Bryant

Always shocked by the world's irrational confidence but here for the celebration.

[Memphis Jookin @MemphisJookin]

Everybody snapped but the last guy went crazy 🔥

[SpursRΞPORTΞR @SpursReporter]

Seriously, if @nikebasketball doesn’t turn this🔥fire viral campaign into an official release, somebody should probably lose their job.

And the 20-year-old design student from my alma mater who created it?

Hire them immediately.

No interview.
No second round.
Just send the offer letter.

This is exactly the kind of concept brands spend millions trying to create.

[Rebecca Aguilar (on Blue Sky & LinkedIn) @RebeccaAguilar]

Everyone COPY this video, share it far and wide. Paramount Skydance billionaire baby David Ellison can’t handle that Stephen Colbert is getting millions of views . @Youtube we will cancel our subscription as we did when we dumped @paramountplus.

[Brad Stulberg @BStulberg]

This piece on Coach Kerr from Wright Thompson is extraordinary. Everyone who is interested in good writing, good craft, or good coaching should read it and savor it. My god is it good.
https://t.co/zvhIBESHGJ

[Bobby F. 🍁 @bobbyfairview]

Dear @ebehdad

RE: The Conflict of Perverse Incentives

I want to be fair to you. You had less than a month to structure a complex billion pound transaction, so some mistakes were always going to happen. But the mistake I’m describing isn’t an execution error. It’s a conceptual flaw baked into the deal from day one, and it has permanently poisoned your strategic position.

You built a structure with three stakeholder groups, and you only have a fiduciary duty to one of them. That was always going to end badly. Let me explain why.

A man came to you and said he had £300m and wanted to buy a business for £4.2bn. Two of his mates would chip in £300m each. You lent him the rest. To their credit, they’ve been matching cash calls ever since. But here is what you actually agreed to: you needed Boehly’s money, which meant Boehly got something in return. What he got was influence over the sporting operation. And the first thing he did with it was sack Thomas Tuchel so he could have his dressing room access.

That decision, made to protect your financial relationship with a co-investor who couldn’t actually afford the asset, is what set everything else in motion.

Roman left you a blueprint. He won trophies, built a global brand, and maintained a fair value that always exceeded his cost basis. Central to that was Cobham. Fans across England sing “he’s one of our own” for a reason. That bond between a club and its homegrown players is not sentiment. It is enterprise value. You dismantled it. You sold the graduates and killed the pipeline, not because it made sporting sense, but because your financial model required short term asset monetisation over long term brand construction.

You have now spent more on transfers than any ownership group in the history of football. Chelsea are currently 9th. Below Brentford. Below Brighton. That is the sporting output of your model, and those fans who sang “he’s one of our own” have noticed.

Here is where your conceptual flaw becomes permanent. Boehly has £100m of interest accrued and payable to Ares. You have at least £600m sitting in the Cayman Islands, accruing and payable to COP III. Across the group the interest bill is approaching £400m this year. That means you have no choice but to run this club for one purpose: to make debt service payments. Managing a football club to pay interest has never worked in the history of this game unless you’re Manchester United. Your problem is that you don’t have their revenues. So you are flipping players to fund cash flow.

There will be no properly experienced signings. No manager with real authority. No trophies. You’re caught in a sell-to-buy death spiral and fans have worked out exactly what is happening.

If you’ve made it this far in my letter, this is the part I’d encourage you to sit up and focus on. You need the fans more than they need you. Every day more of them are learning what this structure actually means for the club they love, and they are making a rational decision: do not buy the brand of an owner who is just here to pay interest.

Your perverse incentive is to balance the books, manage the asset, and extract the best possible valuation before the debt matures. Their perverse incentive is to make sure you never get there, because the only exit that actually serves their interests is Ares foreclosing and forcing a sale to someone who can run this club properly.

Think about what that means. The fans who generate the revenue you need to service your debt are now rationally incentivised to undermine that revenue.

You created a structure where your key stakeholder group is rooting for your creditor to take the club from you. That is not a communication problem or a PR problem. It is a structural conflict with no resolution inside your current ownership model.

I’m not sure what the long term prognosis is for a business in that position. But I think you already know.

Yours truly,

bf

[Micah Erfan @micah_erfan]

This is the best political ad I’ve ever seen.

[WordSmiff @_WordSmiff_]

One time we really gotta sit down and talk about what black men really go through man. Cuz this shit real bro.

[Evan Luthra @EvanLuthra]

Mark Cuban sold Broadcast dot com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1999.

He spotted the internet wealth transfer before most people had email. This time he quietly called the next one.

“33 million companies in this country. No AI budgets. No AI experts.”

Read that twice.

He’s not talking about startups. He’s talking about the dentist with three locations. The freight broker in Memphis. The family manufacturer running on spreadsheets from 2011.

They’ve heard of ChatGPT. That’s where it ends.

For twenty years, software worked like a landlord. One product, millions of tenants, everyone pays rent and nobody gets to move the walls.

AI flips the lease. The product can finally shape itself around the business instead of the other way around.

Which opens a door nobody is talking about.

Someone has to walk into these 33 million companies and do the work. Sit across from a 62-year-old owner, understand how his invoices move, hand him back a system that saves him 15 hours a week.

That person is not going to come from OpenAI.

Every smart 22-year-old right now is sprinting toward the same five labs. Cuban is pointing at the empty chairs in every other room.

Here’s the arbitrage: you don’t need to train a model. You need to know one industry cold and speak fluent AI.

The last time this setup existed was 1999. Every small business needed a website and almost nobody local knew how to build one. The operators who figured out dentists, restaurants, and contractors built agencies that printed money for a decade.

This time the ceiling is ten times higher.

33 million companies. A handful of people who can help them. The math does the rest.

Cuban saw the gap first. Whoever moves next owns the decade.

[CHELSEA FAN TV @ChelseaFanTVyt]

This fan is not enjoying Chelsea at the moment…

[Glenn Crooks @GlennCrooks]

The word "intensity" came up in Mauricio Pochettino's presser Monday & his Argentinian blood took over.

Take the 4 minutes to watch his complete soliloquy on the subject, stimulated by the passive 2nd half vs Belgium in 5-2 defeat here in Atlanta.

"I need to translate it to the players." 👇

#USMNT #WorldCup #USAvPortugal @SiriusXMFC

[Billy Misanthrope @notesfromspain]

Probably the most accurate nailing of the MAGA base I have ever seen.

[shark memes @SharkMemess]

Dianna Russini’s husband waiting in the car while she “follows up on a story.”

[GhettoGronk @ghetto_gronk]

Drake Maye: "Coach, the Seahawks look pretty tough. What's the gameplan?"

Mike Vrabel and Dianna Russini somewhere:

[Pop Base @PopBase]

Zohran Mamdani walked 6 miles home last night from the New York City Hall to round out his first 100 days in office.

[BonkDaCarnivore @BonkDaCarnivore]

Drop everything you're doing and watch this now. RIGHT NOW.

Ari K and Schuyler Brown, I have no idea who you 2 beautiful bastards are, but you're instant legends. Hopefully someone in the comments knows and tags.

[CBS Sports Golazo ⚽️ @CBSSportsGolazo]

A really honest and vulnerable moment from the #UCLToday crew to open today's show 🥹❤️

[hasanabi @hasanthehun]

this is how you talk about trans issues w the median voter btw.

[aly ✶ @jinthirty]

Steph Curry on what he thinks needs to happen to solve America’s basketball problem:

“The ability to develop a baseline for like basketball IQ and what does that mean. There’s an epidemic in that respect. I also feel like even just the ability to allow kids to play multiple sports and be kids for as long as they can before it turns into kind of the business mentality and mindset. On the whole, I think the culture around it has kind of shifted in the wrong direction. I played multiple sports until I was 13 and then figured out what I wanted to do and what I loved. I think what I gained from playing multiple sports and the physical skill sets, the hand-eye coordination, different footwork, you’re around different people, have different demands on your body — that’s only helped me in basketball. I think there’s a lot of people trying to solve it knowing we need as much homegrown talent as possible representing the highest levels of basketball. So, we’ll see what happens.”

(via @TheAthletic Show with @ThompsonScribe)

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

I worked at Epic Games for two years. This is real, and the strategy behind it is smarter than most people realize.

Tim Sweeney has spent nearly two decades buying North Carolina forest land. 50,000+ acres across 15 counties. He’s now one of the largest private landowners in the state. The purchases started in 2008, right after the real estate collapse wiped out developers who had been planning golf resorts and luxury communities on biodiverse wilderness.

Sweeney paid $15 million for Box Creek Wilderness, a 7,000-acre stretch in the Blue Ridge foothills containing 130+ rare and threatened species. Developers had owned 5,000 of those acres before the crash. He bought them for conservation prices when nobody else was bidding.

He runs the acquisitions through an LLC called “130 of Chatham.” He buys the land, holds it for years, then either donates it to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, sells it at a discount to state parks, or hands it to land trusts. In 2021, he donated 7,500 acres in the Roan Highlands to the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy. Largest private land donation in North Carolina history.

The part people miss: he told the News & Observer that since 2021, land got too expensive to keep buying. So he shifted focus to converting his existing 50,000 acres into permanent conservation status. He’s locking the land into legal structures that make development impossible regardless of who owns it in the future.

A billionaire worth roughly $6 billion is spending tens of millions acquiring wilderness specifically during economic downturns, then giving it away or placing it under permanent legal protection. The land will outlast him, Epic Games, and Fortnite.

That’s the part that separates Sweeney from billionaires who write checks to get their name on a building. The building depreciates. The forest compounds.

[Dr. Jebra Faushay @JebraFaushay]

Saturday Night Live occasionally makes me laugh. Welcome to MAHAspital.

Where emergencies are treated with beef tallow and raw eggs.