Why Dynasty Managers Need to Be Using AI with Ronnie Evans

AI expert Ronnie Evans, founder of Goodguy.ai, joins Jeff to talk about how dynasty managers can actually use AI without handing over the decisions that still belong to them. Knowing where AI saves real time, and where it doesn't, keeps you from wasting money on the wrong tools or falling behind managers who've already figured it out. They also cover what league commissioners can automate, how content creators should and shouldn't use AI, and where the industry is headed next.

💡 Key Takeaways

• Pay for AI tools. Free versions are outdated technology, but $20 a month buys real power.
• Prompt AI like a professional analyst, not a chatbot.
• Use AI for coding, busywork like building spreadsheets and research. Don't rely on it for final decisions.
• Non-coders can now build their own dynasty tools with AI.
• Vet the builder before trusting an AI-powered tool.
• Commissioners can automate league questions and engagement tracking.
• Responsible use means disclosing your sources.

⏱️ Chapters/Timestamps

00:00 – Introduction & How AI Entered Fantasy Football
09:19 – How Fast Is AI Actually Moving?
15:23 – Building the Expo's AI Panel
18:45 – How Dynasty Managers Can Start Using AI
24:19 – Where AI Actually Saves You Time (and Where Credit Is Due)
30:10 – Building Your Own Tools With AI
35:38 – Inside the Scott Fish Bowl Tool Demo
43:18 – Evaluating the Flood of AI Tools
49:19 – AI for League Commissioners
56:16 – Defining Responsible Use of AI
1:02:12 – Where to Draw the Line (and the AI Arms Race)
1:08:13 – Wrap-Up: Takeaways, What's Next, Where to Find Ronnie

🔗 Links Mentioned

• Follow Ronnie on Twitter/X https://x.com/RonnieAEvans
• Follow Goodguy.ai on X https://x.com/goodguyai
• Goodguy.ai https://www.goodguy.ai/
• Fantasy Football Expo https://thefantasyfootballexpo.com/
• Follow Jeff on Twitter/X https://x.com/jeffblaylock
• Jeff's Dynasty Rankings https://www.footballguys.com/rankings/ranker/jeff-blaylock/duration/dynasty
• Footballguys https://www.footballguys.com

👍 Support the Show

If you enjoy Dynasty Compass, please consider subscribing, leaving a five-star rating, and sharing the show with another dynasty manager. Reviews on Apple Podcasts help more dynasty players discover the show and help the Dynasty Compass community grow.

Visit dynastycompass.com to learn more about the show.

Transcript

Ronnie: Do not hand over all of your decisions holistically to AI at the very baseline. I built that tool I showed you guys I haven't made a single pick based on that tool. I have made my picks based on what that tool told me, and I've done my own thing.

And so a lot of my picks have actually gone against the tool, but I've used it to inform me on what the industry's saying and so on and so forth, and I would just use it that way. Like use it as a informational resource, not a deciding factor.

[theme music]

Jeff: Welcome to Dynasty Compass. I am your host, Jeff Blalock, the other Jeff B. from Footballguys. Thank you so much for joining us today, whether you are watching us on YouTube, listening on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. You're the reason why we're here. We wanna make you a better dynasty manager so you can win your league, not only this year, but for years to come.

And I've got a guest who just might help you be able to do that. We go a little bit off of our usual trajectories here to talk about a tool that everyone can use, but not necessarily a specific tool, and we're talking about AI, and I've got one of the industry's foremost leaders in AI with me today.

That is Ronnie Evans, my friend. Welcome so much. Welcome so much. Thank you so much for being on the show, and, uh, welcome. You are welcome so much too, but thank you so much and

Ronnie: Thank you. Thank you so much for welcoming me. It's, uh, I'm excited to be on

Jeff: Yep, so we are recording this on, uh, Tues- Tu- Thursday. This is Thursday, July 16th, so about a week before the Fantasy Football Expo, uh, where I will get to see you. Hopefully, I will certainly be out there. I know you will be as well. Uh, and looking forward, uh, to seeing you in three dimensions instead of these little boxes that we're in.

Ronnie: Yes

Jeff: Uh, and you're gonna be doing a, a panel on AI there, and we'll get into that a little bit later. Um, but it is always exciting to see the industry, uh, looking at this as both a, an opportunity and a challenge, and so we'll try to get into some of that today. But let's just kind of go back a little bit in time and see, you know, when did you first see the potential for AI to change how you thought about or how you played fantasy football?

Ronnie: It's a great question. I think, uh, I think it got real in like February, March of 2023. Um, that was the first time I really like took the gloves off and said, "Why don't I go see what this is all about?" And spent two weeks pretty much all day every day just breaking ChatGPT and getting frustrated. But it was so cool.

And, um, I-- at that time, I made a post actually in March of 2023, and it's since been deleted from the internet. Um, but it was a long and lengthy kind of diatribe about this AI thing that I had just seen and like the, like the spin up and how it affected the industry and all of these jobs that might be threatened and all of these technologies and abilities.

And then I, I closed it with this line that was like something along the lines of like, "In the future, I don't think there are any more moats." And I don't think anyone in any position of power in any industry saw messaging like that and was excited. And for everyone else at the time, it was just sci-fi concept, and obviously it's turned out to not be.

Um, but I-- the truth is, I think that there are like a unique category of people that were predisposed to just kind of say like, "Heck yeah, I'm in. What is this AI thing?" And those were like either like hardcore software people or more commonly it was just people that didn't always love following the rules or like fitting into the system, kind of the creative sort of entrepreneurial mindset.

Um, like that kid that would do good in one class and do terrible in the other, and the teachers couldn't figure it out. It seemed like that was the activation switch early on, like hardcore tech people and then really like abstract system breaking, uh, creative thinkers. And I don't know. I, I guess I'm saying all that because I've been thinking about how something like AI could change every industry I've ever been a part of in my whole life.

I've loved it since I was a kid. I'm a big sci-fi nerd, and I think that predisposed me to being more open than other people at the onset.

Jeff: Yeah, you certainly, uh, struck me as someone who was into this a lot more than the rest of us. We were still keeping our drawbridges up and hoping that our moats were gonna hold for another year or two until we had to face it head on. Uh, but when you started having conversations with folks in the fantasy football space, in the industry as we sometimes call it, you know, what were some of those reactions that you were getting early on?

Ronnie: It was awful. It was like uni- universally like, "This guy's crazy. What is he talking about? I don't like what he's talking about. Whatever. Crazy Ronnie. You know, Ronnie's being nuts. Uh, this AI thing is a fad." I remember Danny Carter, who I love, hung out with him at the expo, stud. I remember he made a post in like s- fall of 2023 that was like, "Ah, this AI thing is such a fad, see?"

And there was like some news thing about data centers, uh, one of the data centers hadn't been built. And it was just that. Like everyone was like, "Nah," stick their nose up. "Whatever. You're crazy. We've got our jobs. It'll never replace me. It'll never do what I do. It could never do the research I do. It could never do this and that."

And then now here we are three years later and, well, everyone's changed their tune. It's-

Jeff: early reactions surprise you?

Ronnie: No, not at all.

Jeff: Okay

Ronnie: I think, uh, I think that the prospect of AI at its core is like a democratization of ability and knowledge, and that threatens everyone that's ever worked hard for anything in their life and has gotten to that point of, like establishment.

So anyone that's like worked their way up in a career, even if they're not at the top and they're working their way up, like there's not a single person that fits that bill that hears about this AI thing that might take their job and might make their special skill set redundant and is like, "Heck yeah. Cool." Um, and so, um, I wasn't shocked. I mean, it is just human nature, but like I said, I like uniquely predisposed to be into this stuff. I've always been somebody-- Like when I was a kid, I never read directions in Lego sets, and my parents used to get so mad about it, but I didn't-- I don't wanna follow those rules.

I wanna go figure it out my, for myself and like do my own thing, and AI is the secret superpower for that.

Jeff: Legos had instructions? I, uh,

Ronnie: right.

Jeff: did not,

Ronnie: I don't think it was unique. Not unique, but

Jeff: I didn't even know they were in there. If they couldn't, if they weren't as able to assemble into something, I ignored them, so that must have been, uh, what the instructions were. Uh, you seeing opinions changing? I mean, I know obviously you, you're, you're gonna present to the industry here i- in a few, in a week or so.

But, I mean, have you seen over the last couple years, three years, have you watched the opinions changing about it?

Ronnie: Yeah. I-- So I've met with, uh, I think like over 300 people from the industry in the last few years, and I've done my rounds and I've hopped into conversations, and in 2023 through 2024, it was mostly just resistance and hand-waving and then the occasional like, "That's cool. I don't understand it. Can it do this thing for me perfectly?"

And that was like the cop-out that I ran into from everyone. It might, it would probably would've been you too, Jeff, and all of my other friends. I don't hold it against anyone. But the problem with AI when it first launched is it was advertised like a God tool, but it wasn't. It was like a kindergartner.

It was a really smart, well-versed on everything kindergartner, but it wasn't able to like actually usurp anyone at anything. And that didn't change until like eight months ago. It really like it-- This AI being able to do what it is advertised as being able to do is a newer thing. It used to be like kit bashing and trial and error and like opening up a Lego box and dumping the pieces on the thing and then just playing around until you figure out how to build it.

Um, but I think the opinions have shifted a ton. First expo where I brought AI up was the 2023 expo. I went around to everyone and was like, "Bah! AI, AI. Are you into AI?" No one. Next year I went there, I found like two people that were into it. One of them is the title sponsor of the expo this year. Um, and then last year I got a lot more of like, "I hate it. Happy you're looking at it, Ronnie, but I don't really care and I don't wanna talk about it." And that was about half of the crowd, and the other half was like really curious, really interested, but still mostly like resistant. And then there was a smaller section of people that were becoming degenerates.

And now the tech has gotten so easy that you don't have to be a degenerate to do cool things. If you're willing to pay 200 bucks a month, you can go build anything. And I think people are waking up to that. 

Jeff: even a couple of years ago when AI was doing things, it wasn't that AI was doing stupid things. It wasn't. It was the humans were doing stupid things with AI, like having it write obituaries, for example. And I remember, uh, it wrote one for a former NBA player, and in the headline it said he was useless after age 40.

So that was, uh, that's really, really not something you wanna say in an obituary, certainly not in a headline. But what I've always said about it, even when I kind of looked at it scornfully, was it's never gonna be as bad as it is right now. It's gonna be better tomorrow and better the next day. It will never revert back to being as bad as it is today, and it's always gonna keep getting better, and that does seem to be really accelerating.

And so how fast is this all moving? I mean, you say it was eight months ago that you could really,

Ronnie: How long do you

Jeff: code and build something with it, 'cause I did that. So I mean, we're, we're less than a year from that point. How fast is this all moving?

Ronnie: So it's, it's really, really, uh, easy to get caught up in like a rabbit hole of catastrophic predictions or utopian predictions and acceleration and all of that. But Moore's law is actually the oldest rule in the book, and it has applied perfectly to AI. It is falling on the exact trajectory of Moore's law, and it's-- we're in the beginning of the exponential, and you're, you're witnessing it right now.

I think anyone that's paid any attention to AI over the last year is having that reaction like, "Oh my gosh," like we, like we had like a decade of progress in 12 months. And so we're, we're starting to do this. We were doing this, and we were actually at the tail end of a 40-year lateral in 2023 that started to move up.

And now we are starting to actually like accelerate the movement up, and it's impossible to explain because the, it's scientifically proven that the human mind can't comprehend, uh, exponential growth. It doesn't compute with us. But that is what we're heading towards, and that's like the singularity, theoretically speaking, if we get there, and I'm not sure we're gonna get there super quickly or not.

But e-eventually you get to that "Star Trek" sort of 20-- "2001: Space Odyssey," hopefully not, but AI's in your toaster, it's in your phone, it's in your fridge, it's in your car. Everything's communicating with each other. The Internet of Things has actually turned into something useful, and you have like a 24/7 personal assistant/buddy that's around to help you with everything you're doing in your life.

And, um, that's like before 2030 that is gonna be here. And we like, we already can do it. It just costs a lot of money to do it right now, and it's annoying. 

if AI is like a flight taking off, we've been on the runway and we're still on the runway. But at some point we're gonna hit the 550 mile an hour thrusters and we're gonna leave the ground and take off and go into the sky. And at that point, um, I think that's thing-- where things potentially get really dangerous. I, I doubt it. I just-- I've studied this. I've put 5,000 hours into AI. I don't think that's gonna happen, but that's where the risk gets real.

Um, Jeff, I don't, I, I don't know if I explained any of that well or not. I think I just said

Jeff: know, we, we used to, uh, back in my old Texas legislature days a lifetime ago, we, we were talking about, you know, what happens to energy prices at certain points. We called it hockey stick bidding, where if you were familiar with a hockey stick, it's kind of flat for a while and then it shoots straight up.

So when you were talking about your examples there, I was thinking about a hockey stick and what that looks like. For everyone who's in the South and never seen hockey, sorry, that's not gonna matter. That's not gonna mean anything to you. But for the rest of us, that, that's a pretty decent visual. And, you know, I'm a, I'm a believer that it's, it's never too late to get on any train, but this train's already left the station and it's moving fast.

Ronnie: No, it hasn't, Jeff. It hasn't. We are still, we are still in chapter one of like a, it's probably a six-chapter book, but we're still in chapter one. You can right now, if you go get into AI and dedicate 20 hours a week and like just try to like get up in the morning and use the tools for-- Don't even, you don't even have to have an objective, just type stuff into them.

Just do that. Just use them for whatever, and you just do that consistently. By like the fourth or fifth week, you will be able to do more than anyone in your personal life is able to get accomplished on your own, and you will have access to an ability that like three years ago was Hollywood. It was a sci-fi figment of like imagination, and you can get it now and you can get in early.

We are still early on this. It doesn't feel that way 'cause it's been three years and we might have the final four chapters in a two-year span. But I, I wouldn't say that. It ha- the ship has not left the station just yet. I think the ship has like... If it's left the station, it's, the, the station's still in sight 

So all of this goes down to compute and the ability to process data and spit it back out to people, inference, all that fun stuff. When I was at the expo last year, I talked about the truth.

There was almost $2 trillion of data centers that were contracted and being built when we were at the expo last year. And what's happened over this year is there's been another couple trillion of data centers that have been in planning, some have been activated and they're starting to building. But also what happened is there has been a massive supply shortage on the materials and parts to go make these data centers happens.

So actually about a half of that $2 trillion of data centers that I talked about last year got delayed. They're still happening, but they're being built. And right now what we have with AI, we are using like 1% of the brainpower of what we are going to have at our disposal in three years. And in 2029, we are going to have over $3 trillion of data centers and compute power live across the globe, and the technology will grow alongside it, and that's kind of when I see the singularity happening is right in that range.

But, um, I don't know if that helps give perspective, but like we-- like we're still in chapter one and we haven't even loaded in the material for the next chapters to make them happen yet. But it's being built and it's at a, a scale that like our indus- the fantasy football industry is worth $44 billion a year. That's so much money. That's nothing. Like in the, in the realm of AI, it's literally a drop in the ocean. So it's, uh, it's, it's pretty intense. But, um, I don't know. We're, we're in the middle of the acceleration right now, and it's gonna have to do with compute and availability.

Jeff: You mentioned, uh, you know, you talked at the expo last year. You, of course, are having another, uh, panel again this year. Uh, can you talk about how that all came to be, and then what, what are you hoping to accomplish with the panel this year?

Ronnie: Uh, if Bob Lung, if he watches this show, what's up, Bob? Not calling him out at all. In 2023, I had talked about doing an AI panel. Nobody was ready for that. 2024, I talked about it. Nobody was really ready for it. And then actually last year, I had actually kind of given up on it a little bit. And then Nate, um, Bob's right-hand man at the expo, hit me up and said, "Do an AI panel."

And so, um, we went and organized it, and Nate is also pretty fluent with AI. He's a good person to go consult with and talk to. Um, but we, we put it together last year and basically it was just the result of me chipping, like nipping at the heels of Bob Lung for two years, and everyone else, and Joe Bryant, and every other person that matters, quote-unquote, "in this industry."

And just saying, "Hey, we need to talk about AI more." And finally it was like the expo was like, "All right, fine, Ronnie. Let's talk about AI." And lo and behold, it was outside of the opening stage. We had the most traffic of any, uh, show last-- or any panel last year. And, uh, we're at noon this year, so we're helping kick off the panels, which is, it's cool.

It's a good sign

Jeff: Yeah, and what's the, what's our goal this year? What, what are we trying to, trying to, trying to get the room to think about?

Ronnie: I think, um, I'm still working actually on that, and I'm probably gonna be working on it until the day I leave. Um, 'cause there's just, there's, uh, uh, I could, I could run that panel for 12 hours and have enough to talk about all 12 hours. And so it's really hard to figure out like what the specific messaging I wanna send is.

But last year closed with the message that was, "By this time next year in 2026, right now, everyone is gonna be able to build an app and most of your competitors are gonna be building one and launching one." And we are here. It was absolutely on the money and a lot of people, like I had pushback from that and people were like, "I've tried to build with AI and it doesn't really work."

I had built with AI. It sucked. Up until November of 2025, it sucked. You had to just chip away at it for days and it was just redundant like, "Oh, you didn't fix this thing. Try again. Let me say it a different way. Try again." And you do that for an hour. Now you just go tell AI what to do and it spins out 120 agents if you have ChatGPT Sol or Claude Fable, and it, it takes care of like all of the busy work that we used to have to do.

Um- I forgot the question

Jeff: Well, you, uh, you think you answered it. The answer is you don't know. Uh, the question was what do you hope to accomplish with this year's panel, a- and, uh, it sounds like we're

Ronnie: I think, oh, well, at

Jeff: on that.

Ronnie: this year's panel, I'm gonna empower people to build, um, which we're gonna talk about in a second here. But at this point, if you wanna make it in the fantasy industry, if you have a brand in the fantasy industry, if you're interested in being involved in the fantasy industry, there's this wide open channel where you can go build stuff.

You wanna do it the right way. Like, everyone knows you can build stuff now, so if you show up with a crappy product, people are gonna be like, "Whatever." But you could also, like, it's the season starting, and if you're gonna go do content, like go use AI to do it. So anyway, we're gonna talk about that at, on the panel at minimum.

We'll also show some of my products and a few things too.

Jeff: Very good. Well, let's, let's take a step back for a second and not just talk about our industry, uh, which is obviously, you know, reckoning with what AI is and isn't and what our competitors might be doing and what we need to be doing. Let's just talk about dynasty managers for, for a moment. Um, what are some of the ways that dynasty managers can start utilizing AI to help them either with their draft prep or their trade evaluations, their roster decisions, or anything in terms of helping them become better fantasy football players?

Ronnie: Um, the f- the most helpful thing I could say with that is actually to not use it unless you're willing to pay for the tools. Um, if you are doing anything with AI honestly, and you're doing it with free tools, like you, you're playing with two-year-old technology. It's not good. Um, but if you're willing to pay up, even at like just $20 a month, do it.

It's worth it. Pay $20 a month for ChatGPT, and then you can use it to like accelerate and bridge the time sink in research. And you do need to make sure you structure the prompts the right way. So as an example, if I was gonna go in and I did this actually the other day. I have a tool that I built that I do use, but I was on a podcast and they had a question and I was like, "Let's go see what ChatGPT says."

But I didn't go into ChatGPT and say, "Would you rather have Saquon Barkley or Ja'Marr Chase in Dynasty?" I went in and said, "Hey, your task right now is to be a professional fantasy football analyst. You need to go th- on the internet and find the top 10 most actionable and accurate resources with clear data from the last two months, and then you need to go weigh in the statistics and the words and the sentiments of those resources and create an analysis that determines which way we should go with this trade."

99.9% of people that are doing AI are not gonna do that. They're gonna be like, "What do I do with Saquon Barkley or Ja'Marr Chase?" And if you do that, it's gonna give you bad advice. Um, but if you prompt it well and you pay $20 a month, you can literally just simulate, like, Jeff's job. No offense to Jeff or anyone else.

You, you can basically just do that. AI is now your secondhand analyst. But, like, if you wanna use it and you're just gonna be casual about it, and you're gonna be like, "I'm gonna have free ChatGPT tell me what to do," or free Claude or Grok or whatever, cool. Let's join a league. I would love to take your money.

Like, that's sounds great. It's just the worst thing you could do. So don't use the free tools. Don't be casual about it. You need to prompt it properly. And again, um, actually, not again for you, Jeff, and for your audience, but I've, I've said this on many shows over the last few years. Prompting is really just organizing context.

And at this point in time, if you're using AI for fantasy football research, you just have to prevent it from being lazy and assuming things. And to do that, you organize the way it operates by giving it as much context as possible. I use AI, the majority of the way I prompt now, I pull my phone out, and I hit the microphone, and I go, "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," and I hit send.

And the tools are good enough where you don't have to, like, if you're, you don't have to be a master prompter. All you need to be a master prompter is to include all of the context and the word string that you're sending into the AI tool. So it works if you don't even know what you're trying to say, but you have a thought.

Hit your microphone and blabber for three minutes, and then at the bottom, just type in and be like, "Hey, so I need you to go accomplish this. I didn't organize it well." Send it in, and it will do exactly what you want. It's, it's amazing. Um, and that's all you gotta do. Just don't be lazy. That's really the trick.

Don't be lazy with the AI tools, and pay a little bit of money. And at this point, they can replace, if you want them to, a lot of the research. 

Jeff: I agree with you completely. You know, at this particular moment in time, these tools are what I would consider to be very inexpensive, $20 a month, you know, that's 240, $250 a year. That is a lot for some people a- and, you know, I'm not gonna, you know, say that it isn't. But considering what I'm able to do with that $20 a month, there is no other $20 a month that I spend that delivers what, you know, Claude, which is the one I'm using now, I also use a little bit of ChatGPT.

Chat- chat's now a pay- an unpaid free plan for me 'cause I'm, I'm focused on Claude. But there's nothing I spend $20 a month on that does what that does, and I, I, you know, utilize it almost daily for various things, and we can get into that here in a little bit. Uh, but I agree. I mean, that's, that's an easy investment for me, uh, at that price.

Will it stay $20 a month? Probably not. Um, but at least while we're still in the heavily subsidized phase of AI development, it's, it's a cheap resource and, and I, I think it's at least worth even just... 'cause they don't make you sign up for yearly plans. Just buy it by month. If you're not using it, turn it off

Ronnie: That's all I've done for three years. I do monthly subscriptions and I deactivate and reactivate and I hop around. In the first two years, the way I got to be an AI expert is, um, I, I literally beta tested over 100 tools from 2023 to 2024. I was in like probably an equal amount of other tools playing around with them, and that's really like the trick.

Like, it, it's the only way to like really get comfortable with anything is to take part in it. And, uh, it's the same with AI

Jeff: Yeah, sadly that works for surgery too, so let's not think about that. Uh, what are some of the things that dynasty managers are doing right now by hand that AI could actually help them do either better or faster or more accurately?

Ronnie: Um, if you're making spreadsheets, you can get AI to make the spreadsheets for you. That's a huge, huge time sink. Um, but again, to do that, you need to go provide it the right information. You need to prompt it with all the right context, and you need to also hook up your tools with like your Google Sheets and stuff, which is easy to do.

You go into your connections and click on Google Sheets and link your account. Um, but that's a big one that when I think about what I used to do when I did dynasty research, which is, we haven't talked about that, but that's, that's my bread and butter with fantasy. I've played dynasty football for 20 years.

It's like my, my ethos. If I could only do one fantasy pla- format, it would be dynasty fantasy football with some IDP and salary cap, uh, thrown in. Um, that I used to spend hours every week tinkering with spreadsheets and like loading spreadsheets and finding data and like pulling the data and then putting it into the spreadsheets and just all of that manual like, um, prep work. You can do it with AI now. Um, it's best to like double-check it and even if you don't wanna double-check it, you can go do all the work and then open a new chat and be like, "Check all this work," and let it check it for you, and it'll do a great job. But I think the simple answer is busy work. Just like the searching around like, "Hey, I wanna go absorb all of the information I can on Stribling from the 49ers."

Great. Go into ChatGPT, tell them about what you're trying to accomplish. I wanna go look at Deshaun Trip, Deshaun Dru... What's his name? Deshaun? De'Zhaun Stribling.

Jeff: De'Zhaun, yeah, rhymes with Bijan dribbling,

Ronnie: at Deshaun.

Jeff: name is actually De'Zhaun

Ronnie: plug, excellent dynasty stash. He's getting overlooked in dynasty circles for some reason. You can get him super cheap right now.

Um, but you would say, "I am interested in learning more about this player, so I need you to go pull up all of the actionable statistics that expert fantasy football players point to. I want you to go find 10 to 15 high-quality resources that have talked about him, and then I want you to go aggregate all of that data, put the numbers into a spreadsheet for me, and put the words into an article and give me a breakdown on Deshaun Stribling."

Funnily enough, a lot of the fantasy content that you're reading right now is the result of that process and people just post it as their work, and that's partly AI side that sucks, and it's not all great. Um, but you can do that for yourself

Jeff: Yeah. I mean, I, we'll, we'll kind of divert here for just a second 'cause I, I did wanna bring up something that a guy named Pete Nova, who's been on this show before, posted a few weeks ago. He

Ronnie: Oh, I love that tweet

Jeff: yeah, he said, "If I see a fantasy account that replies and tweets all sound AI-generated, I just block them."

And there was a conversation that came out of that about where the lines are in content creation. There are a lot of people who create content who still pour their own hearts and souls into it, and then there are the folks who can do exactly what you just said, go, go look at other people, put together and synthesize in an article about this guy and print it, and there you go, and in three minutes you have written something that takes me two or three days to do, even with AI helping with research and running statistics and so forth.

And so it really led me to kind of think about, okay, well, how do I use it? How do I not use it? And, and I just said, I think to me, and, and see if you agree with this, we just need to be upfront with it. We just need to be transparent about how we're, we're utilizing it, not only to help other people learn how to use it, but also to make sure that folks realize that, you know, when I put something on the internet, it is me.

It's not some piece of code somewhere that, that decided to do this. And so if I'm right or if I'm wrong or somewhere in between, it's still me. It isn't, it isn't, you know, a synthesis of a bunch of other people that a machine told me in tor- 30 seconds of looking.

Ronnie: Right, that's probably inaccurate on top. Um, yeah, I think that that's-- I think that's the right sentiment. It'll never happen, um, unfortunately. Like, people aren't just gonna be like, "Hey, you know, I used ChatGPT to help me write this article. Here's how I used it." Funny that you bring that up. In 2023, one of the projects that I dabbled around with people in the industry was, like, why don't you-- When you present your articles, I can build a tool that allows users to click your article, and it'll highlight all of the text that was generated by AI.

So you can like, not to like point fingers at anyone, to be honest and be like, "Hey, like I'm still a great journalist and I do great work. Here's how I'm inserting AI into my workflow to accelerate what I'm doing and make it better." Um, but I don't know. The, the, the altruistic transparency, if you wanted to like call it that I like you and me and like 10% of the industry would care and actually activate on it.

the rules still apply. It, it's, it's easier to just steal people's work and, and role play as an expert and live on the back of other people's hard work than it used to be.

But that's also actually like, it's like been a problem in this industry since day one . Yeah.

Jeff: Plagarism's been around a long, long time. It's just a lot easier now..

Ronnie: Yeah. And so I think that those-- it, it-- for me, I just wanna simplify it and just be like, the laws still apply. Like, like if you're gonna go use AI to write your work, I like, I'm not-- I, I actually don't fault people for that.

I just would say like, you need to be realistic about what your reception's gonna be, 'cause some people won't care. Actually, a, a pretty decent amount of people don't care. But a lot of people do, and if they sniff you out, you might not make it. And so I would just... I don't know what the right answer is.

Just, just, just be a good person I don't know.

Jeff: We probably need that all over the AI space right now, else this little singularity thing is, uh, not gonna go the way that we really want it to. Uh, but you know, we're talking about these tools a-a-and I'll just set this up by saying, you know, uh, I used to do this. I, I did a dynasty value model, and it was all these interconnected spreadsheets.

It was a tremendous amount of work. Anytime I wanted to update it, it was hours and hours and hours of stuff to make sure it all still worked together. And so in, in, I think December or January, I started working on a revised model using AI to build it for me in the R programming language, which I still to this day do not know.

I, I can pick out when syntax looks wrong or a comma's in the wrong place, but that's really about it. I, I don't-- I, I know that language about as well as I know French. I, I can order stuff off a menu, and that's kind of it. And, you know That became this, this model that I can use. It's far more complicated than what I had before, but it-- I can run it from beginning to end in about 10 minutes.

And, and that is, you know, talking about building spreadsheets, building projections, building these kind of things. That's what this is really able to do. And so I use its ability to program R to do all of my statistical analyses now. Uh, there's-- I, I just recently even, I think it was today, an article I produced about, uh, I wrote about Zay Flowers came out.

Every bit of the statistical analysis in there was not generated by AI, but the script was, the R script was, and then I went back and verified what I needed to verify. But it would've taken me, probably it would take me two weeks to do that, uh, a year ago, and it wouldn't have happened. I wouldn't have done it.

And so we would-- that article would not have existed. It certainly wouldn't have been as detailed, uh, as it was. And so that to me is one of those things that, that I'm, I'm using it as a tool to help me do things that are more complicated, that are more thorough, uh, and, and it can do it a lot, lot, lot faster than I could.

And you're right, you have to, you have to tell it what you want it to do. You have to give it context. And I-- that's only experience. You know, I've been now really working heavily with AI since about December, so we're what? Seven, eight months. Uh, I'm no expert, but certainly I can make it deliver an R script that works without errors, that gives me exactly the data I'm looking for and interpret it and, you know, in a, in a matter of minutes.

And, and that just used to take days or at least hours. So, you know, you can now, and I use it for other tools. Like I, I have, uh, I take the, uh, depth charts that we publish on Put- Footballguys and coordinate that through, uh, an HTML tool that lives on my desktop that has my up-to-the-minute dynasty rankings attached to it.

It marks who's a rookie, who's new, who's an undrafted free agent, who's going to be a free agent at the end of the year, and all this sort of information, injuries, all this stuff, in more or less real time, and that would have taken days to build once, uh, before AI came along. And so, you know, to just sort of put all that in, in a row here, it,

Ronnie: Good for you

Jeff: yes, thank you. AI makes it possible though, for someone like me, who cannot code, uh, to build apps and to build tools that really, uh, help them. what should we be building?

What should, what should a dynasty manager build for themselves?

Ronnie: Well, I wanted to-- I, I love that you brought up that example 'cause you-- thank you. That's, like, actually a better answer than the one I gave. Um, it is-- and 'cause it hits on this conundrum with AI. AI, we talked about it earlier, AI is advertised as God, and then you go play with it and you're like, "Well, this is more akin to," I can say this because I'm autistic, but it's more akin to like an autistic child than it is God.

It's really great, and if you put it down the right path, it'll go until that path is exhausted and everything's perfect. But it's, uh, it's a little s- it's a little silly about things. It'll kind of just do literally what you tell it to do. And, um, what you did is the best way to use it. So for you, if you're a Dynasty player and you're trying to figure out, like, how do I use AI?

What you shouldn't be asking is how can I-- like what can I do with AI to get AI to do it for me? You should be asking How can I get AI to help me build the mechanism that would make an outcome happen consistently? So, um, my mom has built some sort of like, uh, uh, little like managerial app for her and her friends and the stuff she has to do around that. That's a great use case because you're using AI to create something that benefits you in your life with efficiency or like ease, less stress, so on and so forth.

So in Dynasty, maybe you have a spreadsheet with a bunch of numbers and models that you use and you have to go do work with. Like I said, like you can have it help you automate things. But what Jeff was talking about is basically the best use case of AI right now, which is coding and building things. And all of the best fantasy analysts, especially in the last 10 years, that you pay attention to, have some sort of script and system that is running code and helping them with number crunching.

And you can go get AI to help you build that now. 

And so that's, that's really like the secret superpower. Also, build shit for your league. But we'll talk about it a little bit. I've got some tools that you can use for your league, but I don't know, make your life more fun. Go like make, like, uh, just make stuff for your league.

Jeff: Let's get into that. Le- let's get into that as, as not only a use case, but also just to show off some of the work that you've been doing, because this is not... You're not just a philosopher on this. You're actually trying to build product suites that, that, for those of us who may not be interested in designing our owns, we'd just rather buy someone else's, that that may be an option, uh, in the, in the near future or so.

Um, so if you wanna show off a little bit of that, let's, uh, let's just go ahead and dive in now

Ronnie: So this is-- When you go to Good Guy, there's this terminal. Don't worry about it. Um, use Scott Fish Bowl. Cool. All right. So that unlocks you to the War Room. You can also get here just by going in goodguyai/scottfishbowl, and it'll just take you right here.

So Scott Fish Bowl is happening right now. Scott Fish Bowl is the most coveted chair, like tournament in the industry. It's not the biggest tournament anymore, but it is still like the primo tournament of fantasy sports. And it's a free charity tournament that benefits a lot of great causes, and there's a lot of people that do really great research.

Footballguys has some research that they did, they did for it. Pretty much every brand has someone that made some content about Scott Fish Bowl because it's kind of the thing that kicks off our industry. And Scott, if you know him, and if you come to the expo, try to meet him, he's amazing.

Jeff: He is amazing. He, he will talk to you as long as you wanna talk to him, so please. That's true of any of us really. Approach us. Anybody, if you're, if you're a fan of, of, of fantasy football and you're going to the expo and you see somebody you know from the, from, as I used to say, from the TV, just walk up, say hi.

This is the way this industry is. But Scott in particular, can't miss him. He's about 11 feet tall. Uh, and, and so he's, uh, but yeah, he's just a great guy. So anyway, I didn't interrupt you there for that, but

Ronnie: No, you're good

Jeff: to give a thumbs up to, to Scott on that. He's terrific

Ronnie: so this thing, basically all I did was I went into Ch- uh, Claude first. And just a tip, if you're gonna pay for tools and if you got money, pay $200 a month for Claude and $200 a month for ChatGPT, and use Claude as your project manager and ChatGPT as your worker. That is, like, the secret cheat code.

Um, but I went into Claude and I told it about Scott Fish Bowl, I told it about the type of tool I wanted to build, and I basically just wanted a draft resource that went and consolidated everything everyone had made about, and all the advice about Scott Fish Bowl, the history of Scott Fish Bowl, the rules, every bit of information.

So if you're playing in the tournament, you just come here and find everything you need to know and do your research. And it has, like, the history of the whole tournament, past winners, all this stuff. This is all made with AI. Um, goes through and breaks down the rules. So for you in your league, if you have a really complicated and fun league, you could actually go build a tool like this, and if you're interested, I'm on Twitter, shoot me a DM.

I'll, I'll go teach you how to do it. Um, but it breaks down the strategy, so it's a full-on informational resource. And most importantly, because my company is Goodguy.ai, and I'm not here to be one of the turds that does make up a pr- decen-decent portion of the AI industry, and it's, like, s- linked back. I explain exactly how everything is built, where the weights are on each source, links to every source, all that good stuff.

And, um, also the math on everything too. So you can go actually to this resource and build your own on top of what I built. Go for it. Um, but the core offering here is the draft board, and this is pretty much just as good as anything else that's out there. Um, it's themed to look like a video game retro, 'cause that's Scott Fish Bowl.

But right now we're in the middle of my draft, actually. I think it's synced right now, yeah. Um, this is a funny bug. He keeps popping up, "Don't draft Marlin Klein." I don't know what that is. Um, I've tried to fix that three times in the last week. Someone's data out there is saying something about Marlin Klein that is getting nuts. Um, but it does everything for you. It syncs to your league. It's super easy. You can also sync with MFL if you don't have, uh... If you're not in a Sleeper league, it does the whole nine yards. You can do your research. You can sort by the draft strategy. This is a fun tool that was like, again, like, I know there's somebody watching this show right now that has a great fantasy football advice, tool, angle, idea that hasn't been done yet.

You can go have AI help you activate on that and make your place in the industry, and that is what I have done. I've been in the industry for 10 years. I had my place beforehand, but this has really accelerated my career just by being available to do stuff like this with Jeff. And this little tool here Allows you to sort by your draft strategy.

So if you're doing bully wide receiver, tight end, hero running back, yada, yada, it goes in and switches the players around. That isn't available on any other site. I imagine if I push it, it'll be on every site by next year 'cause it's pretty obvious. But that's like, that's why AI is so cool, that you can go do this.

You, you don't need to be me. You don't even need to be Jeff. You don't need seven months. You need the tool. Just pay for the tool. Go in and ask the tool how to do what you're trying to do, ask it how to set itself up, follow its instructions, do what it says, and then go. And you can do whatever you want.

and that took me two days, probably n-no more than eight hours of work. Um, and again, I went into Claude. I planned and strategized, built a project blueprint, and I went into-- I, actually, I didn't go into Codex. I told Claude, "All right. Great. Good job. Plan's great. Now go into my computer and use ChatGPT and have ChatGPT build this," and it did.

And it's so cool, like just that, that little interaction. I know I'm rambling, Jeff, but like I-- you can't take it for granted. Like the ability to go to your phone and say, "Hey, I need information out of X, Y, and Z," and have it spit out text and explain it to you, I think we all take for granted now, and it's only been two and a half years.

Like it, it is genuinely something from sci-fi. Jeff and I are old. You might not be, but you're not old enough to not remember when AI wasn't around. Like that was just a couple years ago. It is remarkable, and we are still in the first chapter, and it's just the worst it will ever be today, uh, like you said earlier.

So anyway, I hope that pumps people up. But like genuinely, you have, you have Michelangelo at your fingertips and he's a- he's available to go work for you. Go do it

Jeff: yeah, yeah. I mean, when the cell phone finally came around and data and, and, you know, the advanced networks that we had, you know, a decade or so ago, we suddenly had the sum of human knowledge in our hands. Well, now we have the sum of human capability in our hands in addition to the knowledge. Now, not necessarily physical capability, but certainly, you know, you can have one of these services design something for you that you could then go build if it's not something that's like code, which it'll build for you.

Uh, and then you can get them to work together as you did. I mean, can you imagine 10 years ago the idea that, you know, two different, uh, computer systems would work together just without supervision, that you could just tell it to go do something, you'd come back and it was done, and they worked together great?

That, you know, that's-- it's just kind of in- in-incredible where we are. And, you know, I'm, I'm old enough to remember when the telephone was attached to the kitchen wall. So, you know, to, to think about where we are now compared to that, it's just something. So I imagine my audience, probably a little younger than that, may not remember those days, uh, but, but I certainly do.

Um, but so we do have this proliferation of tools because obviously we, if we can build our own, then other people are building them as well. If you're not into the building side of it, you just really want to explore and, and utilize, uh, aside from using the ones that you're building, Ronnie, how should dynasty managers kind of evaluate these tools that are out there that people are creating for them that are free, that are paid, that are whatever, they're all over the place now, and I imagine that six months from now, there will be 50 times as many of them as there are today, and for next

Ronnie: It's a waterfall,

Jeff: times as many as there are today.

How do you evaluate them and just pick that I want this, I want that versus this one?

Ronnie: Um I'm gonna share how I do it. I don't know if this is best for everyone, but for context, yeah, we talked about it earlier. It's happening right now, like anyone can build an app. Everyone's got apps. Everyone brand's got five projects going on. Like it's, it's actually, I think, bad, um, for consumers because there's just too much to digest and there's too many options.

And so I do it this way, and I don't know, uh, hopefully it helps. But I look at things that people build, and for me, the first filter is: Do I care? Like is that something that I would use? And if it's not, great, proud of you. I don't care. Sorry, I don't have time. The second thing is then I w- I will go and look at the person that built it, and it's shallow and I, I feel bad about it, but it just is what it is.

Like if you're just some rando and you built some tool that's feels neat but it feels kind of redundant or something I could do myself, I don't care, and it, it sucks. If you're established though, and if you have a reputation and you have a backlog of good products or good work, and then you go say, like Hayden Winks, for example, or J.J.

Zachariason or Andrew Cooper, or at Footballguys, Jeff Bell, uh, Dave Kluge. Like, like, uh, just like the studs or someone that you respect, if they come out and say, "Hey, I vibe coded something," or, uh, well, they won't say that. They'll say, "I built a tool." And I'll be like, "So AI built you a tool. Great." Um, I don't care.

I'm like, "AI built you a tool? That's amazing. You built it. You built it with AI. That's awesome, and I value your tool, and I will check it out." And then the final thing is after I look at the tool, I ask myself whether I'd use it or not, and if the answer is no, I don't care. If the answer is yes, then there's a fourth question, which is: Is it worth paying this person for this service or Can I go build my own? 

But what I would not do is I would not just hand wave people. I think that's the worst thing you can do is see somebody that did something with AI and be like, "Eh." They did it with AI, I could do it. Maybe. Depends on how patient and deliberate and, uh, able to communicate you are, and those are not easy skills

Jeff: They are, they are not. Those take about a lifetime to learn. Um, you know, we earlier we were talking about like the free level of these tools, uh, ChatGPT, Claude, and the others and, and, and various levels of the paid. I'm on the lowest possible paid level at the moment. There are at least one tier, probably many above me that I don't need.

Get all that I need from that, that $20 tier. But where I wanted to kind of take this was a lot of what you're seeing, uh, at least initially from anyone who can build a tool, is they just kind of throw it out there and it's, it's free. Is there still value in paying for someone else's tool, even if this guy over here or this person over here or this kid over there has something that does something similar, uh, has some of the same ideas to it?

Is, should we just, should we be paying for, you know, some of the tools that are out there that people are building?

Ronnie: Yeah. Like if it's worth it to you, yeah. I, I wouldn't overthink that. I think that I-- it's, it's a trap that I fall into a lot as somebody that just lives and breathes AI all day. I'm constantly like I, I, I fight it, but I, I am like super judgy about things. I can't help it. I'm super just like, somebody did something with AI, let me go see if they actually did this the right way and blah, blah, blah.

Um, but no, I, I think the laws haven't changed on that personally. Like for your life and the way you delegate your money and your expenses, it's the same as it's always been. If the tool's good and it benefits you and it's w- you feel like it's worth paying for, pay for it. Like it's, it's-- I, I, I think that like everyone should be building things.

I will never get my dream. Most people aren't gonna wanna go build things. So if you're one of those people, there's nothing wrong with that at all. Nothing. I would, I would-- I'm, I'm gonna push you to like go build something and I'll keep poking you at it. But if in the end, if you're like my dad and you're like, "Ah, I've got money.

I don't care." Like great. Well, then go pay attention and if somebody builds something that you hadn't thought of and it's new and they're a random person, I would just do your homework, play with the tool, like feel 'em out a little bit before you pay. But I don't see any problem with paying for anything if, if it's beneficial

Jeff: y- you know, I like to support the content creators who are putting out good content and are doing it right. And if it's throwing somebody $5 a month to be a Substack subscriber or something like that, if you've got somebody who you like, who, who you appreciate their content, you use their content, it's valuable to you in some way, you know, find a way to just throw a little, little something at them if, if they don't have a paid subscription level.

Just at le- nothing else, at least retweet, thank them, say, "This is really helping me." Because even if you don't send any money, that raises profile because it says, "Okay, that guy there, that guy creating content right there, he's one or she's one that I wanna follow because they're going somewhere. They've got this right

let's, uh, get back to kind of where, where we was and, and switch over to league commissioners for a second. We do love to talk about commissioners and commissionering, uh, on this show. What are some of the ways that commissioners can start using AI to help them, uh, manage their leagues or, or at least add value to the league even if they don't need it for management purposes?

Ronnie: So this is one of the things that you can build on. Um, if you have a fun league, you can make... I don't know, like in one of my leagues, I have like a weekly report thing I made. Um, and it, it'll show up and do like a little trash talk report on the whole league and what happened. Um For commissioners, I think that that it's like the best use case. And if I-- Can I self-promo a little bit?

Jeff: Uh, yeah, please. Yeah, I think you've, you've got something you might be able to demonstrate. If you've got it up, uh, we can put it on screen. Otherwise, you can just talk about it

Ronnie: that. So I talked about it actually at the expo last year, and it's something, it's a product I've been working on and kind of admittedly like very tentative about rolling out for the last year and a half. But the number one problem in fantasy sports for people that wanna play is finding someone to run and manage their leagues.

The league commissioner is like, it's, it's... Some people like it. Most people are like, "Ah, nope. That sucks."

Jeff: Yeah, it's when you feel like the middle manager at that retail store you were

Ronnie: Yeah, you're basically HR and you don't get paid. And it's not, it's not HR with like you can't like close it out. It's your friends and your family in a lot of cases. So, um, I have built...

I'm not gonna show it in this episode. Um, we're not gonna roll it out until later in the off-season, probably mid-April or excuse me, mid-August. But Goodguy.ai has a couple of tools, and one of the tools that I've built that you can go build, like I, I, I don't have a problem with it. If you're wanna go build something like this, let me know.

I might hire you and you can build with me actually. Like the... It is, I have a tool called The Commish, and what it does is it goes and installs into your league chat. We can't do that on the platforms, so you have to have a league chat in like Slack or Discord or Telegram or GroupMe or whatever. But if you do, it goes in and it answers all of your league's questions, all that busy work about being commissioner.

"When's our draft? This guy made a trade. Can he do that?" Like all that stuff, it's got you covered. And then on top of that, it does active sentiment analysis on the league and it a- it, it, uh, tracks user activity. So like we've all, if you played man-- fantasy football for more than one year, the likelihood is you've been in a league where somebody checked out before the season ended, and it, it's, it's just part of the industry.

It goes and keeps tracks of that. It, it comes in and it will go in and identify like, "Jeff hasn't said anything in the league chat for four weeks, and in week one for four he was in here every two days. We need to go work on him, and we need to go like make this league interesting, and maybe his team sucks and he's out."

And, uh, it helps you with that league hygiene activity. It builds league reports. It comes in, you can go generate trash talk with it. It has a meme generator. There's a lot of little features into it that are upsells, but the idea is basically like being a commissioner sucks. It's basically a job that you don't get paid for.

Some people love that grind. Most people don't. So let's use AI to actually like automate it for all the, all of the pe- the m- the majority of people that don't wanna do that and actually haven't formed leagues because they don't have anyone to build it or are running leagues and hate it. We just have a tool that takes care of it.

And for you, if you're a commissioner in a league, like it's, it's pretty good, but you can also build smaller tools for yourself. And if your, if your league wants like a weekly report, great. Go build one. Have it automated. Um, you can use AI a league commissioner to make it like a genuine, like role-playing, fun, secondary to life escape experience, which I think is what we all are here for.

Like it's, this is our escape. Like fantasy football at its core is a social media canvas and a way for people to connect and stay in touch with their friends and escape the daily grind. And in some cases, even like it, it's not toxic, but like if you're a dad and you got kids, sometimes you wanna get away from the family for a Fantasy football gives you the ability to justify saying, "I'm not available.

It's Sunday. I'm watching football for six hours," and I have a reason. And,

Jeff: the word fantasy is literally in the title.

Ronnie: Yeah.

Jeff: Fantasy football. It, it, it's, it is an, it is an escape. And you're talking about what AI could do, talking about commissioners. I had Joey Wright on the show earlier, uh, this off-season talking about commissionering, and I asked him what he th- what I've-- what he thought was the ideal cadence that a commissioner should be talking to their league, whether it's in-season or out of season, and he said weekly.

And I nearly had a heart attack because I am nowhere near that kind of a cadence, and I consider myself to be a decent commissioner. Uh, and so, you know, I think that we are now to that point, some of the ideas that you have, if you're creative, you have ways that you wish you could communicate with your league and just don't have the time or the ability to do, that's the sort of thing that you go to Claude and say, "Hey, I have this idea.

I'm a league commissioner. My league is scattered across the country. They're in five different time zones. I wanna do these kinds of things. How, how can I help do that?" You'd be amazed at how quickly you'll be doing those things if you just get that, that little

Ronnie: Dude, I, I wish I could share it. It's-- I closed it down, but I run the uni- I'm, I'm a Vols fan, and being a weirdo, I've somehow figured out my way into like the Vols circles, and I now run the University of Tennessee's online annual fantasy football tournament. Um, The way we do it though, because it's a bunch of people, we basically, our twist is you draft during the season, and then when the playoffs start, there's no more roster movement, it's best ball. And we take all these different leagues together and we play best ball playoffs. And there is not a platform that exists that allows that.

It is not provided to anyone. So I had to go make a tool, and I tapped into the Sleeper API, so we play on Sleeper during the season. Guys, it, it really didn't take that much work, and I did it last year. This year, I think you could actually, if you gave it all the context and you just rambled a lot in one prompt, you could one-shot this.

But I built a live website that pulled our entire league's data, and it had a playoff bracket that was like live updating as the scores came in. It was amazing. It was something that three years ago I could have sold it to Sleeper as a feature. It was incredible, and it was easy to make. And it's not 'cause I'm...

I am an AI expert, but it wasn't easy 'cause I am one. It was easy 'cause the tech's gotten good

Jeff: Yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit about, we've, we've hinted at it a couple of times. Let's talk about, you know, what, what, for lack of a better word, I'm gonna say responsible use of AI is. You can define that however you want, including putting your own term on it. But, you know, and this could even be broader than just the fantasy sports industry.

We're gonna be talking about life here. What, what is the responsible use of AI?

Ronnie: I do. Jeff, it, it's a really hard question to answer when you're in it this deep. Um 'Cause I, I think out of the real-- outside of the really obvious stuff, there isn't, there isn't a responsible use. The, the proposition here is that the rules go to the wayside, and we all are able to work with each other and realize our dreams.

And a lot of like responsibility in business and online e-commerce and branding has to do with like playing ball with people that have been there before and walking around rules and like limits that people have set in place to protect their businesses and their brands and their industries. That's the whole point of AI is that that's out the door.

Like we're not, we're not there just yet. By 2030, like unless the government shows up and makes a bunch of laws, and then it becomes piracy, and it's like, okay, well, you have a law, but we're gonna get around it. I, I don't think laws get passed that limit people, and I, I don't... I think like just It, I, it's not the best answer, but just like try to be a good person about things.

Like that Scott Fish Bowl tool I built, I scraped like 80 websites and I told them and I linked back to the websites and I did it the right way. And on my, on my site I'm like, "Hey, here's where this data came from. Go click on this link and go read that article." And no one cared. No one. Not a single brand or content creator fussed at me for the Scott Fish Bowl tool and I was actually worried about it 'cause I, I did the unethical thing and I scraped websites, which is a no-no traditionally. But like even that as a no-no, it's not really, it's not really a no-no anymore. Like your site's getting scraped right now if you're on the internet. It's just a, it's part of playing ball. And so I would just say like, like the obvious like don't make bombs and

Jeff: Yes.

Ronnie: really like heinous other stuff that happens on the internet.

Like just stay out of all that. And if you're gonna go scrape people's work and you're gonna be relentless about it, I personally would not fuss at you. I would say go for it. Like that is-- People aren't used to it and people will get upset, but that is now the norm on the internet. That is gonna be commonplace in five years in a world by the way.

If your data's on the internet, people can have it. That's, that's always been the case, but now like the McDonald's burger flipper can also have it. It doesn't have to be like a Russian hacker that can come get it. And, um, I don't know, Jeff. That's a really, really tough question, man. I, I just don't, I don't think that there are rules and I don't think that's a bad thing. But like moral compass needs to be part of your experience on the internet and if you can maintain that, we're kind of in the Wild West again and, uh, I'm sure most people would disagree with me, but I don't know. I meet with people from OpenAI and Google every other month. I know like I know what the industry is actually doing and where this is going and it's, I think it's just a disadvantage to actually put rules and stipulations up in front of yourself with the internet. It's free range.

Jeff: Yeah, I mean, on the content side, you know, we kind of stood aghast decade or two ago as Google started to be able to drill really deeply down into what we were putting on the internet, at least on the, on the free side of the paywall. And you don't even need to now go to those websites. You- Google will just super summarize it for you.

But that was a huge company investing tremendous amount of resource to be able to do that. Now anybody could do it for their $20 a month if they wanna spend it. And so, so, you know, the, the, the Google-ification, the, the, the, uh, making content free is, is now at least freely available. And if it was free to begin with, it's just now much, much easier to find, uh, and manipulate and do something with.

So I'm, I'm with you. I love the idea that if you're going to, if you're gonna scrape some of this stuff, give them credit for having said it or put it out there in the first place and point back to it, um, just so that, you know, that work is, is, is still, you know, Your De'Zhaun Stribling example from, from earlier in, in the episode when we were talking.

I mean, if you, if you have 10, 12, 15 different fantasy analysts that you used in that and you were to put that out publicly, please mention the

15 

Ronnie: yes. Of course

Jeff: took it from. Even if you don't say specifically who said what, just say, you know, J.J. Zachariason and Dave Kluge and, and, Derek Brown, Jeff Blaylock, and all these people that you're using.

J- just put it there so that, you know, we, we know. That disclosure, I think, is, is one of the important things, that good people who are doing the right thing should be willing to disclose all that sort of stuff. They may not, but that there should be no question as to, you know, where did this come from? You should be able to have an answer if you, uh, if you're a good person, if you're doing it the right way, at least the way I think of as the right way, as responsible, is you, you disclose that.

You say, "Yeah, this is what I'm doing with this. This is where this came from. This is whose ideas these were, uh, and I'm now putting my lens on top of it," even if that lens is AI's lens. At some point still, I hope you're putting a lens on it, too, a- as the human. Um, so, you know, we're thinking about all these things that we can do.

What are the things that we just as-- And we'll go back all the way down here to dynasty fantasy football so that we're, we're leaving all the bigger world

Ronnie: Sure, sure

Jeff: Go, go back into our fantasy world here for a second. What are things that dynasty managers should not be handing off to AI, whether it be, you know, roster management or scouting or, or any, any aspect of this?

What should we not be letting AI do for us?

Ronnie: Do not hand over all of your decisions holistically to AI at the very baseline. I built that tool I showed you guys earlier. I haven't made a single pick based on that tool. I have made my pis- picks based on what that tool told me, and I've done my own thing.

And so a lot of my picks have actually gone against the tool, but I've used it to inform me on what the industry's saying and so on and so forth, and I would just use it that way. Like use it as a informational resource, not a deciding factor. And if you just keep it in that lens, if you're on the like $20 a month to free plans, it's great.

It'll help you make informed decisions. It'll give you more context. It'll help you like just absorb more information in a quicker time span than you could have previously, and that's a real advantage. Um, but I would not ever, like I will not make fantasy football decisions because of what ChatGPT told me unless I'm paying big bucks for it.

And even then, I'm still probably not gonna do exactly what it said unless it actually adds up and I'm like, "Okay, that I agree."

Jeff: Is there a point where, you know, the game of fantasy football just sort of ceases to be, you know, a, a battle of 10 or 12 or 14 or however many people in a league, you know, trying to, to manage their way to a championship, and it just sort of becomes machines battling on our behalf?

Ronnie: Um, no. We talked about that at the expo last year actually. It was a great question from the audience. And I think that for our industry in particular, never going away because the core value proposition and the excitement comes from the, like, jeopardy that we play as a human being with these unknown statistics.

So we go in and we like, we make all these decisions about players, and then in the end, what has to happen for us to be correct is exactly what we saw on the spreadsheet formulating into real life activity with 22 human beings in 70 to 80 snaps a game, all playing out exactly like we thought they would, and that never happens.

So for fantasy sports, like we just, we have, we have the ultimate buffer. Our industry is built around communal human competition and activity, 

no, it will never happen. What will happen is we'll get to a point where like the baseline for success in fantasy is automated and like, like the tacos in your league, you're, you will genuinely be like, "You're an idiot." Like, "You're a taco 'cause you didn't even use ChatGPT to help you and your team sucked."

But we'll probably get to a point where you can like ride the mid-tier with AI and then it's gonna fall back to what it always has, which is like the human being unique, like crunching of the data and the scenario and us flying by the seat of our pants in the end being like, "Well, I actually, I think this is gonna happen."

And even the num- the numbers don't specifically say that. I have more context I can't put into the numbers that allows me to make this decision that's more informed than the spreadsheet 

Jeff: fantasy football has been, to some extent, a- an arms race as people in the league try to find leverages and advantages. And, you know, at first it was reading box scores and out of the newspaper for people who remember what either of those things are.

Uh, that was kind of how, how this all began. Uh, and, and then it's evolved, and I'll just, I'll, I'll plug my company here for a second, the one I work for. You know, if one guy in a league uses Footballguys and nobody else does, the one guy is going to be in a really good position. May not win every year 'cause fantasy football is still random, uh, but they will be in a better position to do that.

If all 12 are using Footballguys, then, then we are all back to even again. We're all back to level, and so we're looking then for that next advantage. To me, this, this AI, at least as of today, July 16th, 2026, at 5:20 in the afternoon Mountain Time, as of right this moment, um, it, it seems like AI is able to do some of those things for us a little faster than we used to if we'd go look at Footballguys and three or four other sites and try to put an opinion together about a player.

We can now ask AI to do that for us, but we still have to make the decision, uh, we still have to do that. And I think that the people who are willing to, to take the, that opportunity and use those tools are going to end up with an advantage over the ones who are not. And the lesson here, I think, is if you are dead set against AI and don't want any part of it in your fantasy football leagues, get used to losing because It's still the, that arms race.

You need to have something, I think, to be competitive with some of the other people. Is the margin gonna be huge? No, I don't think so, 'cause again, it's a random sport. A- and a lot of what, a lot of what we do and talk about all just kind of makes sense. I mean, you know, De'Zhaun Stribling is probably going to be the number two wide receiver in San Francisco because somebody has to be.

Uh, a- and he's the guy. Uh, never mind they've got McCaffrey and Kittle and Evans who are all gonna hog way more targets than Stribling's gonna get, but he's still gonna be, he's still gonna be the guy at number two. Don't take AI to know that. You can just look at a depth chart and figure that out. But,

but you have to look at the depth chart to know that.

A- a- and every, every ability to get additional information can help set you up, and so I'm with you. I don't see this being a battle of machines battling on our behalf with our names on them. I, I think it's still very much a human sport, but if you're not taking advantage of some of the opportunities and the tools that are there to help you with that task, you should expect that, uh, you're gonna lose compet- whatever competitive edge you might have had, you're gonna lose very quickly and, and you're not gonna make it up unless you, you start doing some of these kinds of things.

So with that monologue, uh, let me turn it back to you and just say, as we were gonna wrap up here, if a dynasty manager's been, been hanging with us this whole conversation, they can take exactly one thing away from it a- and, and use it, do it, do whatever that is. Whatever that, whatever the one thing you want them to remember they actually can do something with it, what, what should that be?

Ronnie: For $20 a month, you can now with AI actually efficiently save time and improve your performance in fantasy football. You're not able to go use AI to make all your decisions for you. Like that, that, you can't do that. But If you do a lot of research, you can cut that research time in half and do probably a better job actually if you're able to tap in.

So that would be my takeaway. Um, don't count on it for everything, but if you're looking for surgical efficiency gains. And I, I would go in and analyze every part of my dynasty process, and each one of them I would ask, "Can AI do this quicker and better for me, or can it do it quicker and the same?" And if the answer is yes to either of those, pay $20 and go figure out how to activate the tool for it.

Jeff: If we, uh, if we do this episode again one year from today or so, what will we be talking about? What will have changed in that year? How will the landscape have changed for us that the conversation we're having today is quaint, and now we're talking about something quite different?

Ronnie: Um We're moving into the stage of AI where I've, I've traditionally been like, eh, like that starts to get a little bit gray. Um, I think that if we did this next year, we would be talking about specifically which tools we can use to activate solutions for quickly, because it will just be commonplace. Um, and then I th- I think one of the things this industry is lagging behind on a little bit is, uh, internal architecture and data provision for AI. So it wouldn't shock me if at this time next year, like Sleeper's API is paid and no longer free, and all of these data sources are behind paid gates because everyone's building on top of them.

And there is a new, like massively fruitful vertical within our, our industry that is data distribution. And, um, we already have that with Sports Radar and, uh, a couple other like massive companies, but it wouldn't shock me if we see that. And we're, we're talking more about like which data set we're building on and which tool we're working through, and not about what we can do with them, 'cause we all know we can do whatever we want.

It's more about like, which are the best avenues to go get a, get this accomplished in.

Jeff: That's great. This has been a really, really fun conversation, Ronnie. It's always fun talking to you. We just happened to hit record this time. We usually do not, and I'm looking forward to seeing you in person in three dimensions next week as we are recording this the week that this episode will come out.

The expo's a couple of days later. Um, so before we, uh, we go, um, you know, where can folks find you a- and, uh, reach out to you if they have questions or, uh, or, or just wanna show what, what they're doing and see, see how they could make that better?

Ronnie: Um, I'm on X @Ronnie, R-O-N-N-I-E, A Evans. Should be on the screen somewhere. Um, Goodguy.ai is literally that on X. It's Goodguy.ai. Um, and I'm not anywhere else. I, I, I am on LinkedIn. I probably will take three weeks to respond if you hit me up on there. I, I hate social media. I like-- all of it annoys me, and so I, I use X. Um, but that's where to find me

Jeff: All right. Well, thanks so much, Ronnie, and thanks you to everyone who has, uh, watched or listened to us today. Uh, if you've got comments, you wanna talk about how you use the AI, whether it's in fantasy football or something, just you put those in. Uh, if you're on YouTube, I answer all the comments, uh, personally.

Uh, I bet if I pointed out Ronnie would answer some, uh, as well. Uh, and, and we'll do that. We, uh, we love the engagement. Uh, please like, please subscribe. Uh, if you're over on Apple, a five-star review, five-star rating and a nice review would really help this show grow. Uh, and also just sharing us, uh, talking about us on the social media that Ronnie can't stand, uh, just go ahead and talk us up on there.

Uh, that's also really helpful. It's like Ronnie said earlier in the episode, you know, if you see someone doing some good content, just shout 'em out. If you can do that for me, that would be, that'd be great. If you do that for Goodguy.ai as well, that would be really, really wonderful. And otherwise, we will see you next week on Dynasty Compass

[theme music]