Are sports & entertainment becoming the ‘anti-AI trade’?
Turney Duff chats with Yahoo Sports staff writer Dylan Dittrich and Clocktower Group chief macro strategist Eric Wallerstein about how sports and the “entertainment economy” are emerging as attractive investments as the public’s appetite for in-person experiences continues to grow.
It’s funny you mention the anti AI trade. I think where we’re seeing that show up mostly right now is in um sports franchises and and there’s not, you know, a lot of that on public markets. You have Madison Square Garden sports, which is going to be spending off the Nicks and Rangers um into their own company using the coming weeks. Um but in in private markets, you see um the investment thesis on on sports in general right now and certainly sports franchises is, you know, in in a world where kind of content becomes abundant, there’s going to be greater value placed on, you know, really live organic human content and sports is kind of king.
the entertainment economy. Yeah. is It’s not an anti-AI trade necessarily, but in a world where you’re worried about AI, I think that’s the that’s the thing, right? And it’s a little more zoomed out, uh but Josh Kushner at Thrive Capital, you know, buying the Lakers, obviously there was a forced seller. Um but I think he’s, you know, the big AI guy um in private markets and for them to go buy a sports franchise, which is obviously everyone wants to own the Lakers, but like I think that’s the right thing to do and you can go to a million Taylor Swift concerts. Like these repeatable things which aren’t just like a one-time big box purchase.
I’m super bullish on those things. And you know, it’s very funny if you go on Twitter, you see like VCs trying to get reservations at good restaurants, and I find that hilarious as an issue to solve. But nonetheless, people want to go out to eat, like they want to go to a concert, they want to go to sports games. So I’m super bullish on this whole entertainment economy idea. Um and if you, you know, if you join a run club, so I live in Venice Beach in Los Angeles, the Venice Run Club is like sponsored by uh on or own, whatever, whatever the the name is, I don’t know the name. So they have a partnership. There’s like thousands of people who go to this run club twice a week. Uh they sponsor people who run in the LA Marathon. And so those events, those activities, I think are a great bet for a world where you’re just unsure what AI is going to do.
I also just think there’s a an appetite and a desire for, you know, uh unscripted entertainment where, you know, the the outcome is unknown. Um there’s there’s an element of monoculture still to it, right? And that’s that’s something that’s really limited today, right? Where where nobody’s kind of watching the same shows on network television anymore. Everybody’s streaming their own things, watching their own things on YouTube. And sports are still kind of that that one element of um you know, they have that kind of water cooler power.
It’s things like that. It could be in person experiences, it could be live events, but you know, things things that are attracting attention in a world where attention is just incredibly fragmented in ways we’ve never seen before.
