mitchell and Ness. So I think there was a big opportunity to drive through product innovation. And then from a consumer experience perspective, we have a big opportunity to just go from good to great. We've been better than everybody else, but that's been good. We haven't been great. We need to be great. That means when you buy from us, you know, how the package gets delivered to you, the speed that it comes to you in.

And by the way, as a company that's grown a lot, we've also done some dumb things over the years too. And so what do I wish we'd done? What's a dumb thing? Give me an example. You know, I think we want to cover all sports fans. So, you know, certain fans want to lower in t-shirts and maybe we sold 1999 t-shirts. Maybe we just shouldn't have been in that business because they weren't high enough quality as an as an example. And so we're always looking at ourselves saying, how can we be better? How can we deliver better for the fan? How can we innovate for the fan, both on the consumer experience and on the product side? And that's in our biggest business, which has grown from a $250 million business to almost a $6 billion business today. And I feel

like we're just getting started. We have so much to do to be better. So this was happening in shoes, really starting in the mid-2010s. Kanye was pushing the envelope a little bit, the Travis Scotts. Are you watching this going, what's our version of this? Can this translate? What does it look like? I'm definitely studying it, paying attention to everything and saying, how can we bring that into this business where there's been no innovation like that before?

What we've seen is when we do great things, consumers react in the most positive way. And by the way, when you screw things up, fans tell you as well. You know, we sold, you know, I'll just give you an example because I like to be hard on myself. We sold 4 million units of vehicles of power in the last 12 months. We had a t-shirt that came out that got misprinted by one of our factory partners. And we had 36 units that were misprinted out of 4 million and fans killed us. But you know what?

They deserve to have perfection and that's what they want. And I agree to that. And so we always need to keep pushing ourselves to be better. How do you think, as we head into the mid 2020s, who are the competitors that are coming up? Are you learning anything from people that are trying to challenge you or you feel like you have almost a monopoly at this point? No, we don't think we have a monopoly in any way, shape or form. I think this is a highly competitive market. It's a, you know, $30 billion global market today. You know, we have about 20%

of that. And I'd say what I want to do is learn from people outside of the licensed sports market, because I don't think there's enough innovation within the licensed sports market. What I want to do is learn from people outside of the licensed sports market. Cause I don't think there's enough innovation within the life. What I want to do is see what's happening in fashion, what's happening in performance. How do I study all the different things and how do we bring those into, um, you know, our category.

So you asked about, you know, you know, a couple, you talked about Travis, uh, you know, as a,

an artist who's one of the most, you know, um, you know, best consumer products, people, the planet, you know, travel. I spend a lot of time

talking about what we can do together in the sports business. And there are many other relationships, companies, brands that we think we could bring into this category to bring a lot of innovation. So, I mean, that's one of your specialties is the athlete relationships,

but I haven't really seen that translate into- Stay tuned. Merchandise. Yeah, stay tuned. Absolutely. Absolutely. What does that look like? Like a clothing line or like specific things or like quick sales? What is it? Yeah. I think you're going to see several things. If I'd say what are our goals in that business in the next couple of years, one is again, to take the, just the everyday consumer experience for that evergreen fan from good to great. I think we serve most fans very

well, but we're not perfect and we need to be better in everything that we do. And that's our responsibility. The second thing is, I think from a product perspective, I think we have a big opportunity to bring artists, athlete collaborations in it and other great brands into the business. We found when we brought other great brands into the business, we've had incredible success. I'll just give you a small example. Vineyard Vines, they never made licensed sports. I met the guy in the Bahamas. He came up to me. He's like, hey, I own Vineyard Vines.

I want to make licensed sports. Great. Now that's a big business. We do that together. There are so many examples if you go brand by brand. I don't want to give out things that we're doing that we haven't publicly announced yet, but there will be brand collaborations, artist collaborations, you know, athlete collaborations that I think can really move the needle

with innovative products that can add a whole new layer of growth onto the business that fans will be so excited about. Well, you also have like this war chest of mailing lists. I mean, what is your, how many people do you have the information on

at this point? I mean, we have over- 150 million? We have over a hundred million fans today. So it- How much do you know about their habits at this point? I look at that and say, we're just getting started. Cause there's, you know, 8 billion people ish in this world. So, you know, billions of them are sports fans and they should all be fans of fanatics. And so we have a lot of work to do and we want to become a beloved brand today. I think fanatics has been too transactional. We want to just, you know, you want to go out and

get a Patrick Mahomes jersey or CJ Straud jersey, you know, kind of to come to FinEx, but we haven't become that beloved brand. We have a lot to do to earn that, you know, from a customer, but that's what we're working hard to do. What is the mailing list? What are the advantages of that other than the obvious ones? Yeah, well, I think you can really best serve a fan because you can personalize, you know what that fan wants. You shouldn't go to the FinEx site or the NFL shop and have an experience that's not

completely custom to you. And so I think over the next year or two, you're going to see a very personalized experience, not just in the email marketing, but in the whole web experience. I know what you're a fan of and what you're not a fan of, and I know what your habits are. You know, I hate the New York teams. Yeah. Well, that makes- The AI will know that immediately. That makes, yeah, that makes both- Don't send them Yankee stuff. If you go to, you know, you're a basketball guy. If you go to Fanatics and the first thing you see is Knicks versus who your favorite team is,

that's a mistake on us and a miss on ours. You know, who's your, you know, who'd you grow up being a fan of? Celtics. Okay. So I hate Celtics. Yeah. But if you had the disfortune, actually, you actually had the fortune, not the, not the misfortune, but if you had the fortune growing up a Celtics fan, actually, and I actually love Tatum and I love Wick.

So I actually, I'm a fan. You were a part Sixers owner. I'm not a fan of the Celtics. I'm a fan of Jason Tatum, a fan of Wick. I'm a fan of my friends who are, you know, who are involved with the organization. But, you know, if you grew up a Celtics fan and I know I should know what types of memorabilia you would like, what types of training cards you'd be interested in. I want to send you things that are very personalized to you. So I think the benefit to knowing so much about sports fans,

we can really personalize the experience to them. Does AI and the advancements in the last year, does that help you? Does it transform it? What does it do? It's a big opportunity. I mean, I think any company like ours that's creating a lot of content, you know, has a massive opportunity from an AI perspective. But I think in each of our business, probably collectibles, the business where we probably have the biggest opportunity, but you know, we create a ton of content. You know, we have 2 million. People don't realize in our, in finance commerce, the merchandise business, we carry more than

2 million different products today. 2 million SKUs. That's insane. we carry more than 2 million different products today. 2 million SKUs. That's insane. So we carry, we have about a billion and a half dollars of cost of inventory that we carry to best satisfy fans. And think about that with all of that, we're still not satisfying fans as well as we want to.

So that shows our opportunity. But, you know, the future today, you know, we bring a jersey in, you know, that we make and we bring it in by player. We make them one at a time here. The future is going to be, you're going to have a robot. When someone orders a jersey, you can take that blank jersey. You're going to make that robot with automation.

And by the way, that content is going to be created with AI. So there's so much opportunity for us to push it. And I'm sure the AI will be able to tell you exactly what the habits of, oh, this team is about to win the NLCS. Here's the window. This is 15 hours. You need to get these seven things ready to go right now. You probably have some of that already.

We do have a lot of that. But I mean, again, we're not even in the first inning of that. I think we haven't gotten to the national anthem of that. You know what's cool? I was thinking about this watching the Black Friday game and they're putting the QR codes up, Amazon. And I was like, you know what? This is just smart. I see what they're doing. It's a, Amazon. And I was like, you know what? This is just smart.

I see what they're doing. It's a little manipulative, but I get it. And this is probably where sports is going over the next 20 years, right? They're going to have commercials. The QR code will come up right away. Like you were watching this right now and it's 15% off.

It feels like the future, right? Yeah, I think the not too distant future is you're watching a game and anything you do, you can click on that item to buy it, right? Yeah, I think that the not too distant future is you're watching a game and anything you do, you can click on that item to buy it, okay? Whether it's on the field and it's the jersey, whether it's on the

sideline and it's the sideline gear, you can buy it right off a player. I think you can make player props, your bets right off of it. I think you can collect a collectible right from the show. You can trade it. I think you've got card prices going up and down based on player performance that you can action the show. You have marketplace from the broadcast. And that's why for us, when you think about where

this company can go, it's such a baby company. Think about where Fanatics can go. The opportunity to kind of create that Fanatics app where you can do anything in one place. There's so much to do for digital sports fan. And that's really what our opportunity is. I was thinking of you with the QR codes because, I mean, at some point, you have to be involved in sports rights in some way because that would be the final piece of this, right? Where I'm watching a game and you're able to offer me,

I can bet on it as I'm watching it. I can buy the hat of one of the players on the sidelines because I like it. I can just do all these different things based on this experience I'm having on your app. So two thoughts. One, I hope it's definitely never the final thing because there will never be a final thing for us because we'll always be pushing. That's number one.

Number two, I think right now we're in three businesses where we have so much to do. So if you think about what we have to do in the commerce business, what we're already talking about, everything we're doing, have to do in the collectibles business. And then the same goes in the online sports betting business and the iGaming business. Yeah. We, you know, we can't take on anything more today, but I think we're studying that business. We're watching it. You know, we're seeing how things develop and yes, it's a massive opportunity in long

term. Do we absolutely want to be able to have live sports where you can, you know, bet on the sports, buy the products, collect them, trade them, you know, get tickets in our platform, you know, absolutely. Now, by the way, we don't need to do everything ourselves as well. Like, you know, we look at a company, you know, you know, like a Live Nation Ticketmaster that we could partner with to put tickets into our platform as well, because, you know, they have such a, you know, they have such a breadth of assortment of tickets that fans want. What we want to do is give the consumer what they want in one spot. I just assumed tickets was coming at some point. Why wouldn't it?

Yeah. I think tickets will come as a product that we offer to a consumer. I don't think we'll be the ticketing platform. I don't think that's a business that we should be in on our own. I think there's too many companies doing it. And I think we can more partner to get the product into our platform to satisfy our fans, not that we need to do it ourself. You have opinions on all the sports right stuff that's happening, I'm sure. I definitely have some opinions. Do you watch this as a fan or a student? Or this is down the line, I might be involved, but I'm sure you're watching the NBA.

What do they do? I know you're tight with basically all the different types of people in the NBA. But when you see the position they're in, what would you do if you were the NBA? How would you want people to see your games? Who would you want your partners to be? Yeah. So I look, I'll say a couple of things that I don't want to comment on what the NBA or Adam Stratis should be. Let me say this first. I'm absolutely a student to all this. You know, it's nothing better to say, Hey, let me get some popcorn, be on the couch and just watch because I've got so much to do in the three businesses we're in. I don't want to

take anything new on. But at the same time, I want to study. I want to learn. But it's all the things you like. Yeah. So I love being a student of this. There's nothing more fun than watching how NFL is developing on Thursday Night Football on Amazon and watching how Sunday Ticket's developing with YouTube and Google and watching the process thaticket's developing with YouTube and Google and watching the process that the NBA is going through right now. Look, I think the NBA is in an incredible position because it's, you know, truly a global game.

They have a very digital audience. So I think they've got the, you know, an incredibly digital audience. And I think they've got not only all the traditional bidders that want to be in business with them, but they've got, you know, all the digital bidders that have all watched what's happened so far and been, I think they've got not only all the traditional bidders that want to be in business with them, but they've got all the digital bidders that have all watched what's happened so far and been, I think- I think it's been good for Amazon, right?

I think it's been a win-win. I think it's been great for everybody. Yeah. I look and say, I think NFL is blowing past what they thought the viewership was going to be. And I think Amazon's getting better results than what they thought. And I think they're each doing a great job with it. And I think it's been an incredible partnership.

So hats off to Andy Jassy and the crew at Amazon and to Roger and Roll Up and the team at NFL. So you're not giving me a prediction. Well, look, here's the prediction I would give you is the NFL a few years ago did not have Sunday Ticket with YouTube and did not have a partnership with Amazon.

And those are doing great. And I think you're going to see that much or more in what the NBA does next. So I think the same way the NFL moved digital and has had a lot of success, I can't imagine the NBA does anything. I think they do that or more, not less. You're definitely going to see a shift in how these games. And the other thing is, I think one thing that doesn't need to happen, one thing that frustrates the shit out of me as a fan is, you know,

it's so hard to find out even where to watch a game. And it's like, it's too complicated. This needs to be simplified. Like I want to be able to go one place and be able to watch, you know, most of my sports. So, you know, that's obviously the dream we have for Fanatics long-term, but we're not even thinking about that today. It's just, it's a big bold dream and then you figure out how to make it happen over

many years. The baseball playoffs were tough with that. Whereas like, as soon as it was time for a game, you had to do this basically roulette to see what channel it was on. Sports are tough. It's not just baseball. Five partners. Sports are tough for that.

It's hard to find where you want to watch games. Is it TBS? Is it, oh, we're on ESPN tonight. And by the way, I was part of a basketball team before and I can't figure out

where to watch a basketball game sometimes and where to watch a baseball game sometimes. And so, yeah, it's, I think that's an opportunity as well.

And you get, the one thing, if there's one thing that I didn't know enough in the beginning of my career that I really think now is you got to think about the fan first and everything you do, and then back into the business model from that. And that is

something that we talk about religiously fanatics today. That's a different conversation than five years ago. We're just, you know, you got to think about what's in the fan's best interest. And if you start there, I think you have a better business long-term. So you gave up your stake in the Sixers. I did. Is it true that being a minority owner just means that you have season tickets? No, definitely not. I mean, look, I was obviously, and you know this because you follow this business close. I was probably, you know. You were pretty hands-on for a minority owner. Yeah. And that wasn't by design. It's just kind of what happened. Look, business is about relationships, I suck at a lot of things, but I generally have pretty good relationships. Seems like it. And so, um, I think, um, in the first five or six years,

I wasn't that involved. And then as time went on, you know, I kind of got more involved and look, my relationship with Josh Harris and Dave Blitzer, um, was, and is incredible. And I think, you know, we all kind of, you know, do what we did best, but I was very involved in the last couple of years and, you know, certain things went as planned and certain things didn't go as planned. And, um, I could tell you. What didn't go as planned? Um, we never won a championship.

Do you have any guesses? Well, we never won a championship and that sucks. And, you know, when you own a basketball team, you own a sports team, you have one job, which is to win a championship. And each year that you don't win a championship, you failed. Right. And you should look at the end of the season and say, we didn't achieve our goal if you didn to win a championship. And each year that you don't win a championship, you failed. And you should look at the end of the season and say, we didn't achieve our goal if you didn't win a championship. And so, you know, to me, I was involved with it for 11 years.

And, you know, we got bounced in the second round of the playoffs, you know, too many times. And so we never achieved our goal. And that's something I look at as a personal failure because I was deeply involved with it. You certainly owned an interesting team. We did. That's the story of my life. I mean, I think I'm used to having- You could have just been the Pistons where like nothing happened year after year. Your team was like a soap opera. Yeah. Well, I mean, sports has a lot of that that follows it. And I feel like I have a lot that just follows me with that as well. So yes. Were you trying to mediate the thing at the end or did you know this ship had sailed?

Look, it's no secret that I'm incredibly close still with Josh Harris and David Blitzer and the Sixer organization and Daryl and also with James. I thought there could have been a really good solution in it. That didn't come to fruition. At the end of the

day, I'm happy now that the Sixers are happy and doing great. And James is happy. He got what he wanted. I'm more bullish than you are. I think the Clippers will be better than you just told me the Clippers were going to be. I'm the opposite of bullish.

Yeah, you're very negative. I'm un-bullish. Yeah, so I'm bullish and I'm going to put that out there. Look, James, you know, it's very easy. Bearish? What's the opposite of bullish?

Bearish. You're selling the Clippers short. I'm sold already. I have all the shorts on it. Okay, perfect. I'm more bullish than you are. I think it takes time. If there's one thing I learned that I didn't know in the beginning of the Sixers, to get multiple

stars to play well together in jail, that takes time. Something that I think James doesn't get enough credit for is the way he adjusted his game to fit into the Sixers. And, you know, look, Joel is a incredible basketball player. He's, you know, great, not very good. And James came in there and figured out how to change his game to really, you know, support Joel and support the team.

And I think that was working pretty well. What would be interesting game to really, you know, support Joel and support the team. And I think that was working pretty well. What would be interesting is to watch, you know, and by the way, to see the way Reese is, you know, stepping up now is, is a beautiful thing.

And he's, you know, he could be one of the best humans in the planet. I mean, that guy is a, you know, he's a born leader. He's always happy.

He's always got a smile on his face. He's going to make the all-star team. Yeah. And by the way, no one deserves it more than he does. Yeah. And he's working his ass off. But,

you know, it's interesting. You got to get through a season, you know, without injuries or without, you know, season ending injuries and you got to get through and, you know,

shit goes wrong in any season in, in, in just about any team is very hard to keep a team healthy for, you know, the key guys healthy for entire season. So, you know, to me,

you know, are the measure of success for the Sixers is going to be, how do we progress? for, you know, the key guys healthy for entire season. So, you know, to me, um, you know, are the measure of success for the Sixers is going to be, how do we progress and, you know, not be bouncing the second round of the playoffs. And, you know, I'm rooting for great outcomes for both. I mean, for me, you're out, you're never owning a team again. I'm never owning a team again. I think, you know, fanatics is such a bigger opportunity. I'm fortunate to sit in the middle of sports technology, the greatest athletes in the planet. I love what I get to do. I learned so much. I'm grateful for the opportunity. I did it from 2011 till 2022, and I'm so happy to not be part of it anymore. It doesn't sound that much fun. I mean, the ego part sounds great. You get sick courtside, you get to potentially win the title. Those are

the good things. And then the bad things are literally 90 things. The fact that players can become unhappy within six months and now your whole season's unabunded or you have a basically 29 and 30 chance of not winning the title year after year. Here's the reality. It's not fun because if you think it's fun, you don't have the responsibility of every night going to bed and every morning waking up saying, how do I win a championship? And the stress and anxiety that goes along with that. And all the fans who are just like, they're looking at you. It's like their savior.

Being fans during their job saying, win a championship for me, God damn it. Right? And so, you know, I learned so much from it. I think it was actually helpful to me in the early parts of my career from a development perspective. And by the time, you know, in the later part of it, it was so complicated with Fanatics getting into the online sports betting business with Fanatics having direct deals with 3,000 athletes, which is, you know, violates all the league rules. So it was definitely time for me to move on. It took, I had, in addition to the stress of wanting to win a championship and not succeeding for the city of Philadelphia, then I had this stress that I knew I was violating all these league rules and, you know, what

legal letter was coming each day from it. And so it was very clean. It was time for me to move on. Makes sense. And now I'm in the best position in the world because if there's a situation I care about, I can help behind the scenes. And so, you know, my, and my relationship with, you know, I think still, I joke around people all the time.

People still like, if you were an NBA star, when I owned, you know, when I was the third largest owner of the Sixers in a very visible, you know, part of the organization, people looked at you a little bit sideways. Now, no one looks at you sideways anymore. Everyone just looks at you as neutral, which is the way I need to be as the leader of fanatics. You occupy such a weird territory in the sports world because you have, you're probably, you could make the case you're the most powerful person in sports because you have the relationships literally with every league, every commissioner, all the, all the famous stars. Right. But you, you don't have a lot of the negative responsibility of that. Right. It seems like

your role is additive in all of these different things. People call you, they ask for advice, or you're trying to help them from a business standpoint. There's nobody quite like you, but I always wondered, I wish there was a sports czar that could basically be for the sake of just how sports would run, things that make sense,

that could just be like the sounding board for people. But we don't have that job. It doesn't exist. You're kind of like the de facto sports czar, even though you're not the czar. Does that make sense? First, thank you. You're a sounding board for all these different areas. Thank you for the kind words. I don't look at myself like that at all. The people that are the most important people in the sports organization are the athletes, these incredible

talented athletes that do what they do. We'd have no- But they'll ask you for advice though. We'd have no, like one thing I'm very aware and humble about, without the thousands of incredible athletes that do what they do, we'd have no business. Yeah. We'd have nothing to do. Okay, we wouldn't have people to buy merchandise from us,

to buy collectibles from us, to buy, to bet on sports with us. We'd have nothing to do. And without the sports organizations, the leagues, we'd have no business either. That's what I think what is, where I'm finally in the right place in my life is I've got rid of conflict. And that's a great place to be.

You're the only one. Everyone else has some sort of conflict. I think, you know, a lot of what I do is the behind the scenes stuff that, you know, we never talk about. And I enjoy that. And I learn from that. And I grow from that. And, you know, look, I don't think there's a lot of people that have really good relationships

with the commissioners and also really good relationships with the people who lead labor. Okay. Cause naturally there's tension, you know, between those organizations a lot of the time. And I think, um, you know, there aren't, you know, I don't have much complexity anymore other than I'm waking up every morning, going to bed every night, you know, focused on one thing, which is how do I better everything that we do financially? We have so much to be better at. But I think I look at it as a, as a opportunity and something that I love doing that so many people come to me and say, Hey, what would you do here? What do you think about this? You know, and, but I learned as much from each person. You know, the way I work

and people don't really get this about me. People think I'm just being self-deprecating. I'm not. I legitimately barely made it out of high school. It's a miracle that I graduate. I went to college. I posted my, you know, my 1.87 GPA that I had in the one semester.

I'm a little, like, I can't read. Like someone just said to me, yes, so you should read my book. And I said, I need to actually, without getting into who it was, I'm going to listen to it on audio. And I haven't even done that for, I haven't read a book since ninth grade. The way I learn is by getting great people around me and by they learn from me and I learn from them.

So I'm always picking up different data points from people. So that's the way my brain works, you know, get a really differentiated group of people around you that all have different backgrounds and different things they can add and try to help make their lives better and then learn from them. And that's a lot of how the ideas that we get at FNAX come from. That's how a lot of my growth comes from. But I want to make sure I'm always giving more than I get in every time that I can. Would you call yourself a problem solver? I think it's one of my best skill sets because I'm street smart. It's like, you know, look, look, you obviously, you can't be dyslexic, not be able to read,

a horrible student barely made it out of high school, didn't go to college. And then also, you know, you have to have some positive traits. My positive traits are relationship skills and like common sense and common sense solves problems. So yes, I think I'm generally a very good problem solver. I've also learned you can't solve everyone's problems and you can't fix everything. And that's something where I work on average 18 hours a day, seven days a week. You know, people always see the fun, Michael, when they see the shit on Instagram, they

see, you know, my white party, this FNAC Superbowl party, you know, they see me with, you know, some people that are strategically important to me or some good friends of mine. They always think I live a fun life. I'm like, what I love to do is get up, work my ass off and then do it again the next day. Cause that's the one thing I'm a good at. I'm not a good, I'm a terrible athlete. I'm a terrible student, but that's the one thing I like doing. And so, um, but you also learn at the same time, you can't, you know, you can't fix everything. You can't solve everyone's problems. The Vanity Fair just, or Vanity Fair wrote aboutity Fair wrote about the white party a couple months ago, which you revived. P. Diddy had it. It stopped in 09, and then there was a Hamptons white party void, and then you stepped

in, and now this is the party. What's it, July 3rd every year? Well, it's your change. It depends on where the holiday falls but you know it's funny I had not even thought about that Diddy had done the party and obviously he had an amazing party but it stopped in 2009

and at that point I was just working in my old company you know 24-7 and nobody else did it for 10 years? I don't think so look I bought a house

in the Hamptons in 2020 and I just decided to you know I think I just picked up from one of my friends because Lorne Michaels used to have them

in like the 70s, right? Then you have a, there's like a tradition of celebrity white bars. I can tell you like, look. It's a great idea. One of the things

I love to do is bring people together. Yeah. Like I actually really enjoy that. But from different pockets of. That's exactly where I was going. I love bringing people

from different backgrounds together because what happens, you all learn from each other. And whether it's a dinner that's got a bunch of athletes from different sports, a bunch of friends, some really successful business people, and some collectors, and we're all learning from each other. Whether it's, I remember the first time I introduced Robert Kraft and Meek Mill together,

and we flew to Miami for something, and they're learning from each other. So, but we, these are always, you know, I think what's a loss is if the really successful people in the relationship aren't always learning from everybody around them. So if you sat with Robert Kraft and you were on that flight, the first time they introduced him to Meek Mill and they were going, and we were going to Miami, I remember just listening to how many questions Robert was asking Meek. And it's like, Meek had all these questions he wanted to ask Robert, but this went on for two and a half hours. I barely said a word because I knew each of them so well. So you were just delighted. I was, I loved watching. It was just like a great conversation. And, you know, Robert's learning about, you know, the culture in the background that Meek comes from.

And Meek's asking Robert business questions. And it's like, I love stuff like that. And so we do a lot of that. And the white party is really just a big manifestation of that in a lot of ways. Because you have so many different people from different backgrounds. You've got some of the best and most iconic business people in the world. Some of the best investors in the world. And some of the most, you know, well-known athletes in the world. And then by the way, people get to have fun as well. And that's a fun thing.

What's the single best story that's happened at the party or that you can tell, I guess? Great question. Single best story. Has there been one where you're like, I can't believe honest. I mean, you, when you see so many great people come throughout the world, I mean, I think just, you know, for me, um, I feel really fortunate and lucky that so many people would just want to come together and, you know, hang for 12 hours. It's actually a 13 hour party. It starts at 5 PM and goes till 6 AM in the morning. And most people go the entire time of it. Um, you know, uh, for me, I just like seeing the relationships get formed from the people telling me I met this person there. Um, you know, funny story. I just, Mo Bama's now in the Sixers. Um, he came the first year he's now married or engaged the person he met, you know, at the white party. I love that.

You know, it's amazing. Um, but I mean, there's so many incredible stories, probably none worse than when, uh, Camille, um, you know, um, fell off the stage and had to go to the hospital in the middle of the white party. But I knew she was going to be okay. She didn't know that. So I was trying to stay behind and make sure all my friends were having a great time. I was told I need to immediately go with her. I would be in a lot of trouble. That would have been bad for the relationship. Yeah, it seemed that way.

Your guy Bob Craft, the Pats might have a chance to have the worst record in the league here. This is not what he's about. This is the worst Patriots year since he's owned the team. I'm a giant Patriots fan. This is part of the process. We knew when Tom Brady left. We knew.

We were in first class of the airplane cabin for 20 years, having a great time with Tom Brady. And then eventually you get moved to the back of the plane. It's part of the process, but he's probably not handling this well, I'm guessing. Look, here's what I'll tell you. To do what they did,

Robert needed to be the glue in a lot of places. And I watched that firsthand. Yeah. Okay, and I can tell you, the person I learned the most from in sports ownership was absolutely Robert. It's not the stuff that people see. It's what happens behind the scenes.

It's how you keep shit together. It's when people want to kill each other and they actually don't kill each other. It's when you stop bad stuff from happening. And so for me, I've always been a big student. Like I study, you know, lots of tricks that Robert has. And I've watched lots of things. I can tell you he's a perennial winner.

Yes, this has been a horrible season. He will be a perennial winner. Yes, Tom Brady, greatest quarterback, greatest NFL player of all time. To me, there's no debate about that. But I think if you ask Tommy, he would say he alone, that Robert was, you know,

glue and helped, you know, keep everything to where they were able to win six championships together. Actually, six Super Bowls. Got to get my vernacular right. If it's an absentee owner, do Brady and Belichick make it until through 2019? No. When do you think they break up?

I don't want to get myself in trouble, but far before 2019. It is amazing. But now it's like the big controversy in New England is, well, Brady won the Super Bowls. And to me, it was both of them. I give them equal billing in the six Super Bowls. So how about this? I give the three of them.

And look, you're going to say, the person who had the most responsibility is Tom Brady. I got to tell you something, I'm fortunate enough to really have got to know Tom really well in the last few years. I have never seen someone who, when you spend a ton of time with them, you see why they've got the outcomes that they've got. He's truly extraordinary.

And I've seen other athletes that have won a lot of championships. I think they've maybe been more athletically talented than Tom was. Tom did it from an absolute will to win. I'm not going to fucking give up and I'm going to win that game. And just watching him and his work ethic is truly extraordinary. And I will tell you, I don't think there's another person that's like from an, from a people who've played sports, he could be the person who motivates me the most. I hear from him the earliest in the morning. Yeah.

Okay. There's, you know, there's generally a text before 6am for one of the, one of the two of us, but he's on the West coast. He he's always, he's,

he's just, and he's always working and pushing and whatever he's doing. And that, that's a, that you realize why he's got that outcome. But that said, he alone would not have done that. I do think that, you know, in addition to Bill, that Robert really added,

there's so many things that I know that he did that people will never understand to get the outcomes they got. Well, I hope that the next quarterback, it's somebody who's super competitive and a freaking maniac. Because I'm convinced that's like 90% of it. For somebody to be great at that level, at that position, it can't just be about

the talent. There's these extra pieces that come with it. And you can kind of tell when somebody doesn't have it. And you can tell by the way people talk about them and their teammates and their coaches. Well, probably. Look, the best confirmation of what you just said is what happened when Tom Brady went to Tampa. I mean, this guy went to Tampa. That was a very weird situation. Yeah. And he wins a Super Bowl.

The first year he's there. With playing with a bunch of guys who he was 20 years older than, who he had nothing in common with. Yeah. But they all loved him. And you watch that leadership come through from him. And that's the thing, again,

when we started, we do a company meeting once a quarter where we bring our 18,000 employees together and we bring a guest in front of the 18,000 employees. Every quarter, my first guest was Tom Brady. Yeah. And I think when Tom came on, people would say like, hey, you're just like trying to showcase, hey, we have a great relationship with Tom Brady. No, what I wanted to do was ask Tom, okay, how do you deal with high pressure situations? Could you learn from someone better than Tom Brady on how to deal with high pressure situations?

What are the things you do to lead and get better results from getting people work together? What are you doing when people aren't working well together. You know, and his answers were spectacular. I asked him for an hour, all these different questions about leadership, management style, work ethic. And I mean, so many people were side texting me and email me saying that was spectacular listening to him. And that's again, why he got the outcome. Did you ever hear him talk about playing in the Super Bowl, how it took him like five or six times to realize that the halftime was longer and it was screwing up his mental whatever. And so then when he went into like the last couple of Super Bowls, he figured out how to crest his energy after the halftime because he was too hyped for the first half. But then it would dip and then he couldn't get it back. So he put all this weird mental energy into like, all right, here's what I have to do.

And I have to be super calm and then do this. And then third quarter, I crest. I didn't. Who else would think like that? But I just heard him tell the story last week about what the different things he went through in his brain when they were down 28-3 against Atlanta and just listening to how he first didn't want to be embarrassed. And then he realized, okay, we can win this game. Let's go just part by part.

6 plus 2, 6 plus 2, 3. We're there. Correct. And just how he knew he was going to win that game is just an incredible story. Since the last time we talked, which was almost two years ago, and you were just getting into collectibles back then, something I've cared about my whole life, but now you're deep in. And it seems like you have the bug. We're at your house, couldn't help but notice, get some uncuts up. You have some proudly displayed cards, but do you have the bug? Are you in? I absolutely have the bug. I was, as a kid, trading cards was my first, and I like, remember, terrible student, terrible athlete. I was the last person being picked on every team.

I couldn't do well in school. So business was the only thing I was good at, but the business I loved the most as a kid was buying and selling trading cards to my friend's parents. That was the business. Okay. They had the money. I found the customer with the money. I bought and sold cards like crazy as a kid. I didn't get back into this until three years ago. I can tell you, I've never had so much fun. I mean, this is an incredible industry. Collectors are the best fans in the world. There's nothing I love more than going to collectible shows, talking to, because these are the best fans in the world. You talk about someone, you're a collector, you're are the best fans in the world. You talk about someone,

you're a collector, you're definitely buying a lot of sports merchandise. You're investing in cards, memorabilia. I might've gambled a couple of times. I mean, this is the fanatics, these are the fanatics most important. I'm your wheelhouse customer.

Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. But you saw, you must've looked, you saw what everybody who was in the collector thing. And when I was at ESPN, I used to do the photo essays from the convention. And part of the comedy of it was just, you know, it was at a 1973.

You really felt like you were in a time machine. There was no woman to be seen. It was the most depressing place on the planet. And yet there's tens of millions of dollars of product in here and some of the best stuff and all these people who they've been waiting the whole year to go. And it's like, why isn't this cooler? What are we doing wrong? Why isn't this better? I've never seen an industry with more passionate collectors that have been so underserved than this business.

And to me, that just creates so much opportunity. And we've done, look, we've only, we came up with this idea only three years ago. We only bought Topps January 1st of 2022. It's not even two years that we've owned Topps and we've done so much so far. We haven't even got started yet. So you buy Topps, everybody goes nuts. Then Panini's involved. Now there's been some battles with Panini, right? How does that all work out? Is it different sports?

Is that an obstacle or is that something that eventually works itself out? Yeah. I mean, for me, we're just focused on doing what's in the best interest of the collector. So for us, let me tell you what we saw when we looked at the business. We saw a business where you had sports properties and players given the rights to Tops, Panini, Upper Deck. These companies were all selling cards to distributors who then picked where the cards go and they weren't selling the hobby shops. They weren't serving the breakers. They weren't serving the retailers directly. It made no sense. Would Nike ever sell to a distributor to sell to Foot Locker or to sell to Foot Action?

Well, they were middlemen who used to just mark it up. Right. And so they were taking money away from the collector and the hobby shop. So the first thing we saw that we said, this makes no sense. We need to collapse that and service the hobby shops directly, the breakers directly, the retailers directly. I think when we bought Tops, they served 300 hobby shops. I think today we service 800 hobby shops or something like that. So they're all happy that you did this. Elated. Yeah. They want to get product directly from us because they need that direct relationship so they can get the allocation of what they need to build their business to best support their collectors. And we'd rather give them the margin. If you'd say there was a big incremental margin

to split, most of that margin went to the hobby shops, the breakers, to the collectors, you know, to the industry. It didn't sit with us. We kind of passed it on. So that was very obvious. The players were getting kind of shortchanged too. And now they're making a lot more money because we're paying them on a much higher sales. The second thing, and this was crazy, I didn't know what a redemption was. Okay.

Now you're going to laugh at me. And if you're not a collector, you know, people are going to bore people here, but, um, you know, everyone kept saying to me, Michael, you need to get rid of redemptions. So it took me like a, you know, a couple of weeks to figure out what a redemption, which is basically an IOU. You know, I bought, you know, a case of cards, a pack of cards. And, you know, in that card came, um, your, um, Joel Embiid, Zion, you know, card, and there's an IOU for it because they didn't have the card signed by them. And, um, there were so many redemptions out there that collectors

were like maddened by this. So I went to, um, you know, baseball, which is our biggest business today. And I went to the head of the union, Tony Clark, you know, I went to our organization said, we need to eliminate redemptions. And they're like, okay, explain to me how this works. What do you need to do? You need to have a much better relationship with athletes. To give you an example, when we launched Topps, you know, Chrome, this is a rough number, but like, you know, a year ago, we probably had 30,000 redemptions. And that means 30,000 IUs. This year we had less than a thousand. We reduced it by 97%. That means when you buy cards now, you're not chasing us for cards. Right. Well, didn't some part of the motto is they were hoping that people wouldn't chase for the card

and then they just got to keep the card? I can't speak to what other people do. What I can tell you is we want to delight our customer. The last thing we want to do is a customer chasing us for a card. And by the way, if we need to get them a card, we want to get it to them very quickly. So we've reduced our redemption as tough since we bought the business is much bigger than it's caught twice the size. And the absolute amount of redemptions is down by 75, 80%. And all the new releases it's down by 95%. So that was just like focusing on our relationship with the athletes to get cards signed more quickly, making it a better experience for the athletes.

Cause you're worried about the collector. So that's where your relationships help. It's where fanatics relationships help. And by the way, we're focused on it because we care so much about the collector. The next thing was like product innovation. There had been no material product innovation. Like I remember this is actually- It was basically just the Chrome cards and that was what, in the late 2000s? Yeah.

Well, I'll just give you an example of how entrepreneurial we were. Mike Mahan, who's the CEO of our collectibles business, he called me last December. He said, hey, I've got a great idea. Every time a baseball player takes the field for the first time, I want to put a debut patch for one game on their jersey. When they get off of the field, I want to take that debut patch off and put it into a one-on-one card. I said, wow, that's an amazing idea. So what are we doing? He said, well, you know, I spoke to the Tops organization.

They told me it will never, ever happen. There's no possibility. Like, what are you even wasting your time? Wait, you're going to try to put a patch on the uniform? And like- Of every rookie that ever played? You think that the league's going to be okay with that?

The player's going to be okay with that? He said, but like but it makes complete sense. So I called Rob Manford. I called Tony Clark that minute. I called Tony. I said, Tony, I got a great idea. I said, I want to put a debut patch on the jersey for the first time a player plays their major league game.

He said, that sounds like an amazing idea. You make the jerseys, go do it. Then I called Rob. Rob said the same thing. We launched that four months later. Wow. These are the most valuable cards today. There's each year, three to 400 people debut in Major League Baseball.

They play their first game. And think about if you got- So it's almost like the Jumpman card, but it's a debut. Could you imagine if you had Otani's debut? If you had the only one in the world, if he had a patch from his first game, that patch was in a card, you had that card. Okay? That card if he had a patch from his first game, that patch was in a card, you had that card. Okay.

That card is worth millions or tens of millions. That makes way more sense to me than when they would just grab, like, it's a piece of their cheater's Jersey on a card. And by the way, a lot of times they say they're game warm because the guy put the Jersey on his body for one minute in the park. We stop in all that stuff. So look, by the way, do we still screw things up every day? Yes.

Cause it's, you know, we've only owned tops for less than two years. And then we bought, there were so many problems just in the manufacturing. So we bought the biggest printer of trading cards because there were so many problems. You were having misprinting of cards, delays, like you should launch trading cards. Like you launch a video game launch or a shoe launch. Okay. So Nike says this Travis Scott shoe or this Jordan's launching on this day. And that's an event. When we launch cards today, we have a giant launch coming up on 12-12

with Bowman Chrome. And what's going to be Brady Day for us. And it's going to be insane. You'll see all this. You're going to actually text me at 12-12 and say, wow, that was awesome. Okay. Because we take our launch

and we turn them into events. Well, the basketball has been the opposite where it's like, it's coming out soon and you never know. And it's like, can I just get a Zion rookie box? Can you just tell me when that's coming out? Here's what I would say. If Nike did the same thing every year

and they just had evergreen business, the business would fade, okay? But they keep innovating. So what we need to do is have great product breakthroughs. I'll give you another example. In a base card, like in baseball, in the base card, there are many base cards of a player. So our CEO and the team came up with something called the MVP Buy Back Program, where the cards used to trade for 50 cents or a dollar for these cards.

And we said, hey, we're going to buy them back. We're going to give the hobby shops a credit of $20 for every MVP each year. So, you know, Okuna, Otani, we're going to give, last year, Paul Goldschmidt, we're going to give a, you know, $20 credit through the store. So now you're driving all these people into the stores who are returning tens of millions of dollars at retail of these cards to get store credits. And what do they do?

They buy that much more cards. It wasn't that complicated for our team to come up with that. But it's been like, if you ask a hobby shop, they'd say it's driving demand like crazy. And then just marketing. We are marketing collectibles and trading cards for the first time. And so I think overall, this was a sleepy industry with no innovation. We're coming and saying, we're going to innovate products like crazy. We're going to innovate marketing. We're going to fix the consumer experience. And then we're going to worry about the collector

and the hobby shops and the breakers. And so, you know, for a business that we came up with an idea three years ago, we had our first dollar of revenue less than two years ago. We're making great progress. By the way, there's lots of things to still fix. You know, you know, we bought, you know, this really big company that makes, you know, and packages a lot of cards, you know, we have to keep pushing quality and say, you know, the quality needs to be amazed. I told you a little bit ago, we're going to put a chip and all high end cards going forward with a unique identifier. So you can't counterfeit a card. So you can't steal cards. You know, there's so many things we can do to improve this.

So the counterfeiting is the biggest issue, which has been the biggest issue for 30 years. It's not the biggest issue, but it's a big, look, if you can't invest in something and know that it's authentic, okay, then why am I going to invest in it? So take that example, we created this debut patch and let's say, you know, you had, let's say we did that when Otani or Aaron judge, you know, had their rookie years and you had that debut. Well, that card's gonna be worth millions of dollars. So we better put a unique identifier in that card to make sure that no one can, can, you know, come up with a counterfeit version of that card. So we're very focused on doing what's in the collector's best interest. It'll take time, but we are, I mean, we've doubled the team at Topps

since we bought the company. We've invested so many times the capital in the manufacturing. We just moved into a brand new facility to really fix quality, fix timeliness, eliminate theft, eliminate counterfeiting issues. And, you know, we're a lot better than we were, but, you know, you still, you wake up certain days,

you wake up certain days, you're like, I can't fucking believe this just happened. Shit goes wrong because you've got new companies that you're working to perfect and get right. I told you how I was on the tops board for a couple of years and I was always surprised. The goal, it seemed like of the entire card industry was just people like this stuff. Just keep serving the burgers and fries. Don't get crazy. Just keep going out. Let's try to turn a profit. Let's not think outside the box at all. And that was the case in the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s, kind of protect your lead. And now you're basically throwing a chainsaw in the whirlpool here. But has the response been,

have you felt like a little, whoa, whoa, this is too much. You guys are acting too crazy or you feel like everyone's welcomed the innovation? Neither. So I'd say it's been overwhelmingly positive, but there's still negativity. First of all, I look at a collector like the ultimate sports fan. They care about their hobby and it is their hobby. The same way for a sports team, it's their team. They care about their hobby and it is their hobby. The same way, you know, for a sports team, it's their team. They care about this more than anything in the world. And there's so much- You almost can't win with them. No, I think-

You can only lose. I think you can win, but they have really high expectations. We see they deserve to have, they're investing in this hobby. I think people give you a lot, like we're getting so much credit for the debut patches that we did and how much people love these cards. And people love Fanatics Live, the live commerce platform that we launched. People love the marketing that we're getting so much credit for the debut patches that we did and how much people love these cards and people love fanatics live, the live commerce platform that we launched.

People love the marketing that we're doing. And, you know, hobby shops told us the MBB buyback program is the best thing that we've ever, that anyone's ever had in the hobby. People love the marketing we're doing, but then when you screw up,

they tell you as well, but guess what? Great. That makes us better. You know? So what would I say? Well, one of the things now is the national with me,

you would see thousands of people showing appreciation for what we've done. But when we screw something up and we still make mistakes, people tell you and they have the right to tell us. Yeah. One of the things now, and it's not with you guys necessarily, but just like these box breaks, it's a whole thing now about, did they fake they fake that one oh how did that person end up with the card in this box here's what I'm going to tell you so how do you fix that

so first of all breaking is a big part of the collectibles industry and a big part of Fanatics Live and if a collector doesn't like that then they're just not being realistic because you say there are three distribution points, uh, for primary cards, right? Breakers, hobby shops, and retailers like, oh, you know, a Walmart or a target that's been, and before it was hobby

shops and the retailers, it wasn't, um, the breakers, the breakers now have a, you know, important, you know, and, and by the way, it's, it's, it's great marketing. So, you know, for us, um, we understand the math of you take a big break and if one guy's doing 15% of the business, they're going to get 15% of the cards. So what we did, people always questioned the integrity of what we do. So this year for the first time, we said,

hey, let's take our auditor. I think we hired Deloitte and Touche. It wasn't Deloitte and Touche. One of the auditors, we're going to hire you. I think it is Deloitte and Touche. We're going to hire you. We're going to pay you to audit all the results the same way the NBA audits their draft lottery. That's cool. And we did that this year. Okay. Now we haven't really

broadcast it, but we started doing that this past year. We now have Deloitte and Touche coming in, auditing everything to make sure that everything is random as it's advertised. So that was a great thing for us to do. We just added a cost for the authenticity of the hobby. Does everyone know we did that? No. Did we make a big deal out of it? No. But it's important to do things like that. Absolutely. I always say, anytime someone has a gripe, we should listen to it, figure out whether they're right or wrong. If they're right, we should act on it. If they're wrong, we should still hear their perspective. So what do you collect other than James Harden cards? Well, you only saw some of the new displays that we're working on. So you saw my 86 Jordan

downstairs in the basement. And for me, I like to collect things of my on. So, um, you saw my 86 Jordan downstairs, um, in, in the basement. And, uh, you know, for me, I like to collect things with my friends. So, you know, big Brady collector, um, you know, obviously Joel, you know, I'm not friends with Jordan, but you know, you can't be a collector, not having 86, you know, 10, you know, uh, Jordan card. And for me, what I want to actually collect, honestly, are the really interesting things that we're making for the first time. So we have some Brady cards coming on 12, 12 that are going to be spectacular. Okay. And we have some, um, you know, some of the innovations that are coming next year, just things that I'm like, I need to own this because they're so cool because it's more like

to me, like, you know, look, I've got into art in the last couple of years for the first time in my life. I feel like these are things that make me want to say, I want to own this instead of art because I can display it the right way. It's a piece of history. And that's what I think is so great about collectibles. Do you have a 2000 Brady yet? I do. Just a couple of good rookie cards that of course I didn't get in the moment. We didn't talk, before we go, we're going to talk about gambling quick because you got into that too. What have been your thoughts as you dive into the business? What surprised you? I haven't been surprised to date, if I'm being blunt.

I think it's a really big industry. I think there's some really good companies in this, certainly FanDuel, DraftKings are really good at what they do. A lot of respect to MGM, the different competitors in the space. What I tell you is I think we do have some real competitive advantages. First, our offering to the fan is more rewarding. We give on every bet place, we give 1% on a straight bet, up to 5% depending on the type of bet back of the gross bet back to you and fan cash that you can then go place other bets, by merchandise, by trading cards. So we have the most rewarding offering of anyone out there. Because if you say the rest of the

economics is the same, but on every bet you make, you get fan cash, which is essentially cash back to either bet more or buy other things from the Finax ecosystem. I think that's incredible. Look, I knew this was going to be really hard. People, you know, people said to me like, Michael, you know, FanDuel and DraftKings have 80% of the market. Do you really think you have a chance? I'm like, I can read. I'm fully aware of it.

Yeah, look, we have more than 100 million customers. Right. You know, we talked to those customers a fair amount of time. We have a lot of relationships in this business and we're in it for the long term. We want to be, you know, a real player in this long term. We're going to be, by the spring of this coming year,

we'll be in every state that Bandle's in from an online sports betting perspective. We'll be in every state from an iGaming perspective. So we're going to have a full, the Fanatics Sportsbook will be out there. We're in the middle of doing transitions now because we bought Points, but we're transitioning that over the Fanatics brand.

So it's going to take us a little bit of time. I think I have no patience. That's not a strength of mine. But if I'd say, what have I learned? You just have to be a little bit patient, even though I'm not. Well, as you know, I have a giant Fandle tattoo on my back, but there's room for more than Fandle. I thought you screwed that up and you were trying to have a Fanatics tattoo and you just somehow ended up with it wrong. You started with the right first letter, but then somehow it got screwed up after that. You had the first two letters right. Were you surprised? First three.

Were you surprised that the sports have embraced gambling like this? No. Like even when you see it on the NBA, the studio shows, all that stuff. Not in a slice because every conversation I was having five years earlier with everybody who mattered was already embracing it. Everyone knew it was coming. You know, you got to give Adam Silver tremendous credit for going out and being so open about why it made sense to embrace it.

But it was the most logical thing on the planet. So it was obvious it was coming. It wasn't a question of if, it was a question of when. Everyone knew it was coming, but ESPN. I'll let you say that. I had to. I was sitting there. It was a funny joke.

It was relatively funny. All right. So you have gambling, collectibles, merchandise. Is there anything coming that you can't hint at yet? No. What's coming right now is deep focus on being great in each of those businesses. And we have a lot of work to do in each of those businesses. And then over time, when we're ready, when the businesses are more mature, when we feel like, you know, right now we have so much to do. We haven't even launched the rights yet. If you look in the collectibles business, you know, today we have baseball, F1, Bundesliga,

UEFA Live, UFC launches next year. We still then, we still have to launch WWE. We have to launch, you know, NBA. We have to launch NFL. So we need to get all of those properties moved over. We need to do a great job. All the product innovations that we've done in baseball. We remember to do a great job. We need to take all the product innovations that we've done in baseball.

Remember, baseball, when we bought tops, was the number three player. Yeah. It's now number one by far and away, okay? NBA and NFL have dropped quite a lot and baseball has grown tremendously because of the product innovations, the market innovations,

the distribution innovations, the consumer focus, the elimination of such a high percent of redemption. So we need to do that same thing in the new sports that we're taking on. So we have so much to do in the three business world and we're not doing anything new for a long time. What do you gamble on?

Because you're prone to a 6am Vegas gambling session. Are you blackjack? Yeah, I haven't gambled on sports since 2009. No, but you're like a cards guy. I like blackjack and baccarat. Baccarat because of how fast it is. Baccarat. What are you like James Bond?

No, it's just so fast. You get maximum amount of action in the least amount of minutes. And if you ultimately want to get back to work and you just do it for a quick change in mental stress levels for something else, I like Baccarat because it's the fastest game. But all that, the NBA players are mostly Blackjack, right? Yeah. I mean, yes. There's a lot of Blackjack. Do you have a seat?

Are you like a third base guy? Are you middle of the table? Where are you? I generally like to be on, I think that's an individual sport. Gambling is an individual sport. So when I'm playing blackjack, I generally like to play on my own.

But if I'm- Oh, so nobody at the table. But if I'm, look, I'll just play differently, more conservatively. I'm going with a big group of people. So you're one of those guys. I mean, you want everyone to do whatever they want and don't ever tell someone what to do. But if you're really going for a lot of action, then you want to control

your destiny versus others. So when I'm with my friends gambling, I'll probably gamble a little bit differently. And then someone puts too many drinks to me, I might not care and just go all in no matter what. So you, James Harden, you're at a table playing blackjack. You're just playing for fun or you're trying to win like crazy amounts of money? Are you giving him tips? Like what's happening? Are there drinks? What's it looking like at four in the morning?

You would need to give James no tips. He knows how to play blackjack well for better or worse. You would hear a lot of screaming, go to your home. That's what James loves to scream. Go to your home for the deal at a break. You see a lot of screaming, go to your home. That's what James loves to scream. Go to your home for the deal at a break. You see a lot of pounding the table. We did it for charity for the criminal justice organization that myself and Robert Kraft and Jay-Z and Meepo started.

We did a casino night, September 30th in Atlantic City. And that was fun because a lot of us got to gamble together. And that was fun. But I moderate my gambling based on the situation. I'm a situational gambler. Baccarat. It's fast, baby. Unbelievable.

It's fast. I've never made that leap. I'm just like pure blackjack. I can play blackjack for like 11 straight hours. I love blackjack. When I was younger, I had a big win once. I had played for 36 hours straight. Never went to sleep.

Just pee trips, that's it? No food? Was there food at the table? No, there was no food at the table, of course. Oh my God. And no poker for you? Never played once in my life. And I had a phase, but it's just not social enough for me.

It's too sad. It just feels like everybody just feels like- There's nothing more fun than gambling with your friends so long as everyone's in control. So that's like- Yeah, when you start out the night and everyone's gambling together and there that's like, yeah, when you're, when you're, you start out the night and everyone's gambling together

and there's nothing more fun than when the tables went together. I don't even know how to play craps. I'm, I've played, I've logged a few hours of Blackjack in my life

and recently flew a few hours of Bach. Okay. Bach. Now you're, you're abbreviating it. Yeah. Interesting.

All right. Michael Rubin, good to see you. Great hanging. All right. That's it for the podcast. Thanks, Michael Rubin, good to see you. Great hanging. All right, that's it for the podcast. Thanks to Michael Rubin. Thanks to Justin Termini. Thanks to Steve Cerruti and Jonathan Kerma for producing today.

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on the wayside on the wayside on the wayside on the wayside on the wayside Must be 21 plus and president select states. FanDuel is offering online sports wagering in Kansas under an agreement with Kansas Star Casino, LLC. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit fanduel.com slash RG in Colorado, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, New Jersey,

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