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SportsTranscript
00:00All right, Pat and I talked about this story earlier in the week, Sam, and I know that
00:06we're going to expand on it as well.
00:08You know, the notion that there's some antitrust lawsuit against DraftKings and FanDuel, or
00:12one potentially coming, really doesn't add up to me, Sam.
00:15You know, I understand that they are the leaders in the industry, but naturally that doesn't
00:19mean that other companies can't get their footprint in.
00:22What's going on here with this potential hearing?
00:25Yeah, it's a really interesting thing to talk about right now.
00:30As you rightly point out, it didn't really add up at first, but now we're kind of hearing,
00:34at least I'm hearing, the climate around this in the industry, what people are thinking
00:39of it, is really changing a lot just over the past week.
00:43You know, originally it came out that the senators who really have had no involvement
00:47in sports betting were calling on a lame duck FTC and a lame duck DOJ to investigate these
00:53supposed antitrust claims from this one source document that this random Temple Law professor
00:59had sent out.
01:00And like you point to, Craig, you know, other people have options to bet on different apps.
01:04There was really no evidence we've seen of this happening.
01:08But now a lot has changed.
01:11First of all, I'm told that there will be a couple of key witnesses at this hearing,
01:15one being NCAA president Charlie Baker, who, while he did sign the bill to legalize sports
01:21betting when he was governor in Massachusetts, he's been relatively critical or at least
01:25outspoken about its impact on student athletes, even calling on a lot of states to ban player
01:30prop betting on college athletes.
01:32You're going to have a Rutgers professor who's been critical of the industry testifying at
01:36this hearing, someone from a company called Epic Global Solutions, which specializes in
01:42dealing with problem gambling.
01:43They employ a lot of people who are gambling addicts or recovering gambling addicts themselves
01:48who have now worked at really admirable to tell their story and use their story to work
01:53with leagues and sports books on solutions here.
01:55But I'm told from industry sources that nobody representing the industry itself is going
02:01to be has yet so far been invited to speak at this thing.
02:04So that kind of points us in the direction of maybe this is going to be a very critical
02:08hearing.
02:09You know, you don't know what will come out of that.
02:13More has come out in terms of the picture of what the FTC will look like next year.
02:17Trump just appointed his new nominee.
02:20That nominee is a former staffer of one of the senators who called for this investigation.
02:27He also works for a law firm that does heavy work with one of DraftKings and and FanDuel's
02:33chief competitors, which does not do sports betting.
02:36So that kind of leads us to maybe some breadcrumbs as to where this is exactly coming from.
02:41At the end of the day, we don't really know if it will amount to anything.
02:44It could.
02:45It might not.
02:46But it seems to be more than we thought it was at this time last week, and I'm sure more
02:50is going to come out.
02:51I'm really excited to see, you know, what flies during this hearing next week.