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00:02 >> Yeah, so essentially for people who don't know the news
00:05 yesterday is ESPN made the announcement they are getting
00:08 into the sports betting space.
00:10 They're using Penn Entertainment to invent what's called ESPN
00:14 bet, Penn Entertainment has a ton of background in sports
00:17 betting with the Barstool Sportsbook, which let's be
00:20 honest, did not have a ton of success.
00:23 Whether that had anything to do with the way that Barstool
00:25 operates or not still remains to be seen.
00:27 They have a lot of followers.
00:28 They just weren't able to make it work.
00:30 So Penn basically parts ways with Barstool, jumps in the same,
00:36 I don't know, kitchen with ESPN to cook up this new idea.
00:40 What do you know about this, Sam?
00:42 Do you think that this will be successful?
00:44 Do you think ESPN and Penn are making the right merger here?
00:49 And what will this look like, you think, in the future?
00:52 >> Yeah, I love that analogy of it's like the same kitchen.
00:57 They're essentially hoping ESPN can be everything and
00:59 more that Barstool wasn't for them.
01:02 If you remember about Penn acquiring Barstool,
01:06 obviously Penn has this huge casino background,
01:08 like you said, huge sports gaming background.
01:10 They essentially acquired the Barstool brand for
01:13 half a billion dollars to use it to license their users,
01:17 to reach all their followers on social media.
01:20 It didn't really work out like they had hoped.
01:23 They only had about 3 to 1% of market share across the country,
01:27 depending on where you were.
01:29 And they spent a lot of money on it.
01:30 And quite frankly, Barstool was sort of a thorn in its side when
01:34 it came to getting cleared with regulators and different violations.
01:37 And a lot of the content Barstool does or
01:40 did was sort of borderline problematic for gaming regulators.
01:45 This is sports betting we're talking about,
01:47 which is highly regulated and under the microscope.
01:49 So it was almost like any excuse regulators could find with
01:52 something that either the President Dave Portnoy said or
01:55 somebody else, they would go after them.
01:58 So now all of a sudden, they've somehow turned this into ESPN bet.
02:02 It's just such a bizarre story.
02:04 They're paying $1.5 billion to essentially use ESPN's name on their sports book.
02:11 ESPN itself won't be offering any of these bets.
02:14 If you're in the industry, you know that ESPN would never do that.
02:16 But if you're just sort of a common person listening to this thing,
02:21 you think maybe it's problematic.
02:23 ESPN already pushes a lot of betting content.
02:25 So kind of thinking about it as like an NIL deal where they're using their license,
02:29 their name to go out and reach a lot of people.
02:32 Pretty interesting that ESPN can still do advertisements with other sports books,
02:37 like FanDuel, DraftKings.
02:39 Caesars has a marketing deal to be the exclusive odds provider of ESPN.
02:44 It's pretty unclear right now what exactly happens to that deal.
02:48 And it would be a pretty weird scenario if there's an ESPN bet,
02:51 but while you're watching ESPN, you see odds presented by Caesars.
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