🏴‍☠️ Banana's Black Market is Booming

The Las Vegas Sphere was as cool as I imagined multiplied by two. But I realized something while I was there:

This thing isn’t meant to compete with other concert venues, it’s meant to compete with the growing number of sports teams in town.

I explain how in my newest YouTube video, out now!

Anyway, here’s what we have on tap:

🗞 The Big Story: Banana’s Black Market

📉 Biggest Loser: ESPN’s Deepfake Mess

🏆 Winner’s Circle: The $200K Gambling Coin

⬇️ Listen: There’s a new asset class investors want in on, and it’s the most unsexy, sexy investment of all time.

🗞 The Big Story

The Black Market for tickets to see America’s most popular baseball team is booming.

The $206 ticket you see above? Yeah, it doesn’t actually exist. In fact, the team’s president, Jared Orton, confirmed on LinkedIn recently that the team has yet to sell any tickets to its 2024 World Tour.

And this scam is costing fans thousands.

2024 World Tour: A few weeks ago the self-proclaimed “Greatest Show in Baseball” announced their 2024 schedule which includes stops at six MLB ballparks and a cruise to the Bahamas.

Immediately following this announcement, the team allowed fans to join a waitlist for tickets, which owner Jesse Cole said is nearing 500,000 people.

1. Fans on the waitlist enter a random drawing

2. Two months before the event, winners are selected

3. Winners then have the option to purchase their tickets

Ticket options are:

• $35 - Open-seating

• $100 - VIB or “Very Important Banana”

  • Grants early access to the stadium

  • Special access to meet the team

So if these tickets don’t exist yet, why can you go on sites like SeatGeek and buy them right now?

Shorting the Market: Savvy ticket resellers treat Bananas tickets like shorting the stock market.

They make listings without actually owning the tickets and sell them to unsuspecting fans. Those resellers then attempt to buy the actual tickets at a lower price so they can deliver on their sale and turn a profit.

But if they can’t get the tickets, they’ll just cancel and refund the order.

The only problem?

The families that buy these tickets thinking they’re legit, have already bought flights, booked hotels, and taken off work just to find out the tickets aren’t actually real.

Orton mentions in his post how he’s met thousands of fans this past year who fell victim to this exact scam, with one commentator even saying that he met a family at a game who paid nearly $600 per ticket off of one of these third-party sites.

People really will find a way to ruin anything.

📉 Biggest Loser

Do you have to disclose the use of AI in sports content? Because ESPN just walked that line, and now they’re catching heat.

Background: After Damian Lillard's debut with the Bucks, in which he scored 39 points to help the team to a win, ESPN posted this post-game interview clip.

There's just one problem, that clip is from 2020.

ESPN digitally altered:

• Dame's uniform

• The logo on the court

• The logo on the microphone

However, there was no clear indication by ESPN that the video was changed.

Fallout: ESPN was forced to issue an apology in which they stated that they "occasionally look to connect sports moments of the past with contemporary imagery and storylines" and that "it was never their intention to misrepresent anything."

But I'm calling B.S.

Social Flop: From a social strategy perspective, this makes no sense. ESPN thought this irrelevant clip from 3 years ago was in the public zeitgeist and totally missed the mark.

For a traditional brand trying to compete on “coolness” with brands like Overtime and Bleacher Report, this was a total flop.

Legal Implications: This original interview was aired by TNT, and ESPN digitally edited it to make it look like their own. Yahoo Sports points out how legal retaliation by TNT could be on the table.

Or what about retaliation from Dame? His name, image, and likeness were altered without his consent. Isn’t he privy to protections surrounding content he’s in, especially from the biggest sports media publisher in the world?

Not to mention the morality of presenting a deep-faked video without any disclaimers.

(P.S. The tweet is still up with over 9 million views on Twitter)

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💰 Pick of the Week

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🏆 Winner’s Circle

This coin is the best sports bettor I’ve ever seen, and it could be worth almost $200,000.

Origin: Before the 2023 NFL season started, a Saints fan named Matthew Lauricella flipped a 1999 Georgia quarter 17 times - one for each game the Saints would play this year.

If the quarter landed on heads it meant the Saints would win, and Matthew recorded the coin’s predictions on the back of a receipt.

The Coin Speaks: Matthew sent his friends the results on September 10th.

The coin predicted the Saints would go 11-6, and while that may have seemed ridiculous at the time the coin has actually perfectly predicted the outcome of each of the Saint’s first 8 games.

Now in case you’re wondering, the coin is predicting a win for the Saint’s this week against Chicago but I wanted to see how much money you could have won if you had tailed the coin all season.

Tail the Coin: Let’s say you put $10 down on the Saints to beat the Titans in Week 1 as the coin predicted, you would have been paid out $16.76.

Now let’s say you reinvested that money into the next game, and you did that through the first 8 weeks of the season:

• Week 1 | Saints win (NO -148): $10 → $16.76

• Week 2 | Saints win (NO -168): $16.76 → $26.74

• Week 3 | Saints lose (GB -122): $26.74 → $48.66

• Week 4 | Saints lose (TB -215): $48.66 → $71.29

• Week 5 | Saints win (NO +110): $71.29 → $149.71

• Week 6 | Saints lose (HOU -130): $149.71 → $264.87

• Week 7 | Saints lose (JAX -140): $264.87 → $454.06

• Week 8 | Saints win (NO -130): $454.06 → $803.34

You’d currently have $803.34 and if the coin is right this week, that total will increase to $1,023.43.

And if the coin manages to stay perfect the rest of the season, you’d be turning $10 into almost $200,000…

⏱ In Other News

• ESPN could sell for $24B.

• Super Bowl ads are already sold out.

• It’s so crazy, it just might work.

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👋 I’m thinking of running another giveaway as a way to promote the newsletter to new people and give back to you all who have been reading.

I want some feedback as to what would be valuable for you to receive.

My initial thoughts were some sort of “sports marketing & content bundle” which would include things like a ring light, USB microphone, Adobe subscription, etc.

DM me any ideas on Instagram.