A conversation that begins with the quiet disappearance of “outside” childhood turns into Hani and Shaheer tracing how screens, and specifically the iPad, became the decisive generational rupture reshaping attention, leisure, and social space. What starts as a critique of stagnant video games and microtransactions (03:48) expands into a broader diagnosis of legalized gambling’s capture of sports culture (04:50), before breaking down the financialization of teams themselves, discussing how private equity, real estate leverage, and asset-stripping logic redefine modern sports ownership and fandom alike (06:07).

From Saudi Arabia’s sportswashing project (09:53) and MBS's soft-power repositioning (22:36) juxtaposed to Germany's role after Nord Stream (24:15), to the Saudi-Pakistan hedge as a case study in regional power management (28:53), the episode situates sports not as escapism, but as a revealing surface of contemporary political economy, where culture, capital, and geopolitics increasingly collapse into the same machine.

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