UP504 What Just Happened: Inside IMG's farmhouse; Peter Thiel's Enhanced Games; Jamie Redknapp's new agency

19:23James Emmett:and his only hope for humanity. He does believe we'll get to a place of sort of utopia, but he thinks we need human good to save us. And he was followed by a session with Alistair Campbell and Mike Pompeo just sort of sniping at each other, which didn't do much for the old hope in human good.

19:44David Cushnan:Yeah, as a program, as somebody who thinks about programming, where do you put the session that talks about no future after 2037 on a program is that start of day end of day the after lunch slot he was responding to a question

20:00James Emmett:from the audience they had done a session earlier in the day about sort of vision 2050 real future gazing stuff and someone had sort of referred back to that and he he took a moment to think and then he said well i don't think we'll get to 2050 i think 2037 is the is the the final moment at which we can possibly predict what might happen it's not that i think okay so i'm i'm all for this i'm all for punchy headlines but i think you know sort of beware people selling books and talking about the future but let's it's a nice it's interesting richard do you see a future after 2037 uh i'm pleased that i wake up every morning frankly at this point so you know 27 p.m yes i made it through there's a what was i going to say i was going to say something about there's a link here i think david to your your bit which i think we'll go go to but just to finish that off it's quite interesting the breadth of the people there and also the subject matter isn't it yeah because we come at it through a sports lens and i was fed a load of sort of sports related things and obviously that's a central bit of it but it's quite interesting that you know alistair campbell and mike what was his name what was it mike mike pompeo secretary mike pompeo yeah did mark shapiro did i see him say that he wants to do it in america or is that gonna yeah that's the plan they've done three years of it now at soho farmhouse and i think the intention is to take it to the us i think they want to take it to new york i'm not sure whether that is dependent or not on whether there is a soho farmhouse opening in new york but yeah

21:41David Cushnan:You could see it in the Hamptons, couldn't you? Somewhere like that.

21:44James Emmett:Yeah, well, I'm pretty sure they want to put it in. So there's a sort of thin slice of Connecticut where all of these massive media execs, including Mark Shapiro, live. And I think that kind of area is where they're thinking. That is pretty smart. I like that bit of area. I mean, if ever I got Mark Shapiro's salary, that's where I would head, somewhere around Westport. It's very nice. I think he's mainly a dividends guy now. dividends guy i want to be a dividends guy yeah right let's jump to david because i think the thread there is the end of humanity yeah and here we go we're gonna talk about the enhanced games

22:25David Cushnan:yes which has been around for a couple of years as an idea as a concept but this week american sprinter the world 100 meter champion 2022 fred curley i think he got a bronze medal in the 100 meters in paris last year fred curley became the most high profile athlete yet to join what will be the first edition of the enhanced games which will take place i think over four days next may in las vegas so this is the enhanced games where essentially athletes are able to take performance enhancing substances. There's no drug testing. Last week, British swimmer Ben Proud said he was joining and he's a 30 year old, you know, in the middle of his career, again, an Olympic medalist.

23:18David Cushnan:So, you know, hard to call it momentum, but two reasonably, you know, accomplished athletes, very accomplished athletes, not household names necessarily, deciding to join up this first edition. Worth noting, as we'll get to, that Fred Curley is currently suspended for an alleged anti-doping whereabouts violation and is not competing in the World Athletics Championships. The bigger picture is the Enhanced Games has a guy called Aaron D'Souza, an Australian businessman. It's always an Australian businessman, isn't it? who's the the guy behind this investors include peter thiel the tech is it teal or feel teal and the investment company oh look at this uh belonging to donald trump jr and they are trying to pitch this as some sort of big important worthy medical experiment really to see how far the human body can be optimized.

24:20David Cushnan:Obviously, there's a group of people, and I would suspect the majority of people listening, the majority of people who work in the sports industry, who would see this as pretty reckless, downright dangerous potentially, and making a bit of a nonsense of fair competition, of sporting integrity, which I guess we can all get sometimes a bit high-handed about, but is still pretty fundamental to the whole business model of sport. Aaron D'Souza says that the Enhanced Games is renovating the Olympic model for the 21st century. In an era of accelerating technological and scientific change, the world needs a sporting event that embraces the future, particularly advances in medical science.

25:05David Cushnan:And they are really clear that all substances will be disclosed, there will be health profiling, it will all be supervised, but there will be no doping tests so i think it could work and then i'm going to tell you why it won't okay there's a moment in time here i think and kind of hinting you know building on what you were hinting out there richard this sort of idea of super strength super size super charge trump this high performance sort of culture of optimizing your body of optimizing your lifestyle how long you can live i get up at 3 a.m to go to the gym and work out and i've done a day's work by the time you idiots are waking up it's sort of the jake humphrey lifestyle yeah but but even more extreme i think this sort of really more extreme than jake real you know extreme high performance culture that some people like to adopt and like to tell us about on linkedin um i think you have to say that this is something that if it happens when it happens could have the potential to create some viral moments in a viral world that's probably quite handy and there's an economic piece here because there's big prize money being put up for this so five hundred thousand dollars per event a million dollar bonus if you break a world record um for the 2026 competition ben proud the swimmer was actually saying that he would if he wins an enhanced games competition he will earn as much as he would have won if he'd won the world championships 13 years in a row.

26:44David Cushnan:So there's a, for certain athletes, even if it means trashing your reputation, trashing your credibility in the sort of traditional sporting world, there is money, there's financial reward on offer here that they can't get anywhere else. why it won't work 9.58 famously is the 100 meters men's world record if somebody takes a load of stuff and runs 9.57 say to me it doesn't feel like a big enough jump it's not an interesting enough jump to make people five seconds or i'm not interested yeah but totally like if somebody's if yeah somebody if you're served up a clip that says somebody has just run 100 meters in 7.5 seconds you're gonna watch but yeah clearly that's not gonna happen and also from a you know with this whole thing is sort of about artificial enhancement who on earth is timing this that who yeah who is going to be the official timekeeper because if the whole business model rests on people blasting through world records and showing exactly what the human body could do if you tune it and feed it with stuff that you shouldn't be dealing with if you don't break any records you've got you know you undermine the whole business and so will we be able to believe the times here it feels like to me there's scope for manipulation there's scope for you know fiddling the timings on this and uh that's why ultimately i don't think this has a chance discuss okay right interesting you mentioned Peter Thiel and I think it's worth just pausing on him for a moment because my sense of this there's a few threads in here which before we get to him there's things that get people excited and there's a few tidbits in there about a sort of anti-voice to the Olympic movement a bit of it which is unlimited potential it's part of the disruption question so you've got all the you know the the words that people congregate around and it's useful and interesting to ask questions about development whether or not the status quo is getting in the way of human development whether or not other things could be done i'm someone who on a fairly regular basis questions the ioc and the olympic movement and its impact on the world because it's very central to lots of different sports both culturally but also economically so there's a whole load of stuff in there which we can have quite an interesting conversation about.

29:16If you then get to Peter Thiel, I think what I see in this is that all of that is just a sort of confection, a noise. This is a tiny side project for him. He's one of the world's richest men and certainly one of the most powerful. One of the initial investors in PayPal is a sort of Musk era PayPal cohort, but also an early Facebook investor. But someone who is sort of sitting behind a great deal of what we're seeing more broadly, the story being that J.D. Vance is his guy. He's in the White House because of Teal. And that's the link to the Trump fund and their involvement in this. If you sort of poke into Teal, you get to some fairly murky stuff about transhumanism, which is, you know, again, an idea that has been around for a very long time, but has been resurrected by a sort of, you know, very rich Silicon Valley people who are just interested in ideas.

30:13A lot of it is a bit of sci-fi. They're all Lord of the Rings readers. And a lot of it is to do with what if we just weren't human in the same way as we know it and whether or not technology will be an answer to the questions. So he advocates radical transformation where your human natural body gets transformed into an immortal body, positioning transhumanism as compatible with Christianity through the concept of transcendence. The enhanced game serves as a public laboratory for this philosophy, normalizing chemical enhancement as a pathway to human optimization. A lot of it, when you again get into some of the detail of it, and I don't recommend you read Ayn Rand's Fountainhead because it's very tedious, but a lot of the stuff that this is about has its beginnings in that book.

31:04Thiel famously stated that I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. He views mass democracy as potentially destructive to innovation. And he explicitly accepts a technologically enhanced elite emerging separate from the general population. You're saying, right, okay, if this is, and quite often you get to the Overton window in these types of conversations. Joseph Overton was a political scientist in the 70s. It was all about what do you do when you've got a set of ideas and you want to move them into the mainstream. And we saw a lot of this in relation to Brexit and Trump.

31:41And it takes relentless amounts of marketing, the ownership of news. Social media is perfect for this. It makes otherwise or previously ideas that were seen as marginal and a bit mad in terms of the mainstream shift them into the into the middle and you know that's that's going on all the time all day every day this is a sort of sporting version of that and i can sort of see that okay if we move this thing if this is the vehicle by which we can then move these ideas into the center of conversation and we have podcasts like this discussing them that's the beginning of okay well there is a body of people who might really like this and as that body gets bigger and bigger they're able to sort of talk about it in a more sensible, coherent, open way.

32:28So I think this is a sort of front. He owns Palantir, which is a sort of operating system for war and death. So he's got other things on his mind. But this is interesting because it's probing and poking the official sport. And a lot of, and again, I wrote about, I don't want to plug my news, but I wrote about the Olympics and the IOC standing for a particular set of values of which Peter Thiel doesn't much like them. And he, you know, he's someone who called Greta Thunberg the Antichrist. And so progressive ideas, which the IOC, a lot of them are wrapped into their mission statements, is an absolute, the enemy of Peter Thiel.

33:12So I could see why you would create a sort of antichrist olympics to begin with and then if you've got enough money you keep it going and over time maybe you start to then bring the ideas that are couched within that vehicle out to play and so this is a very well you have to keep an eye on it i think i agree with you completely that your initial response is this is stupid and you know and no one's going to go for this it will be interesting to see who comes out of the ether and supports it do you think they'll

33:44David Cushnan:use the anti-Christ line when they're pitching it to Coca-Cola? Well, you know, Coca-Cola invests in some strange things. There's a, you know, if you wanted to pursue that a stage further, one of the, and you mentioned Aaron D'Souza, he frames performance enhancing drugs using the sort of libertarian rhetoric. Athletes are adults and they have a right to do with their body what they wish, my body, my choice. And obviously that's appropriating reproductive rights and the whole abortion subject, particularly looking at America, that is an absolute trigger subject in the culture war left and right.

34:22You suddenly become, that becomes a whole different thing.

34:25James Emmett:Just to ignore the, and it's a very far reaching bit of commentary that you've just given there, Richard, but to put the moral compass bit to one side for a second and where it's all going, the Olympics or sort of athletic competitions that the enhanced games are designed to go up against to provide a different an alternative to they they are competing in the same in the same pool you know the the Olympics already are in enhanced games that they run that they have WADA running their anti-doping, providing anti-doping guidelines. Those guidelines, the substances that are within the WADA code, exactly how much you're permitted to have in your body of any of those substances at any one time, that changes every year as science progresses, as the understanding of what human bodies can do changes.

35:28James Emmett:The Olympics are already run to the to the same sort of guideline that is there are a list of allowed substances that you can put in your body up to safe and fair limits as dictated by WADA. And Dave, you mentioned in your explanation of this that the enhanced games aren't going to do drugs tests. Well, I think that they have actually said that they are going to have some doping control measures, and they do have a list of approved substances, they're not going with WADA's list. They're going with the US's FDA list of basically what someone can legally take. So you can't get someone jumped up on cocaine or whatever in this.

36:13David Cushnan:But it's just, it is the same set.

36:16James Emmett:It's a really good point. It's the same set of rules that they're abiding by. It's just that the Olympics are using a code which is tried and tested and is in place to provide safety to people and fairness. and the enhanced games is going to use a different one, which isn't in there, which isn't, is not set up to provide safety to athletes. I think it's a really, really good, good point, because, again, it's you then get back to the sort of COVID anti-vax conversations and you start to say, right, where is the line? And, you know, who controls the line and what is fair, what isn't? I'm wearing a pair of glasses.

36:50Is that an enhancement? You start to have those types of conversations.

36:54James Emmett:you've got to have you've got to have rules it's a competition you've got to have rules and someone's got to set the rules and who sets them and why they set them and have they their own agenda see we're doing we're doing peter teal's work for him i think the more practical

37:08David Cushnan:challenge that they will have is getting a bunch of either recognizable or halfway decent athletes to do this you know you need enough a lot of athletes to create a um you know an athletics competition a sort of you know wannabe olympics multi-sport things so they haven't revealed how many athletes they've got yet we're getting individual announcements um so ultimately at a really practical level it will sort of live or die by how much of an impact that first that first event makes and from a sort of you know to sort of if it is about shifting the dial as you say in terms of the the broader conversation they do need to make a massive impact at those first one the first events in vegas they need some records to be absolutely obliterated otherwise you know what what what was the point there's two things one if i'm an athlete and i'm looking i'm out there in you know in the world championships this week what are my options where am i going particularly if i'm looking at 30 or i'm on the other side of 30 this is you know a great deal of money and the there's you know quotes around well this is more money than i've made my career for you know breaking a record or whatever yeah so on an individual basis i absolutely get it the alternative being i'm going to put my trust in michael johnson's new thing i don't get paid i've turned up trained put all my focus in that sort of event and it suddenly looks like the money either wasn't there or it's not in the same way as it as it was promised initially so what do i do I'm now stuck.

38:48I'm back at the world championships. This suddenly appears and thinks, okay, well, there's a huge check here. I spent my money, I spent my life being an athlete, and I feel very unrewarded for all of that compared to other sports and other places that I could have focused my attention. The other bit is on the commercial side of it. Talked about Coca-Cola, but I think if you look at the journey of cannabis over the last 20 years, you're now looking at companies, well is that a category that i would then say right okay i'm gonna sponsor this this is a legitimate product that's gone from talking about overton windows that's gone from being marginal to something that the nhs is prescribing or is about so you know that all of those things and you're you know back to james's point is that the line is somewhere and it's really interesting and important to push that line my point being i don't like where he wants the line to go but I might be wrong.

39:46This might be a sort of open-hearted view of humanity that, okay, we're looking at improving what humanity is. I think the Olympics already does that. And I suspect the motives of the money behind it. So that's, you know, and again, it's always useful, I think, to have a starting point and reveal your starting point, your sort of prior assumptions on things. And I'm happy to be challenged and change my mind over time. on these things.

40:16David Cushnan:There is also the question of whether we're actually talking about a new sports event here or actually just a Netflix show, ultimately. Yeah. That's sort of effectively a behind-the-scenes documentary of how far an athlete can push themselves.

40:30James Emmett:Do you know any of the execs involved in the Enhanced Games and whether those execs would end up as pariahs, as you'd imagine the athletes that are involved in it in my...

40:44David Cushnan:That's a good question, because you're going to need a sort of operating team, aren't you? Of course, yeah. I don't actually know off the top of my head if any of those execs have revealed themselves or what their sort of background is or where they're coming from. But if they do want this to be a sort of, you know, a proper sports event, you're definitely going to need a few.

41:06James Emmett:Yeah, well, I know a couple of them. And so do you, Dave. probably not the best idea to name them but I should imagine that they haven't thought about it in quite the Peter Deal, Ayn Rand depth that Richard has. Who has? Who's got the time to do that? These people have got jobs. Right let us move on. I'm saying this like it's one of you. It's now my story isn't it? So I've picked on a story which it came through this week and piqued my interest. It is former Liverpool and Tottenham midfielder Jamie Redknapp, a new football talent agency backed by former England and Liverpool midfielder. They don't mention Spurs there in the press release.

41:48Unbelievable. Jamie Redknapp has been launched with the aim of reshaping the way players are represented. MNC Saatchi Football, unveiled today, brings together Redknapp's long-running management group M &C Saatchi Talent, sports lawyer Udo Onwer, a former professional player and partner at the London law firm Bray and Crace. The pair say that the agency's focus will be on championing the person behind the player, building careers that extend beyond the pitch. Okay, so there's a couple of, the reason I picked on this, and this is a bit of shorter piece but there's a sort of micro macro question here when I looked at that I thought oh that's interesting because I know that Jamie Redknapp has been a long time client of MNC Saatchi and is obviously you know people know him off the telly sky he's got a very successful post-playing career almost like the model of a post-playing career and his relationship with MNC Saatchi he's very good mates with Steve Martin who is left sort of in fairly acrimoniously with and set up MSQ Sport and Entertainment and that's going on so it's interesting that he's you know doing it with MNC Saatchi the relationship I think with Richard Thompson I think is very interesting so Richard Thompson is the chair of MNC Saatchi and was his business was Merlin which they then initially sold I think in 2013 into MNC Saatchi Sport and Entertainment or into MNC Saatchi which became M &C Sarchi Talent.

43:21It's a sort of family tree thing going on there, but that was sold. Richard Thompson had, I think, 60 % of that business, which he sold and made one and a half million himself. So that's, he is now still the chair of the company, but comes with that background. So it's a deep knowledge and understanding of fame and the rise of the athlete as brand, all of those questions that we talk about a lot on podcasts like this. he's obviously now chair of the ECB England and Wales Cricket Board and formerly chair of Surrey Cricket so more chairs in Ikea but he is obviously very smart able and bright bloke and you can see here you've got a good public face to this business so Jamie Redknapp then you get to the the macro of it which i think again is equally interesting it feels like a business which is being set up almost to be bought by george pine so you've got brewing capital over the last let's call it 18 months maybe let's just see what they've been up to so there's a sort of consolidation in the player athlete agency marketplace brewing capital 310 million euros they bought as one or as one soccer agency providence equity bought into wasserman so you've got private equity money interested in this space why and there's an obvious reason is that this is where the money is ending up so where you've got a lot of the conversation at the top end about people investing into leagues and teams that money quite quickly flows through those entities into the pockets of players and the agents and the players this generation of players obviously very wealthy and that is creating a whole new market for liquidity at the bottom of the sort of funnel and where is that money going to go and that money becomes sort of liquidity for things like tech investments and you know wearable investments but also into other teams buying up TGL franchises live franchises buying minority partnerships into Formula One teams all of this stuff that again we talk about a lot you can sort of follow the money down and and one of the questions is okay well how do we capture that and a player agency is quite a useful entity for them to be able to do that so i think on a small version you know the micro story is interesting for people in the sort of british london centric sports marketing world in terms of okay well that joy we were sort of immediately joining the dots in terms of what's happening but i also think that and you know it's a fairly obvious point to make is that the out the the road or the the intended road to travel this business still very early days and projecting onto it it's only been going a week i can see why they're doing it and i can see if they get a client base which is sort of starry enough and valuable enough and that'll be rednap's job presumably to to locate the talent they can then bring in all sorts of you know other services that they can then bring in to you know help their clients at slight the the challenges will be that the agency market there's there's a few conflicts of interest it was always img always used to have to answer the question you know well why do we always end up with your client your talent because you know so if o2 come into mnc sarty and say we want to do a football campaign they will say yeah why don't you use one of our players and it was IMG always used to be, the answer's Colin Montgomery, now what's the question?

47:12Or the answer's Tiger Woods, what's the question? If you've got a stake in the player and you're looking to build commercial value in the player, don't be surprised if they are offered up as the talent for your ad campaign. That's always agency politics. And if you have got a talent agency, you defend it one way. If you haven't, you attack it using that lens. So all of that is just normal stuff. Then there's the bit about how many players sell tickets. That's the other question here. And that's the bigger question in terms of management of footballers is a bit of a ball lake. If you ask football agents, they're always moaning.

47:50They're all, you know, the players are always moaning. They always want more. They're booking flights and doing all the management stuff is really boring, low-level grunt work. And not many of them are Mbappe and Neymar. So you've got a relatively small group of players who are just sort of there for the ride or are a cost base versus the ones, the superstars that are going to generate enormous amounts of revenue for you in terms of your glitzy campaigns and all of that stuff. If you look at Sonny, the great Spurs player, his value to Spurs and turnstile, Gemba did a bit of work about the IP value of Spurs globally.

48:28And you look at the proportion of that that was attributable to Sonny as a global brand, obviously talking to the Korean market particularly, was enormous. So they've got a huge lever and someone like him needs someone like M &C Saatchi or someone else to have those negotiations and get fair value for their impact that they're having on contracts. So I can absolutely see it. It's a really good idea. If you compare that to someone like James Madison, it's not a like-for-like comparison because James Madison is a good footballer, but he doesn't bring a whole new marketplace to bear. And it doesn't help that he's made of sort of balsa wood.

49:06So there's a, by the way, what is balsa wood? I mean, I haven't used the word balsa wood for a long time since Mr. Kaplan in my woodworking class.

49:17David Cushnan:If I was asked to describe it, I'm going to say a thin wood. I think it's a thin, but quite light, but quite strong wood. Mr. Kaplan used to say, Gillis, get away from the balsa wood. Put the balsa wood down because it would be, it was so easily breakable. And the other thing about Mr. Kaplan, while we were on him, He was a sort of, in my end of school report, he praised me for my chamfering. And I was obsessed with chamfering. He said, oh, you know, and I think, how little did he have to talk about? How little did he know me as a woodworker for chamfering to be, you know, part of the end of year report?

49:52Anyway, that's me.

49:57James Emmett:They're quite big trees, Bolsa's, Rich. I've just got a picture of one up here now. but why are they so flimsy it's very popular material for light stiff structures in model bridge tests model building a lot of model making that's why they use balsa wood yeah

50:12David Cushnan:i was quite surprised to learn that mnc didn't have a football division uh if i can if i can swing the conversation back to i think what you were talking about which was this new jamie redknapp agency so the other thing that i thought when i read this was uh former footballer you know pretty good footballer well known had a wife who was a pop star pundit probably not at the absolute top tier of punditry but you know well known starts feels really it felt really quaint to me like it was a sort of story from 20 years ago almost in a world where we become so used to oh ryan reynolds has started this or bought into this as you say so we've forgotten sketches poster boy for sketches that's true that is true what i would uh i think what you say about it maybe being created to be sold is there's probably something in that and there is i wouldn't underplay actually as well the and i know this is mnc talent as opposed to mnc sports mnc sports and entertainment but there i would suggest there is a bit of sort of recalibration of you know, how MNC views sport and where it plays in sport, given Steve Martin and, you know, several executives have moved on over recent years.

51:33David Cushnan:So that's, I think that is an interesting bit in terms of the, you know, the sort of inside industry piece of this. But I just, yeah, my overriding feeling was this just all felt a little bit quaint. And I'm sure it'll be, i'm sure it'd be fine and i'm sure it'd be a really good business but it didn't feel to me like something that was that you know felt massively exciting i was quite surprised you chose it as a story richard if i'm honest well i'm taken and what i will say is is in the in the quotes and i had to work quite hard to find the quotes so i'm clearly on the wrong mailing list is um jamie redknapp did talk about mentoring as a bit of this so what you were saying about not everybody's a Neymar or a Messi or Ronaldo I think is it suggests to me that they are going to go in at the at the younger they're going to try and find the talent rather than okay so just on that and that's an interesting pushback because part of Merlin or MNC talent MNC Saatchi talent is a social media talent agency and they were quite early to that.

52:47And so you have a whole load of people, a lot of sort of beauty, fashion and parenting bloggers, vloggers, TikTokers on their roster. And you skew that, push that into football. Again, you get to young social first YouTube meets football. So it's a different sort of fame.

53:10David Cushnan:You quite quickly get to Kings League and Baller League. Yes. Yeah, yeah. That's the direction. Again, the other bit to it is how you then, the other one I really like is the dog father they got on their roster. So it's a broad church on there. So, you know, the Telegraph calls him one of the great dog trainers. So that influencer marketplace. Sorry, I've got to jump in. What are you talking about? There's a guy, and I forget his name, but he's written a book and he's called the dog father. And he's a dog trainer.

53:42James Emmett:One of the great dog trainers. one of the of our time you know the daily telegraph you know love it and hate it they know dog training excellence when they see it so when you see that name and you know that's not just any any bit of puffery richard yes um your man thompson old richard thompson was with me at the farmhouse yeah i saw that yeah um he's actually on a list i've made entitled people who are taller than you think um because he's a very tall man he is a very tall man i i we used to go to the mc saatchi golf day and he used to play with jamie thexton oh two two absolute giants absolute giants and matthew letizia which again so the the combined height of which was was substantial letizia must have been a tiny in comparison to those he was tiny but he had lots of sort of interesting political views yeah tall tales um yes so richard thompson was at the img redbird summit and i didn't talk to him about this jamie redknapp thing but jerry cardinal had a session jerry cardinal who runs redbird he did a session with um jamie redknapp's sky sports colleagues who are also on that cbs show so micah richard anyway jerry basically jerry can't open his mouth without putting forward some sort of articulate investment thesis you loved it you love jerry i love him so i honestly think he is going to be the most significant figure in our era of sports media business and i love him but he said he said i love him that one of the things that he's constantly on the lookout for is talent that transcends its world that he believes he can move into our world.

55:37James Emmett:And what I'm sure what he means by our world is the world of sort of plug and play financial vehicles, move them out of what they're used to doing into something else, build a business around them. And he thinks these folks on the CBS show are that. Whether Jamie Jamie Redknapp is talent that transcends his boundaries. Well, I think, though, I think that this is a signal that Jamie Redknapp's role on the sofa may be coming to an end. I think there's a sort of the next generation of Jamie Redknapp's. I think this is a sort of smart move by Jamie Redknapp. I keep saying, stop saying Jamie Redknapp.

56:14But there is a...

56:14James Emmett:Redknapp is one of these words that will very quickly lose meaning. I think mentoring, if I was a shareholder in M &C Saatchi, I would sort of pare down the mentoring. I don't think there's much money in mentoring, but I do think there's a, you know, I can see why you would lead on it in terms of being the front of the message to the players.

56:32David Cushnan:Talking of Redknapp's, I Google Jamie Redknapp to prepare, imagine that, for this. The research that goes into this. And I discovered it's been a very big week for the Redknapp's because Harry Redknapp has a new job as well. Are you aware of this? Have you seen this? No. Harry Redknapp has joined the management team of Speedway Futures, the organising and operating body for British Speedway. And the press release reads, Redknapp, 78, enjoyed a stellar career as player and manager. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he will be leveraging his commercial and media contacts for the benefit of British Speedway and actively raising the sports profile through all his connections as part of the management team.

57:20James Emmett:So Harry Rednard lives famously down in Sandbanks. And Poole is one of the few destinations where there is a British Speedway track. Oh, James.

57:34David Cushnan:Harry talks about this in his quote. I only live a few miles from Poole Stadium and back in the day, I often took my boys, Mark and the aforementioned Jamie, to the speedway to watch the brave daredevils in action. And it still is the great evening out that it always was. I love it. It's a fantastic, exciting watch and must be the rawest form of motorsport in the world. I know once people go, they will want to keep going back. TNT are getting great audiences for the live events, and I really want to be part of making Speedway huge again. That is certainly my aim. Great. So a couple of things there.

58:09I think I would love to know whether Harry Redknapp wrote that press, or, you know, said those things. But I wonder if living next to a Speedway track gives you a skews your view of the commercial value of Speedway.

58:22James Emmett:Almost certainly. I mean, it was the talk of the time. I lived in pool for a little bit, Richard. And honestly, you cannot move for Speedway fans. that everyone's dressed in their favorite speedway well i'm you know again i always say this on this podcast i'm older than you and speedway was one of those sports which dominated saturday afternoons grandstand frank boff people don't talk about frank boff much anymore but speedway ivan major that it was brilliant it's so exciting and it's really great to go and it's a brilliant thing but obviously it's one of those sports that has declined and and uh good on harry for getting behind it i have been trying to work enhanced enhanced speedway i do i know yeah nice i you've brought it that's you see what i do the best in the business not sand but lava or something like

59:05David Cushnan:that what are you going to call this episode followed by a giraffe what are you going to call this episode because uh we have made i mean will mr kaplan or the was it the dog father make the dog father no i i'm i took your note from the first series of this uh this series i obviously was playing fast and loose with the headings. And I remember the one that we did for last year's IMG farm get-together. Didn't go down well. But we won't be repeating that. This is going to be straight down the middle. I'm selling this big. I'm going with it. So the headlines will be, you know, what's the thing? End of humanity.

59:42End of humanity. The dog father. I'm going with the dog father. And the return of Speedway. No, I won't. The dog father will sort of follow. He can't lead.

59:52David Cushnan:he's not he's not big enough to lead and this is available no pun intended this is available on all good podcast platforms is it most of them i think we had a good call with spotify this week and they they said we're not doing enough promotion on spotify so uh you know can't please everyone but we're big we're big we're big with apple apparently big apple is apple is uh is the heartland spotify is trailing but you know spotify are trying hard we'll see more on that soon thanks Richard it's come to the end goodbye