UP450: Who is Charlie Ebersol, and WTF is Infinite Athlete?

Today's guest is Infinite Athlete founder Charlie Ebersol. 

Infinite Athlete has been a sports business story since the brand suddenly appeared on Chelsea’s shirt at the start of last season.

It's a story with a lot of baggage: Ebersol is former boyfriend of Maria Sharapova and Britney Spears, and son of actress Susan St James and Dick Ebersol, the legendary NBC Sport chairman. IA is backed by Andreesen Horowitz, Silver Lake, Endeavour and Todd Boehly, the Chelsea co-owner. Insert the boring but important phrase ‘Associated Party Transactions’. All parties were asked by the Premier League about potential conflicts of interest and whether the sponsorship value of the shirt exceeded fair market value, which is a slippery concept in and of itself. The final sentence of this paragraph is: ‘The Premier League approved the deal after thorough scrutiny’.

That story, or a version of it, is how many people talk about Infinite Athlete. 

Charlie Ebersol’s responses to this narrative are really interesting, and I’ll leave you to have a listen and judge for yourself.

We then get to the other question, which is: WTF is Infinite Athlete?

Using Chelsea as a use case, Ebersol is good on the big problem of sports tech, which AI is about to make worse.

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Transcript

0:00

Hello, welcome to Unofficial Partner, the sports business. Podcast. I'm Richard Gillis. A couple of weeks ago, we got a message from a New York PR firm who offered up infinite athlete, found a Charlie episode, as a podcast guest. And here it is, but I'll warn you. It's not quite what you might expect. Like you possibly infinite athlete. It's been a sport business story. Since the brain suddenly appeared on Chelsea shirt at the start of last season. And I'd heard plenty of insight and gossip in terms of what was going on. And we get into that in the first part of the podcast as you're here. But if I were to summarize the starting point, I think actually, It's not quite what I thought it was. Infinite athlete is run by Charlie episode and his partners, charlie is. Son of Dick episodically and legendary NBC sport, chairman and Susan St. James. Very famous actress. Former boyfriend to Maria Sharapova and Brittany Spears. So there's a lot of baggage that he's taking into this. Product. So whenever he appears those stories come with him. The company is backed by some very high profile names. Andrea sun Horevitz silver lake endeavor. Todd Boley. And there was some questions in terms of. What is the company? How did it. Afford and how could it get on to the Chelsea shirt? At the price. I quoted, we get into all of that and you're here. What that means? We talk about associated party transactions. then. The conversation changed tack and it becomes about what is sports tech. Where is it going? What's the role of AI? All of which provoked some interesting questions, not just for Charlie episode and infinite athlete, but also for the sports industry and the investment community. More broadly. I think you'll enjoy it.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 1:37

Thanks for coming on.

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 1:38

Thank you for having

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 1:39

not at all. it's been really interesting following the story cause it's one of those and, you would have answered a thousand times Chelsea connection and the sponsorship story. And obviously I'm standing here in the UK and that was how I first sort of, came across. Hang on, bear with me a minute.

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 1:55

I was worried it was going to be my puppy.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 2:00

It's the joys of, uh, podcasting.

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 2:02

I thought it was going to be my puppy who is sleeping under my desk. So I just want to give you a heads up, I may, I may, uh, seek the same grace in a minute.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 2:12

I dream of a puppy that sleeps. so yeah, I imagine. That you get the Chelsea question very, very frequently. And I was trying to think of ways because there's, when I heard, when I heard the name Infinite Athlete in, you can imagine there's lots of sports tech companies come on the podcast and it's, you know, a sport business podcast and they tend to divide into two different types. There's a sort of It's player performance data and or it's, commercial data. And you, those are the two starting points and yours is slightly different. Doesn't feel like it fits. Either of those frames easily. And I'm interested in the product and what it is before we get there. We just have to answer the question about, the Chelsea shirt question, because that's how most people will know the name and the job of the Chelsea shirt has done. It's done its work, but it's obviously the question was how and why you got on there. You're in there. Yeah, I can see that. how do you go about answering that question? Cause again, you know, it's coming and it's, I imagine it's a pain, but we need to. Get through

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 3:17

No, it's not, you know, it's funny, the question, the question inherently answers itself, which is you had never heard of Infinite Athlete before, and now you're asking, what is Infinite Athlete? And you're engaging with the product. And your initial question, which is about, you know, how do you define what we are in a space that seems pretty. into two hemispheres. Um, what we faced a long time as a company is we were stealth for the first four years of the company. And so we'd raised all of this very, uh, blue chip money. We'd raise money from, you know, I used to joke that I only raised money from investors that my mom had heard of. So if it was, you know, Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst and Founders Fund and Silverlake, it was like, okay, those are, those are valid, but we weren't telling them what we were doing. And I'd had a very long, I mean, it's going on a decade now, relationship with Todd Boehly, who had been, A close advisor and mentor when I was doing, um, my previous company. And when this technology started to come together, we'd gone down the path with the Dodgers, um, and we'd had conversations about different applications of what the technology could do for his various franchises, et cetera. And, uh, he called me. Almost right when the Chelsea deal happened and said, this, this is the most complete ecosystem of everything you're working on, you know, you've got the largest academy of any football club in the world, you have a lot of control of media rights globally in areas that have, that are mobile, that are more mobile forward. environment. So think like Singapore and Nigeria, where you've got huge populations that are very mobile. And, uh, and last but not least, we're in this unique position where we have a lot of control over what we can do in terms of marketing. And so we did this original deal and then eight months into the deal, the front of shirt opportunity came together and we just signed this like almost decade long deal with Chelsea. And it only, to me, it only made sense to start to tell a story. Plus, um, we had not announced, in fact, I think we still have not announced at the time of this podcast coming out, we had not announced yet this long term deal that we were doing, um, with an international partner, um, I'm sorry. Let me rephrase that. We still have not announced it, but we had not done the deal yet because there were a lot of questions about what was Infinite Athlete. And even though we could sort of like validate with our partners like the NFL and the people we worked with, um, I I told Todd after the fact that he premiered on the front of shirt in the end of September of 2023. And within, 48 hours I was invited back to Europe to go meet with this partner that we'd been negotiating with for like six months, who was like, kind of like, and they were like, well, you're real, so let's sit down. So it had this validating effect that I was important. And when we're ready to come to the market, it started, started to tell a story for us.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 6:18

So it sort of established the brand exists. The company exists. It's on the front of a famous football shirt that was, you know, in very primary colors. That was one of the benefits of it. The second level story was, it's a company that's turning over 12 million, but the shirt is 40 million. So there was that mismatch and people jumped on to, Oh, it's a Todd. This is Todd Boley being clever. And the story got, it sort of was about you, but really it was a lot, it was a root into a story about Todd Boley. And look, he's doing things differently at Chelsea. Look what he's doing with player contracts. And this is him up to something. We don't quite know what he's up to, but there is something happening here. That was the general vibe.

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 6:59

Yeah, I mean, first of all, I don't, I've always been fascinated about the reporting on my revenue or turnover, um, mainly because not only are we a private company, but there are, um, there are public contracts that we have that are worth. Multiples on multiples on multiples of what were being reported and it seemed this is a year and a half removed and I don't know enough about the British press to be able to really say anything with

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 7:27

I bet you're getting there though, are you?

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 7:30

I'm certainly getting an education. It, it seemed like it all came from one website, um, that sort of did corporate reporting and I couldn't figure, I couldn't even figure out how they got the 12 when I, when I actually, I think, I also think they were saying 14, but I couldn't figure out, I couldn't make heads or tails out of what contracts they were even getting visibility in that, that equaled 12, uh, million pounds. Although again, to be honest, I'm not great with conversion, so it might've actually been the right dollar figure, but that part was interesting. I will also say within your question though, um, whenever you think or someone says or thinks Todd Boley is being clever, absolutely the case. This is Todd Boley's whole M. O. The man is not 50 years old and he's built, you know, probably one of the biggest personal fortunes in the world. In private equity entirely because he sees gaps in the market. I think that's always been the thing I've been drawn to about Todd is he's an innovator, but, but more importantly, he's someone who looks at everything from multiple angles and figures out what, what people aren't seeing. He is the, uh, he is the king of arbitrage. By the way, that's my puppy. So if you do hear her start, then she'll, she can evacuate to, to

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 8:42

What's her name?

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 8:43

starts to interrupt. Uh, Minnie Mouse, we have, we have a, we have, we have a very, very large Doberman whose name is Maximus, and we have a very, very small English bulldog whose name is Minnie. So Max and Minnie are, and they're in separate rooms, but can see each other right now, so that's what this is about.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 9:02

Minnie is welcome to stay. I like Minnie already. Um, And so it's interesting that because we're a year down the road. what's your feeling of the impact that the initial story has had on the business? And we've talked, you know, is it, is it just, okay, positive upside, it's awareness, it landed in a way that would take a lot of time and effort otherwise.

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 9:23

Yeah. I mean, it's not lost on me that. We were front of shirt last year and Chelsea had a pretty good year and now we're on the shirt sleeve and they're second in the table. So, you know, it's not all positive. Like they've, they've gotten significantly better since our partnership started. And, and I think that, uh, I'm glad they're showing a lot of replays from last season. Um, but you know, look, I think it's certainly accomplished. our, our goals, like we set pretty rigid, KPIs, uh, for our company and we'd set a pretty clear goal on what this needed to do for it to validate the amount of money we're spending. And as you might imagine, I have a pretty, uh, seasoned and involved board based on the, the investors that we have and things are not taken lightly inside the company. And so to a very large degree, it was, One of those things where we had a lot riding on the deal, but we felt pretty confident that we could hit the metrics of what it needed to hit. And it did. That being said, um, I think one of the ultimate downsides is, uh, my head of revenue, uh, Sid Rao spends a lot of time, um, taking inbound calls from teams. They're trying to get us to do marketing deals, which, um, I think is not, uh, not part of our business model. Traditionally, I'm going to, let her out. Hold, excuse me for one

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 10:40

go for it.

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 10:41

Come here, bud. Let's go. Let's go outside. Okay. I'm back. Sorry.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 10:46

And again, just, there is a, It was interesting, again, looking at the stories and the way it evolved, because we're in a moment over, you know, in terms of the Premier League and its relationship with money and Man City and associated party transactions. People were, that was the jump. People say, well actually this is a, this is an example. This is a bit like Man City and Abu Dhabi and the various funding sources that are coming into that club. This again is, back to Todd Boehly being a clever person, going back and saying, well this is a version of that because he's an investor and he's various other people. That was, and the Premier League then went through that process, I assume.

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 11:22

Uh, yeah, we, we had a, uh, we had a, um, uh, a thorough, uh, examination that, um, um, I think also cleared me of, uh, colorectal cancer. So on both sides, I think I came out ahead. Um, what I would say about what, what I would say about that, though, what I think is a nuance that is really important to understand is the associated transfers that have been at the center from my understanding of like the primary league stories, you're talking about companies that are wholly owned or a majority owned on both sides. So, you know, you have a, you know, A club that's wholly owned or 80 percent of the team is owned by one thing. And then you've got a front shirt sponsor who is wholly owned or majority controlled. Assuming that all of the numbers were, were correct that were reported, which they aren't, but let's just say that they were correct and that that investment had been made. One of the key indicators here that's important to understand is they, they would be a minority, minority, minority investor in the company. So they wouldn't, they, they, nobody involved on the CFC side had, uh, a board seat or, uh, or majority investor rights or anything like that, that would've been involved and didn't hold equity in our company. So we went through this in detail with, with, um. With obviously with the Premier League and there was an independent board and there were several external law firms, a lot of people made a lot of money over the course of a short, a short investigation, but we were happy to do it in part because, you know, ultimately the Premier League and these, these international bodies are organizations that we think can benefit from our technology. So I jokingly said that, you know, when, when the investigation ended, That my best chance to spend a lot of time inside of Premier League headquarters, showing off my technology and explaining our differentiating factors to all of the leadership, not just of the Premier League, but of other clubs, because obviously the clubs were like, ah, something fishy is going on based on what they're reading in the press. And then they'd come in and we ended up doing, you know, a lot of work for a variety of those partners. Um, It, it, it was one of those funny things. I think I was quoted in the press. As saying something to the effect of, uh, the investigation might've been the most valuable part of our front of shirt deal. Um, which obviously is, is me being cheeky, but like ultimately it was, it wasn't a bad thing for us because it ultimately became this thing. On the financial side, I don't pretend to understand financial fair play by any stretch of the imagination. And through some odd quirk, I have a number of investors that own significant. Premier League teams, you know, across all of our various investments. And so I have spent more than a few occasions trying to understand, because it's such a foreign concept in the United States to that type of structuring. And I have a lot of, um, empathy for everyone involved from, from, Richard Masters, you know, to the team owners, to, to the various groups, because I can't imagine playing the three dimensional chess that you have to play. In international football, when the premier league, which is basically a national organization is interacting with, you know, UEFA and the Saudi pro league and basically every league in the, in, in, uh, Central and South America. And then obviously FIFA, the complexity is it's, it's been an interesting education. I wish that I had had 10 years prior to just start to learn the machinations before I decided to just dive headlong into it.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 14:55

Well, it's sort of interesting, isn't it? Because that complexity is what, you know, we've had lots of American investors or people who, you know, are in that sort of, space. And the conversation normally goes to, again, it's a bit of a sort of reductive conversation. Conversation about America, simple, simple, the NFL, straight lines, central ownership, closed leagues, less risk. And then you've got the complexity of European football, which is a sort of mad house of clubs and organizations. And you've lived through that. It's quite an interesting. Process, I guess, because you're looking at it from both sides, as is, as is Boley, I guess, but you're looking at

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 15:32

You know, it's, it's, It's It's very interesting for two, two things stand out to me in what are interesting. First of all, the NFL is this, the NFL is this unicorn in sports and entertainment because one, it's uniquely American. So, you know, while they're expanding internationally, they don't have the NBA situation where. You know, the top players are now international players because of the investment that David Stern and then Adam Silver really made in the international game for so long. The NFL, Roger Goodell is only just starting to really make that investment to start to train and sort of expand the game. And so you're probably decades away from seeing like the best player. In the NFL coming from Serbia or, you know, Australia or whatever. Um, and so it's uniquely American and then it's a game that was sort of inadvertently perfectly designed for television. It, it, it moves left to right. You know, the scoring is pretty simple to understand. It stops every 15 seconds so that the. The announcer can set up the drama again without, you know, being surprised by a goal or something like that. And so like from, and they play very few games because it's, you know, the game is obviously taxing on the human body. So they can only play, you know, 18, 20 games a year. So you have this very condensed schedule. It's very television. And thus the centralized command of the league and the ownership is like very much to the benefit of a small group of people. I think the thing they're struggling with. From a business standpoint is the opposite problem, which is because of scarcity. You know, I jokingly say that the NFL is Bitcoin for billionaires, you know, like they're not going to make more of these things and their, their, their, their perceived value outstrips any type of actual, actual value relative to the marketplace. I feel like global football has this different problem, which is the Premier League is clearly the. No pun intended, the premier asset among the national versions of the sport. And yet they're still competing with everyone. So like, you know, sure, technically Chelsea's only competing with Liverpool and Arsenal and Man City, et cetera. But in reality, they're also competing with, you know, um, PSG and Halal. And you, you've got these, you know, You know, and those, those external entities, it's not like the Chicago Bulls are worried about Madrid taking a player, yet every morning, Todd Bolli wakes up and he's like, I got to figure out the Cole Palmer situation because I could wake up and he could be playing in Riyadh next year because, you know, you know, you have infinite capital for, for assets, you know, around that value set. And so I, it's not the NFL they, the NFL is incredible. They have a hard cap on what you can pay players, and they have a floor. So like every year an owner wakes up in the morning and knows, knows, on day one they've got a, I don't know,$250 million profit. Before they even wake up in the morning and the players know, not only do they get a profit, every player in the league, but they know they can't make less than a certain amount of money. So like you have this level of financial safety. I mean, obviously there's all kinds of external risks and injury, et cetera, but you have this like cap thing. The thing that blows my mind about, and it's really specifically, ironically, Chelsea and Man City, is the investment they made in their academies, and certainly Abramovich deserves a lot of credit, but the amount of investment they made in their academies to start generating new assets, the Bitcoin equivalent of mining more Bitcoin, so that you have this massive pool of assets that you're starting at zero from, so when you go out and spend, On, on a, uh, uh, a premium player from another area. You can offset that with, with real talent. It's not like they're faking it. They've got incredible talents at these organizations. It doesn't really surprise me. The thing I can't figure out is how does a Rexxum. Meaningfully compete if they don't go out and get sovereign wealth because private equity would private triple seven and a couple of these funders are realizing is like, okay, great. You have 50, 75 billion assets under management. The sovereign wealth fund of some of these countries is a trillion dollars. You know what I mean? It's like the nexus is just so hard to wrap your head around.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 20:09

Yeah. And that's the, that's the concern, isn't it? That that money will, you know, does distort. It always has. Money, you know, money is handy, but it's distorting that competitive balance, which is quite fragile. In that open environment. That's the, that's the challenge. Well, let's, let's talk about the product because again, as I said before, I thought I knew, I was sort of guessing what it was and then obviously listening to your podcast and various other places and, and seeing your, seeing you pop up, it's clear that I didn't know what it was. And I think probably I sometimes use myself as a proxy for the audience, you know, in this way, and let's just go through it then, what is it?

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 20:53

I use my mom as a proxy to the market whenever I can. And I, my mom, an article came out in like. September here in Atlanta. And my mom said, I've had, the company is five and a half years old. And my mom said, it's the first time I really think I understood what your company does. So I was like, okay, great. it's actually, it's actually interesting parallel and where we pivoted from the conversation about the premier league and global football economics to what we're talking about, because it's a similar problem. You started to put, um, your, you sort of put the head of the hammer on the nail, which is sports technology is a huge umbrella. It, a lot of sins are covered under that blanket. And, and what ends up happening is you get companies and I'm going to do my best largely because, um, I, I find that no matter how complimentary I am, and I'm very complimentary of a lot of people that are in this space, whenever I mentioned other companies names, somebody seems to take offense thinking that I'm. Deriving them in some way. So I'm not going to use company names, but there are huge technology companies that own tech sports technology. They do player tracking, they do computer vision, they do graphics, they do, uh, social media editing. They do all these various things. And this curious thing has happened in sports technology and in healthcare. And in fitness, um, in mental well, wellness, like these are big verticals under themselves that are all basically built on the same basic foundational technology, right? Like you're doing observational tech. So I want to know what the human body is doing. You're doing data science analytics on how do humans react to different inputs? Like when their heart rate's really high, what's their stress? What does the cortisol look like? Like all of these different impacts. And What do fans like to see? Do they want to know how fast a player is running or how fast a ball is kicked or thrown or caught? You know, all of these things, they all basically derived from the same, call it 10 sources or 10 types of data. But because we've just decided to verticalize and silo these technologies, we now say, Oh, this is sports media technology. Oh, this is biometric data. Oh, this is whatever. And so you go to a, uh, Chelsea football game and there are, Anywhere on a given game, there can be anywhere from 8 to 18 vendors that are capturing some sort of data, if it's visual data, or audio data, or statistical data, or, or biometric data, or, muscular skeletal movement data, like all these different inputs. All being caught by different companies, all being delivered back in a lot of cases to like the Premier League or to Chelsea or to FIFA or to UEFA or to whoever. And yet the data, despite all being required to do all these various different things, is largely siloed from each other. It's, it is largely disintermediated. And so what's happened is companies have made huge investments Um, in very narrow silos because they don't want to sort of get outside their lanes and, uh, just metric ton of, uh, incumbent, excuse me, um, startups have come into the space that do really narrow things. So it's like, Oh, we use LIDAR, we use radar, we use whatever, and they're really good at it, but, but it's a little bit like. The bad cheesy metaphor is the elephant in a dark room and you're holding the tail and I'm holding the trunk and I don't know what I'm, you know, looking at, but the, the, the, the really bad version of it is I'm, I'm dumping marbles into a jar and asking you to figure out by holding an individual marble what the shape of the jar is. You know what I mean? Like you can't, you can't get a picture of it and therefore you can't build anything. So that's the problem. The solution has existed for a really long time. If you step back and you look at the global macroeconomics of the, of the world, this problem has been solved in basically every other sector, right? You know, Michael Bloomberg solved this problem 30 years ago with the Bloomberg terminal, where he just said, okay. There's all of this, this data about the market. I'm just going to create a centralized computer where you can sit in front of this computer and you can see everything in one place. I'm not going to make judgments on the data. I'm not going to influence the data. I'm just going to give you the data in one place. Google did this with mapping software in the early 2000s. And when they originally did it, people said, Oh, they're trying to compete with Garmin, you know, which was like a boat GPS system. And what Google was saying is no, Everyone needs to be able to tell you how to get to your store, how to get to your restaurant, how to get to the airport, which is what they were thinking about. They weren't thinking someone was going to build a company on top of it. That was going to rent the back of your Ford Taurus as like a business model that would generate a hundred billion in revenue. And, uh, Apple obviously did it with the app store and micro, uh, uh, Facebook, did it with Facebook marketplace. Amazon did it with marketplace. I mean, there's still companies are building these platforms. And in that process, we went from a capitalist environment to a platform economy. And so, you know, 40 something percent of the US economy is now basically six companies, all six companies don't actually produce like 80 percent of their revenue is being produced by other people building on their platform. So, sorry, I'm going on this like long rant. Someone can just filter all of what I said into chat

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 26:39

No, no, I'm following, I am following.

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 26:42

Okay. So. Basically, what we started out to do was we, this is seven, eight years ago, was if you could get certain pieces of data and put them together, you could create an interactive experience for a user around betting or data or whatever you wanted, where instead of me sending you video. Like, when you watch BBC or ESPN or Sky, um, what you're watching is the same thing I'm watching. So the ticker at the bottom is feeding you the same ticker it's feeding me. Today, right now. Meanwhile, if I open my Instagram and you open your Instagram, we're getting fed completely different things because they know we're different people, right? So, um, we just set out to solve that problem, which is just synchronize the stuff in the stadium so we can deliver individually. But what we quickly realized when we started working with the leagues were the people who were using our central synchronization technology were not using it for that. In fact, we couldn't even sell those products beyond very narrow use cases because, you know, television producers and broadcasters, etc. We're like, we're making plenty of money the way we are. We're not going to try to, like, disrupt this health and safety, mental health, field testing, like all these, these, what we would have thought of as niche markets. We're like, Hey, we're trying to figure out why every player on the field has this increase. Like women's football is a great example of this. They have this huge epidemic of lower extremity injuries, but to really be able to study that with any level of validity, you've got to be able to look at every single camera angle and the biometric data and the skeletal muscular skeletal data simultaneously. And the amount of time it was taking, I'm just talking human hours. Like we did a calculation on one study where we were saving something like a thousand hours a week over a 52 week metric. You know, you're talking about like decades of research, researchers lives who are like PhD level researchers who are literally just looking at Adobe Premiere and like synchronizing video to each other, let alone the musculature. Anyway, long story short, we took all of this structuring and we put it into one place and then we started saying to people, Hey, try to build what you want to build on top of this and we got like nibbles, et cetera. But then when we started looking inside the leagues and we started looking inside the teams, we saw these massive use cases that were going on. And so we started saying, instead of just building. A place for people to build on tubs. We're just gonna start buying those companies. And so we did the Biocore deal. We're, We've done a couple of other deals that haven't been made public. We're in the process of doing a couple of those where we're looking at companies that are the largest users of our core technology that, and what's happened in the process is we've basically created a new total addressable market because what we originally set out to do, which was like disrupt one, One area we've stepped back and said, actually, if you build an AI native infrastructure plan, meaning you build pipes that are designed to facilitate. AI, which just the really, really dumb version of explaining AI is, AI requires coherent data. The reason you get six fingers when you create a image in Sora is because it's drawing from the open internet and the open internet has a bunch of garbage in it. But if you make it coherent data, AI is, you know, a force multiplier. So if you can create coherent data of all the structure, you can build these things. And, It's usually about six minutes earlier in my pitch that people's eyes glaze over. And I can only raise money from like AI investment firms because they're the only ones that are like, Oh, we need this. We need this. But people like Todd Boley, Roger Goodell, these guys who, you know, kind of took a deep breath and said, I get it. They, they made these huge jumps on us and we've been very fortunate.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 30:43

Okay, right. A load of questions then. Bouncing off what you just said. There's a, there's a question I've got, which is, Again, this comes from 450 podcasts of people, you know, a lot of them talking about the industry, but also selling tech and it was some of the vendors that you probably, you know, I'm almost certainly referencing within this. so it's almost like an operating system sell, is it? You're, you're looking at, you know, bringing all those. Sources together. I get the Bloomberg terminal analogy. Um, there's a tech versus culture question. Silos are there for a reason. They've grown over time. What's the hardest one? What's the hardest one that's, you know, people, change is hard for a reason. There's a lot of people in the industry don't want it and they'll resist it. And they'll find creative ways of talking it. Cause actually the value is in the silo. So there's a question there about, I can see that I have no idea about the tech. I get it from a top line perspective, obviously, but I'm wondering about the human bit in terms of the reasons we talked about the chaos of European football, the complexity of European football, even within a one single club like Chelsea. I'm sure there are silos. I'm sure that I'm, I'm sure that, you know, Mr. Boley is trying to break down walls, but they exist. So it's just take me through that. What the, what the resistance is to this thing.

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 32:04

Yeah, I, it's funny, I was having a conversation with my wife this morning and we were talking about all the announcements that are coming out of CES about AI and people on social media particular like, it's over, you know, Terminators arrived, like AI is here. And I said, uh, something to the effect of, you know, AI's biggest barrier to success is going to be human adoption. The AI, most AI can currently. Reasonably do the majority of jobs in the world right now, or if not right now in 12 months. I mean, it's It's pretty much like you look at CES is there, but is your aunt or your grandmother or your uncle going to let a robot come in and do the plumbing in your house? Like it's going to be a while before that happens. And so there is this like period of adoption to your point where it's like, you know, I'm used to doing things a certain way. Am I really going to like, um, When I am asked in fundraising conversations what the biggest challenge my company faces is, I tell them without exception, it's inertia, that you are dealing with organizations in some cases that are a hundred years old that have been doing things a certain way for a long time. And so adoption is really painful. In fact, when I'm interviewing employees to come work at the company, when they finally are like, yeah, I want to come work at the company. I'm like, great. Now let me tell you why you should not come work at this company. And then I enumerate for them all of the ways in which our biggest partners. Even though they are actively trying to be in business with us, the Todd Boley's, the Roger Goodell's, et cetera, that, that it's not even malicious. It's not even people being like, I want to stop this. It's just like, I know how to do this. I'm comfortable doing this. You know, it's like, we know the chat GBT is a better search engine than Google, but it's going to take a long, the joke was always, it was like 2010 or something like that, that AOL stopped sending out DVDs. of their program for 19 a month. You know what I mean? It's like, it takes a while for people to, inertia is a huge problem. Our, at least our initial, and then, okay, so that's part one. Then to answer your second question, there's a lot of maliciousness among vendors where, you know, I would say half of my interaction with the major leagues that we're in partnership with is fielding calls where vendors are clearly in the ear of their clients saying, Oh, they're trying to Blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever that thing is. Um, and so, you know, between threatened lawsuits and all this other nonsense of people that largely don't understand what we do, who think that we're trying to like. Sports really comes down to two types of businesses. They're either vendors being paid to do a job, or they're people that are licensing some intellectual property from the league to sell it. Like those are the only two businesses. We are neither of those things, right? We go in as a partner and we build the infrastructure and then we and the league participate in both sides of that. Sometimes we hire vendors to do certain work. Other times we're licensed. We, not we, the league is licensing intellectual property, but we don't sit in the middle of any of those deals. That is not our business, right? Like we don't, we don't ever want to be on business. I don't hire anyone that works for me that works with intellectual property because it's the third rail. It's how you, the, the ratchet, I mean, go look at every publicly traded company that did big deals with the league, buying data, the top shots of the world, et cetera. There it is. I gave you a name. Um, the. You know, the first year is great. And then the second year, when the league realizes how much money you're making off their intellectual property, they're like, cool, we're going to charge you 900 percent of what we charged you last time. Anyway, I'm off topic. To answer your question. So our approach has been twofold. We only work with organizations where the absolute top decision making leader at the top of the organization understands and buys into what we're doing. That's, that's number one. And number two is we spend as much time as possible going into the organization and finding the scientists. So in the case of the NFL, for example, one of the reasons BioCorps was so attractive to us is look, they're marketers, they're broadcasters, they're people who are coming up with, I mean, the NFL is, they have just the best minds in sports focused on figuring out the best ways to generate content that are going to be sticky and all that sort of stuff. That side of the business largely, We don't touch. We focus on like, how do we help improve player health and safety and return to work and, you know, um, uh, security protocols, like anything that is very meritocracy, you know, very merit based and very objective outcomes, where it's like, you want to do this thing, you're spending this amount of time, this amount of resources doing it, we'll just make that easier. Um, and. Uh, we try the best we can to sort of avoid the soft sciences or, you know, um, a lot of the areas, that I think would get us in a lot of trouble.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 36:59

so the neutrality of it is your cell to the, to the club that it's not gonna, you're not, you're going to be not bumping into some of their existing commercial relationships.

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 37:12

Yeah, where we get into the most trouble,

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 37:14

There's a trust element in that you're not going to get in there and then Change.

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 37:19

well, here's the thing, the clubs aren't the issue. It's the vendors that are the issue, because what ends up happening is the club does a deal with us, or the, or the league does a deal with us, or the organizing body does a deal with us, and then internally, their stakeholders. Who have, who have brought vendors in, like I'm the video guy, and this is the video company that we do work with. And so the video company thinks that we're a threat, they don't understand our technology, and they're going to their guy inside the league and saying, this guy's coming for, for your job, you know, or whatever. And they get them all worked up, and then I'm, and then it's six months of our team having to be like, not only are we not interested in coming for your job, we we want to reduce cost for that vendor, and the vendor can keep doing the product. The equivalent would be, well, a great equivalent is the way cab companies dealt with Uber coming into New York. There are still yellow cabs in New York, but drivers no longer are spending 90, 000 on a medallion to be able to drive or more in New York because the chokehold was taken off. So it like made the life of the driver better. And ultimately, by the way, the cab companies adopted Uber. You know, enterprise versions of software. And so like it, I think ultimately from a cost perspective, it got better and the market got bigger, but you got to imagine to your point, like, it's not just that it's siloed for a reason. It's siloed because they've consolidated down to every single team in the primary league basically uses at least six of the same team. Vendors. Now, some of them have a lot more money and have more vendors, but like the basic vendors, and if you go in and interview on both sides, the engineers, for example, that work on those technologies, their frustrations are a function of the fact that they are businesses that are built on, you know, 20 year old technology, 20 year old, whatever. And, and so you're, you're, you're really exactly right about the challenges. And, and a lot of what we're doing, I mean, the reason that I've gotten talked into doing business podcasts and talking about this is to try to like Invite people into the conversation, alleviate. Like we publish all of our technology on our website. You can read white papers about how the tech works. Like we're not, we, because of how we're built natively, like we're not worried about being disintermediated by partners. We want partners to be able to test and build on top of it so they can learn what they're doing.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 39:41

So is this, I I, we did a thing at Amazon, their London hq, um, before Christmas, and they were talking about Amazon Bedrock and that that felt like a sort of, they were selling this idea, you know, a lot of companies are building their businesses on top of AWS or on top of Amazon. And is, is that where you're getting at? I'm just, I'm just trying to sort of. Place, because the, the, the longer story is people come on to podcasts and they say, it's all about data and we need football clubs to, you know, to behave more like, and it could be Amazon or it could be Netflix. You know, you talked about Rexham could be a content business, all of those things that a football club could be. And then you need the people and you need the tech. So, and a lot of the tech is built on top of the big ones, you know, whether it's Microsoft or Amazon. Where do you fit into that chain?

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 40:34

So we're really big fans of Bedrock and, and AWS. I mean, AWS is not only are they one of our largest partners in terms of actual like volume of use. We're one of the largest people on AWS in sports in the United States. Um, by I'm just talking sheer volume of data that we're running for the platforms. And we have a very close relationship with them. The coffee. At the headquarters you're talking about is exceptional. Um, worth noting and definitely

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 41:04

Well, they've got to give them good coffee because they work 20 hours a day. So that's, you know,

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 41:08

I mean, it's they are, they, they, they're definitely, they're definitely, uh, exceptionally hardworking. Um, the way I like to try to explain how, like, let's, let's use Bedrock. Bedrock is ai, right? So Bedrock is their. Version of open AI or Gemini or, you know, um, Claude or, you know, what, whatever system you're using, um, certainly more focused on enterprise applications because obviously Amazon is exceptional at that, but like that, that's sort of their AI is basically IQ. So, you know, you have a child and the child is born with a Mensa level, you know, he's got like a 135, 140 IQ. That person still needs to get educated on how to use that IQ to do something. So if that person is going to become, this is an old reference, Dugie Hauser, they have to go to med school or they have to get trained in this specific technology. And what, what AI is right now is it's. It's trained models on how to think, not what to think, right? So what we're betting on to a very large degree is we're building, um, very specific, uh, uh, infrastructure to allow the AI to learn faster. on that type of data set. So then it can go build the things that it needs to build because there's a stat that I love, which is, of all the information in the world, only 17 percent of the information is on what you would call the open internet. So 83 percent of information in the world. Is behind firewalls. So when you look at these deals that a lot of the, the I, the AI companies are trying to do right now where they're going to, you know, I don't know, I'm making this up McDonald's or whatever. And they're saying, you know, we'll build. Blah, blah, blah for you on blah, blah, blah, AI platform. What they're really saying is let us have access to your data and we'll build models on it. But they're saying we want to train on this model so we know how to think about, you know, quick serve restaurants or consumer behavior in airports or whatever they're trying to figure out. Because obviously that information is largely protected. And. In, I think Europe has done a significantly better job than the United States has Europe and England of, you know, protecting a lot of that stuff in terms of like what can actually be shared and personal information, et cetera. But like at scale, it's going to be very difficult to do that. And so what you're seeing is these like fortune 50 companies are getting wise to the fact that they probably shouldn't give open AI or some of these companies this, this, this modeling. And so we believe we've believed for a while that. The next wave of AI is going to be very niche. So you went from, if you look at how platform technology worked, it started huge and then it got narrower and it got narrower and it got narrower. And now like the next atomic unit, I heard, um, maybe it's Chamath, somebody was saying like the next obvious atomic unit is the creator, that creators will figure out how to, you know, build because we, we had, you know,

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 44:18

We saw the difference on a micro level. So notebook LM, I did a thing with Steven Johnson, who's at Google now, as he charges, you know, he's an editor director at DeepMind and he, that he's pushing that. So it's closed sources and it's quite, it's quite interesting. Again, this is on a very, you know, individual level, but trust element and what, if you know, what's going in at the front, you can then, you know, Manage the data in a, in a better way. So there's sort of the wild west of just grabbing everything from the world

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 44:50

Well, yeah, it's the, the best way, well, I shouldn't say the best way. One of the ways to think about the framing of the conversation, I'll use BioCore as an example, right? So BioCore has 40, 35 or 40, you know, PhDs who have spent the last 20 years focusing on really specific problems, right? Like. Like, um, concussions based on impact of the frontal cortex in a certain environment. And if you change this and whatever, like you make this rule change also, I mean, just reams of data going back, you know, all the way down. And then, and then they've, they've done a lot of scientific testing around the impact of, no pun intended, the impact of that research on adjusting rules and things like that. and out of it have come. You know, algorithms and modalities and all this other stuff that sort of educates on, on how you think about that. I get pitched all the time startups come and they said, we've looked at all the publicly available concussion data and here's our suggestion of what it is. And, and I'm in my mind, I'm thinking your models are based on models that BioCorp built that was based on the actual raw data from all of these sources. And so, like, these are derivative. These models are derivative and don't know where the issues are. So like, if I'm making this up, but if their model has some sort of factor where they have no left handed players in their model, we have no left handed players in our model, for example, they have no way of knowing that. And so now the whole, their entire model is reductive or reduced by that information set. And so if you think about. The, the future of AI, it's going to be these company, I believe for the next two or three years, that the most valuable growth in companies be companies that have highly specialized PhD level looks into specific use cases that they have the original data. And then they have all the platforms that can be tested scientifically. Like, does this work? Yes, it does. This is work because then when you drop that into AI, AI can just take. All of that data set and then they can, you know, supercharge it and multiply it by, by, you know, ad infinitum. What I'm seeing as an example is the majority of people who use, uh, ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a perfect example. Most people go on ChatGPT and they're like, tell me how to, or I go on Instagram and they're like, tell it to act like an expert in this field and then direct it to whatever. And I'm like, Well, yeah, but first create a custom GPT and then within the custom GPT, give it a bunch of information that it'll use to build its base of knowledge and then ask it to act on those things. Because when you say act like an expert, it's acting on an expert based on everything, not what you're narrowly trying to get it to do. And if you don't have it doing what it narrowly needs to do, you have no idea what the inputs are. You know what I mean? It could be, it could be, uh, I almost made another specific reference. It could be looking at people that In a world that is so divided by political, you know, you either believe the world is round or you believe it's flat or whatever. If they're drawing information from the entire internet, then I assure you, if you're a flat earther, a bunch of round earthers are, are going to be in your data set. And if you're a round earther, a bunch of flat earthers are gonna be in your data set. So you want to say, I want to know everything, but I want to know it based on people that fall within this parameter so I can understand the data and I can actually look at data that's verifiable.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 48:27

Right.

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 48:27

the majority of the internet on the open,

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 48:29

I've got, thank you. But no, but there's a, there's a, it builds on what you're saying. So I love the, there's a couple of data points. You've said 18 vendors, let's say 20 vendors at a football club are there and taking data out. There's a question there about the value of that. So if I am a football club, I'm a Spurs fan, come down the road, go at it, make our central defense better. Whatever, whatever magic you can, uh, you can create, but sport is, is largely, and you make, you said at the earlier that it's a licensing business pretty much, and it's about control and sponsorship is based on category exclusivity and media is based, has been sold on monopoly. You know, you, you are the preferred partner, et cetera, et cetera. What your. The future is not that. Or is it? Because if that's, if that's where the value creation for sports, sports club, a league, the NFL is all about control of the data. And we can have the argument about, you know, piracy or whatever, but I don't want to get into that. But there is a something deep there at a sort of control AI versus the Wild West AI. And bring it back

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 49:49

So I'll answer, I'll answer that question in two ways. The first one is I'll ask you, what do you think by volume, the most used product, software product in Premier League football is? So across all the clubs, what app do you think is most used by the teams? And I'll be more specific, most used by the teams in performance, scouting, and coaching.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 50:11

I don't know if it's, is it something daft like Excel or something like that?

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 50:16

Yeah, it's Excel. Because what it is Excel, right? By the way, I've given 30 people this test. You're the only person who's ever even come close. You got it. You nailed it. The reason is, is because you have all these inputs of data, which nobody can use. They don't understand it, etc. And so, They literally have humans type in the data they think they need into Excel, and then they create tables and they look at the tables. So, first and foremost, you have all this data coming in, people don't know what to do with it, and, and, and AI can't do anything with it unless you can make it coherent and usable. So that's part one. The second one is to your point about control. When I first started the company, this is going back a long time, and I was talking to what I think most people would refer to as one of the, Let's call them five most powerful people in all of professional sports globally. And I was talking about latency of data because we were talking about gambling, right? So we're talking about latency and they said to me, we think latency is an advantage. And I, for two years, ate out on that, on that sentence as a punchline. Like, ah, ha, ha, ha, they don't understand tech. They think latency is advantage. Now, with all my years of wisdom and scars and all the other stuff, I'm like, that guy is a genius because he understood that latency for the foreseeable future while betting and all this other stuff was catching up. Latency created a moat for them where they could wait to see how gambling played out and who the winners were going to be. And then during that time, they would solve their latency problem and then show up and be like, Hey, we're selling the non latent video or non latent tech for Boolean and they had all this money. And so what I learned was control, not to go Buddhist, control is obviously an illusion, but control is in the eye of the beholder. I assure you. That if someone figures out how to build a digital moat, I'm sorry, if someone figures out how to build a bridge over the digital moat, the people who control the intellectual property will figure out how to move the proverbial goalposts farther away by creating a new moat and utilizing what they have. What, what ultimately matters is, That I think is the dangerous part of what's going on is if you, which I don't think leads for the most part will do, certainly not the powerful ones, is if you concede access to your foundational platforming to someone who is also the AI partner, so like, if you go to, uh, uh, uh, a Microsoft or a Google or whatever, and you're like, Hey, I know you've built Gemini. And now you want to take all my data and you want to correlate those things to build me something, that's over because you can never undo that. You can never be like, Oh, Hey, AI, forget all that stuff you learned. We're going with a new partner. We're moving from Gemini to whatever. It's like, well, you already gave all that stuff up. So I think it's going to, at least for the short term, it's going to be figuring out how to keep those things church and state.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 53:12

Yeah. So actually the NFL model of closed controlled that's even more of an advantage because they have control over that, over a leakier environment in football.

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 53:26

Yeah. Here, here's what I would say. Um, if you look at the five biggest companies in the world, right? I mean, putting aside oil companies, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, let's just say those are the five companies for the purpose of conversation. If you look at those five companies, those five companies have proprietary data and they have proprietary infrastructure, but their core business Is building infrastructure with that proprietary data. So if you want to go sell handbags on Amazon, or you want to sell handbags on your own website, you really need the Amazon infrastructure or the Google infrastructure to do it. That's what the platform economy is. The new AI infrastructure is essentially the same thing, which is like, we have different models. And if you want to build this, like they haven't. They haven't, um, they haven't swarmed around their defined areas yet because they don't know yet, but they'll figure it out. Like Claude is more legally minded or whatever. You have these consolidations where then people will build businesses on them. That's how the economy works. leagues are going to have to shift their business model away from like, Hey, everyone shows up on Saturday to watch the match to a certain extent. But at the same time, what they're going to do is they're going to say, but all of the related data. Infrastructure, video, all those, all those pieces are here. And if you want to build a business on there, if you want to be the next fanatics or you want to be the next whatever ticket master, like you're going to have to come to us for the structuring, assuming that they actually correlate coherently and control their data. They could become platforms. They're certainly big enough. I mean, the NFL, Premier League, et cetera, they're big enough to do it. I think their challenge is going to be. You know, there's one commissioner in particular who's very powerful, who goes into almost every weekly meeting and says, we are not tech companies. Find us a tech partner. It's an actual partner, not someone paying us. Most

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 55:15

that's, that's, that's, that's the question I was going to ask in terms of the tech, it really echoes of like three years ago, this conversation would have been about blockchain and, you know, clubs and leagues were doing blockchain deals and they were packaging them as sponsorship deals. And then the question became, what if you want to change your blockchain infrastructure, you're going to have to do it, you know, a sponsorship is, is a bad frame for this sort of relationship because a sponsorship is actually, is a commercial relationship, but it's also, there's a term. And all of the things that the sport business is built on. Actually, if you are developing the Premier League as a, as a, you know, as its own data, um, center, you can't really do that. Can you, cause that's what you're saying. It would be very risky once, once you've allowed Gemini in to then say, no, three years of that fees, this Sodoff we'll have, we'll get chatting.

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 56:12

yeah. I mean, the, the general problem with sports and entertainment is that when technology comes along, they like try to put it into a bucket. So it's like blockchain, NFTs. That's what the use case is. And so then it's like, well, A distributed ledger has really obvious. Use cases, particularly in sport, like take, take, take global football. For example, a player who's probably going to play for five or six professional clubs who has, I'm talking about just for the player, I'm not even talking about for the clubs who has. Medical information, financial information, all this other stuff, having a centralized ledger where all of that player's information is protected and individually controlled by them and then distributed and shared accordingly, where it's the only ground truth, is an obvious use case that is probably worth a look. Billions and billions of dollars if properly, properly done. But if I say blockchain to a league executive right now, they're like, Oh, Topshop didn't work. You know, nobody's buying NFTs anymore. And it's like, cool, that's okay. Similarly with AI, I'm very nervous. Right now about how far back we're going to get set by two things. One, young league executives who want to get like big deals done. We're open ass, flush with cash. And they're like, here's 500 million to give you whatever. And they're like, we got a, we got a broadcast level deal for this thing. Not realizing that they can never come back from it. And the other thing I'm nervous about is older executives. I'm, I'm being a total ageist here about old and young people. So we'll, we'll just put that aside. So come back to haunt me in five years, I'll get canceled. Um, Older executives not really taking the time to try to understand the AI. What AI actually like what it is, and then being like, Oh, it'll help us grow, you know, our betting audience or whatever, you know, like, and then it becomes this narrow thing. And then when that thing inevitably either doesn't work or works disproportionately to what its actual value is, it'll just become the whole conversation will be this. And so like right now, every company in the universe is like, we're using AI to usually customer service. That's usually, they're just firing, you know, the people that were answering phone calls for them to do that stuff. And you're like, Sure. But that's like AI is at least right now, a lot of the use case of AI is, is, is, uh, it's about taking skill sets. You already have a lot of expertise in and then expanding and scaling that use case because you have the knowledge, like whatever you're really good at. AI will make you better at that thing. If you're disciplined about just focusing on that thing. I think a lot of people right now are like, AI can make me fly. And you're like, well, could you, could you jump really high beforehand? Cause if you couldn't.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 58:55

Right. I've got, I'm conscious of your time, but there is, I mean, there's so many tips, but there's a, let's go back to where do you think the most success is going to come from, from your project, from your, from the company? What, what is it that the, the play, the, where is the, the biggest selling point do you think from your point of view? CRM question? Is it, is it the data? Is it a media data question? You mentioned you saying that under sports tech, it's a big umbrella and loads of everything's piled in. Where is the

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 59:26

I look performance. I

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 59:31

money or saving money is the other question.

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 59:35

well, we're, we're a startup. So, uh, it just asked me today and I'll give you a different answer. I give you

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 59:43

I meant for your client. I meant for your client. Are you, are you making

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 59:46

Oh, oh, yeah. Yeah. Um, well, two things 1 to answer your 1st question. All of our focus is going to performance now, because what we're seeing is that performance is foundational to all of these verticals. If you get into healthcare, if you get into, you know, somebody said something just the other day, we said, we're becoming, we're really going to focus and become a performance focused company. And they're like, well, But you are a performance company, BioCore. We're like, yeah, but that's, you know, health and safety. And they're like, listen, not being on the field is zero performance. So if you can get a player back on the field or keep a player on the field and not injured, like that's performance. Like you're, you're driving performance. It's like, it's binary to, to a certain extent. And then you get into the spectrum. So performance is a big focus for us. But found, uh, going back to the foundational, if you save money, if you save people money around performance, you are inherently making them money. Right? If you look at the number of days, like think about this, for example, one of the studies that was done was about the reduction of time it took for a player to get back to the field of play, right? Which is good for the player, good for the team, good for, you know, everybody is in a better situation, and at what level they return. You know, RTW, Return to Work. we started measuring the impact of that. We did a, we did a study. And at a certain point in time, the company we'd hired to do the study was like, Hey, I think we need to put guardrails on this. And we're like, why? And they're like, well, we're getting into like, beer sales in the stadium relative to people, You know what I mean? Like, like, uh,

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 1:01:33

Yeah,

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 1:01:33

I'm just using Cole Palmer because the jersey's behind me, but like, Cole Palmer misses a match. Like there is a impact that goes all the way, not just to the mega store, but to, you know, the vendor that's two blocks away. And So now all of

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 1:01:47

about four silos away, Charlie.

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 1:01:51

but that's what I'm saying is like, at a certain point in time, somebody asked me the other day, they're like, are you interested in credit card data in the stadium? Like, could you, could you metric that out? And I was like, I mean, at some point in time, sure. But like, this is the problem is you have to stay really narrow and focused on the application of the broadness of the technology and stay out of other people's lanes or just empower them. And so I think the answer to your question, unfortunately, is both. Like we aim to serve, save certain people money, which then inherently makes other people money, which in turn makes the original people money. So it's like creating that flywheel. Where, where the benefit is about expanding the available capital coming into an environment by saving and making, um, and, and, and bringing in new, new, uh, new parties like that's, we want to be, we don't just want to be, An arbitrage. We want to be additive in terms of we're bringing new stuff to the marketplace that otherwise would not exist.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 1:02:48

Listen, we could go on for ages. said right at the beginning, it was really interesting having my first impulses completely turned upside down. So. You know, it's a, it's a really interesting conversation and thanks for your time. I really enjoyed it. And, um, what's next? What's this year going to look like? What you, what's the plan? You just, is it more embed in Chelsea education of the marketplace? Is that, is that the job?

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 1:03:15

We're right now what we're really trying to figure out is where the most impact could be felt. So certainly, um, one of the things that I think has been incredibly compelling about. Chelsea, and it's interesting because it happened at both the women's and the men's clubs is they both shifted managers and then you had this shifting culture. Um, that went all the way through the organization. I mean, scouting is affected on both sides and the academy. And then obviously all these other things. And when you look at that in the context of performance, one of the things that people really focus on in performance is like muscular skeletal, like, are they getting injured more, are they working out more, et cetera. But I heard this, um, I went to the university of Notre Dame and, and. Though I imagine this doesn't make it that far into London. Notre Dame has made it to the national championship game in college football, which is a very big deal. It's been a long time. And they have a new head coach as of like three years ago. So this coach has sort of won the hearts and minds of the general American population because he is likable and relatable and he's an exceptional, he seems to be an exceptionally good human being, right? But what they found when they looked at the team. Was you, uh, there's a famous NFL coach. His name is Mike Tomlin, who says that when he recruits players, he doesn't look at what they can do. He looks at what they're willing to do and something that they talked about at Notre Dame was players had started to become willing to do more because they had someone that was rootable and the effect of that. And so we've started looking at a version of that at Chelsea about the impact of a style of leadership. Not, not necessarily like Enzo's specific leadership style or, or the, the women's team's specific leadership style across that whole coaching. Cause that entire coaching infrastructure at the women's team is like, they were able to seem to like capture Emma's winning spirit and, and add this other. You know, je ne sais quoi to the, to the platform, but looking at the impact on, um, sleep and mental health and the impact of that then on, you know, does the reaction time of the goalie get faster when, you know, their endorphins are higher or whatever, um, which has this crazy impact to, you know, I always tell people that at the end of the day, if you could sell anything to anyone in business, it would be the ability to. Flip a switch in your brain and be at 100 percent of your mental capacity and your energy the moment you actually needed it. Like 10 minutes before I got on this podcast, I'm, you know, I'm sort of puttering around not doing anything, but I want to like get on this podcast and be like the best version of Charlie for Richard and et cetera. And then, you know, the next phone call I have is less important. I can like come down to

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 1:06:00

Yeah. Sod them.

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 1:06:01

But like Tony Robbins has made billions of dollars teaching people like sort of like his version of that. I'm very interested in how you. Look at that and professional sports and the military are like the two best places to look at this because if you look at elite Special forces elite athletes at the highest level and certainly Chelsea I apologize for saying this given your allegiances, but given how dominant Chelsea is now You're you're talking about being able to look at it at a really high level.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 1:06:32

Well, listen, good luck and, uh, yeah, don't have too good a season, but we'll, um, we'll get you back on at some point. Thanks for your time.

Charlie Ebersol, Infinite Athlete: 1:06:40

We're not trying to do too much We're just trying to win everything