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00:02 Okay, so let's get back to this story here, Matthew.
00:07 We've been talking about it now for almost a week on ESPN bet.
00:12 And very clearly, there's a lot of discussion in the industry about this.
00:15 It just keeps going on and on, how this is gonna look and
00:19 what posting ESPN's name on a sports book is actually gonna do for them.
00:25 Is it gonna make an impact or not?
00:28 And I think we're all just very curious to see if this is going to be a success or
00:32 if simply put, Penn made the wrong move doing it.
00:35 We're just not gonna know for a while.
00:37 >> Well, I don't know that we can say that Penn made the wrong move completely,
00:42 because obviously, shedding Barstool from its company was what it needed to do.
00:47 It just wasn't bringing in the market share, and
00:51 it was causing regulatory and licensing problems for them.
00:54 That being said, yeah, is the essentially $2 billion buy-in to ESPN,
00:59 is that going to do enough?
01:01 And that remains to be seen.
01:04 I'm really interested because a lot of the conversation right now
01:08 seems to be centered on the fact of Penn's technology.
01:11 And how it's recently new and upgraded and
01:15 just what that's gonna be able to do if that's a differentiator enough.
01:18 But I don't know, Craig, that ESPN name, that brand is just so big.
01:25 And to me, it's really gonna come down to how ESPN treats the app.
01:30 How is ESPN going to sell this app to the masses,
01:35 while also not turning off people that aren't interested in betting?
01:41 ESPN actually emailed a couple of notes over because they were seeing some
01:47 inaccuracies in the press about how this ESPN deal is going to work.
01:54 Obviously, a lot of different organizations have been reporting on this,
01:59 Craig, and if you don't have the institutional knowledge of how business
02:03 and gambling works, you may not totally get it.
02:06 But ESPN isn't just gonna slap a sticker on this and say, okay,
02:10 let's see what happens.
02:12 Do they necessarily need the money from a parent company, Disney standpoint?
02:17 No, of course not.
02:19 But they also don't really have a choice but to get this right,
02:25 in my opinion, Craig.
02:26 The Disney family, it's so family oriented.
02:30 It's so tidied up and clean.
02:37 You go to a Disney park, you never see any trash,
02:40 anything like that on the ground.
02:42 And ESPN, it's gonna have to be similarly perfect,
02:48 I think, to fit this Disney brand.
02:50 But Disney is so good at what they do that I would have
02:55 a hard time seeing this go wrong.
02:58 You know what I mean?
02:59 We're gonna have to see what happens with how the insiders are allowed to talk
03:05 about it.
03:05 We have a lot there that we just don't know exactly how it's going to be presented.
03:11 But overall, I really think ESPN is going to push this the right way.
03:17 And let's be clear, they're not just launching a new app.
03:22 They're launching a new app in the middle of football season.
03:26 And they're launching a new app when the biggest two companies in DraftKings and
03:30 FanDuel, they say that they know what they're doing when it comes to
03:35 new state launches, right?
03:36 Because we have a couple of new state launches coming up.
03:39 We have Kentucky coming up, we'll have North Carolina.
03:41 And so I really think that Fanatics and ESPN are just going to change
03:47 how DraftKings, FanDuel, and the like have to react in these kind of situations.
03:53 And if Pan and ESPN come out swinging, Pan is gonna probably lose
03:59 more than $100 million in the second half on promotions and marketing and
04:04 all that kind of stuff.
04:05 Which they said on their call,
04:07 that was about two-thirds more than what they had planned for Barstool.
04:10 So we're gonna see a big push from ESPN, we're gonna see a big push from Fanatics.
04:15 And in a couple months time, we're gonna know if this is really the shakeup
04:20 of the US betting industry that everybody thinks it could be.
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