The Dumb Zone FREE - The Dumb Zone 2-6-24

Episode Date: February 6, 2024

We talk to the former director of quantitative research and development for the Dallas Mavericks, Haralabos Voulgaris(00:00) - Open (16:45) - Haralobos Voulgaris (01:33:15) - Viewer Mail (01:56:30) - News (02:16:00) - Today in History ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Hello, I'm Dan McDowell, longtime professional broadcaster. Why subscribe to our Patreon podcast? Well, perhaps you support our struggle to get out from under the oppressive thumb of the man. Or, objectively, if you sign up at patreon.com slash the dumb zone, you'll get the two episodes per week that are available on all podcast platforms, like this one, plus an additional two episodes each week that are exclusive to Patreon. So subscribing on Patreon gets you four episodes per week. Oh my, what a bargain. Now, on to today's program.

The Dunza, Dunza, Dunza. The Rollabob. The Rollabob. The Rollabob. Hey guys, happy Tuesday. Show number 111. Show 111. Make a wish. What do you make of that? It's 1111.

I don't know. I'm not into that voodoo nonsense. As a kid, I would always, little kid, try to stay up till 11-11 and couldn't do it. And now I'm hoping to get to bed by 11-11. What exactly was the impetus behind this? Was there some sort of legend behind it? Just to see 11-11. Make a wish.

Because I wasn't allowed to stay up late. Might come true. There's so many stupid things ingrained into our culture that we're just like, yeah, I'll blow a candle out and make a wish. Well, we used to not have things to do. It's got to be it, right? Yeah, we still do it now. I mean, if you have cancer, I understand. There's a Make-A-Wish foundation.

But if you're just some kid who's turning eight, like, Make-A-Wish. It's just stupid, if you think about it. All the old witchcraft-y type things that we still... Why won't you let people have hope? I want them to have hope. I just don't want it to be related to dates and candles. If it makes a seven-year-old feel better to wish for a new bicycle by blowing out these flames, then just so be it.

Yeah, but he's not going to get it. So then what? What if he does? Then he'll believe in God. Yeah. And not his parents who actually have been working 50 hour weeks. What do you think about teaching your kids about Santa? I'm a little bit conflicted on it.

I talked to TC about this last week and it's an interesting dynamic because he's been telling Izzy Santa's not real from the day that she could understand him. And once she got old enough to where she understood what he was saying, she was like, okay, I think you're wrong. Like he tried as hard as he could. Everybody else is really into it. Yeah, and she's like, I see him right there. He's like, that's not real.

That's a guy dressed up, and she's like, okay, dude. Because that was a very, I was conflicted with that too. Yeah. Because, you know, I don't have any harsh memory of it myself, but I just remember people, you know, some people cry when they find out about Santa, and it's like, well, why purposely lie to your kid? I mean, we did the –

Tooth Fairy? The Tooth Fairy? The tooth fairy, because my kid, like, I think one time, like, put a note... Oh, yeah. ...under there, expecting the tooth fairy to answer. So I did, like, I wrote it left-handed

so that it would look different than my handwriting. Okay. You know, she was very skeptical. I know for me personally, and this is one of the things that, while I appreciate all the help that I get from the It Takes a Village to Raise a Child, one of the things I struggle with the most is just

I don't have much control over her inputs at all. And so there's no chance that with my mom I could get away with being like Santa is not real. Like my mom's a six-month Christmas participator, and there's just no way I could get away with it. I would like to. If it were up to me and only me, things would be a lot different. A lot different.

That's interesting. a lot different. That's interesting. I mean, that's a difference between your situation moving away and raising your kids and mine. Because for me, I get the help of having five other people that will watch our kid,

but I also have her coming home and singing songs about Jesus. And I'm like, and that's the other thing, I'm fighting that one though. I'm like, Jesus is, you know, she's like, she's talking about heaven a lot now. And I'm like, heaven is in your other thing. I'm fighting that one, though. I'm like, Jesus is, you know, she's like, she's talking about heaven a lot now. And I'm like, heaven is in your heart.

It's not a real place. Nobody goes, there's no place you go, it's in your heart. Like when her hamster died at school, is Monty in heaven now? I'm like, heaven is not a place. Heaven is your memory of him, and he's in your heart. Now, that's not going to stick because I'm going to have a wave of other people battling that. Whereas with you,

you didn't have any help with your kids at all. But you got to really control the narrative which I lost out of the gate. Yeah, the only struggle I had is with the lady I married. She had some different ideas about...

That's a lot easier. That's a... Right. It's only two... The matrix is one by one. Yeah. Whereas I got... You sent her off to the in-laws for a week of indoctrination.

Yeah. Or even some more than others. That's a weird bit because I remember... I think it was my... I don't know if it was my aunt, not Uncle Gary, but Aunt Terry. The first time I was ever at a Baptist church and saw like a human, a whole body dunked to get baptized, like in the church, like in this giant bathtub or something, I was like. I've done it twice.

You've done it. Yeah. It's done to you. Yeah. Twice? Because they were like, this one didn't stick. Definitely. The first one felt like this is a bad seed. I think the first one they knew that I was kind of like

forced to do it. Like it was, I had no say in the matter at the first one. My mom had done it and some guy came over to our house and I was probably like nine or ten and he drew us like a photo, or not a photo, he drew us a drawing, and he drew like basically what amounted to like a

cliff with a gulf in the middle, you know, so there's a cliff over here, a cliff over here, and then down on both sides, so it said like you and then I think it said heaven and over here he drew my family. So I'm by myself on one side. My family's over here on the other side. And I think at the pit it said like accept Christ or

hell. Something like that. It was very clear to me that they were saying do you want to be with them? So there's no middle ground in this equation. No. And i had no theological underpinning to understand any of this stuff so i did at that time and then in probably junior high i did have like a probably two-year period of being somewhat like into church uh-huh you. You know, church camp, VBS. You weren't against it. No, I wasn't against it.

And in fact, we should talk about this more at length at some time because this is something wholly foreign to you. Church camp is a wild experience. Like, dude, it is. They are coming at you. It is emotional sensory overload. You talk about grooming. Dude, it was crazy.

I was really attempting that. My brother was there, actually, for this one. And they had some deal where older kids, and in my case, older sibling, if you didn't have a sibling, you just found a younger kid, you had to wash their feet while Christian music is playing. Jesus. And I was bawling my eyes out. Like, I'm a bad brother.

I'm sorry I'm a bad big brother. And he's crying. And then they're like, once they see you crying, they're like, want to get saved? They're like, we got him right now. He's vulnerable. And I'm like, yes.

And so you did it again. I did it again, yeah. At church camp. When I got home. You know, there's nothing. So wait, the first time they did it at your house? No, no, no. They came to my house.

To give you the pitch. To give me the pitch. And I was like, yeah, sure. I want to be with my family. Yeah, yeah. I give me the pitch. And I was like, yeah, sure. I want to be with my family. Yeah, yeah. I don't want to. Yeah, what nine-year-old in that situation is going to say? I might have been 10 or 11.

I don't know. But I was very young. Any little kid under full control of your parental units, there's no real opportunity to. You've not really even started thinking for yourself too much. That's probably teenage years for sure, right? Yeah. So that's weird, man.

Interestingly enough, though, the second time I went, when I went to church camp and I came back and got baptized a second time, while I was very excited about Christ at that point, also I smoked weed there. At the church camp? Yeah, and I did not smoke weed again for probably five years. Didn't smoke in high school at all.

Not once. It's a crazy experience because there's the mix of like hardcore church kids. Then there's a middle section of kids that kind of just want to go hang out with their friends for a few days away from parents.

And then there's the kids that are sent there that are their parents are hoping to get fixed. Yeah. And so when you put these three groups together, it is an incredible time because in the morning and during the day, you're like playing capture the flag and you're running around. Softball. Yeah. And then two on two. And then you swim and then you go listen to church music for two hours.

Yeah. It's a wild time. It's a wild week. It really is. But, yeah, there was an older kid there who played football. I think he was in, like, 10th or 11th grade, and he played football at our high school, and he was badass. And he seemed like a boatie to me.

Like, he believed in God and everything, but he also like smoked pot. And he was like, to me and my buddy who were there, I brought a, I brought a guy with me. In fact, I believe that was a part of the deal is my mom was like, um, I want you to go, um, but you can bring a friend and we'll pay for it. And we, we just ran through the sports leagues because I had a ringer. It was not associated with the church at all. Who's this guy? It's not fair. And, yeah, the older kid was like, hey, before music tonight, come on down.

And that's where you smoked pot. Church music in that setting? Oh, my gosh. Pretty amazing. They got the fog machine, the lights. It was like the Grammys. The God Squad ripping stuff. Was that the first time you ever smoked pot?

Oh, yeah. And it was, like I said, I didn't again until well into my freshman year of college. But he wasn't a hardcore church guy. No, but he was spiritual. Okay, because I know the hard, well, I wouldn't say that, but the kids that went to Catholic school, they partied way harder. There's probably somebody in my school partying, but I never, I tried pot once when I was in high school and it was at my dad's wedding. Yes. We kind of drank some wine coolers, But I was pretty much just a big sports nerd

And then once I befriended these other people You know one of them, but I'm not going to say now But once, you know, college age and everything But I met them They had gone to the local Catholic high school And I would come to find out When they were in high school, they were doing Coke. I'm like, yeah, what? Yeah. I think I remember hearing that about Fort Worth Christian.

Like, you know, it might, by no means were there not, I mean, we were having overdoses at my high school, um, from pills. But I remember hearing that like, man, those kids over at Fort Worth Christian, like they go hard. Like, I i don't remember coke necessarily but it was like they had money yeah maybe that was it so they would either think it because you have you could afford to go to the catholic high school exactly whereas like our and i never did this uh but the kids at my school would just like raid their grandma's cancer medicine. Yeah. Some of it too is having naive parents.

Yeah, Catholic parents. Yeah, Christian parents. They're taking care of it. He could never be doing that, whereas if you kind of have a little rougher crowd, you're like, I got to keep an eye on you. But also I have a good babysitter. It's their school. It's the Catholic church or it's whatever. Yeah, but yes, the parents think you're hanging around good kids, and so you have a little bit more freedom. of a good babysitter it's their school yeah the catholic church it's whatever yeah but yeah yes

the parents think you're hanging around good kids and so you have a little bit more freedom the parents don't really ask because it's like well you you're all christian school kids i'm not going to check in on you that's a big part of it a big part of it well yeah if you know you have a little jake running around you're going to question everything he does yeah the other thing too is and again this is not something i ever experienced, but I certainly dreamed about it, is people would hook up. That was a big, and it might just be like

making out, but that was a big player for the whole week is like trying to figure out if there's any girls here that like you. So maybe that's why I started crying

is I just needed to put on airs. But it was a lot, dude. And then we did like, did you ever do like, So maybe that's why I started crying is I just needed to put on airs. But it was a lot, dude. And then we did like – did you ever do like – there was one in the winter. I can't remember what it was called. Winter was popular for the lock-in. Yeah, that's kind of what we did, and it was at the Embassy. Or no, what's the one right there on Grapevine?

Is that an Embassy Suites? By the – On 26? Yeah. By my Bass Pro Shop? Yeah. We had one there. And my only memory of that, really, is that in the middle of like, is it Vespers? Yeah.

Like the evening acoustic sessions and stuff. Okay. They had us in like a little ballroom. And you know, it's like low light. There's guys up there with acoustic guitars. And I said I had to go to the bathroom. And instead, and I'm probably 13 at this point, I went to the bar to watch Major beat Washington in the Holiday Bowl.

And when they found me, they were not happy. Because I had been gone for about an hour and a half. I'm like, fuck, dude. It's major. I'm going to rank the figures you're throwing at me right now in order two, Christ, one, major. I'm not out on your guy, but... My guy's dealing right now. My guy is absolutely dealing.

There's a lot of time for everyone, right? All right, we have a cool guest book today. Haralabob. We only need one name for him, right? Haralabob Vulgaris? Sure.

Well, I think his name is Haralabob. We're going to find out. We are going to find out. I've heard Haralabob all my life, or all my life that I've known who he is. I don't think I've known who he is.

You know what I'm saying. Anyway, we're going to have him in a few minutes. And I have on my run sheet here Jake's assorted NFL notes. That's right. That's a new feature that we're starting today. So, yeah, let's pause for a second, uh we'll be back with haralabob we hope everything's bigger in texas and that includes jerry jones's new stadium what do you think of the new place i think the new stadium is absolutely stunning and for fans who are going to the ball

game they have an opportunity now to tailgate at a brand new stadium and smoke it up and serenade the whole stadium itself to me tailgating is is a part of game day experience and what we found is that 42 percent of the people prefer pork over the other meat and that tailgate part is i can understand why, because pork is easy, it's easy to cook, it's simple, and it's affordable. And so going to game day stadium, look for everybody out there that be tailgating to be using some type of pork meat on their grills. You're listening to the dumb zone no puppet uh that's kind of where it goes so we had to do so we are recording live to tape a little bit early

today generally we get going around noon ish we got going a little before 11 because of the guest I was mentioning is not in this time zone. He is far, far away. The other side of the world, Jake. He is Bob Vulgaris. I'll go with that. First of all, we really appreciate your time. Second of all, I would like to say, so I heard you recently on a different podcast

listening to some different things you've done. The host had said, am I pronouncing your name right? It's Haralabos. And you said, yes, that's right. Haralabos, Haralabos, yes. Okay, because I guess I got to know you. I got to know who you are and hear you and everything with Simmons for years.

And he always said Haralabob. That's my Twitter name. It's kind of a nickname because I go by Bob. So somewhere along the line, Bob and Haralabos turned into Haralabob. I just kind of ran with it. Okay. Haralabos. I'd like to get that right.

It doesn't sound like he cares that much. No, there are more important things. There are ways to make Haralobos more complicated, but I guess adding in another name that's very similar to it is another way to make it more complicated, so I decided to roll with it. It works. So you're in Spain right now.

Haralobos, or Bob, is a former professional gambler. He's currently the owner of a Spanish soccer club, and so he's over there right now ruling with his iron fist. You may remember him from the Dallas Mavericks as he was the director of quantitative research and development. As I understand it, you totally made that title up. I didn't made it up. I was like, I'm not an American,

so I think I was cognizant of getting a visa approved as quick and fast as possible. And so I think having a title that makes sense with my expertise, which is quantitative research and development was part of it. Mark's pretty like, call yourself whatever you want. It's kind of fly by the seat of your pants guy. So I was like, how does this sound? And he was like, sounds good. So I think if I did it all over again, I probably would have went something more along the lines of basketball strategy or something, or maybe not had a title at all and just kind of hung out in the background.

Probably been the sharper move in retrospect, but yeah, quantitative development made up title that's but pretty accurate in terms of what i was doing perfectly that's interesting as you say you're you made something up and it's like what you name yourself but is it going to be taken seriously by you're saying the visa as you're trying to get a visa so we named this uh we used to be called the hang zone in our radio uh era and now we're the dumb zone and we find that very difficult to try and book guests. When I saw the message and then I saw the name of the thing, I was like, okay, these guys at least don't take themselves too seriously. Okay, so it's not bad to you. It's interesting, though, because he had to sort of gin up the title for the visa purposes.

But I wonder if whenever that title was presented to the old heads on staff, they were like, what does that mean? Yeah. There was no presentation to the old heads on staff. I don't think it was kind of, you know, I had I think a lot of people. Yeah, possibly they didn't know. There wasn't really a lot of of of organizational structure, I would say, with the Mavericks. I think Mark maybe would even admit to this. It wasn't super well thought out in that regard.

And so when Mark wanted to hire me because I was working a lot with the coaching staff, I think he wanted me first before we agreed to any terms. He wanted me first to get vetted by Coach Carlisle. So I met with Coach Carlisle. So I met with Coach Carlisle, spent some time with him. And then and so that was really the only person I really met. I met I met I met Donnie for the first time because I was kind of shadowing Carlisle around, just talking to him, meeting with him, and then he had to go run practice.

And so he just deposited me in Donnie's office. So the first time I met Donnie, I got deposited in his office. He started talking to me. It got kind of awkward. I didn't really know what was going on. So then I left. And then the guy who was his assistant, I think his assistant at the time, a guy named Max, I guess, knew who I was and told him who I was. And I guess the gist of the story was Donnie realized I was wealthy in some way. So he called me back in there and tried to sell me a futsal franchise. That's a true story. Oh, and a Mexican G League franchise.

Those are the two things he tried to do. Hustling. Yeah, it's just funny. He was always, always looking for a deal in some way. Not in a bad way, but it was kind of funny because I was just like, yeah, I'm not here to buy a, I don't know what futsal is. And I have no interest in owning a Mexican G League franchise. So maybe I'm not the guy for you, but it was, yeah, it was kind of funny because i was just like yeah i'm not here to buy a i don't know what futsal is and i have no interest in owning a mexican g league franchise so maybe i'm not the guy for you but it was yeah it was pretty entertaining okay so you didn't actually have to like get vetted by donnie you're saying no no i didn't which i don't i don't i think you know in

in in fairness to donnie i don't i don't think he knew who i was what i was doing or why i was there and so maybe that got us off on the wrong foot right away. To be fair, he was always very nice to me in person, especially the first little while. And then I think based on how things went in terms of the roles of how Mark, you know, because Mark's, it was in my estimation, I think even by his, he's the ultimate decision maker there. So I think once people realized that I had Mark's ear as well, I think then things started to change a little bit. But yeah, Donnie was always very nice to me up until like the very, very, very end. It's interesting you mentioned the organizational structure, because I guess I don't know how every NBA team works. But for a long time, I've thought, obviously, Mark is the

ultimate decision maker. But I've just thought, I don't really know how this team is run. And even up to today, you know, I know that Michael Finley is involved, but he's not the GM, but they have a GM in Nico Harrison, but he's supposed to be working hand in glove with Jason Kidd. It's all very confusing. Dirk is around somehow

involved, but yeah, it's always just seemed like Cuban valued this sort of, we're going to throw a bunch of personalities and intellect into a room and just see what happens. There's some merit to that, I think, especially my experience now at the football club and hiring someone to help me run the sports department who was super detailed, structure-oriented. Everyone had a job title, who they reported to, et cetera, corporate structure. everyone had a job title, who they reported to, et cetera, corporate structure. That has its benefits.

It also has its negatives in some way because it kind of prevents the free flow of ideas, I think. And if you have someone like Mark who wants to be very involved and who deems himself to be like, you know, the guy who should be making the final decision, I think it can work. Just everyone has to get along. I think that's the key thing. I can't speak to how other teams operate. I know I've, you know, I've interviewed with a couple of different teams and I think it's a lot of times the coach is involved. Sometimes he isn't involved. They're consulted. You know,

the one thing I'll say in defense of the Mavericks and any NBA team is, you know, the number one goal of a general manager, in my mind, is most most of them their goal is to save their job and so that doesn't necessarily line up with the kind of the the the goal of what the team is so they don't have the team in mind so but an owner has the team in mind so like for my football club i we don't have a sporting director which is the spanish version of or a football version of a gm i'm the sporting director and i'm making all of the decisions in that regard. And I think it lines up really, really well in that because I'm the custodian of the club. I have the team's long-term best interests.

Whereas if you've got the coach involved, he's got one year left on his contract. Is he really going to want to develop a young player versus signing a veteran? So it makes sense, but yeah, it wasn't super organized and it definitely didn't contribute to a, I would say, healthy work environment the way the Mavericks were run. But it wasn't like a frat house either, which I think I've read a couple of different people describe it that way or allude to it. It wasn't like that. It was still professional. It just wasn't, you know, it wasn't a Fortune 500 company. I think the frat house thing came out after that. Who was the guy that had like a condom fall out of his pants?

Sports illustrated pants DJ. Okay. That was, uh, was that before you got there? Yeah, much, much before I got,

I, when I got there, synth was running things and it was, uh, okay. My office was actually in the business, the business side, because there was no room in the basketball department for,

for, for my, for my, but I, you know, I always worked out in the basketball department for my, but I always worked out of the basketball department. The people who worked in my department, the other quants, because there were several of them, they all worked on the basketball business

side next to the Mark Cuban Company's area. He never saw a condom on the floor. Hey, definitely did not. It feels like, we've always thought like Cuban is... But he really is the dumb zone, isn't it? I mean, he's really good in the mix. Cuban really is.

He's the GM, though. It just feels like that's actually what he does, but he hires some people under him. I don't think that's unusual. I don't know if that's true or not, but at the end of the day, you had a franchise that's worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 to $5 billion.

Why wouldn't you want the guy who's owns the team and cutting the supermax checks to be the one making the final decisions uh i mean i don't see anything wrong with it it's it's not uncommon uh at all you might think it is but it really isn't uh so in fact in fact the luca trade was negotiated by Mark and the owner of the Hawks. They're the ones who finally got the deal done. So are you telling me the Hawks are also? There's lots of examples of this, I think. How did your association with Mark Cuban begin? I don't remember, to be honest.

Email, this predated Twitter, so it was probably email conversation. I work, and a lot of people don't know this, but I also worked for Mark and the Mavericks when I took a year off gambling, starting about a month or so before the All-Star break, the year before you guys won the title. So I worked from the pre-All-Star break all the way through to the start of the nba the following nba season when you guys won the championship in 2011 i was contracted by mark so i was doing similar stuff for him then advising him on players player trades etc um most people don't know that but that happened uh so um i think i had to start somewhere via email i think also there was like a couple of articles are written about me.

And then I think that gave him more like information as to who I was. We met in person a couple of times during summer league. Um, you know, for me, I wanted to see if I liked it at that time. I wasn't, uh, financially in a position where I would want to give up gambling for more than a year. So I went back to gambling cause I wasn't gonna go work for the Mavericks for a small amount of money. And then by the time I actually started working for the team as an official non-contracted, but official team employee, my financial situation had changed. And I think also the amount of money he was willing to offer me also was a lot more, in my mind, substantial, even though it didn't really

materially impact my life in any way. i've heard you talk about this before but it seems like you sort of had a healthy symbiotic relationship of respect with rick yeah why wouldn't you respect him he's a great coach and a hard worker and yeah he just he he's uh he's a he's a difficult guy in our in our dealings we didn't have a symbiotic relationship in how I would define a symbiotic relationship but in his mind I'm sure it was as symbiotic as it gets I mean I think

you know it's interesting for me looking back I think I have to look back through the lens of how everyone viewed me and so I think a lot of people are out for self preservation I'm not saying Rick was but a lot of the people I interacted with in the office were either like, okay, I have to either pretend I'm this guy's friend because it'll help me with my job, or I have to actually try to be his friend because I want to get to know and learn a little bit more about the business of analytics or the approach. And then there were some people who were like, I'm never going to get this. This is outside my lane. If the organization is going in this direction, I'm going to become a lamplighter when electricity becomes about and I'm just going to be, you know,

kind of evolved out. So with Rick, you know, we worked really, really close together. We never really had any issues at all up until the very, very end when I left before, like in March of the year, everyone thought I was around for the whole year, but I actually just left at that point just because we had had a couple of instances pop up where I felt like he didn't have my back. But yeah, it was like, you know, Rick's a tactical guy. He's very psychological. His idea of a great conversation is you both argue with each other for an hour and 30 minutes. And then you feel strongly enough about your point that you're, you're fine being in a, in a real kind of, I don't want to say hostile, but like a real that you're fine being in a real kind of,

I don't want to say hostile, but like a real, you know, it's a real passionate conversation. And then the next day, if things go well, you repeat the whole process all over again. That's kind of his approach. He's very tactical. He's very sharp, like in the way he conducts himself. And so for me, I appreciated that level of kind of drive to win, which was about which I wanted to do also. And I thought Rick also really respected my ideas. He didn't necessarily agree with everything I said, but he respected the amount of work and detail I went into providing my opinions on things because they weren't just, I wasn't just spitballing stuff I was doing. You know, in some cases, lots and lots of, or in other cases, had ideas that I already had predated

when I was building my models to predict outcomes of basketball games. So Rick, in my mind, was someone I enjoyed working with. It also helped me learn how to deal with people in sports better as well because I've learned that this is very common amongst coaches who have to lead men. They have to have this type of confidence in their beliefs and a way of going about things. So yeah, I had a good relationship with Rick. Can you give an example of something where he didn't have your back? Um, you know, after, after I, after the article came

out, uh, and we had like a conversation, this was like maybe a couple of days before he decided to quit the Mavericks. I was like, Hey, you're next, bro. You think this kid doesn't like me? It's not really about me. So you need to figure that shit out. An example was just like, maybe in my mind, when I approached him with this, he said, no, it wasn't intentional. But it certainly occurred to me that it was intentional that some of the decisions on who would play or who wouldn't play, you know, the numbers say might be taken as code from the players like, hey, this isn't my decision. This is foisted upon me by the analytics nerd or whatever. But he never disrespected me to my in person. And I don't know that was the case, but it definitely occurred to me that it made things easier for him to have some plausible deniability

with the with with the players didn't you know people think i had a bad relationship with the players i didn't have a good relationship or a bad relationship i just didn't have a relationship there's some players who i had a friendly relationship with outside of basketball that i was friends with but for the most, I never talked to the players about basketball. So I think if you're having to have a tough conversation with someone like Wes Matthews, who's a pretty confident, well-paid veteran NBA player, it could make things easier to say like, hey, it's kind of out of my hands, but the numbers say that we can't play you. We got to play this guy. We got to play Dodo over you. We got to develop Dodo over you. But, you know, so I don't know that that happened, but it kind of felt to me like based on my own

intuition, that's what might have happened. So. One of those decisions that I think you were pretty heavily involved was the Clippers series decision to start Boban. Correct. And the other thing, I think it was the same game in that Game 7, where Batum had been bodying Brunson basically every time he touched the floor that whole series. He seemed just too small to play. And he played 10 minutes in Game 7, scores two points. And I feel like at that point, that's when the Mavericks decided we're not going to extend Jalen Brunson,

even though they had a little bit of time to do it. So what were your opinions on Brunson at that time? My opinions on Brunson were twofold. I had a funny interaction with Jalen Brunson's father last year at a Lakers-Knicks game where he was eyeballing me from the court, from the bench, like he knew who I was. Jalen knew who I was. Jalen knew who I was. I think there was this rumor that was spread by one of the members of the staff, which was kind of true. It was true. I was trying to trade Jalen, but it wasn't because I didn't think he was a good

player. It was because for whatever reason, they signed this guy to a contract that meant that we didn't have his rights anymore to match. So he wasn't going to have a classical rookie contract. didn't have his rights anymore to match. So he wasn't going to have a classical rookie contract. So we were either going to have to overpay for his services and not overpay, but pay a lot with the ability where he still might want to leave. We had no leverage. And he was also the only asset the Mavericks had after the KP trade. Yeah. Because we didn't have any draft picks we could trade really freely. So my opinion of him wasn't so much long-term that he wasn't going to be a good player. Because to be fair, did I think he was going to be this good? Absolutely not.

The amount of work he's put in is really, really a testament, I think, to how hard he's worked and what a good professional athlete he was. But yeah, my opinion on him at that time wasn't he's not a good player, he'll never be a good player. My opinion of him was just in this series, he's not really, you know, as long as they put Batum on him, we're not getting any advantage here. That was basically the, you know, and all my communications are via email. So it's very easy for me to go back and look at them and see exactly what I said. And that's basically what it was like, this is a matchup where we don't have an advantage on. We don't have an advantage once they figure out how to go small and play five smalls versus us.

We're fucked. I said that the previous year when we played them. They didn't figure it out that year, Clippers. They only ran it a few times when they were losing. And then once they got back, they went back to their traditional Zubac lineup or big lineup. The next year the conversation was how do we you know at some point when we're up to zero i i was still sending

you know communicating with with rick like hey at some point they're going to figure this shit out and they're going to go small what is our plan and our plan was well when they do it we'll figure it out i was like well it's better to do it when we're up to zero than when it's two two or when it's three two you know what i? So that was kind of that. And so the Boban situation was one of the rules was we couldn't not start KP. That was like a rule for whatever reason. I don't know why that was a rule, but it was a rule. But the lineup when they went small, you know, KP's still coming off an injury.

He has to guard a small. He has to guard in space. It's very difficult for us to defend, and we weren't gaining anything offensively at the other end because he wasn't able to post up those smaller players in an efficient manner it was clogging the lane so given the ability given the notion that we had to start him the other option was okay let's not allow them to go small by putting in bobon which forces their hand now we can get some players in foul trouble we We can get some offensive rebounds. They had nobody who could guard Beaubon.

Like Beaubon was, people think, oh, what a banana's idea, but it worked. And the whole idea was, is it was going to be something that would steal us a game at some point. That was kind of the idea. It wasn't going to work long-term and it wasn't a game seven thing.

We didn't do it in game seven. You know, if you remember when we did it. So we did it earlier than that. The Beaubon move was earlier. So, did it earlier than that. The Boban move was earlier. So, and it worked. It bought us a game. We went zone. So we didn't have to really worry about the defense.

We lived with their above the break threes. Hope they got a little bit unlucky from three. And then got them in foul trouble on the other end. So it kind of worked. Unfortunately, it didn't work in game seven. Because at that point, we were out of moves. If that makes sense. Yeah, that's fascinating. Because I i remember as a fan fans were like well

they're just trying to throw something against the wall but there's actual well thought out reasoning behind starting bobon i have the emails from even it's funny i have like the the video clips from the year before when we put bobon in there in the in the bubble in the playoff series and he just put people under the basket. I mean, there was like a couple clips of Marcus Morris trying to guard him. It was effective. Funny, funny anecdote. So that is like last year, about a year ago this time,

I'm at some like LA celebrity's birthday party in LA, and I see Ty Lue there. And I'm like, I don't really, you know, I don't know Ty Lue, but I knew Kenny Atkinson, who was on the staff at the time. And we had talked about this. And so I was like, I'm going to see, I'm going to go talk to Tyloo. I introduced myself. So I introduced myself to Tyloo. I was like, Hey, how's the guy work for the Mavericks? And he's like, Oh, you're the gambler. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's like, was that you who wanted to do Boban? I was like, yeah. I was like, we fucking hated that. You guys did that. We were like, fuck, that was good, man.

It was actually a cool moment. Yeah, playoff series are fun like that in the moves. Going back, though, a couple minutes ago, you mentioned something that I don't think really gets brought up enough, which is the initial Jalen Brunson contract is the real culprit. That's really all there is to it. I mean, people talk about, oh, we didn't do this, we didn't do that. But, like, why are you trying to save?

You know, you get an extra year at a cheaper rate when you sign for that four-year whatever contract. But you don't have the restricted free agency rights. So, I mean, I don't know who negotiated that contract. I don't think it's fair to blame Donnie on that. I don't just because, I mean could i don't know right so he's the gm but if it's a bad idea let's say it's it's not his idea then uh then he should try to convince the coach not the owner not to do it you know part of your job as a general manager is to is to is to you know go to bat for bad ideas that you you know talk talks like mark has a lot of ideas my job

was to kind of like give my opinion on his ideas and if there were some that were really really ones that i disagreed with strongly really be confident enough to to not care if if i was wrong at the end of the day and i think a lot of people were acting out of self-preservation so i don't know whose idea that was but it was definitely a bad idea i've always heard and i don't know if this is true that it was about just saving a little bit more on the cap so they could pursue yannis in another maverick pipe dream like they did with dwight howard many years ago at the end of the day if yannis wants to you know miami has proven this time and time again if a star wants to come to you no matter how much cap room you have you can make things happen yeah possibly but it was also explained to me that you get an extra

year of maybe it's a yannis thing and maybe but it's also you get an extra year of lower salary for it's four years versus three years whereas your fourth year is is higher but yeah you lose it's like in a gambling term that's called a negative free roll where like this player ends up you know you're it's a small investment the option of him of of him becoming a superstar and now you you know now you're paying like the, the option of him, of, of, of him becoming a superstar. And now you, you know, now you're paying like the amount you're paying more versus the amount savings. Yeah. It was a bad move. That was, that was the hardest thing. And so for me, it was, it was less about whether he was good enough to play in the Clippers series. That's not really relevant to his long-term future with the club. The other part is his contract kind of aligns with,

with Lucas in some ways. So like how much cap space do you have if you do sign him to an extension? So yeah, but to your point, there's less to do with the Nico or whoever, you know, fucking up the extension earlier in the year and more to do with the fact that he was on this ridiculous contract where he was going to become an unrestricted free agent versus a restricted free agent. So the Perzingis trade happened, what, four months into your tenure. Correct. So what, what was your involvement with that? Zero, zero involvement in that trade, which is to say that my theory on that, I don't know if this is true or not, but this is kind of what I talked to before is, you know, Mark had asked me to, to rank who I thought were some of the best restricted free agents earlier on in the year. So I just, you know, had KP was on the list. Like here's a guy

I would look at as a restricted free agent thinking I'm going to have another year's worth of data to really evaluate him. I didn't realize it was, Hey, these are the guys we're going to go for. So it wasn't, I had zero involvement in the trade. Mark, I think it sent me a message. And this was the only trade that I didn't really have any involvement in. And I think that this was something that wasn't Mark's idea. I think this is a narrative that I've kind of, I've asked about,

but I think it's like, part of it is what I talked about earlier. A GM's job is to save his job. And so if you're a GM and you have this new guy who's around, who's really close with the coaching staff, really close with the owner, what can I do to, what kind of splash can I make here? So I think the KP trade was that. I think it was Mark obviously was on board for sure, but I had,

I received a message from Mark. We might be doing something. I think you're going to like it. Can you tell me what it is? No. I'm stupid, stupid, stitious is what he said. So, so I didn't know. Now, would I have vetoed the trade or said, no, I don't have any idea. I certainly wouldn't have given up picks the way I understood it. The conversations were going, I had, I had talked about absorbing Tim Hardaway Jr. and Courtney Lee's contracts for picks because that was the year KD and Kyrie were going to be free agents. And so the Knicks were actively trying to get cap space. So our conversation somehow went from, I think it was DeAndre Jordan or Wes Matthews or something like

this in a swap. I can't remember exactly for Tim Hardaway Jr., who I liked at the time. I thought he was a decent valued pick, decent valued player. And in exchange for getting some kind of compensation from them, absorbing salaries and giving them, that's kind of where it started. And I think it ended up with Porzingis somehow. But yeah, I had no involvement in the trade, which isn't to say I, then when the trade was explained to me and they told me picks were involved, my initial reaction was great.

What picks did we get? It's a true story uh and then when i was told that we gave up pics i was like oh and then of course you don't want to be the guy who's like you know oh what a stupid idea why did we do this like you know everyone was talking about like don this is how donnie does this is what he does he's a deal maker this is his expertise this is what he's good at this is why we need him etc so you know i was excited uh at the possibility but it wasn't you know i've said this before you don't align a superstar like a future superstar like rookie uh like luca and his rookie contract you don't even know what you have yet why are you in a rush to pair someone with him for the next that you're gonna have to max out yeah you have yet why are you in a rush to pair someone with him for the next that you're gonna have to max out yeah you have to sign them in free agency you're you know similar to the same thing i talked

about with halliburton and siakam it's like what is your rush one guy is much older than the other guy they don't really align uh and you don't even really know what you have yet so my my belief was we don't have to win right now. We can just kind of like chill out, build a team, see where we're at. And then we ended up making like a franchise altering decision. But hey, not my team wasn't really my thing. So you just kind of be a good team player and try to make the best of it. And then once you acquire him, having given up so much, you had to sign him, right? There was no... Yeah, of course.

The idea we're never going to... Same thing with Kyrie, right? You're never going to give up assets unless you're pretty confident the player is going to re-sign. And differently, Kyrie was unrestricted, but the only teams that had money to offer him weren't going to be interested in him. Whereas KP was unrestricted.

So the idea that KP was going to opt out of his contract kp was unrestricted so like the idea that kp was going to opt out of his contract nobody in the history of the nba has opted out of that contract same thing everyone was panicking uh when the article about me came over luke oh look so upset that donnie you know mark spears went on on espn breathlessly almost in tears talking about how luke is going to hold a press conference which was already scheduled ahead of time because it was an Olympic Slovenian press conference. But that was something that was spun by his camp. So yeah, no, you have to resign the guy. Otherwise, what are you doing here? And it wasn't even a rental because KP wasn't even

healthy. So you didn't get a half year rental. He didn't play. Something else you mentioned in there that- It's like a deposition, by the way, Dan. I'm looking forward to a conversation, not a deposition. What's happening here? This is a deposition? We're fascinated by the behind-the-scenes stuff, and I've got to think you were as well once you first

got in there and see how everything is working. I think the most interesting thing about it is that most people who leave a job in the NBA desperately want another job in the NBA. I turned down two jobs. So that's the thing is they're not going to say shit because they're not going to burn a bridge. You're like, I don't need this. So why not?

I think to me, like my, you know, I think I'm much more, to me that this, yeah, you're right. I think also like maybe the way I handled it post-Cato article was maybe not the best. If I'm looking back, I would have handled it a little bit. Because I honestly really didn't care about what was written in the article. To me, it was nonsense. What I cared about was the organization's lack of response to correct the actual narrative of what happened.

Keep in mind, everyone knew about the Donnie Nelson, Jason Luton thing at that point. Keep that in mind. That kind of just went away. Still pending as far as I'm concerned. As far as I understand it, the lawsuit hasn't gone away. It hasn't been settled. But so understand that that is in the background.

Everyone knows this. They can't talk about it because everyone's still trying to protect Jason and rightfully so. And also there's a pending lawsuit, so they have to be very careful. But also remember, in my mind, there was something else that happened with the Mavericks, which was the Tony Ronzoni situation in the hotel room in Vegas. And they had an immediate PR response for that. Mark's idea of a PR response for me, which is what bothered me. And I told Mark this afterwards. Now we're since now we're like totally cool. But my, my, my annoyance was that Mark's PR response was to do like the Streisand effect, which is to retweet, retweet

the article with the word bullshit. And it's like, okay, now you've just given it, you know, 30, you know, three and a half more, however many followers you have on Twitter, more visibility. Not that it needed more visibility after Tim Cato went on his immediate horror tour of podcasts over and over and over again. But, yeah, so that was like my issue was that. And people also don't know my personality. I think I'm this guy who's like difficult and really I'm an easygoing, you know, don't let most I don't know what other people think of me doesn't really bother me. I don't really I care about the people I care about so this wasn't really impacting my life negatively it was just kind of like oh i thought you had my back uh you know i gave you three years of my time and you paid me some amount of money you know the money doesn't mean anything to me

you know i did this because i believed in the vision you sold me and now where is you you know where are you backing me on this? And I think, you know, Mark, Mark's just in a different stratosphere in terms of wealth and, and, and fame that I don't think he's ever really had anyone talk to him the way I talked to him in that regard. Like where, like, you know, you know, stuff I said to him after when I was quitting was like, yo bro, like I don't want to be here anymore because these types of things are important to me. You know? And so, but yeah, to answer your initial question,

which I don't remember what it was, but it was something along the lines of, yeah, I didn't really care. I got offered other jobs. I would never work in the NBA again because at the end of the day, not being able to make a final decision really weighed on me a little bit.

Like if I'm doing all this work and I'm dependent on some guy who's like, I like this guy better. Why? Intangibles. That's not how I operate. So it was just a difficult situation. So yeah, maybe I shared more than I should have,

but it's just kind of my nature in some ways. You wouldn't take a run a franchise? You're the GM? Absolutely. Have you seen what these people look like after five years of running an NBA franchise? It's like becoming a president. They got two phones to one ear.

No, absolutely not. You can do it your way. You don't have to do it the way they're doing it. But you still don't have the absolute, I mean, what is the goal here? Your goal is to give up your, I don't know, people seem like my life is pretty good. I don't need to be a slave to the NBA draft.

It's a lot of work and the guys who do it well, really, really, really are willing to sacrifice a lot of wellbeing. And so for me, it was like, oh, I can kind of dip in and out. People think I was around Dallas all the time. Like, I was going to Mexico, coming back with a tan. Like that probably didn't endear me to some of the staff. I was always working, but I had the freedom to work wherever I wanted to work. So, no, I wouldn't be a GM. You have to be there all the time. I wouldn't want to do that. It just wasn't, you know, maybe at some point I thought,

you know, it'd be interesting. But once I saw the reality of it, how the sausage was made, I was like, no, that's not for me. So the move then is just go buy a team in a Spanish soccer league. Yeah. Or an NBA team. I'm not rich enough. The NBA teams got more and more expensive along the way. So, yeah. And I also, you know, I studied basketball for 20 years. Basketball got a little boring to me after. Basketball, in my opinion, is kind of salt. You need a top five talent to win, and you basically spread the court and shoot a lot of threes.

The math is pretty simple. Soccer is a little more intricate and a little more exciting to me because of that. That's what I was going to say is what's your background with soccer or analytics or strategy? Like anything, you collect enough data. There's a wealth of data available in football, soccer. We call it football over here. So building models, trying to predict outcomes of games, trying to predict what a player's worth. If you can give me the 11 players who are starting for each team,

I can predict, if I can predict the outcome better than the Vegas odds or here in the European sports book odds, and that tells me I'm onto something. It tells me I understand players. So that was kind of the impetus of it during COVID. It was the first sport to start up again. So I became more interested in it then. We're already building models. I loved, loved, loved the idea of relegation and promotion. I don't know if you guys are familiar with this, but the Detroit Pistons would be in the fucking fourth division of football somewhere now instead of the top division. In the NBA, failure is rewarded with draft picks.

Here, it's a death sentence for some clubs, so that's exciting. So, yeah, we just like a different approach over here in terms of like we're a data-driven organization. We try to lean into what we know, which is analytics and strategy and modeling. We identified our coach that way, the new coach we hired. So that was kind of the impetus for it, just something new. I like Europe. I spent most of the summers in Europe anyway. So even back then, um, we want to,

even during free agency, during the Mavericks one year, I was in Europe, you know, basically in Greece trying to help Mark out then. So, um, that was kind of the impetus for it.

Do the, even in the second division, I guess like to the players over there where do they have track? Do you have tracking data? Yeah, we don't have, so we're in the third. Okay, clear. Sorry. Hopefully we'll be in the second. We're in first place right now. We're tied for first. So we came close last year within we lost the last game of the season one zero. Well, we're actually two one. We were up one nothing at halftime. We have in the Liga two, the second division, there is tracking. So there's full tracking provided by the league.

In our league, we have Statsbomb does tracking with human track data. And then there's something called Skill Corner, which uses the broadcast feed to provide data very similar to Second Spectrum, although not quite as effective because it uses the cameras from the broadcast. There's a lot of data though, a lot of data. So how were you received as far as, do you speak Spanish?

I don't speak Spanish. I'm learning, but it's going slow. And I found that I really enjoy the way I communicate in English. So until I get to a level where I can be nearly as, let's say, eloquent or efficient in my speech, I'm avoiding speaking in Spanish. But I can understand what most people say and I can string together some sentences, but I don't come across very intelligent when I try to speak Spanish. I only ask that because obviously we know the old trope, every sport in America, when it comes to numbers and analytics, and we're going to do things a little bit differently because of this, which almost always end up being correct. How it's received by, I don't know much about European soccer. I know analytics are a huge, huge part of it, but I don't know necessarily how the players react to it.

Players are great. The difference between football players and NBA players is pretty massive. I think there's a real deferential culture here, is pretty massive i think um there's a real deferential culture here uh and so we've never ever had a situation where we've explained to a player why you know the so this year to be clear we have i have a coach that i identified as like a top top level coach convinced him to leave the top division in holland to come down here and help us and so i don't i had more impact on how the mavericks played uh basketball strategy wise and game plan-wise than I do with the team I own. Because what I realized is I trust this guy to do his job and I let him do his job and I don't fuck with him.

I try to sign all the players that I like with his input, but I let the coach have free reign. But last year, it wasn't like that. Last year, we kind of thought we could coach some coaches up. We could hire a coach. Maybe he wasn't as good and give them the right analytical information. We realized that didn't work because at the end of the day, these players are like wolves. If they can sense some weakness in you and then you don't really believe in what you're saying, but you're kind of what the owner is saying, it can cause some issues. We had a little bit of that last year, but not a lot. The players are great though um if you can identify something as simple as shoot less three shoot

less two long twos take more threes in soccer and explain to a player there are some things like that they've all been pretty well receptive to it like high crosses are a good example they're pretty low efficient thing you do so you want to cross low or you want to cut back in versus crossing the ball high so we had a of players who were crossing a lot. We kind of weaned that out of our approach. But yeah, it's been good. It seems like a lot of fun. What's that?

I said it seems like a lot of fun. You've arrived at a point. It's like this is what I wanted to do when I was a kid. It's like a real-life football manager in some ways. It's kind of fun. Super cool. I love the whole whole like you said the relegation the draft pick thing it's do you find it really weird that that european side

we're we're a capitalist society and we hate you know every politically it's like oh we hate socialism which is what nba is like the least capital yeah that's what all all of our sports leagues are socialism aren't they yeah it's like a commie socialist red but it is really when you think about it it's it's it's the revenue is shared fairly equally obviously you have your individual tv contracts their team can sign but bri is kind of spread out between the players and the and then yeah you can be as inept as you want running your team. I look at the way Donald Sterling ran his team for years. This is a joke.

How is this rewarded? You know, it didn't matter because no matter how shitty he ran his team, he was also shitty. They're also shitty at drafting players. But like the Pistons, you know, all the teams that were, you know, I had to like game plan. You know, the Mavs got in trouble last year for tanking. And really, they didn't get in trouble for tanking.

They got in trouble for talking about tanking. Everyone was always tanking. They just weren't talking about it. You know, Henke got booted from the league for being honest about his approach. So it's kind of like, yeah, in some ways, the American sports are kind of fraudulent in that regard because you can't be too honest and everyone kind of like wink, wink, nudge, nudge just plays the game. Here, it's like, you know, when I bought this team, there was like a big fear that if we didn't get promoted, that the team would disappear because financially, it's not a moneymaker right now. It's losing money.

But we have, you know, my plan is to get into a higher league. And then the other part that's exciting is you can invest in players. You can sign a player for a small amount and sell them for a higher amount. So that's like our business strategy in terms of to make the team competitive in the top league. who can, you know, their max salary allow, their salary cap is like around 400 million, let's say, whereas competitors in their league are like somewhere around 40 million, just because Real Madrid's revenues are so high. And let's say like an Osasuna's revenues aren't as high, to use an example, or Almira. So there are some disadvantages to it as well, but it's more exciting to me. It's different. It's more exciting to me. It's maybe it's more, and just the gambling aspect of investing in a lower level team and bringing them up is a real fun story.

There isn't anything like that in American sports. Do you think that the international soccer community is going to be pretty fired up to come to Dallas? For the World Cup? Yeah. I mean, more so probably than they were to go to Qatar or Qatar, depending on how you want to pronounce it. Yeah, I guess that's a good point. Everyone around here, like Jerry Jones and for some reason like Emmitt Smith, were at a press conference yesterday where they were certain they were getting the final.

And then they didn't. Yeah, New Jersey. Yeah, and it was hilarious but I just a lot of people were excited to go to Dallas and now they're finding out they're going to New Jersey so I just don't I just can't imagine your average European citizen if we just limited to Europe

they're going to come to Dallas and be like what is this what is this I think I've already said enough bad things about the city of Dallas and it's not the city of Dallas it's just I didn't enjoy my time there just because of where I chose to live. It was my own choice. But Dallas isn't so bad. I don't know.

Yeah. I mean, it's different. I mean. Stop it. No, it really wasn't. I mean, look, for me, like I was choosing between like Monaco mexico south of france you know greece yeah if you're throwing dallas in that mix it's not it's not holding up to no it's it's never going to get promoted it can it can be like nebraska or something i don't mean to offend

the people from nebraska but if we were sioux city or whatever yeah it's not a bad spot you know so i've never been over in uh europe i'm going to France in about a month to visit my daughter who is studying there for this semester. She's in Paris. She's actually in – her apartment is like two blocks from the Eiffel Tower. That's a good – around this mountain. That's a good area. So from what I understand, you are an expert at avoiding jet lag. I am an expert. There's the CIA. People type in the CIA hack for jet lag. That's what I read this

article on it and I've been doing it and it works really, really well. But yeah, you basically starve yourself for 24 to 36 hours before your flight. Take your first meal at breakfast time of wherever you're arriving. So if you're on a plane, I go back and forth a lot to Mexico or even like sometimes to the US from from Spain direct with my doodle. And neither one of us have suffered from jet lag in the last three years by applying this approach. It works quite well. Starve yourself, take your first meal at breakfast time, and then immediately acclimate to the the rhythm of the sun in the place you're staying at so it helps if you're in near the sun that definitely helps your doodle my doodle he's i don't know where he is he's got sick last last night two nights ago he got sick he got some kind of food poisoning or something so he's he's not

his usual doodle self today he's very he's prominent on social media and you're claiming that he you've also solved his uh jet lag dogs don't get jet lag. I figured this out. When I go from Spain to last trip I took was from Spain to LA for a few days. And we flew out immediately after our Copa match. So we, you know, it's ideal if you can fly out at 10 PM because then your dog, cause you know, this dog's got to be on this plane for 12 hours. So it's nice if you leave at night. I work it around his time. So we sleep on the plane. We get on the plane at 10. We sleep.

We arrive in America. It's also 10 p.m. So it's like, okay, this is kind of weird. Now we go back to sleep. And then we wake up the next morning and we're good. Never have any jet lag. And, yeah, he's never had any jet lag, never had any accidents on the plane. He's a one-of-a-kind world traveler.

That's nice i wish i would have known that for the now that i'm probably done traveling internationally it's the it's the worst move i was telling dan yesterday is when you you you get to where you want to go and you just go to sleep no it's so i had some people you probably heard that on my in the podcast i did with my friend live and igor like they were on my boat at the time and you know the boat has like blackout you're on you're in the middle of the ocean so it's like how could you have a jet lag just get up at eight in the morning jump in the water but you know they use the blackout blinds which really make the room black and so yeah they would sleep they went and slept they slept till six o'clock then at six p.m the next day and they're like oh we can't beat this jet lag it's like yeah because you're awake now when the sun is down like you should be getting up when the sun comes up so yeah we're

the plane stuff is interesting because you can't be eating on the plane if you start eating on the plane when you first like sit down and start taking your meals your body has an internal clock based on your feeding schedule too and that's probably why the doodle also doesn't suffer jet lag because he's not eating he only really knows when he's eating so so you want to make yourself hungrier for that meal like you said at 8 a.m or whatever correct yeah that's your first window that you're eating and so your your body attunes itself to that and then it anticipates your next meal around around uh around dinner time so that would be my recommendation where uh where's your head at on crypto still all in very what am i still all in i've been all in crypto for a long time uh yeah i mean uh i wish i could say that i uh you know was a little bit more aggressive selling

some of the tops because i do believe in in the cycles the general cycle but yeah i think this is about if you're not if you're still negative crypto now, there's probably something wrong with you, in my opinion. Like this is about as bullish an environment for crypto as there's ever been. You have all of the fraudulent people have been washed out. You have black, you know, CEO of BlackRock on CNBC pumping your bags, talking about the ETF. black you know ceo of blackrock on cnbc pumping your bags talking about the etf this is like the largest wealth management and financial company in the world uh the etf being passed also means

that the likelihood of it being banned uh is is is near zero because the lobbying situation has changed um so yeah i think it's it's you know not crypto because there's a lot of scams in crypto So, yeah, I think it's it's not crypto because there's a lot of scams in crypto. Bitcoin isn't a scam because it's not crypto. It's its own coin that's decentralized and there's no authority on it. But, yeah, there's always going to be scams, just like any type of financial instrument. There's going to be scams. But as long as you're in the right types of crypto, I think it's a pretty, pretty good time to start scaling in. I think there's all there's always a risk with it. start you know scaling in i think there's all there's always a risk with it and i think the if you can stomach the volatility uh you can kind of do well i got rc into crypto by the way

and he was like he was like i gotta get to sell because he couldn't handle the swings the volatility just got to him and he was checking the price too often so he had to sell it all but he made money he got in i got i told both him and Mark around, I think it was just before MicroStrategy was doing its bond offering. I don't know how much you guys follow crypto, but it was a pretty big event where they had to file with the SEC to announce they're going to buy like a billion or a billion and a half dollars worth of crypto. So you could actually front run them. They weren't allowed to buy. They had to announce that they were going to buy. Then they had to buy on that date. So I was like, this is about as close to a sure thing as there ever is in life

You know, even if you only want to sell afterwards But they bought and then then later on Tesla bought and then it was the whole GameStop Kind of people sitting around their house doing nothing with stimulus money So yeah, RC was like sweating the price of crypto like every day And then he could he could here you know here's a guy who's who's like about as passionate and as hard working as it gets uh but also is like you know pretty strong pretty high in some cases yeah so i don't know if crypto was the right thing for me when the price goes down 30 i'm just like oh okay no big deal him it

was like i think i think it was negatively impacting his day-to-day. Yeah, I got him into it for sure. I got a couple other things that I just thought. Here's a guy that might have an opinion on cryogenics. I don't have an opinion on cryogenics. Okay, I thought maybe you would for some reason. I don't mind talking. I don't mind. You ask me whatever you guys want.

I'm not trying to get away from you, but I don't have an opinion on cryogenics. Okay, yeah. No, I'm just, you guys want. I'm not trying to get away from you, but I don't have an opinion on cryogenics. Okay. Yeah. No, I'm just, like I said, I'm just, I'm finishing out there.

It just seemed like in listening to you talk a lot, it just felt like you're a guy who is analyzing everything. And might this have. No, I think people, I think, I think, yeah,

I think I know what I know and I know what I don't know, and I don't know anything about cryogenics. It's good for you. I know that. I'm not looking to – I feel like my life's had a pretty good run. I'd like to live as long as possible. The idea of living forever doesn't appeal to me. So I feel like I'll accept it when it happens and maximize every moment of my life,

but I'm not trying to be like that Brian Johnson guy who's trying to reverse age himself himself. Like at some point you have to just accept the fact that it's part of the, it's part of the natural, you know, natural rhythm of life that it's going to end at some point. So appreciate every moment while you have it. Now you sound like an old school coach who's telling me that, uh, I mean, this is just the way it's done. Uh, and you can't change. The one thing I don't ascribe to is coach speak. That was always my pet peeve in the NBA was coach was coach speak this like this type of language is codified language to explain things that can't be explained using words that you know sound good but i'm not

a coach speak guy like like in the real world dan did you read moneyball uh did i read moneyball um you're familiar with moneyball right yeah i know of course no i read Moneyball? You're familiar with Moneyball, right? Yeah, no, of course not. I read Moneyball. I think, yeah, I read Moneyball when it first came out. I was a big fan of Michael Lewis until he got paid to write a book about Sam Bankman Freed. That was a complete... That was a bad look.

Yeah. It was, yeah. A lot of people really got a bad look there. But yeah, I read Moneyball. I thought it was decent. I think it's interesting to, I think a lot of the stuff that was written about wasn't necessarily super accurate just because it wasn't like, it wasn't like they really solved baseball in that regard, but it was, you know, it was a decent story for sure. Yeah. I just grew up a

baseball nerd and I love learning that everything I've been thinking is wrong and a lot of your history seems to be with running into people who don't love learning that and it's just like when you I never thought about it before I heard you say we should try to uh sometimes you target you look at other okay if you're making a trade in the NBA, I would think it's just about the players. But sometimes maybe look at the other team's GMs and who is looking to make a big splash because they got to save their job. And agents.

Or agents. Or who's a new owner like the Suns with KD. That's one that a lot of people talk about. Yeah, that's definitely one that I think is a, you know in in poker there's always like we call it like whale hunting or like looking for fish yeah so kyc know your customer so identifying the weak spot at the table like there's that not money ball but there's a movie rounders or like if you can't spot the weak weak player at the table it's you so that's that's kind of the philosophy i grew up my like people think i came from money or came from whatever

like i grew up having to like gamble and not having to, but I chose to. And so for me, these types of things are always like solving these puzzles were always important to me for, because it's fun, but also because it was financially rewarding. So yeah, I think that's, that's something maybe that could be fun about being a general manager in some way, but also can be, you know, manager in some way, but also can be a little bit difficult. But saving your job thing, I think is something that's really, really, because you see it not just in basketball, but I think it's true amongst all sports.

It's like, what can I do here to handcuff my franchise is maybe the result, but hey, maybe I can just run it back and create a splash. Um, I didn't experience that as an owner of the team, but I definitely remember in the summertime, everyone was clamoring for us to sign a striker. And we had already signed one last winter, which was also the people almost revolted over when we made this move in the summer, we had our leading goal score of the team at the time, our striker, we let go to our number one rival because we needed a spot to sign another player who'd only scored two goals that year, but who our numbers said was like very, very good. So we signed this player, Jesus de Miguel, let go our leading goal scorer, our leading striker. Our fans were like in uproar. It was

like a revolt. It'd be like trading, not like trading L, but it'd be somewhat like trading Luca, you know, for this tub, for this town. And so now fast forward a year later, the guy we traded for is leading the league in goals by a big number. The guy we got rid of has scored, has only scored two goals since. So, but my point is, is that around the summertime, everyone's clamoring for me to sign a striker. And it almost occurred to me at that point, like, okay, we already have a striker. It's this guy, Jesus DeMiguel. But I almost signed one just to shut people up. And now imagine if I didn't own the team. If I was a general manager, I probably would have went out and signed one because I would

have wanted everyone to see what a good job I was doing. It's also easier just to make the safe choice and go along with consensus because when stuff doesn't go right, you can kind of be like, well, you know, everyone, everyone, everyone else agreed with me. It wasn't an outside the box thing. Whereas for me, it's, it's, it's, it's okay to make, you know, to take, take risks and, and, and, and make big gambles and hope they pay off. So. So with your team, So with your team, are you not the – there's always this performative thing in sports where we have to act really pissed if you lose. And, you know, we have to walk on eggshell. We used to take trips with the Dallas Stars and going on their team bus after a loss, you couldn't smile.

You had to keep your head down. You couldn't make a peep. And it was always so – They lose like 35% of their game. Yeah, it was so illogical to me. I had a situation like that my first year with the Mavericks. One of the assistants on the bus – or on the plane, excuse me, was like, you know, they're all reviewing film. You know, the last thing I want to do after I, after I, we lose a game is to watch

more film because I feel like I want to have like a clear mind to, to watch it. I don't want to be upset. Not that I was upset, but anyways, I was like reading a book or something. And one of the coaches got upset with me when the assistants, not Rick, but when the assistants got mad at me and they were just like in front of the other coaches and we're like, you know, it doesn't seem like these losses bother you. Like, you know, like, where's your, you where's your you know what the like this isn't a joke to us like we're doing this because we need to we're not here you know i think he was offended by or maybe he didn't understand was like ray very early on in my my maybe my first road trip i ever took with the team and my response was like if i thought you know acting like a child because we lost would help

us win games then i'd start throwing but I don't see how it helps with a better decision. Did not endear me to some of the people on the team, I would say. That was one of the moments. But it's just like, it's just true. Like, what is it? How does it help you? How does it help me make? It's performative.

Like you said, it's performative. Like, oh, man, break something, throw a trash can across the room. Like, I don't, that's not me. I also don't really i've never been a someone who really uh expresses my emotions negatively like that because i just feel like it doesn't serve me and also it's it's just not part of who i am so and it's not a robot is that part of how your your soccer team is too now it's is that a change everyone here is very passionate like here it's different it's like one of the you know the people here have been amazing like the our our the reception i have as the president of the team is

like top level i mean it's like i i if i wanted to i would i could sit there and take a thousand selfies and never leave because everyone wants to take my my photo with me or my dog or whatever they love me for whatever reason because we're doing a good job and we're in first but but here the people are very passionate so and you know the current coach we have now he's not spanish he's he's dutch but he's also like a very passionate guy like you know he's so it's it's how whatever works for people is fine i don't i don't um our my team doesn't know my my team definitely shows emotion that's just who they are they're at you know it's part of the culture here too we have a lot of Spanish people Spanish people are just a little bit more uh I would say more geared towards that versus like maybe like an Icelandic person or

a Nordic person might be a little more reserved it's just a part of it is cultural I think in some ways and um yeah the fans are I say this in the nicest possible way are batshit like they're they they live and brought and die with this team. It's awesome to see when we're winning and it's not so fun to see when we're losing. Hopefully, we just don't lose and we're good to go. I got one more thing and I know we've kept you for so long

and I can't thank you enough. Whether it's with the Mavs or maybe in the old days of looking at poker forums, we got a little of this when we were in our recent lawsuit situation. And then a lot of people with their opinions, oh, this is what's happening or this is what's going to happen. Like it was comical to read and our lawyers, our attorneys found this Reddit page and they loved reading it because they're all these lawyers are idiots. They don't know what they're doing. And they loved it.

How about you? When you know what's going on behind the scenes somewhere, do you look at the fan forums or what people are saying? Or even Twitter? Yeah, Twitter even. I'm a Twitterer. Some people would, the kind description would be

power user. The not so kind description would be like, you know, addict in some ways. It's like my brain is wired now to get information fucking every 256 word bits or whatever. So yeah, I read this stuff. I try not to, you know, I'll say this, like I think, and this isn't to like sound whatever, but I think like someone else could have really been damaged by that Cato piece and the stuff that was said about me Because there's a lot not just what not what Tim wrote because Tim was Tim didn't really say anything super negative about me Although he did but it wasn't like mean-spirited. Yeah, he was just trying to write what he thought was the truth

But yeah, I mean it's hard not to read stuff and and and be impacted by it in some way I think like someone else might have had like a really, really hard time. Like imagine I did need a job in the NBA or I did need to earn a living somehow. Now, a friend of mine who's like, oh, your Q score is so low right now. You got to raise your Q score because people don't think of you positively, you know. But it's kind of, for me, it's more like kind of, you know, maybe there's a part of me that is maybe still somewhat kind of, I would say, you know, it's a negative aspect where I like to, I don't know, it's not clapping back, but it's like giving more, like today,

just before I came on the show, like there's this idea of like, oh my God, Bob drafted Josh Green instead of whoever it was they pretended that we were going to draft if it wasn't for me but what they don't realize and this is the god's honest truth that if i wasn't around you probably would have had wendell carter jr instead of luca donchich you know mark talked about this on all the smoke podcast our analytics guys love luca who's the analytics guy there was no analytics department aside from one person and me. I can promise you that one person wasn't going out on a limb for Luca just because he didn't have that type of relationship with Mark. And it's also tough to go out on a limb when, you know, you need the job and you, you know, like, I'm sure he did some, maybe like Luca,

maybe didn't, I don't know. All I know is I was the only one, I only talked to Mark and I was pushing very, very heavily to make this deal. And Mark will say that the reason he did the deal was because I pushed really, really heavily. So, you know, correcting that narrative is somewhat fun to me because these Luka fans are like out of their fucking mind because they think, A, I ruined the team. B, Luka hated me. And so I almost chased away Luka too. If they didn't get rid of me, Luca would have left. All of this stuff that they believe because some guy who lost his mind during COVID and

was scared he was going to lose his job decided he was willing to do whatever it took to keep it, even if that meant going attacking me personally and crafting the story that wasn't true or allegedly outing someone who was gay and wanted to be in the closet still. Like, just think about that for a second. That's the one thing I will say. So correcting that is important to me in some ways, because I feel like that does still bother me a little bit, that people believe this story to be true because someone wrote it. And the state of journalism is such that nobody will actually write a new article they'll just take the old article and well the reason why he left the

maps is because luca donchish didn't like him blah blah blah so the nice thing about reddit twitter having your own platform is you can you can you know tell your own version of of what happened the bad thing is is that you can have people that should never have any interaction with you on a day-to-day basis are now impacting your life. Like, do I really care what's SLOB fan, Slovenian Luca fan? Like if that guy came up to me and said something on the street, I'd be like, yo, bro, who are you? Why are you talking to me? But here he's on my phone and he has access to me for like a minute and a half of my day. I'm sure he's a nice guy, but you know, I don't need this guy in my life. So that's a weakness that I think I definitely had a problem of when I was younger. And it probably still

impacts me a little bit now. But it's also fun. I think for me, I also enjoy interacting with our football fans, being somewhat, I don't want to say controversial, but somewhat I'm trying to get more notoriety or attention to my soccer club. So part of that is my approach to Twitter is part of that. It's not completely contrived, but it's also somewhat contrived. I bring my dog around with me everywhere because, A, I love having my dog around, but, B, it's also fun to beat a second division team and have your dog run on the pitch after the game is over.

It's like it's kind of fun. It made the news in Spain all over. So it got some attention. So, yeah, it's, you know, it is what it is. Twitter is you guys are on Twitter. I mean, Jake, I wouldn't have even had contact with you if it wasn't for Twitter. So, you know, it opens up some doors and it also opens up your life to people that you probably shouldn't have access. You probably shouldn't allow inside your house or your life. It's very tough too, but you have to at least try to tailor your experience. Like I have no

problem blocking somebody and used to, these guys would make fun of me. They're like, Oh, you soft. You're just going to, I'm like, no, I just don't. If there's negative energy coming my way, that's not going to make me feel better. Not going to make me a better professional. I'll just block you. Yeah. or mute. Sometimes I use the mute button so they don't even know that they're getting to you. I kind of like them to know, but that's just more of a personal thing for me. You have to say really something to me

like really, really rude to get blocked mostly. And also for me, I don't look at my mentions that often anymore, and I'm kind of exclusively looking at the for you part versus the following which is almost even more scary because now my for you feed is like completely tailored to this like thought bubble this like bubble that i'm in and it's it's kind of pushing you in one direction

but it's also kind of interesting because it's giving me stuff that i would never i've never even i would never follow this guy now i'm seeing him and it's oh it's kind of interesting and it's it's pretty smart it knows what you're paying attention to and what you're not paying attention to. And it's constantly feeding you more of that. So on the one hand, it's a little dangerous. On the other hand, it's also pretty brilliant in some ways. What's your favorite gambling movie? Um, favorite gambling movie, California split is a good one. It's a classic. Uh, that's probably my favorite one i would say yeah i mean yeah california split it's old one but it's a good one rounders is great i probably watch rounders like

10 to 15 times rounders is on tv i stop and watch it pay that man his money so good yeah so many i mean it's completely unrealistic like okay if you spot a guy's towel and first thing to do is tell him about it so he gets angry no first thing to do is tell him about it so he gets angry. No. First thing to do is to keep on exploiting that towel for as long as you possibly can. But whatever. They had to wrap up the movie in an hour and a half. It's like you guys probably have to wrap up this movie at some point.

Maybe that should have been my question. Most realistic gambling movie. I don't know if there are any really realistic gambling movies. I would say, you know, Molly's Game is the opposite of of that but the story behind it is is i think even more crazy than people realize like you know these so i don't know you guys know what molly's game but she talks about this game but like this like literally the biggest poker

game in the world um i i was i played in it a few times you know with some of the most famous people in the world now that one is spun through the narrative that she was like this hero that which she wasn't but that's that's an most realistic i don't know i'd have to think about that a little bit more uh there's not really that many good gambling movies i thought about doing a gambling uh docu-series or not a docu-series but a series uh with drama like an hbo style show with a friend of mine who's a writer and we've spent some time thinking about that but maybe maybe when i have more time i'll i'll get into that because there are some interesting stories in gambling and there is a real a real opportunity for for that there's like a cool hbo one called it only lasted for a very short period of time because the horses sadly kept on dying i forgot what it was called but it was on hbo

and it was about hollywood park um no i'm being serious like what it was called. It was on HBO. It was about Hollywood Park. No, I'm being serious. Really, it was sad. It is sad. I think horse racing should be eradicated. I don't know. Didn't you predict it would be gone in 15 years?

I only have about five years left on that. The lobby is too big. I grew up around the horse racetrack. That was my first exposure to gambling. That's where I first started trying to, like, make money gambling with my dad. I was, like, 10 years old, but I wasn't.

I was, like, sitting there with the math, doing, like, the buyer formulas and everything. But then I came to find out that it's a game that can't really be beat. But, yeah, we owned horses at one point with some friends, or I've had some friends who own horses the horses do know they're racing and they do want to win it is interesting but they're also you know it's not safe and it's it's inhumane and yeah it probably should be banned uh if you

really care about animals it's hard to argue that it's a net positive for for that sort of thing so they have a somber note to say though so you. Well, I was going to say, though, so they know they won, huh? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your claim is. I had a friend who had a racehorse, and, I mean, it knew the day of the race. I mean, they're just like, do you guys have pets or anything? Sure. Yeah, like, it's amazing how smart these animals are.

Like, my dog knows when I'm taking a shower at 7 to 8 p.m. at night that, like, I'm going out somewhere. It's just not like a usual occurrence for me. So like the look on his face is like, oh, like when I was dating for a while. Oh, yeah. Like a look gives you like a sad look. Right. He knows that you're leaving.

He understands when I close my computer that it's time to go to, you know, that usually means I'm leaving to go somewhere also. So it's the sound of the computer closing will wake them up and want to go somewhere. Like they're really fucking smart. So like, yeah, the horses know for sure. Like this guy is like, you know, he sits on the pitch without a leash, will not piss on the field ever. He goes like way on the perimeter of the field because he recognizes that these are where the human beings are walking. And so the field is grass. It's like the perfect spot to go yeah i should go pee on rocks so yeah but he's an abnormally smart dog um but yeah he never runs on the pitch during practice until i until i give him the signal and when when the players go for a water break that's when he's allowed to run and do

his laps and as soon as the water breaks over he comes back and sits at my side never yeah the dog the animals are smart so yeah the horse definitely, maybe not every horse knows, maybe not glue stick number six knows, but the rest of them does. That's a high. Yeah. Man, we can't thank you enough. This has been super, super interesting, fun,

and informative. Don't take one clip and spin it into a negative. I know how you guys work. No, that ain't us. At some point, you're going to find the one bad thing I said. No, we're just going to clip just the jet lag thing. The world needs to know. Shadow GM goes nuts on Donnie Nelson for the fifth time.

By the way, why don't you guys get Donnie on the pod? You know, he hasn't really done much. It's weird. I thought because he used to be, he would appear on our station I don't know, once a month at least. But I just haven't heard much. I mean, probably some of that is the pending litigation

stuff. To be perfectly not to having some empathy for him. Like here's a guy who put his entire heart and soul into the franchise for a long period of time. You know, I think very quickly along the way, he kind of saw me as an enemy for whatever reason. His influence was slowly waning. Maybe he thinks he handled himself perfectly correctly versus me.

Maybe he did. I don't know. But from my perspective, it is, yeah, I do have a little bit of, up until I found out about the alleged Luton situation, I had a lot of like, you know, honestly sadness for him because for me, it wasn't a competition really. Like it would have been great to learn, you know, work with him, learn some things that he could teach me. You know, maybe there's some

things I could explain about, you know, it could have been a nice, a nice working relationship, but it really wasn't that, unfortunately, it was more combative or adversarial. So, but when then when I found out about the alleged, then my opinion of them changed a lot, because now I'm like, oh, wow, this, you know, depending on which side of the story you believe, you know, he goes from just being someone who's very cutthroat and, and, and, um,

competitive to save his job to, you know, this is a, you know, depending on which side you believe. Yeah. So, um,

yeah, I don't know. At the end of the day, you ended up, uh, with a football team instead of a futsal team. So what a win, right?

There you go. That's the way to end the pod. Yeah. You came out. Okay. Did Cato ever call you for, for comments or anything before he put that out? 15 minutes before he was about to publish the article.

I believe he, uh, he sent me a text message, asked me if I want to comment on anything in my response. I never did any media. So I was always just like not interested. No, I had no idea what he was talking about.

Didn't think it was going to be good for me, but didn't care either. I was in, I was on vacation at the time. So it was always just like not interested. No, I had no idea what he was talking about. Didn't think it was going to be good for me, but didn't care either. I was on vacation at the time. And then the article came out and my phone blew up and I was just like, oh, this doesn't seem good. But it was also kind of funny at the same time, you know, because it was also around the time Mark was dabbling in that. time mark was dabbling in in that you know mark released a blog post that day on uh iron protocol crypto thing that ended up turning out to be a ponzi scheme and so it was like literally the same day and i actually sent them a message like the night before i was like hey you might want to get out of this iron thing it's it's you know it's a ponzi and you're like no it's not a ponzi i'm

just like well it wasn't created by a guy named char Ponzi, but you know, Ponzi. So here's the math behind why it won't last. And then, then the article came out. So I, you know, my, my response to him was like, Hey, did you ever get out of iron? Cause it was like a pretty busy day for everybody. And he didn't. So that was kind of maybe, you know, it's kind of funny. Were you surprised he, uh, in the sale this year? Yeah. Very surprised. I, in fact, I talked to him about it afterwards and I was just like, year? Yeah, very surprised. In fact, I talked to him about it afterwards. And I was just like, I never thought in a million years you would ever sell the club. And but, you know, I'm sure he's explained his reasons for it. I'm not going to make sense to me. There's all kinds of and I had lots of people like, oh, is it because of this? Is it because of that? Is it because of that? Is

it because of this? And I'm just like, I just think he just wanted to, you know, he understands what his strengths and weaknesses are and he understands where the league is going. And, you know, he's also, he's also been doing it for a long time and why not? You know, so it did, but it did surprise me. Yeah. But I mean, if he's able to still maintain control of the team, it seems like a pretty good deal from him, for him, however long that lasts. Yeah. All right, man. Well, thanks so much.

Yeah. Thank you guys. I'll definitely follow along and see what you guys are up to. And yeah, happy to help. Happy to provide some color. Hopefully gave you a little bit of entertainment. Well,

we have a, we have a new favorite Spanish soccer team. Now we do. I've had a team. I would let's get on. No. We do. What's your name on the team? Castellon, no? All right, there you go. I literally am CD Castellon. That just means Club Deportivo.

It's like Club Castellon, basically. I mean, of course I knew that. That's like this weekend when they take on Sueta. There you go, Sueta. Thank you. Which is like technically almost in africa but it's technically a part of spain you don't say that you don't say the ad even though they are they are ad exactly big match and then the third to the last week of the season is a battle between

current number one and well they're basically tied with us that'll be a big game the winner of that likely gets promoted so hopefully it'll be us How do they have a team in Ibiza? They were in the second division last year. How do you ever get anything done? Yeah, I almost bought that team because I was like, I would rather live in Ibiza. It's a nice area.

It could be fun. It seems like you were primarily looking at clubs located near the water. Exactly. I didn't want to buy a club that wasn't accessible via boat, basically. I't want to buy a club that wasn't accessible via boat basically. I'm going to buy a jersey.

Harala, Bose, Bob. I'll ship you guys some stuff. Yes, Harala, Bose. I will buy a jersey as well. That's our main focus now. Let me fix the store first because the store, I just had a meeting today. The store is a nightmare. Let me take care of that first and then you can buy a kick.

I think the U.S. shipping is expensive. The navigation is not great. I only focused on the sports side for the first year, and now I'm trying to pay more attention to the business side because I feel like there's some stuff we can improve there. We feel you. Yeah, we know how that goes. All right, man.

Well, maybe we do this again sometime. See you. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks know how that goes. All right, man. Well, maybe we do this again sometime. See you. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks a lot. That's the great Jarell Abos. Did I hit X? No, you're good. That was awesome.

You can do X now? Yeah. What a guy. Very interesting. Yeah, yeah. And I, oddly enough, we talked to him for a long time and I probably could talk to him for more. He seemed very cool about it.

Yeah, I mean, we pitched him on 30 minutes and he went to 115. So that's always the best for my guest. An hour 15? Yeah. Okay. No, that was great. No, and I'm with you. I feel like we had another hour.

Yeah, no, I feel like maybe we'll get them on again sometime. I actually will now follow a soccer team. Sure, why not? That'll be the one. Why not? Hey, guys, I kind of have to pee. Okay. I don't know if we're prepared for that or not.

Well, you know what that means. The Dunzo. Okay. I don't know if we were prepared for that or not. Well, you know what that means. The Dunza. The Dunza. All right, all right, all right, all right. We finally got a team. We're in Austin, Texas. About damn time and right on time. Yeah, the great game of soccer is coming to our city,

but the great chance that we have right now is to take Austin and give Austin to the rest of the world. You're listening to The Dome Zone. No puppet. No puppet. No puppet. Twice in one day. A little extra.

Something extra. How you feeling? You lighter? Lighter on your feet? You're not so full of urine? You just said I gotta go. Oh, okay, yeah. Okay, sorry.

I was trying to... I know that was in real world five minutes ago, but in Jake and this little magic world that we're in, it was like 30 seconds ago that you said that, and you already forgot. Yeah, and I didn't forget Haralabal was on, and he was awesome. Or Haralabos. You know what? Before Jake's assorted NFL notes, what if we just do a little bit of viewer mail?

A couple birthdays out of the way. Just kind of relax. We have fewer hotmail. Hope this reaches you from hotmails hot stepsister MSN. MSN. That's a blast from the past.

He says my dad is your fat doctor. Oh, no. I know. I know. You're in trouble. He's really not that fat, but he's like, he's told me to lose weight. You give him the side eye. He could lose weight himself, but he's, now I feel like, oh my gosh.

Anyway, he's 70 today. He says, I did not wake him up in that special way. Don't worry, he respects HIPAA. I've seen you at his office, but was too nervous to approach an A-list celebrity like yourself. Oh my God. P.S. No puppet. And how about a late ice cream flavor edition? Peach in the Middle East.

Okay, that's pretty good. I like that. That's from A.J. Shorn. I like that. So yeah, man. You're in trouble. I don't like you might need to

I don't like when now I know somebody I'm talking about has family listening I like to just be how about this why don't you have your parents

your wife everyone you know a lot of people you know as dads. Think that's better? How about this? Your in-laws listen. Yeah. Who was not thrilled with me saying it would be weird to stay over there.

We just got to press on, boys. Yeah. And I've always thought, man, what if my radio career was where I grew up? And I thought that'd be cool because then people would know I'm much better than them. All these a-holes in high school who thought that they were like, look at them now. Look at the star of the football team who is working at the 7-Eleven. Look at how much better I am than you. But I guess what you guys say here is valid.

I mean, I will tell you that I've been out before. It was actually at my wife's reunion, like 10-year reunion. And predictably, I'm a couple classes ahead of her or three there were a couple guys there that were a couple ahead of me so they're playing in the real young leagues now and they were not i mean they were just there they didn't you know why would you show up it was at a bar but why a bar. Knowing that that's the reunion for the girls that were six, seven years younger than you. I know why you would do it, but it looks weird. They were real, real assholes to me.

Probably brought a lot of it on myself. In high school? Yeah. They were the dudes who would do the rub-a-taint on your face. How were they when they saw you 10 years later? It was awesome. Dope. Yeah.

Oh, my God, Jake. I really listen every day, man. Yeah, but in Jake's mind, he was like, you know, if I ever see them in person again, I'm going to tell them what's up. Tell them how much they hurt me. And then at this reunion, they're like, oh, my God. I might have if I wasn't with my wife. But they cut her off at the pass. Like it never got to that point.

Like they were so nice. And in my mind I'm thinking like, you remember when you guys were making my life hell for an entire season? But there's also the downside, which is what Blake's talking about. You think I want... My mom's going to hear what I'm saying right now.

Like if I use the word... No, I'm not going to do it. Why does she listen? This isn't for her. I don't know. Let's check in on her son. I personally think that the dumb zone

is for everyone, but if Dan is more of a... I'm just saying, it's not... He's trying to redline the podcast like a post-World War I neighborhood for black people.

If your daughters did a podcast, you would listen. It wouldn't be for you. No, in fact, that's a bad bit I've wanted to bring up for a while. Jeff Perlman on Twitter. Number one, you might already just say, okay, bad bit. Fantastic writer. Bad bit. He tweeted out,

Hey, could you listen to my daughter's college radio show? Here's the link. There's a difference between listen and blast out the link. You could just listen and be like, oh. Yes, I've tuned into my daughter's. This isn't funny. I've tuned into my daughter's college radio show, and she didn't want me to know when it was on, and she didn't tell me about it the first year, as you know.

And I'm all for that because, well, I don't, you know, she's like, I don't want you to hear me figuring things out. Of course. You know? And I think that would be a disservice. That's bad for them. It's kind of like now. I've always talked about podcasting with you when you started it.

Because I think you and TC got good. But I always think it's a really weird thing because no one heard me doing college broadcasting. Barely anyone heard me when I was in Youngstown, Ohio. Yeah. You know, you're getting your reps, but now, let's say it's someone who works at the ticket, like in a weekend guy or something, and they follow in your footsteps and say,

I'm going to do a podcast now, because just being on the ticket is, even a weekend guy, you're going to have some higher level of notoriety exposure that anyone else would you're going to get a thousand you know followers right away on twitter um but now people are listening to the worst and of course you're going to suck yep you should. You've got to learn things. And do you want to promote? Like if you're a weekend guy on the ticket who doesn't have any broadcast experience, do you want to blast out, hey, tune into my podcast?

Because it's almost like the restaurant that's not ready for opening, and you say, hey, come in. You might get one shot. And if this thing sucks, I'm not going back to that restaurant. Yeah, TC makes fun of me because I think I fish story you might get one shot and if this thing sucks i'm not going back to that restaurant yeah tc makes fun of me because i think uh i fish story how many episodes we did that we did never publish but i swear it was it was 10 or so and then after that um i think i've probably said before it was more and maybe it's even less than 10 but after that when we started doing it regularly, nobody knew what it... We didn't promote it at all.

The only time people started listening to our podcast is when Bob and Dan became obsessed with the GBL Fantasy Draft, which is where Space is super gay and Barbra Streisand is a C. And you guys played it on the air. That was like... We were way into

it by that point. We weren't promoting it at... No one heard it. Yeah. Like, it was terrible. Absolutely terrible. So it blew up because of me. Yeah.

Like everything in my life, I always... But I loved the... When you guys broke down the GBL thing. We would go for like... Who wants this? We would go for three hours. Yeah, three hours just on everybody's guests.

Great, like we're looking at... It was awesome. Cade Williams or something. I'm like, no. This guy's a round three pick. Hey, Dan, my buddy Jorge Martinez has a birthday, Feb 6th.

Is that today? Yeah. Yeah. Great. Crushed it. His leaders are Tuba Girl and France Girl. Sorry I didn't include a picture of my wife.

She just squirted out a baby. Could Jake give a ruling on his name? Sure. Kai. K-A-I. Love it. Gotta be careful, because I have a very close friend. Friend of this show,

with a son named Kai. I think it sounds like, it sounds cool. Like, I feel like you need to surf. Is this based on the... Smash guy? The guy who smashed Kai? Yeah, probably.

But it just sounds like a very cool name. Like, I would have not survived being named Kai. He says, more video guy laughing in the background. We'll do what we can. From Dustin in Lucas, DF number 404. Okay. I do like your bit, Blake, that people can identify themselves in that way now. Thank you, Nima.

However, what if they're at number 5,500 and then we went down a little bit to 5,495? I don't know. Can we have more than one same number? That means we just have to keep adding. Yeah. We got to stop going down. No one can leave.

He says, PS, I Venmoed the DZ account $20 to make sure this would get read live to tape. Okay. Pizza Friday. That'll work. My name is Skip Lights, day two,

DF. DF. As I write this, it is my birthday. He says some stuff about his inferior Outlook email. When I was out celebrating tonight, I met a dumb F in the wild in San Antonio. We talked about buying a remote to be able to smoke with Jake. Smoke a cigarette? Like an analog old school cigarette?

Her name is Black Candice. I think from the campound. Did we have somebody named Candice who you guys who see color named Black Candice? If you're going to ask me about what I remember from the late night, overnight

campground this year. Night one, I can help you. Night two, I got nothing. We thought 690 would be too little. So we'd like to ask other DFs to join together to get a South Texas remote. Picture attached. Anyway.

Wait. Skip Lights. That's his name. A couple other emails that are not birthdays. Sports Fuhrer, I am your Singaporean listener. There you go. Geographically speaking, I must be the most isolated DZ-er in the world. I wanted to send a photo

from Singapore's 9-11 memorial. No way. But it turns out we don't have one. Yeah. That's from Jake Moon. You on the moon? Oh, here's one titled Subject Line Bad Bit.

Hi Uncle Hotmail, Cousin Gmail, and Blake. Oh, here's one titled Subject Line Bad Bit. Hi, Uncle Hotmail, Cousin Gmail, and Blake. D2 DF here. I guess I was too lazy or slow. Last week, my wife was undergoing a C-section for the birth of our third child. As I'm sitting in the operating room waiting for the procedure to begin, the surgeon was making small talk. Hate it. Just prior to

beginning the surgery, he states in the proper tone, he said, as Dak Prescott says, here we go. Yeah. And then he starts cutting. Yeah. Of course, now I will remember fourth round pick Dak Prescott's cadence

every time I think of that morning. Should I advise him that he's permanently impacted my memories of my daughter's birth? Kid's never getting out of the first round. I was trying to think of an interception joke. It's from Tom. Yeah. Couldn't come, yeah.

Baby flies out from the C-section and somebody else catches it. Yeah. Not the doctor. And my final email is from Dan Volendorf. Oh, by the way, have you assembled your funny comments yet? Not yet. They're still pouring in. What are you looking for?

Funny comments on the Apple podcast? Yeah, and I don't want to act like this was my idea, but someone recommended like a... I mean, I know another podcast that does it. That's why I felt bad about it, but... Oh, okay. I think we can still do it. They're in the trust. Reviewing five-star reviews.

I know another podcast who had Haralabob on too. So we're allowed to do things that others have done. We'll do it better. You said it was like my thing or my bit. I actually believe. Oh, you brought it up the other day. I actually believe that there. Okay, well, I don't want to take credit for it. To my knowledge, that there's only one radio station in the history of the world that has read birthdays.

You know what I've always said? Don't you smirk and look away and avoid the. You know what I've always said Don't you smirk and look away and avoid the You know what I've always said If you steal from me You've stolen twice You know why I said that Because I stole it from Kid Craddock

Who used to say that as well It covers you You're allowed to steal stuff Sure Anyway this subject line It's Dan Volendorf. Give the people what they want. I'm a Gunnison, Colorado, DZ subbie.

I'm writing because I think a lot of your listeners feel like we're getting cock-teased a bit. Uh-oh. I know you're not going to go bag on the ticket. I assume the majority of your subscribers want to know what happened that led you to leaving.

I know your contract was up and you couldn't come to an agreement on a new one, etc. But I'm sure there was a serious effort made by others who worked there to get you to stay. We'd like to hear about all of that. And if this has been worth it, who and what drove you to the decisions you made? What, if any, regrets you have? None.

What the other expatriates of the ticket are saying, who has supported you, etc.? Forthcoming. We will? Yeah, I mean, you'll probably go a little harder than I will, but I definitely want to forthcoming we will yeah I mean you'll probably go a little harder than I will but I definitely want to I'm down to talk about it gotta give the people what they want as Blake said

spring break week I think everyone's is about the same right it's like March 11th March 13th something in there March 11th is what we're targeting right now for a week of vacation time. Four, maybe three. What should I do for France?

I want to get as many days as I can, I guess. Should I leave the Thursday night prior? What would you do? You should probably listen to her all about it. Take a night flight. Yeah, you got to. Well, you have to take a night flight. Oh, you have to?

Pretty much every European flight. I think everyone I've ever been on has been at night. Okay. And so try to sleep on the plane. Yeah, I guess. You have to plan it out. If you were like, if you were going overseas now, like what would you? Because it feels like this shouldn't be a, I need some buffer time.

You don't go over there very often. So you could leave on, you're not going to do the show the Friday before? Well, I'm just saying, but maybe we will. I would leave that Friday night. Okay, do the show, leave that night. I'm just saying, but maybe we will. I would leave that Friday night. Okay, do the show, leave that night.

And then, I mean, you could fly home Saturday night. You're going to be fucking whipped. I've been in those positions before, and it's a weird feeling. And that's not even that long of a flight. But your body will be doing things. If you've never taken a, you know, it's probably, what, an eight-hour flight? It's not the end of the world.

You've been to Hawaii. Although they break that up with LAX. Is that worth it to only go for seven days? I'm just thinking, should I make it? Most people don't. Should I try and make it ten? Should I try and extend it a little bit?

And I could, you know, do the show there with you, couldn't I? You could. Let's see. Seven. Because they do have an AT&T, some kind of a data thing. If you pay $10 a day, you can.

Yeah, you could do Monday, Tuesday there, and then fly back Tuesday night, have business Wednesday to rest. That's interesting. Yeah, I mean, it's a nine-hour flight. It's still not that bad. What's the longest flight you've been on? Hong Kong. Which I think was like 14 hours, 15 hours. Let me check.

I do remember the Hawaii one was quite long. 16 hours to Hong Kong. Oh, wow. From LAX. So you got to fly to LAX, and then that flight might have left at midnight. It's very... I'm just interested in Haralabob saying he hasn't had jet lag in 10 years. Yeah, so...

And I want to see if I can avoid it. For the most part, people don't go to Europe for six days, even seven days. I mean, it's expensive, you know? So, I mean, usually the way we would do it was... Like, expensive to be there or just the travel to get there? You're paying so much money that it's like, ah, I kind of want to get the most out of this, like on the flight. What we would usually do was... Okay, so there was a week that I would be off. And the preceding week, we would fly out that Wednesday night.

And sometimes I would even fly out Tuesday night. But I wouldn't take two full weeks off. I would work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, fly out that night. And then that gives us a weekend built in on the front end, a full week, and then a day on the back end of Saturday to get home. Now you're there for like 10 days. That feels a little more worth the juice, worth the squeeze. My wife yesterday was like, because I want to do some other things.

I want to, or where does she want to go? She definitely, Amsterdam was one of the places. And, if she thought I was going to argue about that. It's a special place. I think it was because, oh, she said it was because of, we saw it on Atlanta,

and it looked cool. Yeah. When Earn was in it, Amsterdam. I think they've changed it up a little bit, like we're now in the district, you can't, you,

they don't have them, like, the curtains closed, I'm pretty sure. change it up a little bit. Like, we're now in the district. You can't, you, they don't have them, like, the curtains closed, I'm pretty sure. Like, the way that, do you remember,

the red light district? Do you remember when they had, pet stores at the mall? Yeah. And you could just like, see like behind, they're like in a little compartment, it's glass. And you're like,

oh, that one's cute. When I went there, you would just, you walk down the streets of it, and there's women like in little i don't know pod type things naked uh no but like lingerie showing off that like hey this is what you're getting with me and it was just like shopping and you just walk by and somebody would like a hooker yeah i mean when i when i hear the word hooker, I think of like the streets.

You know, these are like... A call girl. Escorts. These are like top, top, top looking women. What kind of... What are we talking about? Monetarily. I don't know. I was not single. I was with woman. So I honestly don't know what it is.

If you would like to pay for Dan's escort at Venmo, on Venmo At the dumb zone Specify what the money is for And we'll get Dan hooked up That's probably the most stoned I've ever been in my life Why? We went to this cafe in there And it was actually the cafe that's featured

In Ocean's Twelve There's like a pot Scene in Amsterdam there And there was a cat It's like a pot scene in Amsterdam there. And there was a cat. It's like one of these old hippie type tea and coffee shops where they sell pot. And you're just right there at the bar.

It's a pot bar. I mean, they bring you over. There is an actual bar. They don't sell alcohol, but you get a tea. They roll it up for you or they'll give you a pipe or whatever. There was this cat when we walked in and I thought it was fake.

And then I got like, you know, we both were like, we're in Amsterdam, whatever. And then I turned around and I saw the cat moving after I was like maybe 40 minutes into space mode. And I'm like, oh, like I'm like hallucinating, you know, this is. I'm like hallucinating you know and then I got so paranoid that I told like I leaned over to my wife and I'm like the guy next to me

is planning to blow this place up she's like what we gotta go right now it's a great place and I don't think it's can't be far from Paris. Are you able to get stuff? Are they searching your cavities on the way back?

I've never played the international game, so I will leave that up to you. What about within Europe, though? Yeah, I think that's fine. I do remember... Because from what I understand, these are very small countries. Going to Arkansas would be going to a whole different country.

Do you go through a customs every time you got to travel? We did it... Yeah, I think so. You do? I think so. If I recall correctly. And I also remember that when we left Amsterdam, I think we were headed to Germany. And I didn't bring anything with me, but I remember them being like, Hey, wake up, you know, time to search

everything. Yeah. Like you left Amsterdam. Cause there's no search when you get on the train. Okay. You went train. Cause I did see it's a four hour train to Amsterdam from, from Paris and, or a pretty quick flight, I believe. Well, I think it was Amsterdam. I can't remember. The trains are awesome, though, because you're in the European countryside, you know? Uh-huh. And it's cool.

They have good food, wine, whatever. They're comfortable. It's not like being on the subway or something. Anyways, we got way sidetracked. But that's what we do here. That's right. Want to switch up? It's time for a dumb zone interstitial.

You got to keep them separated. What's next? I don't know. I don't know if we have time to do football and news. I think I'm with you. We will be going along. We did a lot of sports today. Okay. So what do you think?

Here's Jay with the Dubs. That's what you seem to be saying. I don't exactly know why Shaq has always had such interesting ties to the North Texas area. I remember we were talking about last week the deal where he bought a family at Grapevine Ford. He came in and bought a family a new van or SUV or something, just

paid cash. It just seems like he's around here a lot. Doesn't it? Yes. I don't really know. Maybe he had a house here at some point, but I've never thought of him as living here. Well, in coordination with the Dallas County Sheriff's Office this Saturday,

Licensed Deputy Shaquille O'Neal will sponsor a gun buyback event. He's a licensed deputy in Dallas? I think he's just a licensed deputy in general. Somewhere. You don't remember that whole bit where he was a cop for... Kind of. This was in...

That feels like something you shouldn't be able to just give to anybody. It's kind of like a degree. Like the honorary. Okay. I think so. That doesn't mean anything? Right. He can't pull you over.

I don't think. Can't do a citizen's arrest? So owners who give handguns will receive a $100 gift card. Long gun owners will be given $125 gift cards. That's it? Yeah. To what? To give your gun back.

No, and where's the gift card? It doesn't say. To the gun store. To Knives gun back. No, and where's the gift card? It doesn't say. To the gun store. To Knives R Us. Yeah, why would people do that if you could make more money selling your gun? I think the logic might be, and I've never really understood it, the logic might be that there are people that are just like, I don't really want this gun out there anymore.

Like, I liked it for a long time, but now I'm at the point where I kind of just, I don't want to sell it. I want there to out there anymore. Like, I liked it for a long time, but now I'm at the point where I kind of just, I don't want to sell it. I want there to be less guns. And I don't have the ability to melt it, but the buyback program does. Do you have a gun safe? Because you have a gun, right?

Yeah, I do, and I don't. We're going to have to take care of that. We might. It's just kind of an interesting thing because... We've got kids now, bro. Yeah, if I had a handgun, I would definitely lock it up. Oh, what is it, like a musket?

Yeah. That's right. Yeah. As an intruder, I have to pack in the gunpowder. No, I mean... Oh, speaking of intruder, you know what we got to talk about? What?

That documentary. Yeah. Have you seen it all? I've almost done. What's it called? American Nightmare? Yeah. I described it poorly the other day.

And I'll tell you what. Everybody said it was like Gone Girl. It kind of is. But in Gone Girl, the girl actually was trying to blackmail her husband. He had cheated on her, and so she was going to get back at him by kind of trying to frame him for murder, and then she disappears, and all this weird stuff happens. That's what people kept saying.

It's like Gone Girl. It's like Gone Girl. Well, the police department there said it. I know, but what I'm saying is that... And that was a huge, huge error. Yeah. Oh, so it's not like Gone Girl? It's kind of like Gone Girl in that she disappears and comes back.

But it's not like Gone Girl in that she didn't plan her own disappearance. So you haven't watched any? No. It's worth it. Okay, but that's what they say. I know. And that's how you guys sold it to me. Well, dude, you got to watch it. Seriously. It's insane.

What do you mean? It's also very depressing. If it's not like the Gillian Flynn novel of 2013, then I don't want to read it. I want to watch it. Oh, my God. Dude, it's really good. How about do something that we do?

It's also terrifying. Anything that we do on the show. Like one thing be a part of. I thought the whole bit was you don't watch it and you guys explain it to me and I can represent a part of the audience that hasn't seen it he's got you damn it what a solid response it really is that's that's excellent Blake I stole it from you we've taught him too much you've probably stolen it from you. We've taught him too much. You've probably stolen it from someone else. No, that might be an original.

This Valentine's Day, the Fort Worth Zoo has a perfect option for people who think love stinks. The skunk something. You would never guess this. You know how people used to buy a star? Yes.

Star registry. I think I've had somebody give me one of those before as a gift. What am I supposed to do? Okay. This Valentine's Day, for $10, they will symbolically dedicate a pound of

zoo poo in the name of whoever you would like. Okay. Presumably your ex. Will they put it in a bag and... Mail it to them? Put it on their doorstep and light it on fire? You ever do that?

No. I didn't either. Always heard of it. Yeah. Shockingly, I have not done that. Yeah. Shockingly, I have not done that. Yeah. To me, it was just like... Because I knew a guy who pooed in a kid's shoe and got in trouble for it.

How old? Oh, either junior high school or high school. Okay. But I was around when he was doing it, and I couldn't believe that. Like, I just couldn't do that. I couldn't poo in a bag. I've done it in a cup. You pooed in a cup?

Yeah. In a car. All for the two girls thing? No, no. In a moving car. In a cup? Why? Because they wouldn't stop?

We were driving home from New Orleans, and we were in like a monsoon. Like, you couldn't even see in front of you. And we were in the kind of like, there was... This guy has gone number two everywhere. Yeah. Planes. Yeah. Just wait.

He's going to tell us he threw the cup at another car. No, but we did immediately just throw it out. Somebody's got to pick that up. Are we talking about a Fuzzy's cup or like a little... It was like a large drink from a fast food restaurant. Okay, that's pretty big. Yeah, but it was also paper, you know? I'm like the Fuzzyies cup, which is plastic.

Oh, my God, yeah. You just chunked it outside. There's like four other dudes in the car. Jeez. Why are men disgusting? We just grow up thinking poop is funny. Yeah, and I don't even really think it's funny. I just was like, I have to go.

I have to go. And it's not like you could pull over and run out into the woods. No. Because it's not an option. There's a soon. Mm-hmm. R.I.P. to country singer Toby Keith. Yeah, I saw that this morning.

I listened to some Toby Keith on the way over here. Did you? What do we got? He's got your favorite. Yeah, you love the Boot in Your Ass song. Oh, he's the Boot in Your Ass guy. He's what is it?

Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses. That was a popular one. I love this bar. That was the Starz victory song back in the early aught era, right? I recall. Red Solo Cup. Yeah, he turned into bit pop country guy. Oh, he's Red Solo Cup guy?

Yeah. Okay, I know that. Songs like that. How do you like beer now? I thought that was a pretty good one. Shoot a bit of Camelot. That's another good one. He's got some hits.

He's got some hits. Were you crying when you were driving? No. Some hits and some hot opinions. Oh my, yeah. What does that mean? He knew his audience and he catered to it. Yeah. Political? Yeah, he was really into like universal basic income.

I think he big proponent of the Green New Deal, too. Yes, I remember him signing off on that. It's actually probably not going to pass now that he's passed. Stomach cancer, I read. Yeah. And I didn't even know that was a thing. Pretty much anywhere can get cancer. Really?

Yeah. Slow that down. I know your skin can, but... Yeah, that's a wild one. It's not like you're... You can get blood cancer. For real? I think so.

Son of a B. Blood cancer. How do you find that out? It's because your blood's moving. It's like, can't get a hold of this guy. No, but I'm just saying, how do you... It's like if you find a lump, you're like, oh, okay, there's your cancer. But how do you...

You know, doctor... My perfectly normal-sized doctor, he looks good. Cherubic at best. Has put his digit into my backside. Look out that window. You can feel something in there, or at least he tells me that he can determine if there's some cancer growing around up there. I always wonder about that, too. It's kind of a feel thing.

Yeah, so he checks my, you know, does that, and then what if the cancer starts growing the day after I leave his office? Or the colonoscopy. I've gotten a colonoscopy, and they say, well, you don't need another one for five

years. What if cancer starts growing tomorrow? Right. Like, I feel like I should get one every two weeks or so. Just because you love it. Yeah, I bet you'd like that. What are you guys saying? Not gay, man. Okay, we'll do one final one. I'll hold some of this audio for next time. No, do it all now. No. Why? We're not doing a show tomorrow. Yeah, but we're doing one Thursday. It's kind of not really, it doesn't really fit with the news anyways.

You know what? F it. I'm going to play one thing for you real quick, and it's not even the thing that I was originally going to play, but I'll start by telling you about Patrick Mahomes Sr. You probably saw this in the news.

He was pulled over Saturday night out in tyler where they are from and it was about 8 p.m officers notice a car moving slower than the rest of traffic runs the registration his registration had been inspired it expired since uh september of 2022 i believe which to be honest with you though like i'm way behind i'm this is the longest i've i've never gone more than a month and i'm like five months of 2022, I believe. Damn. To be honest with you, though, I'm way behind. This is the longest I've... I've never gone more than a month, and I'm like five months out right now. It's just bad.

I got my car inspected, but I haven't found a time where I can actually get down to the courthouse. But you mail it? If you're on time. If you're on time. Oh.

If you get even like a day past, you can't. So his registration's been out for almost two years. He had an open container, an open Tallboy. It was Tallboy Saturday for Patrick Boehm Sr. So he's 53 years old. Admitted to drinking a few beers while watching a game at the bar. Then they saw the open 16-ounce can of the Rocky Top.

And he did a field sobriety test. He failed that. He had one DWI charge in South Dakota in 2008. He had a second one in 2018. He served 40 days in county jail on weekends. Man, I would think that's enough. Yeah. To scare you straight.

That's not how it works, though, man. You're an addict. So to scare you straight basically means you need to go get... Straight enough to go get help? No. Straight enough to get Uber. Oh, I see what you're saying. But I do know also sometimes there's a... Ego.

Well, or just a, boy, this will really get me in trouble with the wife. If she... Yeah, that's true. If she has to drive me to go get my car tomorrow morning. That's true. That's what I always wonder about with the kids. Like, you know, you try to say. Call me.

Yeah, look, it's okay. Look, don't call your mom. I know she'd get upset about, like, just, you know, I won't tell anyone if anything ever happens. But, you know, human nature, you would just be worried about that. I've always been an admirer of yours that you are Uber guy, man. I've spent a lot of money. You kind of plan ahead.

Yeah. Sometimes, but you also will leave your car somewhere. Yeah. I've done it. And I would think... Many, dozens and dozens of times. Yeah, I mean, if I didn't grow up in the Uber era, I'm sure I would have made some way more terrible decisions.

Not to say I've never made any on that front, but I would have made way more. I mean, dude, the weird thing is, as everybody says, I can remember being in the car with, for sure, my grandfather, who lived out in the country. People had beer in the car. Dude. That's just what you did.

I think every now and again on Twitter there will be a thing that goes viral. Have you seen, like, it's a 1985 news clip from Texas? Maybe it's from Fort Worth where the old farmer is in his truck and he's got a beer. And they were just saying, like, they were just trying to stop open container. Yeah. And he's like, out of my dead hands, you know, like, I'm an American. I'm going to, you know, they're going to tell me I can't drive around with this? Yeah.

It wasn't that long ago. No, it wasn't. As far as Mahomes Senior goes, you've seen videos of him throughout the playoffs where he's out the tailgate shotgunning cold ones with fans.

He definitely gets down. He does pretty hard for his age. Yeah. I mean, here's the thing. He's 53. He looks 65. Oh, okay. I thought he was older than 53.

That's the thing. He's not really that old. I know a bunch of early 50s guys who, I mean, think about it this way. Pull up a picture of Patrick Mahomes Sr. and then understand that he's the same age as Corby. Another guy who parties pretty hard. He does, but he takes care of himself outside of that pretty well. So you've got to try to balance it out.

All right, there's your news. What do you think he gets funneled? You know, I'm fascinated by that sort of stuff. So, like, if you made $50 million a year, what do you send to Chappie? Well, I mean, I've got to divvy it up. I mean, I think his parents are divorced, too, so somewhat of a situation. But I've got to divvy it up. I think you probably do this.

Like, what's enough, you know? You let them each pick a house in a reasonable range. One million. One and a half million. You buy it cash. Although we've since learned from Michael Irvin that's not the smartest move. I just don't want to be dealing with it. Just pay off their houses.

And then you come up with some sort of – you figure out what you want your lifestyle to be and then you kind of give them some sort of monthly stipend. Maybe it's not much. Like you're still going to have to work. Yeah, who gets, yeah. $50 million is not enough for you to be like, I'm going to give each of my parents $10 million, you know, right away. Or a year, however you want to do it.

Yeah, that's not going to happen. Then the question is, how close of a relation do I get to get Jake's monthly stipend? Because now you've got parents, you've got a brother for sure.

Okay. What about your favorite uncle? Is he going to be like, oh, wait, you're leaving me out of this? I'll tell you what. You guys can come to a barbecue at my house once a year. You know, money does just cost. I'm glad I don't make $50 million a year. No problems.

All the trouble we'd have. There's your dues. Although I am going to play you guys a small piece of audio here because I'll forget by Thursday. So this is outside of the news? Yeah. Is this the announcer getting mad at his crew? Just bring it up during the show meeting. I'd rather just hold it over your head for the next couple weeks.

What is he talking about? We've had a piece of audio, and we forgot to play it that day, and then something came up the next day and now at the end of every show because he doesn't bring it up in the meeting as a producer would do to remind us like hey we got this good audio of this announcer this college basketball guy are you officially our producer i don't know see that's the thing that we got a heralab Mavs situation here where there's no defined rules. I mean, hell, I booked the guest today. You did.

I'm just kidding. I think... Just bring it up when we're talking about... When someone says, what do we have today? Which we generally do before the show. Way more fun. And you think of something we have. No, I thought this commercial was hilarious. And it might have been my state uh on the trip but i think brands in general are way more okay being like sexy now

which has always been the case in europe or something like that but this is a kfc commercial for their new fries. You're looking to smash that bowl of fries, potatoes, cheese, and bacon. Okay, I'm going to play that again for you. Yes, you wouldn't have. Are you looking to smash? Yeah. This is how the kids talk about doing it. Yeah, yeah.

And they leave just enough hang time in there. To think about doing it. Yeah. You're looking to smash that bowl of fries, potatoes, cheese, and bacon. The new smashed potato bowl is just $3.49, only at KFC. They got like kind of porny dance music playing there. Like I kind of couldn't believe that they got away with that. Yeah.

Look at it smash. And then once he describes what you will be smashing, now you're thinking of an American Pie situation where you're actually having sex with this. Yeah, I got to stick my junk in this thing of fries? Yeah. That seems way worse than a pie. There's always bacon, right?

Yeah, just let it go. Bacon won the war against McDowell. We can't have sex with every piece of bacon. There's always bacon, right? Yeah, just let it go. Bacon won the war against McDowell. We can't have... Don't have sex with every piece of bacon. Can't I just have sex with the potato? Gotta add the bacon? Definitely a little sour cream in there, you know? Well, you put it in there.

The Dumb Zone presents Today in History. This is the longest podcast of my life. How long have we been going? About 2.15. Oh, okay. Want me to hustle through this then? Do whatever you want.

Oh. Can I say whatever I want? So it's Tuesday, February 6th. On this day in 1935, Monopoly goes on sale for the first time, the board game. Were you guys Monopoly guys? Yeah, big time.

Yeah. I used to play it on my Sega Genesis. That's interesting. Just because it was a... So you never played it as a board game? I did too, yeah. This was a big thing, you know, family get-togethers.

Oh, we'll pull out the, you know... Yeah, not until I was... Cousins come over. Yeah, much older. But yeah, it was fun. On the same day in 2013, Hasbro announced that Monopoly fans voted online to add a token to the board game

which would replace the iron. Iron. The iron. Don't make us guess what it is. What won the vote? Oh, why do you think I'm doing that? What were the originals? You had the guy with the monocle.

Actually doesn't have a monocle. Oh. The rich guy, you had the... He wasn't a token. Oh. I thought you had a rich guy that was a token. No, you had a token. Oh. I thought you had a rich guy that was a token. You had a car. You had a top hat.

You had a wheelbarrow. He does have a monocle, but originally he didn't. Did I already say a dog? You had a cat. Did the iron... Did it replace the thimble? No, the iron was replaced by... Okay, the thimble? No, the iron was replaced by... Okay, by thimble?

No, it was replaced by a cat. So there wasn't originally a cat. Okay. A ragdoll cat. That's pretty cool. You going to bring the ragdoll cat over one day? I'd love to, but I don't know how Kip and Bodie would feel about that. It has to be a video day.

Yeah, I'd love to, but I think there could be potential chaos. Let's see. If you're willing to sign a waiver. On this day in 1987, President Reagan became the oldest U.S. president in history, as he did every year on this day. But I think this was his last day doing that. 76 years old. The previous high was Eisenhower at the age of 70.

And now what are we at? 80 and 77? Biden's 80? I thought he was. Okay, I don't know. Why are you yelling at me? It's so funny. Even though the 80s were 40 years ago,

it's so funny to me to imagine that we had a president in the late 80s dealing with like the AIDS crisis who grew up when people still rode horses in some parts of the country for transportation. Like I remember when I met my great grandmother, I could not comprehend how old she was. Like she was born in, like, either the late 1800s or 19-zeros. 19-aughts.

I'm like, oh, God. They were building the railroad when you were born. And now you're here. This must be weird for you. Well, and it's technologically, exponentially, you know, gets more advanced. Yeah.

Like, imagine what, you know, old Jake is going to be looking at. I can't. Your grandkids will have zero idea how to process that. On this day in 1998, Mary Kay Letourneau was sentenced to seven and a half years. She had violated probation by going to see her 14-year-old father of her baby. She was 36. He was 14. So she was out on probation with the condition that she not go see.

And I think they caught him. Didn't they catch him like in a parking lot or something? Yeah, pretty sure. Doing it. Recently passed. Yes. On this day in 2012, Lynn Sanity started. Jeremy Lynn scored a career-high 28 points in his first ever start

when the Knicks beat the Jazz. It was a fun time. It really was. Yeah. Do you remember when that reporter from ESPN got in trouble? Probably fired, right? You think he was fired? It was an article that said it was about the Knicks or somebody, the chink in the armor.

Yeah. And I do think... And I don't... When you read the article, it was kind of just an honest oversight. Yeah. But, yeah. And on this day in 2018, SpaceX had a new rocket blast off. Is that Elon's company?

Yeah. So it was on a route that would take it to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. And the goal was that it was going to, it had a red sports car on board and it was going to, like, that there's now a red sports car. Well, I don't know if it got there yet. I don't know how fast you get to. The asteroid belt? The asteroid belt.

But they're going to have a red sports car flying around. So, like, in the future, somebody will sign... You know, somebody will... What a giant waste of time. What is this? Birthdays today. Chris Humphries is 39. Kardashian. Former Dallas star Fabian Brphries is 39 Kardashian former Dallas star

Fabian Brunstrom Brunstrom is 39 always talking him up to me this guy's gonna be the next one I thought he was he had three goals in his first game and he finished with

19 career goals how about that oddly enough the singer Fabian is 81 isn Isn't that weird? Do you think he was named after? Probably. Blake's done. Honestly. Rick Astley is 58. Is that Rick Roll? Yeah. Okay. And then born on this day, we have Babe Ruth. Was Bill O'Reilly really Rickrolled? Or am I falling for something? Was this recent? His explosion or whatever.

What do you mean to play us out? That whole thing. No. That was just confusion over the teleprompter? Yeah, it was Sting. Here's Sting to play us out. Okay. But I do think I saw a very, very well done Rick Roll

recently at like a public thing. Like where people waited around to see something. But I don't have any more details on that, Dan. Back to you. I'm hoping that's what this stupid asteroid does.

Everyone looks up into the sky and someone's just projected a global Rick Roll. Born on this day, we have Babe Ruth, we have Eva Braun, and Reagan, of course. And let's give you Rip Torn.

Oh. Jackass. Dogball. Jackass? Isn't he? Isn't he on, like, the boat? I don't know. The Jackass 1?

Let's see. Yeah, the first one. Hey, don't challenge me on Jackass, bro. No, I shouldn't do that. And that was Today in History. He, like, fires a gun at the end of the movie. And somebody jumps off something. It's wacky.

I'm sorry I don't remember that. Blake? What should my title be? That's for the fans to decide. Yeah, that'll go well. Adios, mofo. សូវាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប� ༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱༱� Thank you.