The Pomp Podcast - #584 Joe Pompliano on Athletes Investors Buying Bitcoin

Episode Date: June 17, 2021

Joe Pompliano is the Founder of Huddle Up, a new media platform that breaks down the business and money behind sports. He also happens to be one of my younger brothers, so this episode is packed with great stories and plenty of laughs. In this conversation, we discuss athlete investors, being paid in bitcoin, Rich Kleiman, Kevin Durant, Saquon Barkley, Tom Brady, Sterling Shepard, Danny Boy Hustle Hard, Conor McGregor, and a number of wildly entertaining stories.  ======================= Did you know nearly 338 million dollars worth of NFTs were sent last year? And in 2021 that number is growing faster than ever. Looking to make your first NFT? Check out NEAR’s fast, scalable, low-cost, open-source platform. Learn why NEAR is the infrastructure for innovation at near.org: https://near.org/?utm_campaign=pomp ======================= Exodus is an absolute game changer in the crypto wallet space, and we’ve teamed up to offer an exclusive discount for you, as listeners of the podcast. Sign up for Exodus today using my promo code Exodus.com/pomp. This is a no brainer for both newcomers and crypto heavyweights - go sign up today.  ======================= With 10M+ users, Crypto.com is the easiest place to buy, and sell 100+ cryptocurrencies. The Crypto.com Visa Card gives you up to 8% back instantly, and 100% back on Spotify and Netflix. Also, Crypto.com lets you earn up to 8.5% p.a. on BTC, and 14% p.a. on stablecoins. Get $25 when you download the Crypto.com App with code "pomp". Download the App now: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/pomppodcast2021 =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Joe Pompliano is the founder of Huddle Up, a new media platform that breaks down the business and money behind sports. He also happens to be one of my younger brothers. So this episode is packed with great stories and plenty of laughs. In this conversation, we discuss athlete investors, being paid in Bitcoin, Rich Kleiman, Kevin Durant, Saquon Barkley, Tom Brady, Sterling Shepard, Danny Boy Hustle Hard, Conor McGregor, and a number of wildly entertaining stories.

I really enjoyed this conversation with my brother, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Near. Near is an open source platform that accelerates the development of decentralized applications, overcoming high fees and slow speeds with its fast scalable low cost and climate neutral blockchain protocol this is why near was recently awarded the climate neutral product label from the south pole one transaction on near consumes about 1300x less carbon than a similar transaction on other chains you can learn why near is the infrastructure for innovation at near.org

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Get $25 when you download the Crypto.com app with code POMP. Again, $25 if you go download the Crypto.com app and use code POMP. Go click on the link in the description and it'll take you right there. $25, Crypto.com app, use code POMP. All right, let's get into this episode with my brother. I hope you enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano runs POMP Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect

the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is brought to you by Pomp Investments. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got my little brother here.

we're about to oh he's already max i called him my little brother well you're my little brother right true but you don't have to say that but we almost my younger younger taller brother well you're not taller but that's fine uh we can say my younger brother not little younger brother he's still littler than me uh let's get into it though you have blown up on the internet congratulations great job thanks let's start with uh some of these viral threads you've had then we're going to talk about a bunch of professional athletes that are investing uh we've got some inside information she maybe will reveal uh and then we know a bunch of people who've been buying bitcoin in the professional sports arena uh that we're going to talk about as well but first the viral threads

uh i don't know where you come up with this stuff i don't know if you steal the content you borrow it you come up with it yourself but it's good and uh you had one recently where there's a fan who basically gave a team a loan and then ended up with 300 million dollars yeah the gambling one gambling well he was a sports game all right explain it all right let's start uh so european soccer right there's different levels promotion relegation and uh much bigger than is soccer in the u.s yes of course yeah so we're talking like premier league right and then levels underneath that so the way it works is uh a lot of times you'll hear like billionaires in the u.s right they'll come over and they'll buy teams and they'll try to spend a bunch of money and get

the promoted and because with promotion comes tv money and the same stuff that you would see in the nfl and the nba and all this stuff right so so it's a pure investment for most of them yeah some of them it's you know fun or whatever but a lot of these guys all want to make money similar to what they want to do with the NFL, NBA and have fun doing it and all that. So this guy, Matthew Benham, he was, he grew up in England. He went to the University of Oxford in like late 80s, 90s, early 90s. And he was a sports gambler. So he worked like 10 years in finance. He was a physics major, really good with numbers. He got hired by a sports betting company to do predictive models with analytics. Was really good at it. Basically did it for three, four, five years. Had a falling

out with this guy called Tony Bloom, who was like, he's a known sports gambler, one of the bigger guys in the world that good guy bad guy uh i mean questionable yeah i mean like everyone has their opinion on him i think but like he won a lot so so he's good gambler but if you're a gambler you're a gambler yeah okay yeah i mean that's fine whatever your opinion is on that yeah but uh so some people claim he stole the models from them some people claim that oh got it they don't know what the falling out essentially was and it's not really public uh but they had a falling out they hate each other he left tony bloom kept on with the company uh and he goes and he starts Matthew Venom starts gambling his own money. Really successful two, three year run where he

makes millions of dollars. Again, they don't know how much exactly, but not a million, not a hundred plus million, but somewhere kind of in between. You're really going to come on here and say it's somewhere between one and a hundred million. I mean a lot of money, right? Like I'm not saying it's, I don't know if it's, it wasn't 500 is my point, right? So he gets a lot of money. He starts his own company doing the exact same thing basically that Tony Bloom was doing. Predictive analytics, helping people consult for gambling, right? You go to him, you say, hey, I want to use your models. You're really good at this, obviously, like show me how to win, where the edge is, all this kind of stuff. So he makes a lot of money doing that. He eventually now runs

an exchange. He's the CEO of a betting exchange, et cetera. But basically what that afforded him to do was go buy a team. And he didn't buy a team at first, but his hometown team, Brentford, was the club that he grew up rooting for as a kid. Went to games when he was 10, 11 years old. I think it was 2007 or eight, they got in financial trouble. They're a lower tier club, so they have a small budget. The economics aren't great in a lot of these places. So basically they're going to go under. He says, all right, the fans want to buy the team

so the team doesn't go bankrupt. I'll provide a $700,000 loan so the fans can buy the team. And if you guys pay me back by 2012, five years, you'll keep going, you'll own the team, whatever. If not, there's a clause that it converts to equity and I have the opportunity to purchase more of it, right? And I can own fully, full control of the team. And 2012 comes along, team's still really struggling.

Financials weren't doing great. They're struggling to get by still. So he converts it to equity, buys the rest of the team. Okay. How much money total do you think he spent to get the whole ownership? It's tough to tell, but maybe a couple hundred million, maybe less. A couple hundred million? I mean, maybe 50.

I don't know. Like they don't really know because he bought it in pieces, right? So the way a lot of these work is you buy out shareholders as it goes on. So the team maybe owned 50% at the time or 51%. And he was slowly buying out other guys. so then when his option came up he converted it so the aggregated price i don't know 50 million 100 million something like that right so uh but not billions so he he buys the club but he takes a completely different approach so a lot of these guys they come in and they spend a lot of money

for two three four years to basically try to get promoted as quickly as they can yep and the way you get promoted is finishing at the top of your league if you're in the fourth division you get finished at the top two you get promoted you have to finish at the top two again and etc so winners advance basically to a higher league yeah losers lose yeah completely different than the model we have here where it's closed and and everyone kind of stays in regardless all 32 teams stay in the nfl regardless if they're good or if you're terrible you just get the first pick right so completely different but uh he takes a completely different approach as to kind of how he's going to make the team better he's like i'm really good at analytics let's try that so if you think money

ball here with the everyone knows money ball right the oakland athletics where uh they came in and they used analytics to kind of drive their reasoning on to why to sign players so he does the same thing which has historically been like a no in soccer in europe because they think it's a game of finesse and analytics don't really tell you that much. And it matters much more. And that sounds like a stupid perspective. Of course. Right. So there's, there's people will argue, you know, 100% till the death on both sides, but that was his theory. So what he does is he doesn't only just run numbers, starts firing all the coaches that don't believe in it, right? Hires guys that don't have this great background, but they believe in the numbers and they'll

listen to him and all this stuff. He buys a smaller club. I think it was in Denmark and he pays like $10 million for this club and $10 million, a lot of money, but he basically used it as like a, a proving ground for his concepts. So he would try all these things there. And if they worked, he'd bring them over to the bigger club. Got it. So it was basically like kind of a minor league for his, his, uh, his bigger club. So what he did was he didn't care about wins and losses. He literally he's famous. He wouldn't even look at the league table of the standings. He was just like, that doesn't matter. Uh, and what he would do is he would look at expected goals, how many opportunities a player was creating, uh, stuff like that, just key performance

indicators that would tell him whether the team was improving or not. So that went on for a few years uh the most drastic change that he's famous for is he a lot of these teams have youth academies that uh essentially like barcelona or any of these other you know premier clubs uh by the time you're like five ten years old they're already recruiting you you're playing for them you make your all the way up to the big team etc he was like we're not going to do that anymore we don't have the time patience money whatever to invest in all these players for this long we're instead going to delete that team remove them delete yeah delete remove whatever that's why i went back to remove uh and we're gonna have a b team right which is guys 19 to 23 years old 22 years old whatever

of basically cast offs from other clubs so guys that played for these other premier league teams and were deemed not good enough not worthy not didn't get minutes right in games uh and they're gonna come to our club we're gonna use them and play them and his theory behind that was that you needed 35 games to be able to determine if a player was good enough right what do we know why he came up with 35 that's just i it's not really clear but it's one of his models right so you got remember this is all based on uh his predictive models that he was using for gambling right so he took those same models and was applying them here um and it's funny because tony bloom actually owns a premier league club too so people are like they joke like he just followed the same same protocol

of what he did there uh and tony bloom's club was promoted they've been there for a few years now so so same thing uh but yeah he he uh basically his theory was 35 games and he would get all these players to come in and what he did was he would give them opportunities sometimes it worked out sometimes it didn't but the ones that worked out he'd buy him for a million bucks two million bucks and he'd sell him for 40 million bucks right so that was how he was able to turn a quick profit pretty pretty easily uh and then he was using that money to reinvest in the club and do the same stuff so a lot of these concepts ended up working out he had three four or five maybe even more chances to get promoted the team ended up losing a lot because the way it works is if you're

in the top two you automatically get promoted then three and four play for the final spot so he lost that kind of playing game a couple times but this year he won it so they're going to the premier league next year uh and what that comes with is anywhere there's you know it depends on kind of how much merchandise you're able to sell and concessions and they just got a new stadium and all this stuff but uh most estimates have it around at least 250 million dollars in year one additional which is way more than his budget right now uh and it could be 350 400 500 depending on if you stay two three four five years right so the longer you stay up the more money you make but it's mostly just tv revenue right now you're playing uh manchester city you're playing all

these bigger all these bigger clubs so the joke is right like a gambler took 700 000 loan and turned it into 350 million dollars so that's when people really enjoyed right just i think piece part of it is the gambling part which everyone kind of uh but gambling investing is the same thing i knew you were gonna go there right yeah i mean it's risk reward you're basically looking at data if you're a professional gambler not i mean there's people who just go when they're drunk and they you know bet on something and yeah they lose yeah well that's a good point because some people were like, why are we putting a gambler up on a pedestal and praising what he did? What's different than him and an alcoholic? And it's like, they're way different, right?

Like he was using analytics and numbers and intelligence really to drive a return through a different market, which is similar, yes, to your point. Yeah. I mean, a hedge fund manager looks at data and then they risk capital for a return and they understand the risks that they're taking. They try to find edge, right? And they try to find some sort of data point or signal or whatever that this has lower risk and higher return than some other opportunity and they're either right or wrong and the market rewards or punishes them same thing here uh where you're essentially doing the same thing you're looking at all the data you're risking capital you either win or you lose the market rewards or punishes you and if you have a significant advantage in

the data when you're gambling it's incredibly profitable same thing in the stock market right if you could figure out something that other people haven't figured out yet uh until it gets commoditized away, it's an advantage. Well, I would say that two things on that is one significant is 5% in gambling, right? Like you only have to be 5% better than the average model and you can make a lot of money on it because just the way the odds work. But outside of that, it's clearly the same thing because he used the same models for gambling that he did for the team investment, right? Like he was using the same stuff and just, you know, you altered a little bit for kind of the outcomes, but he was using the same models and the same analytics and data.

He just used it for two completely separate things. I don't know if you've done this. If not, you should do a thread on this uh have you seen the susquehanna uh investor susquehanna investment group at sig uh they started out horse betting no i haven't seen that but yeah they used to go to the horse tracks and that's how they originally got started was they were basically uh they figured out a bunch of mathematical things uh and they would go bet and they would win a bunch of money and then somebody was like hey man you that works for horses like you should look at stocks yeah and like now they're a huge market maker and investor and all this stuff um all right what's one more thread that's gone viral that uh that people really enjoyed well you have one of mine

do you not remember any of them i mean i remember them all right well what's your favorite one recently um i don't know dude i gotta like you gotta think about it yeah like uh what did i do recently um the mcgregor one's great all right what's that one uh the mcgregor one was great conor mcgregor conor mcgregor yeah conor mcgregor story is just cool because like it's like a movie right we should call out there's a lot of people who don't like conor mcgregor there's also a lot of people who like him and then there's a bunch of people in between who say hey there's some stuff he does that i don't like but i also respect that's me the hustle the middle one i'm in the middle all right so i'm probably in the middle as well yeah and right like uh i think it goes both

ways right like he's had allegations of crimes and all this stuff that i i don't know if he did or he didn't do but i don't necessarily obviously agree with uh the punching people in bars stupid stuff right but when it comes to his ability to promote himself and uh make a living and doing all these things as a fighter his superiority within the cage clearly works extremely hard at that and all this kind of stuff right and just the the ability to distinguish himself as a personality right there's hundreds of you know thousands of ufc fighters that were unable to do what he did right and he's really transformed the sport not only from his ability but his promotion of is he like the muhammad ali of the ufc like from a branding and a promotion standpoint that's

what i was going to say is like he's clearly not the best fighter right that i think that's been proven he's lost multiple matches in a row and all this kind of stuff but um from a promotion standpoint he's the biggest ticket by far okay not even close all right so what's his story so uh he grew up in ireland right um he was uh from a family that was just not uh super wealthy or anything like this right he he blue collar family moved towns when he was younger um 16 years old got into ufc him and another guy chris egan they were uh well mixed martial arts right not, not UFC, but like MMA. So he actually started boxing. He would go to the, uh, to the gym. And the reason why he started doing that was because he was getting picked on. Right. So it's like,

it's literally like a movie, right? Like he was getting bullied. He, I think the story is he walked home from school one day and, uh, they threw like a rock at him or something. And then they came up to him and his first thought was, so he went home. He said he sprinted home. Didn't look back, like just scared. He goes to school the next day. He went to school every day from then on with a dumbbell in his backpack, a weighted dumbbell. And he was like, yeah, like y'all came at me once, but if you try it again, like something's going to happen. uh, and obviously he realized pretty quickly, like that was dumb. And he started going to boxing classes. So he goes to a boxing class. What's he going to do? Knock guys out with a

dumbbell? Exactly. Right. So I don't know if it was like the next day he started boxing or like a month from that. Can you imagine the teacher being like, Hey man, it looks like your backpack's kind of heavy, but you got 30 pound dumbbells. Clearly there were no books in there at that point. Right. So, uh, he goes and he, he starts taking boxing classes, his family. He does that for five, six, seven years. I don't think he was like competitive boxing, but it was training and kind of doing all that stuff his family moves towns uh he goes to high school in kind of a different area an hour hour and a half away he meets another guy named chris they start taking up mma right so they're at first it's not like hey we're gonna start training they just fall in

love with the ufc so they start seeing people fight in the ufc it's really early at this point um the ufc started in the early 90s so it's it's established but it's not uh you know the biggest ticket in the world yet so they start watching the fights practicing the moves they start training etc um and he basically is like okay i'm not going to college uh i need to make money i am not in any professional ufc competitions or anything so i need to go get a job so he starts plumbing he's an apprentice for a plumber right so uh it's funny looking at mcgregor now and imagining that but you know he was a young kid and he was like riding a bus or something right like every day so he was he would wake up at 5 30 in the morning jump on a on a uh on a bus to

basically the train meet a random guy there that he knew right it's like a construction job so he's meeting these guys that he doesn't know and they would all scoop them up scoop them up they would travel to the to the uh the spot where they're working work you know 7 a.m 8 a.m to 6 p.m at night all day long and then he would have to either go find time to train or you know do all the other stuff uh he was getting paid terrible and he just jokes he's like i knew pretty quickly it was not what i wanted to do just like from the standpoint of he was like my back was hurting these guys all looked miserable like he's like i totally respected the work and respected them but just from like a quality of life didn't wasn't interested uh so he makes a decision

i i think it was within like six months maybe three months maybe even less where he's like i thought it was like within like two weeks he was like yeah maybe it was even less and he's just like screw it uh i'm gonna double down on this fighting thing like i'm gonna try it right and people got to remember at this point like he's 18 years old 19 years old he doesn't have any jobs no income uh lives at home with his girlfriend living at his yeah his parents house with his girlfriend in the same you know same house all that kind of stuff they're making him meals that you know the whole the whole thing and his family's not like super well off either so there's you know he was he jokes that he was letting the uh he owed taxes to the government he was that was

on welfare and all this stuff right and his girlfriend's working uh to support both of them at the time and he's just training all day long now so he was like i couldn't train at first now i'm gonna do it all day long and i'm gonna make something of myself so it's kind of a movie in the standpoint of now everyone knows who he is uh but yeah he fought in england in uh in ireland for a couple uh for a couple years didn't he lose the first two fights yeah so he lost it i think he won his first fight but then he lost like but he was like four and oh or four and two and he lost back to back fights uh got down on himself he was hurt he was out for like a year and then he came back and that's when he won like he basically there's a few stories about kind of what motivated him

when he was away he read some books and stuff and he claims like my mindset just changed he claims he just now he's like an animal where he's training all day doing all this stuff uh but yeah he comes back gets signed by the ufc dana white flies over sees his fight and he's like dude this guy's nuts you know i mean like he's just like because he was doing the same stuff he does now which is the funniest part is he was literally doing the exact same stuff like running around the ring screaming jumping on stuff press conference the same thing you know like and he was a star who just didn't have the stage yeah and like there's stories of him just like you know talking trash to people at the weigh-ins and stuff and it was just like he wasn't mcgregor

so everyone was kind of like this is weird but now it's like you know it's genius uh so dana white sees him and he's like this guy's a star like all i gotta do is put a camera as long as he can live up to the hype like in the ring like total home run uh so he gives him a contract for a couple ufc fights his first fight is actually a hilarious story because he wins gets knock out of the night and knock out just so people understand if you fight you get a guaranteed minimum yeah if you win that point is minuscule it's your first fight 20 grand 10 grand whatever uh if you win you get like a winner's bonus yeah and then there's like for the night of across all the fights a knockout of the night with a couple of bonuses yeah and if you get the knockout of

the night then you basically you got uh paid for winning and you got paid for the knockout yeah it's an additional bonus basically right but it's bigger than bigger than the other one so he wins knockout of the night uh and he gets a sixty thousand dollar bonus and at this point he had never seen that much money right and there's people gotta look it up there's a video of it he stands up uh at the thing and he just yells and he grabs he grabs a microphone yeah uh i think it's uh dana white 60 g's baby and he just and data's like told you home run he's like this is great and uh and the best part about the whole story is i think he bought his girlfriend a car with the 60 grand right like didn't save it didn't say it didn't know but that's no financial

education whatsoever just like yo i'm buying you like a range rover or something yeah and uh and it's funny because people know him now, right? He was the highest paid athlete in the world last year, which based off a few business deals that, you know, we can go into and we can't, but basically he's obviously good with his business and his money and all this stuff. But that was just his mindset was like, he was an entertainer. You know what I mean? He was just like Dana 60 G's went and bought a car. He's celebrating. And I'll, uh, if anyone's seen his, I don't know if you've seen it, his documentary on Netflix, it's notorious. My favorite part of the whole thing is he wins one fight, literally the first fight. I know exactly what you're going to talk about

he's on the ipad he's on the ipad like sitting on the toilet taking an interview and he's just yelling ariel hawani right yeah and he's got the sunglasses on and he's just yelling i'm the best in the world all this stuff i'm a big world champion world champion i'm the best in the world all it's incredible and his girlfriend's like in the room in his parents house and she's like she's like you literally won your first fight you got paid 60 grand and now you think you're muhammad ali exactly exactly and it's it's great from an entertainment perspective obviously but honestly i think he truly believed it too right well he ended up and he did become the world champion came the world champion multiple weight classes all this stuff right and uh and

off out of the octagon uh he's done extremely well he had the uh kind of the the liquor company the whiskey company proper 12 uh that he sold this year highest paid athlete in the world right so all right so how does he become the highest paid athlete in the world yeah so he makes uh you know pay-per-view wise maybe a few million bucks a year on the best years when it comes out of the ring he made a ton a ton a ton of money 150 million dollars plus when he fought uh mayweather but that's kind of once in a okay so take out the mayweather fight for a second he made 180 million last year yep and of that 180 million how much was in the octagon versus outside a few million in the octagon so 5 million 10 million dollars yeah and everything else was outside

yeah and most of it is uh you know in a typical year maybe here in 10 15 20 million dollars on endorsements kind of just like hey your typical stuff promoter products monster energy all the typical ones that you see in the Octagon and all these other places. Beats, all those. But then he did the liquor company, the Whiskey Proper 12, which was genius because obviously you've seen a bunch of these pop up with Aviation Gin and Ryan Reynolds and The Rock and all these different ones that people have had just massive exits. And he was probably in the middle of that. We see a lot more now. And there was a couple of early ones that really were successful. He was on that second tier of like, hey, there's a blueprint for this. I'm going to team up with the right guys who have

done this and we're going to go attack it. Ken Austin. Ken Austin. Yeah. And what they did was exactly that. He was just promoting it. Right. And they had a deal in place with kind of distributors already where it was like, Hey, you guys are going to manufacture this. You're going to distribute it. You're going to kind of just plug and play it into your network already. And we're going to promote the hell out of it. And we're going to see how much we can sell. They had milestones that if they hit, they would exit the business. And those were hit over the last, you know, three, four years where, Hey, we hit this milestone by an additional 20% of the business. We hit this one by an additional, and those aren't the correct numbers necessarily, but they're just an example

of kind of how the deal worked and this year was the last exit of the deal he's still a promotional partner i'm sure there's still kind of maybe a little bit of equity or whatever at least kind of payments for marketing and stuff uh but he made like 150 million dollars which is for 60 g's right and uh the the craziest part about that whole thing for me is like never in the wildest imagination would you think that a ufc fighter would be the highest paid athlete in the world But it just shows the branding, the promotion, the marketing, and what he turned himself into from all of that, right? But the highest paid UFC fighter in the world

maybe usually max makes $5 million a year, $10 million a year outside. Boxers make more than the UFC folks and the whole nine yards. I mean, there's a reason why Jake Paul and Logan Paul got into boxing, not UFC. One, because they'd get killed. But two, because the money's obviously great. How bad would it be if they stepped into an octagon? With a guy like McGregor? Sure.

just well like best of the best yeah it'd be bad it would be really bad yeah all right and so that's also why the celebrity boxing matches are so interesting is because they're basically they're poking the bear right both jake and logan uh are poking the bear trying to get the ufc fighter saying hey you're not getting paid enough money come over here and do celebrity boxing and what's unique about it is a lot of the mma folks actually aren't good boxers right and this is coming from somebody who i'm not a good boxer either right so like it's just they're much more well-rounded they're not an expert at boxing boxing is one of the many uh disciplines that they have to be good at to be a good ufc fighter and so what they're essentially trying to do is is almost get the ufc

get the names to come into the ring uh and do boxing which jake and uh logan are better than they were a year or two ago i don't know we went to the fight like i was pretty impressed with they're obviously not bad box going eight not eight rounds with floyd mayweather like i don't think any of us expected that i was gonna say it's also like threading the line a little bit to have like hey i mean mayweather is an extreme example of going the full way uh but what what jake has done really well is like i'm gonna be a boxer i'm gonna be legit to some degree of like you know fighting real fights and training hard and doing all this stuff but i'm gonna fight ufc guys that you know maybe like you said lack a little bit of that can we talk about ben askren

yeah what are you talking about ben i love you i need to know did you train ben i love you to death you're the you're the smartest person i know because you got paid i know you got paid everyone knows you got paid but we need to know you think he trained i saw i saw the video of him running in his yard in the snow and stuff like that but outside of that i'm not he showed he showed up uh on the way and those those photos were viral it was all time yeah i don't know i saw a picture of ben and amy amy's wife they were walking in the hallway afterwards they were laughing. That looked like the face of a mad genius to me. We got paid. That was that face. Yeah. I love you, Ben. If that's what happened, you're the absolute OG of all of this.

All right. Let's talk about some other investors that are athletes. I know that you've gotten to know Rich Kleiman and 35 Ventures and a bunch of what they've done with Kevin Durant. What is Rich Kleiman doing? Let's just talk about Rich. Rich is an OG. I know. You know him too. He's great, right he's he's awesome he's uh what's his deal he manages kevin he runs 35 ventures their their venture capital uh kind of investment shop and where they invest in everything tech not he they 50 100 plus investments at this point right and some big wins coinbase uh uh what was the food delivery startup uh doordash doordash right so they they invest in a bunch of companies they're investors in dapper lab all these you know these uh mostly technology focus i would say um but i

think they do some consumer products and stuff like that but he runs that boardroom which is their kind of media arm of everything uh sports business wise but he's a busy guy but he uh rich climbing forever will get my respect because uh i saw him he was doing an interview and he was sitting in his corner office in new york city and he looked just smooth and he had sunglasses on while he was doing the interview and i said hey man ain't nobody screwing with rich climate rich climbs the top of the world he got the sunglasses on on the interview yeah yeah rich is great and and they've built a great business right like on the court kevin obviously is a is a great player killer last night oh yeah well i don't know what date is going to release tomorrow uh the bucks

playoff game last night i think 45 points 17 assists 12 whatever it was right we only it happened last night i have a good memory yeah jimmy neutron looking ahead uh i promise i wasn't gonna make fun of him the whole time but whoops uh all right so rich and kevin how do they get the deal flow? Like, do, is it now just, uh, in the beginning it was like, Hey, let's work really closely with venture capitalists and we'll kind of invest alongside them. And now like they just built a name for themselves. So people come to them for deals. Like how does it work? Yeah. I mean, I'm sure that, uh, I don't want to speak for them. Right. Cause I think their answer might differ to some degree just based on kind of being in the trenches on that, but

keep playing golden state. Right. So that's kind of where you want to be at least back then in 2017, whatever it was, uh, from a venture capital perspective, made incredible relationships. And I think the people that, I think the thing that most people understand is like, athletes want to talk to VC investors and VCs want to talk to athletes, right? So Kevin was a natural guy that, you know, they're sitting courtside. They want to talk to the players, the best players, all that kind of stuff. So I think you naturally learn some of that through those relationships. You obviously get brought a lot of deals through that. You are interested in investing. You want to learn, you make that clear to them. They bring you deals. You talk

to them. You can obviously provide value for Kevin, whether you have kind of his own traditional distribution on social media, YouTube, all that kind of stuff, or through the boardroom and kind of all that kind of stuff so i think it was a combination of hey this guy can be super value for some of these investments that we're doing and then kevin being super interested in the investing stuff how important was it that he went to golden state for a lot of this i mean one from like a basketball standpoint like traditional fans love to hate on the fact that he went there and teamed up with all these players to win but at the end of the day uh i don't remember his exact quote when he did it but it was just like when the game's over and you retire and it's 50 years

from now the only thing people care about is championships they don't care about who you did it with people forget all that right like guys that are not born yet they won't have any clue what the heck happened to get him those championships they just care about championships so that's what he went and did he wanted to win their style play all that kind of stuff so from basketball standpoint it was great investing wise he couldn't have done anything better right because you're teaming up with world-class uh investors out there you're meeting some of the brightest minds in the world and uh not only are you creating personal relationships but you're seeing the deal flow you're investing alongside them they want you in they want your check all

this kind of stuff so i think it was just um amazing from both perspectives basketball and there and obviously it worked out on the court and then off the court with some of the exits it's worked out so they got a nice ass office in new york city my favorite was the guy downstairs yeah you want to tell that story yeah we uh we rolled up to the office once and uh what the door was locked right yes well joe and i went it was at night too it was like we met went met uh rich at like six o'clock yeah at night yeah and when we walked up uh you'd been to the office before right so you knew where you're going but we walked up i think joe tried to open the door i didn't see this guy the first time and it was locked and uh while we're waiting a second trying to figure out

you know is there a bell to ring or whatever i just looked uh uh kind of at the street and there was a black like suburban or escalade whatever sitting there and there was a dude uh who obviously was not just a driver he's a big dude uh and i think he even might have had his sleeves rolled up and had like a tattoo or something on his forearm and uh he just kind of looked over at us and there was a second there where i was like what's this guy doing here yeah like uh like you could tell he was doing something there but you didn't quite know what it was like we didn't know was he there for us or was he there for somebody else yeah yeah he had that that look in his eyes but uh and so when we went upstairs we made sure that we told rich hey man don't be sending no

to come get us yeah yeah and which he thought i saw him uh i saw him later on a different time and he was he's like you know exactly what you would expect uh ex-cop right parks wherever he wants he's got takes care of everyone he's the man yeah great guy right i talked to him for five minutes he was awesome uh but it was just funny seeing him the first time and like what's going on here all right the next person i want to talk about is saquon uh saquon barkley we've gotten to know him uh ken katz connor all these guys uh we'll talk about danny boy hustle hard in a second you know we're going to talk about him uh but saquon is fascinating because uh he is uh what you and i would say is the best running back in the nfl uh go giants and i was gonna say do we

have to put a disclaimer on that no he just facts it's like it is a fact saquon barkley is the best giant fan running back um and now he's starting to get really really interested in investing so like maybe walk through like take somebody like Saquon as he becomes more interested in this like what's the journey for an athlete to become an investor and kind of get much more kind of exposure and and deeper into those circles yeah and I think it's not only what we were just talking about with Kevin but what we've talked with Saquon about which is like you come in the league you're making some money you're figuring out what you want to do you get comfortable for a little bit of time you do endorsements you get your name out there you build your brand distribution all the

type of stuff, right? All the things that are important when you start investing. So he's done that for a couple of years now. And then I think it's, it's what he's really been trying to do is just build those relationships, right? Those same things that we talked about Kevin with in Golden State is like, you call up the five, 10 best investors, you know, the guys that have the best returns are women that have the best returns on wall street. And you say, Hey, look, I want to learn. I just want to learn. I don't even want you to give me access, all this stuff. And what you find is it's that same thing. They want to talk to the athletes. Athletes want to talk to them. You build that relationship. They care about you because they're seeing, Hey, he really wants

to learn. And then they start bringing you deals naturally, right? And you get the same access that they have and you provide value. It's not like they're just any favors, but Saquon has a massive fan base, especially when you look at it from like sports technology companies and things like that, that, uh, that he'll invest in over time. He provides tremendous value. So I think it's more about just, uh, learning at first, figuring out what you like and what you're interested in investing, and then seeing that deal flow from these guys. All right. Saquon, love you. You're going to be an absolute genius uh on the investing front let's talk about uh our all of our favorite human in the whole world danny boy hustle hard yeah who maybe first let's just start with who

is this well why don't we just tell the story about the first time we met which was uh so we went to dinner with these guys and we were going out to new jersey right and we get uh danny boy who's the driver for sake it's not danny boy it's danny boy hustle yeah sorry i don't want to just do the first name here where danny boy hustle hard from new jersey absolute legend in the tri-state area we were told we were told danny boy hustle hard who for those that don't know uh drives a ton of celebrities ton of athletes etc all throughout new york new jersey uh that anywhere you need to be in the tri-state area danny boy hustle hard to get you there in 10 minutes oh yeah 10 15 maybe but 10 15 minutes anywhere you need to be he's got you and so when you hear that

You're like, man, there's some areas where it might take you an hour and a half. Don't worry, 10, 15 minutes, he's got you. Yeah, like I've never gotten to MetLife in 10 minutes from the stadium. So as part of the experience of meeting him, he came to pick us up in New York City, Manhattan. And maybe let's just start with literally how we knew which car he was in in order to get in the car with us. So like me or you, we gave him an address, right? I'll meet you on the corner. it's like dude i gave you an exact address right which he doesn't want to turn on the street

typical new york kind of uh personality and driver right so meet you on the corner so we're out there waiting on the corner and uh instead of a text or a call hey i'm pulling up whatever we see him we're literally sitting on the corner uh we see him pull up he almost goes down a one way the wrong way backs out yeah the wrong way backs out and parks down like basically the curve where the buses are supposed to go and just lays on the horn just lays on the horn and not like a quick beep like hey i'm over here like a hey this is me come find me and you and i looked at each other and we're like i guess that's him yeah yeah we're like no one else would do that so that's him yeah but then uh uh we get in the car yeah i mean say what's up he says what's up cheech

yeah multiple cell phones are ringing well i'm like and we had to go maybe 45 minutes away yeah i think we got there in 25 minutes how do we get out of manhattan oh this is yeah so i mean to be fair we knew two minutes into the ride that craziest experience i've ever had in manhattan also absolute legend danny boy hustle hard he yeah he's unique as a driver because it's pretty reckless the whole time but you're completely comfortable the whole time also like he's just he's talking he's chatting he's just doing his thing he runs every red light yeah i didn't know if we were supposed to say that he i mean you know he just he is he's danny boy hustle hard yeah he goes hard uh and every single maneuver he uses to get through that tunnel yeah you're

sitting there and you're like this guy could win the indy 500 he literally could drive a chevy suburban and win the indy 500 that's how good of a driver he is yeah and the entire time he's doing it he is making you die laughing yeah and you and you literally feel like you could not be safer yeah it is a skill he's great at it yeah way back to had dinner with us and then yeah way back yeah we probably even got back quicker on the way back my favorite thing that he does by far is uh the entire time he just keeps laying into anything that you would think might be controversial he has an opinion yo cheech let me tell you and i don't know where that word came from but cheech is the is the chosen uh uh nomenclature for how he addresses you is just a cheech yeah he seeks

out those topics really is what it is he'll like bring up a question that at that is like controversial a little bit you'll like kind of skirt it a little bit to some degree and he'll just go straight on a scale of one to ten one not being not funny ten being hysterical where do you put him oh he's a 10 oh i think he's like 11 or 12 like he's off the charts funny yeah we our brother john is funny but like danny boy hustle hard makes john look like a mime yeah he's great yeah and the best part about the whole you let me know if you're flying in anytime you want to ride i was dying yeah he's like yeah we got your number all right so uh Danny Boy Hustle Hard, he drives all kinds of professional athletes, et cetera, all throughout

New York City. Legend, if you do not follow him on Instagram, highly, highly recommend the follow on Instagram. Literally, you will be laughing on the floor at how funny this guy is. But a bunch of other athletes also come through. Some of them are investors in Bitcoin. Let's talk about athletes who have decided to get paid in Bitcoin. What exactly is going on there? Who's done it and why are they doing it yeah so there's a few of them right and i think uh the the main guys that people that everyone knows about are russ russell okun uh sean colkin did it last russ i think he took 50 of his salary right he said it kind of november of last year he gets paid like 13 million bucks a year and he took 50 of his salary in bitcoin yeah six and a half million bucks a year

said pay me in bitcoin uh sean he actually tweeted that too yeah pay me and then he said paid him Bitcoin. Yeah. How it started, how it ended. Right. But so Sean Culkin, he was a tight end for the Kansas city chiefs. Same thing. He said, I'm going to take a hundred percent of my salary though. So he's a, a, a kind of a veteran minimum player makes a million bucks a year said, I'm going to do a hundred percent, all million dollars. I won't pay him Bitcoin. So, I mean, you know, the way these, these things work, like they don't, they're not actually physically the team is not buying Bitcoin, holding it on their kind of balance sheet and paying them, but the transaction is facilitated and they get paid in bitcoin via strike via strike yeah good plug uh hashtag

investor yeah strikes taking over the world yeah so they el salvador the nfl whatever you need we got yeah so they uh they strike and they've been uh taking their salary in bitcoin and part of it is kind of like hey why don't you just buy bitcoin like somebody's got russ has been buying bitcoin for years right so it's kind of like why don't you just keep doing that and do the same thing but i think it's two things one like they're opting out of of uh of traditionally the u.s dollar to some degree. Right. But also, uh, they're just believers in it. Right. And they're showing, they're making a statement, they're making a statement. And that's really what it is, is it's statement. You can call it marketing, whatever you want, but really what it is, is this

what I believe in this, why I'm doing it, et cetera. So Okun, same thing, Sean Culkin, same thing. The one I thought was interesting was Trevor Lawrence, right. Where he said, uh, I'm going to take my endorsement, uh, the money from, uh, oh, Blackfolio. Yeah. So Blackfolio paid him his, uh, basically what was equivalent of the signing bonus of the deal all in crypto, not bitcoin other stuff right or was some bitcoin some was bitcoin like a third of it bitcoin a couple other coins uh so he got part of it he just went all in on all kinds of weird coins no there was three of them and i forget exactly what it was but uh there's three of them bitcoin was one of them and he took you know a third of their third i think what's up with uh the goat tom

brady mine let's just caveat tom two super bowls yeah you're oh and two in the super bowl against eli manning i love you you're great you got to respect great players yeah you multi uh super bowl champion but against eli manning the best quarterback to ever grace the nfl as a giant uh you're owing to especially from a meme perspective yeah i mean eli manning is 2-0 against the goat in the super bowl like if you beat the goat twice in the game that matters then you're the goat right whatever shout out eli all right go ahead what do you think about him and his whole uh bitcoin foray i mean he hasn't you know come out and said hey i'm taking salary and bitcoin or whatever but he's got the laser eyes on twitter everyone loved it uh he spoke at the conference

he's obviously into nfts with kind of the platform he's working on everything like that so i think it's the same stuff and and the more uh one of the things that stuck out to me was when russ did the and he got paid and they came out and said hey we're gonna pay you and he was up big and all this stuff and it was going viral on the internet uh he was like i'm having tons of athletes reach out to me right and he said the exact same thing when tom brady did it when tom brady put the laser eyes he was like all these nfl guys are interested one because it uh it legitimizes a little bit right it comes out and he says hey look i'm invested in it i own bitcoin another crypto, whatever it is. But in our quarterback room, we talk about it every day.

He said, our quarterback coach has been in it for a while. He's kind of, you know, got all of us on the same train and stuff. So when a guy like Tom Brady does it, whether you think he's the best investor in the world or not, he's obviously super respected from kind of a, not only a football player, but a business perspective and kind of who these guys look up to. So I think he was a major turning point for people in sports of like, Hey, this is legit. Like we should go check this out. Right. I don't want to put it on blast. So let's not say the sport or the team, but uh we've been told a story by the people involved so we know for sure it's true uh that there was a team that during halftime uh of important games they would be checking their coinbase wallets

or their coinbase accounts showing each other how much money they lost uh made or lost in crypto and bitcoin and literally the coach at one point had to be like hey put your goddamn put your phones away like we got a game to play at halftime yeah what do you do if you're a coach in that standpoint I mean, you're like, put your phone away. We have a game to play. And the player's like, yo, coach, do you see how much Bitcoin I just stacked? Like, I'm out here. Like, I'll see you.

Yeah. What's fascinating to me, though, is like some of these players, do you think that they would literally retire if they were a billionaire? You think some of these players would just walk away? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you got to remember, too, specifically like football, right? Like, because your body.

Yeah. Saquon has never said this, so I'm not going to speak for him, but a position like a running back, you're getting killed out there, right? you're constantly hurt. You're rehabbing, you're doing surgery, all this stuff. Oh no, man. He was throwing the deuces up. Ain't nobody touching him. Of course. Like he's, he's an incredible athlete. Right. But just from the perspective of like, it's a physical game. If you're a billionaire at some point, you're like, all right, I don't really want any head injuries, concussions, knee injuries, whatever it is. Like, I'm just going to

go chill and retire. Right. And maybe you find something else to do or whatever it is. But if you told these guys, I mean, guys have literally told us not those guys, but like other guys, they're like, yeah, I'd be out. Yeah. So like, it's yeah. You know who we should talk about? uh that we haven't mentioned yet uh probably one of the funniest people in the nfl is uh sterling shepherd yeah uh i'ma plug him for his advertisements because this guy is hysterical and then you look at his instagram and he's taking photos with like bars of soap next to the bathtub with his kids and he's like yeah go buy this soap and one where i mean hashtag getting paid yeah when we met him i was like these are the same people he's and not in like a he was like

a ridiculous perspective but he's just hilarious right he's just like me or you he's the normal guy hilarious and like it's just funny seeing two way different perceptions of them but i think that's why folks there are certain players that everyone gravitates toward like man i like that guy right and maybe you can't you don't like personally interact with them whatever but like the authenticity comes through yeah it's probably also why the brands like uh certain players right they're like oh this person's really authentic they uh the audience feels like they're relatable they they you know we don't have to worry about them going doing crazy stuff or whatever and it just seems like a couple of people that we've talked about like they all kind of hit those

uh marks and that's why they get the endorsement deals that's why brands want to work with them all that type of stuff yeah 100 yeah i mean look he was uh super personable obviously right like super good guy but hilarious and he relates well on the field he plays for the giants that obviously helps he's good at football all that could you beat saquon or uh shep in a 40-yard dash is that a serious question i don't know could you i could easy let's go how much bitcoin what's your 40-yard dash uh split second faster than either one of them okay so uh saquon probably ran like a 4-4 at the combine well i run a 4-3 then all right we'll we're gonna test that out Listen, that's what I want.

And rather than do celebrity boxing, I don't need to box anybody. Let's do 40-yard dash. But I'm getting paid before. I mean, Mayweather, even if he lost the match, he got $30 million on his shorts. Like, I'll run against Saquon. Do you believe that?

Sure, let's go. I mean, he said it, yeah. Yeah, whatever, that's fine. Oh, do I believe that Floyd Mayweather got $30 million? Oh, yeah. I think that he probably didn't count correctly and he probably got paid more. Like $30 million on the shorts.

Then he probably got paid another $20 million posting stupid stuff on the internet. Then he got paid $10 million to show up to the Bitcoin conference in an Ethereum shirt. Yeah, I mean, that was the best part. He showed up in an Ethereum shirt. I was like, dude, read the room a little bit. But yeah, I mean, at some point,

you got to think he's like over, I mean, he's probably not overwhelmed, I guess. People are handling it for him to some degree. But just like so many things go into one fight where it's like, he had the mask sponsored. He was wearing the face mask out there. He's like, dude, everyone's, you know, testing. Wait, let's go back for a second.

Now that I'm thinking about this, I think Saquon would do it too. If somebody said that Saquon and I would each get paid five million dollars to do a 40 yard dash who's gonna pay you oh listen people would watch people would watch you race people would it's got to be at least competitive the whole thing about the boxing why the boxing works no i would smoke no the whole reason why the box you really think saquon could beat me in a 40 yard dash yes wow okay you're not you're fired let's bet a bitcoin on it huh huh we go uh-huh when that came up he's like no never mind no a

sponsor could pay me to race though okay would you race too for money yeah yeah that's what we we should do a four-way race shep saquon you and me loser yeah whoever comes in last loser is banished from the internet forever winner gets five million and the other two each get a million bucks so you're definitely banished from the internet you know and then i'm gonna win so i'm gonna get five million dollars and the other two gonna get a million bucks you see uh win win win and then you lose you know what that reminds me of is uh when rovelle was trying to box darren rovelle was trying to box uh pft from barstool that's not real yeah you never saw this no but his stipulation was damn i forget the exact amount he wanted millions of dollars though and they were

like uh you know no one not gonna happen but pft was like uh i'll meet you anywhere anytime any place and if i win we'll box and if i win you have to stay off the internet for like it was like two years or something like one or two years like you just can't use your twitter account or yet it was either you have to delete it or like you can't use it for a specific period of time i forget exactly what it was but he's like uh yeah you have to get off the internet and that was the deal breaker for roval he was like dude this is my business and i have two million followers all this stuff and it was funny because it's true to some degree right like that's what he does for a living but obviously vft was like dude you can't use twitter anymore if pft boxed darren romeo off the internet

he would be the hall of fame immediately go internet oh my god it would be that would be pay-per-view right like uh but i think this is where the world's going as much as i'm joking around about the 40-yard dash whatever i literally think that you me and let's say saquon and shep could literally create enough controversy around an event and literally each get paid seven figures to go run a 40-yard dash. As crazy as that sounds, Logan Paul just fought Floyd Mayweather

and Floyd Mayweather made like $50 million doing it and Logan probably made $10 or $20 million doing it. Like the world we live in now is so different than the world we used to live in and some of it is it's an attention economy. Some of it's just like the market's been manipulated, you know like crazy and then some of it frankly is just outright who can draw like who can be the most outrageous against each other and just convince people like hey i want to watch this

slow car will you get rewarded for obviously building the audience and all that kind of stuff but also just being authentic and wild to some degree right like uh uh i forget who exactly it was but all these ufc guys were like hey man we're getting screwed you know uh logan paul just made 20 million dollars fox and uh fighting floyd mayweather like why can't i do that and the reality is like because you don't have a million people buying a pay-per-view yeah well not only that but you don't have 50 million people on on uh between twitter facebook you know all these different social platforms and he does he has this audience people that are willing to pay and they sold a million on pay-per-view right like that's not even some ridiculous amount of money

uh ridiculous amount of buys it's not even in the top i don't think 25 of all time but it's around there and it's well he made 65 million dollars he made 10 15 20 million dollars so obviously the model works um and i and i agree i think you're right the one thing that's uh fascinating i wrote about the other day was have you seen what house of highlights is doing no house of highlights so you know who they are right the the instagram instagram account uh i think they have like 25 million followers it's very good very well done so the story behind house highlights is cool it was a student at central florida omar who started the account he basically was looking for uh lebron james was leaving miami heat at the time and he was going back to cleveland and he was

looking for highlights of not them in the game but like the antics they were doing on the sidelines and in the locker room and all the stuff you like heard about and saw sometimes but he couldn't find them anywhere so he went to youtube couldn't find him went to twitter couldn't find him and all this stuff was on instagram couldn't find him so he's like all right i'm gonna start a page and they do some highlights they do kind of the cool plays and stuff like that but if you actually look at their page most of it is uh outside of that kind of stuff so it's crazy home videos it's trick shots like dude perfect and all these things and there's obviously content in the game uh but the account blew up 20 million followers they got purchased by bleacher report uh who rolls up to turn and all

this stuff but now what they're doing instead of just focusing on that they're building an entire franchise around live competitions. And it's not live competitions like we think of with the NFL or professional games, finding the best athletes and doing this stuff. Their bet is exactly what Celebrity Boxing is doing. We're going to find the people that have the largest audiences and we're going to do super relatable games for high cash prizes. And so what it is, is they've done a couple now. They did a golf tournament, which was basically just like a longest, I think it was either longest drive or closest to the pin, but some kind of backyard golf tournament. They did a free throw competition and their next one's a dodgeball tournament. So the free throw competition,

they just got a bunch of individual creators right with large audiences hey you have a million followers on here you have two million here whatever put them all in a in a free throw competition winner got a hundred thousand dollars and the next one is a dodgeball right where winner gets 250 000 but what they're doing is they're taking all these like groups right so phase clan and all these people that have these massive audiences and they're pitting them against each other so not only do you get the core audience from that group to come but you're usually these people don't interact right so when you put them against kind of a competitor or someone who does something similar to them on the internet and you put them against each other doing dodgeball

tracks the audience everyone's engaged all this type of stuff so their whole idea is like super uh engaged audiences coming from large uh large creators have live competitions make it a relatable game that you or i could play dodgeball uh closest to the hole in golf and free throws and then have high cash prizes right super low cost to put on you pay the creators or whatever and then they're doing the dodgeball tournament in the uh warner brothers parking lot i think that's where they're doing it, which is like, you know, it's great. It's a dodge. You just need an area that you could do it in the park. Right. And that's essentially what they're doing. So it'll be fascinating to see. This is the third one. I think the first two, they didn't have any major

sponsors. This one sponsored by I think Pizza Hut or something like that. So they got a sponsor, they're monetizing it. And then the interesting part is like what they do with merchandise and products off of all that. Right. And it's only the third iteration, but you could quickly see when you look at celebrity boxing and this, like how they merge together of like, people just want to watch people that they know compete in these things. And sports is one avenue. There's a million different other ways to do it but it's fascinating to see them kind of combine the two and and try to build franchises out of it it's going to be unreal to watch all this unfold it's like a no-brainer and then all of a sudden if you start to layer not only athletes then you talk

about some of these internet you know communities then you get musicians then you get business people like you just start bringing all these people together and you literally can't look away like you have to watch yeah well the internet did an incredible job of not only giving you exposure to these people but being able to build up the the kind of momentum and attention towards these events right so you think about a boxing match you announce it a few months beforehand you do the weigh-ins there's gotcha hat right it was just incredible content right and the one clip of of logan when he left the fight was like thanks jake for selling the fight for me right because that's exactly what it was what he said yeah he said thanks right like because that's exactly what

it was he flew in got it they got in a scuffle it went viral on the internet espn's posted about it all these you know people are posting about it uh and it just drives attention towards the event is jake paul the best marketer on the internet right now one of them for sure i mean and people hate it because of his past and who he is and same thing but right you gotta separate the two may have done some terrible things whatever you don't always agree with that kind of stuff incredible marketer sure whatever there's probably a middle ground uh and he and that's where he is right is like he does an incredible job of building up kind of the anticipation for these events um now the ufc guys used to hate him because they're like this guy's ruining our sport and now he's

arguing against dana white for them to get paid more so like yeah he's all right yeah they're of like yeah we like him a little bit yeah that jake paul guy's got a point i think that guy actually is pretty intelligent dana yeah would you say back to him okay yeah is dana white the best kind of like league uh mastermind out of all these he's great i yeah i mean he's would the nfl be better off if dana white was running it it's tough to say because the nfl's like roger goodell gets paid you know 50 million bucks a year for a reason right uh he obviously does an incredible job and he works for the for the owners and they obviously like him and they continue to move him over but dana white's incredible right he took a sport that started

in like 1992 uh the first i always laugh about the first ufc competition there was no rules like literally no yeah it's just a street fight and and the comp and no gloves right no glove uh some people were wearing like one glove some wouldn't wear any like it was just mayhem and what they were doing was they were bringing people from all these different disciplines right jujitsu taekwondo straight fighters uh and just putting them in a ring sumo wrestlers no judges right so like it could not end unless it was a knockout or someone gave up. And there was just no rules, right? So it was kind of barbaric. I think John McCain called it human cockfighting. And he was like, I'll never let this get anywhere. And it has obviously Dana White bought it for I think it

was 2 million bucks or whatever. It's, you know, almost a $10 million company now. But one of the things Dana White did really well was he understood really, really early on what everyone understands now very clearly, which is the audience and the attention. When they were struggling, they were about to go bankrupt they had already pumped like 60 million dollars into it on top of what they bought the company for and the Fertitta brothers were like hey you know we need to start seeing some progress here uh so he had the ultimate fighter he came up with the tv show if people remember it on spike tv but what people don't know about it was that he went to like five or six different networks at first and we're like hey we want to do the show you guys do it whatever

and everyone said no like this is because remember it was barbaric at the time no one watched it everyone thought it was like kind of ridiculous and whatever and we've come to kind of be uh uh immune to that to some degree right like we don't think about that as much anymore but at the time no one wanted to touch it he said um okay spike tv i'll pay the 10 million dollars ourselves we'll invest 10 million dollars for the production we'll pay for everything you guys just put it on tv they put it on tv maybe there was some kind of like revenue whatever it might be but he paid 10 million bucks to get it produced shows a hit they went from doing like 50 000 or 100 000 pay-per-view guys they did a million the next year on an event wow so crazy just of just getting in

front of people because i don't even think it was necessarily as much about just getting more eyeballs on the sport it was showing that the fighters are actual people right and you were seeing people uh kind of in their in their bed calling their wife training all day saying hey look i really need to win this next fight to make paychecks to be able to buy a spoon and all this stuff right so you just see that human aspect of the fighters so i think that was incredible but the other one that uh is even less talked about was when all these leagues remember when twitter was like younger right oh eight ten whatever uh leagues were banning or finding people for saying anything basically on twitter you just couldn't unless it was like promotional

tweets and like building your brand like they didn't want anything and it's completely changed kind of perception but the nfl was handing out fines nba was handing out fines they just generally didn't really want you to do it uh just scared kind of what you would say dana white actually created a fund and he said i'm gonna hand out cash payments to whoever tweets the most and whoever gets the most followers he had a bunch of metrics that was basically like i'm gonna give you five thousand ten thousand fifty thousand whatever uh to whoever has the best performance on twitter this month or this quarter and what it did was it just built up the sport right and guys like mcgregor now uh it obviously wasn't as big then but it's exactly what they what they've the

approach they've taken of kind of like just having these fighters build up their personas on twitter and attracting an audience showing their human and that was off the heels of the ultimate fighter and showing seeing how uh kind of the success of that show parlayed the success of the ufc so i thought that was cool i mean that's crazy yeah he's really paying for the winner to be active on twitter i mean should i be rich if that was the case all right where can we send people it'll find you on the internet where should they uh should they go to twitter email yeah i mean twitter's uh what's your twitter the easiest at joe pompliano i mean you're the second best pomp account on twitter behind john pomp well from a quality perspective john's in the room he just

gave me a little you know a yeah john's got a good twitter account he's the numbers guy uh yeah i mean how much of your content does john find for you zero i was gonna i was gonna lie but i uh and give him the benefit of the doubt but this is gonna be recorded and etched in history so let's uh let's stick with zero all right just making sure so at joe pompliano yeah all right and then email you send it what every morning every morning monday through friday uh i mean nine to nine thirty let me let me just i'll just say this so i wake up and i write mine in like 30 minutes like i'm just like done send it's great people love it big audience like highly engaged big open rate you know i'm

not gonna brag but like pretty good uh and then joe you wake up what 5 30 and it takes you four hours to write this and one day i was like man what is this guy writing about three hours i never read it but oh no i never read it so i went and i read it and i should remove you from the list and it was actually good like i was surprised and i was like oh this is why it takes them four hours to write this is because you actually do research and there's numbers and data so like it's actually very good uh but it does take you four hours which makes it me uh like to give you shit for it uh but where can they go to sign up for the email uh thanks for that intro for the for the for the letter uh read huddle up.com read huddle up.com huddle up huddle up like that like

that like the like the quarterback calling everyone that was the idea behind the name was it really yeah yeah and then do you say like you know i don't ever say it like that wait how do you say it huddle up oh you say like normal yeah yeah well the quarterback always you know huddle up huddle up and then everyone comes together and he's like all right on two one two ready break we know how it works all right go follow him at joe pompliano go subscribe at read huddle up.com you can even say huddle up huddle up and we'll do it again in the future