Why Live Streaming has Taken Over 2026

In this episode of The GaryVee Audio Experience, I sit down with John and Jordy on TBPN to talk about how I don't let my audacity or my financial situation dictate my observations of the consumer — and why I'm willing to lose all my money to be historically correct. I share why the call was never Facebook or Twitter specifically, but the network effect of scale and no gatekeeper. I also discuss why every genre still needs its own daily live show, why football exploded with television and what will explode with streaming, and why we as humans need a little romance instead of a fully black-and-white AI world. You'll learn about: • How Observation Beats Audacity • Why Every Genre Needs a Live Show • History Rhymes in Media Shifts • Entering Your Prime at 50 • Why We Need Romance

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is the Gary Vee Audio Experience.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Love to see it. Well, we have Gary Vaynerchuk, creator of V Friends, back on the show, third time. Love catching up with Gary Vee. We'll go all over the place, creator economy, AI, open source, building stuff. How you doing, Gary? What's up?

• 0:19Speaker 02

  There he is.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  Man.

• 0:22Speaker 02

  Man.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Man?

• 0:23Speaker 02

  Man.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Or I think you said meh. You're doing meh.

• 0:26Speaker 02

  Meh.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Meh.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  Meh. Uh, what's happening?

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Okay, I wanna, I wanna start with, unless you have something to kick right off with, I wanna start with something. Like, I've been seeing these, these videos of you from like years and years ago with just these like crazy, crazy accurate calls about the future. What, what victory lap do you like to take the most? Like, like what, what's the one call, when you think back, where you're like, damn, I really nailed that one?

• 0:56Speaker 00

  Social. Like, if I'm being honest, like, like, no, it's like, it's crazy. Too bad I wasn't making the videos back then. Like, just my complete conviction on Facebook and Twitter, completely unearthing and changing the world.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12Speaker 00

  No, it, it's ironic timing. I met with someone today, I hadn't talked to like 12, 13 years, you know, retired gentleman. I met him early on. He's like, he's like, it's crazy how much you believed in that stuff and how dismissive we all were. Um, but there's, you know, I'd listen, the only, one of the few things I really do well in business is I don't let my audacity or my current financial situation or what I would like to happen financially dictate my observations of the consumer.

• 1:51Speaker 00

  I don't think I'm smarter than anyone or have a bigger knack. I think you have, now let me give some flowers to you boys. You have some of the greatest people on here, right? You guys have crushed. You've also gotten much better at your actual job interviewing because you know, I'm a day one with you guys. Like, so I just want to give some flowers. You guys are getting better and better. All these brilliant people you have, it's not that I know it better, I don't know it better. It's that I'm, I'm willing to completely change course of what I think is working for me. Or I'm willing to lose all my money to be historically correct. I'm not talking about things that I want to happen for my financial interests. I'm talking about what consumers are actually doing.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Do you think you were more bullish on the other thing is that's than like the actual platforms? Like, because I guess like when I look back at some of those calls about like the pivot away from the, there's this one where you're like looking at the newspaper and you're like, nobody's going to use the newspaper. They're just going to get their news online from other people. And it's like a very accurate prediction. But, but, but it's like that distinctly wasn't coming from like Mark Zuckerberg in 2008. He was just saying like, I built this cool website, like it's fun.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, like I'm connecting the world.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:06Speaker 00

  It was connection. What I, you know, I think that I, you know, when you go read Crush, it, the first book I wrote, I wrote in 2008. Also in that time, I am fully predicting, and you guys know this, we've talked off, like I predict, like literally there's parts of the book that talk about what you guys are doing right now.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no. You were super early in live streaming too.

• 3:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, and don't forget, we just came out of Friendster and MySpace failing.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:35Speaker 00

  So my thesis wasn't necessarily, now look, I thought Mark was generational because I'd spent some time with him. And like, I ended up being very right about that. And I thought Twitter was incredibly unique. So I was bullish on those platforms, but I was incredibly agnostic, to your point. I was, whether it was called Facebook or Twitter, or the many things that failed along the way. Social cam, Peach, Vine, you know, like LinkedIn or YouTube or Twitch or TikTok. It didn't matter. Apps that connected people on top of the internet. I knew had to win because of the network effect of scale and no gatekeeper in between. You think you two handsome young bozos would have gotten on CMC? You would have had to wait.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  But I knew that you could just do it. And then it's like sports.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  We love the term bozo.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  It's underrated.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  It's so good. It's not, it's not, it's like only slightly derogatory, but it's like not totally not a bad.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  I do identify as a bit of a.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  It's like a sweet thing.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  It's a sweet thing.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  It's a great word.

• 4:40Speaker 00

  You know, you guys have become very influential and definitely the people watching are very influential. Can we all collectively put our hands in the pot and all bring bozo back? It would be really enjoyable.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  It's bozo time. Golden retrievers are kind of bozos.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, no, no, no.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  We have, we talk about golden retriever mode.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but yeah, better installation. Jordy, sorry, I cut you off. You were gonna ask.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I think, I think what was interesting about your call is you were bullish on the platforms, but the take wasn't just you should invest in Facebook. It was like, you should just put stuff out every single day and you've been remarkably consistent with that.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it was, it was real for three guys like us that could go from zero notoriety to a lot. And literally the most famous people in the world right now. You know, at least a third of them are either streamers or purely on social. They have no television. They have no, you know, theatrical, they have no other platform.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, TV is now coming to them and saying, hey, could we work something out? You, you clearly have demand for your content. We want to get it on our platform.

• 5:42Speaker 00

  I started a company a couple of years ago called Vayner Watt. W A T T. It's a TV production company and we are bombarded by the distributors for me to get access to the Stephen Bartlet's or the Hermosies or the Cody Sanchez's or the, like, it's all here. And what's crazy is like YouTube, for example, right? There's 900 genres that should be doing what you're doing right now.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, we just talked to some folks who are doing this show for Europe specifically. And there's one that's for car dealers and there's one for crypto. And there's a whole bunch of different sort of like, and it's not even like we were the first live streamers. Obviously, we just took.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  Still, the funny, you know, the craziest, the craziest thing? No one has done TBPN for the market open. Like you're in New York.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  You're in New York. You start at.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  I know someone that's working on it.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, we know, we know, we know a couple of people, but the fact that we're 18 months in and no one saw what we're doing. We go live at 11 Pacific, so we're going live at noon. The market has been open and

• 6:49Speaker 00

  Which is, which is an indication of your laziness. You guys should wake up.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  We do wake up early, but we do a team workout.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  And it's more, it's more an indication of our, of our fascination with private markets versus public markets and, and like longer term, uh, less quarter by quarter, less day by day market moves and more, uh, 12 to 18 month fundraising cycles for private technology companies. And so I think that my natural interest is in the private markets and the earlier stage technology. So if I was trying to cover, you know, the day by day in the market, what oil's doing and how that's affecting, you know, GE and Boeing, I would just be a little bit less sharp than if I'm talking about, you know,

• 7:33Speaker 00

  Makes sense. And honestly, that's what, you know, back to crush it, back to you guys, back to all of this, what you're already like, the whole theme of this interview, the fact that people that are watching that are deeply sports, like you, the TVP N for sports with talent like you guys is, is ESPN's biggest nightmare. Um, you know,

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Have it, right? Isn't

• 7:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course, of course. I mean,

• 7:57Speaker 02

  But they have to pay him like 60 million a year.

• 8:00Speaker 00

  And, and Pat had to be lucky enough of all the serendipity that led, led to that. There are 913 Pat McAfee's. And I mean, and Pat's incredibly charismatic and talented. You guys are as well, but the long tail of knowledgeable or charismatic individuals is quite long. Now, everyone has a different upside, right? Like, like, again, somebody could replicate this exact show.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:26Speaker 00

  And if they're really just much sharper and more entertaining, they will take market share. That's just how it works.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Well, the other, the other thing about sports versus business that's interesting is like sports, there's so many people that played sports, whether it's college or professionally, and then they stop being able to play at that level. And they're like, well, what's the best thing I should do? I should just talk about the game that I love. Whereas in business, you don't get to a point where you're better at talking about it necessarily than doing it. There's a lot of people that, that could.

• 8:55Speaker 00

  So well said. And so well said. And there's another thing. I just turned 50 and like literally this morning, like no bullshit. I'm like, am I starting to enter my prime?

• 9:08Speaker 01

  That's such a great philosophy. You're just like, I'm having, whatever the inverse of a midlife crisis is, that's me.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  But you know what's funny again?

• 9:21Speaker 02

  Wait, is the generational run just beginning?

• 9:23Speaker 00

  But then I really like, and it's funny, and I have a funny feeling, especially given the incredible nature of your audience. I think when that was just delivered a few minutes ago, there's just a lot of people that really understand it because, you know, my whole life and probably many others watching it, you wish you were an athlete. But if you were an entrepreneur, you kind of realize at 30, you're like, wait a minute. If I was an athlete and I was great, I'd be kind of wrapping it up or like thinking about post. And I own a large sports agency. My brother and I own a very large sports agency now called Vayner Sports. You know, I feel for these kids. This is what they were meant to do. They're 35 years old and they're like, what do I do with my, you know, like just like really intense stuff.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  I truly, I feel so blessed to have always been obsessed with business. Like I never, I never came close. You know, I got very into surfing, but I never liked surfing as much as business and being, having a love for something that you can do for a lifetime. Even more so that people say like, oh, you should play tennis because you can play it, you know, you know, basically indefinitely. But it's like, well, you can, you can do deals for truly for life.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is what we always, we always bring up.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  Got a segue.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  We, we, we, sorry, one thing, we, we always, we always bring up Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. It's like the greatest, the greatest run of that career happened from like 50 to 90. It's like, that's so long.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  No, but wasn't it more like 70 to 90 or like 80?

• 10:55Speaker 00

  Was, it was like 60, like, that's right. So segue. We just brought up tennis. I've done incredibly well. I think this is important for a lot of people. Again, I'm always saying about the audience, alternative sports league investing. I think you guys, I think there's some more fun stuff you guys could be doing about that. It's gone really well for me.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, Alexis, we had Alexis on. He, he has the, the running, running league, which is cool. We had the, the founder of Enhanced Games on.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's some article in the journal today. Is Pedal the next pickleball?

• 11:27Speaker 00

  Right. So Pickle was a huge win for me, right? I bought a team for 500,000 pre-COVID. They're trading at 16 million right now in our Major League Pickleball League. Right. I.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  So do people watch pickleball?

• 11:40Speaker 00

  Yes, that's why, that's why I invest. So I have a little bit of a secret of why I think I'm doing well. Cause I'm doing well with this wiffle ball league that is starting to get some juice. We get some great owners in that.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Let's go.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  Wiffle ball boys.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  I have one little advantage. It's back to this and we've had some meetings off camera and you guys know, I'm like pretty in the weeds with like how communication and marketing works. The reason I invested in Pickle is Pickle highlights even seven years ago massively over indexed on social.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Oh, sure. Yeah.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  Right? Like.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, but, but the, but the thing is, I do wonder if that's. So, so Dana White has the, the slap fighting league.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  Forget what it's called. And that's something that does incredibly well on social, but I don't know anyone, even hardcore MMA fans. It's like, can't wait for the card this weekend.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  I'm gonna watch live.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  Two things. Two things. One.

• 12:36Speaker 00

  Ish on incredibly well on social. You have to, you know, when, when you, because I've looked at that as well. And a lot of it is driven by the TKO machine, much more than, you know, the organic nature of what I've seen.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  And, and seeing somebody that's about to get hit in the face is like naturally scroll stopping, even if it's not a good.

• 12:55Speaker 00

  There's also, there's also something that people don't realize about sports that matters if you're going to watch it, which is your capacity to participate in it.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:03Speaker 00

  Right? Like, like, like people, a lot, when people try to zing pickleball, they're like, yeah, everyone's playing it, but is it a business? And I always like, literally, those are the articles that were written about tennis and golf, 50, 60, 70, 80 years ago. It's like, it's funny. By the way, back to your first question, the other thing I do pretty well, that I hope other people do, so I'm saying it out loud, is I really use history, along with paying attention to people. So for example, the biggest sports in America in the twenties and thirties were horse racing, boxing and baseball. Those sports were very good on radio, but football is not a great radio sport.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  Football exploded with the television. If you look at the explosion of the football, it came along with television. And so back to streaming, what you guys are doing right now, one of the reasons I'm invested in the sailing league, slam ball, pickleball, wiffleball.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  What's slam ball?

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Slam ball's trampolines.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  You don't know about this?

• 14:05Speaker 02

  Dodgeball and trampoline.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  No, no, basketball with trampoline. So everyone can dunk and do like bathless and stuff. It's crazy.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  All right, I gotta watch.

• 14:12Speaker 00

  The reason I did it was I knew I didn't need, just like you guys didn't need CNBC to be like, you're the right, you're talent. Our, all these alternative leagues do not need ESPN or, you know, Fox Sports to say yes. People can see this stuff through these platforms and that's going to continue in an AR, VR. Like we're going into an incredible era of opportunity and meritocracy.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  Uh, real quick.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  Hey, everybody. I hope you're enjoying the podcast right now. Make sure you follow the podcast. That's why I'm interrupting. Let's keep going on this show, but follow the podcast. It'll make my mom super happy.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  What was your reaction to the World Cup? Do you think that flopping will, uh, and flopping culture will, will forever prevent America from actually getting into, uh, do you think that's a bottleneck to growth?

• 15:04Speaker 00

  No, that's not a bottleneck. Americans are hypocrites. We love basketball. SGA is the greatest flopper of all time.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  I have, I don't watch enough. I haven't watched enough basketball to, to, to have even seen SGA flop, but I feel like the, I feel like in Europe, they appreciate the, the drama and it's almost like the, the acting of it all. But then you watch the replay and it's like, you know, Americans that are used to watching, you know, some corn-fed linebacker run through a guy and the guy just gets up instantly. You know, it's hard to then go watch somebody flop and completely fake an injury.

• 15:41Speaker 00

  I, I think that soccer players at this point have this incredible four to seven percent academy award-like acting capabilities that probably piss people off. But I agree with you. I'll use football because football is a sport that people hate when they first see it. And then they become infatuated with it because it stops and starts and stops and starts, especially the world immigrants coming to the U.S. when they're used to soccer, which is flowing. They hate it. And then inevitably, within a decade, they love it because you start falling in love with all the little nuances. And I would say for Americans, the nuance of flopping is annoying, especially with the NBA. It's been a big topic, by the

• 16:23Speaker 00

  way. So I think, especially this season. So I think some of that energy came to it. But look, I mean, I'm a little older than you guys. Everybody who's over 50 knows this. The strides that America has made in its interest in football, AKA soccer, over the last 30 years is profound. FIFA, the video game had a huge impact. Being able to watch the Premier League in America on Saturday mornings had a huge impact. And um, and I'm, it's a great sport and I, I already am excited for the next one.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  What about, what about the intersection of technology and a game like soccer? I grew up playing soccer, reffing soccer. I've reffed, that was like, you know, that was, I would spend my weekends when I was 12, I'd ref like 20 soccer games. Cause they didn't cap it, like there was no like, you can only work eight hours. It was like, you can ref as many games as you want, cause there was a shortage. So I'd ref like insane number of games in a day. And, and watching the world cup, and again, I'm a super casual viewer. I hadn't been watching soccer prior to the world cup, but it was fun to kind of catch up on it. Like, you know, there'd be an offside call and, or, or maybe there wasn't a call. And then they'd run the tape and they figured out that the guy's hand, you know, elbow was slightly over the line.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  And they'd call it and they'd take the goal back and that, that to me, like part of, part of the, part of like what makes the sport great? Is there's just players that can finesse the situation and just be right on that line. So a ref couldn't possibly call it. And then to have a machine being like, you know, no, you can't, you, you could beat the ref, but not the machine.

• 17:57Speaker 00

  Look, I think of this like marketing, cause I'm, I'll make this valuable to the audience who does not like sports.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  This is slam ball, by the way.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  I thought those were the Chinese robots first.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  No, these are, now we're watching slam ball best hits. Look at this.

• 18:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, this, boom, look at this.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Oh, all right, all right.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Tell me this is a lack of.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  I can get behind this.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  It's so insane.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Is this made to look like it was shot on VHS? What's going on here?

• 18:26Speaker 01

  This is an older video.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  Okay, so it's been around for a while.

• 18:29Speaker 00

  A little bit more, um, so I'll, I'll say, I'll answer you like this. To make it a little business terms, hopefully help some people's marketing. There's a lot of people watching right now that become too one dimensional math performance marketers.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 18:45Speaker 00

  And they lose. In fact, you boys were one of my favorite executions to watch from afar, cause you guys played like me. You sell more on brand than on math. You guys were getting brand deals that were completely inappropriate, cause you sold on value, not on metrics.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  I think that that's how I think about technology and sports. If we get all the way to full AI robots and everything's 100% black and white, I think the league's gonna learn pretty quickly that we as humans need a little romance, need a little gray, not black and white, need a little of a balance. And so, just like I wish in political terms that everyone was purple instead of this garbage red and blue we're in with the sports and technology and replay, if they can find purple, I think it's great. When they go too red or too blue, I think it's a problem.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, even in Formula, even in Formula One, there's, you know, the drivers are having issues right now because there's AI is deciding how much, you know, fuel and how much power to, and, and they're all just getting angry because they're like, am I, am I losing because I'm not as fast as my opponent? Or is my, is the AI running on my car just not as dialed?

• 19:56Speaker 00

  It's, it's all these analogies. It's like, is dinner fun without the side dish and, and, you know, the, the amuse-bouche and dessert? Like, when we get so binary, it, we all want a little romance. We need a little romance.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Okay, one more potential league. I want you to run, run this down and, and let us know next time you're on what you find. But I have a theory that when every car on the road is autonomous, that, like, driving on the track is gonna have a resurgence in popularity because people are gonna be, you know, it's so romantic, it's so romantic, there's so much great history around racing, every person, everyone I know. Uh, yeah, hit me with the counter. But, but I have a theory that like, not, like, things like, like, there's something like a slam, slam ball or whatever it is for driving.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  And that's just like demolition derby.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  No, it's something like rally car. I was driving, yesterday I was driving, I was driving a dune buggy. I, I was like with my buddy and we were like, we were laughing, it was so much fun. We're drifting around.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a more dynamic.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  Counter is, I don't know if you know this, but we used to ride horses before the cars.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  And I don't know if you know, there's something called horse racing.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:13Speaker 00

  That is pretty out there. And so, the counter would be that we kind of just lived it with horses and horse racing. But the counter to my counter is what you said, which is, I actually think horse racing could be massive in this country if they put a contemporary flair on it. What UFC showed is like, it was an evolution of boxing with more.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  Oh, interesting. Yeah. You want like rally horse racing.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Sort of like UFC meets the Kentucky Derby. Like you can punch the other jockeys.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  Or what about none of that? And it's more about, what about storytelling? What about?

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes. A drive to survive, that type of thing.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  Or like, or even when we're watching an actual horse race on a Saturday, that's not the Kentucky Derby. Like if you turned it on and the bottom of the screen was actually a mic version of every jockey and you're learning, like, we want layers. We want like, we want stories. We want to get captivated. Everything is about that in every aspect of life.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  But two jockeys getting up in each other's faces and throwing down after a run.

• 22:20Speaker 00

  You guys are looking at my lens today.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  Okay, here's a, here's a hard hitting question. Do you think Big Boogie turned it down or was he capping?

• 22:30Speaker 01

  That was a good question.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Do you think he, he potentially, because we were trying to do that, John did the math. And he said that if he was going to dental school for a decade and he had a bunch of dependents, it's possible the total package could have been in the, in the $10 million range. But you, you cover NIL stuff a lot more.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  True.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  You'll appreciate this. This is one of the rare moments where I get to do this. And I always look for it. So thank you, men. I'm going to clip this. The answer is, I don't know. I've just not paid enough attention. I've been a little bit of a bubble. I'm very in, I'm in a very weird place right now. I've been in a seven to 10 week cocoon around the collectibles industry becoming the, that collecting becoming the next lifestyle genre. And so like my consumption of anything happening in pop culture is at an all time low the last two months. Cause I've been in the lab, like in the lab on this thesis that I've been on for about eight years that I think is about to completely blow the roofs off of. Like for example, for instance, to give you even more color, again, always try to think about

• 23:36Speaker 00

  how to bring value to this smart show. I'm, we've started at VaynerMedia, a collectibles marketing division. Just like there started, just like Coca-Cola started a sports marketing division when the Olympics were getting important. As a driver to consumption, I believe in 10 years, every Fortune 500 consumable product apparel, CPG, will have a collectibles marketing strategy. I don't know if you guys saw lines around the door at Popeyes chicken for the one piece collectible, people flooding to a Dodgers game to get the one piece collectible. I think that in differentiation in an AEO, GEO, you know, agentic commerce world differentiation around collectibles and community.

• 24:22Speaker 00

  To get people to stop their normal pattern of what they're just reordering because they want to buy a deodorant that has a collectible of their favorite. I just see collectibles eating up because of what it means for community and analog and value and investment.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, and AI creates like insane, is going to continue to create insane abundance. Like one example is everyone, everyone can have a SaaS product now. You can make it.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  Everyone will.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Everyone will.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  What's the chain?

• 24:50Speaker 00

  Everyone who wants to, go ahead, brother.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  What's the chain from? People are playing a sport, is it watchable, then it becomes a sport with teams professional. Uh, you identified some of the translation effects like, uh, you know, is anybody, is anybody gonna watch golf? Sure, a lot of people play it, but will people watch it? Obviously, the answer was yes. And that was true for football before there was a league and there was TV and the Super Bowl, right? People were just playing it.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  By the way, just for fun, because I'm just nerding out.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Please.

• 25:24Speaker 00

  Like, everyone said there would never be a professional football league. That football was always good in college.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  Notre Dame, the twenties, the thirties, like.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Like smart people that come on every this one, like those people back in the forties and fifties, like there will never be professional football.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Yes, but at the same time, there are sports that are played by lots of people. I'm thinking of like running and running is not a massive, there's not the Super Bowl of running, even though millions and millions of Americans go jogging and they participate in the sport. There's something special about competitive football that makes it the Super Bowl, right?

• 26:00Speaker 00

  Super Bowl is very special, but like, you know, the New York City Marathon is a very cultural event with good ratings.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  You know, I think we're in the era where an entrepreneur watching this show right now is like, fuck it, I'm making a running league and it might hit.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. So then talk to me about the translation layer from there. There's a sport that a lot of people are playing. If it's watchable, it becomes a big national sport with professional teams that we're all watching. At what point does it become, is there a collectible culture around it? Because we're just in this early stages of like pickleball has been played by a lot of people. It's now starting to be watched by people, as you mentioned. When will people be collecting pickleball cards?

• 26:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. Your production team seems really capable based on what I just saw.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Can the production team, before I leave in the next three or four minutes, put up eBay, type in Anna Lee Waters. Lee is L E I G H. Anna, A N N A, space Lee, L E I P H, space Waters. Then enter on eBay and then go to completed and sold items and then sorted by most valuable. If the team could do this.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  This is a great challenge for the team.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  Are you just trying to move some Anna Lee Waters merch right now? You're like, and then click purchase and then click check. I'm kidding.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  But she is the star of our team and we do rep for Fainer Sports. She's my, she was our Joe Namath. She is our Larry Bird. Like, oh, look at this. Now hit on the left side, on the left side, hit completed and sold.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, real eBay ball knowers. No, there's Dylan on our team. Big collector.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  Nope, no, no, all the way down. I'm very hardcore. I'm very in the dirt on collectible culture. The completed sold.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  Honey, that flu keeping you up?

• 27:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't got this.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  You need NyQuil Intense Flu.

• 28:01Speaker 05

  Undo your flu symptoms with NyQuil Intense Flu. The nighttime sniffling, aching, aching fever, best sleep with a flu medicine. You do got this. Uses directed, keep out of reach of children.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Where we going? Hunting around for Anna Lee Waters.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  Oh, show us this, show us this.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Log in, show us the password.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  No, so, so Dylan on the, on our team already got there.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  And he's seeing.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Share screenshot.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Anna Lee Waters rookie autograph cards going for $8,000, $5,000. $5,000.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  And I would argue.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Okay, whoa.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  We've done a very good job with Anna Lee. We've made her famous, she's on Fallon, she's on McAfee, she's the face of the sport. Ryan Harwood at Vayner Sports deserves a lot of credit. We've crushed with her. She's the best player in the world. Pickleball is the only sport where a female can be the best. She's the best player in the sport, including the men.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  Because, you know, that's what's interesting about pickleball. Eighty-year-old grandmas are whipping nineteen-year-old grandsons in pickleball. It's a different kind of sport.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  There is another sport where women outperform men. A certain equestrian. In the Olympics.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  There, I'm sure there's others, but this is one that people know. Uh, you can see eight to five thousand, and I will tell you, ninety-nine percent of the audience, and everyone on Twitter right now, hit me up, Gary Vee, and answer this. Ninety-nine percent of the audience right now has never heard of her in their lives. So it doesn't take a lot to get to collectible. These collectibles are niche, are tribals, right? Look what happened with Comic-Con. Fifty guys in a weird hotel in San Diego, right? In nineteen seventy-six to now, this last weekend, millions of people go into San Diego and it's a cultural phenomenon. So, collectibles is when it flips over to pop culture.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  I would argue that athletes that are the most valuable are more pop culture than people realize. They're more superheroes than people realize. And when you're building a league, whether it's Conor McGregor and Ronda Rousey, whether it's Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Steph Curry today, like, you meet a superhero. Joe Namath was the superhero for the NFL early on. He became one of the most famous people in the world. Jets had a huge upset in Super Bowl III, and football was on its way.

• 30:25Speaker 02

  Business, uh, collectibles. Where do you think it's going? We saw Jensen Jack go for about a million. That was for charity for our friend, Justin Mares. Uh, his grants that he does.

• 30:37Speaker 00

  I believe collectibles, I believe collectibles have eaten up the pop culture energy of what young 20-year-olds would do with public stocks. So instead of buying 50 shares of Nike, like my generation did, they're gonna go buy a collectible. I think it's completely eaten up the oxygen of contemporary art. So you guys, especially after your nice transaction, or, you know, continue to hang around people of wealth at a young age. Your contemporaries, people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, only 25 years ago, 30 years ago, are buying the hottest contemporary artists to put the art in the house. Much of that money is now going into $100,000, $1 million collectibles. Obviously, Michael Rubin, sitting on the top of the TOPPS empire with all his cultural

• 31:21Speaker 00

  relevance, has brought an incredible amount of pop culture energy to it. And kids, people forget, trading cards are 100 years of collectability now. This has been a very long-term asset class, but the numbers are just out of control. You see O'Leary wearing his sheet. Like, you know this, even for you guys that are young, definitely people in my generation, people that collected cards as teenagers in the 80s and 90s were nerdy. People collecting cards are now cool. And once that's happens, it gets really different really fast and we're on that other side. And so you'll see collect, you know, watches.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  What's on your shirt? I wanna know what's on your shirt.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  I wasn't even, I was, right, there you go. Look at the hell I'm wearing.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Are you, are you going to the national?

• 32:09Speaker 00

  Of course, leaving tomorrow.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Break it down.

• 32:12Speaker 00

  I'm like, let me just make this so I can clip it in nine years. I am building the next Disney Pokemon Marvel, all in everyone's faces. It's called Be Friends. And because I have 13 different other jobs, no one sees it, and I don't speak about it that often. But, but you're cooking. Building a business during this AI era is gonna end up being one of my savviest moves.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  And the generational run is just beginning.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  Clip that. Clip that in a decade.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Clip that in five decades.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  I mean, ninety-nine, hundred.

• 32:45Speaker 00

  Thank you, man.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  Uh, great to, great to catch up.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Always great.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  You're the man.

• 32:49Speaker 00

  Let me know if I can help you.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  Good luck at the national.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Go bye.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  Cheers.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  Everybody, if you enjoyed this podcast, please go back and look at the prior episodes. They're loaded. I appreciate your attention and uh, thanks for being part of this journey. See you later.