WTF is Infinite Athlete anyway; Second brain updates; Zettelkasten and other rabbit holes; Unofficial FOMO; What would UP+ be? Conferences as haystacks
Overthinking the sports business, for money
What’s it all about?
Backgrounder
This is a build on last week’s note on the Unofficial Second Brain.
It’s a line of thought that’s not about AI per se, but certainly Gen AI is moving the conversation forward, rapidly.
Second Brain 1.0
For years now I’ve been down a rabbit hole.
The dream is to create a note-taking system that is actually useful, that helps me remember things I’ve read or heard or watched, and re-presents it to me when I need it in the future.
Very quickly you get to the Zettelkasten method and to creating networks of ideas in Obsidian, using a system of backlinks.
This is a screenshot of my Obsidian vault, where I link my notes together, hoping to make useful connections that spark ideas for written work, and more lately podcasts.
Press play to get the gist.
From here you get to Steven Johnson’s Tools for Thought research, which provides the intellectual basis of NotebookLM, Google’s Gemini AI response to ChatGPT.
I’ve started, along with some like minded WhatsUP collaborators, to build something interesting in NotebookLM.
One project is a poll of polls type resource, which throws together all industry research reports in to the machine and then tries to make something interesting from them:
How UP will develop
Initially, the question we want to solve is “How can we release value in the archive of UP podcasts and newsletters?” There’s a bigger question as to the value of a curated database of sports business material (UP+). Currently, we’re looking at the interestingness of the basic second brain idea, the probable roadblocks and random thoughts around the subject of ‘What would give away for free and what would be valuable enough to pay for?’ Is this a publishing or consultancy offer, and is it something we want to do with our time.
It’s my assumption that versions of this type of product will quickly become how B2B media will evolve paid-for added value communities. Where and how these are serviced is another question.
The bet we’re making is that there’s an increased return to brand, which gets to trust. My curated database is better than yours, because me. We’ll find out I’m sure.
I go to Ben Thompson of Stratechery for guidance:
If text and images are all a commodities, that value increasingly comes not from the item itself but from the brand surrounding it. I mean, does that seem like a reasonable way this might play out?
I think it does increase the returns to things that you trust, and I think it increases the returns to thoughtfulness, insight, surprising ideas that are true.
The model so far cannot produce these big out of distribution kind of insights that kind of cause you to rewrite your whole model of the world in your head. I’m not finding that. I do occasionally find myself using ChatGPT for brainstorming and it’s like, “Gosh, how should I solve this problem?” And it’ll come up with sort of five obvious ideas. The problem sometimes is that I haven’t tried two of them.
As is compulsory to say at this point, ‘it’s early days’. But, exciting.
Unofficial FOMO: Not Everyone Will Go, But Everyone Will Know
We’re hosting one of our small VIP evenings, in collaboration with the clever people at Teneo.
Invited guests, nice dinner, lively conversation. We record it and publish it as a podcast.
The subject is India.
You can’t come, but if you’re in the market for something similar, give us a shout.
This is where we’ve been going with our live events, and 2025 is already looking busy.
Smaller and Smarter: Not Everyone Can Go, But Everyone Will Know etc.
The business model of many big ticket conferences is based on scale, more people means more money. Crowds. Jostling. Inefficiency. Your would-be client is the needle in the haystack. Create your own haystack.
What if, we narrowed the odds, by creating a better, more focused environment for you to engage with your target clients?
A hybrid model, between an in-house networking evening and a public conference, where you help shape the editorial agenda, which is then supercharged via UP’s industry leading podcast channels, that have been built over six years, reaching a community of tens of thousands of sports industry people around the world.
Plug over.
Infinite Athlete is not quite what I thought it was
A few weeks ago we got a message from a New York PR firm who offered up Infinite Athlete founder Charlie Ebersol as a podcast guest.
We recorded that podcast on Monday and will put it out in due course.
But I’ll warn you now, it’s not quite what you might expect.
Infinite Athlete has been a sports business story since the brand suddenly appeared on Chelsea’s shirt at the start of last season.
Like you, I had heard plenty of insight/gossip on what was going on here.
If I were to summarise my starting point it would be along these lines:
Infinite Athlete is run by Charlie Ebersol, former boyfriend of Maria Sharapova and Britney Spears and son of actress Susan St James and Dick Ebersol, the legendary NBC Sport chairman. So, a nepo baby with a tech firm, using daddy’s contact book to line up Andreesen Horowitz, Silver Lake, Endeavour and Todd Boehly as backers. The media (and the Premier League) wonders aloud how a business turning over £12m (disputed) can afford Chelsea’s £40m a year front of shirt price point, and so the story shifts, connecting IA, Ebersol, Clearlake and Boehly to the boring but important phrase ‘Associated Party Transactions’. All parties were asked by the League about potential conflicts of interest and whether the sponsorship value exceeded fair market value, which is a slippery concept in and of itself. The final sentence of this paragraph is: ‘The Premier League approved the deal after thorough scrutiny’.
That story, or a version of it, is how many people talk about Infinite Athlete.
Charlie Ebersol’s responses to this narrative are really interesting, and I’ll leave you to have a listen and judge for yourself.
We then get to the other question, which is: WTF is Infinite Athlete?
Using Chelsea as a use case, Ebersol is good on the big problem of sports tech, which AI is about to make worse.
They all basically are derived from the same, let’s call it 10 sources or 10 types of data. But because we've just decided to verticalize and silo these technologies, now say, Oh, this is sports media technology. Oh, this is biometric data. Oh, this is whatever. And so you go to a Chelsea football game and there are, on a given game, there can be anywhere from 8 to 18 vendors that are capturing some sort of data, if it's visual data, or audio data, or statistical data, or, or biometric data, or, uh, uh, uh, muscular skeletal movement data, like all these different inputs. All being caught by different companies, all being delivered back in a lot of cases to like the Premier League or to Chelsea or to FIFA or to UEFA or to whoever. And yet data, despite all being required to do all these various different things, is largely siloed from each other. It's, it is largely disintermediated. And so what's happened is companies have made huge investments Um, in very narrow silos because they don't want to sort of get outside their lanes and, uh, just metric ton of, incumbent, excuse me, um, startups have come into the space that do really narrow things. The bad cheesy metaphor is the elephant in a dark room and you're holding the tail and I'm holding the trunk and I don't know what I'm looking at, you can't get a picture of it and therefore you can't build anything. That's the problem. The solution has existed for a really long time. If you step back and you look at the global macroeconomics of the world, the problem has been solved in basically every other sector, right?
Michael Bloomberg solved this problem 30 years ago with the Bloomberg terminal, where he just said, okay. There's all of this, this data about the market. I'm just going to create a centralized computer where you can sit in front of this computer and you can see everything in one place. I'm not going to make judgments on the data. I'm not going to influence the data. I'm just going to give you the data in one place. Google did this with mapping software in the early 2000s. when they originally did it, people said, Oh, they're trying to compete with Garmin, you know, which was like a boat GPS system. And what Google was saying is no, needs to be able to tell you how to get to your store, how to get to your restaurant, how to get to the airport, which is what they were thinking about.
AI requires coherent data. The reason you get six fingers when you create an image in Sora is because it's drawing from the open internet and the open internet has a bunch of garbage in it. But if you make it coherent data, AI is, you know, a force multiplier.
Got it?