NBA Hands Historic Punishment to LA Clippers & AI Food Slop is Disgusting Everyone

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Life throws a lot of challenges at you. How you adapt is what matters. Rising Stars on Amazon Ads is all about rising to challenges. This docu-series follows small business owners as they grow and advertise their brands with the help of Amazon Ads. You can see them go from building awareness to driving sales. They didn't even need huge budgets to get started advertising. Watch the full series at advertising.amazon.com/risingdashstars.

**Neal Freyman** (0:28)
Good Morning Brew Daily show. I'm Neal Freyman.

**Toby Howell** (0:31)
And I'm Toby Howell.

**Neal Freyman** (0:32)
Today, 5,000 American sailors hit Thailand after 286 days at sea. What could go wrong?

**Toby Howell** (0:38)
Then how a podcaster brought down the richest owner in sports. It's Thursday, September 3rd.

**Neal Freyman** (0:53)
How's this for a little inspirational start to your morning? On Monday, Dale Sanders summited Mount Katahdin in the northern wilderness of Maine to become the oldest person ever to through hike the Appalachian Trail. He is 91 years old, reclaiming a record he first broke in 2017 when he was a sprightly 82
How do you do it? With a carefully thought out plan that involved a rotating team of volunteers to help him on his journey. But most of all, it was a mindset. His biggest takeaway from the trail is when it hurts, keep going, it'll probably go away.

**Toby Howell** (1:25)
And it certainly did hurt by his count. Sanders said he fell 71 times while hiking, including one just 200 yards from the finish line. In one fall in Vermont, he was banged up, but he said he didn't rub the blood off. I just kept hiking. Pretty epic. Here's a fun fact too. Sanders was born in Kentucky in 1935
That is two years before the Appalachian Trail was even completed. Guy's legend holds a bunch of other age-related records, including the oldest person to paddle the entire length of the Mississippi River. It's got me thinking what I want to do on my 91st birthday. And now a word from our sponsor, American Express. Neal, I am all go.

**Neal Freyman** (2:06)
You're what?

**Toby Howell** (2:06)
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**Neal Freyman** (2:16)
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**Neal Freyman** (2:36)
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**Toby Howell** (2:50)
The NBA has been sitting on a bomb for months now, and it's finally detonated. Steve Ballmer, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, has been suspended for one year as part of a rash of penalties for his team for circumventing salary cap rules to pay superstar Kawhi Leonard in an investigation dating back to 2019
The league's investigation found that Ballmer and other Clipper execs knowingly helped Kawhi secure some extra cash through endorsement deals, which don't count against a team's salary cap and violates league rules. As a penalty, the NBA took away five first-round draft picks from the Clippers and suspended the organization's president of business and basketball operations, in addition to fining Ballmer $30 million.
Leonard was also fined $700,000 by the league, and released a statement saying he entered into his contract with, quote, no knowledge of any intent on anyone's part to circumvent the salary cap. He also said, I accept full responsibility for lapses in judgment by people within my inner circle. The Clippers released their own statement saying they vehemently reject the league's decision. For the past year, we cooperated fully and in good faith, and will now fight just as hard to demonstrate our innocence. Strong words that don't have as much bite as they might hope, given there is no formal appeal or arbitration process in this case. In fact, according to NBA reporter Shams Sharanya, LA's only outlet to fight the punishment is in court. Neal, Ballmer's tenure as CEO of Microsoft was famously shaky. His Clippers tenure is shaping up to be even worse. Do you remember how this whole thing started?

**Neal Freyman** (4:26)
I do, it is as crazy a story as the actual Kawhi Leonard story. The only reason we know about all of this is a podcaster. Pablo Torre, a sports journalist formerly with ESPN, almost exactly one year ago, published several episodes on his own podcast about this strange relationship that he found between Leonard and this eco bank, Aspiration, that showed them paying him tens of millions of dollars, $28 million, but Leonard doing essentially no work for them and the Clippers and Balmer allegedly orchestrated it at all. These were wild allegations sent shockwaves across the NBA. What was a solo podcaster doing taking on Steve Balmer, one of the richest guys on the planet? Along the way, Torre faced a lot of pushback from more mainstream outlets who were like, this guy is in over his head, he doesn't know what he's doing. But clearly the NBA took him seriously, launched an investigation just a few days after he went public with his findings. Ultimately, Torre won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting and yesterday received the ultimate vindication with this penalty. It reminds me of the sports version of Serial, that true crime podcast from 2014 when the host investigation caused a real life re-evaluation of a murder case in Baltimore. Certainly a sign that this podcaster, creator, journalist hybrid is now a major force in media.