For the Love of Sports with Michael Rasile

There are pockets of substantive content - voice AI for ticket offices, CDP fan data integration, Deep Seek cost implications, AI content indexation for sports media - but they are interspersed with lengthy tangents about Mets hats, Shake Shack, and personal anecdotes that kill the pace. The ratio of actionable ideas to filler is low for a 46-minute runtime.

“Voice AI, you could handle something that's just for the single game ticket holders. And then you could put your folks with your, your full season ticket holders and offer that prioritization without losing any of the service layers”

“major retailers are looking at Voice AI to reduce their call center cost. That is like a reality, not a theory where they could potentially reduce 60, 70% of their cost”

The retail-to-sports data sophistication gap is a legitimate and underexplored angle, but nearly every other idea in the episode recycles widely-circulated takes: AI won't take your job but someone using AI will, costs going down democratizes innovation, DeepSeek is like Android vs iPhone. No contrarian or first-principles arguments emerge.

“you're not going to lose your job to AI, you're going to lose your job to someone who is using AI”

“it's kind of democratizing AI because it shows that you don't need billions of dollars to build something that could be just as good”

Shah has genuine, scaled operator credentials - nine years as Chief Strategy Officer at the Washington Commanders, CDO at Shop Your Way overseeing a 50-million-member loyalty program, and now CDO at Next League serving major leagues and brands. He is a practitioner, not a career podcast guest, though the conversation doesn't fully extract the depth his background could support.

“I spent nine years. I was the chief strategy officer there. Um, and, you know, really drove a lot of their innovation around emerging technologies at the time”

“when I was chief digital officer of Shop your Way most recently, we knew a lot about our members because we had Shop Your Way had 50 million members”

The episode has a creditable number of named figures and companies - DeepSeek V3 at $6M vs Meta's ~$60M, 60-70% call center cost reduction, 40% bot traffic, Shop Your Way's 50M members, ESPN/Accenture/AWS, Persona used by baseball teams - but attribution is loose, many numbers are approximate, and the claims are rarely interrogated or sourced precisely.

“DeepSeek V3 was developed for 6 million compared to say the estimated 60 million spent by Meta on its latest technology”

“as much as 40% of traffic could be bot traffic”

The host asks exclusively broad, open-ended questions and never pushes back on a single claim, including the unverified Deep Seek cost figures and sweeping call-center reduction predictions. Conversations regularly derail into personal anecdotes about the host's Shake Shack preferences and Mets fandom, and the one moment of mild skepticism about Deep Seek is quickly dropped.

“I don't really Google much anymore. Like I try and chatgpt everything because then I. You always want to ask Google a follow up question”

“it doesn't help that it's, you know, from China where, let's be honest, their government, not that I'm going to say our government's the most trustworthy in the world. I know where you're going”