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

Episode Date: September 23, 2026

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

Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com. It is a hedge against inflation. I think that people are rightfully thinking of it that way. And then I think it's also a global store of value. And it's sort of easily accessible from anywhere to anywhere.

and that it's just incredibly powerful in that way. And so, you know, once it became, you know, accepted as a standard, once enough people said, okay, this is going to work and the validator network works and everything else, it became, you know, the standard store of value. What's going on, guys? Today we have a great conversation with Chris Kelly. He's a co-owner of the Sacramento Kings.

He's the founder of Kelly Investments, and he's a former Facebook executive. In this conversation, we talk about why he owns Bitcoin, why he likes artificial intelligence, why he owns sports teams, and a brand new idea that he's bringing to the market to go and take minority sports ownership stakes and bring them to the public market. There's a lot packed into this conversation.

Chris is someone who's been around the technology industry for a very long time. He understands a lot of what's happening, both in terms of the trends, but the underlying technology itself. And he has made investments in a whole multitude of different areas and industries, and I think that you're going to learn a lot from them.

Here's my conversation with Chris Kelly. All right, Chris, you are the co-owner. of the Sacramento Kings, and you also like Bitcoin, which is going to get everyone very excited. So explain a little bit of maybe your journey with Bitcoin and why you like this asset so much. Yeah. So, I mean, I think that it is a hedge against inflation. I think that people are rightfully thinking of it that way. And then I think it's also a global store of value. And it's sort of easily accessible from anywhere to anywhere. And that it's just incredibly powerful in that way. And so, you know, once it became, you know, accepted as a standard, once enough people said,

okay, this is going to work and the validator network works and everything else, it became, you know, the standard store of value, the same way that, you know, Ethereum turned out to be a, you know, when Vitalik, you know, went deep on Bitcoin decided that there are some extra features that it might need. That's where Ethereum comes from. And then, you know, I think people have been kind of riffing on themes in those areas ever since with other coins. But Bitcoin and Ethereum are kind of well established throughout the world at this point. What I find interesting is, like, you must have this barbell strategy. I don't even know if you thought about it this way.

But, like, Bitcoin is something that benefits from inflation. And so it is scarce. It is digital. It is decentralized. It is non-sovereign. All those aspects. And it's done very well over the years. The Sacramento Kings or any professional sports team of the least four major leagues,

it's not decentralized. It's actually highly centralized. It's not digital. Like, there's real estate and teams and humans and, you know, merchandise, et cetera. But it is super scarce. And so it's almost like you're barbelling in, like, you have a digital store value, you've got an analog store value,

you've got a centralized, a decentralized. Like, did you think through that? Or you're just like, now, I just want to own the team because it's cool? So, I mean, again, the scarcity and the availability, although I think that there's an unbelievable mindshare that teams have in people's lives. And that is a powerful, powerful, power.

And it's also an area where people come together at the time that our politics can be very divisive and there are all these challenges that we have in terms of the way that we get along. People figure out how to have useful and sometimes heated but but also decent rivalries around sports. And so you know, for growing up with Giants Dodgers and and and all that and seeing, you know, growing up in the Bay Area never really become a Warriors fan because they just weren't very good when I was young. It's like being a Brooklyn Nets fan in New York. Exactly right. Don't kill me. It was pretty easy to do the King's deal.

And for us also, it was keeping it in Sacramento. There was a Seattle-based group that included Steve Ballmer that was going to buy the team and move into Seattle. And we said, look, we think Seattle should have an NBA team. They just can't have ours, right? And then Balmer went and bought the Clippers and drove the enterprise value of teams up markedly, which we thought was good to. That's a great thing.

Now, when you're thinking about these types of investments, you know, I think most people look at Bitcoin as a long-term investment in their portfolio, but it has a day-to-day price to it. It's liquid. You could go hit the sell button today. There's a lot of discipline that it takes in holding. Sports teams are very different, right?

You know, we literally are seeing someone right now in the professional sports ownership world who needs cash and, you know, he's going through a whole process. And he's like, hey, speed this up and it's taking months. You said, well, they got the Chelsea thing done. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's on top of the Lakers. But then, like, illiquidity almost feels like that is a feature here,

because people are forced to hold for long periods of time, and we've seen those teams do really, really well over time. Yeah, I think it's definitely been, you know, in its part because of the scarcity, because it's a trophy asset, all these different things contribute to the increase in value. And it's a hard process to go through, to actually become an owner, whether a majority or control, in these teams, both the teams themselves and the leagues and all of the, it's never clear when

these things are going to come up and how. And so you have to act quickly when they do. And luckily, in our King's case, we, you know, we had a set of dynamics that were very favorable to our group being put together. And we had a mayor at the time, who was a former NBA player and very much wanted to keep the team in Sacramento. And we had to, the league held our feet. to the fire quite aggressively and said we had to commit to get it a new arena done in three years. And otherwise, we had to sell the team back to the NBA at cost. Yeah, that was one of the demands at the end. And we met it.

We got the arena done in two years. And it's still rated the number one arena in the NBA by ESPN, which we're very proud of it. So I went to a game. This is probably 2019 or so. your partner Vivek, who is also a co-owner. He's the controlling owner. We should be clear. I'm a smaller partner, and he is effectively my boss, but he's a good friend.

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

So we wanted the certification, and we jumped through the hoops that you have to do to get that. We put a Tier 4 data center in the arena because we also knew we needed to run the hotel condo tower that we were building next door in the mall that we were refurbishing. And we started mining Ethereum in the data center on the early side of that.

That may or may not be why I was invited out there was to say, should we do this type activity? Exactly, exactly. Well, we had a great visionary, you know, CTO in Ryan Montoya who, you know, pushed for us to do that. But we had an ownership group that was very technologically oriented. So with my history at Facebook, with Vavex at TIBCO,

with the Jacobs family at Qualcomm. So we had a bunch of very tech friendly and tech almost obsessive owners. So we wanted to have, you know, something that's a good, that would sort of be easily upgradable. And building a data center in the arena was part of that vision.

I also think that there was this element of like, when you have an ownership group that is doing this, like investing in Bitcoin, building a stadium, owning the team, there was a lot of education and knowledge transfer to the players, which I thought was pretty interesting. And my wife would tell the story that we were walking through and getting a tour,

and Vladivok showed up. But she was like, you look like you're from Eastern Europe. My wife's from Bulgaria, right? She had no clue who he was. And then she watched a documentary. She's like, I love that guy. You know, he's got this amazing story. Bloddy still works with us pretty extensively,

and he's just a delightful human being. Yeah. He's funny. He's great to have around. Well, and I think one of my takeaways from this was, you basically have technologists that are running this team, and it seems to be going pretty well in terms of the corporate site. Not so much as we would like on the court, but.

Well, that was going to be probably question. We're getting back to that. Is if you think about, let's take the New York Knicks as maybe an example, right? I think James Dolan got a ton of, you know, bad press and a lot of attacks and critiques, et cetera. They just won the NBA championship, stocks up, you know, 2X. I hear a lot of people talk about James Dolan right now. Now, there's still the hardcore Knicks fans that'll like never forgive them for some crazy thing he said or whatever. But for the most part, winning solves a lot of this stuff.

What I do think is interesting, is the NBA in particular has really gotten good at there's money made inside of the arena, but then there is the real estate, there is, you know, the data set, like all of these other components, I stayed in the hotel that was attached to the stadium, and I was blown away. I was like, oh, this is crazy. And so if you then look at this as like, okay, hold on a second, Bitcoin, kind of hard asset, benefits from inflation. Team, scarce asset, benefits from a lot of the debasement stuff.

Real estate. In a very weird way, somebody who comes from the early days of Facebook, you got a hell of a lot of exposure to like hard assets that are, you know, kind of insulating you and your partners from the inflation and debasement. Yeah. And we thought that, you know, the real estate side of things, if the team itself was not generating the cash, it turned out to generate as well for a variety of different reasons, the real estate was always a safety play.

One of the questions I had to ask myself was, is this just a vanity investment as everything else? But it made sense from a hardcore economic perspective. The real estate was always a useful hedge. Now, if we think of real estate in the AI industry, this has become a huge hot topic. You know, Facebook where you worked, I worked there much later than you did. They are making immense amount of CAPEX investments and going, you know, pretty hard into this. And it hit the stock hard for a while, and now it's not. And everyone's realizing, oh, those are actually useful investments that you can generate cash off of easily.

Yeah. And well, I think that's part of this is like the CAPEX investments that were required for the stuff were, I mean, they were bonker numbers. Right? And people were like, you're going to do what? You're going to take CAPEX from 40 billion to 60 billion? Yeah. Exactly. Oh, okay.

By the way. If you're making $20 billion a quarter, you can do that, right? Correct. Well, but I think a lot of people had questions. Is there going to be an ROI off of this? Now, it seems like there's really two things happening. One, things like Muse get released, and for those that don't know,

it's like a personal assistant that Facebook has released. By all accounts, I think, pretty widely accepted as one of the best, if not the best, personal assistant. In two, three weeks of release, like. Crazy, crazy, right? And we were talking before this that there are two things I took away from my time of Facebook.

Facebook is amazing at doing all of the growth in analytics work, and they are amazing at building consumer products. And this is the, you know, kind of culmination of those two activities shows up in this. But if you go through the rest of the industry, Google, Amazon, you know, GROC and SpaceX and all these, they're all making these investments. Yes. And I think now the market is starting to realize, hey, they're all going to get an ROI off this. It is available because the demand is intense. And AI has driven a lot of that. Although, actually, it's going to have to get a lot more efficient over time.

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

Like, it's the, you got to get more efficient with the way that you're using the power and all of the inputs that go into it over time and to make it more cheap over time. So there will be ROI on all of these things because the, you know, demand for compute, it's not infinite, but it's kind of close to infinite right now. I think the harsh part is, we don't know what the, like, upper limit is. And so this, like, kind of sort of infinite, I don't know. The more that it comes online, the more it gets consumed. And it almost is this, like, reflexive thing where we've also seen on the token costs.

Like, I shared a chart recently. Grok came out with their, like, latest model, and they, you know, plot out. But you can toggle on the chart between cost, efficiency, you know, kind of like compute power or tokens. Every single model, if you look, is just down into the right. And it's just like the price war is on. It is indeed. And when you've, you know, invested the type of CAPEX that the big companies have, you can do that. And that's the way that this market's going to go.

Is you think token costs just continue to fall? And token costs continue to fall. I think that, you know, you have more widespread usage of the various frontier models. And, you know, I don't think that, you know, anyone's revenue is going to go down because the usage is going to go up so much. But there will be a point at which, you know, you. revenue peaks. Today's episode is brought to you by Arch Public. Arch Public has just expanded its agenic trading platform beyond crypto, so pay attention this is a big one. Now they are automating strategies across stocks, commodities and ETFs, and I think that this is going to be huge.

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But I had to guess, OpenAI and Anthropic have two different customer cohorts. There are customers who adopt their models and usage continues to go up and the cost per token, if you will, falls. But the net dollar retention of that customer is like through the roof. Exactly. There's another cohort of customer, though. Like we have a AI CFO product that we've built, and we are much more into like, own your own intelligence camp.

And so we started off using the frontier models and then we've really built a lot of our own technology. We've trained our own stuff. Everything is kind of unified and customized for our specific use case. Our token consumption, like number of tokens can... As just got down, markedly. Completely because the, you know, economic incentive is like we can do computations for 97% less than we could with the frontier. Exactly.

As long as you have similar or better level of intelligence for your specific use case, you would do it. So the verticalization of AI is exactly the way that things are doing. And so those users, like the net dollar retention actually looks horrible for these large language models, but they're probably from a volume perspective, that cohort is still growing. That's right. Because they're signing so many people up. That's exactly right. So in a weird way, whether you're actually...

actual usage of processing of tokens that's growing, or on a per customer basis, it's decreasing, but your volume is making up for it, these businesses still seem to have quite a bit of runway. I think they've got a fair amount of runway to go still, but there is a limit at the end of the day. Everyone's saying, well, when does it turn bubblish? And the answer is probably not yet,

but will we know exactly when it does? And is that at a 3x, a 5x, a 10x uptick from here? And I don't think we know yet, but I don't think we've hit there yet. So if you go back to 2021, which is probably for, especially a lot of the younger investors, that was the first really like regime shift from zero percent interest rate environment to all of a sudden, hey, market is crashing, what goes on.

And probably the one thing you could point to is the Fed race interest rates. And they telegraphed it. In November of 2021, they started talking about it. In March of 22, they started. And they did it very aggressive. and they kind of did what they said they were going to do, which a lot of people just didn't believe them.

If you go back to 99, 2000, kind of similar story, not perfectly, but still, like, interest rates were a huge piece of the story. The Fed just raised interest rates, 25 basis points. And telegraph, they telegraph that they were going to, too, which is the interesting part of this, Contra, the president who appointed the new Fed. So also, I've seen the charts.

The business cycle, And global liquidity tend to be about every four years. Well, four years ago, five years ago was the last time that we kind of peaked. Are you worried at all? Concerned, but not worried, is the way that I would put it. What is the difference in your mind? I think that there's a, you know, I don't think that we're going to have a radical war on inflation that, you know, causes a real spike in interest rates from here. I think that there might be another hike.

and then it sort of settles in. And some of it is the counterbalancing that the president trying to job own it down. But I also think that the fundamental health of the economy that sits underneath, a lot of the investment that's been driven will not cause too much inflation. We had a very COVID-driven inflation last time.

I don't think we have that factor at this point, although war could substitute for COVID, and that's not a good thing for anyone. Now, if you think in the AI field specifically, it does seem like also some of these large players are taking very different approaches. Some are truly close-source kind of American model approach. Facebook meta, taking more of a little bit of an open source type approach.

And after sort of doing a restart to say, we're going to do Frontier models too, but then we're going to open source them, which is interesting, right? What do you think about that strategy? I think it's been, look, I think open source strategies, and from the very beginning of the company, we believed in open source. And in open sourcing, a lot of the things that we were doing in terms of improving performance on the Internet, we think that that's a healthy way to make sure that, you know, costs are reasonable. And if you look at, I mean, Linux Apache stack still run the backbone of web servers everywhere. It's open source is a critical part of Internet success. But you figure out what your secret sauce on top of that is. And for Facebook, it was personalization and, you know, in personal contact and having a view of the social graph.

that they may have gotten away from a little bit for a while in talking about the Metaverse and things like that. But I think they're pretty firmly back to personally as the AI and then AI as it relates to your social group. And I think that makes it an exciting time for them. But mostly open source is a way that drives value throughout the ecosystem. And you can still find ways to be immensely profitable

in those contexts while supporting a community around the software that you're running. The other aspect of Facebook that I think people maybe forget is 15-ish years ago, can they make money on mobile? Absolutely. Massive question. Well, it was just at the time of the IPO and sort of affected the stock and the marketplace view of the company for 2012 when they went, I think it was 2012 when they went public finally. And then, you know, obviously, mobile turned into this massive monetization and, you know, another set of data that gets collected about where people are and how they're operating and how they're interacting with, you know, other people and businesses in that stack. Now, the question at the time was, can they monetize mobile?

Now, I think that people don't question whether Facebook can make money. Right. They don't charge a consumer subscription for the personal assistant. Right. Because I think they understand the one thing that Silicon Valley legends understand, consumers don't like paying for stuff. That's right. And Facebook is an advertising business. Yes.

And they're real good at it. And if you're handing over your email, your calendar, your Uber, your DoorDash, your name whatever accounts people are putting into here. I mean, this is like Facebook's, you know, dream from targeting. Google figured that out with Gmail, sort of when they, when they launched that, you know, well back in what, it was 2001, I think it was. So, you know, this is a tried and true Silicon Valley story, still primarily an advertising business. And when we started to recruit a number of people from Google at Facebook, I thought that was a smart thing to do. I think that there was an understanding there that was going to build a very valuable business and one that worked very well. It feels to me also like there is this really big opportunity in AI in particular to play multiple aspects of the stack, right?

And so you've got kind of power land, data centers, you have the chips and all that, but then you've got the applications. How do you think about investing across that stack? Are you just like, hey, I want to own as much across as I can? or do you kind of pick? I think infrastructure is still a great set of businesses that you can find that are maximizing value in parts of the stack. And so I've been happy to do the main investment. The fund that I run is focused on blockchain-based businesses because I angeled Alchemy, which is a huge infrastructure provider in the space.

And I believe very much in the way that blockchain-based businesses will be sort of taking over aspects of the infrastructure stack over over time. You need to have distributed trust in the numbers of every enterprise, and blockchains are the best way to do that. You need to make sure that you have provenance checked of what AI is generating and that you can trace it back to. Is it a human doing? Is it AI? Is it an agent? All of these different things. Blockchains are an easy way to trace that. So I think that those infrastructure plays are all going to do great. I think that there will be consumer, you know, verticalized consumer plays, and there will be verticalized business plays for each of the AIs and specialty players in, you know, whether it's finance, intelligence, or things like that. You know, I look for, I look for great founders more than anything else.

And so I've done some things that are a little bit further to field over and a little bit of hardware here and there, you know, the guys at Etched, who've done a fantastic job. A $20 billion company now. That's exactly right. So I'm in the seed round of Etched. And flex. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, just very, very happy to see a lot of these businesses. I'm also in the seed round of Zipline, you know, which hasn't gone out yet, but it's done extraordinarily well in delivering amazing things to the world.

So that physical infrastructure and actual deliveries is a big part of the way that these things work. When you mentioned earlier, blockchains, you're going to kind of take over. What does that mean? What is your vision of that world? So it's having a independent, trusted, you know, a network that works to validate. transactions and works to trace them back in a mutable format. It's an audit trail for the way that everything went on because, you know, it carries important information about the trust level of a system.

And, you know, you need that. And the reason that we have, you know, audit firms and public companies and all these different things is to build trust in a system over time, that you're actually getting the information that you want and that you need in order to make a judgment about it. And so blockchains are a very efficient way to do that. They're inefficient in the short term and that you have to do all the writing and the validation, and it takes a while to get a network up and running for that. But once it's up and running, you have Bitcoin and Ethereum and all of these and other

ones that have escaped. So they're theoretical levels in Solana and XRP and all of these options are blockchain-based. that have various purposes for the token that they use, if they use a token, there are a whole bunch of businesses that use blockchains that don't have their own token too. And that infrastructure is a powerful one to invest in. When you think of that future world, one aspect that, if people were to critique this podcast, they'd be like, hey,

you talked a lot about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency and that world. Now you talk a lot about the AI stuff. And I actually think these two things are very intertwined. I agree. And some of the elementary analysis would be like, the machines need a currency. Exactly. That is where you start, right?

True. But it feels like the blockchain, the digital network, I mean, what is an AI swarm? It's a different version, but like it is a bunch of quote-to-quote nodes working together to get things done, validate. You start to almost see this convergence, and you're like, are these two things like actually the same thing?

They're definitely closely related over time. And so you have these agents when they can swarm, they can build multiple instantiations of themselves. And as we've seen in the hugging face hack and other things like that, they can think over time, you know, think is a little bit strong there. But they can operate over time as if they are executing a strategy to get to a result. And one that may transgress a variety of rules that they're, that they're, that they're told or taught or tried to be hardwired in the system.

And so this is where some of the regulatory questions start to come up and get more active. And I think we've seen some responsibility on the part of the industry to say, hey, we've got to figure out how to get independent people other than us making these judgments over time and people who are trained in the and their technical experts and available to, you know, say, hey, this is where risk gets a little bit too big. And I think that's a helpful thing, but it has to be done in a way that's not, you know, inherently anti-innovation. And so I think that there's been rightfully a lot of worry about that over time. We faced a lot of these questions in the design of systems around safety for kids, you know, in the online environment.

And, you know, in a variety of ways that, you know, a lot of people would argue that Facebook sort of went off the rails on a number of these things. And they've, I think, quite rightfully, in my view, you know, settled out on some conduct, remedies that are, you know, are more active in restricting kids' access to, you know, what can be very powerful technology, social technologies. But doing it in a way that's, you know, teaching and sort of a, like a media literacy approach to things instead of a, you know, hey, you just, it's too dangerous for you. We always tried it in the early days as we expanded into high school. So when I joined Facebook, it was still calling.

And it was all validated based on an odd E.DU email address. When we expanded into high schools, I tried to work with a lot of folks, particularly in the law enforcement community, around how were we going to make sure that people, the kids were actually members of the community that they were joining, that they had access to other kids in, you know, how we were going to deal with fake accounts. And I think we did a reasonably good job of that.

And, you know, that's one of the reasons that Facebook sort of won over MySpace and a number of other, you know, sort of people who had approaches there, that can deteriorate over time and the dedication to that can deteriorate over time. And I think that that's what may have happened. And now there's been a bit of a reset in the company engaging, I think, very productively with regulators. I think we'll see a lot of the same things in AI. I don't think that there's a, I don't think it's valid to say we should just have

a free-for-all. There's no way for us to regulate that. It's just not accurate. it, you know, but you can have smart regulation or dumb regulation. And I think we're moving towards some people who call for dumb regulation, unfortunately, and that's, you know, that happens in the space. And it's easy to crusade against technology companies. And you're seeing some of the data center backlash happen right now because it's a proxy

for, hey, I don't like the fact that I feel out of control or my kids may be on this technology and I can't control it. How we give people more of a say in that and how we regulate in an intelligent way is one the key questions that we've got for the next couple of years. Luckily, there are a lot of people who've done this and who think about it a lot, and we're all engaged in that dialogue, I think, in mostly a meaningful way. There's some posturey stuff that goes on and on both sides. But I think that the companies are deeply engaged in this now in AI and the broader technology companies, too. We recently heard some of the AI leaders say that, you know, 10% chance this could kill us all or whatever, right?

The skynet problem. I always refer to this as the sky net problem. Well, to me, it just feels like the people who are saying that seem to be the new companies. I don't hear Mark Zuckerberg saying, regulate me more. I don't hear him saying, we need to slow down. Although, I mean, interesting, I mean, the company did agree to a lot of, you know, restrictions on, you know, access to Instagram in particular. Sorry, I'm talking about the AI development. But I'm saying that they're somewhat similar at the end of the day.

That you know. Because you're saying the AI powered. The AI powers a lot of the things that are allegedly addictive mechanisms for this. And so I think that when you're talking about regulating all of this, it's, it's a, there are more particular problems in the AI space that have their own individual parts. But the AI is touching these other ones where there's been been some, I think quite reasonable consent to redesign and some rethinking about how how those systems work with humans. It is all a talk about humans regulating the technology and ultimately having control of the technology rather than letting it, letting the technology take over the conversation.

I recently saw a demo online. Somebody had built a, like it was almost like a Chrome browser or something, you know, a thing where they were going through X. And, and, you know, a And as they were scrolling, it would basically mute or like a kind of dull certain posts. So if it was an ad, as they were scrolling, you'd get to it and it would just say, add. But you couldn't see the ad, right? Blurred it out. Correct. Or it would be like slop.

You know, like, you don't need to read this, right? And as it was going, it was like maybe one every four posts, five posts, you know, in the demo. Was, like, actually worth consuming for the human? Right. And again, like, cute demo. They were trying to show how, you know, real time, I think it was like something related to Jev and the ability to kind of do this, you know,

synthesizing in real time. But it got me thinking. Like, if you don't have that turned on, you and my brain is just consuming it. And this is like the, ultimately the scarce resources, time and human attention. And so the question of how can you use AI on your behalf to make your time and your attention more,

efficient to get you good information. You know, the problem, of course, is that it can be manipulated to present bad information or, you know, false information or questionable information and to advance, you know, arguments that might be, you know, divisive. And so all of these are concerns. And looking at facts and who has incentives to present disinformation is a critical part of all of these networks and how it gets surfaced more effectively for people to make their own choices.

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some Bitcoin. And that's part of the beauty. It's just like open accessibility. Sports teams, not exactly so easy. No, it's not. And that's part of the, the instance. that I think, you know, we're trying to take in the new project that I'm working through on the fund. So I was going to have you explain. Exactly. It is this idea of like, you're almost trying to take some of the like Bitcoin ethos of open accessibility and say, well, this asset class of, you know, championship or professional sports teams are so hard to access. Yes. If we could somehow democratize that access, there's probably a lot of people who'd be interested.

Exactly. And so describe kind of your strategy because it's a thing. I think it's a little bit different than anyone else I've heard with this. I think the fund is called Sports One. Sports One is the exactly the company that we've founded to focus on this. And the goal is to own multiple minority stakes in teams. And you use that as an effective sort of basket of sports assets that people can either buy the equity in the company of will be a public company or buy a token that's associated with that. And the token is designed for people.

who may be more casual users who want a cheaper access point. The, the, we think that the multiple minority stakes in the teams, because there are regular public valuations and discussions about the teams, that that, you know, will provide enough of an access point. It is incredible, there is incredible scarcity and incredible challenge. There are a lot of people who have made a lot of money in other businesses and who run family offices, you know, where folks have been wealthy for years and they're looking at this as an asset class,

it's actually really hard to access because you have to get the approval of both the team, you know, somebody has to be selling something. And then the leagues also have a pretty extensive approval process. And then also, as we're seeing, you know, recently there are a lot of rules you need to pay attention to in the league too, where some, you know, some things that have been, you know, sometimes are seen as just healthy competition and attempts to evade the rules that sometimes get, get, get cracked down on quite extensively by the leagues, and for good reason, because you're trying to preserve competitive balance. You're trying to make sure that this ecosystem works well. So our approach to access to sports as an ecosystem is we'll acquire sort of somewhere between

ultimately sort of, we target three to five teams to start, minority stakes of teams, and that will provide a floor value of both the equity in the company that owns them and for the token that's associated with it, where we'll hold about 10 percent. of the token, 10 or 15% of the token in the company. And you can back into a floor valuation from that. From there, we plan to do a lot of stuff that's very pro-athlet over time allowing people to issue their individual coins to support their own careers that will raise the money,

that will allow them to participate and get from there. We really want to have the striving athlete who's up and coming be able to be financed by a sense. a set of fans around them. And obviously, some famous athletes will want to participate in that, too. We think that's great. But, you know, when they can use that as the basis for their fan club or how to communicate with people over time.

But we needed an extrinsic source of value to, you know, think about that ecosystem. If you, even if you launch with a famous athlete, a coin that doesn't have something associated with it, you know, it's ultimately going to crash. So, and there have been a couple examples of that. So we decided that if we had an associated company that tied to the token that actually owned multiple minority stakes in teams, and that way you don't have, there's not a control factor that you're worried about. You're not, you know, sort of deep in the day-to-day of any of these teams, but there's, you know, the Sportico and the Forbes and the CNBC valuations that all come out and provide these estimates that investors can, you know, have access to the to the, to the, to the, to the, to the, to the, to the, asset class and support the teams that are part of the basket, too. When you think about this strategy, how do you go about which teams, right?

It's different if I want to buy a team in, you know, one of the less popular leagues that maybe I don't even know that much about the team versus, you know, Apollo recently wants reportedly 15, 16% of the Yankees. I'm a Yankees fan that I know they're going to be valuable. It's all professional sports, but how do you kind of think? think through selection. We're going to have a variety of discussions with, you know, the variety of current owners and where we think we can be a good partner because of our experience in the space, my experience with both the King's process, but also in Major League Baseball, so we bought the

Giants AAA team in Sacramento five years ago, six years ago now. And then we've leveraged that in some discussions and helping out, you know, a challenging situation. for the Oakland A's. So they've been playing in our ballpark before they, in West Sacramento, before they moved to Las Vegas eventually and while their ballpark is constructed. And well, you know, we, obviously, you know, there are a lot of East Bay fans that can still have access to the A's for now playing in West Sacramento. Ultimately, the ownership there decided to move the team to Vegas. And there's not much that anyone can do about that. We, you know, think that that's been a pretty good transition for them and for us. And we think that there's just, we also had to go

through the Major League Baseball approval process, which you have to do for AAA teams. So having been through the process in two of the four major leagues, having partners of ours that have been through the NFL process, that have been through the NHL process, we think we have a likelihood of success in getting pieces of these teams and getting approved by the leagues. But also, we think that we have a lot to offer those partnerships in terms of our experience. Now, the leagues have set restrictions on institutional owners such that they can't take board seats. They can't, you know, be involved directly in the day-to-day operations. But that doesn't mean that we can't be good advisors and good partners.

You mentioned that there's equity in the company. I think you've announced a public transaction that you are planning to do. There's a public shell. that we are planning to merge into. Okay. And then from there, we'll be, you know, sort of purchasing the teams within that company. Okay. And then you mentioned that there's a token as well.

What is the difference between the equity and the token? So the equity and the token, so the token will be a, you know, sort of a separate way to have association with the company and with the ecosystem that we're building. The equity will be a classic publicly traded, you know, on public exchanges and available largely for, we think, larger holders, whereas the token will be a way to buy in for average consumers and a way to participate in the system. And it also feels like those two things are converging.

Like we see a lot of tokenized securities, all that stuff is now starting to kind of show up. Do you think eventually there's no difference between the two? I think that you'll see some trading between one and the other for various aspects of what people, like the token may have some formal associations with it in terms of access to the underlying, you know, team benefits that the equity might not, but we might end up offering it both to equity holders and token holders.

I mean, we think that that'll just evolve over time. And we'll watch the way that marketplaces react to the way that it trades and the way that people think about it as a store of value. It also seems like domestic markets. are very equity-focused. International markets start to be more token-focused. These leagues are definitely trying to expand. I mean, the NFL has got games, you know,

with a recent played a game in Australia. Exactly. So Melbourne are 49ers Rams in Melbourne. Oh, yeah, 49ers played, right? 49th Rams in Melbourne. And there will be, I think, a game in Berlin this year. There's a Mexico City game coming up. There's, you know, and the NBA has largely in preseason

done games in the Philippines, in China. We went with the Kings, we went to China. We went to India with our partners, two of our partners being first-generation Indian immigrants, including Vivek, our lead partner. We went to Mumbai and played the first NBA games in Mumbai. There's a whole bunch of different internationalization that's going on here.

And we'll look as Sports One at the English Premier League, a variety of other European soccer operations and the possibility of having those in our basket. We'll look at Indian cricket and a number of others. I'm part of a group that there's an 1890 innovation fund associated with FC Barcelona that I'm participating in with a bunch of friends, mostly from the States, but a number obviously from Europe as well. So it feels like sports when I grew up. It was almost like people bought teams for the love of the team, right?

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

It's been an interesting. evolution. Yeah, like positive or negative or like, how do you evaluate how sports themselves are changing? And we see it, like, the players now are transferring teams in college. Lane Giffon's weekend. I mean, that was an interesting set of conversations that you get, you know, Morgan Freeman calling you out. It's a very powerful thing, right? Yeah, so like, how do you just think about, and maybe college is like a more pure thing, or it was? It was, I would say. You see it more obviously versus professional sports. I think people, you know, they've heard the stories,

you can be the star one year, you're cut to next year, right? It's kind of a business to it. But I think that we have aspirations through Sports One and the, you know, athlete coins that we think will be affiliated with it over time. At returning to, you know, both making athletes more powerful in that process. But over time, you know, we think that allowing another access point

for individuals that's not, necessarily, it's not betting, it's not all these different things. It's other ways to express your interest and your love for the athletes and the teams that you're around. And we think that that has some financial basis to it. People spend their money on tickets, the time that they spend at stadiums, and then on memorabilia, on all of those things that go into this. We think that that ultimately is a thing that people positively associate. even when there's a rivalry associated with it, where there's, there's, you know, a deep enmity going on for, you know,

for if you're a Yankees fan, not so much the, it's the Red Sox, not the Mets in town, but, you know, Dodgers Giants and all of these kind of classic rivalries. I told you earlier, you know, the Brooklyn Nets and I said, don't know what get mad. The reason I can say that is because there's no, because there's no one really cheering for them as much, right? Now, if I was to say the Mets and the Jets, you know, not only would I get beat up by our friend Matt over here, but there are plenty of people mad. But ultimately, we think that those rivalries are healthy ones and that, you know, this is another way to experience it. I also think the reverse is true. Like, financial markets have become somewhat like sports.

Yeah. Right? And people cheer for their favorite company. They wear the company swag. They are, I see people all the time, tweeting out. charts of like this beat this and you know i mean it is kind of interesting to see there is definitely a rooting nature that goes into investments and that people have you know their own selection bias that they want to be they want to be smart and they want to be right and that's a very human thing that

the rise of sports like enthusiasm and financial markets is also meeting the rise of sports betting yes right and it's like people want their money and the things they deem entertainment right to be a line. Now, I would argue that, you know, although I believe the stock market is just as much of a casino, the odds are better, you know. Oh, much. It's worth gambling. And then the public nature of that data is a significant part. And this is another part of our sports one business is that we're trying to gather better data and apply AI in a smart way to, you know, give people deeper insights into individual athletes and teams and both their business, on the business side, but also on the live performance side. It's fascinating to me that no one's done this yet before. I think the first time

we talked to, I told you this, like, of course people want exposure to these assets. There are things like, what is Fenway Sports Group or whatever? They own some teams. And Arcos and Dial, all of these players have amassed certain minority stakes in teams as sort of closed-end funds for, you know, largely the wealthy investors who are already putting into that. We want that to be much more democratized. And we think that that's healthy for the teams, for the leagues, and for fans everywhere. Yeah. I mean, it makes a lot of sense. Where, for people who are interested in sports, one, where should we send them to? So right now, we're, you know, so we've, you know,

announced that we plan to merge with this public company, it was originally called Sono that's out there. And we, we expect that we will, you know, get that done and, you know, it'll take some time. But, but, but they They can go read like publicly. They can go read about it right now. We've been done with a Google Sports One. If they Google, you know, Sono, they'll see the basic plan from here that we've announced

so far. And obviously there will be further announcements as we moved on down that road. And then from there, you know, we'll, we'll achieve the, you know, hopefully multiple stakes in a matter of, you know, you never want to put it, you know, too much of time frame on it. But we think we can get that done quickly, given our experience and our experience and our knowledge and the conversations that we're having. So from there, that, you know, we'll launch the token eventually, and then we want to provide for athletes and for their fans the ability to invest in individual athletes, too.

We'll get to that in the right way. And luckily, the SEC has been a lot clearer in terms of what our securities and what are or not, and that's enabled us to think about that and design these in a way that will provide the broadest access that we can. I think that this is a convergence of things that people learned in the Bitcoin world, in the AI world, in the sports world, in the Facebook world. You are kind of uniquely positioned, given all of your interest. We're trying to bring it all together.

Yeah, I'm trying to bring it all together. Very unique way to do it. But I think that, by the way, the government's ever going to stop printing So I do think these assets will probably be worth more in the future too. I think that's right. Amazing. All right. Well, thank you very much for doing this, Chris. We'll do the other future.

This is fantastic thing. Thank you.