The Derivative - eSports, ETFs, and Enormous Deals with the Sports Pomp, Joe Pompliano

Episode Date: April 1, 2021

The world of sports and finance have continually meshed together – and the Covid-19 pandemic has fast tracked that even further. Between the growth of analytics, to financiers making their way into the pro sports arena, I think we’re past a future where these two worlds will ever depart. Today’s guest is the culmination of these two worlds in one with the background (and family name) to prove it. Joe Pompliano, founder of Huddle Up – a daily newsletter breaking down the business and money behind sports – has joined us on The Derivative to talk about just that. We’re talking with Joe about his new venture – MVP ETF, team income sharing agreements, valuations ballooning, the billion-dollar athletes, analytics importance in sports & valuation, expansion teams, the entire Pompliano family, paying college athletes, hedge funds making their way into sports, growth of the eSports brand, and the beginning and expansion of the Huddle Up newsletter. Chapters: 00:00-02:21=Intro  02:22-12:36=A Fast Start with a Big Idea  12:37-21:19=The MVP ETF & Sports as Investment   21:20-41:54=Engaging the Fans, Expansion Losses, & Sports Revenue Impact from COVID  41:55-59:44= Athletes to Break a Billion & are they Worth the Payout?  59:45-01:18:47=Top Threads & Investing in Athletes  01:18:48-01:26:23=Favorites Follow along with Joe on Twitter and subscribe to his newsletter, Huddle Up, here. And last but not least, don't forget to subscribe to The Derivative, and follow us on Twitter, or LinkedIn, and Facebook, and sign-up for our blog digest. Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as legal, business, or tax advice. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of RCM Alternatives, their affiliates, or companies featured. Due to industry regulations, participants on this podcast are instructed not to make specific trade recommendations, nor reference past or potential profits. And listeners are reminded that managed futures, commodity trading, and other alternative investments are complex and carry a risk of substantial losses. As such, they are not suitable for all investors. For more information, visit www.rcmalternatives.com/disclaimer

Thanks for listening to The Derivative. This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of RCM Alternatives, their affiliates, or companies featured. Due to industry regulations, participants on this podcast are instructed not to make specific trade recommendations nor reference past or potential profits, and listeners are reminded that managed futures, commodity trading, and other alternative investments are complex and carry a risk

of substantial losses. As such, they are not suitable for all investors. Welcome to The Derivative by RCM Alternatives, where we dive into what makes alternative investments go, analyze the strategies of unique hedge fund managers, and chat with interesting guests from across the investment world. Traditionally, in the past five or 10 years, there was a cycle of no one knew about esports and it became super, super popular and everyone wanted to talk about it. A ton of firms were investing in it and people realized valuations were probably inflated a little too high. And then now like valuations are probably inflated a

little too high. And then now I think we're kind of seeing that resurgence again of like, they had a really good time during the pandemic, right? Everyone was at home. They were even on ESPN at one point, I think. And so all of that's super helpful. But I think the real goal is a lot of these companies want to transition into full lifestyle brands, right? So 100 Thieves, Drake's an investor, right? So Scooter Braun's an investor. Dan Gilbert was like one of the founding, I think he gave them the kind of the seed money to start it. And they handpicked Nadeshot as kind of like one of the more popular guys in esports at the time. So I think as they transition to full-on lifestyle companies, there's going to be more

room for valuations to grow. I want to say their value, 100 Thieves is maybe like the fourth or fifth highest value team right now, maybe $200, $250 million, somewhere in that range. Would it surprise me if they're a billion-dollar company eventually? No. I think that's probably within reach. Hi, everyone. We're mixing it up a little today and diving into the sports business. From viral Twitter threads to fire memes, however you say that, today's guest is one of the best to follow if you're into both sports and the big numbers that come along with the business of sports, like how an NBA player parlayed a $K salary in the 80s into 600 million franchise empire, or how Michael Jordan has earned 1.3 billion off his Nike deal. Not exactly spreads on the VIX curve, but just some crazy big numbers and tangentially tied to the hedge fund world,

given the hundreds of millions we're talking about and the names like Tepper, Cohen and John Henry, who've parlayed hedge fund success into sports ownership. So without further ado, we've got Joseph, Joe Pompliano with us today. Joe's the founder of Huddle Up, which is a new media platform and daily newsletter that breaks down the business and money behind sports. Welcome, Joe. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me, Jeff. Happy to be here. We were just talking offline. You're somewhere in North Carolina? Yeah, I grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, so I'm back here this week visiting some family and stuff. I'm typically in New York City, but I was happy to get out of there for a little bit during the pandemic and come down here.

Raleigh, so Tar Heels fan, what's your... It's funny, I grew up. Uh, so obviously when you're from this area, you kind of just pick a team, whether it's a Duke UNC or NC state. And I was born, my reasoning was two things. I was born in Duke's hospital. So, you know, that's like kind of a cheap one, but, uh, I was born there. And then two, I grew up when, uh, JJ Redick was at Duke and he was you know uh everyone around North Carolina he was kind of an electric player and all that kind of kind of stuff but I just really enjoyed the way he played and everything so I picked Duke um and I stuck

with him but yeah I mean it's everyone picks their own school and they kind of just go with it what could you believe no Duke in the tourney this year just felt wrong I couldn't I couldn't yeah all it was just a weird year in college basketball in general. It's certainly disappointing for Duke, a team that should be there every year. Rude, we'll bring you over to Loyola Chicago. The city gets

a little crazy with those guys doing well, which is fun. My kids' school, they're younger, but their kids' school is right next to Loyola. Reddick is your favorite player. Have you ever heard his podcast he does a good job on it yeah yeah i'm a big fan of his yeah yeah um who's he with now didn't he get traded uh he got traded last night i think to the mavericks right yesterday oh last night yeah from the from who was he on he was on uh pelicans pelicans yeah yeah he got traded to the maps um so the rest of the time you're up in new york city how long you been up there

a few years now so i graduated from college i went to high point university in uh i graduated in 2016 so i've been uh I've been another good tourney team from time to time, right? Yeah. Yeah. Can be, um, the women they played, uh, they played, uh, Yukon in the opening round this year as the 16th seed that obviously didn't go well, but, uh, but yeah, no, that was a fun school. Uh, I graduated from there. I moved up to New York city. I've been working at JP Morgan for the last few years. And then, yeah, kind of when the pandemic started, that's when I started my newsletter and all that kind of stuff and,

and kind of completely did a one 80 on the career path. Yeah. It's been fun to watch from afar. So let's dive in. How did, did your brother to pop? So let's get it out. That pops your brother otherwise yeah um who's got the podcast and laser eyes and all the rest um so what was that like did he say hey you gotta jump on this train and find a different niche um i think it was more of just yeah i think obviously uh him having an audience is helpful you know clearly uh But I think it was more of just me figuring out like the white space of a personality in sports business. Right. So when I looked at the

landscape, like sports is always something that I was passionate about. I, for those that don't know, I have four brothers. We're all two years apart. We grew up playing every sport you could imagine, basketball, football, baseball, whatever it is. Right. We just, you know, we always enjoyed and loved playing sports and watching them. So I always had a passion. I'm the fourth. There's one younger. There's four.

Okay. There's one. Four others. Yes. Yeah. So Anthony, you know, is the oldest. I'm the fourth. There's two in between and then one younger

for the, for the, the outline there. But yeah, so for me, it was like, this is something I'm always, I've always been passionate about. Right. And then as you get older, I think you just kind of have a natural progression towards the business side of it. Like, you know, why are these players making this amount of money? What's going into this? How are the contracts being negotiated? All that kind of stuff, right?

There's a million different angles. But I found myself just becoming more curious about it and reading and learning and doing all that stuff throughout the years. So when I, when I sat down and I'm like, okay, there's some publications that I think are doing a pretty good job, whether it's Sports Business Journal, Sportico, Front Office Sports, whoever it might be. But from a personality standpoint, really, like since Darren Robel took over the space, there wasn't anyone doing it for a younger generation, right?

So I just saw that as a huge opportunity. And then, yeah, like how can I leverage Anthony's existing audience and use that to build's existing audience and use that to build my own audience and kind of build out ancillary products like the newsletter and build up the Twitter account and all that kind of stuff. So I started doing that in July. Most of it was just the newsletter started as kind of just like a family and friends thing, writing it. And then once I got more serious about it, I started tweeting about it and all that kind of stuff. But it's gone well. So I was able to leave my job at JP

Morgan within like three or so months, monetized it through sponsorships. I have probably just about over 32,000 subscribers on the newsletter now. And the Twitter account has gone from zero to almost 170,000 followers. Wow. That's great. So what were you doing at JP Morgan? I worked on the wealth management side on the fixed income sales and trading desk. So any good stories from there? Derivatives, any blowups, anything good or no? It's just kind of you were a low man on the totem pole. Yeah, basically. I mean, you know how it goes. I was an analyst, right? At first, right before I left, I was promoted to associate.

But as an analyst, you're kind of doing a lot of the stuff that the other people don't want to necessarily do. So that's always fun and interesting, but it was good. You know, it's a good experience. It was obviously a great job. I learned a lot, but I think for me, it was just like, it was just something I didn't have a passion to be doing, you know, 20, 30 years from now. So for me, it was more important to just kind of find that, that passion, that niche that I could, you know, see myself doing long-term. And what, was there a lot of like, I want to be like Anthony, but different, not as crazy or what was the, what was, was there any of that? Yeah. I mean, I don't think there was necessarily like, I need to repeat this process. I think it

was more of like, you know, how can we leverage his existing audience to build a similar kind of playbook, right. On the content side and then leverage that to do other things, whether it's, you know, build out other products. I'm sure we'll get into some point, kind of the ETF that we launched or I launched last week, but it's stuff like that, right? How can we use this audience in this content business to create ancillary products and services? Whether that's investments wise or like physical products. And it's crazy that you started this in July, right?

Like I feel like a lot of people would be like, Oh, if you weren't an early mover on Twitter six years ago, right? Like how do you build the audience? How do you do that? So it's, it's crazy that you could do this even within, during the pandemic a and then B like there, there was plenty of people tweeting about sports for years and years so yeah it's exciting kind of that you can still find a niche and get in there if you need yeah yeah and i i think um so i don't know how many of the people listening will follow me but for those that don't follow me uh you know kind of how it worked for me was just like, just retelling sports business stories, right. In like a compelling eight, nine, 10 tweet thread format. And then

like a call to action at the end, right? Like, Hey, if you enjoyed this, sign up for my newsletter, follow me on Twitter. I'm going to be doing this all the time. And while that sounds very simple and easy it's extremely time consuming, right? So I was doing four to five tweet threads a week. Each one would take four to five hours, So just an extremely time-consuming and extensive task to be able to do these on a consistent basis. And some of them didn't get much traction. Some got a lot of traction. But over time, you kind of get that consistency to build up.

And leveraging that audience and that distribution kind of effect helps, obviously. But just consistency and quality output is, uh, is probably the most important part. And then did I see another one of the brothers is getting into the game with like, yeah, we convinced, uh, the, the youngest one, John to get online. So he is, he's new to Twitter. He's been about on about a month now. Um, and his, uh, his start was even better than mine. He's up to 30,000 followers now. And I think just about a month or two. What's his niche was like, I can't remember. I want to say real estate, but it's not real estate. It's like, no, he's a, we call him the stats guy. He likes to think he's

the most interesting guy on the internet. So it literally, he just spends all of his day reading different articles, watching podcasts, listening to podcasts, watching videos, whatever it might be. And, uh, he's got just absurd, like, you know, interesting stats. So you'll see, he'll just post like random things. Uh, like one, the other day he posted, it was like, um, I don't want to butcher it, but it was, uh, you know, like the hotdog cart outside central park, the permanent loan for it is, is three or $400,000 a year. Yeah. So it's just, it's stuff like that, right? It's nothing I would say specific, but it's more of just kind of general stuff that I think people find super interesting. Right. And what will you get the other two brothers involved? Have an

empire? Yeah, we're trying, we're trying. I don't know what the appetite is, but maybe if they see us having too much fun, they'll eventually come join in. And so how did Anthony get you guys all on crypto rather early? Yeah, I mean, he's not only been a vocal component of it, you know, in public on Twitter, but certainly within our family. So we've been, you know, talking about and hearing about it for years now. And, you know, I think we're fully on board at this point, all of us. So, yeah, you mentioned the ETF. So let's talk about that.

So this is, they approached you, you came with the idea. How did this all work? So I know, so I did it with Roundhill Investments, right? So just to level set, you know, they handle all of the actual kind of ETF, you know, functionality, whatever you want to call it of, you know, they're the one man. Yeah, they're managing everything. I'm strictly a marketing partner in the deal. But so I've known, you know, those guys for a while, Will and Tim, and we've worked on a couple other things together. They've wrote in guest posts for me. We kind of leverage each other's resources here and there. And then it was just kind of a natural thing. It was like, hey, we think that, you know,

just looking at sports in general as an ecosystem, it was like, this market's going to continue to grow. Valuations are getting massive now. We think as more institutional investors get involved, more of these teams are going to go public. So let's set up a vehicle for people to be able to take advantage of this. And once we found out and realized, wait, there's no one else doing this from an ETF perspective, it was kind of a no-brainer. So then it was just about kind of just moving quickly and doing it. So when I say quickly, in the ETF world, that means a couple of few months, but we were able to get it up. We launched it last week. It's called MVP. And to get it up, we launched it last week, it's called MVP. And really what it is, is it's just the first ETF that will allow kind of everyday

individuals to invest in professional sports teams and leagues through, you know, the diversified format of an ETF. And so how does that work, though? Because you can't necessarily right, if you raised if a billion dollars flowed into it over the next week, you can't necessarily right if you raised if a billion dollars flowed into it over the next week you can't necessarily go deploy that billion over the following week right so is there some lag there is there some mismatch between the money coming in and what you can actually invest in or are they talking about the holdings so yeah right like like if a lot of money flows into it it has to be right? Or are they just buying a piece of what's already owned by the ETF? I'm assuming that's what they're doing.

To be honest, I'm not sure of the mechanics of how they're doing it. But yeah, I mean, it already holds a basket. About 50% of it is professional sports teams, right? So if you think of it as just Manchester United, New York Knicks, New York Rangers, kind of all the publicly traded assets already. And there's leagues and there's teams like Formula One, WWE, and stuff like that. And then there's like a decent mix of apparel brands and sports media companies, whether it's Nike, Adidas, Puma, and stuff like that. So it's already got a pretty diversified basket there. So I was thinking it's going and buying private ownerships of the teams. Got it. So it's just.

So it's already a public. Got it. Yeah. It's publicly traded companies already. Yeah. Because I've had, I don't know if you know these guys, Tag, Bob Reif. They do valuations for sports franchises. They were on the pod about a year ago or so, which is super interesting.

I'll send you that link but they do valuations on all these uh you know maybe it's not just tv audience maybe it's people in the stands plus rebranding yada yada um but we were talking there i'm like why isn't there an etf that allows people to like buy a piece of the bears or the steelers and he's like well the because the current owners aren't necessarily giving you that liquidity whenever you want. Yeah. Yeah. So it's only publicly traded teams already. So if you think about it from like a public market aspect, you know, individuals can go and they can buy MSG right now, which gives them access to, you know, a part owner of the New York Knicks,

New York Rangers, whatever, uh, Liberty, which is the Braves, Manchester United, the soccer team, obviously. Uh, so we're just pulling all those together, basically. Do you have any stats on that? I think I've read, I don't know if it was Barcelona or Manchester United, of how much they do in just licensing, like a billion dollars or something just in licensing. Yeah, I mean, I don't know off the top of my head. Ringtones and apps and all the rest. Yeah, I mean, the market's crazy, right?

If you think about just, so kind of the approach we took was the three level thing, right? Just the overall market, the franchise's value appreciation over time, and then future opportunities. And that's how we kind of spelled it out from an investment perspective. So if we start at top level of just the overall market, the sports industry is massive, right? So I think it was in 2018, it was at like 471 billion was the global market size. sports industry is massive, right? So I think it was in 2018, it was at like 471 billion was the global market size, and they're expecting it to go to 626 by 2023. So that's a, you know, a massive jump. And that's even with the COVID-19 year we had last year, but kind of pulling back a little bit. And then if you just look at the average franchise, right? So if you look at whether it's the NFL, MLB, NBA, Premier League. Were those numbers revenues or that was team valuations? No. So that's just

global market size of sports. So that's including encompassing of everything, right? And then if you go a level down on like the actual, what you're getting to, which is the professional sports franchise level valuation wise. If you look at all the teams, basically across every major professional sports league, not only in the US, but then when you look at all the teams, basically across every major professional sports league, not only in the US, but then when you look at Premier League also, they've over the last decade, they've appreciated over 500% on average. So there's been a massive uptick in value appreciation from a like individual franchise perspective. And we just think that there's one, it's a unique time because of COVID-19, right? A lot of these names have been beaten up and it's kind of like a reopening trade when you

look at it from the perspective of, okay, vaccine or not, right? Like life is returning to normal at some point, kind of within the next six to 12 months, people will be back in stadiums, whatever it might be, right? Like we're going to return to some normalcy when it comes to sports. So we think that there will be a good bounce from that. Kind of when you think about the MLB, right? So I wrote this letter, I wrote this morning, my newsletter. In 2019, they had $10 billion in revenue on like when you collectively look at every team. Last year was 3 billion, right? So it's just a massive loss,

just insane. But we think that there's going to kind of be a recovery over the next 12 months as teams return to normal. And then there's a bunch of new opportunities, right? So if you look at streaming rights, Amazon's the perfect example. Amazon just bought Thursday Night Football from the NFL exclusive rights to be on Amazon Prime Video. They're paying a billion dollars a year. And people always talk about the decline of linear television, but one, linear television, their entire model is built on live sports. So they have to continue to pay up for all these live sports. And then when you add new digital bidders into the process, it drives the rates even higher, right? So we think that when you start looking at all the, you know, all these Amazon, ESPN plus, whatever streaming service it might be, and you start throwing them into the equation for media rates, we're going to see those go even higher. And, you know, all the data analytics companies, whatever, I think you'll see they'll agree with that. And then secondly is just sports betting. So if you look at it from a perspective of kind of what's available right

now, people don't understand there's only 25 or 27%. I think of the U S population currently has access to mobile sports betting, legal, legal, mobile sports betting in, in the U S. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So as a New York City resident, I don't, right? So people will go to New Jersey, whatever. People are still getting bets in where they can, I think, but there's estimates that suggest 96% of the population will have it by 2025. So there's going to be a massive shift over the next couple of years, continuing on what we've already seen to get more people access. And not only does that drive revenue for the operators, obviously, but it drives a ton of revenue for the leagues and

the teams. When you think about not only partnerships, but revenue share agreements, whatever it might be, there's going to be a bunch of opportunity for additional revenue streams. And then I've always thought about this, right? If they get that, you think I go into Wrigley and there's like, it's more like Churchill Downs, right? Like I go into Wrigley and there's like, it's more like Churchill downs, right? Like I go into Wrigley and there's a betting window or even like a computer, right. And I can bet on what the next pitch is going to be or something. Well, I was going to say, uh, it's to be determined, I think in, in, when it comes to specific, uh, you know, sports leagues, whether they're on premise or whether they're off or next door or whatever it might be, but there's going to be, there's the key part is mobile sports betting, right? So you have the ability to place it from your phone. That's obviously an important part too, of kind of

doing it near the game or the, the event. But I think the other thing is like, speaking of baseball specifically, kind of what you just mentioned, like the market's just massive, right? So when you think about baseball, there's like, you know, I don't know what the exact time is, but there's seconds or a minute between each play of action. So it's perfectly right for in-game betting. Right. Whereas the NFL may be more difficult because there's like a seven second lag between the play and the TV and when it's seen in your home. So it's a little more difficult. But baseball is like that. I did that in Vegas like six years ago. And so I can't remember where, but they were trying to do the live betting.

It was so clunky. It was it was terrible experience. Well, they got to be able to they got to, you know minimize the lag between the live event what you're seeing on tv because seven seconds is is too much right now but i think over time that'll get better and then let's go back you were saying so major league went from 10 billion in revenue to 3 billion. Yep. How, but we don't see that reflected in like players salaries coming down. Like, that's what it was weird to me. It seemed like this was going to be the top for professional sports, right?

A naive view was, Hey, this is going to cripple all these owners. They're not going to be able to pay these $600 million, 12 year salaries anymore. Yeah. What, what are your thoughts on that? Why did that not happen for everything you just said? Cause there's still the future's bright. Yeah. So I think like like the NFL is a good example. Their salary cap was lowered by a little bit compared to where it was last year. It was the first decline in like two decades or something like that. Right. So, but it's minimal. It's not very you know,

noticeable to some degree, right. It's teams are maybe a little more cap constrained, but they all kind of figured it out. But I think a lot of these teams just use debt facilities to be able to finance a lot of this stuff. Right. So they know that they're, you know, within we'll call it one to two seasons are going to be impacted by this virus revenue might fluctuate here or there depending on maybe not to the degree it was last year. Now, if they can get kind of some fans in the arena,

but if you think about the MLB, right, like they didn't have, they didn't sell a single ticket to a game other than kind of the playoffs in the world series. So no one was selling tickets. They didn't sell any concessions, any merchandise at the game, no parking pass. Like, you know, it's just a million things that, you know, add up over time, which make up that seven. But I mean, they make money on those $12 beers. Yeah. Just a couple bucks per

beer. Yeah, I'm sure that's all. Yeah, I just think it's, you know, it was it was a crazy year was an interesting year. I think the interesting, the more interesting part to me specifically is kind of what these owners are seeing, right. So if you think about they all have, you know, their main business, or if the team is not their main business, something that built up their wealth, typically, not all of them, right? But some of them, most of them kind of have a secondary business, which is kind of what provided them the wealth to buy these teams. So how was that business impacted by COVID-19, right? Was it something like a food industry that was shut down or they couldn't, they had a

tough time, right? And I think those are the things that people are looking at because there's a bunch of kind of what we'll call minority owners, guys that own five, 10, 15% of teams that had those situations that are probably trying to either liquidate their shares or, or find capital of some way to kind of work on their main business. But the problem is these shares already trade at major discounts, right? Anywhere from generally around like 30%. But like the Redskin sale was perfect example the other day. Dan Snyder got those shares at a significant discount because one, they didn't have a bunch of options.

Two, they're minority owners. Three, there was a COVID season where the finances were impacted. So I think we're seeing kind of the guys that are well capitalized and can take debt out, taking advantage of those opportunities. And then the people that need capital kind of getting the tough end of the deal on a certain aspect. So that tells me if you're saying those, there's a discount there, that tells me the valuations are down, right? Like if they're willing to take less for their minority stakes, that implies the overall valuation is a little lower. Well, so the way to think about it actually is that there's always for non-controlling stakes, there's always a discount, right? And it's

generally around 30% for a variety of reasons. One, you don't have a control on the team. Two, they're much more liquid and it's tougher to find buyers for those exact reasons. And, you know, there's a litany of things that go through as to why that discount is there. But typically what we've seen over the past decade is around 30%. Uh, but this past year, the few that we've seen minority sales, they've traded at, you know, almost 40 to even 50% discounts. So I think that the valuation standpoint, yeah, you're correct. Right.

I think some of these guys, maybe the numbers don't tell you exactly what it is. Uh, but I think that there's probably less of an impact when you're talking about a controlling stake in a team, right? So Steve Cohen, he paid a record price for an MLB team. And that certainly didn't have an impact on the valuation. But I think if you were selling the minority stake, like we saw from the Redskins, you probably noticed it a little more.

And you brought up Stevie Cohen. So him with the Mets, what's his name with the Panthers, like all these hedge fund guys coming into professional sports. Any thoughts on that? Good, bad, indifferent? I mean, it's fine with me. I think we're going to see kind of more of the financialization of these teams regardless. Right. So if you think of like fenway sports group's a perfect example they just raised 750 million dollars from uh redbird capital and it's basically i don't i don't know who called it this but it was it's for a shopping list of teams they want to go acquire right so whether it's uh smaller teams within european soccer whether it's an mlb team whether an nba team whatever it might be um i think that we're going to see a lot of these institutional kind of players

want to get involved. So the NBA just allowed, they're changing the rule to allow institutional investors to acquire multiple minority stakes in NBA franchises. So I think it's like six teams you can acquire a minority stake in. So, you know, we're going to see larger pools of capital go after some of these equity in these NBA franchises. And I think that's good because one, people may not like it because it probably distracts a little bit from the concept of sports being that, you know, that fun and entertaining outlet and being more of a commercialized product. But I think that as valuations get more expensive, there's really not another option, right? Like the amount of

people that can afford these franchises at the MLB rankings, valuations valuations came out today. They're almost $7 billion, right? Like individuals can't afford these teams anymore. There's such a small number of people that can afford these and have the desire to do it, that you have to get institutional capital involved. Right. Like that's to the point, like there's only a handful of typically hedge fund guys who are worth a couple billion that can buy the whole team. And for those guys, I think it's fun, right? I mean, they obviously have some vanity purchase.

Yeah. And like, like Cohen, he's, you know, he's been very clear. He's like, look, 0.72 is my real business. This is like, you know, it's a business, but it's a side thing. I obviously want to make money doing it. Mark Cuban's the same way. I saw an interview with him the other day. He's like, I obviously want to make money doing it. Like, you know, I'm in business for a reason, but I want to have fun. Right. And I think that's what all these guys want to do. It's like, how can I have fun doing this?

Whether I got to pay, I'm Cohen. I got to pay a little extra for someone or whatever and provide a little capital here and there and not make as much. I don't think it's as big of a deal. They're all competitive. They all want to win. And I think that aspect of it is great for sports, right? Like bringing in people that want to spend money are OK with, you know, spending what it takes to win and make sports competitive.

I think that's excellent. And I think I think they've also been attracted by the move to all the analytics. Right. So it's like, oh, this is how I trade the market. This is how I want to run the team. Let's put a whole analytics team in there, do what's best by the numbers, both in hiring players and running the game. What have you seen on that? Is that a huge getting bigger? The analytics side of it? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I 100% agree. I think when Tepper came to the Panthers, we saw it a lot.

Like he basically cleaned house up a bunch of people and not only on the football side, but like you mentioned, it's the personnel side too, right? Like hiring the right people, the medical staff, it's the equipment necessary. So these guys aren't getting hurt. Like there's just so much more data going into everything that the teams that aren't using it are getting left behind. Right. Yeah. And are they not only from a record standpoint, but free agents are less likely to go there. Coaches don't want to go there. You're not attracting the best talent. Right. It's just things like that that make a huge difference. So I think the introduction of that, not only on the player side, but the personnel side is super important. We all know about money ball. We know, you know, the Browns have a whole analytical department, analytics department. There's a bunch of teams doing it i think but more of it is um

i think the personnel side is super interesting and then i think from a league level it's also super interesting so uh the latest example a good one is sport radar they just they're in talks to go public via spac at 10 billion at a 10 billion dollar evaluation and for those that don't know their business is basically they package uh the data from basically every major professional sports that you can think. And they they package it and they distribute it to sports betting operators and companies like that. Right. So not only is the the NFL is an equity investor in them. So is Michael Jordan and a bunch of other guys. Right. But Mark Cuban and guys like that, just because they see the power of it and where this is going. But also so the NFL gets money on the equity is going but also uh so the nfl gets

money on the equity side then they sell them the data for a couple hundred million dollars a year and then now they're going public at 10 billion dollars right so they're kind of like uh triple dipping to some degree but i think and we're talking like they're tracking like number of drops by a wide receiver and things like that everything yeah everything you can imagine yeah everything you can imagine and they, everything you can imagine. And they do it for all professional sports leagues. It's a huge business, not only for sports betting, but a bunch of other kind of industries and companies.

So I think that that's going to- Stats Inc.? What was that other company? Stats Inc.? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sport Radar is the one that everyone knows just because they have all the major professional leagues. And then they were just in the news because now they have a $10 billion valuation. So I think that's the one

that most people focus on. But yeah, there's a bunch of other companies doing it. I think probably the most interesting part for them is the sports betting side, right? Like all these companies are willing to pay top dollar to be able to, like we said, even the lag, right? This data is super important to everything they do, not only from, you know, betting standpoint, but teams want it, individuals want it, everyone looking to gain an edge wants it uh and wants to cut it up and slice it their way so i think like it's been proven over time people are going to pay top dollar for it and these businesses are going to continue to grow and i always uh one of the things i always bring up is that uh there's two companies that do this really well that you know that i always use at

examples i'm sure there's others but but Sport Radar and Fanatics. So what they did is Fanatics is the retailer, obviously the clothing for all the professional sports leagues. But what they did is they went and got equity investments from all these leagues. Right. So the NFL, Venture Capital Fund, the NBA, the MLB, they're all they all hold equity in Sport Radar and Fanatics. So what it really did was not only do you get exclusive licenses to all of these leagues, but you align your interest, right? And those deals aren't going anywhere. So if you look at a company like Fanatics, they raised, I want to say $100, $200 million in August at a $6.5 billion valuation. They just raised another $50 or $100 million this past week at a 12 billion

dollar valuation so they doubled their business and it's not like the business started you know five years ago it's a 10 15 20 year old business yeah so uh these leagues are just continuing to grow there's a ton of money to be had and i think the ones that the companies that are going to do the best are the ones that are you know partnering up with them now not only through uh you know partnerships but equity partnerships who who owns that data? So does the league owns the data? They're basically saying you can track this sports radar, but we own it. So you have to license it from us and then you can license it elsewhere. Yeah. And then they're distributing it to other companies, but they're, they pay a fee, right? So it's, I, the, the old, the deal they have in place has been in place for

a while, but there's talks that they're going to renew it now. And it could go from anywhere from like two to $300 million annually. Right. It seems like I could just start up, right. If I could watch all the games and track all the stats in the old days or something, I could resell those stats. But then with NFL come and say, no, you can't resell those that, that those are our stats. Yeah. I don't know. I, I mean, there's obviously a lot more that goes into it than uh you know yards gained and all that kind of stuff because i think that's that's

kind of free game uh but i think that you know i've never looked at concept it's like publicly available data but i'm sure nfl and all the leagues want to say no this is actually our data yeah well i'm sure yeah there's uh there's some kind of big money without giving us a cut right yeah same reason why these these players in these uh the leagues don't allow them to show the their uniforms right so if they take a picture or they do a promotional event you can't have the league name or the team name on your uniform the uh here in chicago we have oz park baseball is where my kids play mlb actually would charge the literally the kids teams to have like they had like the one team was the cubs and the angels and

the so they're like would actually charge them and i'm like this is ridiculous so they had to drop the names because it got too expensive and the kids are you know now they're in just like a black shirt or a purple shirt with like Oz Park on it. I'm like, come on, let the kids be the angels. And to me, like it's short-sighted on MLB. Like you get these kids locked into some team that they would have never known about. Right. They were on this team as a kid.

Now they're always following it. Yeah. The Major League Baseball specifically gets a lot of heat for kind of that stuff. Because when you think about it from like an innovation standpoint, they've just been behind on all this stuff. Right. So that's an easy example of kind of like, why wouldn't you do that? It's, you know, get the kids involved early, get them picking teams, right. Get them interested in the game. Right. And it's like a known issue that youth participation in baseball is way down.

So it's like, why not? And then you look at you look at a league like the NBA. And one of the interesting things that I always remember about Adam Silver is when he came in, YouTube was obviously getting massive and there was these problems with how they were going to use their highlights on YouTube and stuff. And, and kind of the old guard that the NBA didn't want it on YouTube at all and the highlights and whatnot. And Adam Silver was like, look, YouTube is going to be there. It's going to be a massive platform. If the NBA isn't there, it's more of a problem for us than it is for them. Right. We need to be there. If that's where the next generation of viewers are and that's where people are going to be watching content like that's where we need to be. Right.

So he cut like a super friendly deal because he was like, look, it's more important for us to be there and be in front of our fans of the future than it is to make a few million bucks here or there each year. Like we just need those fans and the attention drives everything else right and you hear like uh bill simmons will say like his son that's all he does is watch the clips like he doesn't watch full games he's just watching youtube clips of like multiple games and that's basically how they're ingesting the league right now yeah Yeah. I, a friend of mine, Bo Han, he used to run sports at Twitter. He's launching a platform called Buzzer,

which you'll probably think is interesting because when you think about it from the aspect of everyone just wants to watch, our attention spans are getting, everyone knows they're getting smaller and smaller and smaller by the day, right? And everyone wants to just watch the highlights

or the most important moments. No one wants to sit through. That's part of the reason why baseball is declining, right? Is that games take three hours long. There's not a lot of action, whatever it might be. But Buzzer, the product he's launching, well, basically it's a mobile application

that they monetize through micropayments. So they'll ping you basically, you download the app, you log in and you tell them, okay, I'm a Cubs fan. I'm a Bulls fan, et cetera. And they'll ping you and they'll say, hey, look, the Cubs are down by a run in the bottom of night, two outs guy on second. Do you want to watch you swipe, right? And it'll bring you the live feed and you'll be able to watch kind of like the most important

moments of each game, whether it's the Bulls down by two with 10 seconds left and they show you the play or whatever. And it costs, you can either do it through your existing provider or it's like 99 cent micropayments. They're super early. So it's like to be determined if it's going to catch on to, to a large degree, but like stuff like that's super interesting to me, because when you think about the aspect of like people today just want to watch the most important, not only the most important, but like the shortest amount of time that they can do to get the full picture. You know,

live game viewership has been down for a period of time this year. You know, we'll see if it's because of COVID or if it's other driving forces but I think like that kind of innovation is important and I think the leagues that adopt that will end up uh kind of winning in the end what and that my brain goes to like does that does the attention span just kill the sports as we know it right does like baseball cease to exist as we know it and becomes like a home run derby or something right like you could take these sports like hey why are we trying to put a square peg in a round hole let's just give the fans what they want and like give them these highlights by changing the game room which you know yeah yeah baseball is probably the one that would get changed first

right when you think about uh kind of how long the game takes limited to the action i forget the stat right now but there's a crazy stat i'll have to dig it up. That's like the average game is three minutes or three hours long. And there's only like 12 minutes of action, right? Of like actual people moving the ball and play pitches being thrown, right? Cause the pitch only takes a couple seconds. Then there's double or triple that in between the next one. So when you think about it from that aspect, like baseball is probably in the biggest amount of trouble. And baseball, the season's super, super, super long, right? So that helps from a revenue standpoint. Yeah, it helps from a revenue standpoint, right? You obviously have, that's an important part of the equation. But from a fan and engaging point

of view, it's tough, right? You have to follow an extremely long season. There's a bunch of games that they're playing every day. It's just different compared to, you know, other sports that have, you know, far less games. The flip side to that is there's nothing better than being sitting out in the sun for three hours at Wrigley Field. I just, uh, watching the game, right? Like, so the flip side is, uh, I don't want it. Yeah. I drove by a minor league park yesterday and I was telling someone that I just, one of the things I'm most excited about is literally sitting on the grass in the outfit of a minor league park, having a beer on a sunny day, like that kind of stuff you can't beat, right? Like that stuff will always draw interest, I think, to baseball because people, you know, that's just fun. But like, when you think about diehard fans, it's still a much older generation. The younger generation hasn't really caught on as much. It's just, it's been tough sledding for them. And then you mentioned Mark Cuban. I wanted to, I heard him on a podcast.

He was talking, was interesting. He was basically there saying, hey, the revenues are down huge because of COVID. They were talking expansion. Let's do some expansion teams. And he had an interesting take because he's like, let's just borrow the money instead he's like expansion you're going to give up 10 of the future revenues i can't remember what

the numbers were but it's like it's way cheaper with rates at zero to just borrow the money that we need instead of to bring someone in who's a partner forever yep yeah i mean cuban's obviously a smart guy he uh he gets it from that from that degree right like they're going to get the way it works is you get an upfront payment. I think the NBA was going to ask a two and a half billion dollars, right. Which is split between all the teams. Uh, they have to do two teams. So call it $5 billion. They would get split between the other 30 teams. Uh, but yeah, then you have to give them a percentage share of everything into the future. So the other owners, like, is that 5 billion less than or greater than what I'll make in the future? And he was like, way, way less than what we'll make in the future. Yeah. So the NBA kind of what I would call, you know, the owners, I don't think are huge fans of

it. The ones that are hurting, like you said, they can just go borrow the money, whatever is needed. And the NBA open debt facilities for all these teams. So they, they should have the capital that's necessary to kind of survive this. But, you know, I think fans kind of want expansion to some degree. I think, you know, I tweeted out a while ago, like, Hey, look, the NBA is thinking about doing it. Who should they get? And it was like one of my most popular tweets, right? Because everyone has an opinion on kind of what city should get one. Seattle feels like they should, they should have a team back, you know, there's just a ton of different variables to it. But I think it's more fan driven than owner driven because the owners understand, right?

Like we have to give them a piece of everything that we earn or the league earns into the future by just kind of accepting $5 billion split up among 30 teams. So, you know, we can do the math, but it's, it's a fraction of what they'll earn kind of into perpetuity. And who were the main Seattle and who was the second place? So people think Seattle, people think Kansas city. So the way to think about it is you have to find a big enough market. You want a, a somewhere that already has an arena, right? So you don't want to have to build a new arena necessarily. You could, but it's just, you know, that's a variable that you would have to

consider. You want a big television market and there obviously has to be fan interest. And you don't want to kind of, you don't want to be into anyone else's geographic location. So it has to be isolated to some degree. So there's been talks about Seattle. They obviously had a team prior. They want one again. They just got the NHL team.

There's interest from kind of Amazon executives, I think to take ownership in more sports franchises as they move into the streaming and all that kind of stuff. And then I think Las Vegas was another big one. Kansas city is massive. People think Virginia beach could be a good one for an NBA team. Just from a geographic standpoint, there isn't anyone close. So there's a, there's a few different options. But again, right. You just got to determine if, if that $5 billion fee is enough to sway you for future revenue.

Let's talk my favorite Chicago sports. You got any good stats or threads or stories for me on Chicago uh I was trying to think like I don't know if I've done anything on like Chicago specifically I've done a ton of stuff on Michael Jordan for sure obviously he's uh he's probably like an easy one I I just think you know you might want to do uh I'll just jump in sorry Rocky Wertz and Junior right so yeah old man when they had the Blackhawks and he wouldn't let them show it on TV. And then he died and the son was basically like, what are we doing? Let's promote ourselves, get us out on TV.

And then they went on to win the four championships. So that's a good one. That sounds like that would be a good thread. Because you used to be, you could get a ticket easy. Now it's like Carter's ticket in town to get a Blackhawks ticket. Is it? Yeah. Still, even though they've had some down years. Yeah, I don't necessarily doubt that.

The thing that people love Jordan, obviously, right? So those stories always do really well. And the thing that I always was fascinated by him was like, I don't know if there's ever been a professional athlete in history that has kind of licensed their name better than Jordan, right? So obviously, kind of his deal with Nike is historic, to some degree, but also, he's had a bunch of other good investments. So when you think about the Hornets, for example, or the, you know, what were the Bobcats originally, I think he bought the team for like less than $200 million. And he bought like a 97% stake.

So yeah, I thought he would just have Yeah. Well, so then he sold off a part of it. About a decade later, he sold about 20% of it. And by the time he sold it, I think that was like two, three years ago, 2019, maybe it was valued at $1.5 billion. So he bought the team in 2010, about $180 million, valued at $1.5 billion 10 years later, nine years later. Massive, massive, yeah, just an incredible investment, massive growth. He still owns a huge portion of the team. He's the controlling owner. And that was the difficult part, too, like, everyone talks about LeBron James

owning an NBA franchise eventually. He's been very clear that that's something he wants to do and is a desire of his. What he wants to do though is he wants to be the controlling owner, right? So he wants to determine everything. But LeBron's obviously made an amazing amount of money. I think he's one of four or five athletes all time

to reach a billion dollars in on-court earnings while still active. So incredible career from a financial perspective. He's obviously made a bunch of money in investments also. We could go through that list another time, but that might take the whole podcast. He's built up a great financial wealth, but the problem is these teams are getting so expensive. Yeah. Mod Pizza is him, right? Yeah. So he, Blaze Pizza. Blaze, yeah. Yeah. So he made a bunch

of money doing that beats, whatever. He's got a tequila company. Now he's got his hand in a bunch of things. He's got an entertainment empire, all this stuff, but these teams are getting so expensive. So the average team is like two and a half billion dollars now. Uh, so to buy that, you need a lot, a lot, a lot of money. Uh, so the challenge for him was always going to be finding someone to put up more money than him, like him not putting up the majority of the money, but still getting majority control. Yeah. So that was always going to be the challenge, but that's why, I don't know if you saw, he

just, uh, he, so in 2010, I think it was, he announced a deal with Fenway sports group. Fenway sports group owns the red Sox. They own Liverpool. They own a bunch of other kinds of sports assets. Uh, and he announced through a deal in 2010, they got part of, I think it was 50% of his global marketing rights, right? So they helped negotiate all of his rights and took revenue from that. In exchange, he got a 2% ownership stake in Liverpool.

That investment's done really, really well. They're, you know, kind of one of the more expensive teams now. He's made a bunch of money doing it. They have 50% of LeBron's marketing, right? That seems like that should have done pretty well too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. So everyone's happy. Yeah. When you look at the financials, I'm sure everyone's happy. But what actually happened now that's more interesting, I think is that he parlayed that 2% ownership stake from Liverpool into a 1% ownership stake of Fenway Sports Group, kind of the parent company, right? So that made him a part owner still of Liverpool, but also of the Red Sox and kind of

all the other assets they own, whether it's they own a Roush Racing, they own a bunch of real estate, all that kind of stuff. And that's actually John Henry, who's from my neck of the wood, right? From our business of Managed Futures and hedge fund owner, right? He was one of the- Yeah. So he's another great example, right? And he's, he's built one of the, probably the more important sports entities from an ownership standpoint in history, right? They're just a massive conglomerate now of, of sports teams and they're looking to acquire more. But for what it means for LeBron is my prediction is that he's going to be using that Avenue as a way to get NBA ownership, right? So if you think of him now, he's a partner in Fenway Sports Group,

him and his business partner, Maverick Carter. But that gives them the ability to have additional capital, find the funds to go buy a team eventually, right? He has to wait until he retires. But would they allow him to run it? Probably, right? I think maybe, maybe not. But I think that he'll at least have that opportunity now

to easily find the money to go buy a team, however can however much he contributes on his own uh but i think that was strategically done to kind of get uh you know a seat at the table for more ownership stakes in multiple franchises well and it's like he can it's kind of like draft picks or something right like he can say hey i'll trade you two percent one percent of these six teams for 40 of one nba team yep um down the line i think that's that that's a good point also so you mentioned who are the who are the other five athletes you said lebron's one of that have made over a billion dollars tiger i'm sure yeah so i think there's four others tiger woods is is one uh floyd mayweather is one ronaldo is one and i think messy it's crazy yeah right and messy's that was messy with it why right it was they that contract was kind of

under wraps and then someone leaked it right yeah i mean that deal is so everyone always points uh to kind of the forbes evaluations right i think they've kind of become like the, the industry standard to some degree of athlete endorsements and kind of yearly earnings. And everyone always points to them when they talk about, you know, net worth and then annual income and whatever it might be. So Forbes, I want to say had his, his annual salary at like $75 million. And he was making like 135. So just like, not just not even close, right? On a percentage basis. And it's like, you know, that that's a huge difference. And, you know, no, no shame on them, right? No one knew really what he was making. Versus those articles where Trump would call up Forbes and be like, you've underreported my assets.

Yeah. So like, yeah, tell him I make seven million. I'm going to pay taxes. Yeah. He's like, sounds good. Less the, less the better. But that was, that was obviously super interesting. I think people were shocked to kind of hear how much those guys are making, but it always brings me back to, I joke, Colin Coward put out a, he put out rankings of kind of his global list of, of icons in sports, the most recognizable name in sports. And it was, there was probably some recent some bias in it because Tom Brady had just won the super bowl. This was a few weeks or a month ago. And he had Tom Brady ranked as the number one,

most influential person in sports right now. Right. The most noticeable person in sports. He called him, I think. And people were like, dude, if Tom Brady goes to one of these other, they don't know who he is someplace. Right. If Messi or Ronaldo anywhere in the world, they go, people know who they are. Right. And if you just look at the numbers, Messi, he has 500 million followers on social media across platforms. That is, it's just an astronomic 500 million, right? The U S has 330 million people. So it's just like, it's, it's a massive number and whatever, you know, there's some probably mix of bots, but you get the point.

It's just an obscene kind of reach. No athlete in the U S is close. Another perfect example is they gave out rankings the other day. I forget the source. So forgive me if I'm not giving them credit, but they basically were showing NFL players and how much they make per Instagram post, right? Sponsored Instagram post. Odell Beckham Jr. was the highest paid NFL player for000 per Instagram post, which is much, much lower than you would expect. I would think, especially when you think of Ronaldo, who supposedly makes $1 million per Instagram post, right? So the global, what's he putting on there, like him in a Calvin Klein underwear or him in a bathing suit? Like what is, what is he promoting everything? I think, yeah. I mean, I think there are a lot of, and he's like, yeah, I think there, uh, there's a misconception that like, you know, these flashy brands are just paying him for one off

Instagram posts. Uh, and that's where that number comes from. I think really what it is, is there are much longer term deals and partners that he have that like Instagram posts are part of the package and you can work it out to kind of how it works, but we're going to give you a hundred million dollars, but you got to promote us on everything you do. Yeah. So it comes with events, whatever it might be signing session, you know, there's a million different things, commercials, uh, but Instagram posts are one of those kind of, uh, additional things that he typically needs to do. So it's really hard to put a value on it, but you know, estimates suggest around a million dollars, which is just in a different atmosphere compared to, uh, to, to kind of the most popular american

athletes that's crazy where do you where do you stand on like is this good for society that these people make so much money for playing a sport like i don't want to get too philosophical here but just right like you hear older people especially like this is crazy that guy's making 600 million dollars to put a ball in a hoop or drive a car or whatever. Part of it's just the market, right? Like, hey, I can't blame them. They're making people willing to pay them, let them pay them. Yeah. I mean, it's tough, right? Like, I think there's obviously some people that get upset seeing the overall totals and the numbers of what they're doing. And there's always people that want to compare what they're doing to individuals,

people that are making a difference in society, you society, whatever it might be. But I think, just like you said, it's the market, right? That's what the market determined their worth. So maybe they had some immense talent at birth that gave them kind of some inherent advantage or whatever it might be. But most of these guys are extremely hardworking. They chose a profession. They're the top of their field. That's what the market determines. They should be paid and that's what they're paid. Right. So it's difficult to say like, they shouldn't be making that people watch the games. We're the ones driving those, those fees, right? Like we buy their merchandise, we watch the games, we bet on them, we do all that. So I think it's tough to kind of criticize and say that they don't deserve it. Uh, because in reality, like, you know, if, if you're the top of your profession, that's what your profession says that, uh, you know, if you're the top of your profession, that's what your profession says that, you know, the free market has decided is worth, then why shouldn't you make that? It's always crazy to me, like, it's way better to be like the 200th best golfer in the

world, right? Then like the third best water player, water polo player or something. So there's like, between sports huge, what we were just talking soccer versus basketball, but. That's a good question for you. I like to ask this to people all the time is like, if you had to pick one sport from like, you know, two years old, basically for the rest of your life to focus on and try as hard as you could to go professional in, what sport is that?

Just like joy of playing or. No, see, that's the important part. That's the important part. You got to take everything into account, right? playing lifestyle money all that kind of stuff that's tough uh because i think the most people say go ahead well i've always said like you'd be good to be the long snapper right make like 600 grand a year you don't really have uh danger of getting hurt or anything uh or like the backup catcher but i catcher. But if you're a good long snapper, those guys will play for 10, 12 years. Yeah. Patrick Manley on the Bears played for him.

But from a financial standpoint, I'd say baseball or soccer, right? Where there's basically no limits. There's no upside. Yeah. Yeah. So those are, I think you kind of, you hit it right. I think, right. Like when you think of quality of life, there's certain sports and then financially there's certain sports. The one that I always get the answer to, and I don't know if it's the correct answer. I think it depends on the person, but when you think about quality of life and financial combined, a lot of people say golf, right? Cause you can, you get to travel all over the world. You can play forever. You don't really get hurt that much. If you're good, you make a lot of

money. There's sponsorships. You get to live in Florida usually, right? Where it's the taxes and the weather and all that kind of stuff. And it's a fun game, right? You can play forever. It's social, all that kind of stuff. So I think that's the typical answer. Esports. Do you delve into that much on the newsletter and whatnot? I have. I have in the past. I've done a thread on Nadeshot, who's kind of the creator and CEO of 100 Thieves. So I'm fascinated by these organizations. I don't do much on kind of like the overall structure of the leagues and stuff like that. I think I focus more on kind of the individual organizations and franchises.

So when you think about a hundred thieves, we'll use them just because they're a more popular example. And I've done some background work on them. They've really turned into like full life lifestyle companies, right? So a hundred thieves competes in tournaments, the kind of stuff you guys you'll hear about typically. And they do all that, but then they also have a massive apparel business. They have a massive sponsorship business.

They do a bunch of content on YouTube where they have millions and millions of subscribers. And their fan bases are like super, super loyal. They're super engaged. And their audiences are massive. So I think when you think about it outside of just like the traditional kind of tournament style esports, there's a lot of value to be had, right. So I think we're going to see traditionally in the past, like five or 10 years, it became, there was a cycle of like, no one knew about e-sports and it became super, super popular and everyone wanted to talk about it. A ton of firms were investing in it. And people realize like valuations are probably inflated a little too high. And then now I think we're kind of seeing that resurgence again of like, they had a really good time during the

pandemic, right? Everyone was at home. They were even on ESPN at one point, I think. And so all of that's super helpful. But I think the real goal is a lot of these companies want to transition into full lifestyle brands, right? So 100 Thieves, Drake's an investor, right? So Scooter Braun's an investor. Dan Gilbert was like one of the founding, I think he gave them the kind of the seed money to start it. And they handpicked Nadeshot as kind of like one of the seed money to start it. And they handpicked Nate shot is kind of like one of the more popular guys in e-sports at the time. So I think as they, they transitioned to full on lifestyle companies, there's going to be more room for valuations to grow. I want to say their value a hundred thieves is maybe like the fourth or fifth highest value

team right now, maybe 200, 250 million, somewhere in that range. Would it surprise me if they're a billion dollar company eventually? No, I think that's probably within reach. Yeah. The, I think it was the tag pod. They were talking like, I'm like, I just don't get it. And they're like, well, imagine all these people following them. And then they say, Hey, you need this new headset in order to play that. And they can write, they can make $400 million overnight, basically just saying. Well, the key, the key, right. They can make $400 million overnight, basically just saying the key, right. Just like anyone who has a massive audience is finding those is owning the pipes, right. It's not, uh, eventually there's like, okay, sponsorships and ad dollars are nice,

but how can I own the, you know, the services or the products or whatever. And just like you said, the headphones, let's not work with a company, uh, like JBL or whatever to produce these and sell them to people. Let's just make them ourselves. Right. And how do we, how do you create products and white label things like that and sell them directly to your audience? You already have the distribution, especially people that you know, those e-sports teams, like I said, the audiences are massive. Not only are they massive, but they're super engaged. Nadechak could tweet out, Hey, and he would get 2000 likes on Twitter. You know what I mean? So I think when you think about it in that context, selling products makes a lot of sense. And then it's just finding like,

how can I own the most equity in these products that I'm selling? And do you think they will like my naive view is if e-sports blows up and gets huge, that will hurt traditional sports. But maybe they can coexist and they both grow huge on that you know what are your thoughts on that yeah i think um i see both sides really i think like there's obviously kind of uh people want to call it like a limited uh limited supply of attention to some degree like there's only so many fans that want to watch something and do all that kind of stuff and the numbers show that it's actually shifting towards that way a little bit, right? So if you

look at just data on kind of Gen Z specific, a lot of these people will name e-sports as a more popular sport for them to watch than maybe not the NFL or the NBA, but kind of college football, stuff like that, college basketball, it's more popular than those sports already. And it used to not be that case. So it's clearly climbing the leaderboard a little bit from like a kind of an attention standpoint. And then it's just like, I think it's more about like, how do these leagues and these teams work with them to kind of leverage their following against each other, right? So I think there's going to be kind of some consolidation where we see a black and a white world start to gray a little bit of like okay uh like uh the

knicks for example they have an esports team right how do they work and leverage those two to become fans of both and start to gray that concept a little bit of just esports versus traditional sports right like how do they work together yeah and make these fans you know these people fans of both my and my problem with esports always is, right, nobody owns basketball or baseball. But, like, someone owns Call of Duty, right? Someone owns these games that they're playing. So eventually those companies are going to be like, hey, we need, and they already are, but they're going to say, hey, we need a larger and larger cut because you're making, you know,

these billions of dollars off our product. I mean, the NFL tries to do that and say they own football but they don't technically own football i think we've covered a lot but any of your favorite threads or upcoming threads upcoming newsletter topics um yeah well i have a. How do you, how do you source all this and come up with it? Just lots of reading and listening. And yeah, I mean, the good thing about what I do is a lot of it is, uh, there's a good mix of kind of like current event type stuff. And then there's historical, like legendary stories, there's analysis, personal opinion, right? So it's kind of all mixed together. So it gives me a much wider range of topics to talk about, right? So one day, like today, I wrote about MLB valuations that just

came out from Sportico. A week ago, I could have written about a, you know, sports business deal from 1965. I just have a wider range, right? So when you think about it in that concept, it's kind of limitless of the stories that I can kind of go from. So I've tried to mix it up here and there from like a favorite standpoint. Um, sorry, have you ever written on Bobby Bonilla day? I haven't written about it, but I, yeah, I mean, it's, it's certainly popular. I did a thread on, um, like my top 10 favorite stipulations and contracts. So if you think about these guys, like they're always asking for, you know, some of them make the news, but some don't about like what the weird things they asked for in their, in their contracts. And that one did really well. Cause I think a lot of people

know Bobby Bonilla and know, you know, what the Mets did and kind of the day gets the day he gets the payment is very public every year. They call it Bobby Bonilla day or whatever. But there's a bunch of others, right? So one of my favorites is Manny Ramirez when he went to go play, I think it was in Japan. One of the stipulations of his contract was, it was a few things. He got a, his own hotel suite for every away game. He got a personal driver and a Mercedes. And then the best one was unlimited sushi.

He was like, I want sushi at all times all times unlimited and i want to pay for it so like that's just you know that's a funny one it's uh they're like i'd love to see what that so the bobby bonilla i don't know if you knew this that it the rumor is that that ties back to madoff so the what were they the maloo Who was, who were the owners? The, um, I can't remember their name right now, but they basically, they were saying, Hey, if we have to pay this guy $10 million, if we have it in Madoff, it's going to make, uh, $2 million. Let's just agree instead to pay them an extra million dollars a year. And then we don't have to, you know, we'll make 2 million in Madoff. We'll lose a million paying Bobby for the next 20 years. Yeah. They, um, the Wilpons were the owners. They, they,

they got screwed. Yeah. By that deal. But also they, I mean, that's the easiest way to put it. They got screwed, but it also hamstring the Mets financially for decades, right? Like for a decade plus. And I think that's why Mets fans were so happy to get Steve Cohen, right? Someone with just deep pockets that if he wants to spend the most of any team in the major leagues, he will, you know? And I think with the Wilpons, we saw that that just wasn't a reality that they could do. They were pinching pennies to some degree in a lot of cases. And, you know, Madoff is obviously

a part of the reason why that happened. But yeah, I think the Bobby Bonilla deal is that's going to be a legendary one for quite some time now. I don't think I've seen kind of a worse deal in history for a sports team. Or a better deal for him, really. Yeah, it's fun. What is it? I think it's in July. And I wanted to come back.

So it's Michael Jordan. Who are our five on the Mount Rushmore there? Jordan, Tiger Woods, Messi. Of earnings? Yeah. Yeah, so Jordan didn't actually earn a billion dollars while active. He earned it after. Okay.

So the only athletes, I think there's four of them, to earn a billion dollars while still active. LeBron James, Tiger Woods. Oh, no, there's five, yeah. Floyd Mayweather, Messi and Ronaldo. I love that Floyd would fight for one hundred million dollars and then go bet like ten million dollars on himself to win as well at the casino. His his story is wild. I did a thread of him a while back and people I don't think people realize that he he obviously makes a lot of news with how flashy he is and his persona and all that kind of stuff and spending money.

And half the people think he's a genius and the other half people think he'll be broke in 10 years. There's not really much in between. Right. When in reality, what he did was actually very, very smart. He was, he was basically signing deals and getting a percentage of everything after everyone else got paid. Right. He would get paid a fee, a flat fee to fight. And then eventually he was like, wait, why don't I just, you guys are promoting the fight. Why don't I just do that?

So he built his own promotion company and he built this persona of himself, money, new weather and all this stuff. And he got a cut of not only the revenue from the pay-per-view, but every hot dog, every soda, every parking pass that was sold, right? So yeah, when you think about it from kind of like a very calculated move to maximize his revenue in a short period of time.

Well, not really that short. He fought for a while. But I think, you know, he was he made a really good deal. And he was kind of like one of the pioneers of that whole like bet on yourself thing of like, hey, instead of working with other partners and making everyone else rich, like I'm going to run the company myself. And you see that he actually got set up pretty well now because he manages 10 or 15 fighters now doing the exact same thing for other people. And he became that guy. So he's built a really good business. Two things that won the annual hedge fund conference down in Miami last year, he rolled up right before all the, everything got locked down. He rolled up in some huge Hummer limo thing, people falling out of the car. So I don't know if that is really him or a persona that he built. It seemed at the moment like that is his real personality.

Yeah, it's tough to tell, right? I think at some point the acting becomes like kind of you. Yeah, the acting becomes the reality. Yeah, exactly. And I don't know if that was like intentional or if that's really who he was or money change all that. I don't really know. But I think that was, I talk about it more from the aspect of like, that was super important to his whole persona, right? Of like the whole money Mayweather and people flocked to it to some degree, whether they liked him or whether they

didn't, people had an opinion about him. And then we'll finish up here in a second but then speaking of betting on yourself what are your thoughts on these um i can't remember what they're called now i imas or like basically they sell shares in their future earnings yeah uh income sharing agreements yeah isa isa um like that guy just came out in the news for the the uh fernando tatis yeah yeah the player, you think that's a business thing? We'll see more and more of that. I think it's definitely a business. I think that the opinion on it is very widespread, right? So people think that a lot of people are taking advantage of these people,

of these players, um, which there's an argument to be had. I think that to some degree, maybe. I think that there should be rules and regulations, just like anything around educating people about their decisions, right? I'm all for kind of making the decision that's best for you and having the options. You don't want to limit people's options. You want to give them the options, but then it's just about educating them and determining what's best for them and their family. So I think that's important. But I also think that the other side of it doesn't ever get talked about enough, which is for every Fernando Tatis that pays out, you know, millions of dollars to one of these firms, he's like, his was very public because

he was one of the most like high paying ones ever, right? He signed a massive deal. It just doesn't happen like that. For every one of him, there's hundreds of players that get free money, that get free loans, right? And never have to pay anything because, sorry, it's not a loan. It's just a grant to somebody. Yeah, it's just money, right? If you don't make it to the majors, you don't have to pay them back. So there's tons of players that see the other side of it. And give everyone a little how it works. Basically, the companies are formed and they give you money when you're a minor leaguer? Yeah. So they'll give you cash upfront while you're a minor leaguer. Basically the way, so the company that did it for Fernando Tatis was called Big League Analytics or Advanced, Big League Advanced, I think. And the way it works is they have a model

driven by data that tells them a percentage chance that someone's likely to make it to the major leagues, right? And they go after these players and they raise a fund of capital from a bunch of investors, Wall Street guys, whoever it might be. and they raise $100, $150 million funds, and they go give them out to a bunch of players, and they distribute cash. And what they do is they give you cash while you're in the minor leagues, generally kind of low, single A ball, stuff like that people that are still kind of riding the buses didn't get huge signing bonuses, want to provide making in the minor leagues, 50 grand a year or something. Less than that. Yeah, they're raising it too. But it's like, yeah, because you're only playing part of the year, right. And your salary is only

guaranteed for a certain amount of time. So you're not making any money. The conditions are terrible. Only a small, small percentage of people get signing bonuses if they get anything. And sometimes they're not even significant enough to live off of. Right. So when you think about it in that aspect, these players all want cash, right? So they provide them with cash upfront and the deal is basically like, Hey, look, we'll give you a hundred thousand dollars for every 1% up to 10%. This is an example, right? It could depend on the money wise, but they promise you cash upfront for a percentage of your future earnings. So maybe it's, Hey, we'll give you $500,000, but every contract you sign in the major leagues after this, we get 5% of, right. And for a guy who's kind of a fringe prospect, uh, it probably makes a lot more sense than a guy like Fernando

Taiz. And I think people were surprised by him because his dad was a major leaguer, right? So they assumed that he might've had access to financial capital in some way, whether it was through his dad or through relationships or even a bank, right? Like there's other ways to do it. Uh, but I think that it's an enticing business because like I said, some people pay out massive. Those are the ones that get the news. And then hundreds and hundreds of players kind of just get free money if they don't make it to the major leagues. So there's kind of like your capital model, right? I'm going to invest in a hundred of these small companies. One or two are going to bust out and make me all my money.

It's funny. They actually, they literally compare it to that when they pitch it to people, they say, you know, we're, we're, we're betting to hopefully find the next Facebook, Google, Apple, stuff like that. Right. And, and, and that was, yeah, in terms of athletes, that was Fernando Tatis. But I I'm with you. Like, what about those 99 other players who would have never made a million dollars in their career who have, you know, this cash in hand. Yeah, and I think I don't want to lead people astray and be like, oh yeah, everyone's getting a massive amount of money.

Some of these guys are only getting maybe $25,000 or whatever, not small amounts per se, but not life-changing. So I think you can't forget about those people though, right? They are essentially handed free cash and never have to pay it back. So if you're going to argue that what happened to Fernando Tatis should be illegal and shouldn't

happen, then you also have to understand that the people that are getting $100,000, $50,000, whatever it might be, and are able to provide for their family for multiple years are given kind of a safety net. Some of them have children, right? There's just so many things that go into it that, yeah, maybe there's more education that needs to be provided, or maybe there's alternative solutions uh maybe the MLB should start a program whatever it is I think there's probably alternatives that could make sense uh but I think the concept behind it of providing minor leaguers with adequate pay is the right concept it's just whether should the

MLB be doing it should minor league baseball figure out another avenue should this process be illegal um I think there's a lot that goes into it that uh you know the average fan probably doesn't consider what what about we've kind of waded into like my brain just jumped to paying uh college athletes so it seems like a car i've always thought like a college should do the same thing like hey your scholarship actually i get one percent of your future earnings like you you get to come you play at the school, but it seems like they can pay, like, we're going to pay you, but it's not payment. So you're still an amateur athlete, but I'm taking some percent of your future earnings.

Yeah. I mean, that's probably a model that makes sense. I think that, I think the same people that have a problem with kind of income sharing agreements in baseball would have a similar issue with, with that in the college model. Cause I think people, you know, hating on the NCAA is easy to some degree. It's, they just, you know, whether it was the women's basketball thing the other day where they provided the weight room for the women that had eight dumbbells and three mats, like, come on, you literally couldn't draw up an easier way to make fun of an organization or not make fun of really just hate. And people were aggressive and all of that, but I think they just can't get out of their own way. Yeah, exactly. Perfect way to put it. And I think when it comes to, uh, college athletes,

like we're, we're, we're going to see a shift where they start being compensated adequately. I think it's just a matter of time. We're seeing a bunch of different leagues come up. So over time, uh, the, the sports media kind of, uh, basketball brand that was, it started as basketball and it's geared more towards kind of high school athletes. They just launched a league, right? So you can go play for them. They're going to recruit, I think it's like 15 kids, 20 kids. They'll take, they'll provide you school.

They'll pay you $100,000 a year. And if you make it, if you don't choose to play professional basketball, they'll pay for you to go to college because you're giving up your amateur status to go play for them. Right. So it's kind of like a small thing. It's only going to be 20 or so players. A lot of these players don't want to do it. It's supposed to be basically for your high school years. And it's a way to compensate you for your talent while you're in amateur age, but you're not going to be an amateur. But I think stuff like that is important, right? That's the good stuff because while people want to hate on the NCAA, like companies like overtime are going out there and providing people options. And I think that's really what it is. It goes back to the same thing of like,

it's just about giving people options and letting them decide for themselves, educating them obviously, and then getting out of their way and letting them determine what's best for them, their future and their family. Uh, because if you provide them options and you give them education, like those are, those are, that's all you can really ask for. Right. And then let people make their own decisions. I don't think there needs to be some huge intervention and people need to be told what to do. It's like, okay, the NCAA is an option.

If they're not going to pay you, that's fine. Let's create other options where people can be compensated for their talent and their athletic abilities, and then give them the adequate education to make the decision that they should. And I think that's kind of what we're seeing. Right. I think we'll eventually see the shift. And we already are within some states of players being able to profit off their name, image, and likeness. And I think that makes a lot of sense.

There's obviously the argument that players are compensated through scholarships, but let's be real. In some cases, that's just not even close to adequate compensation. There's obviously only one Zion Williamson, but if anyone thinks that he was, well, some people think he was paid by Duke, but whatever he, if anyone thinks players like that are adequately compensated through a scholarship, that's just not the case. So I think it's just finding unique ways to, to allow these players to financially profit off themselves in a free market.

My, my work, I think the worry of like NCAA is if you start paying, do you just become like soccer and have, right, the Bears junior squad and all these, like you just have the feeder system or the minor leagues, and then you don't have fans, nobody really cares. So then the money all dries up. So that's the problem, right? There's just too much money to like mess with it. Yeah. And I think one of the, like an easy solution for me, right. It's like, let's,

let's go allow these guys to go profit off their name, image, and likeness through endorsement deals. Right. If, if I command a signing session, that'll make me $10,000 in the afternoon. Why shouldn't I be able to do that? Right. Like I'm one of the, say I'm one of the best players in college football and I can go do that. Let me go do that. And the free market will determine what the worth is of these players, right? You don't want, you want to obviously put rules and regulations in place that, you know, disallow kind of the, some of the negative stuff or the swaying of opinions or schools illegally recruiting people and stuff like that. But I think you want to provide players with the opportunity for the free market to decide what their worth is from an endorsement perspective.

Yeah. And you would even have at small schools, a guy could be like the local sub shop to, you know, making $500 a month or something to promote. Well, someone, someone laid it out perfectly. It was like the NCAA right now. I don't know if I tweeted out a thread the other night, save Stanford wrestling. And I don't know if you've caught up on this at all, but basically stanford is eliminating their wrestling program uh basically at the beginning last july they said we have 11 of our 32 or 33 sports we're going to eliminate we think we're going to lose like 70 million dollars over the next decade on these sports alone so we're just going to cut them after next year you guys you guys will play one more year after that year we're not going to have

sports anymore we'll do them at the club level uh but you won't be able to compete on the varsity level if you want to do that we'll allow you to transfer. You can enter the transfer portal now. So wrestling was one of those 11 sports. So they said, okay, what is the issue? And Stanford said, it's two things. It's financial and competitive excellence. So we want to make money on everything we're doing. We don't want to lose $70 million, obviously.

And then we want to be competitively excellent in everything that we do, right? We want to be good. We want to be competitive and win. So wrestling team was like, okay, understood. They went out, took care of number one, they raised $12 million for their program. People don't realize this about wrestling is it's actually one of the lowest cost sports to run on a manual basis. So some estimates say it's only like $150,000 to run a program. It's probably more than that, but it's like, you know, $12 million to allow them to run it at least for a decade, maybe two, right? So not only that they said, okay, we have enough money to run it for two decades ourselves. It'll be self-funded, but we have enough capital to

start a women's team. So that'll fulfill title nine requirements. You don't have to start it. You don't have to keep any of the other organizations if you don't want to, but we'll start a women's team. So now we fulfill title nine. And then, um, they basically were like, that takes care of finances. Competitive excellence is next. One of their wrestlers just won a national championship this year. So it's like, we have one of the best programs in the country. We have $12 million. It's self-funded. What is the issue now? And Stanford was like, no, right. So I don't, I'm laughing, but it's really not funny. Right. Because when you think about it in the context of,

of, of student athletes, the whole concept is, right, these colleges are providing them with opportunities through athletics. And I think the stat is that almost 50% of Stanford wrestlers are from low income or first generation college students, right? And the average at Stanford is 17%. So it's just like, it's a huge diversity kind of fulfillment for Stanford University from an athletic standpoint. You're providing kids that may not be- While their endowment's like 30 billion or something. It's like, come on.

Yeah, $28 billion endowment. And granted, right, I don't want to be the guy that says, hey, pull from your endowment and pay for athletics. The concept of the endowment is a different argument. But when you have a $30 billion endowment and you're pinching pennies over a sport that costs literally 1% of your athletic budget, not only that, it's a hundred year old program. They have Olympians. They have national champions. They had a road scholar finalist. They, you know, just won a national championship. It's going to be self-funded, right? Like they literally raised the money.

So it's like, you know, it makes no sense. So I think about when you think in that context, those are the problems that everyone has with college athletics, right? Like why shouldn't that program be able to, to continue to compete? And I think those are the things that people are going to continue to get fed up with and we're going to see major changes on. Yeah. And it ties back to your whole thing, right? You're writing about the business of sports, which in theory shouldn't involve college athletics, but it does. We all know it will certainly for sure, uh it already has to some degree all right let's finish up with some uh rapid fire favorites questions here so what's your uh favorite sport to write about or your favorite sport overall um nfl nfl okay what's your team

uh giants yeah yeah i'm so i'm from i might have mentioned this earlier but i'm from north carolina right but i uh my parents are from new jersey so my dad grew up in like the red bank homedale area so i uh you know growing up in north car, we always watched the Giants game and stuff. I really had no choice. What, what, how do you feel about their future? I'm a fan of Daniel Jones. People, people, I think that's not the question you asked, but I think that gives you the answer because I think that when people talk about the future of the Giants, that's really what it hinges on is like, did you get a quarterback right? And I think they did.

I think over time we'll see that he's a good quality option. I think it's just about providing him the right resources to succeed. And when you look at quarterbacks that typically make those jumps between year one, two, and three, most of the ones that do really well and make those jumps have the resources, right? And it's the same reason why, while Jets fans may have wanted Trevor Lawrence, there's a lot of Jets fans that don't think Sam Darnold's all the resources, right? And it's the same reason why, while Jets fans may have wanted Trevor Lawrence,

there's a lot of Jets fans that don't think Sam Darnold's all that terrible, right? It's just like, we didn't have any, he didn't have resources around him to be successful. So just as much as people want to criticize quarterbacks, you got to look at franchises too, right? If they don't provide you the resources to succeed as a quarterback,

they should take some heat also. And I think in the case of the Giants, whether it's the offensive line or the defense or the coaching changes, offensive coordinator changes, like he just hasn't been put in a great position to succeed yet. And I think if they're able to kind of solve

some of those issues, I think he'll be just fine. Yeah, I'd rather have him than Andy Dalton coming off Mitch Trubisky. It's been tough. QB1, I died laughing at that tweet the other day. Oh my God. Here's our QB1.

There's another good one. There's a guy doing a Je uh jeopardy not jeopardy what's the uh vanna white the letters but it was like four letters and then five letters and the guy's like i want to solve it russ wilson like nope it's the same number of letters same same number of letters yeah yeah that's funny um so when you're back in new york favorite uh new york city restaurant oh it's tough i know yeah um i don't know i'm easy to please pizza um i don't know where do you live in new york i live in Midtown East. Got it. What's it been like there?

Just crazy? Is it going to open back up? You think New York's dead? Are those rumors? I don't think it's dead. I think, I don't think it's dead. I think that people that have the benefit of kind of working from wherever they want, I think will choose to live in other places.

I think it just makes sense, right? Like prices are super high, rents are high, the cost of living is high. But I think in general, like New York City is always going to be desirable, right? It's New York City. I think it's a place where a lot of people want to live. There's really few cities, if not any in the world that are similar in the concept of what New York City is and what it represents. I think that we'll see a shift over time of like people living in different areas and kind of the workforce in general going to a more digital world. But I think at least in the short term, I think New York City is going to be, we're already seeing it to some degree if you go out there now, like people are there, people are back, restaurants are opening up. And I think, you know, as the vaccine rolls

out, as people return to normal, I think we'll see New York City come back alive. All right. Looking forward to it. Got a favorite sports book or sports business book? Bill Walsh, The Score Takes Care of Itself. Really? Haven't read it. It's a good one.

Is that him as the coach or as the exec? The coach, most read it. Is that the coach or is the exec? The coach, most of it. So he, it's basically like, he's just a super, super detailed guy. Right. So it talks about everything from when he got there to kind of winning championships and stuff like that. And it's just cool to hear some of the stories, right? Like there's, it's mostly of like a kind of leadership and kind of interpersonality type book of, of kind of leadership traits and details that made him

successful. But I think like, just the stories are great, because there was things when he got there, you know, everyone had to wear their uniform in the exact same way you had to practice perfect, like he was a big perfectionist in that degree. He made the receptionist answer phone calls in a certain way, right? He gave them a script to read. And it was just like, everything was super, super detailed. And obviously, some of those things people will say are necessary or not. But it the way it's framed and everything like that, it gives you not not only a lot of actionable things to do kind of in following your own life. But you can very clearly see why he was so successful as a coach. All right, put that on my list. Favorite sports movie that's a good one i just i don't know before the tournament i had my

kids watch hoosiers they were like a little lukewarm i'm like come on this is great what are you talking about yeah that's a great one yeah it's funny i asked this uh on twitter like a few months ago and i'll periodically ask questions here or there if something comes up in my mind and i'm curious about kind of what where people stand on it and that was not only one of the questions that got the most engagement but people were just all over the place right like there's just the opinions differ so much from when it comes to uh to favorite sports movies it's crazy yeah you'll get like Hoosiers and like Talladega Nights there needs to be yeah yeah makes you cry comedy um yeah you're like does halideka nights even

count yeah i don't think so um and finally favorite star wars character we ask all our guests oh well so i'm the wrong guy to ask because i haven't seen a single star wars oh come on i i uh don't don't worry i've gotten significant heat from this already from multiple people i um all right well never into it if i watch one am i gonna get hooked yeah for sure for sure all right the mandalorian baby yoda you didn't want to jump on that no i mean i see it everywhere it's you can't miss it um people talking about it but like i just i never watched him uh when i was younger and stuff and i just you know i never caught on and then i didn't have an interest in it when i got older so i just never watched it but

i probably will at some point and i'll come back to you and say i got hooked all right we'll give you uh poe dameron you got a little poe dameron look to you if you grew your hair out he's from the newer ones uh all right joe it's been fun um any last thoughts we'll put the links to your twitter and your newsletter and everything in the show notes um thank you no yeah no uh no no parting messages just you know i had a good time thanks for having me on yeah we'll talk to you soon we'll visit you when new york opens back up yep all right thank you you've been listening to the derivative links from this episode will be in the episode description of this channel. Follow us on Twitter at RCM Alts and visit our website to read our blog or subscribe to our newsletter at rcmalts.com.

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