The Pomp Podcast - #834 NFTs Taking Over Professional Sports w/ Andy Spellman & Jerod Mayo

Episode Date: February 21, 2022

Andy Spellman is the Founder and Managing Partner at Fifth Down Capital. Jerod Mayo is a former NFL Linebacker and Super Bowl champion with the New England Patriots and is now a top coach within the Patriots organization. In this conversation we discuss technology investing, financial management for athletes, and the sports card and NFT boom. ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ======================= Imagine coinmarketcap - decentralized. 3X in valuation is 15 billion dollars from the current price. Cryptotoday.com starts at zero, at fair launch on 7th of March. No VC. No pre-sale. Team tokens locked. For the people, by the people. For decentralized crypto. Visit cryptotoday.com and read the whitepaper for the details.

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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 for informational purposes only. What's going on, guys? Bang, bang. I'm here with Andy and Gerard.

Let's introduce ourselves. Andy Spellman, fifth down capital. Gerard Mayo, linebacker coach for the New England Patriots. When are the Patriots going to win another Super Bowl? We'll be back. We'll be back soon. I mean, look, we have a pretty solid team. We have a good team.

You know, we've got a bunch of new free agents. Year one to year two will be good for them. All right. And we've got a solid quarterback, too. Don't forget. Everyone's on the Rams. Everyone's on the Rams. Eventually the Rams are going to have to pay the bills, man.

I didn't want to talk about football, but I do have one question. Yeah, ask it. I'm going to talk it in because it's being recorded. When Tom Brady retired, people were happy? Not happy? No, people were happy because he wasn't playing in New England. Yeah. You know, but Tom.

I appreciated the New York Giants when they tweeted out and just threw in the jab there. Yeah, there's always going to be jabs. You had a little jab, like 0-2 against me in the Super Bowl. Yeah. I thought that was pretty good. When you win a lot, as you know, you're always going to have haters. How many Super Bowl rings do you have?

I only have one. I was the bridge between the next generation of three. That's what you would say if everyone else had six or seven. No, because my brother ended up getting a ring. I got him a job, but I went and worked in corporate. yeah so now he's an assistant strength and conditioning coach yeah keep it in the family all right you own a bunch of sports cards i do what why what like and here's my question for you is uh nfts everyone's always like i could just right click and save it this is like crazy there's

images on the internet uh but a sports car is like a piece of cardboard why do they have value what's the thought process well we can go on a lot of things that um have less tangibility that don't have that have a lot of value that i don't think highly of but um sports cards represent a culmination of like art so for me cards are like art when i look at them i get inspired i get excited um they come with a lot of passion and there's a lot of connectivity with for me my children um there's a there's a community around that so you have the community uh side of it and the last 20 years just the innovation that's come with creating the rare cards um the piece of jerseys autographs i i just look at cards and i get very excited some people look at a rothko or

monet and feel like 100 million dollars is you know worthy and i look at a card and i'm like i just want that card and i don't care what it is what's the craziest one that you own so the craziest one i own um probably the most the most valuable and the craziest is a different answer because some of us do both some of the lebron rookie cards are um you know they're known as the most valuable the craziest one i believe that i own is um it's a dual logo man of kareem abdul-jabbar and kobe bryant it's a one-of-one both of them autographed it i believe it is the best lakers card in existence um and kareem abdul-jabbar and kobe bryant both on the same card and they both signed it and it's a logo man it's a one-on-one so it's um it's a very unique

card and because of being sitting here in la also yeah it's there's so many people that are so passionate around the world about the lakers and to think that like if it's not the best card how much is it worth do you think over under five million dollars i wouldn't sell it for five million dollars that's that's actually a pretty good indication yeah i wouldn't yeah i wouldn't consider it all right and then how much are the lebrons considered to be worth so um you know they're transacting north of that there was there was one that that i that i did own and i moved to a friend and he crossed it over there's different grading companies and he crossed it over to a psa 1010 um i think that's around 15 million dollar card and those are like the most expensive trading

cards available or the basketball like kind of one of one super rare type cards and they're 10 plus million dollars for those cards yeah i mean there's some old vintage cards where they're they were mass produced and the rarity is really the grade so a psa 10 is the most iconic grade for example mickey mantel has a few psa 10 rookies one hasn't traded in a long time people speculate it would be 30 million or so dollars now for work how in this for both of you like sports memorabilia in general right so like cards are their cards i think that's become much more popular uh recently from like a financialization standpoint but uh i think my dad growing up he had a baseball and i'm pretty sure it's a legit signature uh of a mickey manuel baseball card you just made me think about

or mickey manuel baseball and like for some reason it feels like a lot of the memorabilia hasn't necessarily continued on the financialization track as much as the cards. So one, is that true? Or how do you guys think about assigned football, assigned baseball, assigned basketball versus just the trading cards themselves? I think your dad should send it to me in all of a sudden.

And there is a reason why for the last 10 years I've been asking Gerard for different autographs of different guys. Yeah, yeah. Maybe you speak. I'm not big into the memorabilia thing. I would say the one thing I enjoy about the card industry is just opening a pack of cards with my son. Yeah, it's cool.

It's cool. My son's 10 years old, and he loves doing it, loves pulling out the cards. And that brings me back to my childhood. And I didn't only collect baseball, basketball cards, also Pokemon cards. You pull that holographic Charizard out, and you're like, you're kind of pumped. And my kids, they get excited, my son especially. So he gets excited when he pulls out, you know, a LeBron James or, you know, a Red Prism, whatever it is. You know, they have a bunch of different products, but just that excitement in his face.

Yeah, it almost feels like in some way we can do all these stuff on the digital technology. Sure, you can have TikTok, you can have Twitter, you can have all these things and there's dopamine hits that come with it. That's right. But there's still something really special about the physical world. Right. And I think a lot about everyone's all excited about the metaverse. It's like, yeah, sure. Like that's probably going to become a thing to some degree. But I don't think that people are going to be like, I don't want to go to a physical dinner with the person down the street and say, let's meet in the metaverse. I still think there's something special about being in person or pulling a physical card, like all of that as well. You know, years ago, there was a lot of discussion as e-commerce and it was booming, like what would happen to stores and retail.

And the reality is there is some impact, but the values of retail chains across the country, whether it's Costco, Target, you know, these types of companies continue to rise. And so to me, they kind of feed each other companies that, you know, there's going to be companies that stand alone in retail and e-commerce. And for me, I believe that there's a marketplace for both. And there's going to be a lot of people that develop passion around NFTs. were involved. All three of us are involved in a company called Collectible, which fractionalizes sports cards. And I was like, I'm never going to be interested in that. If I don't have the card, I won't do it. I love it. I'm a junkie. I'm on there every day. Yeah. It feels like we're seeing this in a lot of these assets as well. So NFTs recently, they're now allowing you to securitize

them or borrow against them. And there's questions because a sports card, I think it's probably got less volatility. It's not like you're going to wake up one day and that LeBron James card was worth you know 10 million dollars now it's worth zero or it's worth you know 100k uh some of the nfts though it's early and so something that was hot and there's a lot of interest around maybe there won't be as much interest in it you know five days from now a month two months from now uh so it'll be interesting to see how they manage the risk right and uh um there's a lot of uh i think comparisons to bitcoin and lending against bitcoin super volatile but you have an asset that you can sell in a fractionalized way that's right so i could sell you know a tenth of a bitcoin a

fifth of a bitcoin whatever with the nfts to your point you can't sell a piece of it right but can you make a non-fungible token fungible does that make sense you can't make it fungible what i think a lot of people want to do is um think of almost like a spv right like a special purpose vehicle where uh let's say i had some shares in a company and i put it into an llc now that spv i could sell fractional shares in and technically i'm not breaking up the equity of the original business i'm just breaking up the entity that holds the shares so like could you basically take a non fungible token put it into a structure that then has you know kind of fractionalized ownership or fungible tokens probably yeah uh but then you get in a weird world of like you know are you just

building uh assets on top of assets on top of assets like there's some value to that obviously see that in traditional financial world but it's also where a lot of the complexity and issues come from that's right well let me i'll distill it down to a simple word called scarcity and you'd appreciate this from the bitcoin world is there there's a lot of volatility in bitcoin yet the value continues to rise you wouldn't sell yours at 65 000 you're also not selling it at 30 or 40 000 but there's more people available to sell so you see it jump around a lot so where i play is in the most scarce market so one of one cards out of ten because those people or not selling it and it takes someone to buy it from you.

Yep. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. Let's finish up with Bitcoin. What's your, what's your thoughts on Bitcoin? I love, I love Bitcoin. I love, I look at Bitcoin as digital gold. I look at Ethereum as digital gas, you know? So I definitely think there's a place for, you know decentralized assets like that, so.

Do you own any regular gold? Through an ETF, which is stupid though. I'll tell you straight up, like, you know as an athlete we all get financial advisors and sometimes they put you in some crazy things and then the more you get educated or hang around guys like this yeah the smarter you you know the more you know the more you learn about to get fired that's right that's right and so they end up becoming glorified yes men or they'll put you into what they call you know the inflation protect yeah safe things like a like a gold etf i don't own gold bars but this guy owns gold bars you got

gold bars cards what do you think about the gold i think as long as you're transacting on river of BlockFi. That's right. That's right. That's just my opinion. I mean, I don't disagree with you. No doubt. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you guys so much for doing this. I appreciate you having me. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to palmscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry it's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into

that three-week time period go to pompscryptocourse.com to learn more and i'll meet you guys for the next episode