B (2:58)

I'm a big NBA fan. And now they have that review you can do, which I think is the first step, I'd say.

A (3:03)

Yep.

B (3:04)

And hopefully they could get to some sort of AI ref in the future, Right?

A (3:07)

For sure. And the other thing that we've learned, you know, since starting this adventure, I'll call it, is even at the big leagues, these major leagues, there's no pipeline for refs. They don't want to ref anymore. I mean, think about it this way. Sports betting was a 200, and it was a $400 million business in 2018. Right. It's now 16 billion.

B (3:26)

Holy crap.

A (3:26)

16 billion. So they're getting death threats. You know, they go home and they don't have a good quality of life because of fans. There's just too much on the line. So even the biggest leagues in the world, they will tell you one of their biggest threats right now is they don't have a pipeline for refs. And so, you know, our focus is having the technology sit amongst the humans so that we never make mistakes. Whether they ultimately replace the humans or not, we're not sure. That's not how we position ourselves. But we just want to leverage this incredible technology to make sure that the right. The right outcome always happens for any sport. Wow.

B (4:03)

I didn't know they were getting death threats like that.

A (4:05)

Yeah, it's bad, dude.

B (4:06)

I did not know that. But it makes sense, because if people are betting their whole income on a game.

A (4:11)

Totally. I mean, you know, $16 billion a year, that's a lot of money. And, you know, think about. Think about putting a huge sum of money on a game. Only in the last second, a clearly wrong call lost you. Whatever that number is for you individually, you would be livid. And so this is the reality that we're currently living in in sports. And, you know, even to this day, replay, instant replay, Upgrade your laundry routine with a durable and reliable Maytag laundry pair at Lowe's. Like the new Maytag washer and dryer with performance enhanced stain fighting power designed to cut through serious dirt and grime. And what's great is this laundry pair is in stock and ready for delivery when you need it the most. Don't miss out. Shop Maytag in store or online today at Lowe's. Can't save some of these calls, right.

B (5:09)

Because they don't have the right camera angle.

A (5:11)

They might have the right camera angle. Some of the calls aren't reviewable, like in the NFL.

B (5:16)

Right.

A (5:16)

And there's all this nuance. I mean, I even think about, like, the F1 title race in Monaco a couple years ago where the race director made the wrong call. Literally the wrong driver at the end of the season was hoisting the trophy, and they admitted it. I mean, the F1 admitted it. The, the, the race director. These are not controversial things. And neither was the Saints call. And, and it's like, oh, yeah, well, sorry we got it wrong, but, man, like, I was one of those athletes. I, I, man, I know how hard you dedicate your whole life to these moments. Referees can never get it wrong.

B (5:49)

Yeah.

A (5:49)

Especially, especially when it costs a team the game. And judges, you know, you certainly got to get away from a world where judges can be bought off.

B (5:56)

Right.

A (5:56)

Which we've seen.

B (5:57)

We've seen it. Yeah. In every sport.

A (5:59)

Just the other month, Major League Baseball fired an ump for sports betting.

B (6:02)

Wow. So, you know, just the money's too good these days.

A (6:05)

Money's too big, so. And the consequences are too high and the outcome's too important.

B (6:10)

How many times from your sports history, whether it was skiing or football, do you remember a ref kind of screwing you over?

A (6:16)

I mean, we would always say you win some, you lose some. Right. Sometimes you get a little overscored, sometimes you get a little underscored. And those things are still going to happen. I mean, just because you have AI judges, some people are like, oh, I don't think that that that jump was that good. And that degree of difficulty. So you'll still have a lot of, you know, a lot of that. But what you, what you won't have is when a race director gets the wrong call.

B (6:39)

Right.

A (6:40)

Or a blatant pass interference call happens in the, in the end zone of NFC Championship game where a team is on the line to go to the super bowl and the remaining one, you know, one minute of the game, you, you won't have that anymore. And, and so we think it's important technology for the Olympics. We think it's important technology for football, for baseball, for basketball. Some of the binary sports were in or out, strike, you know, ball or strike. But what we're really excited at X Games is to use this technology for highly, highly subjective sports. And one of the fun challenges was teaching the AI what good style is. Because style is much different than a ball or a strike or the tennis ball was in or out. And when you break it down, good, good style is basically good economy of motion in the air. So was the athlete on access? What was the amplitude of the jump? Did they grab? And if so, did they tweak the grab? So all these things that a lot of people think, oh, AI could never understand what good style is. Yes, it can, because you teach it and you bring in the judges and you bring in the athletes, which is what we did at X Games.

B (7:48)

Nice.

A (7:48)

When we launched this, the world's first AI judge for a subjective sport in Aspen this year to judge the men's snowboarding competition. And it's been a really fun adventure, I will say. And this technology, as you know, is moving so, so incredibly fast.

B (8:04)

That's really exciting, man. So how did it do at the snowboarding competition?

A (8:07)

It did really well. I mean, not only did it become a PhD level judge, and by the way, it was trained by the head of our, our head judge at X Games. It was trained by a lot of our athletes, but it started commentating the events in like, an endemic X Games voice.

B (8:26)

Wow.

A (8:26)

And it knows the history of the athletes. And why this is important is because we're a global sport. We have athletes from over 25 countries compete at the X Games. And so we have fans around the world that want to watch our event and consume our content. Well, now we can use this technology to broadcast in their local language, which is exactly what we did at Summer X Games in Salt Lake City. So we did Japanese, we did Portuguese. For all our fans. In Brazil, we did Mandarin and Spanish. The first time ever in X Games, and it was all by using owl. That's incredible technology that can not only judge, but it can commentate and it knows the athlete's history, so it can draw back different anecdotes that are valuable to the audience. And so, yeah, we're really pleased with the progress.

B (9:09)

Could you tell with the voice that it was AI? No, I'm serious.

A (9:13)

So in Aspen, you couldn't tell it was AI. It sounded like a human. And it's advanced so much since Aspen. Now you can clone people's voice, like Salema Masake, who's been doing X Games for nearly two decades. We could take his voice, his inflection, his tone and do his voice in perfect Japanese or in perfect Spanish. Or we could go to Snoop Dogg and say, hey, Snoop Dogg, can you lend us your voice? And we could do Snoop Dogg in like the most endemic announcer ever for X Games. It knows every trick, every degree of difficulty, everything about our sports. And so again, this is not technology to replace commentators. It's using this technology to give commentators superpowers so that now they can speak 40 different languages and your sport can be broadcast in local languages all around the world.

B (9:59)

That's going to be big for them.

A (10:00)

It's going to, it's big right now. Like we're, we're in conversations with 12, the 12 other leagues just to use the commentating because every league wants to go global and a lot of these sports have international fans. Even the NFL has fans all over the world. And it's one of their biggest priorities is to go global. And so, you know, we're really harnessing and leveraging the tip of the spear of AI. This, this company was incubated and built inside of Google and that former head of Google AI is now the CEO of owl. And so we really have access to cutting edge technology and we're trying to push the limits as far as we can.

B (10:34)

That's exciting. What do you plan on talking about? Are you talking today or tomorrow?

A (10:37)

Tomorrow. Tomorrow, yeah.

B (10:38)

You going to reveal anything?

A (10:41)

We're just going to be talking about the journey of OWL and some of our plans for the future. And you know, we are targeting some events where, where AL will show up and exclusively judge the competition, exclusively commentate the event. Not at our big like, you know, like summer X Games or Winter X Games with some of these partnered events that we're going to, you know, put on ESPN and let's see what the technology can really do.

B (11:08)

What do you think about this new streaming partnership with sports like UFC just announced a big deal yesterday.

A (11:13)

$7.7 billion.

B (11:14)

I think the NFL's on Amazon now or something. Yeah. What do you think of for sports?

A (11:19)

I think it's really bright because, you know, I spoke the, you know, last month at UCLA to a graduate level class. There's probably 200 people in the class and I said, raise your hand if you have cable. And not a single. Wow. Not a single student raised their hand. And so we're just living in a totally different media landscape than we were when I grew up and I had three channels on my tv and you had to mess with the rabbit ears to get Fox like that. And so, you know, it's really important for. Especially sports like X, where our demo is young. I mean, we dominate teens, we dominate sort of Gen Z's and early millennials. Like, no sports property can sort of match the type of audience and engagement Next Games have been setting youth culture for three decades with skateboarding and BMX and skiing and snowboarding. And so, yeah, just streaming is a huge focus of ours, and I think of every major league. I mean, look what happened when the NFL struck a deal last year with Netflix. They put two Christmas games on Netflix and it was over 50 million people. Holy 50 million. The NFL can't get that type of ratings in the regular season.

B (12:27)

Not even close.

A (12:28)

Not even close. And so you saw paramount do the $7.7 billion deal with UFC, and they're moving away from pay per view. And, you know, they'll tell you that that model is archaic and going away. So we think it's great. And because the, The. The social channels are a great way to. To reach your audience through TikTok and Snapchat and Instagram. And now you have the streamers that have really come of age, like Netflix and Amazon prime and Roku and some other ones. And then linear is still, you know, trying to figure out, like, what's their future going to be.

B (12:57)

It's not looking good for them.

A (12:58)

It's not looking good for them at all.

B (13:01)

I grew up watching espn, and I'll always be nostalgic for me, but, yeah, I think they're losing numbers.

A (13:06)

Well, ESPN just announced their bundle package where you can get all of ESPN's sort of horsepower under one app.

B (13:12)

Wow.

A (13:12)

And that's their big streaming play. And Fox is coming out with something similar. So I think they all know now that, you know, linear is changing. And it's not that the audience is going away. It's not that, you know, people don't like ESPN anymore or Fox. Just they want to consume on their device.

B (13:29)

Yeah, Yeah, I watch YouTube. I'd rather watch YouTube on here than my TV.

A (13:32)

For sure. Most. Most young people would.

B (13:34)

Crazy. You mentioned Roku. You guys have a partnership with them, right?

A (13:37)

Yeah, yeah, we. We have a great partnership with Roku. We love Roku because they're the front door of streaming. And it was non. It's non gated. And we want to be accessible. We want to be able to show the world's best action sport athletes to Anybody who wants to consume it. And we had millions of people streaming on Roku. And what we Learned is that 71% of our audience on Roku didn't cross over to stick and ball sports. So they weren't watching football or baseball or basketball. And so the X Games really is a unique sports property in sort of the world where you have a lot of non traditional sports fans that love action sports and a lot, you know, big teeny audience. In fact, more young people watched X Games than the Wimbledon semifinals match, for example, and more young people watched X games than the F1 Monaco race. These are really big sports properties. Right? And so, yeah, that's sort of our foot, our 10 pull in the world, if you will.

B (14:32)

Yeah, well done. That's really smart that you guys pivoted that way. I was on your Twitter. You had a couple interesting tweets and retweets. I saw you retweet the NCAA lost a $2.8 billion back pay lawsuit and you used to fight the NCAA back in the day.

A (14:46)

Well, I think it's pretty clear now that the NCAA has stolen trillions of dollars, Trillions, trillions from student athletes. We're talking six, seven decades. Wow, six, seven decades. There's 350 million student athletes. So, you know, just do the math. And they stole it under the guise of what's called amateurism, which has always been a sham. Amateurism means free labor, and free labor is a hell of a drug. I mean, imagine starting a company, right? And you're a billion dollar company. And you say, well, we don't pay our employees because we want to keep the purity of them. And we only hire 18 to 22 year olds and we give them continuing education credits to go to school. I mean, that's really the absurdity of what the NCAA had gotten away with for six or seven different decades. And so, you know, we saw Nancy Skinner in California state representative say, in the state of California, we are going to allow our student athletes to accept endorsement money for their name, image and likeness. They own their name, image and likeness, not the ncaa. And that was the tipping point. It happened at the state level three years ago. And once Florida heard what California was doing and once Texas heard what California was doing, the they're like, oh my God, California's gonna get a huge recruiting advantage and all the California schools are gonna get the best high school players because they can go make money. And so then Texas adopted that legislation and Florida and then New York, and then it was a tipping point from there, sort of the tip. The big tipping point was the Alston case, if you remember that, at the Supreme Court, this was about a year and a half ago, I think, and the Supreme Court, which is unanimous in nothing, voted unanimously in support of Alston, which was the end, which signaled the end of amateurism. And we're in a world now where the student athletes own their own name, image and likeness. And that's a human, basic human right that we all have in this country.

B (16:35)

It's a great world to be in. Because only what, 1% of them go professional?

A (16:39)

1%. That's the number. And so why is it bad that a tennis player can go to the local car dealership and sign autographs for 300 bucks? I mean, that's a lot of money. Like when I was in college, like, you know, these are college kids and so why limit their opportunities to commercialize their name, their image and their likeness and all of their hard work?

B (16:59)

Yeah, it must feel good because I know you were calling out the NCAA for many years ago.

A (17:03)

Well, I mean, my history with them, I was an Olympic skier, number one ranked skier in the world before I ever went to college. And when I went to college to go accept a full ride scholarship to play football, the NCAA said, well, if you play football, you have to give up all your endorsements in skiing.

B (17:19)

Whoa.

A (17:19)

Your ski sponsor, your goggle sponsor. Because we don't allow corporate endorsements in our in the ncaa. And I'm like, this is ridiculous. Like I'm an Olympic. I'm the number one ranked skier in the world. I'm just trying to go play college football. Totally different sport. And you're going to take away all my earning rights as an Olympics here? You don't even govern the Olympics. The NCAA has nothing to do with the Olympics. They have nothing to do with the NGBs like US Skiing and US Snowboarding, et cetera. And so I sued them and testified in Congress and sort of been on this, you could call it a two decade Crusader Journey Revenge Tour. Revenge tour, More about, like, I just didn't want, you know, anybody else to go through that.

B (17:58)

Yeah. So do you feel like they made you pick what sport you had to pursue?

A (18:02)

They did. They absolutely did. And so I, you know, I tore up all the endorsement contracts and it was probably 3 or $400,000 worth of endorsement contracts for an 18 year old.

B (18:10)

That's a lot back then.

A (18:11)

Oh, man, that was a lot. You know, they were talking almost two decades ago and I played my freshman and sophomore season and then I was broke I didn't have money to go to Finland and compete in a World cup, and I really wanted to go to the next Olympics, which was in Torino. And so I said, you know, I'm accepting my endorsements and I'm not leaving college. And if you don't like it, ncaa, you got to kick me out. They waited nine months all the way to fall camp, and right when fall camp hit, they declared me permanently ineligible.

B (18:37)

Wow.

A (18:37)

For being an Olympic skier.

B (18:40)

Crazy.

A (18:40)

It was devastating to me because I. I didn't get to play my junior and senior season. And so, yeah, I guess it was the revenge tour.

B (18:48)

Well, you. You still made a team NFL, right?

A (18:50)

Yeah. I was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles and. And spent two seasons there and a season with the Pittsburgh Steelers. And just living inside of the walls of the. Of the NFL was just a huge. It was like. It was a dream come true.

B (19:02)

That's cool, man. Where's your favorite place to ski at these days?

A (19:05)

Wherever the snow's the best. Makes sense. But no, I love. I love tal ride. I love Sun Valley, I love Jackson Hole. I mean, tough to beat those three spots.

B (19:15)

I've never been skiing.

A (19:17)

Never been skiing.

B (19:18)

Not once.

A (19:18)

Okay, well, you're going to want to start at a different ski reserves for now.

B (19:21)

Are those double? What is it? Double?

A (19:23)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

B (19:24)

Diamond or whatever it's called.

A (19:25)

Those are pretty steep.

B (19:26)

I. I just hear some scary stories with skiing, man. I'm a little. I'm a little scared.

A (19:30)

It's. It's hard. It's easier to learn when you're 3 years old. I learned when I was 3 years old, my grandfather used to throw little miniature size candy of ours down the mountain. And so if I was, like, good enough to. To find a medium I could eat, you know, I could eat them. And my mom never let us eat candy in the household. So, like, I love skiing from a very young age because my, my grandfather's sweet tooth and his brilliant method of teaching me how to ski.

B (19:53)

That is brilliant. Look. Look how it paid off. Shout out to grandpa.

A (19:56)

Yeah. And I still have a terrible sweet tooth, so I have that into blame for that.

B (20:01)

You also do some philanthropy work too, right?

A (20:03)

Yeah. I started wish of a lifetime. And as I mentioned, my grandfather was my first ski instructor. And he was just an incredible dude, man. Like, through flew 17 missions over Berlin in World War II.

B (20:14)

Wow.

A (20:15)

As a gunner, like a B17 bomber. Tough as nails. But he and I shared just an incredible relationship. And same with my grandmother. And as I traveled the world, I just saw all These other societies treating the elderly differently than we treat our elderly in this country. So I went to Japan for the first time and I was crowding this, jumping on this, like, really crowded bus, and I saw this elderly woman start walking on the bus. I saw everybody get out of their seat and I saw them bow and make sure she had a place in that bus before it moved. And I'm like, oh, my God, it's amazing. And I love that reverence, that respect. And so I said, I was 15 at the time. I said, if I ever do anything in my life, I want to do something for seniors. So I started Wish of a lifetime. And we grant lifelong wishes to 80, 90, and 100 year old people. And they are the coolest people you've ever met in your life. And they're also like the most selfless. So like, hey, what do you want? Your what? If you had one wish, what would it be? Oh, I'd give it to somebody else type of thing. Wow. And so now we're granting almost one wish per day and just meeting some of those incredibly humble, awesome people, and we're telling their stories and reminding people that, hey, you know, just because you're in your 90s or hundreds doesn't mean you need to stop dreaming. And reminder for all of us. Young people in this country respect these people. They, they paved our roads.

B (21:32)

Yeah.

A (21:32)

They, they fought for independence on the, on the beaches of, of Normandy and the boats of Pearl Harbor. I mean, they pull us out of the Great Depression. Like, this generation is really incredible.

B (21:42)

That's beautiful. We'll include a link to that in the video.

A (21:44)

Thanks, man.

B (21:44)

You gonna play some poker tonight? Since we're in Vegas?

A (21:47)

You know, I'll leave the. The poker plane and my sister, I don't know if you've ever saw her.

B (21:53)

Movie, but Molly was on your Wikipedia.

A (21:55)

Yeah, she built, I think, the largest underground poker game in American history, only to see it come crashing down by the FBI. And Aaron Sorkin did an awesome movie about her life called Molly's Game. So now I'll leave. I'll leave the poker playing to my sister.

B (22:10)

Yeah, great movie. Check out that movie if you haven't seen it. Well, Jeremy, it's been awesome, man. We'll link everything below. Thanks for coming on.

A (22:15)

Awesome, man.

B (22:15)

Thanks for having me. Check them out, guys. See you next time. I hope you guys are enjoying the show. Please don't forget to like and subscribe. It helps the show a lot with the algorithm.

A (22:27)

Thank you.

B (22:28)

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