STEVE BALLMER: We’re in a weird community. I didn’t grow up in a place where you had two teams in the same sport. That’s an unusual thing, I gotta tell you. You know, in Seattle, everybody’s for the Seahawks. They may be cracking on them, they’re mad at the way they’re playing, but everybody’s emotionally invested. Different in Los Angeles. 

JOHN STANKEY: You know what Steve meant to say is: he’s in a special community, not a weird community, it’s a very unique — 

BALLMER: Thank you, John! 

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft and owner of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, and John Stankey, CEO of AT&T. Steve and John wanted to talk to me together about their collaboration on the new Intuit Dome, opening in Los Angeles next month. The arena isn’t just a new home for the Clippers, it’s a multi-billion dollar canvas for Steve’s dream of an upgraded fan experience, supported by John’s technology. Steve and John, who have known each other for decades, are like a classic Odd Couple: Steve bursting with energy, John calm and considered. They talked with me about new generations of sports fans, the impact of sports gambling, whether it’s harder now to be a CEO, and more. It’s a fun conversation, so let’s dive in. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response. 

SAFIAN: I’m Bob Safian, and I’m here with Steve Ballmer, the owner of the LA Clippers and former CEO of Microsoft, and John Stankey, the CEO of AT&T. Steve, John, it’s great to have you with us.

BALLMER: Thank you. 

STANKEY: Bob. It’s good to be with you.

SAFIAN: You’re both in Las Vegas for AT&T’s Innovation Exchange conference with the NBA. You’ve partnered together on the LA Clippers new arena named the Intuit Dome. I guess, John, you were too late to get the naming rights. Is that what happened?

STANKEY: We sometimes know we should play a supporting role. So this is the case. We’re doing it.

What will make the Intuit Dome different?

SAFIAN: So I wanted to start by asking you guys: What will make the Intuit Dome different?

BALLMER: You know, what we tried to do was to set out to build the most exciting, intense fan experience in the world. Now, we work on that all the time in terms of our team, and it’s competitiveness, and it’s hard work and energy, but we also view the fan as kind of part of the product. How excited do our fans get? How intimate does it feel? I mean, it’s a live event. You want people to feel emotion. It’s a little different than just watching at home. You can get emotional, but you’re getting emotional with a lot of people. So we built a tighter bowl. We built things that are steeper.

We do have a very large scoreboard, so we can tell you more. It can be more of a heads up activity, even though we recognize that people will want to use the second screen, which is why we’ve run power, so you can charge your phone at literally any one of our 17,700 plus seats. 

You come into our building, we have zoom-through technology. So if you just want to walk in friction free, or you want to walk in, grab some food, we have these ‘zoom-throughs’ we call them, all through the building. We have cameras in the building and microphones in the building so that we can tell who’s the most enthusiastic fan, who’s making the most noise, and make sure we’re rewarding people for those activities. We had a vision of what we wanted. We got a lot of input on top of that from the architects, but it had to also come from the technology that underpins, and AT&T’s been our core partner on that.

STANKEY: Well, I joked earlier about playing a supporting role, but that’s exactly what we’re doing. When you have somebody like Steve who has the kind of energy that he has and the kind of desire to change things, let him paint and do what he wants to do creatively as he takes us forward. 

We’ve often heard the term when we talk about a home — “Oh, you know, the home’s got great bones.” And I would say Steve’s dome has great bones because what we’ve done is we’ve taken some of the most robust fiber infrastructure in Los Angeles that AT&T has and we’ve connected it to his new home. And in his new home, we put seven and a half miles of fiber in. And that fiber is going to be connected to some of the best technology that’s available today to connect customers that walk into his facility to the internet into services that are going to make their experience wonderful. And most importantly because the bones are done well, as technology changes and as they come up with new ideas moving forward, they’re gonna have an opportunity to paint on that canvas in any way they want.

Building the infrastructure for future tech

SAFIAN: When Citi Field first opened in New York, I don’t know, 15 years ago, one of the owners, Jeff Wilpon, gave me this private tour. And he was so excited about how they hardwired each seat, so they could eventually add screens to each one. And of course, it turned out that the screens everyone wanted were in their pockets, and Wi Fi was what mattered. How do you think about sort of infusing the tech of today but protecting for the tech of tomorrow, so that you can take advantage of that? 

STANKEY: I don’t think you can actually future-proof because most of us don’t know exactly what the future is going to be. You do what you can foundationally to make sure that when that future comes, you can get there at the lowest marginal cost possible — changing out the endpoints, putting new electronics in that do something a little bit different, that’s going to require incremental investment over time. But what you don’t want to get into is you won’t want to be disturbing the bones of the building, right? You don’t want to get underneath all the cement, the concrete. And I think we’ve done the right things to make sure that there’s a lot of flexibility there. 

SAFIAN: I bet Steve, you love hearing those words, ‘incremental investment,’ right? That’s like what being the owner of an NBA team is. It’s constantly incremental investment.

BALLMER: Look, I know enough about tech to have absolutely no surprise. You know, I come out of the software business. We had recurring licenses because we knew we were always going to bring new things to market. And so, we asked our customers to plan with us for ongoing cost and ongoing kind of improvement.

John and I were talking about it, and I may underestimate exactly what that might cost us, but at the end of the day, make no mistake about it, I know we have screens that are ahead of the game today and will be behind the game in five or six years. We will wind up making more investment. I’ll give you just a small example: We have four game controller-type buttons built into every seat so that you can interact directly with the big board. Okay, what is the wireless technology that enables that to happen? How do we reduce the latency so people really can interact? What will that look like? Let’s use gamification. If you want people to be able to, I don’t know, earn points by activities they’re engaged in in the building —  anticipating what the next play is — we can ask people to do that as long as we have the infrastructure that will let us do that essentially in real time. 

I’ll give you another tech challenge, near and dear to my heart, but it’ll tax everything: I want to get four replay angles up on the screen within a second of the play being whistled dead. I want them all up there. We have the screen real estate to do it. But if you have to wait for a minute, when there’s a momentary pause in the game. This stuff’s going to have to come and it’s got to come up and it’s got to be real time and that requires a lot of work.

SAFIAN: And doing that, that fast, I mean, historically that’s been a human-chosen highlight, right? Is this something where there’s software on the back end about automating that, so that’s faster also? 

BALLMER: The possibility to do things with AI in this instance winds up being very good. There are a lot of possibilities, and yet some human beings will decide because you still need to have human beings that have a sense of what they want the game flow to look like. Now, five years, ten years from now, maybe we just trust the software to do all that. But for now, there’s a, you know, I’ll call it AI assisted activities. But those are not simple problems, and we’re going to have to continue to put money into the infrastructure to keep it working.

How AI is poised to impact society 

SAFIAN: When you talk about AI, I’m just curious where you both are on the hype versus enthusiasm meter on AI? I mean, I know Steve, you recently surpassed Bill Gates on the billionaires list, thanks to Microsoft’s booming stock and that OpenAI deal. Do you have any thoughts about where we’re getting ahead of ourselves with AI and where we’re just getting started?

STANKEY: I don’t think it’s a hype. I think we’re at a fundamental transition. It’s as significant as the founding of the internet back when we entered the 2000s. And, you know, we were back in 1999, 2000, saying, “Oh, this internet’s all hyped up,” and we’ve got the internet bubble that burst and all these valuations were out of whack. Well, you know, you can’t sit here today and say that the internet was overhyped. And I think AI in 10 years will do the same thing for us. Yeah, there’s gonna be some cycles where it accelerates or it slows down. But ultimately, you know, software is a fabulous technology that I view as pretty immature. We may just be moving into the adolescence of software technology right now. AI is one of the things that’s going to take software into adulthood. And as it takes software into adulthood, we’re going to see phenomenal changes: How we get entertained, how we work, how we learn, how we live. And so I don’t think it’s hype. I think we’re at the dawn of a moment where all of us are going to look back and not remember how it was done 10 years from now.

BALLMER: I think it’s one of these things where in the short term, people first get impressed. Then, you say, “ah, it doesn’t do everything I wanted it to do.” So in the long run, I think things are actually under hyped, and then in the short run, they may be overhyped. But in the long run, I sort of take John’s perspective.

I’ll tell you a small story. When I was at Microsoft, people would say, “what’s the new, next wave?” And remember, I’ve been gone 10 years, but my favorite scenario is the one where you can just say to your computer, “get me ready for my trip to visit AT&T.” And it would find our customer interactions. It would find any relevant sales data. It would assemble it the way my assistant was forced to assemble it. That was my favorite scenario. Well, today, you can’t quite get there, but now you get line of sight. You have the core software infrastructure to do that, and the level of innovation you’ll see on top of that I think will be mind blowing. Anyway, I’m enthusiastic. I should get off my high horse on this.

Balancing the digital and physical experience

SAFIAN: So we started earlier talking about fans and thinking about the new arena. I can see as a team owner, Steve, you want fans focused on the live experience on what’s happening on the floor. John, in your business, you might be perfectly happy if fans were on their phones the whole time. Like, did you talk about that? About how the phone experience interacts with the fan experience?

STANKEY: I’ll let him go first.

BALLMER: Look, I want people with their heads up watching the game. I make no bones about that. So everything you have to look down for should be something that is very niche. If it’s important, we should have it up on the screen. Now, are there plenty of niches that various people will be looking for on their phone? The answer is yes. But you didn’t come to a game to have your head down. You came to have your head up. But the fact that you can still be, you know, sort of supported by your second screen, that’s the world today. That’s not something to be argued about or fought about. But we need to make our experience attractive enough. Because I want our fans cheering. I want their head in the game. 

Now, with that said, I’m still pulling my phone out during the middle of the game — ‘where did, I don’t know, player Charlie, where did they go to college?’ What pick were they in the draft?’ I’m not going to get everything up on our big screen. So it’s clear, you know, we’re not trying to deny today’s realities. And we’re trying to make sure that, nonetheless, you’re engaged in the game.

STANKEY: There’s a generation coming up that just isn’t going to do anything if they’re not overlapping and multitasking. That’s just kind of how they’ve been raised and what they do today. As crazy as I find it, they are going to be doing two things at once. The fact of the matter is, you know, data usage on the mobile network is going to go up 30 percent a year, whether Steve wants people looking at their phone at a game or not. The reality of people being a little bit distracted from multitasking, part of the design of the arena is to, in fact, play into that. And the AT&T experience aspect of this is to provide a social place where people can go, interact with AI generated, creative user generated content. They can do that in a way that makes their visit to the experience relevant. That becomes content that they can pull into their life and transmit out. Those are all good things. I think that as long as it doesn’t take away from the core product that are just going to make the experience unique as to why you go to something live as opposed to staying anchored in your living room.

BALLMER: I’ll tell you one thing that would piss me off, though: If people were actually looking at their phone to see exactly what’s on the court. I’d say, “man, we really screwed up our experience.”

SAFIAN: Steve and John are right at the heart of this moment in technology: How do you connect the real world and the virtual world in ways that amplify both, without sacrificing core experiences? Oh, and to do so in a way that doesn’t require too much “incremental investment,” as they put it. After the break, we’ll talk about the impact of sports betting, whether being a CEO today is harder than it was 10 years ago, and their predictions for the next NBA season. Stay with us. 

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, Steve Ballmer, owner of the LA Clippers, and John Stankey, CEO of AT&T, talked about the new Intuit Dome and how technology both improves and complicates the fan experience. Now, we dip into sports betting and fantasy leagues, what Steve calls LA’s “weird community,” and how the role of CEO has changed over the last 10 years. Let’s jump back in.

Steve Ballmer on the state of sports betting

You’re both in Las Vegas. So I have to ask, like, how much of the connectivity in the arena is about betting? FanDuel, DraftKings, you know, attendees interested in specifics beyond sort of the final score. 

BALLMER: I would say, we did not build our arena assuming gambling was the way of interaction. Because it may or may not be legal at any given point. But we built our infrastructure, I mean it was important to ask John and his guys to do this, so that we have very low latency. And whether you’re gambling or a bunch of other scenarios, the latency is important.

SAFIAN: Does it bug you, Steve, that with wagering that like fandom isn’t always about winning and losing, but about specific moments or players or stats? I’m sure it’s different from the way that you watch the games. Is that evolution, do you feel like that’s a good thing for the sport? Or just, it is what it is?

BALLMER: It is what it is. I think if you come to our building, I don’t need to worry. Most of the people who come to our building will either clearly be our fans, or unfortunately, we occasionally get some of the other team’s fans in the building. If really you’re all about wagering, you probably shouldn’t come into the arena and watch. It’s defocusing. It’s distracting. You can only watch one game at a time. I would probably go someplace else if my primary purpose was to bet it, but — 

SAFIAN: Some folks say, like, it keeps the game exciting for them. It’s lower moments. You know, there’s all this talk about how it’ll make the game better. You’re not necessarily buying that? 

BALLMER: No, no. Look, I’m not. I do buy into it. Forget the actual gambling. You know, look, whatever the law provides will happen, and we’ll support it. But just think even about fantasy football. Fantasy football galvanizes that game. And whether it’s through fantasy or gambling, those are… John talked about gamification, which I think about, you know, the first thing that goes through my mind is fantasy, but there’s many other ways to do it. And at the end of the day, fans are going to do what they want to do. Our job is to make them want to help our team win. That’s our job. That’s not the fan’s job. And the fan then can choose their own path, you know, through the experience.

Building a community of fans in LA

SAFIAN: There’s been a lot of very positive talk in LA about how the Clippers are investing in the community, even small touches like a display inside of basketball jerseys from every high school in LA, I think. When you think about building community as a business, as a brand, like how important is it for the Clippers? And I’m curious too, then John, is it any less important for AT&T? 

BALLMER: The people we hire, we want to be beneficial to our community. We’re in the process of resurfacing every parks and rec basketball court in L.A. County because we’re trying to communicate ‘community.’

We’re in a weird community. I didn’t grow up in a place where you had two teams in the same sport. That’s an unusual thing, I gotta tell you. You know, in Seattle, everybody’s for the Seahawks. They may be cracking on them, they’re mad at the way they’re playing, but everybody’s emotionally invested. Different in Los Angeles. And so we have to build our community in a community that, you know, has largely grown up with the other team being the leading team that’s won the championships. So we’re building our community. Our community, we say, is a little more hardcore, and we call it, you know, ‘streetlights over spotlights.’ That’s our community in LA. 

STANKEY: You know, what Steve meant to say is he’s in a ‘special community,’ not a ‘weird community.’ It’s a very unique — 

BALLMER: Thank you, John! But for — 

STANKEY: There’s not many cities that could support two teams. 

BALLMER: If you haven’t lived… I think John, remind me, you grew up in LA if I remember correctly? 

STANKEY: I did. 

BALLMER: It’s just an unusual thing unless you’ve lived basically in either New York or LA to have people picking sides. 

SAFIAN: I grew up where it was all about picking sides, right? It ends up defining the community in certain ways, the side that you pick. Right? 

STANKEY: Look Bob, what we think about is pretty straightforward. We’re in the business of connecting people to the internet. And the reality of our society right now is not everybody can get on the internet in a scaled way. And that means they sometimes can’t apply for a job, or they can’t get the medical advice they need. So, you know, LA is a big part of our market. California is a huge market for us. 

But we’ve got some more work to do and that’s why we’ve been doing some things like targeting a more affordable internet access for those people who can’t afford to pay the full boat, working actively to try to build literacy capabilities or learning centers around the Los Angeles area. You know, our connectivity for what we do with the Clippers and the Intuit Dome is just one part of what we do for the broader city each and every day. And until we get everybody connected to the internet, our work isn’t done.

Rebuilding trust after AT&T’s data breach

SAFIAN: I mean, part of bonding with the community is about trust. I know you had a big data breach at AT&T. How does that impact the way you interact with the community? How do you think about rebuilding that trust? 

STANKEY: Look, you earn trust every day. We’re obviously disappointed that we had this event. I can tell you it’s a very challenging environment out there right now. If I were to kind of look ahead, I think the reality is with the geopolitical dynamics that are going on and the state of technology, we’re probably going to, as a society, see more of this occurring.

I think what you do when you have an unfortunate event like this, you have to, to your point, make sure that you don’t do anything to further damage or jeopardize that trust. I’m proud of the team and the decisions that we’ve made to try to mitigate and minimize the impact to our customers. And most importantly, we learn from it. We learn about what we need to do differently so that we can avoid having this kind of an event in the future. But it’s a pretty dynamic environment that we’re all dealing with right now —  just how challenging data security, privacy and those things are.  

How the role of CEO has changed over the last decade

SAFIAN: There is so much going on in our world today, you know, AI and cybersecurity and sports and the political landscape and Israel and Ukraine and China, it’s almost too many things to follow. When you two talk as business leaders, when you talk with other top leaders, are there topics and questions that you’re most focused on? Like, how do you know what to pay attention to? 

STANKEY: I find myself spending a lot of time listening and asking advice from people in similar capacities to mine about: how do you keep the people that you’re responsible for engaged and feeling good about what they’re doing? Unlike a politician, maybe that is successful if they get 51 percent of the vote. I kind of walk into my job every day and feel like I got to get 100 percent of the votes of everybody who works for my company. And that requires a very, very different set of skills than maybe 10 or 15 years ago. And you try to talk to anybody about, you know, how are you navigating it? What are you doing that’s working? What makes a difference? And I think we’re all learning through this right now about how to work in a little bit more fragmented, polarized society to make work kind of one of those safe places where people come.

SAFIAN: Steve, do you think it’s harder being a CEO now than when you were? 

BALLMER: Look, it’s been 10 years. I’m not going to count the Clippers. I think of myself as an executive chairman. I don’t really run things day to day. So I don’t have the job that John does and haven’t for 10 years. Now, do I believe it’s a tougher job in some ways? It’s a different job. It’s a different job. 

We used to joke in Microsoft: Everybody got a private office. That was a real attraction point for us during the 80s and 90s. And people say these things are generational. I think a lot of things are more reflective of the diversity of the workforce. Extroverts, guess what? They’re happy not working in their own office. Introverts? They want to work in their own office. You know, I think there are patterns that change, but, you know, the basic job hasn’t changed. Now, do I think I would be effective in this environment? Probably not with the same style and approaches that I used, you know, during the bulk of my career. So, I respect the kind of work that John and Satya Nadella, who runs Microsoft now, do. Being a CEO is a hard job. I do know that, and I know they haven’t gotten any easier. And every time I see John, I am reminded nothing got any easier about being a CEO. 

STANKEY: Look, I think everything changes, and I think it doesn’t matter whether you’re a CEO. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a school teacher. Things have changed. And we have to accept that things are going to change. And if you don’t accept that that’s the reality and your job is to figure out how to adjust to the new environment you’re in, then life is going to be really, really hard because the rate and pace of change is not going to slow down. You have to come in with optimism, you know, a positive attitude that you can make a difference and attack those issues. And if you do that, you’ll do just fine, and we’ll sort it out. And we’ll look back and someday we’ll talk about this as having been the good old days. But right now, it feels like it’s a bit of a challenge.

Hosting concerts at the Intuit Dome and Kia Forum

SAFIAN: So the first event at Intuit Dome is a concert with Bruno Mars in mid-August. Will you both be there?

BALLMER: I certainly will be there. I am hopeful that John will be there. He knows. He’s certainly been invited.

STANKEY: On the way up, he just mentioned it to me. 

BALLMER: Your office knows! I know how it is in these big CEO offices. You don’t always know these kinds of things.  

STANKEY: Yeah, sure. You should see the long list of concert invitations that are sitting on the desk of my… You picked a great opening act though. Bruno Mars is probably one of the greatest live entertainers I’ve ever seen. And he’ll do a great job christening the center, and I hope to be there.

SAFIAN: Yeah, no, I mean, listen, live concert sales have been a little disappointing for a lot of artists this year, provided your name isn’t Taylor Swift, right?

BALLMER: Actually, I’m going to push back on that. 

SAFIAN: Yeah?

BALLMER: As part of the process, even though the Intuit Dome is not open, we did buy the Forum, now the Kia Forum in LA, you know, a storied music venue. And what we’re finding is concert after concert, we’re outperforming actually our expectations in terms of attendance. So I want to be a little more bullish on that than you are, Bob. 

Predictions for the 2024-25 NBA Season

SAFIAN: At the risk of this being a layup for each of you — any predictions about the upcoming NBA season? Steve, you may not be an unbiased observer here.

BALLMER: Yeah, the Clippers are going to be one hell of a team. Hard working, gritty, putting the effort in every day. How far that’ll take us? Nobody knows, particularly in the Western Conference where we compete. Basically, it’s so damn competitive. Part of it will come down to good health. The Mavericks who knocked us out last year, they came into the end of the season hot and hey, they made it to the NBA finals, which is an amazing achievement. Although, I’m sure they’ll tell you — nobody remembers who came in second place in most Finals and like us, them, we all want to win it all. 

STANKEY: I just hope the Western Conference doesn’t beat the snot out of each other where they don’t have enough left to win in the Finals this year. That’s my only concern. Somebody from the West needs to win.

SAFIAN: Well, guys, this was great. Thank you so much for doing it. 

STANKEY: Thank you very much. I appreciate you investing the time with us. And Steve, we’re excited as hell at seeing your vision and your dream come to reality. It’s good that you finally have a home that you can call your own. It’s going to be exciting to watch next year. 

BALLMER: Well thanks and thanks for helping us build the best home. We can appreciate it. 

SAFIAN: In thinking about Steve and John’s buddy act, you can see that there’s warmth, but you can also feel that Steve is the client, and John is the provider. It’s a good reminder that however far we rise — even to become CEO of AT&T — everyone works for someone. Even Steve Ballmer, icon, multibillionaire, owner of the Clippers, is beholden to each individual fan and their own personal phone habits. And really, isn’t that a good thing? We can’t keep everyone happy, but we keep trying, and in the process, we create new and better tools and experiences, from the Intuit Dome to whatever AI enables next. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.