Jeremy Bloom: Olympian Exposes the NCAA’s Biggest Scam in History | DSH #1583

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Speaker 2 Pretty clear now that the NCAA has stolen trillions of dollars from student athletes. We're talking six to seven decades.
There's 350 million student athletes. Just do the math.

Speaker 2 They stole it under the guise of what's called amateurism, which is what's always been a sham. Amateurism means free labor.
And free labor is a hell of a drug. You're a billion-dollar company.

Speaker 2 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 continue education credits to go to school.

Speaker 2 That's really the absurdity of what the NCAA had gotten away with with for six or seven different decades.

Speaker 4 Okay, guys, we got Jeremy Bloom here. We are at the AI4 conference.
Man, how you doing?

Speaker 2 Doing good. Just got in.

Speaker 4 Yeah, you've been doing some really cool stuff with AI in X Games. I just want to say that.
And

Speaker 4 I think it's removing the human error from refereeing sports, right? Yeah. Was that the main goal for you?

Speaker 2 For sure. I mean, I grew up in subjective sports.
So I was an Olympic skier for Team USA. It's a judge sport.
It's not like track and field. You know, who crosses the finish line first wins.

Speaker 2 And then I played football and referees still to this day get it wrong.

Speaker 2 And, you know, I think about these really big moments. I think about like the 2018 NFC Championship game.
Right. The Saints lost the game due to a bad call.

Speaker 2 And they got people on their team who never got a chance to play in the Super Bowl because a referee who admitted it was a bad call. And these things happen, right? The tuck rule.

Speaker 2 the figure skating scandal, the Russian figure skating scandal at the Olympics. Like

Speaker 2 when you're an athlete, you dedicate your whole life, man.

Speaker 2 Like, you don't go to prom and homecoming, and you don't do normal things because you think you dream about going to the Olympics, you dream about going to the NFL, you dream about being in the Super Bowl, dream about winning an F1 race.

Speaker 2 And I just can't believe we still live in a world where human referees and judges are getting it wrong, and it's changing the course of history for these athletes, these teams, these fans.

Speaker 2 And I'm just so happy that we're finally at the point in technology where technology can solve that. I really believe it can.

Speaker 2 And that's why we started OWL.

Speaker 4 Exciting times. 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.

Speaker 4 And hopefully they could get to some sort of AI ref in the future, right?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They don't want to ref anymore. I mean, think about it this way.
Sports betting was a 200, it was a $400 million business in 2018.

Speaker 2 It's now 16 billion. Holy crap.
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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 4 Wow, I didn't know they were getting death threats like that.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it's bad, dude.

Speaker 4 I did not know that, but it makes sense because if people are betting their whole income on a game, totally.

Speaker 2 I mean, you know, 16 billion dollars 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.

Speaker 2 A clearly wrong call lost you whatever that number is for you initially. You would be livid.
And so this is the reality that we're currently living in in sports.

Speaker 2 And, you know, even to this day, replay, instant replay from the Netflix series, the upshots.

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Speaker 2 Can't save some of these calls.

Speaker 4 Right, because they don't have the right camera angle.

Speaker 2 They might have the right camera angle. Some of the calls aren't reviewable, like in the NFL.
Right. And there's all this nuance.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Literally, the wrong driver at the end of the season was hoisting the trophy.

Speaker 2 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 man i know how hard you dedicate your whole life to these moments referees can never get it wrong yeah especially when it costs the team the the the game and and judges you know you certainly got to get away from a world where judges can be bought off right which we've seen we've seen it yeah in every sport just just the other month Major League Baseball fired an ump for sports betting.

Speaker 2 Wow. So, you know, just money's too good these days.
Money's too big. So, um, and the consequences are too high and the outcome's too important.

Speaker 4 How many times from your sports history, whether it's skiing or football, do you remember a ref kind of screwing you over?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I mean, just because you have AI judges, some people are going to be like, oh, I don't think that that jump was that good and that degree of difficulty. So you'll still have

Speaker 2 a lot of that. But what you won't have is when a race director gets the wrong call.
Right.

Speaker 2 Or a blatant pass interference call happens in the end zone of an NFC championship game where a team is on the line to go to the Super Bowl in the remaining one minute of the game.

Speaker 2 You won't have that anymore.

Speaker 2 And so we think it's important technology for the Olympics. We think it's important technology for football, for baseball, for basketball.

Speaker 2 Some of the binary sports were in or out, strike, you know, ball or strike.

Speaker 2 But what we're really excited at X Games is to use this technology for highly, highly subjective sports.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 Good, good style is basically good economy of motion in the air.

Speaker 2 So was the athlete on access? What was the amplitude of the jump? Did they grab? And if so, did they tweak the grab?

Speaker 2 So all these things that a lot of people think, oh, AI could never understand what good style is. Yes, it can.

Speaker 2 Because you teach it and you bring in the judges and you bring in the athletes, which is what we did at X Games when we launched

Speaker 2 the world's first AI judge for a subjective sport in Aspen this year. to judge the men's snowboarding competition.

Speaker 2 And it's been a really fun adventure, I will say. And this technology, as you know, is moving so incredibly fast.

Speaker 4 That's really exciting, man. So how did it do at the snowboarding competition?

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 head judge at X Games. It was trained by a lot of our athletes.

Speaker 2 But it started commentating the events. in like an endemic X Games voice.
Wow. And it knows the history of the athletes.

Speaker 2 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 our fans in in Brazil we did Mandarin and Spanish The first time ever in X Games, and it was all by using OWL.

Speaker 2 That's a good thing. This 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.

Speaker 2 And so, yeah, we're really pleased with the progress.

Speaker 4 Could you tell with the voice that it was AI?

Speaker 2 No. I'm serious.
So in Aspen,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 We could take his voice, his inflection, his tone,

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 And we could do Snoop Dogg in like the most endemic announcer ever for X Games that knows every trick, every degree of difficulty, everything about our sports.

Speaker 2 And so, again, this is not technology to replace commentators.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 4 That's going to be big for them.

Speaker 2 It's going to, well, it's big right now. Like we're in conversations with

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 This company was incubated and built inside of Google.

Speaker 2 And that former head of Google, AI, is now the CEO of OWL. And so we really have access to cutting-edge technology and

Speaker 2 we're trying to push the limits as far as we can.

Speaker 4 That's exciting. What do you plan on talking about? Are you talking today or tomorrow?

Speaker 2 Tomorrow.

Speaker 1 Tomorrow? Yeah.

Speaker 4 You're going to reveal anything?

Speaker 2 We're just going to be talking about the journey of OWL and some of our plans for the future.

Speaker 2 And we are targeting some events where

Speaker 2 OWL will show up and exclusively judge the competition,

Speaker 2 exclusively commentate the event. Not at our big

Speaker 2 Summer X games or Winter X games, but some of these partnered events that we're going to put on the SPN

Speaker 2 and let's see what the technology can really do.

Speaker 4 What do you think about this new streaming partnership with sports? Like UFC just announced a big deal yesterday.

Speaker 2 $7.7 billion.

Speaker 4 I think the NFL is on Amazon now or something. What do you think of that future for sports?

Speaker 2 I think it's really bright because

Speaker 2 I spoke

Speaker 2 last month at UCLA. to a graduate level class.
It was probably 200 people in the class. And I said, raise your hand hand if you have cable.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And you had to mess with the rabbit ears to get Fox.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, it's really important for especially sports like X Games, where our demo is young. I mean, we dominate teens.
We dominate sort of Gen Z's and early millennials.

Speaker 2 Like no sports property can sort of match the type of audience and engagement. I mean, X games have been setting, you know, youth culture for three decades

Speaker 2 with skateboarding and BMX and skiing and snowboarding. And so, yeah,

Speaker 2 streaming is a huge focus of ours and I think of every major, major league. I mean, look what happened when the NFL struck a deal last year with Netflix.
They put two Christmas games.

Speaker 2 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.
Not even close. Not even close.

Speaker 2 And so you saw Paramount do the $7.7 billion deal with UFC and they're moving away from pay-per-view. And they'll tell you that that model is archaic and going away.

Speaker 2 So we think it's great, man, because

Speaker 2 the social channels are a great way to reach your audience through TikTok and Snapchat and Instagram.

Speaker 2 And now you have the streamers that have really come of age, like Netflix and Amazon Prime and Roku and some other ones.

Speaker 2 And then Linear is still trying to figure out what's their future going to be.

Speaker 4 It's not looking good for them.

Speaker 2 It's not looking good for them at all i grew up watching espn and that'll always be nostalgic for me but yeah i think they're losing numbers well espn just announced their bundle package where you can get all of espn's sort of horsepower under one app wow and that's their big streaming play and and fox is coming out with something similar so i think they all know now that you know linear is changing um 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 yeah yeah i watch ESPN.

Speaker 4 I'd rather watch YouTube on here than my TV. For sure.
Most kids,

Speaker 2 most young people would.

Speaker 1 Crazy.

Speaker 4 You mentioned Roku. You guys have a partnership with them, right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we have a great partnership with Roku. We love Roku because they're the front door of streaming, and

Speaker 2 it's non-gated.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And 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.

Speaker 2 These are really big sports properties, right?

Speaker 2 And so, yeah, that's sort of our footprint, our 10-pole in the world, if you will.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 is what's always been a sham. Amateurism means free labor.

Speaker 2 And free labor is a hell of a drug. I mean, imagine starting a company, right?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And we only hire 18 to 22-year-olds and we give them continue education credits to go to school.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's really the absurdity of what the NCAA had gotten away with for six or seven different decades.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They own their name, image, and likeness, not the NCAA.

Speaker 2 And that was the tipping point. It happened at the state level three years ago.

Speaker 2 And once Florida heard what California was doing, and once Texas heard what California was doing, they're like, oh my God, California's going to get a huge recruiting advantage.

Speaker 2 And all the California schools are going to 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.

Speaker 2 And then it was a tipping point from there. Sort of

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And that's a human, basic human right that we all have in this country.

Speaker 4 It's a great world to be in because only, what, 1% of them go professional?

Speaker 2 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? And that's a lot of money. Like when I was in college, like...

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 4 Yeah, it must feel good because I know you were calling out the NCAA for many years ago.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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. Whoa.

Speaker 2 Your ski sponsor, your goggle sponsor, because we don't allow corporate endorsements in the NCAA. And I'm like, this is ridiculous.
Like,

Speaker 2 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 Olympic skier?

Speaker 2 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 U.S. skiing and U.S.
snowboarding, et cetera.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 5 Revenge tour.

Speaker 2 More about like, I just didn't want anybody else to go through that.

Speaker 4 Yeah. So do you feel like they made you pick what sport you ought to pursue? They did.

Speaker 2 They absolutely did. And so I, you know, I tore up all the endorsement contracts, and it was probably $300,000 or $400,000 worth of endorsement contracts for an 18-year-old.

Speaker 5 Oh, man, that was a lot.

Speaker 2 You know, we were talking almost two decades ago.

Speaker 2 And I played my freshman and sophomore season, and then I was broke. Like, I didn't have money to go to Finland and compete in a World Cup.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And if you don't like it, NSW, 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

Speaker 2 for being in Olympics here. And crazy.
It was devastating to me because I didn't get to play my junior and senior season. And so, yeah, I guess it was the revenge tour.

Speaker 4 Well, you still made a team, NFL, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles and spent two seasons there and a season with the Pittsburgh Steelers. And just living inside of the walls of

Speaker 2 the NFL was just a huge

Speaker 2 It was like, it was a dream come true.

Speaker 4 That's cool, man. Where's your favorite place to ski at these days?

Speaker 2 Wherever the snow's the best. Makes sense.
But no, I love Telluride. I love Sun Valley.
I love Jackson Hole. I mean, tough to beat those three spots.

Speaker 4 I've never been.

Speaker 2 Never been skiing. Not once.
Okay, well, you're going to want to start at a different ski reserve throughout LCC.

Speaker 4 Are those double, what is it, double

Speaker 4 diamond or whatever it's called?

Speaker 2 Those are pretty steep.

Speaker 4 I just hear some scary stories with skiing, man.

Speaker 4 I'm a little scared.

Speaker 2 It's easier to learn when you're three years old. I learned when I was three years old.
My grandfather used to throw a little miniature-sized candy of ours down the mountain.

Speaker 2 And so if I was good enough to find him in him,

Speaker 2 I could eat him. And my mom never let us eat candy in the household.
So I love skiing from a very young age because my grandfather's sweet tooth and his brilliant method of teaching me how to ski.

Speaker 2 That is brilliant.

Speaker 4 Look how it paid off.

Speaker 5 Shout out to grandfather.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I still have a terrible sweet tooth. So I have that to end to blame for that.

Speaker 4 You also do some philanthropy work, too, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I started Wish of a Lifetime.

Speaker 2 As I mentioned, my grandfather was my first ski instructor, and he was just an incredible dude, man. Like,

Speaker 2 flew 17 missions over Berlin in World War II as a gunner, like a B-17 bomber. tough as nails, but he and I shared just an incredible relationship and stay with my grandmother.
And

Speaker 2 as I traveled the world, I just saw all these other societies treating the elderly differently than we treat our elderly in this country.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 I said,

Speaker 2 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, year old people.

Speaker 2 And they are the coolest people you've ever met in your life. And they're also like the most selfless.
So like, what, hey, what do you want? You're, what, if you had one wish, what would it be?

Speaker 2 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 the most incredibly humble, awesome people.

Speaker 2 And we're telling their stories and reminding people that, hey, you know, just because you're in your 90s or 100s doesn't mean you need to stop dreaming.

Speaker 2 And reminder for all of us young people in this country, respect these people. They paved our roads.

Speaker 2 They fought for our independence

Speaker 2 on the beaches of Normandy and the boats of Pearl Harbor.

Speaker 2 They pulled us out of the Great Depression.

Speaker 2 This generation is really incredible.

Speaker 1 That's beautiful.

Speaker 4 We'll include a link to that in the video.

Speaker 2 Thanks, man.

Speaker 4 You're going to play some poker tonight since we're in Vegas.

Speaker 2 You know, I'll leave the poker playing to my sister.

Speaker 2 I don't know if you've ever saw her movie, but Molly.

Speaker 4 Who's on your Wikipedia, yeah?

Speaker 2 Yeah. She, uh, she, she built, I think, the largest underground poker game in American history.
Crazy. Only to see it come crashing down by the FBI.

Speaker 2 And Erin Sorkin did an awesome movie about her life called Molly's Game. So now I'll leave the poker playing to my sister.

Speaker 4 Yeah, great movie. Check out that movie if you haven't seen it.
Well, Jeremy, it's been awesome, and we'll link everything below. Thanks for coming on.
Awesome, man. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 4 Check them out, guys. See you next time.

Speaker 4 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. Thank you.