Bitcoin & Sports Teams Are The Best Hedge Against Inflation | Chris Kelly

Chris Kelly is a co-owner of the Sacramento Kings, founder of Kelly Investments, and a former Facebook executive. In this conversation, we break down why he owns bitcoin, how sports teams and bitcoin both work as scarce assets, Meta's big AI bets, and where AI and crypto are converging. We also discuss Sports One, his new venture bringing minority sports team stakes to the public markets. ==================== Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates investment strategies across Stocks, Commodities, ETFs and Crypto. Whether you’re rotating into AI & Gold, allocating to the S&P 500, or accumulating Bitcoin, Arch Public executes your plan 24/7 without ever taking custody of your assets or funds. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com, and start your FREE automated trading strategy! ==================== Uphold is the easiest way to buy and sell crypto unlike any other platform allowing you to trade in just one step between any supported asset. Check them out at https://www.uphold.com/pomp/This video includes a paid sponsorship with Uphold. I’m compensated by Uphold for promoting its products and services and may receive commissions from referrals. Terms apply. Not available in all jurisdictions. Digital assets are risky and may result in the total loss of your capital. ==================== 0:00 - Intro1:08 - Why Chris owns bitcoin2:10 - Bitcoin vs sports teams as scarce assets5:53 - Inside the Kings arena (tech, data center & ETH mining)10:07 - Meta's AI spending & falling token costs14:59 - OpenAI vs Anthropic & AI bubble risk16:48 - Interest rates & the Fed18:40 - Open source AI & Meta's strategy22:05 - Investing across the AI stack & blockchain25:34 - AI & crypto convergence 34:20 - Sports One: democratizing team ownership41:01 - Equity vs token44:00 - How sports & markets are changing

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you've got an insurance question, you could talk to the butcher at your local grocery store. He'd probably talk about trimming the fat, but it'd be about your brisket, not your insurance policies. Or you could talk to your local GEICO agent. They offer personalized assistance in finding the choicest cuts of coverage for all your insurance needs, which means more money for filet mignon, or if you're a vegetarian, tofu le mignon. To find a GEICO agent near you, visit GEICO.com/local.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Honey, that flu keeping you up? Did you take Nyquil Intense Flu?

• 0:34Speaker 02

  Nah, I got this. Okay, I don't got this.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, you need Nyquil Intense Flu.

• 0:42Speaker 03

  Undo your flu with Nyquil Intense Flu. Nyquil Intense Flu provides powerful relief of your flu symptoms so you can sleep.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  You do got this.

• 0:52Speaker 03

  Nyquil Intense Flu, the nighttime sniffling, aching, aching fever, best sleep with a flu medicine. Use as directed. Keep out of reach of children.

• 0:59Speaker 04

  It is a hedge against inflation. I think that people are rightfully thinking of it that way. And then I think it's also a global store of value and it's sort of easily accessible from anywhere to anywhere. And it's just incredibly powerful in that way. And so, you know, once it became, you know, accepted as a standard, once enough people said, okay, this is going to work and the validator network works and everything else, it became, you know, the standard store of value.

• 1:28Anthony Pompliano?

  What's going on, guys? Today we have a great conversation with Chris Kelly. He's a co-owner of the Sacramento Kings. He's the founder of Kelly Investments and he's a former Facebook executive. In this conversation, we talk about why he owns Bitcoin, why he likes artificial intelligence, why he owns sports teams, and a brand new idea that he's bringing to the market to go and take minority sports ownership stakes and bring them to the public market. There's a lot packed into this conversation. Chris is someone who's been around the technology industry for a very long time. He understands a lot of what's happening, both in terms of the trends, but the underlying technology itself. And he has made investments in a whole multitude of different areas and industries. And I think that you're going to learn a lot from him. Here's my conversation with Chris Kelly. All right, Chris, you are the co-owner of the Sacramento Kings.

• 2:10Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And you also like Bitcoin, which is going to get everyone very excited. So explain a little bit, maybe your journey with Bitcoin and why you like this asset so much.

• 2:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, I mean, I think that it is a hedge against inflation. I think that people are rightfully thinking of it that way. And then I think it's also a global store of value and it's sort of easily accessible from anywhere to anywhere. And that it's just incredibly powerful in that way. And so, you know, once it became, you know, accepted as a standard, once enough people said, okay, this is going to work and the validator network works and everything else, it became, you know, the standard store of value. The same way that, you know, Ethereum turned out to be a, you know, when Vitalik, you know, went deep on Bitcoin, decided that there are some extra features that it might need, that's where Ethereum comes from. And then, you know, I think people have been kind of

• 3:01Speaker 04

  riffing on themes in those areas ever since with other coins. But Bitcoin and Ethereum are kind of well established throughout the world at this point.

• 3:10Anthony Pompliano?

  What I find interesting is like, you almost have this barbell strategy. I don't even know if you've thought about it this way, but like Bitcoin is something that benefits from inflation. And so it is scarce, it is digital, it is decentralized, it is non-sovereign, all those assets, aspects, and it's done very well over the years. The Sacramento Kings or any professional sports team of at least four major leagues, it's not decentralized. It's actually highly centralized. It's not digital, like there's real estate and teams and humans and, you know, merchandise, et cetera. But it is super scarce. And so it's almost like you're barbelling and like you have a digital store of value, you've got an analog store of value, you've got a centralized, a decentralized. Like, did you think through that? Or you're just like, I just want to own the team because it's cool?

• 3:53Speaker 04

  So, I mean, again, the scarcity and the availability, although I think that there's unbelievable mind share that teams have in people's lives. And that is a powerful, powerful thing. And it's also an area where people come together at a time that our politics can be very divisive and there are all these challenges that we have in terms of the way that we get along. People figure out how to have useful and sometimes heated, but also decent rivalries around sports. And so, you know, for growing up with Giants Dodgers and all that and seeing, you know, growing up in the Bay Area and never really become a Warriors fan because they just weren't very good when I was, when I was young.

• 4:37Anthony Pompliano?

  So be a Brooklyn Nets fan.

• 4:39Speaker 04

  Exactly right.

• 4:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Don't kill me, don't.

• 4:42Speaker 04

  It was, it was pretty easy to do the Kings deal. And for us also, it was keeping it in Sacramento. There was a Seattle-based group that included Steve Ballmer that was going to buy the team and move into Seattle. And we said, look, we think Seattle should be, have an NBA team, they just can't have ours, right?

• 4:58Anthony Pompliano?

  It's pretty good.

• 4:59Speaker 04

  And then Ballmer went and bought the Clippers and drove the enterprise value of teams up markedly, which we thought was good, too.

• 5:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's a great, great, great thing. Now, when you're thinking about these types of investments, you know, I think most people look at Bitcoin as a long-term investment in their portfolio, but it has a day-to-day price to it. It's liquid. You could go hit the sell button today. There's a lot of discipline that it takes in holding. Sports teams are very different, right? You know, we literally are seeing someone right now in the professional sports ownership world who needs cash and, you know, he's going through a whole process and he's like, hey, speed this up. And it's taking months.

• 5:34Speaker 04

  He said, well, they got the Chelsea thing done.

• 5:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  So that's on top of the Lakers.

• 5:38Anthony Pompliano?

  But their, like, illiquidity, it almost feels like that is a feature here because people are forced to hold for long periods of time. And we've seen those teams do really, really well over time.

• 5:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's definitely been, you know, in its part because of the scarcity, because it's a trophy asset, all these different things contribute to the increase in value. And it's, it's a hard process to go through to actually become an owner, whether majority or control, in these teams, both the teams themselves and the leagues and, you know, all of the, it's, it's never clear when these things are going to come up and how. And so you have to act quickly when they do. And luckily, in our Kings case, we, you know, we had a set of dynamics that were very favorable to our group being put together. And we had a mayor at the time who was a former NBA player and very much wanted to keep the team

• 6:29Speaker 04

  in Sacramento. And we had the, the league held our feet to the fire quite aggressively and said we had to commit to get a new arena done in three years. And otherwise, we had to sell the team back to the NBA at cost.

• 6:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, really?

• 6:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was one of the demands at the end. And we met it. We got the arena done in two years. And it's still rated the number one arena in the NBA by ESPN, which we're very proud of.

• 6:53Anthony Pompliano?

  So I went to a game, this is probably 2019 or so. Your partner Vivek, who is also a co-owner.

• 7:02Speaker 04

  He's, he's the controlling owner. We should be clear. He's, he's, I'm a smaller partner, but he, and he is effectively my boss, but he's a good friend.

• 7:12Anthony Pompliano?

  I think, I think he would say you guys are partners. But I went and I got the opportunity to go out and see the stadium and I was blown away. I've been to a lot of sports stadiums. And I think that my takeaway was basically the technology that was integrated into the stadium, the sustainability, but not like, kind of like the woke sustainability stuff that's kind of like all appearance and no substance.

• 7:33Speaker 04

  Right.

• 7:34Anthony Pompliano?

  This was almost like no appearance and, you know, all substance.

• 7:37Speaker 04

  We were the first lead platinum arena. So we wanted the certification. We, and we jumped through the hoops that you have to do to get that. We put a tier four data center in the arena because we also knew we needed to run the hotel condo tower that we were building next door in the mall that we were refurbishing. And we, we started mining Ethereum in the data center on the early side of that.

• 7:58Anthony Pompliano?

  That may or may not be why I was invited out there was to say, should we do this type of activity?

• 8:03Speaker 04

  Exactly. Exactly. Well, we had a great visionary, you know, CTO in Ryan Montoya, who, you know, pushed for us to do that. But we had an ownership group that was very technologically oriented. So with my history at Facebook, with Vivek's at Tibco, with the Jacobs family at Qualcomm. So we had a bunch of very tech-friendly and tech, almost obsessive owners. So we wanted to have, you know, something that would, you know, sort of be easily upgradable. And building a data center in the arena was part of that vision.

• 8:33Anthony Pompliano?

  I also think that there was this element of like, when you have an ownership group that is doing this, like investing in Bitcoin, building a stadium, owning the team, there was a lot of education and like knowledge transfer to the players, which I thought was pretty interesting. And my wife would tell the story that we were walking through and getting a tour and Vlade Divac showed up and she was like, you look like you're from Eastern Europe. My wife's from Bulgaria, right? She had no clue who he was. And then she watched a documentary. She's like, I love that guy. You know, he's got this amazing story.

• 9:05Speaker 04

  Vlade still works with us pretty extensively and he's just a delightful human being.

• 9:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 9:09Speaker 04

  He's funny. He's, you know, great to have around.

• 9:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and I think one of my takeaways from this was you basically have technologists that are running this team and it seems to be going pretty well in terms of the corporate side.

• 9:23Speaker 04

  Not so, not as much as we would like on the court, but.

• 9:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, that was going to be a part of the question.

• 9:28Speaker 04

  We're getting back to that.

• 9:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Is, if you think about, let's take the New York Knicks as maybe an example, right? I think James Dolan got a ton of, you know, bad press and, and a lot of attacks and critiques, et cetera. They just won the NBA championship, stocks up, you know, 2X. I hear a lot of people talking about, about James Dolan right now.

• 9:46Speaker 04

  Right.

• 9:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, there's still the hardcore Knicks fans that like never forgive him for some crazy thing he said or whatever. But for the most part, winning solves a lot of this stuff. What I do think is interesting is the NBA in particular has really gotten good at, there's money made inside of the arena, but then there is the real estate, there is, you know, the data set, like all of these other components. I stayed in the hotel that was attached to the stadium.

• 10:11Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 10:12Anthony Pompliano?

  And I was blown away. I was like, oh, this is crazy. And so if you then look at this as like, okay, hold on a second. Bitcoin, kind of hard asset, benefits from inflation. Team, scarce asset, benefits from a lot of the debasement stuff.

• 10:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Real estate. In a very weird way, somebody who comes from the early days of Facebook, you got a hell of a lot of exposure to like hard assets that are, you know, kind of insulating you and your partners from, uh, from the inflation in the basement.

• 10:41Speaker 04

  Yeah. And well, and we thought that, uh, you know, the, the real estate side of things, if the, if the team itself was not generating the cash, it's turned out to generate as well for a variety of different reasons. Um, the, the real estate was always a safety play. One of the questions I had to ask myself was, is this just a vanity investment? Is everything else? But it made sense from a hardcore economic perspective. The, the real estate was always a, a useful hedge.

• 11:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, if we think of real estate, uh, in the AI industry, this has become a huge hot topic. Uh, you know, Facebook, where you worked, I worked there much later than you did. Um, they are making immense amount of capex investments and going, you know, pretty hard into this.

• 11:22Speaker 04

  And it hit the stock hard for a while and now it's not.

• 11:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Correct.

• 11:25Speaker 04

  Everyone's realizing, oh, those are actually useful investments that you can generate cash off of easily.

• 11:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And well, I think that's part of this is like the capex investments that were required for the stuff. Were, I mean, they were bonker numbers, right? And people were like, you're going to do what?

• 11:39Speaker 04

  You're going to take CapEx from 40 billion to 60 billion? Yeah, exactly.

• 11:44Anthony Pompliano?

  By the way.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  If you're making 20 billion a quarter, you can do that, right?

• 11:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Correct. Well, but I think a lot of people had questions. Is there going to be an ROI off of this? Now it seems like there's really two things happening. One, things like Muse get released and, uh, for those that don't know, it's like a personal assistant that Facebook has released. Um, by all accounts, I think pretty widely accepted as, you know, one of the best, if not the best personal assistant.

• 12:06Speaker 04

  In, in two, three weeks of release, like.

• 12:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Crazy, crazy, right? And we were talking before this that, uh, there are two things I took away from my time at Facebook. Facebook is amazing at doing all of the growth and analytics work, and they are amazing at building consumer products. And this is the, you know, kind of culmination of those two activities shows up in this. But if you go through the rest of the industry, Google, Amazon, you know, Grok and SpaceX and, you know, all these, they're all making these investments.

• 12:33Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 12:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think now the market is starting to realize, hey, they're all going to get an ROI off this.

• 12:39Speaker 04

  It, it is available because the demand is intense and AI has driven a lot of that. Although actually it's going to have to get a lot more efficient over time.

• 12:48Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you mean by that?

• 12:49Speaker 04

  One of the companies that I'm backing now is using, you know, fundamental brain research to try to understand better how to both more efficiently do the processing that you're talking about in AI data, data centers, and also increase the explainability of what go, when things go wrong with AI, when there's hallucinations and stuff just doesn't work, what, what, how do we understand better what went wrong there? Um, and it's, you know, the, the key insight that it operates from is we're building, you know, two, two gigawatt data centers to, to do all this AI work. The human brain runs on 20 watts of power. Like it's the, you, you gotta get more efficient with the way that you're using the power

• 13:31Speaker 04

  and all of the, the inputs that go into it over time and to make it more, you know, cheap over time. So there will be ROI on all of these things because the, the, you know, demand for compute, it's not infinite, but it's kind of close to infinite right now.

• 13:46Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I think the hardest part is we don't know what the like upper limit is. And so this like kind of sort of infinite, I don't know. The more that comes online, the more gets consumed and it almost is this like reflexive thing. Where we've also seen on the token costs, like I, I shared a chart recently. Um, Grok came out with their like latest model and they, you know, plot out, but you can toggle on the chart between cost, efficiency, you know, kind of like compute power or tokens. Every single model, if you look, is just down and to the right. And it's just like the price war is on.

• 14:20Speaker 04

  It is indeed. And when you've, you know, invested the type of capex that the big companies have, you can do that. And that's the way that this market's going to go.

• 14:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Is you think token costs just continue to fall?

• 14:33Speaker 04

  Token costs continue to fall. I think that, you know, you, you have more widespread usage of the, the various frontier models and, and, you know, I don't think that, that, you know, anyone's revenue is going to go down because the usage is going to go up so much. But, um, there will be a point at which, um, you know, revenue peaks.

• 14:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Arch Public. Arch Public has just expanded its agentic trading platform beyond crypto. So pay attention, this is a big one. Now they are automating strategies across stocks, commodities and ETFs. And I think that this is going to be huge. You can now automatically take profits when one market hits new all time highs and rotate that capital into other markets, showing more opportunity. Whether you're rotating capital into AI stocks, gold, if you're investing in the S and P 500, or you're accumulating Bitcoin, Arch Public brings real discipline and automation to your investment strategy. Additionally, they've launched a powerful new tax loss harvesting tool. With crypto being so volatile and its exemption from the wash sale rule, Arch Public can offset gains with losses without compromising your long-term positions. It's exactly what every serious investor does.

• 15:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Institutional grade automation that works across every major asset class. There's no more emotional trading, no more missing tax opportunities, just smarter, hands-free execution of your preferred strategies. Go to archpublic.com right now, connect with their team, set up a time, bring your accountant if you'd like, then you can learn what automated trading can do for you. Archpublic.com. What, what about in terms of, um, we haven't seen the financials yet, right? But I, I had to guess, OpenAI and Anthropic have two different customer cohorts. There are customers who adopt their models and usage continues to go up and the cost, you know, per token, if you will, falls. But the like net dollar retention of that customer is like through the roof.

• 16:21Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 16:22Anthony Pompliano?

  There's another cohort of customer though, like we have a AI CFO product that we've built and we are much more in the like own your own intelligence camp. And so we started off using the frontier models and then we've really built a lot of our own technology. We've trained our own stuff. Everything is kind of unified and customized for our specific use case. Our token consumption, like number of tokens.

• 16:42Speaker 04

  Has just got down.

• 16:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Completely, because the economic incentive is like, we can do computations for 97% less than we could with the frontier.

• 16:50Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 16:51Anthony Pompliano?

  As long as you have similar or better level of intelligence for your specific use case, you would do it.

• 16:58Speaker 04

  So the verticalization of AI is exactly the way that things are.

• 17:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And so those users, like the net dollar retention actually looks horrible for these large language models, but they're probably from a volume perspective, that cohort is still growing.

• 17:10Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 17:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Cause they're signing so many people up.

• 17:12Speaker 04

  That's exactly right.

• 17:13Anthony Pompliano?

  So in a weird way, whether your actual usage of, or processing of tokens is growing or on a per customer basis, it's decreasing, but your volume is making up for it. These businesses still seem to have quite a bit of runway.

• 17:25Speaker 04

  I think they've got a fair amount of runway to go still, but, but there is a limit. Uh, at the end of the day, everyone's saying, well, when, when, when does it turn bubbly? And the answer is probably not yet, but will we know exactly when it does? And, and is that at a, you know, three X, a five X, a 10 X, you know, uptick from here? And well, I, I don't think we know yet, but I don't think we've hit there yet.

• 17:48Anthony Pompliano?

  So if you go back to 2021, which is probably for especially a lot of the younger investors, that was the first really like regime shift from zero percent interest rate environment. All of a sudden, hey, market is crashing, what goes on? And probably the one thing you could point to is the Fed raised interest rates.

• 18:06Speaker 04

  Right.

• 18:07Anthony Pompliano?

  And they telegraphed it in November of 2021, they started talking about it. In March of 22, they started and they did it very aggressively and, and they kind of did what they said they were going to do, which a lot of people just didn't believe them. If you go back to 99, 2000, kind of similar story, not perfectly, but still like interest rates were a huge piece of the story.

• 18:27Speaker 04

  Right.

• 18:28Anthony Pompliano?

  The Fed just raised interest rates 25 basis points.

• 18:30Speaker 04

  And then telegraphed, they telegraphed that they were going to too, which is the interesting part of this, contra the president who appointed the new Fed head.

• 18:39Anthony Pompliano?

  So also I've seen the charts, the business cycle and the global liquidity tend to be about every four years. Uh, well, four years ago, five years ago was the last time that we kind of peaked. Are you worried at all?

• 18:55Speaker 04

  Concerned, but not worried is the way that I would put it.

• 18:59Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the difference?

• 19:00Speaker 04

  I think that there's a, you know, I don't think that we're going to have a radical war on inflation that, you know, causes a true, a real spike in interest rates from here. I think that there might be another hike and then it sort of settles in. And some of it is the counterbalancing that, that, you know, the president trying to jawbone it down. But I also think that the fundamental health of the economy that sits underneath, um, a lot of the investment that's been driven will, will, you know, not cause too much inflation. And we had this very COVID driven inflation last time. I don't think we have that factor at this point, although, you know, war could substitute for COVID and that, that's not a good thing for anyone.

• 19:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, if you think in the AI field specifically, it does seem like also some of these large players are taking very different approaches. Some are truly closed source, kind of American model approach. Facebook Meta, taking more of a little bit of an open source, you know, type approach.

• 19:56Speaker 04

  And, and, and after sort of doing a restart to say, we're going to do frontier models too, but then we're going to open source them, which is interesting, right?

• 20:03Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think about that strategy?

• 20:04Speaker 04

  I think it's been, uh, look, I, I think open source strategies, and from the very beginning of the company, um, we believed in open source, um, and, and in open sourcing, a lot of the things that we were doing in terms of performing, improving performance on the internet. Um, we think that that's a, a healthy way to make sure that, you know, costs are reasonable. And if you look at, I mean, Linux Apache stacks still run the backbone of web servers everywhere. It's, open source is a critical part of internet success. But you figure out what your secret sauce on top of that is. And for Facebook, it was personalization and, and, you know, and personal contact and having a, a view of the social graph, um, that, you know, they may have gotten away from a little bit for a while and talking about the metaverse and things like that.

• 20:46Speaker 04

  But I think they're pretty firmly back to personally as the AI and then AI as it relates to your social group. Um, and that's, and I think that makes it an exciting time for them. But mostly open source is, is a way that drives value throughout the ecosystem. And you can still find ways to be, you know, immensely profitable, um, in those, in those contexts, while supporting a, a community around, uh, around the software that you're running.

• 21:13Anthony Pompliano?

  The other aspect of Facebook that I think people maybe forget is 15-ish years ago, can they make money on mobile?

• 21:21Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 21:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Massive question.

• 21:23Speaker 04

  It was just at the time of the IPO and, and sort of, you know, affected the stock and the marketplace view of the company for when 2012, when they went, I think it was 2012 when they went public finally. And then, you know, obviously mobile turned into this massive monetization and, and, you know, another, you know, set of data that gets collected about where people are and, and how they're operating, and how they're interacting with, you know, other people and businesses in that, in that stack.

• 21:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, the question at the time was, can they monetize mobile? Now, I think that people don't question whether Facebook can make money.

• 22:03Speaker 04

  Right.

• 22:04Anthony Pompliano?

  They don't charge a consumer subscription for the personal assistant.

• 22:08Speaker 04

  Right.

• 22:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Because I think they understand the one thing that Silicon Valley legends understand, consumers don't like paying for stuff.

• 22:15Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 22:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And Facebook is an advertising business.

• 22:17Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 22:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And they're real good at it. And if you're handing over your email, your calendar, your Uber, your DoorDash, your, name whatever accounts people are putting into here, I mean, this is like Facebook's, you know, dream.

• 22:34Speaker 04

  Well, I mean,

• 22:35Anthony Pompliano?

  From targeting.

• 22:36Speaker 04

  Google figured that out with Gmail, you know, sort of when they, when they launched that, you know, well back in, what, it was 2001, I think it was. So, you know, this is a tried and true Silicon Valley story, still primarily an advertising business. And when we started to recruit a number of people from Google at Facebook, I thought that was a smart thing to do. I think that there was a, an understanding there that was going to be, you know, build a very valuable business and one that worked very well.

• 23:04Anthony Pompliano?

  It, it feels to me also like there is this really big opportunity in AI in particular to play multiple aspects of the stack, right? And so you've got, you know, kind of power land, data centers, you have the chips and all that, but then you've got the applications. How do you think about investing across that stack? Are you just like, hey, I want to own as much across it as I can? Or do you kind of pick?

• 23:26Speaker 04

  I think infrastructure is, is still a great, you know, set of businesses that you can find that are maximizing, you know, value in parts of the stack. And so I've been happy to, to do, the, the main investment, the fund that I run is focused on blockchain based businesses because I angel to Alchemy, which is a huge infrastructure provider in the space. And I believe very much in the way that blockchain based businesses will be, you know, sort of taking over aspects of the infrastructure stack over, over time. You need to have distributed trust in the numbers of, of every enterprise and blockchains are the best way to do that. You need to make sure that you have provenance checked of, of what AI is generating.

• 24:07Speaker 04

  And, and that you can trace it back to, you know, is it a human doing, is it AI, is it an agent? All of these different things, blockchains are an easy way to trace that. So I think that, that, the, those infrastructure plays are all going to do great. I think that there will be consumer, the verticalized consumer plays and there will be verticalized business plays for each of the AIs and specialty, you know, players and, and, you know, whether it's finance, intelligence or things like that. You know, I, I look for, I look for great founders more than anything else. And so I've done some things that are a little bit further afield, have done a little bit of hardware here and there, you know, the guys at Etched, who've done a fantastic job of building new chips. That's exactly right. So I'm in the seed round of Etched.

• 24:50Anthony Pompliano?

  As a flex.

• 24:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And, and, you know, just very, very happy to see a lot of these businesses. I'm also in the seed round of ZipLine, you know, which hasn't gone out yet, but it's done extraordinarily well in delivering amazing things to the world. So that, that physical infrastructure and actual deliveries is, is, is a, is a big part of the way that these things work.

• 25:10Anthony Pompliano?

  When you mentioned earlier, blockchain are going to kind of take over. What, what does that mean? Like, what is your vision of that world?

• 25:15Speaker 04

  So it's, it's a, it's having a independent trusted, you know, a, a network that works to validate transactions and, and works to trace them back in immutable format. It's an audit trail for the way that everything went on because, you know, it, it says, it carries important information about the, the trust level of a system. And, you know, you need that and the reason that we have, you know, audit, you know, audit firms and public companies and all these different things is to build trust in a system over time, that you're actually getting the information that you want and that you need in order to make a judgment about it. And so blockchains are a very efficient way to do that. They're inefficient in the short term and that you have to do all the writing and the validation

• 26:00Speaker 04

  and you, it takes a while to get a network up and running for that. But once it's up and running, you have Bitcoin and Ethereum and, and all of these, and, and, you know, other ones that have escaped, you know, so they're, they're theoretical levels and Solana and XRP and all, all of these options are blockchain based that have various purposes for the token that they use, if they use a token. There are a whole bunch of businesses that use blockchains that don't have their own token too. And that infrastructure, you know, is a, is a powerful one to invest in.

• 26:34Anthony Pompliano?

  When, when you think of that future world, one aspect that if people were to critique this podcast, they'd be like, hey, you talked a lot about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency and that world. Now you talk a lot about the AI stuff and I actually think these two things are very intertwined.

• 26:49Speaker 04

  I agree.

• 26:50Anthony Pompliano?

  And some of the, like the, the elementary analysis would be like, the machines need a currency.

• 26:55Speaker 04

  Exactly. That is where you start, right?

• 26:57Anthony Pompliano?

  True, but it feels like the blockchain, the digital network. I mean, what is an AI swarm? It's a different version, but like it is a bunch of quote, quote nodes.

• 27:11Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 27:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Working together.

• 27:12Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 27:13Anthony Pompliano?

  To get things done, validate. You start to almost see this convergence and you're like, are these two things like actually the same thing?

• 27:21Speaker 04

  Right. They're, they're definitely closely related over, over time. And so you have these agents when they can swarm, they can, you know, build multiple instantiations of themselves. And as we've seen in the hugging face hack and, and other things like that, they can think over time, you know, think is a little bit strong there, but they can operate over time as if they are executing a strategy to get to a result. And one that may transgress a variety of rules that they're, that they're told or taught or that are tried to be hardwired in the system. And so this is where some of the, the regulatory questions start to come up and get more active. And I think we've seen some responsibility on the part of the industry to say, hey, we've

• 28:04Speaker 04

  got to figure out how to get independent people other than us making these judgments over time. And people who are trained in the, and they're technical experts and available to, you know, say, hey, this is where risk gets a little bit too big. And I think that's a helpful thing, but it has to be done in a way that's not, you know, inherently anti-innovation. And so I think that there's been rightfully a lot of worry about that over time. We faced a lot of these questions in the, the design of systems around safety for kids, you know, on, in the online environment. And, you know, in a variety of ways that, you know, a lot of people would argue that Facebook sort of went off the rails on, on a number of these things. And they've, I think, right, quite rightfully, in my view, you know, settled out on some

• 28:49Speaker 04

  conduct remedies that are, you know, are, are more active in restricting kids' access to, what can be very powerful technology, social technologies, but doing it in a way that, that's, that's, you know, a, a teaching and, and, and sort of a, like a media literacy approach to things instead of a, you know, hey, you just, it's too dangerous for you. We always tried it in the early days as we expanded into high school. So when I joined Facebook, it was still called calling and it was all validated based on the EDU email address. When we expanded into high schools, I tried to work with a lot of folks in the, particularly in the law enforcement community around how were, were, were we going to make sure that people,

• 29:33Speaker 04

  the kids were actually members of the community that they were joining, that they had access to other kids and, you know, how we were going to deal with fake accounts. I mean, I think we did a reasonably good job of that. And, you know, that's one of the reasons that Facebook sort of won over MySpace and a number of other, you know, sort of people who had approaches there.

• 29:51Speaker 04

  That can deteriorate over time and the dedication to that can deteriorate over time. And I think that that, that's what may have happened. And now there's been a bit of a reset in the company engaging, I think, very productively with regulators. I think we'll see a lot of the same things in AI. I, I don't think that, that there's a, I don't think it's, it's valid to say, we should just have a free for all, there's no way for us to regulate that. It's, it's just not accurate, you know? But you can have smart regulation or dumb regulation. And I think we're moving towards, some people will call for dumb regulation, unfortunately. And that's, you know, that happens in the space and it's easy to crusade against technology companies and you're seeing some of the data center backlash happen right now because it's

• 30:34Speaker 04

  proxy for, hey, I, I don't like the fact that I feel out of control or my kids may be on this technology and I don't, and I can't control it. How we give people more of a say in that and how we regulate in an intelligent way is one of the key questions that we've got for the next couple of years. Luckily, there are a lot of people who've done this, you know, and, and who think about it a lot and we're, we're all engaged in that dialogue, I think in mostly a meaningful way. There's some postery stuff that goes on and on both sides, but I think that the companies are deeply engaged in this now in, in AI and, and the broader technology companies too.

• 31:11Anthony Pompliano?

  We recently heard some of the AI leaders say that, you know, 10% chance this could like kill us all or whatever.

• 31:17Speaker 04

  The Skynet problem. I always refer to this as the Skynet problem.

• 31:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, to me, it just feels like, um,

• 31:25Anthony Pompliano?

  The people who are saying that seem to be the new companies. I don't hear Mark Zuckerberg saying, regulate me more. I don't hear him saying, we need to slow down.

• 31:35Speaker 04

  Although, I mean, interesting, I mean, they, the company did agree to a lot of restrictions on, on, you know, access to Instagram in particular.

• 31:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Sorry, I'm talking about the AI.

• 31:44Speaker 04

  No, no, but I'm, I'm, I'm saying that they're, they're somewhat similar at the end of the day that, that you.

• 31:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Cause you're saying the AI powered.

• 31:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, it powers a lot of the, the things that are allegedly addictive mechanisms for this. And so I think that when you're talking about regulating all of this, it's, it's a, there are more particular problems in the AI space that, that have their own individual parts, but the AI is touching these other ones where there's some been, been some, I think, quite reasonable consent to redesign and some rethinking about how, how those systems work with, with humans.

• 32:23Speaker 04

  It, it is all a talk about humans regulating the technology and ultimately having control of the technology rather than letting it, letting the technology take over the, the conversation.

• 32:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I recently saw a demo online, uh, somebody had built a, uh, it's like, it was something like a Chrome browser or something, cause some sort of, you know, thing where they were going through X. And as they were scrolling, it would basically, uh, mute or like, um, a kind of dull, uh huh, certain posts. So if it was an ad, as they were scrolling, it would just, you'd get to it and it would just say, ad, but you couldn't see the ad, right?

• 33:00Speaker 04

  Blur it out.

• 33:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Correct. Or it would be like slop, you know, like, like you don't need to read this, right? And as it was going, it was like, maybe one every four posts, five posts, you know, in the demo, was like actually worth consuming for the human.

• 33:14Speaker 04

  Right.

• 33:14Anthony Pompliano?

  And again, like cute demo, they were trying to show how, you know, real time, I think it was like something related to Jev and the ability to kind of do this, you know, synthesizing, uh, in real time. But it got me thinking, like, if you don't have that turned on, you're, you and my brain is just consuming it.

• 33:31Speaker 04

  And this is like the, ultimately the scarce resource is time and human attention. And so the question of how can you use AI on your, on your behalf to make your time and your, your attention more efficient to get you good information. You know, the problem of course, is that it can be manipulated to present bad information or, or, you know, false information or questionable information and to advance, you know, arguments that, that might be, you know, uh, divisive and, uh, and so all of these are concerns and, and looking at facts and who has incentives to present disinformation is, is a critical part of all of these networks and how it gets surfaced more effectively for people to make their own choices.

• 34:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Uphold. Are you someone who's tired of juggling multiple apps just to trade, earn, stake or spend your crypto? Then listen up because Uphold does all of that in one single unified platform. You can access 300 plus crypto and fiat currencies with an interface that works for you, whether you're a beginner or an expert. Uphold also features any to any swaps where you can swap crypto to fiat, fiat to metals and tokens to tokens directly in the app. If you prefer self custody, Uphold's vault gives you multi-stick security, key recovery, direct trading access and peace of mind without giving up convenience. Uphold is also 100% reserved, meaning no fractional practices and proof of reserves are updated every 30 seconds. So you can verify your assets anytime.

• 34:58Anthony Pompliano?

  For US users, you can even earn yield on dollars with a USD interest account. No fees, no minimums and funds are insured up to $2.5 million through the atomic cash sweep program. If you want one app for your entire digital asset life, check out Uphold today. Go to uphold.com to learn more. Uphold.com. Go check them out today. When, um, when I think of networks, again, going back to this example of like Bitcoin is an open network, anyone within internet, excuse me, anyone with an internet connection anywhere in the world, they can get online, they can buy some Bitcoin.

• 35:31Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 35:31Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's part of the beauty is this like open accessibility. Uh, sports teams, not exactly so easy.

• 35:39Speaker 04

  No, it's not. And that's part of the,

• 35:43Speaker 04

  the insight that I think, you know, we're trying to take in the new project that I'm working through on the fund.

• 35:48Anthony Pompliano?

  So I was gonna have you explain.

• 35:50Speaker 04

  One, exactly.

• 35:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Is this idea of like, you're almost trying to take some of the like Bitcoin ethos of open accessibility and say, well, this asset class of, you know, championship, uh, or professional sports teams are so hard to access.

• 36:04Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 36:05Anthony Pompliano?

  If we could somehow democratize that access, there's probably a lot of people who'd be interested.

• 36:10Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 36:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And so describe kind of your strategy, cause I think it's a little bit different than anyone else I've heard with this. Uh, I think the fund is called Sports One.

• 36:17Speaker 04

  Sports One is the, exactly, exactly the company that we've founded to focus on this. And the goal is to own multiple minority stakes in teams and use that as a, as an effective sort of basket of, you know, uh, of, of, of sports assets that people can either buy the equity in the company of, it will be a public company, or buy a token that's associated with that. Um, and the token is designed for people who may be more casual users who want a cheaper access point. Um, the, the, we think that the multiple minority stakes in the teams, because there are regular public valuations and discussions about the teams, that that, you know, will provide enough of an access point. It, it is incredible, there is incredible scarcity and incredible challenge.

• 37:02Speaker 04

  There are a lot of people who have made a lot of money in other businesses and who run family offices of, you know, where folks have, have, have been wealthy for years and they're looking at this as an asset class. It's, it's actually really hard to access because you have to get the approval of both the team, you know, somebody has to be selling something. And then the leagues also have a pretty extensive approval process. And, and then also as we're seeing, you know, recently, there are a lot of rules you need to, uh, pay attention to in the league too, um, where some, you know, the, some things that have been, you know, sometimes are, are seen as just healthy competition and attempts to evade the rules, um, that, that sometimes get, get tracked down on quite extensively by the leagues, um, and for good reason, because you're trying to preserve competitive balance.

• 37:47Speaker 04

  You're trying to make sure that this ecosystem works well. So our approach to, uh, access to sports as an ecosystem is we'll acquire sort of somewhere between ultimately sort of, uh, we, we target three to five, uh, teams to start minority stakes in teams. And that will provide a floor value of both the equity in the company that owns them and of, for the token that's associated with it, where we'll hold about 10% of the token, 10 or 15% of the token, um, in the company. And you can back into a, a floor valuation from that. From there, we plan to do a lot of stuff that's very pro athlete over time, allowing people to issue their individual coins, um, uh, to support their own careers, that will raise the money, that will allow them to, you know,

• 38:31Speaker 04

  participate and, and get from there, you know, we, we really want to, you know, have the, the, you know, striving athlete who's up and coming, uh, be able to be financed by a, a, a set of fans around them. Um, and obviously some famous athletes will want to participate in that too. We think that's great. Um, but, you know, and they can use that as the basis for their fan club or how to communicate with people over time. But we needed an intrinsic source of value to, you know, think about that ecosystem. If you, even if you launch with a famous athlete, a coin that doesn't have something associated with it, um, you know, it's, it's, it's ultimately going to crash. So, and there, there have been a couple of examples of that.

• 39:11Speaker 04

  So we decided that if we had, uh, an associated company that tied to the token, that actually owned multiple minority stakes in teams, and that way you don't have, there's not a control factor that you're worried about. You're not, you know, sort of, uh, deep in the day to day of any of these teams, but there's, you know, the Sportico and the Forbes and the CNBC valuations that all come out and, and provide these estimates that investors can, you know, have, uh, access to the, uh, to the, to the asset class. Um, and, uh, and, and, you know, and support the teams that are part of the basket too.

• 39:47Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about this strategy, how do you go about which teams, right? It's different if I want to buy a team in, you know, one of the less popular leagues that maybe I don't even know that much about the team versus, you know, Apollo recently wants reportedly 15, 16% of the Yankees.

• 40:03Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 40:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, I'm a Yankees fan that I know they're going to be valuable. It's all professional sports, but how do you kind of think through selection?

• 40:11Speaker 04

  We're going to have a variety of discussions with, you know, the variety of current owners and where we think we can be a good partner because of our experience in the space, my experience with both the Kings process, but also in Major League Baseball. So we bought the Giants AAA team in Sacramento five years ago, six years ago now. And, uh, and then we've leveraged that in, in some discussions and, and helping out, you know, a challenging situation, um, uh, for the Oakland A's. So they've been playing in our ballpark before they, um, uh, in West Sacramento before they, uh, moved to Las Vegas eventually. And while, while their ballpark is constructed and while, you know, we, we, you

• 40:53Speaker 04

  obviously, you know, there are a lot of East Bay fans that can still have access to the A's for now, um, playing in West Sacramento. Um, ultimately the ownership there decided to move the team to Vegas and there's not much that anyone can do about that. Um, we, you know, think that, that that's been a, a pretty good transition, uh, for them and for us. And, uh, and, you know, we think that there's just, and what we also had to go through the Major League Baseball approval process, which you have to do for, uh, for AAA teams. So having been through the process in two of the four major leagues, having partners of ours that have been through the NFL process, that have been

• 41:32Speaker 04

  through the NHL process. Um, we think we have a likelihood of success in getting pieces of these teams and getting approved by the leagues. Um, but also we think that we have a lot to offer those partnerships in terms of our experience. Now the leagues have set restrictions on institutional owners such that they can't take board seats. They can't, you know, be, you know, involved directly in the day-to-day operations, but that doesn't mean that we can't be good advisors and good partners.

• 42:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, you mentioned that there's equity in the company. Um, I think you've announced a public transaction that you are, uh,

• 42:06Speaker 04

  There's a public shell that we are planning to merge into.

• 42:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Right.

• 42:11Speaker 04

  Um, and, uh, and then from there we'll be, you know, sort of purchasing the teams within that company.

• 42:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. And then you mentioned that there's a token as well. What is the difference between the equity and the token?

• 42:20Speaker 04

  So the equity and the token, so the token will be a, um, you know, sort of a separate, uh, way to have, uh, association with the company and with the ecosystem that we're building. Um, the equity will be a classic publicly traded, you know, on, on public exchanges and, and available largely for, we think larger holders. Whereas, you know, the token will be a way to buy in for, for average consumers and a way to participate in the system.

• 42:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Hmm. And it also feels like those two things are converging. Like we see a lot of tokenized securities, all that stuff is now starting to, to kind of show up. Uh, do you think eventually there's no difference between the two?

• 42:57Speaker 04

  I think that you'll, you'll see some, um, trading, you know, between one and the other for various, you know, aspects of what people like the, the token may have, you know, some formal associations with it, uh, uh, in terms of access to the underlying, uh, uh, you know, team benefits that, that the equity might not. Um, but we might end up offering it both to equity holders and token holders. I mean, we think that that'll just evolve over time. Um, and we'll watch the way that marketplaces react to the, the way that it trades and the way that, that, that the people think about it as a store of value.

• 43:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Hmm. It also seems like, uh, domestic markets are very equity focused. International markets start to be more token focused. These leagues are definitely trying to expand. I mean, NFL has got games, you know, with the recent played a game in Australia.

• 43:48Speaker 04

  Exactly. So Melbourne, 49ers Rams in, in Melbourne.

• 43:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. 49ers played, right? Yeah.

• 43:53Speaker 04

  49ers Rams in Melbourne. And there will be, I think a game in Berlin this year. Um, there's a Mexico City game coming up. There's, you know, and the, and the NBA has largely in preseason, uh, done, uh, you know, games in the Philippines, in, um, in, uh, in China. We went, uh, with the Kings, we went to China. We went to India with our partners, you know, uh, two of our partners being first generation Indian immigrants, um, including Vivek, our lead partner. You know, we went to Mumbai and played the first NBA games in Mumbai. Um, there's a whole bunch of different internationalization that's going on here. And we'll look at Sports One at, um, at the English

• 44:34Speaker 04

  Premier League, at a variety of, of your, you know, other European soccer, uh, operations and the possibility of, of having those in our basket. We'll look at Indian cricket, um, and a number of others. I've also, I'm, I'm part of a, of a group that's, uh, there's a 1899 Innovation Fund associated with FC Barcelona, um, that I'm participating in with a bunch of friends, mostly from the States, but, but a number obviously from Europe as well. So.

• 45:01Anthony Pompliano?

  It feels like sports when I grew up, it was almost like people bought teams for the love of the team, right? You knew there was a business, but it wasn't as obvious. And I don't know how much money the sports owners really made, right? You know, they made money, but like it wasn't what it is now. It feels like this has been professionalized. It feels like it has become much more competitive and, and almost like a level of ruthlessness to it, especially when the private equity firms are getting involved. Like college sports, you're definitely seeing this happen.

• 45:33Speaker 04

  It's been an interesting evolution.

• 45:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Like positive or negative, or like, how do you evaluate how sports themselves are changing? And we see it like the players now are transferring teams in college. Lane Giffen this weekend. I mean,

• 45:46Speaker 04

  That was an interesting set of conversations. You get, you know, Morgan Freeman calling you out.

• 45:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Calling you a rat.

• 45:52Speaker 04

  It's a, it's a, it's a very powerful thing, right?

• 45:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So like, how do you just think about, and maybe college is like a more pure thing, or it was.

• 46:00Speaker 04

  It was, I would say.

• 46:01Anthony Pompliano?

  You see it more obviously versus professional sports. I think people, you know, they've heard the stories. You can be the star one year, you're cut the next year, right? It's kind of a business to it.

• 46:10Speaker 04

  And I, but I think that we have aspirations through Sports One and, and, uh, you know, athlete coins that we think will be affiliated with it over time, uh, at, at returning to, you know, both making athletes more powerful in that process. But over time, you know, we think that, that, that allowing another access point for individuals, that's not necessarily, it's not betting, it's not all these different things. It's other ways to express, you know, your interest and your love for the athletes and the teams that you, that you're around. And, you know, we think that that has some financial basis to it. You know, people spend their money on tickets, the time that they spend at, at stadiums, and then the, on memorabilia, on all

• 46:53Speaker 04

  of those things that, that go into this. We think that that ultimately is a, a thing that people positively associate, um, even, even when there's a rivalry associated with it, where there's, there's, uh, you know, a deep enmity, uh, you know, going on for, uh, you know, for, if, if, if you're, if you're a Yankees fan, that not so much the, it's the Red Sox, not the Mets, um, in town. Um, but, you know, it's Dodgers, Giants and all of these kind of classic rivalries.

• 47:24Anthony Pompliano?

  I told you earlier, you know, the Brooklyn Nets, and I said, don't know, get mad. The reason I can say this is because there's no one really cheering for them as much, right? Now, if I was to say the Mets and the Jets, you know, not only would I get beat up by our friend Matt over here, but, but, uh, but there'd be plenty of people mad.

• 47:39Speaker 04

  But, but ultimately we think that the, those rivalries are, are healthy ones and that, you know, this is another way to, to experience it.

• 47:46Anthony Pompliano?

  I also think the reverse is true. Like financial markets have become somewhat like sports.

• 47:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And, um, people cheer for their favorite company. They wear the company swag. They are, um, I see people all the time tweeting out charts of like this beat this and, you know, I mean, it is kind of interesting to see.

• 48:07Speaker 04

  There is definitely a, a rooting nature that goes into investments and that people have, you know, their own selection bias that they want to be, they want to be smart and they want to be right. And that's a very human thing that.

• 48:18Anthony Pompliano?

  The rise of sports-like enthusiasm in financial markets is also meeting the rise of sports betting.

• 48:25Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 48:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And it's like, people want their money and the things they deem entertainment.

• 48:30Speaker 04

  Right.

• 48:31Anthony Pompliano?

  To be aligned. Now I would argue that, you know, although I believe the stock market is just as much of a casino, the odds are better, you know?

• 48:37Speaker 04

  Oh, much.

• 48:38Anthony Pompliano?

  It's sports gambling.

• 48:39Speaker 04

  And then the, and the public nature of that data is a significant part. And this is another part of our Sports One business is that we're trying to gather better data, um, and apply AI in a smart way to, you know, give people deeper insights into individual athletes and teams and both their biz, on the business side, but also on the, on the live performance.

• 49:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Hmm. It's fascinating to me that, um, no one's done this yet before. I, I think the first time we talked, I told you this, like, of course, people want exposure to these assets.

• 49:10Speaker 04

  Right.

• 49:10Anthony Pompliano?

  There are things like, um, what is, uh, Fenway, uh, Sports.

• 49:13Speaker 04

  Fenway Sports Group, exactly.

• 49:15Anthony Pompliano?

  They own some teams.

• 49:15Speaker 04

  And, and Arcos and Dial, uh, the, all of these players have, have amassed certain minority stakes in teams as sort of closed-end funds for, you know, largely the wealthy investors who are already putting into that. We, we want that to be much more democratized and we think that that's healthy for the teams, um, for the leagues and for, and for fans everywhere.

• 49:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I mean, it makes, uh, makes a lot of sense. Where, um, for people who are interested in Sports One, where, where should we send them to?

• 49:41Speaker 04

  So right now we're, you know, so we, we've, you know, announced that we plan to, to merge with this public company. It was originally called Sono, um, that's out there. Um, and we, we expect that we will, you know, get that done and, and, you know, it'll take some time. Um, but, uh,

• 49:59Anthony Pompliano?

  But they can go read like publicly.

• 50:01Speaker 04

  They can go read about it right now.

• 50:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Sports One.

• 50:03Speaker 04

  If they Google Sports One, if they Google, you know, Sono, um, they'll see the basic, uh, plan from here that we've announced so far. And obviously there will be further announcements as we moved on down that road. And then from there, you know, we'll, we'll achieve the, the, you know, hopefully multiple stakes, um, in, in a, in a matter of, you know, you never want to put it, you know, too much of a timeframe on it, but, uh, um, we think we can get that done quickly, given our experience and our knowledge and the conversations that we're having. Um, so from there, uh, that, you know, we'll, we'll launch the token eventually. And then, uh, we, we want to provide for athletes and for their fans, uh, the ability to invest

• 50:46Speaker 04

  in individual athletes too. We'll, we'll, we'll get to that in, in the right way. And luckily the SEC has been a lot clearer in terms of what, what are securities and what are not. And that's enabled us to think about that and design these in a way that, that will provide the broadest access that we can.

• 51:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Hmm. I, I think, uh, I think that this is, uh, a convergence of things that people learn in the Bitcoin world, in the AI world, in the sports world, in the Facebook world. Like you, you are kind of uniquely positioned, given all of your interest.

• 51:16Speaker 04

  We're trying to bring it all together. Trying to bring it all together.

• 51:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Very unique way to do it, but, but I think that, uh, by the way, the government's never going to stop printing money. So I do think these assets will probably be worth more in the future too.

• 51:28Speaker 04

  I think, I think that's right. That's right.

• 51:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazing. All right. Well, thank you very much for doing this, Chris. And we'll do it in the future.

• 51:33Speaker 04

  This is fantastic. Thanks.