How to Start a Professional Sports League with Lacrosse Great Paul Rabil

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
You're listening to Studio twenty two.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
I love the prospect of this because a lot of
what we do is show business. Yeah, that's Peter Guber
told us. See what he was like, you know, I
was like, we're sports entertainment. He was like, no, no, take
a step further. You're in the show business. Nice. You know,
So which way are you?

Speaker 1 (00:25):
How many different ways are attacking it as far as.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Like I mean, I think if you if you understand
show business, it's film, television, documentaries, books, podcasts, social media, network,
partner for live distribution, all that stuff, And so how
are you delivering the most quality pound four pound per
minute on any size screen? I think is one of
the narratives that I often think about today versus you know,

(00:51):
in a monolithic air of consumption, it's like, okay, we
got to write a script adapted from a book, take
it out, either def sit finance it, or find a
network to finance it. Attached the right director or showrunner, actors, boom,
make it, you know, loads going into marketing, try to
drive box. Yeah, you know, I long for those days,

(01:14):
but but it's just more complex. But the negative framework is,
oh the movie business is going away or people are
cord cutting. Broadcast is going away. The right way to
frame it is consumptions going up, where people than ever
are watching entertainment, film, television docs. Yes, they're also watching social.

(01:37):
It's incumbent on us to identify that social is a
new medium and not the antithesis of film and television.
And like broadcast, cable, broadcast is still what it was
because it's over the air, funded by government. Cable is
getting trimmed, but it's being accessed on streaming platforms. So

(01:58):
it's yeah, yeah, it's up to leadership figure out how
to monetize.

Speaker 3 (02:01):
I love what you said about consumption in this.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
Right now, guys, but.

Speaker 3 (02:09):
Yeah, you look at like Piis Morgan and Will Kine
are having on like YouTubers that specialize in entertainment in
order to talk about the film industry, and they have
millions of followers on YouTube. Right, So it's like, I
love that they're embracing it and not running from it, right,
like merging them and trying to figure out how to

(02:30):
take advantage of that versus they're the enemy, you know.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah, Like I mean, Jeremy Zimmer would say, it's just
attention to attention, you know, and and talent is talent. Yeah,
there are new avenues to acquire or understand emerging talent,
and that could be through creators now getting roles in
films or Justin Bieber getting found by Scooter Braun on YouTube,

(02:54):
you know. And so yeah, so like that, you know,
discovery has evolved with new technology and media, but you know,
attention and consumption is still attention and consumption.

Speaker 3 (03:09):
Yeah. You look at other platforms too, like merging, Instagram
and all that. They're doing that short form video right,
and it's like, okay, TikTok's doing that, so we are
going to change and YouTube has shorts that they're trying
to push. Yeah, so they're all kind of even with
our comic books, right, Like we do a lot of
comic books, and a lot of people don't really read

(03:31):
comics as much, right, So like what we're trying to
do is translate that into where the eyeballs are. Yeah,
so we'll do like a short form video ad on
social media and that'll bring a lot more eyeballs than
just selling a comic.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
Yeah. Right, So it's funny. I think it was Steve
Jobs and someone's like nobody reads books anymore, but they
get the material from the books, either through audio versions
or short snippets. And you know comics, right, Marvel was
one of the greatest acquisitions in the last two decades
by Disney, So we watch comics perhaps more than we

(04:08):
read it. And then back to social I think the
greatest acquisition in media over the last two decades was
Facebook acquiring Meta or Meta now acquiring Instagram, right, and
you could say Google acquiring YouTube for like whatever, it
was three to four billion. It was like nothing compared
to the platforms now, absolutely crazy.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
Those other companies too that I forgot the name, was
it like quib or something like that.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
What was the short where?

Speaker 1 (04:32):
Yeah, it flopped, right, but they put a billion into
that because they saw that's where the market was going. Now,
maybe the timing was off or maybe the way that
they executed it, but for someone to go in and
invest a billion dollars into short form content, it's very
obvious where it's going.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
Top tier executives launched a platform nine by sixteen films
or quality of film in under ten minutes. Sometimes it's
just ahead of its time. Yeah, yeah, I mean Google Glass.
We've seen iterations of it now, the Apple Vision pro
and you know it still slightly ahead of its time,

(05:06):
that the hardware is clunky, you know that the tech
isn't as seamless, and so it's not that it's a
bad idea, it's just sometimes you know, and I think
about that with lacrosse, Like lacrosse has been around for
thousands of years, created by the Native Americans, been played
at the college level for one hundred and fifty years.
It's been played internationally. It was once of the Olympics

(05:27):
in nineteen oh four nineteen oh eight. The pro game
has been around for twenty years. It's just the pro
game had the wrong operators and it was a little
too early because it was really difficult to penetrate the
core four in a monolithic era without new technology and
social media. The NFL their breakout was in the sixties.
They harnessed television. Our breakout was in twenty nineteen harnessing

(05:52):
social media. So a lot of it is timing tech,
but the core principles are always the same when it
comes to its storytelling.

Speaker 3 (06:01):
I love seeing lacrosse get bigger too. I've played from
fourth grade to the end of high school and like
such a great game.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
I love that would you grow up here.

Speaker 3 (06:10):
So I played at a in San Francisco, grew up
there at private school town school, and then went to
Kate Cate in Santa Barbara and played there, and then
we played kind of even though we were smaller, we
played all the schools in kind of like the southern
California area.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
Yeah, I mean lacrosse is more akin to hockey and
golf in America, and that it's a stickball sport. It
requires equipment, therefore it's expensive. The beauty in sport is
that it is ultimately you you know, equal, and it
is egalitarian only if anyone and essentially everyone can play.

(06:51):
So once you introduce a barrier to enter right sort
of cuts away at the egalitarianism of it. The only
sport that I've left out is American football that worked
through former presidents like Teddy Roosevelt and the government and
municipalities to fund wreck pee wee football. So if anyone

(07:13):
grew up playing football, they got their pads for free
and they had a tournament at the end of the season.
But football's fucking expensive. Those helmets are more expensive than
La Cross helmets. If we had to all pay for
our pads before we played football, then we would be
fucking playing, and so football figured it out. We look
at public and private financing and resourcing at the high
school and below level. We don't have to pay for

(07:34):
green fees, green fees or ice time like golf and hockey,
and so it's a matter of how do we get
the game. You triggered me to have that thought more
played out west in the Bay and LA we moved
our headquarters here try to establish more understanding and recognition
and hype around this game that was once a Northeast

(07:57):
game exclusively for sure.

Speaker 3 (08:00):
One of our PE teachers kind of pioneered it and
just brought it out to like we would do lacrosse
camps and all that from starting at fourth grade and
like it really did kind of have this resurgence all
around the Bay area.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
Yeah, which was great. I mean, PE is so important
being able to buy a stick at Walmart or Target
and go to the beach and not have to worry
about like, oh, I just made a fifty dollars investment.
You know, you can pick it up for ten bucks.
That's what we do when we play frisbee or bring
a squishy football or paddleball out to the beach. Think
about that being so underrated for sport adoption at the

(08:36):
competitive level, and then stuff that you guys do for
a living. I to this day still think Mighty Ducks
had a greater impact on the NHL in the nineties
and two thousands than anything that the NHL did. It's
pretty true.

Speaker 1 (08:49):
Yeah, I mean, anybody that never even watched hockey or
anything that watch has seen.

Speaker 2 (08:54):
That, you know. Yeah, I mean it's still to this
day probably the composition of the most diverse hockey team
that ever stepped on ice. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (09:01):
Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:04):
And there were so many human stories in that. And
what those kids did was play hockey. What Gordon Bombay
did was play hockey and coach hockey. Yeah, cool, running
same thing. If there was pro Bob Sutting, I would
have been in in America at the time. And then
you have Rudy and Field of Dreams and remember the Titans.

Speaker 3 (09:22):
Love Remember the Titans.

Speaker 2 (09:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (09:23):
We did our favorite sports films like Top twenty Sports
Films or something of all time.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
Yeah, we did it.

Speaker 3 (09:30):
One episode about that. It was it was just cool
to like reminisce overall, you know, kind of like our
childhood favorites and go through that.

Speaker 2 (09:39):
What was number one for you guys we had was
it Rocky Rocky Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it was Rocky Hockey.

Speaker 1 (09:45):
Yeah, there's there's definitely a solid amount on that list
that was That was probaby.

Speaker 3 (09:50):
That was up there.

Speaker 2 (09:51):
Shout out Peep Burgh who in the area.

Speaker 3 (09:53):
Yeah, yeah, great guy.

Speaker 2 (09:54):
Yeah Yeah.

Speaker 3 (09:55):
The power of media, I mean it's undeniable. And I think,
you know, we look at like the movie theater audience
and kind of having a down year the last year
or two, less films coming out, less television is coming
out this year. Instead of six hundred shows, they are
doing three hundred shows. But consumption is still going up.

(10:17):
Like you said, it's just different areas and we got
to figure out how to harness that. Have you found
in your businesses and your endeavors, like media is something
that has really kind of helped the formation and guided
the strategy are.

Speaker 2 (10:31):
Always has in sports. I have I have some more
to say about film and television, which I think it's
actually more about protecting the art and really good storytelling
going back to our point, than it is around consumption,
because it's really like you know, post parasite, now we're
now we're actually seeing real box numbers of consumption of

(10:52):
international features. I love foreign films, but this didn't really
make their way through the academies before, like Victory was
the year before. Parasite is my favorite film. Wow, German
made film single camera Operator, single shot all the way through,
twenty fifteen minutes, fucking outstanding. If you haven't seen it,
watch on Amazon. Hell yeah yeah, and then you know

(11:14):
you watch all the like another round that came out
in twenty twenty one, the Pond Noor, And I think
we have to protect that and we have to be
very weary of, you know, valuing young creators and their
style of communication. Going back to Steve Jobs, he was

(11:34):
always to me a creative and business leader because he
equally listened to what his customers want and also had
the courage to say, this is what we believe you
should be doing, and this is how you should be
appreciating laptops and mobile devices. And yes it's more expensive,

(11:55):
but trust us on this. It's incumbent on storytellers and
studio to protect that. On the sports side, you know,
there's been I'll give you a few examples. There's been
a big sort of swirl of conversation in journalistic sports
around Drive to Survive and the impact that that had
on F one in America. Drive to Survive was a novel.

(12:19):
Hard Knocks has been doing it with the NFL and HBO.
There was reality programming that uplifted Dana White and for
Teitabos in the UFC called The Ultimate Fighter. They were
forty million in the hole. They did a time buy
and paid to produce that reality show that they still
have today.

Speaker 3 (12:36):
It's a really good point.

Speaker 2 (12:37):
Unscripted is a crucial part of storytelling, getting into the
humanity of the players so that you can have a
deeper connection and care more in the bottom of the
fourth quarter, the bottom of the ninth inning, when the
game's on the line and that player who now you
know his backstory, is taking that game winning shot. And

(13:00):
then we already talked about scripted, which I think scripted
is going to have a comeback right now because there's
been this tilt of like, oh, everyone wants their Drive
to Survive and then they're rushing to produce it. Streamers
had a lower supply than there was a demand. Now
I think there's probably more supply. I mean, there's a
Man City doc on Netflix, and Man City is one

(13:20):
of the biggest, most exciting teams in the world. Yeah,
and like no one's fucking watching it. I want to
check that out. I don't even Yeah, yeah, it's and
it's you know, and then there's a cut of who
the showrunner is, who the director is. That's really important.
I'd love Last Chance You because of Greg Whiteley. I
think he tells stories better than anyone else, So like

(13:43):
getting into that is is arguably more important than getting
into the space how the story is being executed, and
that we found is our largest driver for metrics growth
year every year, whether it's tickets or merchandise or sponsorship
or youth.

Speaker 3 (14:00):
M I mean that's such like a three sixty view
of everything, right, I mean it's literally it's also like
pretty representative of like everything you're involved in too, from
the entrepreneurial side to the sports side and media side.
That's really fascinating.

Speaker 1 (14:16):
Did you have this passion for film before starting the
pl or is this and has it been something that's
grown with you or is it did you realize the
importance of it and then have moved forward and dive
deeper into the space.

Speaker 2 (14:26):
It's interesting, it's evolved. Yeah, I've I've always had a
passion for storytelling. You know, when I graduated from Johns Hopkins,
I was drafted into the league at the time called
Major League Lacrosse. I was taking number one and given
a sixty five hundred dollars wage, and the games weren't
distributed on television. Two weeks earlier, I was playing in

(14:46):
a national championship game in front of fifty five thousand
people on the ESPN close to a million people watching.
What the fuck happened?

Speaker 3 (14:53):
Right?

Speaker 2 (14:55):
But at my disposal was this thing called Facebook, fan
pages and YouTube. Stagram had yet to launch, Twitter had
yet to launch, but they were right on the precipice.
And so my belief was there are case in point
two weeks ago, a lot of lacrosse fans and a
lot of interest in lacrosse that might not know what's
going on the pro level, but they know me from

(15:17):
being on TV, so let me keep talking to them.
So I started uploading and figuring out that medium, which
I feel, you know, native to. In a lot of ways,
it's our unfair advantage compared to the leagues that were
birthed on traditional media. So I think that my interest

(15:43):
and passion has always been for storytelling. And as I've
graduated to the next class. In the next class, I've
started really peeling back good storytellers and styles of storytelling.
You know, Quentin Tarantino isn't classically trained. You never went
to film school. He just watched film. Yeah, he has

(16:03):
that quote, and he's like, you don't have to go
to school. You don't have to you know, have this,
have the best equipment in the world.

Speaker 1 (16:08):
He's like, all you got to do is fucking love movies,
you know, and movies and go out and do it well.

Speaker 2 (16:13):
To sports. Yeah, that's Wayne Gretzky says. He's and I
talked about him in my book how insane he was
about hockey and insane in the best way. And to
this day he still says he never practiced, yeah, because
he associates practice with being asked to go out and
do a number of reps and come back in with
your report card. And he was like, I just fucking

(16:35):
loved hockey. Yeah, and I was out there all the time.
I had to be pulled in by my parents, brought
my stick with me to my room, went to bed
with it. It's awesome. Yeah, it's like that.

Speaker 1 (16:44):
You know, maybe it sounds corny or something, but it's
you find what you love and you're passionate about and
you'll never work a day in your life, you know,
exactly right.

Speaker 3 (16:51):
Yeah, we were doing a podcast with Brett Hull speaking
of hockey and out in Nashville, and he was kind
of saying the same thing with like practice in the game.
He's like a coach, like I'm gonna score more goals
in the game than everyone else, Like why do I
need to focus on practice? Right?

Speaker 2 (17:06):
Yeah? Yeah, And you have the Alan iverson famous quote practice.
We talked about practice. But I will say both of
those guys to Wayne, to the way I view practice
is the right practice. The key to practice is the
practice away from practice. So we all think, Okay, we're
showing up in Nashville. I'm showing up in New York

(17:27):
every day. AI is shown up in Philly every day,
and you have your team practice. Your team practice is
about the team. You're not getting many shots up in lacrosse.
You're maybe shooting ten to twenty times in shooting drills
at the start, and then you're working on offense and
defense and writing and clearing situational schemes. When you go

(17:48):
away from practice. That's when you're getting up one hundred,
two hundred to one thousand shots today, that's when you're
acquiring the real skill, right, And the best athletes actually
don't view that as practice, throwing that at air quotes,
because that's that's something that they just love doing.

Speaker 3 (18:04):
It's a really good point too, because like I would
lift a ton of weights, but I wouldn't do it
during practice, right, Like I just it's just something I did,
but it helped my games. That's a really good point.

Speaker 2 (18:16):
It's kind of the fucked up thing that you know,
kids who are in sports now are being presented with
is racked sports club sports tournaments every weekend, five games
a weekend. So there's this volume of participation that is

(18:37):
pulling them away from where the growth is, which is
on their own right. And you know, Michael Jordan believes
that the competitiveness of an athlete isn't as much just
generational as people think as it is volume of games.
He was like, I played.

Speaker 4 (18:56):
Twelve games a season growing up, twelve games, so every
game was more fucking important than it is if I'm
playing one hundred and twenty as that same sixteen year old,
because guess what if you go to a tournament on
a weekend, you lose the first game, You're still in it.

Speaker 2 (19:10):
We'll get them in two hours. Is this not the
way we grew up right? You know that type of
tension and stress and friction that's valuable.

Speaker 3 (19:20):
Yeah. I think our lacrosse season was like fourteen games
something like that.

Speaker 2 (19:23):
Yeah, And I'd say that in my book as I
as my intention is for the next generation of athletes
and the lessons that they can get. Is the difference
between me and you is that I didn't have social
media or a mobile phone attached to my hip. I
know the pressures of that brings. Fuck man, it's hard.

(19:44):
I can't imagine being twelve to sixteen with that level
of distraction. And the other is also advertize sports, which is,
you know, change the nature of the way that we compete. It.
It's not a bad thing, it's just different.

Speaker 3 (20:00):
Yeah. Figuring out the landscape and is part of that change.
What inspired you to write the book kind of like
figuring out the new landscape.

Speaker 2 (20:12):
Some of it? Yeah. I think everything we do, I mean,
you guys deciding to do this podcast together there is
probably an amalgamation of reasons. I think at my core,
I'm just curious. So studying film, studying, pro sports, studying art,
studying music, learning from the best at what they do

(20:32):
bestowed on me, probably from my dad, who always encouraged
me to ask questions. But I always took it a
step further because I grew up struggling in the classroom.
I have certain learning differences that slowed me down, and
my learning loop was consuming information, writing it down, then
sharing it with someone else. We often miss the second

(20:53):
and third step, but more frequently the third. Yeah, that
to me goes short term, long term memas. And so
I have these, you know, dozens and dozens of journals
with inspirational quotes or you know, I get to sit
down with Steph Curry or Sue Byrd or Dwayne Johnson,

(21:15):
Tom Cruise, they share something with me. Because I've been
fortunate to be at the top in my industry, you
get to meet others in the top of their So
I go back and write it down. And one of
our investors in the PLL is one of my favorite
writers in Ryan Holiday. Oh yeah those books. And Ryan
actually emailed me, knocked on the door and was like,
have you considered writing a book based on the stuff

(21:37):
that him and I talk about in back alley and
he was I was like no, He's like why not
And I was like, I don't think anyone want to
read it, and he was like, that's exactly why you
should because most people think whatever they have to say
everyone everyone wants to hear. And he was like, let
me help you construct this. So I have to give

(21:58):
a shout out to Ryan because he was a huge
creator consultant throughout the process.

Speaker 1 (22:01):
That's awesome.

Speaker 2 (22:02):
Yeah, I mean that's the.

Speaker 1 (22:04):
Saying, you know, successfully excluses, If you want to be successful,
the fastest way to get there is to follow someone's
path who's already.

Speaker 2 (22:10):
Done it, right.

Speaker 1 (22:10):
Yeah, And that's something that I've been fascinated with since
I was I can't remember, and started off with the
Tony Robbins books, right, and then you kind of dive
deeper and I got this book I absolutely love by
us Anderson. They say it's like before it's like the
Origin is written in the fifties, I called three Magic Words,
but before the Secret, it's the Secret, before the Secret,
it's all these other books in the beginning era. And

(22:31):
so I just kept going farther and farther back in
time and you realize, you know, it's the mentality, it's
your perception of reality, it's how you react to things.
It's all of these things put together. And then the
people that are at the highest level exactly what you
said is exactly what I do. And I think anybody
that wants to be a better version of the best
version of themself is going to take these things, these
little quote or it's quotes, it's yeh, you know, it's habits,

(22:54):
it's all these things, and then you put them into yourself.
It's Tony Robins when I was eighteen, is the first
thing I learned. He's like, your brain's like a computer.
You can reprogram it. And is that what you're sharing
in your book?

Speaker 2 (23:05):
So I think about stillness. Ryan Holliday is one of
his books called Stillness is the Key I've he.

Speaker 3 (23:13):
Leads me besides still waters right here.

Speaker 2 (23:15):
I love that.

Speaker 4 (23:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:17):
And what I found writing the book, and what I've
found over a decade or so of meditating and being
in therapy or just sitting still, is that there is
no coincidence in life. There's connective tissue that if we're
still enough, we identify your tattoo just shared with me.

(23:39):
We're sitting here still. That's a connective point. You played lacrosse,
Tony Robbins, you're telling me it was an inspiration. He
was an inspiration to me, which I'll tell my second
point around with my belief in manifestation. I had him
on my podcast. I never met Tony before, but the
idea that I could figure out a way to get
to him and if I was thoughtful enough and poached

(24:01):
him at the right time, that we'd build a relationship.
And so, whether it's Muhammad Ali and the era of
athletes that had the courage to say I am the greatest,
I believe that that courage allows you to become. And
that's also a missing ingredient coming back to social media

(24:22):
and the mobile devices today, is we see fewer and
fewer athletes willing to have that courage to believe, say do.
And whether it's Muhammad Ali, whether it's Tony Robbins talking
about rewiring the way that we think, whether it's Ryan
Holliday talking about how stillness brings us to consciousness, those
are all parts of my own self discovery things that

(24:47):
I've done in my life and then not coincidentally, others
have found as well.

Speaker 3 (24:53):
I love that component of the stillness, awareness, consciousness. I'm like,
I love EKR. Toll Like I read a lot of
his stuff, The Power of Now, the New Earth, and
I love hearing that you're kind of incorporating those typically
Eastern kind of concepts into a more Western version of

(25:15):
success and manifestation, because I think it's really important for
people to learn those concepts and understand them totally.

Speaker 2 (25:23):
I mean, Phil Jackson, winner of Eleven Rings, got a
great book called Eleven Rings, head coach of the Chicago
Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers, and a lot of people go, oh, well,
we had Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant. It's like they had
him right, but there was an alchemy where they were
searching for each other. Phil brought a lot of Eastern
culture and indigenous beliefs into sport, and the fundamental idea

(25:48):
that he had is one that I'm often scratching my
head around when I'm seeing games where it's in the NBA,
the NFL, the poll, college lacrosse is your game day
is about winning, and we know as athletes you're at
your best when you're feeling confident and the source of confidence,
like our parents, is also our coaches on game day.

(26:08):
If you're going to be fucking critical of your players,
they're not going to be confident. You're less likely to win. Right,
That doesn't mean you can't be critical and helpful and
give feedback. Leave that for practice. Phil Jackson was always like,
all right, he's known as the zen Master. I'm going
to get my team to meditate before practice or before

(26:29):
warm up, so we're going to go out there, and
then my job is to just be their partner during
the game, help them when they're challenged, push them with confidence,
and we're going to win more.

Speaker 1 (26:40):
That's such a great mentality. And I didn't grow up
playing sports, but just hearing that, why not you could
have played in the NFL. I moved around too much,
but yeah, I switched high schools nine times, middle school six.
It's I just never had any consistency in that space.
But I did find working out and so I stuck
with that. But yeah, that mentality of you've done all
the work, now to show up and do what you're

(27:02):
supposed to do right and during the game. I think
that hearing that from you, it seems more clear than
getting hounded because you see it all the time with kids. Man,
I've seen I've been in plenty of kids games and
they get beat up by the coaches or yelled at
by the parents, and then they crumble, and then you
know their confidence is just getting less and less, and
then they're not performing right, And it's not much. It's
not that it's any different. We get more resilient as
we get older, I believe. But even as a professional athlete,

(27:24):
hearing that getting something in your ear or you get
stuck in your head, I can imagine that playing over
and over and it's like, I miss the most important shot.

Speaker 2 (27:31):
Now I suck, you know, Like.

Speaker 1 (27:32):
I can imagine totally having someone like Phil Right, someone
like you leading your way and make all the difference.

Speaker 2 (27:39):
I mean, the voices we hear inside our head are
the worst. Yeah, those are the ones that are telling
us we suck, that we're too old, that we need
to give up, that no one wants to read our book.
And those are often framed negatively when someone does give up,
But when those achieve, especially under the framework of proving

(28:04):
people wrong, it's that same voice. It's just treating it
in a way where you become the commander. It's like
I was recruited to a school that had four straight
number one recruiting classes, and I was a number three
player in the country, and a lot of people told me,
why would you go to Johns Hopkins, You're not going
to play. I could have been like, yeah, I'm not

(28:25):
going to play, and that could have manifested and I
could have been a player for four years who didn't play.
I use it as motivation to prove them wrong. So
that's sort of part one. The other part is going
back to coaching and even systems, is how are we
setting ourselves up for success. We're often goal oriented around

(28:48):
things going well, but in life, things don't go as planned,
especially in games. I want to win a championship at
the end of the season, be MVP, First Team, All Pro,
All Star, score three goals, assist every game. So I've
got a fairly intune analytical mind. I'm going to break
that down by every shift on the field, and now

(29:09):
I'm taking myself out of the present moment of just playing. Uh,
and more times than not, As I said, things don't
go as planned, and then what happens is we begin
to downward spiral the sport that I love around goal
setting is golf. YEP, golf has what's called it up
and down. They have a player, Phil Mickelson, who's the

(29:31):
second highest grossing player on the tour behind Tiger Woods.
One loads of majors, incredible talent, but he's known for
his flop shot out of the gravel over a tree
that lands on the green and he puts in and
saves par. What people don't say in golf is he
had a really shitty T shot. How else is he

(29:52):
ending up in the gravel? And so you celebrate the
way that you respond and that is a ma. So
finding your up and down in whatever it is you
do is something that I think about. Don't allow the
bad T shot compound into other bad shots. Yeah, I
love that.

Speaker 1 (30:10):
One of my one of my favorite quotes is life
isn't what happens to you, it's how you react to it.

Speaker 2 (30:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (30:15):
So those reactions and how we show up is that's everything.

Speaker 2 (30:17):
Yeah. And the sadistic part of life is that if
we believe that, and if we put everything we can
into the way that we react, those are the moments
where we end up growing the most. Therefore, the thing
that happened to us, the loss, the pain, the injury
was actually the most valuable. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (30:38):
I mean that's when you learn, that's when you grow, Rightah.
Who would you say has been the biggest influence in
your life?

Speaker 2 (30:45):
Well?

Speaker 1 (30:47):
And I know obviously it's been multiple right, Yeah, and
different people for different reasons.

Speaker 2 (30:50):
I think it comes at different times too. And having
the awareness to say, oh, man, I wouldn't have interest
anywhere close to where I am today. Without the way
that my parents raised me, I wouldn't be doing what
I'm doing in my career now. Without an older brother
who's my co founder of the POL who drives me,
I wouldn't have developed a competitiveness and the drive. Had

(31:12):
I not committed to that school whose head coach had
recruited for previous number one classes. I mean he was
a competitive motherfucker, and I picked up a lot of that.
I wouldn't have been able to soften with more perspective
had I not lost a World championship game in twenty fourteen,
then broke in my foot the week after. That got

(31:34):
me into sports psychology, then therapy, and then you start
growing in a more well rounded way where across no
longer was my identity. It just happened to be what
I did. So I think the goal for me is
holding on to those really important relationships is what I
try to remind myself to do more regularly, whether it's

(31:55):
a simple text message or phone call or writing a
letter for gratitude. And then, by the way, you know,
the saying goes is you're the combination of the five
people you spend most time with. Those five people, because
of technology, don't have to be people in the flesh. Yeah,
it could be you know, reading memoirs of Winston Churchill

(32:18):
and you know, listening to your podcast every day, and
you know, spending a lot of time with your head
coach after practice who's probably not your best friend, but
you can figure out how to put together a really
good five. I like that.

Speaker 1 (32:35):
That's actually I've never heard anybody say that before, So
that's actually very interesting.

Speaker 3 (32:40):
Yeah, because when you hear that, you always think of
like literally being with someone or well.

Speaker 1 (32:45):
And the reason for that too, you know, is because
we're habitual creatures, right, We're going to pick up the
habits of the people around us. But if you're studying
someone who may not even be living anymore, right, But
Marcus Aurelius or whoever, maybe it's you will pick up
that line of code and adopt it to yourself, right
so your whole life. Have you read the book The
Powerful Engagement?

Speaker 2 (33:05):
I haven't.

Speaker 1 (33:06):
Tony Schwartz sport You's mentioned in sports psychology and I
love this book.

Speaker 2 (33:11):
Man.

Speaker 1 (33:11):
So through out reading and studying other you know, people
in that self help space, I found this book and
it basically takes the highest level athletes, breaks down what
they do and then applies it to the everyday person
and to make them better. And it's about your habits,
what you do habitually. And one of the examples he
gave was the number one and number two tennis player.

(33:34):
The difference between the best and the second best was
literally the first person could just rest a little bit
better in between the set that ninety seconds. I think
that they have so slowness, heart rate down and you know,
getting ready for the next one. But taking those moments
of rest in your day to day, you have an
hour on take five minutes to yourself, listen to a song,

(33:54):
get a protein, cheke, do whatever it is makes you
instead of doing the eight hours straight, makes you more deductive,
makes you more effective, and then surrounding yourself with these
people too. They give a great example and I'll shut
up at this is he there was a husband who
had a wife and a kid, and he had a
friend who was a loser, and his friend play video games.
Drake talked about women, and you did things that were

(34:16):
not good. You spent enough time with this guy, he
started playing the video games, slacking off from worse, not
being a good husband, you know, talking about other women
doing this stuff. And then eventually it led to well,
now he's getting a divorce and he's not going to
see his kid and all these other things fall out,
but he became the loser on the couch. So really
choosing how you show up in the world, who you
surround yourself with and recognizing that as well one thing.

(34:39):
And I want to pivot over to this too, because
you mentioned the identity who you are outside of lacrosse.
I hear that with a lot of athletes and again
I didn't get to play. But their entire life becomes
whatever sport because morning, noon, and night, from breakfast to
the second they close their eyes, it's all that sport, right,
and then it's dictated for them, like you know, where
to go for practice, you know what to So finding

(35:01):
that identity was that a difficult process for you or
is it something that came more naturally you think, you.

Speaker 2 (35:06):
Know, getting into therapy felt to me like your earlier
question of studying film. When I find something that is explorative,
that is intellectually engaging, that I can feel myself improving in,
I go all in nice. So I think that whether

(35:27):
it is evolving as an athlete and as a human
being as an individual, that's the goal. Your earlier notes
resonated with me because the beauty and books and meeting
new people and conversations, you pick up things that work
for them, but there is no such thing as a

(35:50):
blueprint for anyone to follow. And that was something that
I was reminding myself when I was attempting to write
this book, is that the answers are in a straight line.
So my goal was to think through what you had said,
which is the evolution of me as a human came

(36:10):
at the time that the universe needed it to come.
At the singular focus of an athlete, where the sport
is their identity that works, you know, And what I
used to ask my sports psychologist was is it possible
to have both, and he was like, yeah, of course,
and let's work on that. And I used to say, well,

(36:30):
you know, it's hard for me to turn the light
switch on and off and be the ruthless competitor, tough teammate,
impossible opponent to deal with on the field and then boom,
locker room, be a good guy, a nice guy, right, yea.
So I learned that it's a dial, right, and that
to me resonated more, you know, on the lessons front.

(36:57):
I talk about two of the greatest footballers of all time,
or Pele and Tom Brady, and there are ways of
getting prepared for a game. Couldn't have been more opposite. Yeah,
Pele meditates, He'd lay down on a bench and put
a cold towel over his eyes and think about the
ball hitting his foot in the back of the net.
He needed to get his you know, he needed to

(37:17):
relax for that note that you shared. Tom Brady actually
found the most valuable thing for him is anger, because
it heightened his senses and his focus and he was
a better quarterback as a result. Whether he manufactured that
anger or it was in the newspaper clippings. Two opposite approaches.
One guy's pissed and the other guy's kind of call

(37:38):
him and happy. One guy won three World Cups, the
other guy won seven Super Bowls. So I like to
share different sort of avenues to accomplishing the same thing
so that the reader. You know, the first books that
I used to read were Goosebumps, is like sort of
choose your destination. That's what I hope I could accomplish

(37:58):
when I went out and wrote different lessons knowing that
there is no blueprint. We all grow up differently and
have different motivations and different experiences and lose at different times,
get injured at moments, et cetera.

Speaker 3 (38:10):
I love that, like studying, because everything's going to be
unique to the person who's trying to achieve that growth, right, Like,
you want to do it a way that's comfortable to you.
I'm doing a and it even works in other avenues,
like I'm doing a fifty book challenge right now, in
sci fi fantasy classics like dating all the way back

(38:32):
to like nineteen twenty Soviet Union books. However, well, and
I chose sci fi fantasy because our comics are sci
fi fantasy. So I'm like basically wanting to learn from
these Hugo Award winning authors throughout the twentieth century, and like,
some have these really long, beautiful pros that are like

(38:56):
amazing to read, and then some are like very sarcas
and short witted, like a Vonnegut, you know, Sirens of
Titan by Vonnugut. They couldn't be more different than like
a roadside picnic or something like that. So like I'm
basically going through it to try to pick and choose
different writing styles and I can then apply to my writing.

(39:17):
So like it all kind of just goes together, this
like cycle of growth I was trying to pursue.

Speaker 2 (39:24):
Yeah, you know what I mean totally. We're not inventors,
were chemists, and we pull things that make sense for
us from others who were great at whatever it is
that they do. Yeah, you, lacrosse found me late relative
to when you think about athletes to achieve a certain standard.

(39:44):
I started playing in middle school. I had been playing basketball, soccer,
I swam track and field. I was always a talented athlete,
but because I started those other sports earlier, I was
better at them. Lacrosse was really challenging, and I stuck
with it, largely because my mom taught me the discipline

(40:05):
and the commitment it was required of getting through the
first season. And then once I got through the first season,
I started getting a little bit better. But I referenced
that because I started adding a crossover dribble into my
split dodge in lacrosse, my field awareness from soccer into
my ability to see the next play in lacrosse. The

(40:27):
way that Steph Curry would practice from inside the paint
is the way that I would start my practice close
to the net. So these were things that were not
instilled in me by my middle school or high school coach.
It was just watching others. I loved watching Reggie Boots
and the way that he would return punts at USC,
how he cut the field and changed trajectories. Barry Sanders

(40:49):
and I would just think about the game differently, which
it sounds a lot like what you do. And that's
what the great storytellers were able to do. You know,
George Lucas like designed his films and his characters based
off of those like huge you know San Francisco Bay
Area Ports, right, and so what resonates for you, how

(41:11):
do you then apply it? And that's the best we
can do is like sharing our authentic connections with the
rest of the world. I love that.

Speaker 3 (41:22):
There's so many different forms of that. I like hearing
you know how you did that in lacrosse, because my
number one move was as like an crease attackman. Was literally,
if someone's guarding me my you know the balls at
acts behind the goal, it's one jab step and then
the other way and without the ball, right moving without

(41:44):
the ball, there's no way that defender can even predict
or guard that. If you're that quick and cutting and
then you have a wide open cut to goal and
it's boom, quick stick you're in yep, And like I
there's nothing more, Like you know, I took that from
ball being a running back, so like it's just that
one step off ball. He can't predict it, he can't

(42:05):
react in time, and like, yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:07):
Exactly, because most people will say, well, you cut and
get open. When your teammate draws a double team and
your defender leaves you, it's like see the back of
his helmet cut And that's the way. I always just
about cutting, and I wasn't a good off ball goal scorer.
And then someone introduced me the concept of just dodging
by your defender even without a ball and then you're
open and someone will pass it to you rightly. Shit,

(42:30):
you know, And so that's that's but that's the beauty
and books and storytelling at large, is like we can
just do these little unlocks along the way super powerful.

Speaker 4 (42:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (42:43):
Is there a you know, it's funny because when you
mentioned the gauge right, for me as an actor, I'm
thinking about turning it on, turning it off right, you
had to become a completely different person.

Speaker 2 (42:53):
Is there?

Speaker 1 (42:53):
As you're pursuing the film, TV and more of the
content for the p L and everything else you're doing,
do you have any interest in acting? Because I feel
like you have a you'd be an easy shoeing for
you in some of your projects. I don't know, just
with what you're sharing mentally, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:08):
I mean, here's here's my just real perspective on it,
and I get it if people disagree and what have you.
There have been some phenomenal crossover athletes into acting or
entertainers into acting. I have a lot of respect for actors.
I understand the commitment to the work and the soft

(43:32):
skills and the subtleties and the empathy that shows up
on screen. Being able to relax understanding marks and relax
with a crew on you. The way that I've approached
to life is, you know, if I wanted to pursue acting,
I would have to go all in. And uh, I

(43:56):
believe that my place in storytelling now is like on
the producing side, on the writing side, potentially directing one day.
I have a maybe a better relationship than most with talent,
having been it on the field. Like I just it
wasn't for me in this life. It doesn't mean I

(44:19):
wouldn't be okay at it, but you know, I kind
of have this reverence for different folks in different industries,
and it's really what the best entrepreneurs can do is
you hear like higher people who are smarter than you,
learn how to delegate, learn how to nourish and appreciate.
And that's you know, me sort of adhering to the

(44:43):
lessons that most resonate for me.

Speaker 1 (44:46):
I mean that's such a testament to your mentality too.
Is in the self awareness that you have, is you
know where you'd best serve moving forward in that space?

Speaker 2 (44:54):
Right?

Speaker 1 (44:54):
Yeah, I'm saying for me, you know, I think the
better you are at studying basically becoming an investigative reporter
at that point the better of an actor, and then
empathy as well totally and just being able to listen.
And You've mentioned all these things in the podcast, So
I'm just saying that's where my head is going to
go as somebody who is an actor.

Speaker 2 (45:11):
Right, That's why I love actors. Yeah, I think they
they they dive into the research and the characters, and
they do dream work and you know it's they have
dialect coaches. It's very similar to sports. Yeah, it's fabulous.
Some of the training for some of the rules are equal.
You know, look at look at what Jake Jonhol does

(45:32):
with Roadhouse, right, exactly exactly that. And you know, look,
if if Pete wants to cast me in, you know,
a locker room scene for his next sports film, I
think I could like bring some heat to that and
then and then start to slowly see, Okay, this is
how the sausage is made. Yeah, but I know it's

(45:54):
complicated and it's brilliant the way that talent is able
to bring a story on screen to life.

Speaker 3 (45:59):
And and you've done like on screen broadcasting. Yeah, of course.

Speaker 2 (46:04):
Right, so you're like, yeah, I fancy myself sort of
as like a chameleon. Yeah, and I but I I
try to check that more now that I'm thirty eight,
and you know, just kind of got this like restart
and on life and this passion for it. But when
I was doing broadcasting, I would, you know, talk like

(46:26):
a broadcaster and you know, just and it's just wasn't
it wasn't me. You know, those that are classically trained
to be on NBC and call a game like they're
so good and that is that's their passions, their love.
So yeah, I guess it's it's a similar note and

(46:47):
and also realize it to acting and also realizing that,
you know, that's what entrepreneurs do as they you know,
some could say fake it and others could say they
they're they're really adaptable. So how athletes are too? Yeah, absolutely, yeah,
I like that.

Speaker 3 (47:01):
If I'm going to do it, I gotta go all in.
I'm like, yeah, yeah, that's great.

Speaker 1 (47:06):
I think one of the greatest skill sets you're going
to have is that authenticity that you bring to the world,
you know, and being your own unique self. There is
nobody else that's like you, right, so being that version
and showing up in the world that translate and that's
the kind of stuff that goes on to athletes that
are coming after you, people that are sitting listening to
this podcast. Right, that's the stuff that I feel now

(47:27):
more than ever, people need and want. You know, back before,
we could fake it till you make it, you know,
But now when you sit down with someone for three
hours in a podcast, you're like, there's someone's going to crack.
You see something that's not authentic, and it doesn't resonate
the same. So the things that you're sharing and talking
about and your journey to me, you being your authentic
self is only going to resonate more, which is more

(47:48):
even exciting knowing you have this book, The Way of
the Champion, right that people can now go read and
digest and take pieces of that and bring them into
their own life.

Speaker 2 (47:57):
So, I mean, my.

Speaker 1 (47:58):
Hat's off to you, dude, Like it's it's it's cool
to see what you're doing and it's inspiring and it's
a yeah, it's it's and it's not easy task, you know.

Speaker 2 (48:06):
I think I think the path to authenticity must include
vulnerability and awareness and the ability to share kind of
going back, and you know, I say that because the
things that I struggled with the most and still struggle
with today. I you know, growing up watching the NFL,

(48:27):
the NBA, Major League Baseball, Uh, seeing entrepreneurs like Mark
Cuban and Jeff Bezos and Zuckerberg. You know, I would
have never, you know, thought that I wanted to be
a professional lacrosse player and start a professional lacrosse league.
It just it just to me, you know. I understand

(48:50):
sort of the history of lacrosse and the perception of
lacrosse and the size and scale of lacrosse, and I'm
an ambitious dude, And so I share that because I
struggled with it. Lacrosse found me and I built a
relationship with it, and I fell in love with it
and I couldn't let it go. And so then I

(49:13):
was hell bent on trying to figure it out professionally
as an athlete, not professionally as the entrepreneur, as a storyteller.
And knowing that, like, you know, I share that because
it's it's just a rocky road everything that we do,
and but and consistent what we've been sharing. That means

(49:34):
you're onto something. You know, there's there there must be friction.

Speaker 3 (49:39):
Yeah, I mean I think I always say, like authenticity
is the currency of the future. And I think the
reason YouTube and those alternative forms of media have grown
so much is because you're able. I mean you're literally
like a guy or a woman in their office with
like this little face can have millions of people watching

(50:01):
them because they're being their authentic selves. Yeah, and they're
giving authentic opinions. And that's where people are missing in
media or you know, more traditional forms. Is that straight
up authenticity. And I think they're finding that on YouTube
or on social media more than kind of traditional outlets.

Speaker 2 (50:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (50:22):
Obviously there's exceptions and you know, for both types.

Speaker 2 (50:26):
But I like to say, assume you're not the exception.
Assume you're not assume you're not the NFL, assume you're
not Taylor Swift, you know, and assume that you won't
be an overnight success. I don't believe in overnight successes.
By the way, every company that we've heard of that's
had an exit has at least ten years of build
ahead of it. Athletes to become NBA or POL champions

(50:50):
must be playing for at least twenty years. And we
have these tipping point moments where press covers us and
you're on national television score in a goal in overtime,
leading your team to the trophy. But all the stuff
that went into that is in direct conflict with instant gratification,

(51:11):
which is largely how these social media platforms are wiring us. So, yes,
be your authentic self on your webcam and commit to that.
Don't look at the fucking ticker of how many people
who you've never met before are actually watching. Right, If
what you're sharing on that webcam is something that you

(51:32):
care about, keep doing it, and keep doing it and
keep doing it.

Speaker 3 (51:36):
Yeah, and starting a you know, a new league in
this new era. I mean, you have this unique opportunity to,
like you said, like integrate social media and integrate that
authenticity into it, right, Like it's not you can break
down a lot of those barriers and you know, have
more fan interaction and have more player media going on

(51:58):
with social and all that. I'm it's really exciting.

Speaker 1 (52:01):
Yeah, yeah, I mean that sounds like it's the difference
between searching for outside validation and inside being validating yourself essentially. Right,
But what was for me? What's different about the phill
and other leagues? And why did you start it?

Speaker 2 (52:16):
Yeah? So sort of the chemist not inventor approach. So
we sat back and went, all right, if Major League
Baseball was starting in twenty eighteen versus early nineteen hundreds,
how would they structure it. We've learned so many war
stories of leagues expanding too fast, contracting two hundred sports

(52:37):
league started since nineteen ninety with a one percent success rate,
and that's being able to sustain beyond three years of play.
So you have to be very proficient in the way
that you are building. You have to have an efficient
cost structure. You have to be able to present as
if you are twenty years down the road and you're one,

(53:00):
because people are going to spend their hard earned cash
to get in a car with their family, pay for
five tickets, pay for parking, pay for concessions, sit in
the heat in the summer, and watch a ninety minute match,
So that what you have to provide has to be
top class. It's an exceptional exercise of grit and imagination.

(53:21):
And so through that we said, okay, kind of you know,
we're occupying a team sport, but from a business standpoint,
I love individual sports, love the UFC, love F one,
love a WWE, and I'm talking about business. They golf, tennis, right,
having majors, getting all the best players in one market

(53:43):
with your one network partner. There's no overlap in games
competing between when Okc's playing and the Knicks are playing
on a Thursday night. Like everything is there in front
of you, your sponsors, your fans, get everyone in one
fell swoop. How could we build that in team sports?
That's why we launched our touring model. We started with
six teams because we felt like that was enough based

(54:08):
on the total allotment of talented players from the previous league,
and not too much such that our costs were really
high and the stories were to spread thin. And then
you know, we utilized social media, which baseball started with
print and radio and a very local mindset from how

(54:32):
you grew up, where you stayed, where you worked was
the same. Tickets was the number one revenue stream in
the early nineteen hundreds, which meant how many games you
should have, which is why baseball plays ten thousand games
a season. Right then, as media introduced itself and after
the NFL, by the way, made the bet that Major

(54:52):
League Baseball didn't, which was we believe our games on
television won't impact tickets. That's why Major League baseball fell
off as they were like, now if we go on air,
people aren't going to attend games. And football then got
the broadcast deals with ABC and NBC and CBS. Then
baseball try to catch up, but it's too late. So

(55:15):
we looked at, Okay, the exposure you get from television
will provide a validating point of view for new fans.
Because par lacrosse hadn't been on NBC or ABC, like
we ended up getting it too. We know we're not
going to get paid a lot for that in year
one because par lacrosse has never delivered a rating. So

(55:35):
how do we figure out the economics and with social media,
how do we build a very sticky and you know,
growing monetizable audience by having conversations with them daily. So
seeing sort of the history of sports, trying to be
predicative of where the future of sports is going, raising

(55:58):
the right long term capital and then ultimately I think
the key ingredients for pro sports and the same thing
in film and televisions. You have to have top tier talent.
You have to have the best players in the world.
It's something that MLS and Don Garber still struggles with.
They get messy over they got Beckham Over they had
Tyry on Rie at some point. We have great homegrown

(56:18):
town in the US, but they're mostly playing overseas. So
how do you harness what sport is essentially asking the
three of us to do on a Saturday afternoon. If
we're not watching the best at what they do, I'm
not going to watch Spring Football has struggled with that
football is so big in America that they're able to
peel off a pretty sizable audience by just showing up.

(56:41):
But you've got to have the best in the world.
And then, what I'll say to wrap on the program itself.
Why it's so valuable and why it continues to hold
up broadcasting cable is that it's live and the percentage

(57:02):
of sports fans prefer to watch games live versus on repeat,
which means it's appointment watching. Which was a huge disruptor
from DVR to streaming. Is that the power shifted from
the network's delivering cheers to eighty four million people on
a finale at Thursday night at seven o'clock to now

(57:22):
being like, no, I want to watch Succession when I
want to fucking watch it, and if it's good enough,
I'm going to watch it on Sunday night, but like
I don't have to, right, So the power shift to
the consumer. Sports holds onto it because of Live. Also,
what's really value about live as advertisers want to be
where fans are, and so they can count on being
in properties where there are authentic integrations, quarters, timeouts, reviews,

(57:47):
on field signage. Streaming essentially has created attacks on advertising
where like we don't have to watch commercial breaks anymore.
Oh right, right, yeah, so I think that's that. And
then the last piece that I that I really enjoy
about sports is that none of us know how it's
going to end, and that is like the ultimate form

(58:10):
of suspense and original programming. I love that. Yeah, that's great,
that's true. It's awesome.

Speaker 3 (58:17):
That's that's crazy. I mean you look at all those
different financial variables that go into like a full league.
It's like it can make your head spin.

Speaker 2 (58:27):
Yeah yeah, and it does a lot of times. Was
why we have a great team and we're constantly thinking
about the next thirty days, in the next three years
and then the next thirty years, and how do we
identify areas of growth and keep this thing moving.

Speaker 1 (58:44):
Hell YEAHS ventured pretty heavily into the merchandise space.

Speaker 2 (58:49):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know that's the other thing.
So we're we're true single entity league, the NFL, the NBA,
their associations. So essentially the Commissioner's office does two things.
It cuts the national broadcast deal and a few other
national sponsors, and then manages the owners and make sure
like the ship keeps moving in the right direction. But

(59:09):
the owners are operating their teams on a week to
week basis. So we're an attractive model the venture capitalist
because we own the whole thing, which means the league
IP all of our eight teams, IP marketing rights to players,
signage on site, inventory online. But the challenging part is
we got to operate the whole fucking thing. So every
game we're operating, we don't we don't get to outsource

(59:31):
it to Mark Cuban or you know, Jerry Jones. So
the you know, the exciting path is always the harder path,
and so you have to have the stomach for it.
You have to have the resilience and the endurance and
know that you know it's going to do this.

Speaker 3 (59:49):
Oh, are you doing a lot of like college recruitment
so that every year you're getting the top all Americans
from the top university as well.

Speaker 2 (59:58):
We actually have our draft this coming Tuesday, so I'm
going to fly in New York on Sunday and then
we do our draft live at ESPN. So that great. Yeah,
that was a big part of our Our initial strategy
is owning the college pipeline and the college draft and
making sure we get in that right. So you'll have

(01:00:20):
four rounds and the best college players will be selected,
and then they'll be playing in June with us. That's
so cool. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:00:27):
Is there any kind of cap on the amount of
teams that you guys can bring on eventually once as
you move forward.

Speaker 2 (01:00:33):
Yeah, it's a great question, and it's one that has
to be carefully mined, so you know, you could expand
too fast. You could also expand with the wrong owners.
So if we were to go from eight to ten
or eight to twelve, or eight to sixteen teams, the
touring model has to shift to probably a home and
away model, because bringing sixteen teams into one mark and

(01:00:57):
everyone playing, I don't think people have the stomach to
watch eight games the course of a weekend, or we
really don't have the airtime to do it. So we're
really focused right now on continuing to drive value through
our eight teams like F one's ten teams, and then
if we were to expand teams. Understanding, okay, who are

(01:01:18):
the owners in those markets that own venues that can
put a really great experience out the care about lacrosse,
care about investing in the players and the fans. If
you find more than eight of those, and then more
than sixteen or thirty like some leagues, then there's a
really great value proposition on the other side of pursuing it.

Speaker 1 (01:01:40):
Do you guys have a like a version of you
that's playing for you guys right now? Is there a
Paul out there in there?

Speaker 4 (01:01:46):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:01:46):
I mean I think I think we do. We've got well,
one of the greatest players to have played in Tom Shreiber,
who's last year's MVP and world champion, and then Trevor
Baptist was the MVP before him, Zad Williams was the
MVP before that. So it's exciting pro talent that is
taking the game to new heights. And then we have

(01:02:07):
a few really talented players coming out of college that
will go one, two, and three in Brendan O'Neil, Pat
Cavanaugh Connor Schallenberger so incumbent on us to help them
grow into the spotlight.

Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
Hell yeah, you mentioned Travis Bastrana, and I grew up skateboarding,
surfing mode. I did like all the you know, all
the the stuff outside of team sports. Really, but I've
seen this evolution since I was a kid. You know,
we kind of all watched it across every sport, whether
it's extreme sports, traditional, you know, team sports, whatever it is.
How much have you seen or do you think you've

(01:02:39):
seen a massive change in the way people approach the
game and play since you started, or even since however
many decades it goes back.

Speaker 2 (01:02:48):
Yeah, I mean, you know, on the business side, JP Morgan,
Bank of America, Allen and Coe, Moles, Lion Tree, they
all have sports practices because sports are now considered a
primary asset class, so banks are trying to get their
high net wealth individuals. On the ownership side, private equity

(01:03:11):
is now being carved into ownership deals via the NFL,
the NBA. We have a big private equity shop that
our great investors on our board in Arctos. David O'Connor
was a co founder of that. He was a partner
at CIA for twenty years here. So I think the
sophistication and the enterprise value is at a level that

(01:03:33):
sport never had. It used to be considered a vanity
play for someone who was really rich to go own
a team and invite their friends into their suite. Now
it's like wow. If you look at the impact on media,
on advertising. The ticketing revenue is the same as the past,
meaning you can sell however many tickets the venue can

(01:03:53):
hold over the course of however many games you're playing
in a season, but merchandise to your earlier note that's
a twenty four seven three sixty five business. Because of
new technology and creative marketing campaigns, and youth has gotten
big real estate, they own venues. They're now bolting on
hotels and retail and restaurants, and that's creating more value

(01:04:14):
under the larger top co umbrella, So that that's significantly changed.
And I think some of it has been in the
air for parents and kids that wasn't there for me
growing up, And maybe it was just in the bubble
that I grew up in where my dad was never like, oh, yeah,

(01:04:36):
you're going to play college sports or pro ball, and
it was like he always says it he wanted me.
He wanted to be able to get me into any
sport that I wanted to play, and that happened to
be wreck But if I wanted to swim, he would
try to figure out how much paper he had to sell.
He was a paper salesman to get me in, you know,

(01:04:58):
or be able to drive me to my swim lessons.
Parents and kids Now, man, it's like everyone's like, I
need to get a Division one scholarship? Are you fucking
kidding me? Like if there was a Division one athlete
at my school growing up, everyone will be like, oh,
you know, like if he was good enough in football,

(01:05:19):
you might see Nick Saban in the hallway, or you know,
Dean Smith in basketball, and that it was almost maybe
people just were more realistic than they are now. So
I think there's some stuff that needs to be managed
because the youth sports business has gotten so big. I
think it's like a sixty billion dollar industry in the US.

(01:05:41):
So to be able to drive those dollars, I think
a lot of the youth operators are pushing the ability
to get there. Any kid recruited because of the relationship
with the coach. That needs to be navigated.

Speaker 3 (01:05:54):
Yes, you're doing so many cool things though, right, Like
I mean, the pro leagues the book, like we can
approach it from like the mental angle on the book side,
and then the business kind of more material angle from that.
I mean, it's really really cool. Congrats on everything.

Speaker 2 (01:06:11):
Thank you. I mean that I wrote the book in
three sections. There's Amateur, professional, and beyond the game. And
some of the lessons, as you can imagine, reoccur like
work ethic, yeah, and camaraderie and leadership, and then some
of them evolve. So as an amateur, it's really amateur
actually comes from the Latin word amateur, which means lover

(01:06:33):
of enthusiast of it. It's so it's a reminder like
you're doing something because you love it. You're finding that sport,
and then profession is more professing to your calling, and
that takes on a whole nother life. It's often not discussed,
by the way, because of the rat race to getting
into pros and then everyone leaves you alone. And then

(01:06:54):
once you retire, a lot of athletes, you know, really
struggle and entertainers and so on and so forth, because
if you haven't up kept your relationship with self you
lost a large portion of that. I've learned that beyond
the game is very much about service and ingenuity and community.

(01:07:15):
And that could be through the lens of rebuilding pro lacrosse.
It could be starting a foundation, it could be both.
But those experiences some of my own, a lot mostly
of others that I've studied is how I think about
my day to day. And where I've learned is like

(01:07:36):
I'm project based, you know, and I don't like to
be told I can't do something. Yeah, And I like
to take on things that I haven't been classically trained
to do, like writing a book or doing a film
or you know, launching a league.

Speaker 3 (01:07:52):
Hell yeah and now acting yeah maybe, yeah, we'll get
chance something.

Speaker 1 (01:07:59):
No, man, that's all awesome and appreciate you. Well, where
can everyone find your book?

Speaker 2 (01:08:03):
So you can buy my book anywhere? Come May seventh,
depending on when this podcast drops, So you could be Amazon,
could be Walmart, could be Barnes and Noble. It could
be my local bookstore in New York, P and T
nit where you can find all those selections on the
Way of the Champion dot com. You can follow me
on social Media'm at Paul Rabel and you know, really.

(01:08:24):
I was hoping we'd come into this podcast and talk
enough about the books so that you felt like you
didn't need to buy it, and then it's your choice.
And I think that's you know, yeah, genuinely my hope.

Speaker 1 (01:08:35):
That's awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:08:36):
You know, we can't force anyone to do anything.

Speaker 1 (01:08:38):
No, and I think anybody who's listening, genuinely listening to this,
like myself included, it only makes me want to read
it and take more out of that book than what
you've already shared, which is so beneficial to anybody. I
feel like that's listening, especially trying to be a better
version of themselves. So where's my sign copy?

Speaker 2 (01:08:55):
Bro? Yeah? All right, I'm going to get pissed off
of my publisher.

Speaker 1 (01:08:59):
No man, Thanks guys, appreciate you coming on.

Speaker 3 (01:09:03):
Yeah, thanks for tuning in to Studio twenty two.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}How to Start a Professional Sports League with Lacrosse Great Paul Rabil