Bi-weekly · Brian Miguel · Damian D'Souza

The lifetime
athlete

A podcast on the participant economy, the athlete-creator economy, and the future of sports capital.

73 million American adults compete. 60 million kids. Together they spend $150 billion a year to train, travel, and recover — and no fund is organized around them. This show is a two-year argument that they should be.

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The market, plainly

73M: American adults who compete; Physical Activity Council, 2024
60M: Kids in organized youth sport; Aspen Institute Project Play
$150B: Spent each year to compete, train, recover; Epic Sports VC estimate
$77B: Youth sports market; Wintergreen Research
$1.7B: NIL market, 2025; Opendorse

What the show is

An essay, an interview, and two hosts landing the plane — every other week.

Brian Miguel and Damian D'Souza open each episode with a written argument, take it to someone who has to live with the consequences, and then disagree with each other on the record.

35–50 min. Essay, then interview, then co-host landing. Video-first on YouTube; audio on Spotify and Apple. It exists because the money in sport is discussed as media rights and franchise value, while the larger, stranger economy of people who actually play goes unpriced.

Editorial architecture

Sports capital & markets

Is sport a real venture asset class, and where is capital actually flowing? Fund formation, exits, and comps to adjacent categories.

Lead: Damian, with Brian leading athlete-capital episodes

The eight to eighty

The $150B Americans spend every year to compete, train, and recover — from youth sport through masters competition.

Lead: Brian

The athlete-creator economy

Athletes as creators and creators as athletes. NIL economics, league-versus-creator dynamics, the death of traditional endorsement.

Lead: Damian

Latest

Founding cohort · before episode one

Ten episodes are written and scheduled. None have shipped.

The canon in progress is public: every episode number, its lane, the question it asks, and whether the guest is confirmed. Read it before you decide whether this is serious.

Read the canon

The hosts

Brian Miguel

Builds inside the thesis

Brian is the operator on the show. He spends his days inside the eight-to-eighty problem — the person who competes at forty, pays for coaching they will never meet in person, and renews for capability rather than novelty. He leads the athlete-capital episodes and the participant-economy lane, and his questions tend to be about unit economics, retention, and whether a business survives its second cohort. When an argument on the show turns abstract, he is the one who asks what it costs and who pays it.

Damian D'Souza

Reads the ecosystem

Damian is the analyst on the show. He tracks how capital moves across sport — fund formation, exits, league economics, and the widening gap between what athletes are paid and what they own. He leads the markets lane and the athlete-creator lane, and he arrives with comparables. Where Brian tests a claim against an operating reality, Damian tests it against the last ten transactions in the category, and he is comfortable concluding that a story everyone likes is not supported by a single one of them.

One email. Every other Tuesday.

The list is the only audience this show owns. Everything else — the video, the feed, the clips — is rented from a platform that can change its mind.

Canon in progress

All ten episodes

The lifetimeathlete