What's your initial thoughts on this? This is a pretty blockbuster piece of information today.

Well, it's crazy.

As you look through the bulleted list that the NBA dropped suddenly at 420, each line item dropped my jaw a little bit more, because five first round picks is quite striking.

But then you get to Balmer being banned for a year, which is probably the biggest of the headlines here in the takeaways.

But then you get to two Clippers execs suspended without pay.

President of business Gillian Zucker, who we've had on FOS before, suspended for a year.

And her, you know, supposed violations here Well, I was about to say alleged, but I mean, this is the NBA saying it, so maybe we don't have to say that.

I guess what does this do for him? What does this do for his relationship with the NBA? And what happens here?

Torre's reporting, because of that.

Well, and my rapid reaction is we sat there and we got a tip.

about 10 minutes before it posted that the findings of the investigation were about to come out, which we all went, whoa, and we got ready because it had been weeks, months, and I think a lot of people wondered whether it was coming, when it was coming.

Now, just two weeks ago, ESPN reported saying that the NBA had found no wrongdoing.

NBA PR at the time kind of vehemently pushed back on that Well, that was correct.

It was not true that the NBA had found no wrongdoing.

So I'm interested as a kind of side note here in the media part of this, what's ESPN going to say about its reporting? But much more importantly, the punishments, right? As I went down the bulleted list, I kind of did louder and louder gasps because five picks is quite a lot.

I guess what happens here? What happens to Steve Ballmer? Is he going to be forced to have to sell the team? What's his relationship with the other owners going to be like? What's his relationship going to be like with the NBA and Adam Silver?

And then, yeah, like he's might throw a nice right right hook and break his hand on her.

Yep.

This is like a technical question that I don't know that any of us know.

But when a ventriloquist makes noise, sound like it's coming from somewhere else.

Can techno like would a microphone and maybe you could a microphone pick it up? Like would it pick it up from where he's making the note like where he's throwing his voice?

Talk us through

it.

Well, I've been waiting because I just think it's robot versus robot.

What are those investors seeing or what can they see that the average person cannot see?

Yeah.

I think first is what I said earlier that you're almost guaranteed to make a return.

Now, how long is your horizon, right? Like it used to be in sports that one rich individual or family would buy a team and own it forever for decades and decades.

You know, Patriots Bob Craft, Cowboys Jerry Jones, the Glazers who owned Man United and the Tampa Bay Bucks.

I mean, they would just hold on to a team and pass it on down.

But now when teams are changing hands, there's always private equity involved.

So we all know about some of the big headlines, but what's your blanket take, if you had to summarize, on sports betting and prediction markets?

But two? Fuck off.

Uh, yeah.

A- and it's, it's...

I, like, n- none of, very few of these were things that I had seen previously, and we usually do, like, a big, like, watch around, like, Halloween.

We did a big watch when we did the first Scary Scuffle.

Yeah, I, these were just a little bit harder to find, so I hadn't seen as many of them as I would've thought.

Um, it just seems to be like what streaming content decides to carry.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm

... into all of his dealings, right? And he's got multiple, the, the Swedish Federation, as I mentioned earlier, and some other ethics complaints.

Again, though, a- and, and I don't think this has to be taken as, like, a, you know, political comment per se, but we're kind of in an era where everything is just shrugged off.

I mean, nothing really lasts.

The memory is short.

Things that seem shocking in the news cycle are, are old news, uh, days later.

And so as a result, uh, it just seems to me that he's, he's harnessing what he sees as an opportunistic moment.

Mm-hmm

So Dan, realistically, how much of a bump can MLS expect coming off of the World Cup?

Well, it's gonna be fascinating, right? And I think a, a popular cynical take is to laugh at the idea of, "Thanks, world, we'll take it from here," and say, "Yeah, yeah, right.

No, you won't," because MLS has just struggled to compete with the pull of European soccer.

In other words, there, there's more of a belief that if newly minted soccer fans now post-World Cup want their soccer fix, well, who's to say they won't just follow the international stars they saw who play abroad? And then even some of the best US stars, like Pulisic, they play abroad.

So really, will you have created new MLS fans? But on the other hand, we are seeing actual data that shows it.

Now granted, it's been literally just a few days, but our own Griffin Senyeck just wrote a story today about how Philly and Nashville both saw major boosts in single-game ticket sales.

Ratings is a different question.

Which by the way I've heard expires in a few years.

So Dan, is that distinction actually meaningful, and does this sort of change anything about how the league or even players approach sportsbook endorsement deals, especially since the leagues are so tied to these companies?

Right.

I mean, perception is really important here.

And I, I'm fascinated by this whole story.

It has had real legs, unfortunately for the league, unfortunately for FanDuel, unfortunately really for everyone involved.

And I think the reason that it has captured so much attention is it's the convergence of a few different things.

It's gambling, and it's the big league's closeness to gambling companies.

Right, which you would pay for in the script that he would be reading.

Oh, no.

So that kind of ramped up.

I mean, I was still working obviously at this point as well, so, um, I had to then go through the ombudsman, chase down the banks.

I took days off to speak to the bank and do the, the kind of formal investigation interviews.

It was quite useful.

Being, having been a fraud investigator, all that training just came back again and I was able to kind of do timelines for the, for the ombudsman and, which was, I think was gratefully received.

Then he had a car crash, um, which I'd then found out that he'd had this medication which wasn't working well for him.

What kind of approaches did you take or what kind of systems did you put in place?

And you set it up and just tell me like why and what's the crack

with it? So it's an LGBTQIA plus or a queer book club.

I know people sometimes, some people don't like using the phrase queer, but I think it's, I think we've reclaimed it as a community.

And I like it.

I think it's a new umbrella term for everyone within the community.

So basically, the Proud Readers Book Club takes place at the Central Library the last Wednesday of every month at six o'clock at the Hornby Reading Room, which is next door to where we're filming now.

We mainly focus on queer authors, queer stories, whether that's fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, but we're more than just a book club.

on Disney Plus or Netflix.

And, uh, uh, quickly, what was your path to OpenAI? So how did you go from studying physics to being where you are today?

I did a PhD in, in theoretical physics, uh, from, from MIT, thinking about the intersection of quantum gravity and quantum information.

Thought a lot about black holes and quantum chaos kind of thing, of what if you throw something into a black hole, what happens to the information? Does it, does it come out? How-- If we think about black holes as computers, how fast are they? Uh, I was very interested in this fundamental question in theoretical physics, which is how do you find a quantum theory of gravity? I also got very interested in this inter-interplay between computation and the laws of physics.

You know, any computer exists in the universe and, and, you know, uh, behaves according to physical law.

So the sort of computations you can do are bounded by the laws of physics, and there's some sort of interesting relationship there.

Black holes are pretty interesting 'cause they sort of saturate some conjectured bounds a-around processing of, of information.

And from there, uh, I did a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Uh, what can physics, uh, teach us about how to understand, uh, those, uh, those, uh, AI systems that we're currently building?

So Dan, what new do we know about the deal, and I guess, why Li-Ning?

Li-Ning?Yeah, I mean, Curry sneaker watch, Curry free agency was really fascinating, right? He was testing out all these different brands, and I think a lot of people figured that it was gonna be Li-Ning or ANTA, that it was gonna be an Asian brand.

So here we are, we got the answer, it's Li-Ning.

Now, what's interesting is 300 million was the initial figure that was out there in Chinese media, and in fact, there was a Morning Star analyst report that cited that as just fact.

Then a source told us, "Oh, it's significantly more than 300 million," and then of course we saw Shams at ESPN tweet it out that it's 400 million.

It seems to me 400 is actually more like the baseline, because another source now tells us that 400 million is about right, but it could and likely will get much higher than that when you factor in bonuses and other things that could get launched and built.

And I think the key here is that a source told us, and this was a deciding factor for him, that Li-Ning is kind of committing to allowing, and not just allowing, but helping Curry to build up his own brand much more than Under Armour ever did.

Mm-hmm.

Cool name

... yeah, it was made in, uh, pff, England, I guess, if I remember right.

So it was created as a Stillwater indicator for trout, um, to, like, detect multiple different kinds of bites.

And what I mean by that is as the fly, or in this case, like the crappie jig, as it falls, the indicator is just a foam cylinder, and the, the tippet is gonna run fle- freely through the bottom of that indicator, like through, like a steel ring or a plastic ring.

It's gonna have a bobber stop on both sides of that, that piece of tippet right there.

Mm-hmm.

Um, it's not like in the winter where they go out deep or whatever, um, and it's not like in the summer when they go way out deep.

So springtime is so fun because you have different stages during the spring period where the fish are moving, or they're what we call pre-spawn, so they're feeding heavily on forage fish, like preparing for the spawn.

... what translates over to fly fishing on a lake, and then what do you kinda have to throw out the window of like this is a whole different ballgame?

So as we're in the situation today, like, there's wind.

So we have wind on the lake, and that's kinda what's creating our, like, water movement, for lack of a better term.

Um, so like those two things can kind of equate from coming from the river over to the lake, um, you know, where there's not, like, true current here to, like, run seams, um, or, like, fish that style.

Fish will still set up very similarly around structure and things like that.

So you can still, you can wrap your mind around fishing a similar way, um, at least in the way that, like, fish will, will hang around the same area.

Mm

... um, at the beginning.

What- what's that like for Iren, and then what are you confronting in that, in that respect?

Yeah, eight years ago when we started this business, we had a differentiated strategy.

We never went to metropolitan areas.

We went to regional communities where there was an abundance of renewable energy that creates a cost, uh, a structural advantage over time, and we've reinvigorated local communities across British Columbia, Canada, Texas, and it's an advantage for us because we are located where people want us to do business.

What are the utilities not doing that you need them to do?

Well, utilities, they're doing the best they can.

Like, they're running complex networks with a lot of generation on one side, a lot of power demand on the other, and at the end of the day, when you connect to them, this is why grid-connected capacity is so valuable.

When you connect to them, they're underwriting 24/7 guaranteed power.