TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* The Banana Ball Shuffle feat. Lauren Walker

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

Lauren from Batting Around joins Riley, Nova, and Hussein to talk sports - what’s Banana Ball? What’re the odds of Neom SC winning the Saudi Premier League? What’s going on in Utah Mammoth player Sean Durzi’s brain? And more importantly, can we bet on it? Check out Batting Around here! Get the whole episode on Patreon here! TF LIVE ALERT We’ll be performing at the Big Fat Festival hosted by Big Belly Comedy on Saturday, 21st June! You can get tickets for that here! You can also get tickets for our show at the Edinburgh Fringe festival here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

It's Tusks Up for the Utah Mammoth about the newest hockey team in Utah and the adventures of two of their players in New York City. Let's fucking go. Yeah. Lauren, this is one I actually have via you. I think it's a perfect athlete brain exchange that these guys have. Yes, this is great. It's not a long article. It's really funny. It's a great way to signal to people that you read The New Yorker. I love reading The New Yorker and telling people about how much I read The New Yorker. It's really quick, a beat where they sent a couple guys from the new Utah hockey club, two Canadians, very important because it's Canada funny.

It's a very Canadian funny sense of humor because the NHL recently changed their, they are going to be the Utah Mammoth is going to be their NHL franchise. So they send these two guys to the Museum of Natural History in New York to see a mammoth skeleton and to talk to like the mammoth scientists. I mean, those two guys, we've got Canadian hockey players. It's like, yeah, we're going to go meet with this mammoth in New York City. Not sure why he lives there.

I mean, he's probably really rich because he's really old. So that's how we can afford to live in New York City. Dude, we're going to be living in New York City. We're going to be living like mammoths. Yo, dude, we're going to live like fucking mammoths, man. Yeah. It's so Canadian hockey player. It's perfect. I laughed for hours reading this.

This is the owner of the Utah Mammoth's Wikipedia headshot has him wearing a backwards baseball cap. It's so cool. So basically, basically, this is my favorite exchange from this athlete brain article. So these two guys, they go to hang out with the mammoth and interview the mammoth. They're- Interview with the mammoth. Yeah, there, Sean Dursey and Alex Kerflit, both Canadians. Um, first quote from Dursey, I love the museum. It's so cool. Kerflit admired a 60 foot skeleton of an apatosaurus, like a bronchosaurus. This thing's huge, eh? Dursey turned around. This was walking the earth at one point. You kidding me? You kidding me, bro? This fucking thing? I love, I love Canadians. I love hockey players. These guys are beautiful.

I always say like the stereotype of Canadians that most people have should be these guys. This is what we are. How many humans do you think to take down one of these guys, kerfoot ass? Derzy answers. Independently reinventing old Twitter jokes? Derzy answers. I don't know, I don't want to fight it. I like these guys, but hypothetically, um, probably just me, I could do it. And an Apatosaurus is better known as a Bronisaurus. They weight, they weighed 35 tons.

Yeah. Well, have they ever been cross-checked? I am going to need you to know that, uh, Alexander Kerfoot majored in economics at Harvard. This was Dersie. This is Dersie who said this. Okay, sure. Okay, yeah. Kerfoot responded, if it was me, I'd say 10,000.

An entire legion of guys. Which is probably true. I think 10,000 people working together. Or maybe moving up a tech tree could probably manage to do like 10,000 print of the primitive technology guy I mean at that point your role is more you're kind of like a like a sea anchor on the mammoth, right? Like your dead body is weighing the mammoth down. Yeah, you're overwhelming it in a human time You're doing the same thing that those bees do when wasps get in their nests, right? Like it gets too hot inside the ball of 10,000 Canadians

for a mammoth to sustain life. Well, I was also, I'm not 100% sure the players are aware that dinosaurs and humans didn't exist at the same time. I think like bringing up the concept of like egg eating mammals is a little over their heads. Yeah, they don't quite, I mean, look, they're great at hockey, but they don't quite get it. But when we talk about athlete brain and what this is such a good example of how do you understand athlete brain? Laura I think it's very important to understand that every major professional Athlete has only ever been good at their sport and it's because they've only ever thought about their sport from the age of about six or

Seven onward like the level of professionalization that exists in sports now means they just don't have the time or ability to think about other things. And I think hockey and you see it in baseball too, like third base especially, the less you're thinking, the better you are at the sport. So those are not muscles they're super used to like engaging with on a regular basis. It's this, you see it in football is over here as well, where it's like anytime they'll always like bring Jack Grealish up to like do an interview where they're like, hey, Jack Grealish, what's America? And he's like, I have no idea. What are you talking about? I have been thinking about football in that for like-

It's very profound actually, as an answer. Hey, Jack Grealish, are you aware of what country you're in? He's like, Wales? It's kind of fucked up as well, because like, I'm assuming it's the same as it is for football academies here, where what you do is you just grab a bunch of kids and go, okay, you don't really get an education, you are joining the circus, right? And at the end of that, you have this insanely competitive process to like, become a professional athlete, and if you don't make that, you just get kicked out on the curb with, all I know how to do is kickball into net and not well enough to make a living off of that.

And if you do make it, you end up on the junior squad on the Saudi... Yeah! Like, fuck what's the... The Saudi Saracens or whatever. You are the guy who has to stand next to Ronaldo while he gets his kid's life threatened, so that the line dawns. Or can score on him, yeah. And a huge part of this industry as well, this grabbing guys, putting them through basically the process you go through to become a space marine, but instead of dying if you don't

make it, you just have to go like a real estate agent, I guess. Yeah. You know, as so much of this increasingly, so much of the economy around this is centered on gambling, right? Like this is, that is the biggest moneymaker in sports now, it seems. It's not just, it's not like licensing, it's not tick, it's not licensed merchandise, it's not TV, like broadcast rights, it's not ticket sales, it's gambling, gambling, gambling, gambling. Gambling, gambling, gambling. Mm-hmm.

Well, that's why every shirt sponsor in football is, like, most unethical company you can possibly think of outside of, like, the arms industry. Yeah. Which maybe they should get into it. Maybe I want to see, like, BAE Systems sponsor, like, a non-league team. I want to see some really niche arms industry players sponsor like Charlton Essay and Elbit. The Charlton JDAMs. Charlton are not an obscure team. They got to the Champions League this year. They're going, they're the best South London team that we've got. You

don't live in South London anymore. In my heart, in my heart. Well, yeah, actually that's true. The best team in South East London. That's still not true. That's also Crystal Palace. They're in South East London. No, arguably it's Millwall. But anyway, look, I'm going to like to stop by. I'm going to, I'm going to, I don't want to get into trouble like Milo does whenever he talks about football. So I'm just going to... They're the best team in a certain area of South East London. They're the best team in central, south east London, south of Crystal Palace.

Yeah, they're the best team in Charles. They're the best team of an area that touches the... We're getting to Inside Britain. We're gonna pull it up. Because I have a startup for you all. It's called Alt Sports Data. Alt Sports Data. Alternative Sports Data. Oh. Sports. Data. Alternative sports data.

It's looking at internal data, and it's logging two sports in particular. One is called Banana Boar, the other is called Quidditch. I think it's the data that's alternative, rather than the sports, so you're logging the players like, haplogroups and posting history. Yeah, my idea was that, oh, it's like gambling. It's like sort of like normal sports gambling but for like relatively obscure sports that no one really pays attention, that much attention to.

Doing uncut gems and how he's got like an 18 way Harley on his quidditch back. Yeah, it's like, all right, New York Giants pitcher Logan Webb, how many books by non-male authors has he read this year? Ha ha ha how many members of the Maple Leafs can beat the four a dollar name a woman thing. Connor McDavid, we're gonna see how long he can be friends with a woman without falling in love with her.

The overrunner is six weeks. Getting increasingly sentimental and profound. And so you're just like looking at this shit and you're making Austin Matthews watch In the Mood for Love. And it's not even clear why you're doing that anymore. But somebody has money on it. You're trying to fix the match. You're doing point shaving for like seeing if these guys, if Mitch Marner can be made

into like a generous lover. I see you two are also on wikipedia.org. Slash Toronto Maple Leafs hashtag players and personnel. These are the only players that I know because I looked at the New York Giants picture but I do know my Toronto Maple Leafs unfortunately. They got a guy called Kalle Jahnkrock? Pontus Holmberg? Okay, next time I need names for anything I'm looking up ice hockey players.

This is beautiful. Anyway, Lauren, Alt Sports Data, what do you think? What do you think it is? This kind of thing is rife across baseball now, so I'm familiar with a bunch of versions of this, including a bunch of which are owned by teams in incredibly scary, compromised ways. So I believe we discussed earlier their their main thing is, what was it? It was F1? No, not quite. Alt Sports Data is bringing the next wave of consumers to sports betting.

By empowering alternative leagues to participate in legal live betting, Alt Sports Data enables their partners to activate, monetize and retain fans, giving the world greater access to the sports they truly love. So, what do they do? But what does that mean? They collect odds on sports such as surfing, skateboarding, rallycross, drifting, motocross. Oh my god, Hussain, you were right. Yeah, I wasn't that far off. Yeah, you were pretty much right.

Darts, rodeo. Yeah, we got a really, a really really good clown in there Nobody knows he went to Goliath