And, you know, I see examples like the Chicago Cubs doing a rom-com short videos for their TikTok platforms that didn't exist five or 10 years ago.

Right.

And it's a little quaint in 2026 to say we're going to write a book that in part targets young audiences.

On the latter point, there's a big focus in the book about careers.

And one thing we found in talking to students and faculty members and others who you know, who teach sports management courses is the audience is really interested in careers and career development.

So that's part of like how we get to a sense of, okay, well, why a book? What we're seeing in media, sports media is a tremendous amount of fragmentation and now modern AI tools that enable almost anybody to do anything.

So for instance, like A baseball team could do a rom-com.

This is a

JK, explain what he's talking about.

Yeah.

So, um, in going through it, um, part of the spirit of the book is we were very fortunate to get to have certain kinds of careers in a business that was really growing by leaps and bounds from when we started, and there were so many interesting things that happened, and reasons that things that happened that aren't well understood.

So for instance, with ESPN.com, and you were a big contributor to it, Chad, there's, you know, there are a set of numbers that demonstrate our business success, but how did that happen? Why did it happen? What are some of the sort of stories behind the scenes that changed our direction, things that worked, things that didn't work? Um, I, I, I was, um, I, I was inspired earlier in my career by a set of books that Mark McCormack, the founder of IMG, wrote called What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School, and I started reading these books when I was at CBS and when Ed and I started working together at the NBA.

And what I loved about Mark's books is he told you what happened, how he thought about things in plain English, and there was no, there was nothing like that that was available.

So, um, a- and while we talk about things like the 80/20 rule, where 20% of the value what you create, you know, y- y- where, like 80% of the value of what you create comes from, say, 20% of your activity, but how do you find that? What's an example of that? It's great, it's great to give people a framework like that, but, and actual examples of things that happened, worked and didn't work, we thought would be, w- would be really valuable.

And I think we also felt that had we had a book like this when we were starting out, it might have advanced us some.

How does a company like ESPN sustain over the next 10 to 15 years?

And were you worried at all about the possibility that your, the changes in the business could outpace whatever the deadline was on what you were writing?

We wanted very much to focus on the here and now, and to use, you know, historical examples as a way of explaining why things were and what's happening, and work through a set of different set of theses about the business, including the fact that technology undergirds all of, all of the growth of sports.

It's just been a central theme.

So our thought is that if you open the book, you'll see lots of examples from 2025 and from 2026.

If, um, if the book has the kinda connection we hope it does, we're, we're hopeful of doing future editions where we could update different things.

We, uh, we have a website that's available to readers and educators where there'll be updates from time to time.

But you're absolutely right.

Uh, if I'm a consumer, how much will Netflix, Apple TV, and Prime Video be part of my sports life in the 2030s?