"Your League Is So Cooked": The Best Bettor in NBA History on How to Solve a Gambling Crisis

Speaker 1 Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

Speaker 2 Your league is so cooked that you are going to have a tough time differentiating between tanking for the purposes of illegally gambling or tanking for the purposes of trying to get draft position.

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Speaker 1 I just want to point out for people who aren't watching on YouTube, though, that is a fake background, Bob Volgar.

Speaker 2 It is. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You're in an undisclosed geographic location. What do you got? What do you got behind you?

Speaker 2 Well, this is my office, and there's a bunch of art that's like stacked against the wall or not hung yet. So it just looks a lot better this way.

Speaker 1 Oh, you're just embarrassed. You're embarrassed to show me what your actual residence is like, those books.
The books behind you, you haven't read those books. It's just fake books.

Speaker 2 I feel like that's kind of standard, isn't it? To have a bunch of books as like trophies. People hang their books like trophies in most places.
That's right.

Speaker 1 I was hoping you would have, you know, like betting slips framed in your, you know, you ever save those?

Speaker 2 Do you even have betting slips when you were working? I never, I wasn't in the betting slip. I mean, I wasn't around for the betting slip era.
I think I had phone calls and

Speaker 2 yeah, dealing with third-party intermediaries for the most part.

Speaker 1 So I should just quickly explain here that the reason I am on this call right now is because of the episode we published last week about NBA NBA betting and these poker games that allegedly involve the Italian mafia and also NBA players and coaches, and more recently, the FBI.

Speaker 1 Because while I've been thinking about this scandal and the federal government's concurrent pair of indictments, there is one person in specific I've been meaning to talk to about it.

Speaker 1 Someone I don't agree with on lots of issues, but someone whose secrets, whose perspective I always seek when it comes to these exact subjects.

Speaker 1 And so I asked this person to introduce himself on camera.

Speaker 2 Bob Volgaris,

Speaker 2 former professional sports better and now current owner of a second division Spanish football club, CD Castlejum.

Speaker 1 That's pretty good. Also wildly insufficient.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 What was your job with the Mavericks, Bob? What was your job title in the MBA?

Speaker 2 I was the former director of quantitative research and development, whatever that meant.

Speaker 1 It meant you, like me, talk to Mark Cuban a lot.

Speaker 2 You probably talked to Mark Cuban more than I did, Steve. Sure.

Speaker 2 Mark's a big texter. He's a big text guy.

Speaker 1 You are also, according to both, I would say, historical record and legend,

Speaker 1 one of the most successful NBA betters of all time.

Speaker 2 No, I was the most successful NBA better of all time. Let's just get it clear.

Speaker 1 And he's not wrong, by the way. ESPN called Bob in 2013, quotes, the world's top NBA gambler.

Speaker 1 Meaning that, yes, he is the only NBA better who became an NBA executive, in large part because of his success betting.

Speaker 1 He also is a highly competitive poker player and now the owner and operator of that European soccer team that he mentioned in Spain.

Speaker 1 But what is crucial to establish here is that Bob Vulgaris got insanely rich off of gambling long before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting in May 2018.

Speaker 1 Meaning that when Bob was becoming the guy that every legal sports gambler you know is now striving to be, there were no betting slips, no legal receipts for his millions to frame.

Speaker 2 I mean, I did it for from 2000 to 2017-ish, 16-ish, whatever.

Speaker 2 Probably made

Speaker 2 10 million or so a year every year, not counting like expenses and salaries, but actual betting net, like wins versus losses. Right.
Average was like about eight to 10, I would say.

Speaker 1 Okay, so for about how long? I do the math. 17 years.

Speaker 2 Yeah, 17 years, 15, 17 years, something like that. Too long.
How about that?

Speaker 1 But we're getting into very clearly the nine-figure winnings territory is what we're talking about.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I made a lot of money. For sure.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Just like the trajectory of guy without money who is desperately trying to get some to guy who uses sports gambling, particularly on the NBA, to get more than he ever dreamed.

Speaker 1 And now is in this position in front of this fake ass bookshelf in which you can survey the world that you kind of inspired on the internet, people trying to be like you.

Speaker 2 This isn't what I inspired, though. This is so far removed.
I mean, I'm not to interrupt you, but this, this world right now is so far removed.

Speaker 2 Like the levels I had to go to bet on sports to get accounts, to find people,

Speaker 2 cash in duffel bags in Canada, dealing with shady individuals, and then later on in life dealing with, you know, VIPs who had access to large casino accounts is so different than people who are downloading an app

Speaker 2 and clicking buttons and using their credit card.

Speaker 1 The way though that you had to do it, put us in the timeline here. When did you place your first NBA bet so we can get a sense of what you had to do from there?

Speaker 2 So when I first started betting, to be clear, it was through offshore sports books.

Speaker 2 So it was through internet sportsbooks or telephone like 1-800 numbers, but there would be like, you know, ads in Pro Football Weekly, some 1-800 number, you'd go get a money order through Western Union and send it to some jabroni in the Caribbean named like Victor Sanchez or something.

Speaker 2 And then I graduated from that. And that was, I would say that continued for a very, very long period of time.

Speaker 2 online casinos, online sports books that were

Speaker 2 not legal in the America, but they were like gray. They called them gray area until the World Sports Exchange guys got indicted.
That was a big thing that happened.

Speaker 2 And then in addition to that, when I was in Canada, I was dealing with like local bookmakers.

Speaker 1 But the idea that the MBA is a thing you're going to start putting these bets on such that you have a facility with it, what was the reason why you chose the MBA?

Speaker 1 And what was, if you were to diagnose it in retrospect, what was your competitive advantage? Why were you actually good at this?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, my competitive advantage is that I just have like a real, real good attention to detail when I'm doing something. And I probably am decent at pattern recognition.

Speaker 2 i think if i have one talent in life it's probably pattern recognition um

Speaker 2 but i just started watching nba basketball because i was in vegas at the time and it was one of the i was under the age of 21 and it was one of the few places i could park myself in a casino without being bothered was in the sports book and i remember i would just sit there at the stardust door of caesars palace and watch basketball that was on and i liked it and um i developed an affinity for it and I wasn't actually good at it.

Speaker 2 And then I decided this is something that I really enjoyed.

Speaker 2 I somehow got satellite TV through the those little dishes that came out and started watching a lot of NBA basketball and it became like something I was obsessed with. I loved it.
I loved the sport.

Speaker 1 You're trying to find patterns in all of these games and you're sifting through like granular, as granular data as you can get.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm trying to collect as much data as possible. And at the time, there wasn't a lot of data.
There was the box score and that was about it.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 When 1999, the NBA started publishing play-by-play data, which is a description of what happens on the court, including where the shots were taken, the location of the shots, who got the rebound, you know, time of possession, when the shot was taken.

Speaker 2 So you could get some detailed information. And that became more and more detailed.
And I would say up until around 2016, that's all you had was play-by-play data.

Speaker 2 But what I was doing is I was watching a lot of basketball, recording a lot of games on VHS. I had like four VHS machines.
I would record all the games.

Speaker 2 I like focusing on the West Coast teams just because it was just easier. There was fewer games and it was later on in the evening.
So I was able to focus more on those games.

Speaker 2 I found it just worked better for me there was like and i enjoyed watching like the clippers the lakers golden state etc and so yeah that's what i was doing just collecting as much data as possible i wasn't just like you know winging it and watching games with my friends like like people think it's easy to bet on sports and it's not easy to bet on sports you have to be able to win like you know roughly 53 just to break even on a straight wage or 52.38 i think something like that

Speaker 2 and that adds up over time. The other part I think that's interesting too, Pablo, is like, let's say you do do all that.

Speaker 2 This is the part that is really like, forget about, let's say you are just good at it and you have a talent and you're better than, you know, you're better than you can, you can beat the sports books.

Speaker 2 Like you just can't win. That's the thing that people don't realize.
They will not allow you to win. It is the ultimate disgusting parasitic upper like business in America, I think.

Speaker 2 Like this idea that they're selling gambling to the masses and then you can't even, if you win, they won't even allow you to keep betting. They will limit you to bet.

Speaker 1 Oh, look, the whole, and I need people in the general audience to understand and appreciate this.

Speaker 1 The reason you have to use a beard, basically a disguise, someone to put the bet in for you, because if you walk in with your face and your name, they're not going to let you do it.

Speaker 1 The reason they won't let you, Bob Vulgaris, do it is because at some point you revealed to them in the course of your track record that you might actually have the ability to win money.

Speaker 2 The moment you show an ability to win,

Speaker 2 you'll be limited and you'll be shown the door.

Speaker 1 In the pre-legalized gambling era, which is the era in which you're coming to have this success. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Who's the most famous person that you used as a beard?

Speaker 2 I mean, the most famous person I used as a beard, but it only lasted for like an afternoon was Floyd Mayweather. But that was like literally, it lasted for like an afternoon and a half.

Speaker 1 What happened?

Speaker 2 I mean, I don't know exactly what happened, but the guy who I got and put in touch with him, he sat next to me at a Miami Heat, funny enough, playoff game and he like took an interest to the person I was with.

Speaker 2 And I was just, she was just a friend of mine. So I had no problem with him like getting her number and talking to her and whatever.
We switched seats.

Speaker 2 So he was, she was sitting next to him at halftime. He asked me what I did and I told him and somehow we got in touch.

Speaker 2 And then I put him, then there was, then he was in Vegas and a friend of mine who was a poker player, funnily enough, decided he was going to link up with Floyd's people in Vegas and give us, you know, we would give them the picks.

Speaker 2 He would bet them for us. And by the way, I'm sure Floyd Mayweather is bearding for other people.

Speaker 2 Like, I don't want to blow up his spot or whatever, but I would, he would be the perfect beard for like, if you're like an amazing, like, I don't know this to be the case, but I would, I would bet that, that there's a good chance that he was bearding for someone else.

Speaker 2 But he's very difficult to deal with. I will say that much.
So my thing was, was I gave him a game that I wanted to bet

Speaker 2 one game, we bet it. Then we gave him the next game to bet.
And it was, I forget what the team was, but let's just say it was Denver versus San Antonio and we wanted to bet Denver.

Speaker 2 And he'd be like, no, no, I like San Antonio. I was like, okay, cool, but we like Denver.
So you're, you know, we would like for you to bet Denver for us.

Speaker 2 Like, no, no, I think that's, I want to bet San Antonio. And I was like, okay, well, then why don't you know you just

Speaker 2 like bet Denver for me? And if you want, we can just bet against each other. Like, why don't we just bet against each other? No, no, I don't want to do that.
You always win. I don't, I don't, I don't.

Speaker 2 That was how the conversation went down. And I was just like, yeah, I don't have time for this.
And I was just basically, I just pulled the plug on the floor. He was not worth it.

Speaker 1 With the premise, though, the premise of why Floyd is the perfect beard is a parallel logic.

Speaker 2 It's because of that conversation. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But it's, but it's the idea that the athlete and this also has some resonance with the poker stuff which we'll get to but just the the idea that there's a very famous person with disposable income for whom strategy is more of a theory than an actual practice well what you want for the perfect beard is what you want is you want someone who looks like they have more money than they know what to do with it and they didn't get it gambling And ideally, what you want is someone who's already has a track record of losing money gambling or looks like a banana or looks like someone who's not very smart.

Speaker 2 Like Dan Bilzerian was a beard of mine.

Speaker 1 Way, though, the Instagram guy.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he was, he loved the cross.

Speaker 1 Excuse me. That's how I know of Dan Bilzerian.
Now he's, now he's, I believe, uh, perhaps the next secretary of the treasury. I don't know what Dan Bilzerian's up to now, but he was.

Speaker 2 He's he's fighting his own battle, I think, is what he's doing. I'm not sure what exactly he's doing.

Speaker 1 Wait a minute. So tell the Dan Bilzerian story.
How does that happen?

Speaker 2 Dan was like around in the poker. He showed up in poker.
That's why I met Dan. In fact, if you read Dan's autobiography, I think I'm a character in the book.

Speaker 2 And I was like, do not use my name under any circumstances. I don't know what you're writing, but I don't want to be affiliated with this at all.

Speaker 2 And so I think there's a character in there that like knows all the angles and set up accounts. But yeah, so somehow Dan got an account with Bet365

Speaker 2 in the UK through his brother. But yes, that's what happened.
So I met Dan in poker. He was hanging around the Bellagio.
He was playing high-stakes poker. He was around.

Speaker 2 You know, he's also somebody who likes to make money. And we used that account to bet.
That's just how it went down. So they thought Dan Belzerian was making the bets, but it was me or Dan's brother.

Speaker 1 Right. How successful was that?

Speaker 2 That account was good. I think we won like,

Speaker 2 we won a lot. We won like 10 to 15 million pounds before they quit us, I think.
And I think how they quit us was because I was friends with a good friend of Dan's.

Speaker 2 Actually, this is interesting because he was a former NBA basketball player. This guy named Jackson Vroman.

Speaker 1 Oh, the late Jackson Vroman.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the guy who died.

Speaker 2 Yeah, really sad story. But he, anyways, I'm pretty sure how our account got discovered was Jackson, who was always in Dan's Instagram stories, and I was never in Dan's Instagram stories.

Speaker 1 I never saw you there. I never saw you there.

Speaker 2 The main reason would like because we weren't really hanging around a lot, but the other reason would be like it would kill the beard situation.

Speaker 1 Right. Also, you weren't a woman in a bikini, so it was less useful for you to be in the Instagram stories.

Speaker 2 But I think what happened was Jackson posted a picture of my dog on his Instagram like the next week or so. Our account got shut.
I don't know if that's why it got shut down, but it got shut down.

Speaker 1 You have a very distinctive dog.

Speaker 2 I did then, yeah. That was a different dog, but yeah.
Excuse me.

Speaker 1 Coltrane, I believe, distinguished. I don't know if Coltrane was wearing the luxury Hermes scarf.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 it wasn't living the French Riviera lifestyle back then. I was more hard-scrambled living in Malibu in the summer.

Speaker 1 That's right. That was before you had your own yacht.
Excuse me. This was the pre-poverty era of Bob Vulgar.

Speaker 2 Poverty area. This is still Deca or Santa Millionaire.
That's right. It's embarrassing.
Bob Bulgaria.

Speaker 2 No, I was not come up. Yeah.
Coltrane was a good dog, but he was very iconic. Everyone knew who Coltrane was.
Rest in peace, Coltrane. Yes.

Speaker 1 Rest in peace, Coltrain. Yes.
The relationship, the financial dynamic with the beard. The beard, of course, gets a cut of the winnings.
That's how that works.

Speaker 2 Different. It works.
So you do two things. You can do 50-50 share or some percentage, depending on what their risk appetite is, where they, where they, they're just a partner.

Speaker 2 And so whatever amount of money you win, they get their percentage. Whatever you agree on, whatever money you lose, they lose their percentage.
So usually the standard agreement with a...

Speaker 2 someone is 50-50.

Speaker 2 And then the other agreement we do is the free roll, which is 25. doing 25 to 30 percent, usually 20 to 30, depending on what the account situation was.
Whereas they just get the upside.

Speaker 2 And if we lose money, they're not responsible for it.

Speaker 2 Even if you have a beard who looks good, if you're winning bets, the casino is going to figure it out and be like, okay, well, why is Dan Bolzarian betting the first half under on this Utah Jazz game?

Speaker 2 It doesn't make sense. So you have to do other things to keep the account going.
So you just have to be smart about it.

Speaker 2 With that guy, what we did was we bet basically primarily at post-time because that's what he liked to He wouldn't let you bet early in the day.

Speaker 2 But the way we kept that account was we bet primarily overs and favorites. If we had a game that we liked the under, we wouldn't bet it with him.

Speaker 2 So it looked like we were always just betting the over and we looked like we were just like a fish on a heater, always betting over.

Speaker 2 And it got to the point where the guy was like shading the lines a little bit. So when we wanted to bet over 210 and he would quote us 212 and a half and the line was 210 everywhere.

Speaker 2 Then we would start throwing some unders his way just to kind of keep him off balance. But that's one way to keep the account going.

Speaker 1 So I have two questions. One, it just seems to confirm like a big part of bearding then is to perform the theater of incompetence.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 You want to throw them off the scent that you know anything about anything. Correct.
The second question is: is that the feds or is that your dog?

Speaker 2 It's an outside dog. It's not my dog.
My dog's just sitting here. Hey, come up here.
Oh, good. Come up here.
Come, come on. Up, up, up.
Give me a hug.

Speaker 1 Your dog, your dog. Well, I was going to say.
There, oh, look,

Speaker 2 he's like a hologram. He's like, most of my life, life, just an illusion.
Most of my life's an illusion.

Speaker 1 He'd be allegedly beaming in is the co-owner of a Spanish football team, Bob's dog.

Speaker 2 But yeah, he's never going to bark. He's just quiet.
He's like

Speaker 1 the perfect accomplice. He's just going to stay quiet and troll out.

Speaker 2 Correct. He knows all the secrets, but doesn't talk.
That's what you want.

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Speaker 1 So one of the secrets that Bob was just referring to earlier, one of the biggest reasons he went from working at the Winnipeg airport in his 20s to making more than $100 million betting on the NBA, is an insight that he kept silent about for years and years and years.

Speaker 1 But then he told me about it one day several years ago when we were randomly having lunch in Boston, I think.

Speaker 1 And to fully understand this secret, I just need to explain to you a couple of sports betting 101 terms.

Speaker 1 Because in case you didn't know, an over is when you bet that the total number of points a team scores will be over the line, the number that a bookmaker sets.

Speaker 1 You can bet overs or unders on individual halves of games. But what happened is that one day while he was, you know, getting his sports betting career going, Bob realized something, something

Speaker 1 nobody else did.

Speaker 2 I was working as a skycap at the airport and I bet some Utah Jazz games under

Speaker 2 and I went to go work my night shift

Speaker 2 at the airport thinking I had won the bet because they had scored like 72 points in the first half and the game total was 195

Speaker 2 or something like that. And then I came home to realize I lost and then it happened again the next night.

Speaker 2 And then I started to look a little bit closer, and I realized almost all of the Utah Jazz games, when they played on the road specifically, were going under in the first half and over in the second half.

Speaker 2 And a lot of times the game would go over no matter how low scoring the first half was. And so I kind of thought, well, that's interesting.

Speaker 2 I wonder if there's other teams that have similar tendencies.

Speaker 2 And so I started just doing like pure database work and seeing what teams are averaging in the first half and the second half, not just by overall, but also home in a way.

Speaker 2 So at first, I thought like they're just playing slower, but then the data shows you that the pace is about the same. So it's an efficiency thing.

Speaker 2 The shots aren't as efficient in the first half as they are, which sounds crazy. How could that be?

Speaker 1 And eventually, Bob wound up staring at a simple NBA rule that I personally had never spent a single second thinking about.

Speaker 1 Because you may generally know that NBA teams, home and away, switch baskets at halftime.

Speaker 1 But the thing I never thought about is that in any given game, the away team, the visiting team, gets to choose which basket they're going to shoot on first,

Speaker 1 which means that the visiting team will have their bench where the other 10 guys on the team are sitting for the entire game, alongside the entire coaching staff, right in front of their defense in the first half or far more commonly, if they so choose,

Speaker 1 in the second.

Speaker 2 And I would say 90% of the teams when I was coming around in 95, like there was three teams who wanted to have their defense in front of them in the first half.

Speaker 2 Usually you want your defense in front of you in the second half.

Speaker 2 And so those three teams were the teams, Utah Jazz, New Jersey Nets, Washington Wizards, who had that first half under, second half over profile in a way games.

Speaker 1 So the three teams wanted to have their bench on the side of the court in which their own team would be playing defense in the first half. Correct.

Speaker 2 And I think the reason is because in general, defense is so important. And so most coaches want their defense in front of them in the second half, which is that's the winning time.

Speaker 2 So every team does that. And for whatever reason, these three teams flipped it on its head.
And so it just, it creates a little more randomness.

Speaker 2 It's a lot harder to defend because you can't call out the coverages.

Speaker 1 So that's the key insight, though, is that if you have your defense in front of you on the side of the court that your bench is on, the coaches can communicate with the players

Speaker 1 more effectively, more clearly.

Speaker 2 There's so many layers to it.

Speaker 2 There's like you get more fouls because you're yelling at the refs and the refs are influenced by you yelling at them there's the bench defense where these clowns shunt in the guy's ear um which is a joke that teams do this but they do right along along the sidelines the bench can try to interfere yeah especially on the side you're shooting on so there's so many layers to it that creates this this this massive efficiency difference now the other thing that's interesting is like

Speaker 2 utah

Speaker 2 the Wizards, et cetera, New Jersey Nets with Byron Scott, that's the other one.

Speaker 2 They did it almost, like, I would say every road game. There was other teams that kind of dipped in and out.
And they sometimes would do defense first, then if they lost, they would switch.

Speaker 2 And so that was where it was really interesting because that's where you really had an edge.

Speaker 2 Because after a while, the sports book started to figure out that the easiest way to do it was to was to was to shade the lines based on home away first half, second half.

Speaker 2 The over-unders, that started to happen around 2007, 2008, 600.

Speaker 1 Explain what that means. Explain the adjustment that the sports books made in response to this pattern.

Speaker 2 Well, the sports books, when they make their lines, the way they do the totals, for instance, is they will set the game total, what they think the game total will be, let's say 200.

Speaker 2 Let's just keep it simple. Even though now it's like 240, 250 because you have base so high scoring.
But back then it was around 200.

Speaker 2 Then they'll usually think, well, the first half's generally higher scoring. So maybe we'll make the first half like for most teams, average team 101 or 102, the second half 98.

Speaker 2 Then some teams would be really, really high scoring in the first half and they'd make it higher.

Speaker 2 But they'd rarely go like lower until the end of the year.

Speaker 2 They would see, okay, these teams, they would start to figure out these teams are getting bet under under under then they would do like some basic database work maybe

Speaker 2 but it was not enough like the amount that they were i even remember in 2005 getting frustrated because the lines had adjusted so the utah jazz number on a 200 let's say away was like what open 98 and a half in the first half on a line of 200 and that was irritating me but then i did the math and i was like well the right line should be 88 and a half like you still have a massive edge they were underweighting the impact of having the bench on the side of the defense nobody had a clue how big of yeah yeah, nobody had a clue.

Speaker 1 I never thought about how big it is. Genuinely, it seems when you spell it out, obvious, like when the coaches can more closely communicate with the players and the bench itself can help play defense.

Speaker 2 Well, the perfect, yeah, the perfect example to this is in college, every

Speaker 2 team plays defense in front of the bench in the, in the first half in college basketball. I believe it was when I last was betting, whenever that was.

Speaker 2 So that's why college games are so low scoring in the first half and so high scoring in the second half.

Speaker 2 Everyone Everyone assumes the reason why they're so high scoring in the second half is because of fouling, which definitely is a factor, but it's not the factor. The factor most I can assure you is

Speaker 2 bench defense orientation.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 The structural choice that has an enormous impact that was so underweight that you made, how much money do you think you made on this specific insight that no one else was really seeing as clearly?

Speaker 2 I don't know, like

Speaker 2 40, 50, 60 million. Something I don't know.
The point is, is that

Speaker 2 a lot of money, but the point is that I was also able to become extremely wealthy quickly because I could not, I mean, I was taking massive chances in the sense like, I don't know if you guys, your readers know what Kelly criterion is, but Kelly criterion, if you want to pull it up, is like you're supposed to bet a percentage of your bankroll based on the derived edge you have.

Speaker 2 Right. And my derived edge was so big.

Speaker 2 And the way you gambled back then was you were gambling through illegal bookmakers for the most part.

Speaker 2 they call them outlaw uh bookmakers maybe not illegal um but you're betting and you're settling up on a week-to-week basis and so

Speaker 2 i could bet if let's say like if my bank like when i first the first year i started doing betting really really big my banker was probably like 500 000 um five or six hundred thousand but i was putting in two or three hundred thousand or more every night in action because I would just bet as much as I could on these games, knowing knowing that by the end of the week, it was like a statistical impossibility for me to lose.

Speaker 2 And I'll explain to you why this particular one was so special was because you had that massive, massive, massive mathematical edge, but then you also had the edge of like

Speaker 2 overtime counts for the over. So you're betting the over and like 4.5% of the games are just randomly going to overtime and that's a bonus for you.
So you're never getting f ⁇ ed by overtime.

Speaker 2 Then you got the fouling situation where teams just foul. Like at the Utah Jazz, especially with Jerry Sloan, would foul down 10 with like 0.5 seconds left, like just never give up ever.

Speaker 2 So that was like also in your favor. So you just had a lot of things that could, like, I remember the average team would play, what is it, 40, 41 road games.

Speaker 2 And the first half, if you were like to break down, like on average, the first half would go over like maybe 12 times and go under the remaining 29 times.

Speaker 2 Like that's how big the edge was, or like, let's say 10 and 30. And the second half would be about the same, 30 overs and 10 unders.

Speaker 2 So you could just, my point is, it didn't matter how much money I made.

Speaker 2 I made so much more money than I should have because then it also gave me more confidence to bet other stuff and gave me a bigger bankroll. So like my other edges that were only 5% or 4.5% or 6%,

Speaker 2 I was able to bet more comfortably.

Speaker 1 Right. Right.

Speaker 2 And then that also allowed me to develop like the programs that I developed and the algorithms I developed and the models and sims that I developed in 2009.

Speaker 2 with like mathematicians to now not just bet that specific thing, but now actually bet everything on NBA basketball and develop a really good simulation model.

Speaker 1 So by the time you get to the Mavericks and you have this title, Director of Quantitative Research, and if you're talking directly, certainly to the coaching staff, you're helping advise them on NBA strategy, using data, using your models, but you also have this perspective from the world of betting.

Speaker 1 To what extent did betting come up at the highest levels of conversations that you had while you were with the MAFs?

Speaker 2 Yeah, not, I mean, you had to fill out a, you had to do like a workshop and fill out a questionnaire, like not a questionnaire, but like a get exposure to what gambling was and and then agree to not partake in it and understand what's illegal what isn't like even nba betting was was frowned upon or whatever but yeah there was there was a moment where i don't think it wasn't centered around gambling but like at the start of my first year with the mavericks all the stakeholders or the key employees of the mavericks were invited to speak to the commissioner who came and met with I think it was myself,

Speaker 2 Coach Carlisle, some of his assistants, and I don't think there was any other front office people just because of the timing of it. It was like, it was weird.

Speaker 2 It was like after practice or something and it was at AAC. But yeah, we got to meet with them and just talk about certain things.
And this was the year after

Speaker 2 the Cavs lost to Golden State the year that LeBron, they lost, like they got swept or lost four games when I forget which one was, but it was the J.R. Smith moment where J.R.

Speaker 2 Smith didn't shoot the ball and held it. after the missed free throw or whatever.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I can only imagine being a gambler on that game, by the way, and watching that happen and just be like well yeah well i i what interested me about that was after the fact the legend was that lebron punched a blackboard after that game because he was or punched something a wall and his shooting hand was injured yeah he showed up with the uh air cast right and so my question was like if we're going to do all this talk about

Speaker 2 like if we're going to embrace gambling and talk about gambling which was kind of like the topic of my questions to him were just like, how are you going to enforce this?

Speaker 2 And do you have, do you, are you worried at all? And I was kind of like, and I don't mean to disparage Adam because he, I just think he was kind of like, what the f ⁇ is this guy talking about?

Speaker 2 But he was like very like adamant that I was, what I was saying was absurd. My point was, was that the Cavaliers knew about this.
This was the biggest betting event in the NBA. It's the finals.

Speaker 2 And only, only after the fact was it released that LeBron had that. And I get why you would do that because.

Speaker 2 As a Cleveland Cavaliers coaching staff, you don't want

Speaker 2 your opponent to know this because now you can can lay off LeBron, you can, you know, guard his drives more, you can not worry about him shooting, all this other stuff.

Speaker 2 And so my point was just like, hey, if you're going to get in bed with gambling, how are you going to deal with this?

Speaker 2 Because I promise you, this is affecting the integrity of what you're trying to do. The game, someone has information, and it's one thing to monitor point shaving.
It's one thing to monitor this.

Speaker 2 It's one thing to monitor that, but that's a big part of it.

Speaker 2 And so I just brought it up and I talked about how, because I know, actually, Casey Smith was in the room also, and he was the Mavs athletic trainer at the time and casey was very diligent about the injury report it was always released at the same amount of time it was always released with accurate information etc etc and some teams are not so my point was there was no standardization between that and that's something that

Speaker 2 you you know that could infect the could affect the integrity of the game and so i was just kind of bringing that up and was kind of scoffed at in front of everybody.

Speaker 2 But then afterwards, I think he did say something to me. And because I was quite at him, I was like, look, like, you don't, the sport isn't as on the up and up as you think it is, clearly.

Speaker 2 Nothing to do with gambling, but just like someone's going to have that information. And that just doesn't seem right.

Speaker 2 Like, you're selling to the fans that you're betting on something that is pure in the sense that they have as much information as they should have.

Speaker 2 And my point is just the ability to control that information from a gambling standpoint. It's not like stock options, or it's not like there's always going to be insider trading.

Speaker 2 There's always going to be inside information. There's always going to be some level.
But I think they underestimated how pervasive it could be in basketball.

Speaker 1 But to be clear about your conversation with Adam Silver in which he's talking to the Mavericks.

Speaker 2 It was just about a bunch of different things, but yeah.

Speaker 1 But that's after the 2018 finals, presumably, just to put us in the timeline there.

Speaker 2 For sure. Yeah, I'm not sure.
Maybe it wasn't the first year I was with the Bass, maybe it was the second year. I forget when it was, but it was definitely after that.

Speaker 2 Because I remember, that's the point I brought up was, hey, like, that's kind of weird. Like, people watching the finals didn't even know about this, but also someone had access to the information.

Speaker 2 Are you 100% sure that that never got leaked?

Speaker 1 And now we look at this indictment and we see that allegedly Damon Jones, who is serving as this like weird volunteer, like shadow assisted coach around the Lakers, allegedly fed information that this player who was identified by the powers of logic and deduction is LeBron James, was not going to play in a game.

Speaker 1 You have a real-time example of player availability being with LeBron James, allegedly, being at the center of the biggest gambling scandal in the history of the NBA, the side of allegedly Tim Donaghy, right?

Speaker 1 And so you have this.

Speaker 2 By the way, the Tim Donaghy,

Speaker 2 but not to interrupt you, but the Tim Donaghy thing was way worse than this. Like in terms of what we know now, I think there's probably much worse things that we don't know about.

Speaker 2 And just to be transparent, I reached out to,

Speaker 2 I sent the league an email a week ago, like offering like, hey, like, if you are interested, I'd be happy to help you protect the integrity.

Speaker 2 Like, not like in an official role, but just like some ideas, because there's lots of things they could do to improve the integrity of the game.

Speaker 2 And the things that they responded with recently about Terry Rozier and Jante Porter, like with all due respect to their partners in gambling and their people at Sport Radar or whoever is doing their integrity, that's like the easiest thing in the world to catch.

Speaker 1 Unusual betting activity on obscure players.

Speaker 2 Oh, not even obscure, just on player props. Like if you think like I had the best beard network in the world, probably for basketball.
And if you think I was getting down money on player props,

Speaker 2 like no, because I knew there's no point in trying to like, yeah, could we beat player props? Probably. Our model was predicting lots of things.

Speaker 2 We could certainly beat player props, but what's the point? You're never, that's like the dumbest thing because first of all, the books, there are people who beat props for a living

Speaker 2 and they're good at it. And it's like the worst thing you can put in an account because it's like, why is this guy want to bet on Terry Rose ears under?

Speaker 2 My point is, it's just easy to catch. Like the line is going to move.
It's suspicious. And then the player happens to pull out with an injury.
So that's like the dumbest way to cheat.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 It's the most linear set of footprints left in the snow for what happened.

Speaker 2 Like, I forget what my exact words were when I emailed because I did. I sent an email.
And I know, I was just being very friendly.

Speaker 1 Who'd you emailed? No, no, no. I'm curious about it.

Speaker 2 I just wrote like the, I just wrote like the player props are very easy to identify and monitor for several reasons, not the least of which is it is very difficult to bet a lot of money in those props.

Speaker 2 They are lightly bet and any amount changes the market in such a manner that makes it obvious. Nobody with a brain thinks this is a successful way to point shave and not get caught.

Speaker 2 You were very fortunate that Rozier allegedly chose this message. Not everyone will be as foolish as he was allegedly.
That's what I wrote.

Speaker 1 Who did you say who did you send that to?

Speaker 2 Doesn't matter.

Speaker 2 And then I wrote, if I was in your position, I'd want to identify ways and prevent other ways of altering the alchemy of sport, as well as making sure the integrity is at the highest level.

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Speaker 1 Your response to poker's interwoven sort of dynamic in these indictments, speaking to the world that you also clearly moved in and played in and profit off of too yeah i've i i played in high street i played in high stakes poker games um

Speaker 2 but my thing is is like i won't play in a high stakes poker game unless i know intimately who's running the game and i also i've had situations back in 2000 and

Speaker 2 what year was this 10 or 2011 when I

Speaker 2 played in a game in LA

Speaker 2 with some characters.

Speaker 2 And if they wouldn't allow me to take a deck home with them, like in the middle of the, like, every, like, I basically, like, I had the feel, like, I would always want to take a deck home with me.

Speaker 2 Because, you know, I want to make sure the deck doesn't have invisible ink on it or doesn't have like the RFID scans. Now, the new latest thing is the Shuffle Master 2.

Speaker 1 The Deckmaster. Yes, that's right.
The Rig Master.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the Rig Shuffler, which that's something that I wouldn't, if like the last time I played a home, I knew that that deck had the ability to do that.

Speaker 2 I didn't realize the level of which you could program it via USB. And I wonder how many people were doing that.

Speaker 2 I don't think it was a lot, but if you, if you, that would have got, that would have gotten me because I could get you in a casino too. You could be at a casino in Vegas.

Speaker 2 And if someone was able to access a deck make two and seat one or seat whatever and just plug something into the USB, that's something that would get me.

Speaker 1 Right, right. The ability to just predetermine which cards are going to which players in which order.

Speaker 2 Correct. But there's other ways people are cheating too.
Like, you know, I remember playing in a poker tournament in Europe and then playing in cash games later, and the guy had a camera on his ring

Speaker 2 and he was sitting,

Speaker 2 always wanting to sit in seat one or seat 10, and he was catching the cards as the dealer was dealing them out via camera and then sending that to someone else who was then giving him the information as here.

Speaker 2 So to make a long story short, poker is very treacherous.

Speaker 2 And I feel like if you're playing in poker games, you need for high stakes and high amount, lots of amount, you have to be very, very careful because as long as poker's been around, there's been people who wanted to cheat.

Speaker 1 I mean, part of the function, though, of like a private game is that it's not ostensibly in a casino with a zillion cameras and some amount of regulation around it.

Speaker 2 You just have to be someone who's just very trusting or unsophisticated or just like naive, maybe in some ways.

Speaker 2 Like the other thing I'd always say is like, when I was playing in poker is why would someone want me to play in this poker game? Right.

Speaker 2 I'm someone who's probably like, if I'm a professional poker player, I'm someone who probably rates to win. And if a game runner is inviting me to a game and doesn't want a percentage of me,

Speaker 2 I immediately am suspicious. Because say what you want about me, I consider myself to be a winner.
I'm trying to win. I'm not trying to give money away.
I'm very competitive.

Speaker 1 I haven't noticed yet, Bob. I didn't know that you were competitive.

Speaker 2 No, no, but I mean, like, a lot of people think, like, oh, yeah, I'm not a very great poker player, and maybe, maybe not, but I'm also not someone who punts off a lot of money.

Speaker 1 Wait, wait, hold on, though, because the whole notion here, though, is that we can try to entice Bob Vulgaris

Speaker 1 by providing,

Speaker 1 hey, look, look who's here. It's allegedly Chauncey Phillips.
It's allegedly Damon Jones. It's here.

Speaker 2 Here you are. I can't imagine why.
Ooh, I would be so excited if Damon Jones was at a poker game.

Speaker 1 But the premise,

Speaker 2 these people are just like so. I mean, I don't want to badden all the kids who lost money playing poker, but like, come on.
Like.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 the idea is these people were whales, were bait for

Speaker 1 But they're not even whales though.

Speaker 2 Like that's the thing. Like get me,

Speaker 2 let me think of like, I don't know, like a

Speaker 2 some

Speaker 2 dude, like a hedge fund guy with a ton of money who's like, but like just some random NBA guy.

Speaker 1 But isn't the theory that you think, you hypothetical poker player, think you can absolutely pants the NBA guy.

Speaker 2 But how much money are they going to lose? It's like my thing. Like, like,

Speaker 2 that's the part that people don't, like they're not like they're wealthy but they're not i don't know i will say that i i guess i should take it back because i remember sitting at the bellagio and i got called out on it on the dan lebetard show curiously and interestingly enough but and antoan walker showed up literally with a garbage bag full of cash one day

Speaker 2 and started playing and started antoan oh no friend of the show antoan walker had a right he did not he said that he said that that's not true but i can promise you it was true he showed up with a bag there was cash in it no one knew how much money it was and every time he lost he duck he reached down and put more money on the table.

Speaker 2 I remember I paid, it was a 25.50 game at the Bellagio in the upper limit area. I remember paying someone

Speaker 2 either five or ten thousand dollars. The buying was $5,000.
I gave someone a more than the buy-in to sit, to jump the list and take his seat.

Speaker 2 And with because I saw the bag. I was like standing over him and I saw the bag.
And everyone else is just like, he's only, Antoine's only sitting there with like 5K or 7K in front of him.

Speaker 2 Like, what's the point? But I saw the bag and I was like, there's a good chance there's going to be more money.

Speaker 1 Hold on, hold on. So in in NBA betting, you were like, Oh, the bench being on the same side as the court with the defense.
In poker, you were like, I see a garbage bag full of literal money.

Speaker 1 That is my competitive edge.

Speaker 2 I think it actually was a garbage bag. Like, I'm not even lying.
I think it was like a like an actual garbage bag.

Speaker 2 Like, it might not have been like a black husky or whatever, you know, stretch bag or whatever, but it was a garbage bag.

Speaker 2 It was like, it might have been like one of those white ones from the it was weird. He had a lot of money in that bag.

Speaker 2 And, um, so, I guess, so I guess, yeah, maybe some of these guys do have a lot of money that they can lose. I don't know.
But just

Speaker 2 the crew that was running those games, though, like just to just to be clear, like the people around the games, I didn't know them because I wasn't around this scene in 2025.

Speaker 2 There was a scene in 2008, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

Speaker 2 that had the poker guys, like Paul Pierce, for instance, was playing a lot back then.

Speaker 2 And there was

Speaker 2 those people running those games, I did not trust.

Speaker 2 And so I'm I'm not saying those games are cheated because I have no idea and I didn't play in them and I don't know, but I know that I wouldn't personally play in those games.

Speaker 1 But speaking of what Bob refuses to do, at this point in the episode, you probably have a pretty decent sense of his vast store of knowledge and money when it comes to gambling and the NBA.

Speaker 1 But the other thing you should know here is that given that background, I did find something kind of surprising, which is that on the subject of legalized sports betting and how America should approach it now, Bob thinks that the whole thing is a really, really, really

Speaker 1 bad idea.

Speaker 1 My position has been, I think we should legalize it and regulate it. Your position is what?

Speaker 2 Legalized gambling should not be in the way, the manner it is right now in the USA. It just should not.

Speaker 2 It's completely antithetical to a functioning society to promote this to young men in particular. It's predatory in nature.
It's highly addictive. It's just a sense of financial nihilism.

Speaker 1 And that is just the beginning, by the way, of what the greatest NBA better of all time thinks about this industry's very public relationship with not just the NBA, but also the media.

Speaker 1 All of which left me feeling somehow less paternalistic. than the guy who once used Dan Bilzerian as a beard.

Speaker 2 It should not be partnered with the league and it should not be marketable and it should not be a big part of all of your sports content. I don't think you should be able to advertise this stuff.

Speaker 2 People want to gamble on it. Great.
It should not be advertised. It shouldn't be like on the bottom of the screen while you're watching the sporting event.
Like, come on, this is a sport.

Speaker 2 It's not like if your only attraction to the sport is the fact that you can gamble on it, there's a problem with your product.

Speaker 1 You're suggesting that the thing that you made your money doing as a premise is destructive enough to want to not merely regulate, but return us to the prohibition era. That's your current view.

Speaker 2 Yeah, or make it like cigarettes, where it's not marketed to young people.

Speaker 1 Personally, I find myself not being as much of a moralist on this stuff.

Speaker 1 My philosophy in general, when it comes to gambling, has been that as with the legalization of other vices like alcohol and marijuana, sunlight is a preferable disinfectant to the alternative.

Speaker 1 And that most Americans really can enjoy this stuff responsibly.

Speaker 1 And that pushing people towards black markets run by even more criminal figures without any legal oversight or taxation does seem worse.

Speaker 2 So you want to legalize and regulate. It is regulated and it is legal.
So what more regulation would you want?

Speaker 1 I think you need to have rigorous and well-funded research into the harms of gambling, in which we are now following, by the way, the parallels to the regulation of cigarettes.

Speaker 1 I mean, look, the European system, Bob, which I think you're familiar with for cigarettes, is what? What do they put on the boxes?

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 it's bad. It's got the whole cancer or whatever it is.

Speaker 1 They put the graphic images of this is what can happen to you if you develop an addiction to this product. And I think some disclosure around that, to me, it's always about disclosure.

Speaker 1 It's about here are the risks.

Speaker 2 I don't think so. Okay, so you're going to be inundated.
People just click, like pornography is a good example. Like you must be 18 years old.
People know about it and they just click on it.

Speaker 2 Like if it's just something that pops up in their phone and shows the risks of it, it's not going to matter to them because at the end of the day, they have an impulse to bet.

Speaker 2 And the other part of it is, is like.

Speaker 2 Maybe it'll help you catch more people through because it's legalized, but it's also going to create more people wanting to do things that they would have never have thought of doing in a million years, which is rig games, point shave, share information.

Speaker 2 Like that, for sure, I believe, with 100% certainty.

Speaker 2 Crazy. It's absolutely crazy.

Speaker 1 All of which is to say that I did find this conversation both fascinating and useful, especially on the question of what enormous legalized menus of prop bats on individual players, their unders especially, have done to incentivize illicit underperformance in games.

Speaker 1 Which did lead Bob and I to agree on one thing as far as NBA incentives are concerned, because we both think that the league now has a genuine problem in trying to distinguish between two different types of NBA teams, one legal and one illegal,

Speaker 1 that both underperform on purpose.

Speaker 2 Just think about this for a second.

Speaker 2 You have like the Transi Billup situation, yeah, where he's alleged to have given information that some players would not be playing, presumably because they were going to tank the game for draft positioning, right?

Speaker 2 And my point was like

Speaker 2 your league is so cooked that you are going to have a tough time differentiating between tanking for the purposes of illegally gambling or tanking for the purposes of trying to get draft position.

Speaker 2 So good luck proving that in a court of law.

Speaker 1 It is very funny, by the way, that the overlooked subplot of this indictment that you're referring to is that the government basically establishes as a matter of observable fact that the Blazers were tanking games.

Speaker 1 And that's now on the record for all time, basically.

Speaker 2 Everyone in the league knows, every player in the league knows that tanking exists.

Speaker 2 And therefore, the integrity of the game is

Speaker 2 just not there. It's not pristine.
It's not even close to being pristine. How about that? Like the Spurs,

Speaker 2 with one of the greatest coaches in NBA history, or if not the greatest, were openly

Speaker 2 trying to get, you know, they did it with Tim Duncan and they did it again with Wen Benyama, you know, not lose games on purpose while they're playing.

Speaker 2 I'm not alleging that because I don't know that's to be the case. And I doubt that that is because I just don't think that.

Speaker 2 But you certainly field players that are not NBA caliber and then you tell them to go out and try and win.

Speaker 2 That was my experience with the Mavericks is you just kind of like played like a bunch of G-League players and you just put them in positions and they just go out there and and and that's just the way the game is.

Speaker 2 So, my point is, is that when you have that, it's hard to tell a player then that the integrity of the game matters and don't tell your friends, hey, like, I'm probably going to pull out this game, or hey, like, bet the under this game, or hey, my, whatchamacallit, LeBron's not playing, might as well go out and get yours.

Speaker 2 Like, there's just no basis for integrity for the sport. There's no basis that the sport is held to a high standard, and you're out there to compete every single game.

Speaker 2 It just becomes this progressive weakening of the integrity of the sport.

Speaker 1 Right. Look, as somebody who like exhaustively reported on the process and the Sixers, I mean, my solution to all of this has never been

Speaker 1 teams should be allowed to tank with impunity. My solution has been you need to change the rules so that the incentives are not causing people to

Speaker 1 tank games.

Speaker 1 The real like upshot of what you're saying is if you're going to have a position that says the integrity of our sport is paramount and fair play is paramount, then you need to also be consistent in terms of the ways in which you are enabling the forces that eat away at integrity and fair play.

Speaker 1 Where I fully agree with you is the appropriate amount of pressure to put on the NBA to catch this stuff needs to go up. Right.
So the question is, how do you incent

Speaker 1 that?

Speaker 2 They need to hire quants. What they need to do, what the NBA does, this is an NBA thing.

Speaker 2 It's going to solve the NBA and then you're going to have NCAA, then you're going to have collegiate football, and you're going to have NFL, you're going to have to.

Speaker 1 So what would you do? What would you do if you actually.

Speaker 2 I would hire quants to build models with the best available data that the NBA has

Speaker 2 to

Speaker 2 look at the gap, like someone who knows what they're talking about with gambling, someone who knows, and I'm not trying to sell them because I'm not interested in this.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I don't have any interest in doing this. But yeah, they need to hire someone who can actually identify performance downgrades via a model using their data.

Speaker 2 But then it's like you're going to do all of that. And half of it's going to be the teams that are tanking.

Speaker 2 And now you're going to have to have a conversation and be like, hey, were you guys losing this game on purpose because gambling?

Speaker 2 Or were you losing this game on purpose because you're trying to tank for a draft spot? Oh, just a draft spot. Okay.
That's okay. That's cool.

Speaker 1 But that, but hold on, because I love that this conversation keeps on going back to tanking, which I think is an under-discussed aspect of the entire

Speaker 1 conflict of principles involved. You're saying over and over again that if you cannot distinguish between behavior that would be incentivized.

Speaker 2 Why you're losing a game on purpose. Yeah.
Why you're why you're

Speaker 1 by betting or by getting a draft pick like Victor Wembanyama, you're kind of f from a first principles perspective. And so you got to sort of change the incentives with draft picks and tanking.

Speaker 1 That's actually what you would.

Speaker 2 If you were to say, focus on FIFA about the end.

Speaker 1 Yeah. If they were to say, Bob, please help us, you would say, it's time to do what? It's time to remove the draft lottery as a mechanism.

Speaker 2 There's several ways. You can just make the draft completely 100% random.
That's one way. That's not the most sophisticated way.

Speaker 2 You can do the wheel where every team is guaranteed a spot every 30 years. That's more accurate.

Speaker 1 Mike Zarin, Celtics, exactly.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Mike Zarin's wheel thing is not bad.

Speaker 2 That thing's not bad. You can make make every rookie a free agent with a hard cap.
Why not just give these kids the ability to go wherever they want and make the salary cap hard with no

Speaker 2 hard salary cap, no salary limit on individual players, but a hard cap, similar to other sports. Like you could, you don't even have to be bright to be an NBA.
And I guess I fell as an NBA GM.

Speaker 2 So that says a lot about me. But like, oh, this guy's a max player.
How much do we pay him? Well, let me look up what the max is for his contract.

Speaker 2 Like the level of creativity that's required to build a team in American sports is zero, especially in the NBA. You're told what you can play the player.

Speaker 2 You know exactly what the mid-level exception is. You know exactly what the

Speaker 2 years of service. You know what the rookie minimum wage scale is, the rookie maximum scale is.

Speaker 2 So yeah, if you want to just bring back the integrity of the game without jeopardizing your golden goose gambling over there that you're so happy to

Speaker 2 cap for over and over and over again, then yeah, and you don't want to go with Mike Zarin's wheel, which seems, you just make it so that there's no draft.

Speaker 1 I'm personally in in favor of free agency for all incoming rookies, and I'm in favor of a zillion mini television shows in which they all get to make their individual decisions.

Speaker 1 I want rose ceremonies. I want the bachelor for I want Victor Wembanyama of 2027 to have his own rose ceremony.

Speaker 2 But why shouldn't they be able to do this?

Speaker 2 And then if you're if you're the Milwaukee Bucks and you've got 250 million in salary that you can spend, you can decide to give Victor Wembanyama 125 of the year and build the rest of your roster up.

Speaker 2 That's an easy way to fix that. That's a very simple one.
No, no, like a very, very hard cap,

Speaker 2 but no max salary. And all NBA rookies are free agents.
And that seems to be a simple way. And then

Speaker 2 that solves the tanking. And then you still have the issue of these bananas who want to

Speaker 2 go and rig poker games when they're making $20, $30 million.

Speaker 2 That's a separate conversation.

Speaker 1 On some level, though, what we are reckoning with is the inability to solve for people being idiots.

Speaker 2 But I think also, like, honestly, like, I know you're not big on this, but like,

Speaker 2 yeah, I'm a big free market. People should be able to do what they want to do.

Speaker 2 I agree with that, but I don't think that should include gambling companies marketing to vulnerable people, a dream that isn't even realizable.

Speaker 1 By the way, I'm open to all of these suggestions of like what you can and can't do such that the

Speaker 1 access to addictive substances is disclosed as a matter of risk and then limited as a matter of law. Why don't we start with the ticker?

Speaker 2 Let's just remove the ticker at the bottom with the gambling odds.

Speaker 2 That could be a big thing. How about maybe the networks don't own gambling companies? Like I think it was ESPN DET.
Is that what it's called? Like

Speaker 2 how about someone just wants to be able to watch sports without being inundated with gambling? That seems like a good thing.

Speaker 2 Easy for me to say now that I've made it and all you other guys are still trying to claw your way up.

Speaker 1 but that's right now that now that you can you can pull the ladder out from everyone else yeah that's what i'm doing clearly yeah

Speaker 1 behind what you can't see behind bob's bookcase is that in his home in an undisclosed location is a bunch of ladders that he collected that i've that i've collecting and pulling up from everybody that otherwise young men across america were gonna use to become him correct

Speaker 1 um Bob, I am glad we had this conversation. I look forward to the NBA responding to that email, maybe.

Speaker 2 Me too, I guess. I don't know.
They could definitely figure it out if they really wanted to, I suppose. It's not that hard.

Speaker 1 So, in other words,

Speaker 1 you're glad to be in the scandal-free and corruption-free world of European soccer.

Speaker 2 Whole different conversation, I'm not cloning down.

Speaker 1 This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Metalark media production.

Speaker 2 And I'll talk to you next time.

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