Spencer Dinwiddie, Professional NBA Player: Fighting the NBA for the Right to Tokenize a Contract

Spencer Dinwiddie is a professional NBA player currently playing for the Brooklyn Nets. He was previously selected in the 2nd round of the NBA draft after playing at the University of Colorado. In this conversation, Spencer and Anthony Pompliano discuss his childhood playing multiple sports, why he chose Colorado over Harvard after getting a 1400 on his SAT, what it's like being injured months before the NBA draft, what a day-in-the-life of an NBA player is like, what he plans to do during the tokenization of his NBA contract, why the NBA doesn't like it, and how he views the current free speech issues surrounding China and the NBA. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. CRYPTO. COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine. Visit coinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world.

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off.

• 0:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Spencer Dinwiddie is a professional NBA player who is currently playing for the Brooklyn Nets. He was previously selected in the second round of the NBA draft after playing at the University of Colorado. In this conversation, we discuss Spencer's childhood playing multiple sports, why he chose Colorado over Harvard after getting a 1400 on his SATs, what it's like being injured months before the NBA draft, what the day in the life of an NBA player is like, what he is planning to do during the tokenization of his NBA contract, why the NBA doesn't like it, how he views the current free speech issues surrounding China and the NBA, especially because he plays for an owner who is more involved than others, and he finally settles the greatest of all time debate between Jordan, Kobe, and LeBron.

• 0:56Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:22Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:52Speaker 00

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:19Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Spencer in the house. Man, it's gonna be fun. We're gonna talk a lot of sports. We're gonna talk some crypto, Bitcoin. Somehow you're an Attron. We'll get to that in a second. And then you're one of the first athletes to try to tokenize the contract, which I think a lot of people are paying attention to. So thanks for coming to do this.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 3:38Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Background. Most people know you as an NBA player, but you got a life before that. So what did you do before you got to the NBA?

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Um, I grew up in Los Angeles, California. My mom was a teacher. She has a PhD from USC. She was a professor there for a minute. My dad's in the real estate. My brother's a genius. He may be the smartest in the family. You know, went to school, played basketball.

• 4:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Only played basketball or played other sports too?

• 4:05Speaker 02

  Nah, I played football as well and I also skied.

• 4:08Anthony Pompliano?

  So you skied?

• 4:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know.

• 4:09Anthony Pompliano?

  In LA?

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, man. I was actually pretty good, though. It's crazy. Not a great swimmer, but I can ski a little bit.

• 4:16Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Wait, hold on. We gotta talk about this for a second. High school?

• 4:21Speaker 02

  No, no, no. So I never went competitively, well, really competitively in football and skiing because at high school, my dad made me choose.

• 4:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Made a decision, yeah. And it was more like injury, avoid injuries or more just focused?

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, like a little bit of both. He was like, you know, if you want to really do this thing, because, you know, I wasn't like highly ranked or anything. I told my dad all the time, like, I want to be in the NBA. I want to be in the NBA. So he was like... Well, if you really want to do it, then focus on it and do it, you know, and and well, I have to credit him obviously for for me being here, of course, because if he had to tore down my dreams at that stage, like, there's no way I'd have been here. So him boosting me in that confidence. I mean, obviously, it required me to give up football and skiing, but, you know, I'm here, so.

• 4:58Anthony Pompliano?

  I I don't know too many kids, especially in L A, that want to be skiers, so basketball is a good choice. You made it. All right. And then you went to Colorado, right?

• 5:06Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 5:06Anthony Pompliano?

  All right.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  My my final two choices for college were Colorado and Harvard. Um, I chose Colorado, another basketball decision. I want to go to Pac 12. I was mad about, you know, feeling a little bit under recruited and being a West Coast kid. I wanted to, I guess, have some vengeance and and and go to NBA.

• 5:22Anthony Pompliano?

  It worked, right?

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it did.

• 5:24Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So so one of the things I want to get out of the way right away is you got accepted to go to Harvard and you got recruited there. So you're not a dummy, right? Talk a little bit about uh how how you did academically and kind of SAT and stuff.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, you know, going into my sophomore year in high school, I was uh trying to get into like some program or some program was like recruiting me, so I had to take the SAT. I got a fourteen hundred out of sixteen hundred. So that carried me through uh through high school.

• 5:51Anthony Pompliano?

  As a sophomore?

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, like going into my sophomore year of high school and then, um, you know, now, when it when it came calling and I, you know, I had like a, I think my GPA was only in like the mid threes at the end of the day, because I kind of let it all go to the wayside when I started really rolling basketball wise. I'm not even gonna lie to you, but, um, you know, it was good enough to get into Harvard because of the SAT and and, you know, the.

• 6:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Basketball stuff, yeah, yeah. Well, and and part of this, the reason why I want to make sure that people understand this is, uh, it's not a surprise what you're trying to do now, because you're not just a single, you know, kind of faceted person around, hey, I play basketball. There's plenty of people who do that. Those usually end up being the kind of the horror stories, I think, of just like they don't have skills afterwards. You get a lot of options, right? So you could have done a lot of different things. Um, all right. So you go to Colorado and then you what you tore your ACL, I think it was, right?

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, ACL, both meniscuses and my MCL. That was, uh, January 2014. And then, uh, you know, I declared in April and went to the draft anyway.

• 6:50Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, because this, this one of the, uh, the cooler parts of your whole story is, uh, I actually remember when you tore the ACL. I do not remember the whole story of then that's when you got drafted. I thought a whole year had gone by. But when I was looking it up before we did this, I was like, wait a minute, you tore it, then declared and got drafted, what, second round, right?

• 7:09Speaker 02

  Second round, 38. Um, yeah, and I mean, so we, we talked about not being highly ranked and all that stuff. So I go there freshman year, have a side year, followed up sophomore year, have a really good year. Um, we go to the tournament. Um, I was on draft boards, you know, they, they suggest I come back because I was going to be like late first, early second. So, you know, the way we were playing, we were about like 15th in the country, we were rolling. Um, junior was actually phenomenal at the time, only had a couple of losses and I was supposed to be a lottery pick, all that stuff. So it was working. Um, unfortunately I got hurt, but you know, I mean, I just, I was ready. I wanted to go.

• 7:44Anthony Pompliano?

  So, so some of it's got to be like mentality wise, you're like, hey, I'm ready to go play, maybe I want to go play against these guys.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Was there any piece of it, like you're already hurt. It wasn't like, hey, if I come back and I get hurt again, I just won't get, you know, there's a possibility of like far falling further and further or potentially not getting drafted at some point? Or was it just, it was more offensive and like, hey, I want to go play, let's go do this.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was more offensive, just, uh, from, from my mindset, right? Like when I started attacking recovery and they started saying like, you know, I was recovering well and all those other things. That's when I really was like, okay, I can really do this. I can really declare, you know? Prior to that, you know, I heard all the doom and gloom stuff because I wasn't supposed to play for a year. You know, it wasn't just ACL, it was both meniscuses and MCL. You know, they're over here like, hey, look, your meniscus was pretty like trash. So this, this could get kind of dicey. Like I don't, I don't know exactly what's going to happen. So, um, in the midst of that fear, that's when, um, I was more so thinking about coming back to school and then trying to, you know, at the very least graduating and all that, all that stuff. But, you know, I had a conversation with my mom, I think it was the morning, it might've been the second day after I got hurt.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  You know, I woke up and I was actually crying and, um, I talked to her and this, this should be a Nike commercial, honestly, even though I'm not with Nike. But, you know, I, I was talking to her and I was like, Ma, like. You know, like why this happened, like all this stuff like, you know, I still want to go to NBA. And she's like, you know, like relax.

• 9:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  I'm like, what? And she's like, what do you want to do? I was like, Ma, I want to go to the league. She's like, no, Spencer, like, what do you want to do? So I want to go to the league. She said, then do it. Just like that, then do it. I'm crying, you know, I'm, I'm kind of in my feelings right now. I'm a what 20 year old kid, I think at the time, who just apparently had his dreams taken away. And so I'm, I'm tripping. And she's just like.

• 9:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, why?

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Like, why? Like, bro, are, are you as good as you think you are? Then do it.

• 9:36Anthony Pompliano?

  It's funny how, uh, moms specifically, they know when to kind of be soft and, and, and, you know, sharpen that or, uh, uh, dull the edge a little bit. But then the exact opposite, every once in a while, they're like, hey, get your shit together, let's go.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  And that's the funniest part. My dad is always like on me. And in that moment, he was the soft one. He was like, I'm sorry, man. Like, I'm so sorry you got hurt.

• 9:59Anthony Pompliano?

  You're gonna be okay.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  Mama's like, boy, if you don't just do it, like, are you good? And I was like, yes. She's like, then go.

• 10:06Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy. And, and so, uh, what were you being told going into the draft in terms of, hey, you're hurt, you're recovering nicely. But was there an understanding that you could fall completely out of the draft to the later round? Like, what was?

• 10:19Speaker 02

  No, no, no. Um.

• 10:21Anthony Pompliano?

  You pretty much knew you were going to be.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:22Anthony Pompliano?

  First, second round.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, once, once we kind of cleared the first couple hurdles of like recovery and it was like, okay, he's going to be fine. We don't know necessarily whether it's seven months, eight months, 10 months, whatever, but we know he's going to be fine. Then it was more so like, okay, he's, he's at worst, like mid second. So it was like 45 or so was like, like how far they thought like I was going to fall. And so I was like, if I'm okay with that and I'm the player I think I am, and I think I can play my way into, you know, better prospects after I'm already in the league, then. You know, let's go.

• 10:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, and, and the difference between, let's call it 45 and top 10 pick is what money at the draft?

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Oh, shoot. Quite a bit. Yeah, because when I came into the league, the minimum was still around like five or 600,000. It wasn't like 1.5 like it is now. So, you know, a top 10 pick probably was in the. Two and a half, three million range and my minimum was probably, you know, six hundred thousand, something like that. So

• 11:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  Quite a big difference, but you know, the benefit was and obviously in trying to be optimistic. If I have a one or two year deal and I play well, then I get to, you know, my next contract quicker. Whereas, you know, a first round pick is going to be four or five years until they get to their next contract.

• 11:33Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. Um, at what point after the league, you know, do you come across Bitcoin, crypto, blockchain? Like, it's just such a, especially because you didn't just do it, you know, yesterday, right? So it's kind of been something that you've been looking at, like, how does that happen?

• 11:53Speaker 02

  So I actually have a friend in finance, works at a bank. He told me about it in two thousand fourteen.

• 11:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Early.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  He told me about it, yeah. Right when I got drafted, he was like, you need to put some of your money in Bitcoin. I'm like,

• 12:04Anthony Pompliano?

  No way.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  Right when I got drafted. The problem is, I'm listening to all these horror stories and I'm like, I'm a second round pick. I've only been in League One or two years. I can't, I can't, bro, you know?

• 12:17Speaker 02

  I wish I had a.

• 12:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, now, now he's probably doing his victory lap, right?

• 12:21Speaker 02

  No, he definitely is. So circle back to about two thousand seventeen, when I get back to the Nets. You know, I've already made, or not get back to Nets, but get to the Nets.

• 12:31Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So, uh, cause you went, you got drafted by the Pistons?

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Then went Bulls, then Nets?

• 12:36Speaker 02

  Um, so Bulls was only for a cup of coffee. Like, it was literally. Yeah, no, I was only at the Bulls for like a hot second. Like, it was just there to say, hot. That's it.

• 12:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Take a quick Instagram in this stadium.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  I took a couple of snapshots in a jersey and then I was gone. Um, but yeah, so basically it's two years in Detroit. And then three years in Brooklyn. It's pretty much, it breaks down pretty evenly like that.

• 12:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  But yeah, so I already had a little bit of money and then, you know, being in the D League for that kind of, or like Chicago D League experience that summer in two thousand seventeen, kind of, you know, looking at other stuff and branching out and expanding my mind. Cause it's like, well, shoot, I'm out the league. Like, I have to, you know, not just, you know, I mean, I have full faith and confidence I was getting back in, but you just kind of take time to, you know, expand your mind a little bit. Even kind of be a little more focused on your family and all those other things. And so that's when, you know, I came back across it, had a couple of conversations with my guy. He was like, look, do it. So I was fortunate enough to catch, you know,

• 13:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Most of seventeen.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I caught the bull run. So that's when it was like. What? But at this time, I still don't understand. You know, I'm just, I'm just listening. And so, you know, he tells me about Bitcoin. I, I look up a couple of other like top 10, top 25. The reason why I got into Tron, right? So, um, no, I'm, I'm, I'm just gonna keep it.

• 13:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Nah, come on, let's go.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  So it's like, oh, the CEO is Justin Sun. He's tied to Jack Ma. And then, so I know about Alibaba and stuff. I'm like, if he's tied to Jack Ma.

• 14:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Like, let's pull it. And, and remember at this time, I'm, we're, we're talking about like Vegas gambling money. We're talking about several thousand dollars. Like, we're not talking about like.

• 14:09Anthony Pompliano?

  It's not a true investment. You know that you're speculating.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, this is, this is speculation at the time. So, and this is why, you know, even though I caught the Bitcoin bull run, it's not like it changed my life forever. It was, I'm, I'm getting into it. I'm learning about it. And so, you know, when the bull run happens and the subsequent crash, you know, you start reading about like, how does a market swing this much beyond the fact that it's in its infant stages? I, I want to know why. But then also, even when it does crash, why is there still over $200 billion in here? Why are people still in this? What does it truly mean? What is the technology behind it? And that's when you start reading about it. That's when you start understanding blockchain. That's when you're like, oh, I understand why Bitcoin is king now. You know, in, in terms of like censorship resistance and all those other things. And so, you know, then it's like, wait a second. DeFi is a real thing. Like, this can open up a completely new world.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  And that's when all of this starts to begin.

• 14:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, and, and there, I, I forget who said this and I, I should remember it because I want to give them credit for it. But they said, I came for the money and I stayed for the money. But they're saying like, I came basically from a capitalistic. I wanted to get rich and I was greedy.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:10Anthony Pompliano?

  But then when I learned what money really was, I learned what Bitcoin was. I was like, that's why I stayed, right? And so it, the price does bring a huge influx of people in and get some pay attention.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and, and that's, you know, I'd, I'd be lying if I told you that wasn't part of like my journey and my story. It's just that like, you know, now, once you're in, now, once you read about it and all that other stuff, you're like, whoa.

• 15:33Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  This is real. This is, this is something that's different.

• 15:36Anthony Pompliano?

  What, what's the general sentiment within the league of like true, like crypto, right? So Bitcoin, Ethereum, like, like that type of stuff that we would consider more the larger cap stuff?

• 15:44Speaker 02

  Uh, crypto in the league in a, in a lot of ways is Bitcoin. Like if you say cryptocurrency, it's just.

• 15:50Anthony Pompliano?

  It's just Bitcoin. Okay.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  People, people don't really understand, um, you know, the difference.

• 15:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Other than Kobe speaking at the Tron conference.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, you know, probably got paid to do it. So.

• 15:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. That's fine. Hey.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen, here, here's the way I look at it is, uh, if you go down the line, I could think of a lot of celebrities, athletes, musicians, et cetera, who have done a whole variation of them, right?

• 16:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:14Anthony Pompliano?

  They're getting paid. It's the same thing. Just like it's a branch, like everything else.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  It's an endorsement deal.

• 16:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, all right. So most people are interested in Bitcoin specifically, uh, and is this like, hey, I talked to my financial advisor and we're building a portfolio of assets and like, we got a little bit of Bitcoin in there. Or is this more of like a, my financial advisor told me I'm crazy for doing this, but I got some like, you know, play money and I'm doing it with the play money, not with the financial advisor, uh, kind of money.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  Oh, no. Like so that, excuse me. That's the thing. When I, when I sit down with my like business managers and stuff, like I, I tell them, you know, what, what, what I personally have a passion for.

• 16:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  And to me that's predominantly Bitcoin and real estate. So I'm like, hey guys, like, you know, I, I understand like where like some of this other stuff is, but these are like the two areas of focus that I really believe in. So like, let's drive.

• 17:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Optimize for this.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. Let's, let's drive like my capital towards these areas.

• 17:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  You know what I mean? So, you know, um, obviously real estate is not going anywhere. You know, market can go up and down, all that stuff, just like any other market. But, you know, people are going to need places to live. We're not making any more land. I'm a big believer in it. So, you know.

• 17:20Anthony Pompliano?

  It's something, it's something that you're interested in. It sounds like, and you understand.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? So it's like, hey, look, I'd rather go do that than go speculate on some stocks that I have no clue about. Like that actually may be more risky than something you understand.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  There you go. And so those are, those are two areas that I'm. Predominantly focused on besides like the entrepreneur endeavors, but predominantly just from a personal perspective, real estate Bitcoin.

• 17:40Anthony Pompliano?

  So one of the things that I've had the fortunate kind of experience to learn from a lot of these guys is what I'll just call like personal finance within professional sports and it's you hear the horror stories, right? Hey guys go broke and all that kind of stuff, but there's even, I think it's Intersect or Intersection Capital, you know, they made a list of like the 50 things that athletes who stay rich made, right? And I think I heard Patrick O'Shaughnessy talking about this with one of the guys and it's things like, hey, they got rims that are 22 or less, right? You know, they wear condoms, right? Like, like they got this whole list and it's a list of not don't do this, it's a list of do this, right? And kind of the positive affirmation and the like, hey, here's

• 18:24Anthony Pompliano?

  the playbook rather than like, don't do this other stuff because by nature, athletes will, oh, I can't do something. You're not looking in, right? And so do you feel like that's a lot of the conversation in the locker room is around finance, investments, entrepreneurs, like all that kind of stuff? Or is it just more sports, music, culture? And there's not so much of the finance and business?

• 18:46Speaker 02

  I would say over the last, well, I've only been in the league for five years, but I would say even in that five years, you've seen more of a shift in the guys being more open about finances, what they feel about different markets, what they're exploring, you know? I mean, I think guys are still very scared about cryptocurrency in general, which is understandable due to the crash and them not understanding like blockchain and stuff like that. But, you know, talking about real estate or talking about VC, which is very in vogue right now, is definitely popping up in the locker rooms for sure.

• 19:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there a competition on who got into what deal? Like, hey, man, I dropped 20 on you last night and I also got an Uber before you.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  Nah, nah, not, well, not that I've heard. I mean, maybe there's some, but not that I know of.

• 19:27Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. And before we get into some of the tokenized contract stuff, like just walk us through, what is a normal day in-season look for you guys? Because I don't think people really understand like how in-depth some of this is that you've got to do in order to be ready to play every night?

• 19:43Speaker 02

  You know, Monday through Sunday, like, that doesn't exist during season. There's three different types of days.

• 19:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  There's practice day.

• 19:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  Game day. And then, like, your light workout day.

• 19:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 19:57Anthony Pompliano?

  I didn't hear a rest day.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, so that is your rest day. Like, the light workout day is your rest day. That's when you go in, you know, maybe you get, like, an hour's worth of a lift or some shots and, you know, you get a good stretch in, hit the sauna or something like that, and then you're out in two, three hours or something like that. That's your rest day. But, you know, a practice day, I mean, you know, practice gonna start at 10, you gotta be there by 8:30 to eat, you know, then you're gonna have, like, your corrective that you have to do in the weight room. Practice goes from 10 to 12:30. Then you got, you know, 12:30 to 1, 12:30 to 1:15, a lift. Then you're gonna do, like, your treatment, which is gonna take you to 2:30, 2:45. Then, you know, you're gonna have to do your recovery, which is gonna involve, like, cold tub and whatnot. So, you probably, you probably in there from,

• 20:42Speaker 02

  it's almost a nine to five. You're in there from 8:30 to 4, you know, roughly, so.

• 20:46Anthony Pompliano?

  And you're not sitting at a desk, right?

• 20:48Speaker 02

  No, no, no, you're not sitting at a desk. Like, this involves running, jumping, playing basketball, all that, all that good stuff, lifting weights, like, et cetera. So, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a very involved job. Like, it's a, you know, it's, it's fun because it's our, our dreams, and so, you know, it's, it's different in that capacity from us enjoying it, especially, like, our reward being the games and being able to compete and do things that we love. But, like, people thinking that we just kinda lay in bed all day and then, you know, show up and drop 20 and then go home and kick it. Like, that's, that's not, that's not how it is.

• 21:19Anthony Pompliano?

  What about game day?

• 21:21Speaker 02

  Um, game day, so, I've been fortunate enough for the last, like, year or so with the Brooklyn Nets, they've been pretty light on shootarounds. But usually, you kinda have this light practice of sorts called a shootaround, um, you know, from 10 to 11:30 or so in the morning. And then you show back up to the gym, probably 5 o'clock for a 7:30 game. Um, you have, uh, one of those kinda light lifts, 20 minutes or so. Um, another round of, uh, shooting. Uh, for about thirty minutes and then you have another like treatment round for another thirty minutes. So it's about an hour and a half worth of work that you put in.

• 21:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Before the game.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then you play the game and after the game, you know, depending upon whether you're injured or whether you're working on something specific or if you didn't play, then you have conditioning, right? So let's say, uh, you normally play twenty-five, thirty minutes, but that night you played ten. They may make you run on the treadmill for the other fifteen, twenty that you didn't.

• 22:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 22:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it, it's, it's pretty involved. Like, it's, it's not a joke, you know, if, if you, uh.

• 22:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And they're, and they're like data-driven on all this stuff and really paying attention to.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, they, they track, uh, you know, loads and all that stuff. They, they have like metrics for it. Their second spectrum in the, uh, in the arenas, like the cameras track like how many miles are ran. Um, they approximate that low based upon like your, your force input into the ground and, and how you run specifically. It, oh, yeah, like this.

• 22:37Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  There, yeah, so the, when people try to think that this is just like, oh.

• 22:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Going to the backyard shooting.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, like it's, it's nothing like that. And so, so it's all data analytics driven. Like, this is a business, you know, if, if the NBA is pulling in billions of dollars of revenue, right? And, and the asset is the one driving that, that force, then they're gonna try to know every single piece they can about that specific player, that specific person, um, just like any other big business.

• 23:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, cause I remember, I think it was, uh, maybe end of, maybe it was beginning of the preseason this year or maybe last year or something, uh, the video of James Harden working out after the game, right? And it was like, hey, the dude just, you know, dropped forty points or whatever and now he's in the gym. And, and it wasn't like he was stretching, right?

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:16Anthony Pompliano?

  He was working out. And, and, uh, and, and so I, I guess I'd never realized how common that is.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, that's, uh, that's, that's, that's not out of the ordinary.

• 23:27Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, and the last question on this, uh, I just read an article about, uh, sleep deprivation.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:32Anthony Pompliano?

  And they're, and they're basically talking about, you know, the NFL has CTE and concussions and, and all this kinda stuff. Ten years ago, nobody talked about, now has kinda become the thing that everyone's focused on. Uh, and this article was like a two-year study, uh, where they were showing like, look, man, these NBA players are not sleeping what you think. They're not getting eight, nine, ten hours of sleep. They're, you know, getting on the game at eleven, they get on a flight at twelve-thirty, they land at two.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:57Anthony Pompliano?

  They, you know, get to the hotel by three, but when are they sleeping?

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's for eighty-two games, right?

• 24:04Speaker 02

  Eighty-two games in like a two-hundred-and-twenty day period or something like that.

• 24:08Anthony Pompliano?

  So a real problem.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, nah, for sure.

• 24:11Anthony Pompliano?

  What what do players do to to try to get over that or kind of?

• 24:15Speaker 02

  You gotta be a big napper, you know, or you have to just be a guy that is fine with that. You know, there are some guys that are fine with four hours of sleep and then that's they're just one of those highly functioning people that does that consistently. I myself am not that guy. I get cranky, I get grumpy, all those things. So, you know, I'm I'm gonna get my nap during the afternoon.

• 24:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. All right. Because I think Kobe used to do the everyday man or whatever, right? Where you sleep like an hour and a half, then like an hour, then an hour, like some crazy shit.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  I've heard all types of crazy Kobe stories. So like, you gotta ask him on that one.

• 24:47Anthony Pompliano?

  The only two stories I got for you that that just are seared in my brain is, uh, he called the trainer at like 3:30, went trainer went home after the workout and then came back at 10 or 11 and was like, damn, Kobe, you got here early. He was like, I never left.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  Oh, the Olympics one? Yeah, that was true. That was true.

• 25:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And then the other one is, uh, it was, uh, Jason Williams, uh, was at a, uh, at a game, the pregame shoot around. And he got there and Kobe wouldn't leave the court until Jason Williams left. And Jason was like, hey, man, why'd you, why were you there for so long? He's like, I wouldn't leave until you left. So it's just, it's a mentality.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Nah, he's, yeah, he's wired different. Like, there's a lot of crazy dudes in the league in terms of that competitive nature, but like, he's a little different. Yeah, he's a little different.

• 25:25Anthony Pompliano?

  He's all over Instagram now with his like 12 year old or 13 year old daughter's basketball game.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  Being a dad.

• 25:32Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So, uh, let's get into tokenizing the contract, right? Um, let's for before we contact about what you're doing, let's just go over the mechanics of how NBA contracts work. So, um, what's the structure like guaranteed, non guaranteed? And then how do most players, uh, get paid? Is it a per game? Is it once a week, twice a week? You know, how how does it actually work from a mechanic standpoint?

• 25:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. So every contract kind of follows this, this uniform. It's called a uniform player contract, right?

• 25:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  Um, you tend to get paid bi monthly. So, you know, first and the 15th, um, over a 24 month period. That can vary, you know, some guys can get it um, as low as like a six months. Sometimes you can get certain advances or whatever. And then sometimes you can have like different incentives in into a contract, whether you, you know, shoot a certain percentage or whatever, but. All those things are very individual to that player. And so, um, you know, the uniform player contract just has like the standard protections, right? In terms of like the guarantees, et cetera. And then, you know, you kind of write in anything that, you know, disputes those guarantees. So it's a player option or team option or something like that, right? But typically, uh, you know, if you have, you know, that set guaranteed contract, then you know, whether it's death, disability or injury or whatever, then you're, you're covered.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  So that's, uh, you know, the biggest difference between us and like football, right? Where like, you know, once, once my contract is good for that year or two years or whatever.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  If I go outside and get hit by a bus, like, you know, um, my family's at least going to be good, right?

• 26:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  I won't be, but. Yeah, my family will be.

• 27:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And after you sign the contract, right? So most, most players have got an agent, agent negotiates the contract. You got your bank or whatever, right? Those contracts are getting paid to you personally to like an LLC? Like, how do most players mechanically engage with the contract? Are they signing it personally or is it through some sort of like legal structure?

• 27:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you.

• 27:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Or maybe it's different.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Well, you can technically do it either way, right? It's, it's as long as what the nets are paying to is considered to be you. So if it's you or a pass through entity, right? That you wholly own or whatever, then it's fine, right? Yeah, it's like, you can't, um, send it to like a corporation that is like split or something of that nature or like.

• 27:44Anthony Pompliano?

  You and I can't start a company and you sign your contract.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. So that's, uh, the whole big thing about assignment, right? As long as they're paying you, then that's it. And then that's why then obviously the buck then stops after that.

• 27:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep, got it. Um, all right. And so at what point do you come up with this?

• 28:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Frankly, probably crazy idea at first that becomes reality, but you're going to tokenize the contract. What did that mean to you? What was the idea genesis, et cetera?

• 28:11Speaker 02

  Um, you know, I've actually been on kind of a journey of like intellectual property rights, uh, brand, fan engagement, like all those things in terms of like. Recognizing what our power is as the asset, right? Like, if you look at, um, what, whatever permutation of this you want to look at it, right? Whether it's, uh, you know, the NBA or other big brands that, you know, use our likeness for whatever it is. Typically speaking, and it's a little bit different with like a Nike, obviously, because they have their own brand status and their own product that they kind of really push in there. Billion dollar company on their own, regardless of LeBron James. But in the NBA sense, right? Like, they're a broker. You know, the fan determines the value, but the players are what bring the value. They're the asset.

• 28:52Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So this is a really important concept. You said this, and I've never heard anyone describe it this way. The NBA is a broker between the fans and the player.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Their, their job is to obviously bring the fans and the players closer together, make their interactions as seamless and easy as possible, and they do a phenomenal job with it, right? Like, one of the best leagues in the world, if you look at it globally, I mean, we're second to soccer, I believe, right now.

• 29:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  Like, growing in terms of like, I know the NFL still brings in, like, obviously, a super high amount of revenue because they can have a hundred thousand plus fans and we can only have like, you know, ten to twenty in an arena. But in terms of just kind of the growth and like, expanding globally and engaging in those other markets and bases, like, I believe NBA is now second to soccer in terms of its, like, you know, growth and its projections.

• 29:35Anthony Pompliano?

  So, that makes sense, though.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, doing, doing a phenomenal job, right? But, at the end of the day, the inherent value is, you know, the players. It's the asset, right? Like, if you drop, uh, the Brooklyn Nets logo in the middle of the street right here, like, you know, people might stop, they might look, they might go, oh, that's, that's weird, right? If you drop LeBron James, or Kevin Durant, or Kyrie Irving in the middle of this street right here.

• 29:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Or Spencer.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  You know, I get a couple, I get a couple people. But, you know, you drop one of those people out there, there's a flock. If you tell, if you tell people on social media, hey, they're going to be playing a basketball game, LeBron's going to play a basketball game, or KD's going to play a one-on-one game in the middle of the street right here, you'll get thousands and thousands and thousands of people.

• 30:14Anthony Pompliano?

  The cops have to come, yeah.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  The cops have to come. Yeah, so, that's where the value is. You know, and so, it, it, any asset, right, has its own asset class. And then that's kind of the, the real genesis of this whole thing. You know, and, and we, just like an apple, or just like a, you know, uh... Whatever other stock or company or whatever can kind of set the terms of what they feel their valuation is. Obviously, people kind of, you know, rate them and have a theoretical value attached to them because of the revenue that they generate and the products that they build, etc. And it's much the same way with us, right? We have a somewhat of a value, right? Like, when you look at us, and you look at our contracts, you look at, you know, our endorsement deals or whatever, you say, okay, he's roughly in the forty million dollar range, he's roughly in the fifty million dollar range,

• 31:00Speaker 02

  or whatever it is. There really is no difference when you look at it in that manner. And so, as me, the company, me, Spencer, me, the asset, I can offer whatever product I want to my fans based upon whatever I feel my value is.

• 31:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  And it's on them to determine the market. It's not the NBA to determine the market, it's on them, right? If I offer a BS product, then they won't buy it, right? Like, it's really that simple. It's kind of the same way, like I told you before. If I went to the bank right now and told them, you know, everybody kind of knows what my contract is, I don't know if, you know, via NBA rules, I can say the exact number. If I go to the bank right now-

• 31:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Ballpark?

• 31:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, ballpark in the thirties.

• 31:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  So if I go to a bank right now-

• 31:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey, by the way, I got to throw this out there. From a skier in LA to thirty mil, you're doing all right.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  Thank you, brother. Yeah, no, but if I go to a bank right now, I'm saying that, hey, guys, I want to buy a hundred million dollar house. They're going to look at me and say, look, you're crazy. Your contract, after we take out taxes and do all this other stuff, there's no way.

• 31:55Anthony Pompliano?

  You just won't have the money.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, you won't have money, like, it's impossible. But if I say I want to buy a five million dollar house, they'll be like, okay, that makes sense. You could probably pay it off in a couple of years, you know, if you so chose. Or you could carry the mortgage thirty years if you wanted. Like, it would completely be up to you.

• 32:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  And it's very much the same way. Like, I set terms for a product that I'm willing to offer as Spencer Demey, the asset. And either fans will say, hey, we like those terms, they're favorable. Or they'll say, no, we don't think those terms are favorable, and they won't buy in. And then the asset, or the product, rather, either succeeds or fails based upon that right there. It really has nothing to do with the league, which is why, you know, it was so disappointing to hear their stance.

• 32:31Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, hold on. So, just so, those who haven't been paying attention, you basically said, all right, I'm going to be, I think it's the first athlete, right? In the four major professional sports, to tokenize my contract. And the mechanism in which you're going to do that is you're going to play. You have a guaranteed contract.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so as long as you don't die, you're getting paid.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? For the most part, the league is going to pay a pass through entity that you have.

• 32:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Pay me. Yeah, they're going to pay you. And then what you do with your money is up to you.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  Bingo.

• 33:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And what you said to me, uh, which just made it clear as day to me was they don't tell you what car to buy.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:08Anthony Pompliano?

  They don't tell you what house to buy.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:10Anthony Pompliano?

  They frankly don't tell you what casino to go gamble at if you wanted to do that. You can do whatever you want with your money.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 33:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And what you've done is you've structured a offering.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? That allows fans to enjoy the product that you're presenting.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 33:27Anthony Pompliano?

  And your point is whatever the terms of that product are, the fans are going to determine whether they agree with the terms or not.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Exactly. They're going to determine whether it's favorable. So if I, if I sit here and say, you know what? I'm not going to give you any interest.

• 33:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm hmm.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  If they said, cool, then that would be on them, right? If I say, hey, I'm going to give you a little bit of interest or a lot of interest, or I'm going to set this variable rate, or I'm going to say like, hey, we should do it this way. As long as the fans determine that the market or that the, the product is, uh.

• 33:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Desirable.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  Desirable.

• 33:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  Then they'll buy it, you know? And, and if I want to set those terms, the way I want to set those terms, then I'm fine with it clearly because I set the terms, right? Cause I am the company, right? That, or the personal entity that set those terms. So really that's what, that's, that's like I said, the most frustrating part about it. Because it really has nothing to do with them. Me sitting down and saying, hey, NBA, this is what I want to do was merely out of courtesy because I view it as something that can be beneficial if we partner. I view it as something that if the NBA wants to be a part of it, it could offer a ton of benefit for them because every owner in the NBA, they want a hundred percent, you know, uh, control over management decisions, et cetera. They want all of that power, but they want 51% capital control and exposure.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  There's no way you go to another billionaire and tell them that. There's no way you sell 49% of the team to a billionaire and tell them that you can't have any control. You can't do anything. You can't like, you can't decide what player we get. You can't have one of your guys on the executive board. Nothing. They don't go for that. Or they go for it and then they try to institute some type of takeover later. Like that's, that's, it's just one of the two ways it's going to happen.

• 35:01Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you announced this, you had already talked to the league or no?

• 35:06Speaker 02

  No, so when I, when I had announced this the very first time, I had talked to the Players Association.

• 35:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Players Association was cool with it.

• 35:12Anthony Pompliano?

  And they, they thought it was a good idea, generally okay with it.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, you're not, you're not doing anything wrong, boom. And then, um, the conversation with the league, obviously, we're scheduled to start after the Players Association. We talked about it a little bit. Well, technically it got leaked. And so that's kind of what shifted timelines a little bit. But yeah, I mean, it was.

• 35:29Anthony Pompliano?

  And what was their reaction? The, the, cause the league was not ecstatic about this.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  No, they just said no, you know? And then I was like, but why? And they were like, well, you can't give your contract to fans. I was like, that's not what I'm doing.

• 35:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  And then I was like, so why can't I do it? And they just said no. And I was like.

• 35:43Anthony Pompliano?

  That kind of, um, there's very few times in life where grown men get told no with no explanation. And it's usually when they were younger.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:54Anthony Pompliano?

  So their parents, their teachers, like.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  That's, that's exactly, that's exactly how it felt. It felt like, you know, they were trying to be my father or my, or my teacher or something. And it's no, because I said no. And I'm just simply sitting there saying, why? Like, if you can explain to me why I cannot do it, if you can explain to me legally why this is wrong, then I will drop everything right now. I promise you. I don't want to go to war with you. You guys are great at what you do. I've loved my time being a partner with the NBA and playing in the NBA. I'm not going to try to deliberately cut my career short or anger you guys to take action against me. So if you guys can tell me why, I'll stop. But if you guys are just going to sit here and tell me no, like I'm a child and, and, you know, get on the phone and just tell me like, I don't know.

• 36:35Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't want to put words in your mouth, but would it be fair to categorize your approach as trying to create a win-win between, well, really it's a win for the fans. It's a win for you. It's a win for the league. It's a win for the team.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  Everybody.

• 36:45Anthony Pompliano?

  It, it, it really aligns interest in a very unique way. And it sounds like the league's reaction of just kind of no, which, cause I think that's what most fans have gotten from the media, right? It's just the league said no. If there's not the explanation, then it kind of leaves everyone asking like, why don't you guys like this?

• 37:02Speaker 02

  Exactly. And, and that's the thing. Like if you look at it, right? So the NBA right now, the biggest thing that is going to be at a premium, not just this year, but years going forward, is fan engagement and getting people to continue to watch TV, right? Because they signed the historic TV deal, but technically like. On TV viewership is down, right? Oh, interesting, okay. In terms of like the metrics they wanted to hit and stuff like that. Now, we're still growing, we're still doing great things, making a bunch of money, all that good stuff, right? But just looking at the TV deal compared to how people are consuming media, because people are getting highlights and small clips here and subscribing to this over here and doing all these things. So it's not affecting the NBA necessarily in terms of the total bottom line, but it's affecting some of the TV companies. So they're a little bit upset about it, right? So if you can continue to drive fan engagement, it only continues to help you. Yep, yep, yep.

• 37:48Speaker 02

  And this, whether it's personal player fan engagement or team fan engagement from them being able to own fractionalized shares of the team, you're getting fans to feel a part of your global system, your global entity, right? So there is no downside for the NBA, because the fans can't sue you, but they are now more entrenched in the NBA now. And then the other two pieces, the fan, right? Depending upon the offering that you choose to participate in, there may not be much downside, if any, right? The way we structured mine was super safe. Now, we don't know how much the fan can make in terms of interest. We will see like based upon, you know, revenue that I can generate, but the protections are there, so it's extremely safe offering.

• 38:29Anthony Pompliano?

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• 39:13Anthony Pompliano?

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• 40:31Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 40:32Anthony Pompliano?

  And part of that regulatory oversight is transparency, clarity of the, you know, kind of the structure. Like, there's more thought into this than like, you sitting at home and just being like, "Let me just fire off a tweet and like..."

• 40:44Speaker 02

  1,000%, 1,000%. We spent just about 10 months building this. You know, we put it on blockchain for a reason besides the transparency and also cutting fees, just in terms of like, the scalability of where we're trying to go in terms of creating an asset class. Obviously, it makes sense. I mean, like I said, we Reg D, you know, we specifically went that way because, and with accredited investors first, we wanted to go Reg A+. We wanted to shrink every token down to a dollar and, you know, make it, you know, accessible for everybody. But we understood the complications with that. And so, you know, we literally took every single, like, step that you could possibly take to be as careful as possible. And then when it was time to package it and take it to the table and say, "Hey, guys, we found something that is not only beneficial for you guys, we found something that's beneficial for the fans, and we even found something that's beneficial for the players," right?

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Which is another point that, you know, to touch on. There's a way, and when you do things like this, that you can immediately lock money. So you can create reserves, or you can create trust, etc., right? So you can make sure that a guy doesn't spend money. If you have a guy that's, let's say a financial advisor comes up and says, "Hey, I have a guy that's, he's shown over the first three years, he's not very fiscally responsible, and now he's got a five-year deal, let's say it's 50 million or something, right? I want to lock." Forty of that away right now. I'll give him ten, he can spend it, whatever, but we're gonna lock forty and we're gonna make sure that he can only spend the interest on this forty for the next fifteen years. You can do that.

• 42:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, it it it goes back to the kind of principles of DeFi or Bitcoin and and kind of software, and I call it like algorithmic finance, right, or automated finances. You can code things in that no matter, no matter how upset you get, no matter how, you know, uh, desperate you are, no matter how drunk you get, right, all these different things. Doesn't matter. The software has no, it's not gonna listen.

• 42:33Speaker 02

  There you go, and and and the interest just kicks it out to you, and as you make interest, you get to spend that money, but you know that through hell or high water, unless there's like some catastrophic event, that money is not unlocking, you are never gonna go broke, you are fine.

• 42:47Anthony Pompliano?

  It it's kind of like, um, so, uh, people who listen to podcasts know, uh, my favorite basketball player growing up was Allen Iverson, right? He just hit people with a crossover and, you know, you're just like, hey, man, that is real, right? Uh, and he is actually one of the, uh, the negative side effects of being a professional athlete, right? He he's gone broke for all intents and purposes, but the saving grace he has is one of the contracts he signed, I think with Reebok, right? I think it's like when he turns fifty-five, it's gonna unlock, you know, thirty, thirty-five million bucks, whatever it is. It's a similar mechanism. Now, we don't know, you know, does he got it leveraged, you know, there's all these kind of things that could have happened, but that mechanism of there is almost like a safety net for him, right? Where he had money locked away till a certain time period and it was far enough out where like he's probably much more mature now than he was when he was in his twenties and thirties.

• 43:32Anthony Pompliano?

  That's been happening for a long time, you know, Bobby Benalia, uh, but he's still getting paid by the Mets, right, like twenty years later.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, and and and there's, it just opens up a completely different, um, line of flexibility to these players that can essentially do whatever they want, you know, with their money and and can have all these, uh, areas to be responsible and to do different things, you know? Obviously with mine, I'm putting a lot in in Bitcoin and I'm also putting some in gold too to kind of show like the differences between, you know, quote unquote, digital gold and physical gold and all that stuff, but that's a very personal thing, but yeah, like you. I feel like what we created is something that literally, everybody can win. And that is like by far the most disappointing part about the the no without a reason. Because if you said, okay, this party is going to get screwed, or this is exactly why we don't want to do it.

• 44:26Speaker 02

  And you're violating these terms here or something like that, then we would gladly shut it down.

• 44:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, if it was a more logical, kind of understandable response, then you'd be amenable to it. So one thing that I think is important for this is for folks who haven't spent a lot of time. This isn't a new concept, right? What I mean by that is, I'll throw a couple of data points out. So the Green Bay Packers, part of the team is owned by the fans, right? The NFL actually changed the rules after they did this because they didn't want everyone to go do it. You then go to something like, I think it was called Fan Tex or something, right? Where you could buy quote unquote stock, but it wasn't stock in the contract. It was more stock in the players' future earnings, and I think Arian Foster was a huge user of that. Then you go to Sacramento Kings, they just announced that it's a utility token, or kind of a fan loyalty type thing.

• 45:14Anthony Pompliano?

  So you had kind of previous, you know, revenue share or stock-based ownership in either the teams or players. And now you're starting to see tokens, it sounds to me, right, and you haven't said this to me, but I'm going to throw it out there. There may be two sets of rules, right, of like,

• 45:34Anthony Pompliano?

  the teams and the things that accrue value to the league and the owners, etc., get a little bit different treatment than the players. You're looking at me weird, like maybe we shouldn't be going here.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  Nah, I mean, um,

• 45:47Speaker 02

  the league is known to do what's best for them at the end of the day, right?

• 45:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Every league does that.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  Every league does that, right?

• 45:54Anthony Pompliano?

  NFL, protect the shield, the whole thing.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's, you know, what a good broker does, man. That's what they do. I mean, it's crazy to see, though, them say no so adamantly. And then, you know, the Sacramento Kings launched a utility token like the next week. I was like, wow, that's, that's interesting, folks. Like, that's really, really, really interesting. The reason why we didn't do it, similar to Fan Tex or in the Arian Foster model, two reasons. When you IPO on like near stock exchange or anything like that, you usually get ate up in fees. You have to have a really large contract to do something like that, or you have to have a basket of players to do it.

• 46:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  To kind of make it work or be raising a lot of money, right? Then also, you know, it tends to lack liquidity because of what they're trading against. You know, our whole idea in terms of creating this asset class, and obviously we all know the ease of like moving tokens and the tradability of tokens and stuff like that. Now, there is a one-year lockup because of the, you know, credit investors and security tokens, Reg D, all that. But, you know, we envision a situation where, you know, almost akin to, I guess, real fantasy sports, right? You could trade a Spencer for a Kyrie, for a KD, for Jared Allen, for, you know, Zan and Musa, for a Karis Levert, for, you know, you could do that and.

• 47:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and you can almost like, so this is getting into kind of the future of where this can go, right? Is let's say that we can get over some of the the speed bumps here in the short term. Fantasy sports is going to be a real thing, right? Sports betting is going to be a real thing in the United States, it's already moving that way.

• 47:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I think the promise of whether it's security tokens, tokenization, all this stuff, right? You know, take real estate. There's been plenty of people who have pitched, oh, you could, you know, go long Soho, short Brooklyn, right? Or, you know, vice versa, whatever. And so you can build these really unique kind of derivative products and all this kind of stuff. What you're talking about is like today, most fantasy sports is like, you're either on my roster or you're not.

• 47:47Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 47:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And it's a binary thing.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:49Anthony Pompliano?

  But maybe actually what I want to do is I want to own 20% of your performance this week, right? And I want to own 40% of somebody else and you start kind of creating these different things where literally maybe I want to go short point guards this year because the league changed the rules and they're going to score us points, right? Or whatever it is.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 48:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Again, it's all about engagement and my guess is, considering the way that the league and Adam Silver took the approach of like, hey, we want 1% of all the the sports betting, they'll figure out a way to make money on it, too.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  For sure. And that, but that's the reason why I'm saying like, I came and sat down at the table. I came and said, here's what we're doing. Um, if you tell me why I can't do it, then I'll stop.

• 48:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Hmm.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  But if you say like, hey, let's, you know, find a way to do this, right? Like I'm here.

• 48:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, you're open minded and you're being innovative.

• 48:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, yeah, like if there's something that you tell me right now that you're like, you know what? We'll let you, you know, pass go if we can look over the terms of, of deals prior to them going out. So we make sure that, you know, it checks all the boxes and this and the third. I say, cool.

• 48:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 48:52Speaker 02

  Right? Like at the end of the day, I, my goal is to partner. My goal is to make this a win, win, win. So let's, let's do it. I'm like I said, the, the disappointing piece was the no with no cause, no, you know, answer, no whatever. It was just no, you know, but, but in, you're obviously an extremely bright individual. So and just talking about those, uh, price that can come next and those derivatives, et cetera. And, and, and the different niche things that can come after this. It's a whole new world of business that the NBA can capitalize on, right? It's not something that, you know, I'm going to be able to do. I'm clearly just defining the class and kind of showing guys how to set terms for, you know, what they feel is, uh, uh, beneficial for them and engaging in their fan base.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  There's going to be a different whole crop of businesses that are born on top of this that capitalize on the actual use of the tokens. Like even the exchanges are going to try to get into this, right? You're going to have the, the, you know, what are the biggest exchanges? Binance, Gemini, those guys, like you're going to have those type of people trying to, you know, trade these in some capacity when they get to securities and stuff. I'd offer utilities, like it's, it's gonna, it's gonna turn to something completely different.

• 49:59Anthony Pompliano?

  I'll even take it further and say, what happens when I can buy a token that you offer? And then I can exchange it at the NBA store for your jersey.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 50:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And there's some sort of price mechanism that actually the NBA comes out more on top, right? You come out on top and I get the jersey that I wanted, you know, and you start playing this whole game. And it's like, actually, yeah, like, like there, there's a world where this all can exist, right? Uh, what's been the, uh, the response or sentiment from the players in the NBA, knowing that you're kind of doing this?

• 50:27Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, nah, see, that's the thing. After I, after it leaked and after, you know, we had some of the stories, like the players have been like,

• 50:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, how can I do that?

• 50:34Speaker 02

  Oh my God, yeah, like, how can we, how can we do that? And I'm like, guys, listen, like, I'm gonna fight this fight.

• 50:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Let me be the pioneer. Let's not get the whole league.

• 50:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Like, let's, let's get through this. And then, you know, when we get through this, I'll give you guys the Bible to do it. Like, all the information we gathered, I'll, I'll pass it and you guys can do whatever you want.

• 50:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Because I, I gotta imagine that once they see, it, it's similar to Bitcoin, right? Once the genie was out of the bottle, everyone's like, you know, they get 3,000 tokens, right? Same thing here, I think, is once people realize, here's the potential, here's how it works. Like, yes, it is legal from regulatory standpoint, the fans are interested, you know, all this kind of stuff. Everyone's gonna want to do it.

• 51:09Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 51:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 51:10Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 51:11Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. We got to talk about NBA in China. So I will caveat this whole thing with, there's no situation in the world that is binary, black and white. There are no perfect answers. So, I just want to ask you some open-ended questions. You kind of run with them as you will. First, what's the take from the players in terms of just like what's going on and kind of the position that you guys have been put in?

• 51:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  I would say the toughest part about being a player in the situation was just kind of feeling caught in the middle. That was, that was really it. Because we, you know, we being the Nets and the Lakers were there.

• 51:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Okay. So, so hold on, I should have started with, let me just, for those that don't know, Daryl Morey, who's the GM of the Rockets and is a huge cryptocurrency fan, for those that don't know, he tweeted out on Twitter saying, just like, you know, stand with the people of Hong Kong. It was some kind of pro or supportive tweet of the people of Hong Kong. And he was, it seemed like at least externally, being more like pro-democracy, right? And kind of pro-free speech, et cetera. The NBA had teams in China playing and there was immediate backlash, really across the world, but, but specifically in China. And so when it first breaks, what's kind of this, was it just like, oh, there's this thing going on? Or was it immediate, like, hey, it's gonna be a big deal?

• 52:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, it was more so like, immediately it was gonna be a big deal, especially once like the tweet got deleted and you start hearing all these different things pop up. And, you know, for the players, because it was a fight that we were never trying to either A, fight or to be in. That's why it was so awkward. You know what I mean? Because we were just kind of in China and we're like, so. Uh, what do you know, what are we, what are we supposed to do guys?

• 52:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Try to play basketball.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, uh, we were just, we just came here to play basketball and say hi to the fans and stuff like that was, it was that simple. Um, so yeah, it was, it was just difficult from that standpoint, just kind of just being literally caught in the middle and it not being something that we did.

• 53:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And then you and your teammates specifically have kind of a, an additional level of complexity in that, uh, the owner of the Nets is one of the co-founders of Alibaba and, um, I was pretty impressed, uh, he, he responded, right? And, um, I was pretty impressed with the level of detail that he went through to explain a perspective that I don't think a lot of Western Americans understand, right? So kind of just, how did that kind of play into it on top of just, hey, I'm an NBA player, but then like, literally I play for a team that probably understands is at a different level than all the other teams in the league.

• 53:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, you know, Joe's a phenomenal dude. He's a, he's been my favorite team owner to interact with so far. Um, that's, that's my guy. And you know, actually it was an educational process for our, at, at minimum our team, right? Because we did have a chance to sit down and, and talk to Joe and he kind of debriefed us on the situation and the severity and it was just honest with, you know, what was going on and, and his personal opinion and, and why he wrote, you know, the letter that he wrote, which, uh, we all respected and, and like I said, we gained knowledge from it. And, um, you know, he, he really kind of broke down why it was, uh, you know, a sensitive topic for, you know, the, uh, the, the country.

• 54:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And, and the part to me, um, and I told you this beforehand, that like, and this is my personal perspective. This is not Spencer's perspective. Uh, that I felt was unfair in the whole situation was, uh, the press conferences where players, I, I didn't see a video of you getting kind of ambushed, but I saw some other players that. They've got to be there, right? You know, the whole Marshawn lunch, I'm only here so I don't get fined. They're sitting up there and reporters, granted, they're just trying to do their job, right? So they're asking questions, but the questions are almost like, I know I got you trapped. I know you got a microphone in front of you and I'm going to try to elicit you to say just things that'll catch headlines. Just felt a little unfair, I think, to the players.

• 55:12Speaker 02

  For sure, for sure. I mean, I would say in general, we find ourselves in situations like that. Sometimes and that's definitely not all media, you know, media. There's a lot of media that does a phenomenal job. There's a lot of media that has been great to players. A lot of media that, you know, enhances, you know, the game and the individual and all that stuff. And then, you know, there are some instances, whether it's, you know, you missing something as small as you missing the game winning shot. Or you kind of being in the middle of some, you know, political controversy where they do ask pointed questions based upon, you know, the situation that you're in and try to elicit that response that they know could be negative, right? You know, those are situations that are unfair, but you know, they happen, they happen.

• 55:55Speaker 02

  And it's on us to be authentic to whatever it is that we feel in that moment, whether it's to comment or not comment. You know, I think that's why you saw like, you know, like the Steve Curves, et cetera of the world kind of say, look, I'm not well versed on the topic. And I know, you know, president had his opinions about that, but you know, you're well within your right to say, I don't know. There's nothing wrong with not knowing everything.

• 56:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Look, there's some people who should be saying, I don't know.

• 56:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Cause and let's kind of pull away from China and just more kind of the, you know, social impact and cultural impact that professional athletes can have. The thing that I think a lot of people kind of forget very easily is the same, you know, kind of, oh, it's uncomfortable as an athlete to be put in a position where I'm getting asked questions. I don't understand something, you know, whatever. A lot of these athletes are still using that same exact star power, etc., for really good things in their communities and in the United States, all this stuff. And I always go back to, uh, the beautiful thing about the United States is, I don't care if you agree with the person or not.

• 56:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:59Anthony Pompliano?

  They have the right to do it. They have the freedom to do it.

• 57:01Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 57:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And if you look across the NBA, NFL, kind of all these leagues, most of the guys are doing really positive things.

• 57:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 57:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And they're using it to their benefit of their communities, etc. And so, um, you know, it's kind of just like, I want to take a deep breath.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. Um, I, I think when you look at where a lot of these guys came from and then being able to succeed at the different levels that they're able to succeed, um, we, we all have a certain level of, you know, indebtedness to where we came from and, and wanting to, you know, have a positive impact on those, on those places and on those people. And, and, you know, the, the more that doing good has become in vogue and become public and all these things, like, you know, you're, you're just seeing more and more. And, and so the more positive, like, we can shed on things in terms, instead of negative, just positive energy in general, like, it's contagious and it, it does wonders for, you know, everybody that's, you know, around it and associated with it.

• 57:53Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. I, uh, I usually end up with rapid fire questions about crypto, but, because I got you here, we're going with some basketball rapid fire. Uh, LeBron, Jordan, or Kobe, who's the GOAT?

• 58:03Speaker 02

  Who's the GOAT?

• 58:04Anthony Pompliano?

  I know, I know you've debated this probably for too many hours of your life.

• 58:08Speaker 02

  See, I'm, I'm gonna throw something else at you guys. I'm not, I'm not even gonna pick, because Kobe's my favorite player, so I'm biased. But I would say the GOAT across all different levels of basketball is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, high school, college, pro. Had to change the rules for him. He's the leading scorer in NBA history. If we're talking about full career GOAT, then it's him. We just talking about like, you know, six years of your prime, then it's Jordan, because he had the 6-0. But

• 58:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  Full career, I'm going Kareem.

• 58:31Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I think that's actually a pretty good, like, legitimate answer.

• 58:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:34Anthony Pompliano?

  They changed the rules, it's, it's a pretty hard thing to argue against. Um, what's your favorite, uh, NBA playoff memory?

• 58:41Speaker 02

  Favorite NBA playoff memory?

• 58:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Not that, not you, but like as a, as a fan, like as a fan.

• 58:46Speaker 02

  As a fan?

• 58:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 58:47Speaker 02

  Oh, it had to be the tip out to, to Ori's three. That was big time.

• 58:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Big shot Bob?

• 58:51Speaker 02

  Oh, big shot Bob, yeah. Because I was panicking. You know, the little kid that was a, that was a super Laker fan in LA was panicking at the moment, like, guys, like, we're not really finna lose, like, come on.

• 59:00Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a pretty good one. Um, and then if you could play with any player in the NBA today, who would it be?

• 59:10Speaker 02

  Kevin Durant.

• 59:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Can we get some inside knowledge on how this all went down?

• 59:19Speaker 02

  You know, they had that famous phone call. That's what they said, right? They had the famous phone call where they got a three-way FaceTime at like 4 a.m. and then, you know.

• 59:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Who was on it? It was Katie?

• 59:27Speaker 02

  It was Katie, Kyrie and DJ.

• 59:29Anthony Pompliano?

  And that was at 4 a.m. three-way FaceTime?

• 59:32Speaker 02

  Science Hill. Deal done.

• 59:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I gotta admit, part of the NBA that did not exist when I was a kid, or when you were a kid, that now has become so kind of enthralling is, it was a couple of years ago when everyone was tweeting the emojis, right? Who's gonna go get, you know, was it DeAndre Jordan, I think, or something?

• 59:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, like got trapped in his house and stuff.

• 59:53Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm not leaving, right? The phone calls, you know, Kawhi Leonard, right? Calling up people and it's, it kinda is more entertaining than some of the actual basketball developments, right? How does all this stuff happen?

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, the NBA's done a great job of like making free agency a must-see TV event, you know, and keeping us on the minds of the fans for, you know, the full 12 months.

• 1:00:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, absolutely. What's your favorite book?

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  My favorite book?

• 1:00:24Speaker 02

  Actually, you know, this is gonna kinda be a little.

• 1:00:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Come on, you got 1400 on the SAT. Don't hit me with something stupid.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  No, I'm not gonna hit you with something stupid. I'm gonna say the Bible because that's what I'm tasking myself with, reading through front to back this year.

• 1:00:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:38Anthony Pompliano?

  How far do you think you are?

• 1:00:39Speaker 02

  No, no, I'm saying that's what, this is gonna be like my season task.

• 1:00:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, this during the season?

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, front to back.

• 1:00:44Anthony Pompliano?

  That's actually pretty good.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, not just passages, but like start to finish.

• 1:00:48Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. You're gonna come back and we're gonna see if you finish at the end of the season.

• 1:00:51Speaker 02

  There we go.

• 1:00:52Anthony Pompliano?

  I usually let everyone ask me one question to end, but before, aliens, believer, non-believer, are they real?

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  I'm a believer.

• 1:01:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah? Why?

• 1:01:02Speaker 02

  I just, I don't know. I feel like stuff that happens just is, it's not all coincidence, not just all random. Like, I feel like things have purpose. Technology advances quickly. Like, we have all these ideas and they all keep, you know, manifesting in this similar type of like depiction, right? And it's like, y'all all thought about aliens and they all look the same way? How did that happen? Like, that doesn't make any sense to me. Like, we couldn't get a variety of imagination in?

• 1:01:29Anthony Pompliano?

  No, it's government propaganda. They all gotta be yellow or green slimy little guys, right? Who come down and talk weird. All right, what one question you have for me to finish this?

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  What one question?

• 1:01:42Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm nervous what you could ask me.

• 1:01:44Speaker 02

  No, no, I'm not.

• 1:01:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Most crypto people come in and ask me crazy stuff, but you could ask me all kinds of-

• 1:01:48Speaker 02

  Ask crazy stuff?

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  Personal question.

• 1:01:55Anthony Pompliano?

  All right.

• 1:01:57Speaker 02

  2030, what do you see Bitcoin in finance in general?

• 1:02:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, that's a good question.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  Not just price prediction, but like where you see like how it falls, like-

• 1:02:09Anthony Pompliano?

  You'll get the compliance department to come over here and kill me if I do prices.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, no, so I, I think that I could talk about it from like a trend standpoint, because I think that's the easiest thing to, uh, be right about, right? So kind of from a selfish standpoint. First, um, I think a lot about automated finance. So if you think of every stock, bond, currency and commodity being digitized.

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:30Anthony Pompliano?

  That unlocks the potential for automation. So, uh, we see a little bit of it today. You know, robo-advisors is kind of advising you on how to invest your capital. Or, um, we see things like, um, you know, with crypto, you can like put your Bitcoin in and get a US dollar loan. And some of the DeFi stuff, right? Or, or, uh, tokenized dollars, et cetera. So I think all that stuff will become more and more prominent, but it's intersecting with like true automation. So, uh, things like Plaid, et cetera, where you can pull in all of your bank information. I can do a better underwriting model to give you a loan, like that type of stuff. So I think that's one. Two, uh, I really do believe that we're gonna see more and more, uh, when I say currencies fail, and these are nation-state currencies, is not like, um-

• 1:03:13Anthony Pompliano?

  They failed because somebody like blew up the country like that type of stuff, right? It's more of just throughout history, if you look from literally the time, you know, ancient Roman times, the downfall of currencies was debasing them, right? And so that's what we're doing with inflation and QE and all this stuff. And so I don't think that that's like a 50% of the currencies fail by 2030, right? I think it's a small percentage, but I think we will continue to see this. And again, some small subset of people will kind of keep putting capital into Bitcoin. At some point in the future, I do think it becomes a global reserve currency. And it's because it has the one thing that none of the other currencies have, right?

• 1:03:55Anthony Pompliano?

  So like, I always go back to this idea that in order to have really, really big innovations, normally what happens is somebody does something different and they're right. So Bitcoin's definitely doing something different and then it's a non-nation state backed currency. It's def- deflationary structure with a disinflationary monetary supply. And it can't be manipulated because it's kind of software algorithmically disciplined. Those three things are very, very different than every other currency. So we got to be different down. For sure. If it ends up being right, changes the world, right? And so if you look around the world, why would somebody be interested in this? Well, if you live in a country where you're worried about, you know, your country

• 1:04:36Anthony Pompliano?

  or one of the corporations seizing your assets, the fact that it's non-seizable is pretty important, right? Here in the US, like, I don't know about you, I'm not worried about like, you know, Bank of America taking 10% of my, now, it could happen, happen in cyber, you know, whatever, but that's just not a daily concern. I'm much more worried about the fluctuation in price, right? Because the dollar is stable versus that. Yeah. So if you just look around the world, like, time and time again, we see these little examples pop up. Eventually that becomes like, it's kind of like a drum in the background. And the next thing you know, it's like the main show, right? So I think that'll happen. And the last thing that I think is pretty interesting is White collar jobs will actually be more affected by the automation than blue collar jobs.

• 1:05:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:17Anthony Pompliano?

  But the advice will become more important. So look at lawyers, right? Like everyone's like, oh, we're just gonna like automate away the lawyers. No, what you're gonna do is you're gonna automate away like the paperwork and the drafting.

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  Opinion and the.

• 1:05:28Anthony Pompliano?

  It's gonna become more important, right? Because now I can't read the code. So if I can't read the code, I really need to make sure somebody can audit it. Somebody can give me advice and all that kind of stuff. So again, this is stuff, you know, you're asking me basically 10, 12 years out, right? Type of stuff. And so it's generally, we're gonna move in that direction. Well, it happened right by 2030. I don't know. But I definitely think that all is like where we're going.

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  Can I, can I get a one?

• 1:05:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah, come on.

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  In terms of like ease of moving these things around, right?

• 1:05:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:05:57Speaker 02

  Like where, where do you see that turning to like what? Cause obviously like CryptoKitty's tanked Ethereum, right? And so now you have all these other like blockchains that are more scalable and whatnot in terms of like the smart contract basically are not so much the currency piece of it, right? But like, where do you see, what, what else do you see that can kind of like move and do these things at those levels?

• 1:06:19Anthony Pompliano?

  So there, there's no one direct answer. I usually answer this kind of from a different, a couple of different angles. Take cell phones, right? When cell phones first came out, they're these big brick things. You had to be pretty wealthy to get one. Um, or you had to be doing a bunch of nefarious shit to have a cell phone, right? There's the two types of people who had cell phones. But you couldn't call everyone.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:37Anthony Pompliano?

  So like if you were the one friend out of all of your friends who had a cell phone, yeah. Well, it was, it was cool because if your friend went to a payphone, they could call you or from their house, they could call you and they could get you because you were with your mobile phone. But it wasn't as valuable to you if none of your other friends had, because you still call their house, they're not there, you know, all this kind of stuff. So as you got more density in the cell phone network, the cell phones became more valuable, right? The other piece of it is the technology doesn't necessarily have to be the best, it has to be good enough, right? And so you look at Betamax versus VHS, you know, all these examples. Um, and so when I look at like how the assets move around today, right? I actually fall in the category of, yes, there are definitely things that could be quote unquote better, right? In terms of like, oh, it's not instantaneous in seconds.

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:22Anthony Pompliano?

  But if you, you know, I've said twice now, so one, if I want to send a Bitcoin on the Lightning Network, it will actually settle faster than if I put a credit card chip into a chip reader. You know, when you go to like a Starbucks, something you put the chip in there? Yeah, it takes like 30 seconds, 40 seconds. Yeah, and it's like, you know, processing, approving, whatever. Like, it's pretty fast, right, obviously? But it's still, the light never can be faster, right? And then if you look at sending Bitcoin on the Bitcoin network versus sending a wire at the bank, the bank takes one day to settle. Yeah. So let's say that the Bitcoin transaction takes 10 minutes. It's a pretty material improvement, right? And so it's all kind of relative. Um, but the thing that becomes most important is it's highly, highly, highly secure with no centralized authority.

• 1:08:07Anthony Pompliano?

  And so to me, it's if you are the best at the security and the lack of centralized authority. And you can live with the time. Well, it just will improve over time, right? Go back to the internet, the dial-up, right? Like, you're probably, you know, you're 31, so you're probably similar age. Yeah, AOL, like, we used to literally, like, that was like the first scheme I had, right? It was like, alright, I got the 30-day trial. How do I get another 30-day trial? So we never, like, we never paid for AOL. Right, but we always had the one, the free trials. And so if you were using the internet, you couldn't use the phone line, right? And then like, I remember, like, my mom would be screaming, "Get off the internet, because I need to make a phone call," right? Today, we'd be like, "What?" Exactly, exactly. But, you know, that was in the mid-'90s. Yeah.

• 1:08:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, so, so we're talking 20, 25 years, max? Like, that's how far we've come? Yeah. And so, you know, look out again, 10, 15, 20 years with Bitcoin. Like, I'm not saying that it's gonna be, um, you know, I blink and my brain wallet sends a Bitcoin to a machine and it kind of, you know, this super, like, sci-fi futuristic stuff. But I am saying that it's gonna be much better improved user experience, better, um, you know, in terms of scalability, speed, lower fees, all that kind of stuff. But it takes time. For sure. People are, you know, they're, they're looking at it like, uh, you know, hey, the iPhone. Yeah. 12-year-old technology, there's a lot of cellphones before the iPhone. Yeah. Right? Now, it's the same technology, though, right?

• 1:09:35Anthony Pompliano?

  So I don't actually think that somebody's gonna replace Bitcoin. I think that it's just gonna take time for people to keep building and improving the Bitcoin technology, and eventually it'll be what everyone wants it to be, but it's just gonna take some time. Makes sense. So, whatever. Alright, anything, uh, well, hold on, where can people go find out about, uh, the contract and kind of what you're doing with, uh, with tokenization? Uh, dreamfanshare.com. Dreamfanshare.com, where the name come from?

• 1:09:59Speaker 02

  So FanShares, I mean, obviously is, you know, what we're

• 1:10:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Pretty self-explanatory.

• 1:10:04Speaker 02

  Pretty self-explanatory. The acronym DREAM, so the company that builds my shoes is called Project DREAM. And so, you know, when I signed on to do that and got, you know, some co-founder equity in it, I just really loved what they were kind of doing with the disrupt reality every available moment, like the acronym.

• 1:10:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Disrupt reality every available moment.

• 1:10:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, just the acronym that they were doing. So I was like, hey, guys, you know, FanShares.com, whatever it was it's taken. And I was like, hey, do you think like, I could borrow the acronym? And they're like, yeah, go for it. And I was like, all right, cool.

• 1:10:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, just put a link on there.

• 1:10:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, man. All right. Well, best of luck with this. We'll definitely make sure that we tweet it out and everything when it goes live. And then good luck with the season. And when you come back, we're gonna see if you got done reading the Bible and if you guys win an NBA championship.

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  Thank you, brother.

• 1:10:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Sounds good. Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.