Shaun Newman Podcast - #93 - Calvin Ayre

Episode Date: July 6, 2020

You read that right Billionaire with a capital B. Originally from a pig farm near Lashburn SK he earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Waterloo & a Masters at City University in Seattle. In 2000 he launched Bodog an online gambling site that by 2005 had 7.3 billion dollars in online bets. In 2006 he was featured on the cover of Forbes annual billionaire edition. In 2012 Calvin was indicted by the US attorney for Maryland of charges of illegal gambling & money laundering. In 2017 he pled guilty to a single misdemeanour & all other charges were dropped. Currently he lives in Antigua. Let me know what you think     Text me! 587-217-8500

My name is Calvin Air. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. We got a great one for you today. And we continue to roll along on our quest for number 100. Let's get into today's sponsors. First off, Lauren and the team at Art and Soul. A huge shout out to them.

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So if you've got the home projects going full bore, make sure you stop in and see Carly and see Carly and Windsor Plywood. They'll hook you up. They'll get you set up for what you need. give them a call today 780 875-9663 shout out to diana wandler read write signs the sn p billboard across from the ufa if you haven't seen it it looks unreal they did such an amazing job we had a little bit of fun on instagram a few weeks ago giving away a few hats i'm going to have more hats coming hopefully sooner than later so pay attention on social media we'll try and get a few more hats out to some of the

folks, the listeners. If you're interested in advertising on the show, visit shawneumann podcast.com. In the top right corner, hit the contact button and send me your information. We got lots of different options and I want to find something that can work for the both of us. Now, on to your T-Barr 1, Tale of the Tape. Originally from a pig farm near Lashburn, Saskatchew, he earned a Bachelor of Science from the University of Waterloo and his master's at City University of C.C. In 2000, he launched the online gambling site, Bodog. In 2005, there was an estimated 7.3 billion in online bets through his system.

In 2006, he was featured on the cover of Forbes' annual billionaire edition. Also in 2006, he sold out and retired. By 2012, Calvin was indicted by the US Attorney for Maryland on charges of illegal gambling and money laundering. 2017, he pled guilty to a single misdemeanor. Currently, he lives in Antigua and is the economic envoy for Antigua on developments in cryptocurrency. Of course, I'm talking about Mr. Kelvin Error. So buckle up.

Here we go. Well, welcome to Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by billionaire Kelvin Err. I don't know if that ever gets old during that introduction or not, does it, Kelvin? But first off, I guess, thanks for joining me. Yeah, yeah. Well, actually, I don't know if it gets old or not. I actually don't really think about it too much.

I'm usually really focused on all the stuff I'm doing in my life. So I don't really think that way much myself. But, yeah. Well, fair. I want to go back. You know, I told your story probably eight months ago. And I thought, man, there's no way I'm ever going to track down a guy that's seen the things you've seen, been the places you've been. And then, you know, I finally make the email and, you know, it takes a little bit of Jocelyn and getting there, but here we are.

So I thought maybe you could take us back to Lashburn growing up on a pig farm to begin with, and we'll go from there. Yeah, well, I mean, you remember your own youth and you remember those moments where you started to get sort of conscious memory of your own reality. All that stuff happened on a pig farm in Saskatchewan. Like I said, about five miles northeast of Lashburn. And because that was the only thing that I'd ever experienced, that that kind of seemed to be the normal way of life. And going to school, once I started school for the first six years of my life, I was there as well.

Most of the kids that I met lived on farms in the surrounding area. So it all seemed very normal at the time. Where did you go to school in Lashburn? Do you remember the school by chance? Was it J.S. Moore? It was Lashburn Elementary School. Lashburn Elementary? Because that would have been about 1970?

I would have started about 67. 67. Okay. So where do you go after? Well, now let's go back to this. So you're on a pig farm. The internet isn't even a thing yet, let alone. Neither was color TV.

So were you always into, you know, I don't know, gambling or... Yeah, actually, we used to gamble my friends and I, since we were quite young. It was quite a normal thing. I mean, hockey players, I was an hockey player. And the hockey players, we used to always gamble. A lot of poker, actually, and blackjack. Righting in the back of the bus.

Yeah, and getting in hotels and, you know, just, you know, killing those lockers. Where did you play hockey? I started in Lascairn. And then I finished playing in salmon arm. And I played defense for the University of Waterloo Warriors in my university years as well. Really? What level would Waterloo be? College, University, Canadian University level.

Was it CIS then? That was a long time ago. But it was the varsity team. I mean, it was the top team in my university. The reason I ask is you're all. On people when they talk about my podcast, it usually gets labeled as a hockey podcast. So I didn't think having Kelvin Aaron was going to lead back to hockey. I didn't realize you played hockey at all.

Well, I mean, being a Canadian kid, that's pretty much what you do as a pastime here through the darkest years of the month or months a year. That was actually my favorite sport growing up as a kid. Was playing hockey. Hockey is my favorite, yeah. So did you get to Waterloo because of hockey then? No, no, no, I went there because I was originally planning on becoming an optometrist, and I just went out, tried out for the team and made the team. So you wouldn't be an optometrist.

Initially, but yeah, eventually. I took a few different paths through university, and I ended up with two degrees, one in sciences and one in finance. So what changed, like, I guess I went to school to be a psychologist. that didn't, that didn't pan out. So I, uh, what changed? Well, just look back, you know, who knows what they really want to be when they're 18? Apparently some people do. And actually, I kind of think I did as well because I sort of ended up where I felt

I belonged in, in that I'm in business. And I kind of had this instinct that I'd be doing business stuff. But because I was good at sciences and physics and math and whatnot, and I had a physics professor in university in high school and he talked me into he said my aptitudes would be quite useful being an eye doctor so he talked me into becoming an eye doctor and so I said okay I'm 18 old what do I know and I went off to university to become an eye doctor and I started taking business courses as as electives as I was taking the science courses I needed for my optometry and I fell in love of business.

So I closed off that degree and then went back and took an MBA and management finance and then started starting businesses. Well, and I read a story on you that at a young age you bought a five-ton truck and started selling fruit. Yes, I did. I did. I did. When I was in my undergraduate years for my summer job, I bought a, I borrowed a truck actually. My dad's pickup initially and then rented a U-Haul trailer, painted up.

some signs, got a $3,000 loan from the credit union with much of my mom co-signed, and then went down to the south of salmon arm where I was living at that time, and picked up a load of fruit into the U-Haul trailer and hauled out to Saskatchewan and sold it on the side of the road, and I'd phone all my relatives and get them to phone all their friends, and they'd come by and box the fruit off me. And you made good money doing that? Right. More than I would have made at minimum wage as a, you know, temporary employee over a summer,

I think. It was less time too. I would only work two months instead of the full four months I would only work two. I assume taking some money out, were you shitting bricks, so to speak, that your fruit might go to rot and you might not sell it? It was, yeah, it was nerve-wracking.

And in fact, a few times I would have to take it to a local hudderite colony and sell it at a discount just to get rid of it because it was getting too ripe. And then they would buy it bulk because they had a lot of people and then they would can it up and prepared. They would start preparing it on the spot.

But I'd have to give it to them really cheap. So that would be just a cover cost. One other place that I heard you lived out here was Manville. I heard you'd live there for a couple years. Yeah, two years. Yeah. What, just you guys move farms or? We were, I was born in Lashburn and raised there until,

I can't even remember now. I think it was, kindergarten in grade one, I think, I did there. And so, yeah, we just moved over there and farmed for two years over there. And then my dad moved back onto my grandparents farm in Saskatchewan. And when I was born, we were farming a farm close to that. Do you still have family then around here, Kelvin? I do, yeah.

I actually probably have pretty extended family. But none of my close relatives are there anymore. but I do have lots of extended family in the neighborhood. So I guess what I'm digging at is you don't come back to this area very often then, if ever. I have not been back there since my last close relative left. I went to visit my sister was actually living there for a while, my older sister, and I went to visit her once, because that was years ago now. Since then, I haven't been back.

But I still see some of the relatives from around there, though, because I actually had a family reunion in Langley on another ranch a few years back, and a bunch of them showed up. When was the last time, this is probably the better question, when was the last time you were asked about Lashburn, Saskatchewan? Asked about it.

Very, very seldom actually, because nobody's ever heard of it outside of Lashburn. So, when people ask me where I'm from, I say Lloyd Minister, because at least,

you know, some people know, well, you can find it on a map. People know, more people will know it. Well, I like to have that dig in there.

Well, I'm from Helmand. I'm from a small, smaller Saskatchewan town than Lashburn. So I get the, I get the Lloyd Minster, saying Lloyd Minster, because people can find it. But that's a dig on my Lashburn folk that are listeners. And I don't mind teasing Lashburn and it's a small town as well.

I don't even think it's in a hospital anymore, but there was one there when I was born. I was actually born in. You were actually born in Lashburn. In Lashburn in the local hospital, yes. No kidding. There's not a local hospital in Lashburn anymore. Shortly after I was born, it was shut.

Well, you go through university, at what point do you start thinking about, like, I mean, the beginning of the internet is right around 1990-ish. Like, what point do you start to have the idea of Bodug? I mean, I assume it didn't just fall in your lap. Well, what happened was, is after my second university to go, I started a company called HQ Vancouver, which was kind of like a packaged office business. But instead of doing it the typical way, what I did is there was a router from the SFU, from the SFU branch campus, Simon Fraser University branch campus.

There was a router from the university back one that preceded the internet in the basement of Harbor Center where I had set this business up. And so I strong my own fiber down to it and connected to it. So I had inside my packaged office business, I had high school, internet to the desktop and it was the first place in the city of Vancouver that you could get it. And that university backboard, of course, connected to what was the start of the internet all over down the states and whatnot. So because I had that connectivity, I tracked it all the internet startups of their day. So my packaged office business became the de facto internet startup place in Vancouver and Cisco systems set up their office for Western Canada out of my office.

and just sort of really got into the old whole really early on internet startup and I came up with the idea. It wasn't even my first internet startup, the gaming stuff. I was working on some other businesses with other people who were clients of mine in my environment, helping them get their startups off the ground. And did any of them,

did any of those create successful businesses or were they flawed? I can't remember any of them that actually that were in my environment that became as successful as what I became. However, after I started what became Bodog, some of the companies that spun out of my company like Unbalanced, which is still in Vancouver and just announced some big multi, you know, $20 or $30 million raise, started by a couple of ex-bodoggers. So I spawned some other tech companies in Vancouver.

But of the earliest, earliest days, I mean, Let's be honest, a lot of them were porn sites, and I didn't even know it at the time. They were coming in because the high-speed internet was cheap and available, and they were renting offices and filling them full of servers, and I knew it, but I didn't know what the heck they were doing. I found out later, which is legal in Canada. Pornography is not illegal. But there was a lot of early porn companies operating out of my environment,

which I thought was kind of funny when I found it. But myself, at one point I read an article in a newspaper about sports betting being done by phone in the Dominican Republic and that was sort of the light bulb moment moment and I just said hold on what a great thing to be doing on the internet and so I started building sports betting platform and then sort of one thing I'd do another and eventually was this big massive gaming company which still exists today you kind of breathe I was going to interrupt and then I'm like I want them to finish his thought here so you're saying that the beginning of corn in Canada came out of your office not you specifically but people yeah i'm not saying it was beginning in canada because presumably

they were doing it in Toronto and Montreal as soon or sooner but for sure the earliest days of porn on the internet out of Vancouver all happened out of my office without me even known about it they were clients of mine they were just renting offices yeah with service package which included internet connection to this fiber that i that i extended to every office in my little little little incubator. And they filled, filled their offices full of servers, and I didn't have a clue what they were doing.

So, yeah, pretty funny. It's almost hard to go back to a time where the internet isn't what the internet is now. Like when I hear you talk about servers and stacking rooms full and, you know,

being high speed, you're just like, well, you can pretty much get high speed anywhere now. Even rural communities are starting. Not from here in Giga, but we're working on that. Oh,

you don't have high speed out there. Well, we do. Yeah. My office has it, and I have it here to my house, but there's a lot of places you can't get it yet on this island. It's pretty weak still. And fair enough, Hillman, Saskatchewan, where my parents are, doesn't have high-speed internet. So, I mean, it's not everywhere, but it has become very commonplace.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So why, when you hear the guy, the bookie taking bets, you go, like, this could, this could, this could work? You go like, what was it about gambling that you're like? Because I guess in the history of the world, gambling, heck, pornography, they almost, they kind of fall into the same like nightclub scenario. Did you ever think, and if I go down this road, I don't know what comes of it? No, no, actually, I never did. I find that sports betting, even though it's illegal in some places, is not considered sort of like a bad thing. Like you don't pretend that you bet on sports.

Most people admit it and they're proud of it. Kind of like what we do as men. So, and I like I grew up with sports betting. When I was saying that we used to play gamble all the time on my hockey team, well, of course we used to bet on sports too. I didn't even bother saying that because that was like for me, it was a given. That's kind of how it started.

And then the blackjack and poker was kind of like the things we did on top of it. But yeah, we used to, you know, all through university betting, sports betting for cases of beer and stuff. I mean, just part of the culture in Canada. So I never really thought anything of it. And I knew that I could get sports betting licenses in other jurisdictions in the world. So, yeah, I just started building the system. My original idea was to license it out, which I did.

But then I got frustrated because I was trying to use my ideas of how sports betting should be done on the internet. And the people licensing my technology were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're the tech guy, let us run the business. And so they were ignoring me. So eventually I put my own side up and, you know, tried all my own ideas, which were mostly marketing, not operations. And, yeah, the rest is history, I guess. Did when you first had this idea, did you tell it to your friends?

And they were like, that's a great idea. You should do that. I did tell it to my friends. But what I did is I asked everybody, my family, all my friends, what they thought. I said, I'm going to start a sports betting company on the Internet. What do you think? Not one person thought it was a good idea. Why not?

Why did they say it was about? A lot of different reasons, but mostly it just sounded crazy. So one day I was at my place. I was living in Gaffound at the time, walking distance away from my HECTA incubator. It's like two blocks away. And I just in the morning, getting ready for work, I looked myself in the mirror,

and I said, you've got to ask yourself a fundamental question. Everybody says you're wrong. It's a bad idea, but you think it's a good idea. You have to ask yourself a question. Would you rather be on your own? your deathbed saying that you were too scared to try this or would you rather be on your death bed saying I tried it and failed and now of course the other option would be that you tried and it worked but but nobody's scared a success people are scared of failure so I gave myself a worst case

scenario and I said I'd rather be I'd rather have tried and failed than to admit that I was too scared to try so I just went for it that was it tough talk to yourself in the mirror and that became a giant success. Looking back on that conversation you had, then, if you could go back to when you looked in the mirror, you feel like, man, I'm glad I had that conversation with myself. Exactly. Yeah, that could have been a turning point all right.

Well, how, like you're sitting there and you're watching this, right? You create Bodog. Hey, first off, why Bodok? Why the name Bodok? I was looking for a name that was like at the time all the sports betting sites were names like sports bat sporting bat bat on sports book.com all the all the names ran together to the extent that even me in the industry I had trouble keeping them all straight so I wanted a name that stood out and was different and so I came up with a full page of branding criteria and then I

started putting a went home one night and went on to who's is and was just making words up and searching to see if the root domain of dot com was available and seeing if how many of the criteria they would tick. For instance, Bodog, it's got a cadence for radio ads, B, O, D, O, G. So it kind of has a cadence to it when you spell it out. It's the way we did the logo with the small cases.

It's five zeros, so it's very symmetric. It's very hard to forget the name. and how it's spelled. And I forget all the other criteria right now, but there was like a number of criteria I had. So I came out with about 20 different names, and I saved them all, and I hand wrote them on a piece of paper, all the names,

but I had saved them all, so I owned them, but I actually had a credit card there and was grabbing them. And then I wasn't ready to launch. This was when I was already licensing my platform, but now I'm going to launch my own site, and I wanted to use all my marketing ideas, and this was actually one of them, to make it something different than what was out there.

So I threw that sheet of paper into my desk at my office the next morning and went back to work, getting all the stuff ready to launch the site. And then at some point I had to pick the name. So I pulled the piece of paper out and just went down the list and there was Bodog. It just jumped off the page at me and I said, boom, there's the name. That's how it came to be. That's a very, now maybe I'm obviously a little bit naive to think that companies just have a you know I like the way this looks and that's what it's going to be

that's a very strategic way to pick a name yeah yeah I put some thought into it for sure did you read a book on that or did you have some training on that how did you create a list already because I've been in business for a while so I had already thought lots and I probably why I mean I had an I have an MBA right so I haven't taken courses taking marketing courses and whatnot at a fairly advanced level. But I don't believe I read a book before I did that. I just picked my experience from all my education experience and came up with this list of how I thought it would work.

So what was the second place? What's the name that never got picked? None of them are in my memory. Really? Can't remember a single one. Cannot remember a single one, which goes to show you that. Bodog was it. Well, not only that, but why it's so important to be first.

otherwise history forgets you. Is that something you live by? You gotta be first? I think everybody does. I mean being second is kind of good. You sort of brag about it a bit, but I mean, it's good to be first. What was it like the day that you kind of woke up and looked and Bodog is just everywhere?

It's like, I don't know, I assume you're... you're on a runaway train and you're just holding on for dear life trying to keep hold of her. You know, I'm in an elevator in Miami once and there's one of the girls that was one of our models, actually. She's wearing some Bodug brand stuff standing beside me, but no one could have known that we were together. And two other guys got on the elevator and one guy sees the girl and she's kind of cute. So he's like immediately trying to chatter up. He says, hey, what's Bodug mean? His friend jumps in and explains what Bodug is.

That was kind of like, hmm, it's pretty cool. Some people know this. It's like just random people in an elevator in Miami. So, yeah. What do you do with a billion dollars or more money than you can ever possibly spend?

Yeah, it's not how it works. It's because, I mean, it's all tied up in businesses and projects and things that have plans. And, I mean, I do a lot of charity,

but nobody sits around, well, at least not normal people, that have money. Mostly people don't sit around with like lots of cash or liquid of your assets in liquid form. Usually it's stuff that has a value, a breakup value that's being valued. But in reality, you're using it for some purpose. So you can't really break it up because it's going to screw up whatever the plan is. I should rephrase that. Because I go, you come from a pig farm. At what point do you just wake up and you got a little bit of money in your account? That can be

$20,000? That can be $1,000. But you go, you look at it and you go, huh. And I don't know what day that is. Because it's just rolls off the tongue. It's more about, I get it's tied up and that kind of thing. But at one point, you had to wake up and go, holy man. Yeah, it didn't really happen like that because it was just so glacial. When you're actually living it, it was just every was incremental. It was incremental. And always there were so many challenges. And even now, I mean, I've got projects and some of them are businesses but have ulterior aims like for instance the government of Antigas asked me to work on some projects down here to create jobs and construction so that we can replace the tourism jobs that have been lost from the pandemic especially in the

lower end of tourism so I'm up to my eyeballs in that and it's being structured as a business but I wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't for the government asking me to do my part to help you know create the economic stimulus so that people have have jobs here. So yeah, so I get to get, I just get wound up in my projects. I don't really think about it that much. And like I said, it all happened so slow that it wasn't really, it wasn't a big win the lottery moment. It was just incremental. And it was incremental with a lot of stress and hard work, which, you know, very few, like those euphoric win moments where you just win big things. That's not really how it worked. How many years did it take then to, you talk about

stress and the hard work. How many years did it take you to get to where Bodog was? You're sitting in an elevator and a guy's explaining it all and you're going, huh, that's kind of cool. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, like I wasn't really keeping that close to track, but I, you know, I kind of look at my life as being a progression every step. So even stuff that predated Bodog was all training for the things that came later. So it's always just for me, it's like I've been working on this my whole life, starting in, you know, elementary school, training to get to where I am now. And each time I think, you know, I'm there, then I seem to learn a new, new trick and break into some other new level, and all of a sudden I feel like I'm still learning.

How difficult then was it to have the U.S. government do, you know, try and, I don't know what the right word is, Kelvin. You lived it. Let me explain what happened, first of all. Sure. It was painful, and particularly from a credibility perspective with people that were relying on me. But the reality was that, you know, I had a license to operate gaming here in Antigua. And under an existing free trade agreement with the United States, that license, which has been ratified three times by the World Trade Organization and arbitration between Antigua and the United States, my license allowed me to do what I was doing up in the United States. So how it's supposed to work with any other country with the United States,

I mean, it's up to them to make sure that their domestic laws conform with their international trade obligations. And in this case, the United States, which I now realize, the United States does whatever it wants and kind of doesn't really follow the rules. They want everybody else to follow the rules, but they don't. What happened was the U.S.'s international trade obligations, which I was in compliance with, were in conflict with some of their domestic laws. and they didn't do their part in stopping their domestic laws from interfering with their international agreements.

So, in fact, I was a victim of U.S. not following the system correctly. And eventually I had to settle with them on terms that weren't, you know, which victimized me slightly when you look at what really happened. But it was a settlement I could live with, so I'm happy to get that out of my life. But I certainly don't begrudge any people in the United States because at the end of the day, the prosecutors I was dealing with were just doing their jobs. The fault lies with what happened to me with the federal level, which is, you know, under the Obama administration. I mean, they were the ones that should have stepped in and stopped that process from happening and allowed their international obligations to be dominant. However, that all said, I landed on my feet, and here I am, and I don't really have any grudges to anybody. I still think that's going through life.

You've got to expect a few lumps, right? Just like playing hockey. Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. Your lumps are, you know, for a guy sitting in Lloyd Minster, Saskatchew, Alberta, the border city, it's, you listen to it, you're like, man, that's a giant lump. Yeah, it was, yeah, it was, but like I said, I got through it. Yeah, I'm okay now.

Was there some tough days in the middle of that then, you know, with, to have a government come after you to be? Well, you certainly find out who your friends are, that's for sure. Yeah, as I made those relationships stronger then, is what you're saying? One of my friends was the government of Antigua and the government of Canada. Actually, both the federal government of Canada and Antigua supported me. And understood that my situation wasn't cut and dry like it was portrayed in the media by the U.S. It's interesting because, you know, if you were just a small little betting site, you might have got attacked.

But, you know, I think I read 7.1.7. $1.3 billion in online bets in 2005. Yeah. Like that is, that's a hard number to even comprehend. And that's probably why the U.S. is like, well, they want a piece of that. They can't have, they can't have that leaving the country, I assume. Well, under international law, in fact, I was within my rights to be doing that. But, you know, like I said, it worked itself out in a satisfactory way.

Do you miss the Bodog days? I do. but I don't think I could do them now. I mean, those are, those was a lot of energy. I like the stuff I'm working on now. So I'm pretty happy where I am now. What do you mean a lot of energy? I was just like literally like

like being on a never-ending treadmill. It just was go, go, go, and it was all the operation stuff. And then we started doing all the promotions, all the celebrity events in the United States, Europe, down in Latin America. It was just non-stop. What were some of the celebrity events you did? We did celebrity events.

events in L.A. with the Lakers. We did ones in New York and Vegas, lots of stuff in Vegas, Phoenix. When you talk about the Lakers specifically, like you just mean at a game you did something or you had like a Yeah, we did a lot of stuff with the Lakers and I actually did stuff. I did presentations, charity presentations, center of center court in Lakers games. And then we did a inner city youth charity nights, Jerry Bust, the previous owner and myself. And honestly, I did so much stuff like that at that time. I probably can't even remember it all. So it was like, that's crazy.

Yeah, it was constant. I threw a birthday party for Jack O'Neill and Phoenix after one of his games. Mike Tyson came to that. How was that? You're sitting there and there's Shaquille O'Neal and Mike Tyson, where you're just like, how did I get to this point? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there was surreal moments.

And Bruce Willis came to my party in New York because, yeah, it was, it was just because. You say there were some surreal moments. What was one of the surreal moments that you put your finger on back in the day? It's hard to really remember them, but there was those moments where you just go, wow. But then the majority of it just started to blend together and become just, oh, yeah, well, this is just normal. So then every now and then you go, wow, this isn't really normal. And then you get back, head down, get working on your stuff, and then it's all kind of normal again. and so what you mentioned charity events and you've mentioned a couple times and it sounds like

that's become a strong thing for you what are what are some things you're doing there and and i assume that doesn't get as much publicity as other things so what are some things you've done um that side of the coin well uh i do a lot of charity much mostly in Antigua now, it's because this is where I live. And helping with education for people from lower income brackets, sponsoring athletes. I sponsor their football club, or pardon me, I sponsor scholarships for football players to play,

to get scholarship up in the US. And the local basketball team, and I bought the hyperbaric chamber here. And since the pandemic, I've been doing a lot of stuff because Antigua needs help. So I airlifted a whole plane load of PPE, personal protective equipment from in here for the hospital. And I'm the major sponsor of the food program

for all the people that have lost their jobs that were tied to tourism that just disappeared. And yeah, I'm sponsoring building some houses from Hurricane Relief in the Sister Island of Barbuda with Prince Charles actually, him and I are partnering on that. So, yeah, I'm just trying to do my part here in Antigua. Well, I'm watching the time closely because I know time is the going currency for everyone.

So I've had you on for roughly half an hour. Do I have you for a couple more minutes, or is it time to... I will give you a few more minutes, but I do have to go because if you can believe it, I actually am doing another interview in Saskatchewan with somebody named Charleston Hughes. Really? Really? How is it that you got two Saskatchewan interviews on the same day? And I haven't done one of these in 10 years, I bet, with anybody from Saskatchewan. So, yeah, well, and organized it, so I actually don't know the details.

But yeah, I have two with Saskatchewan in the same day. Geez, small world. Yeah. I don't know. They showed up in my calendar. Fair. Well, we'll get right to the final five, then. That way I can get you on your way and I don't have to hold you up. It's just a crewmaster final five, five quick questions, long or short as you want to go on them and I'll get you on your way. So the first one is, is there something that you have left on your bucket list? Because I mean, you're a guy who's had basically whatever he wants for a very long time.

Is there something that eludes you that you'd like to finish off? Yeah, I've always been a big fan of building stuff. I've like built and designed a lot of my own homes. So, and I've mostly been a tech startup or tech investor, most of my professional career. And real estate's kind of been an afterthought where I just indulge myself a little bit by designing homes or investing in God, peace of real estate. But I actually like being a real estate developer. So I'm actually working right now here in Antigua on some plans to, and it was actually, I'll give the prime minister and the people of Antigua sort of like a little bit of credit for pushing me in this direction. Now the pandemic has created such as much economic problems that I was getting pressure from various sources here to do some investment here and create some construction jobs.

But so I started down that road and I'm kind of actually enjoying myself. So I kind of feel like there's kind of a new chapter coming here. So hope they enjoyed as much as I think I will. Oh, cool. Another thing that you've been heavily involved with is, and this is question number two is Bitcoin. Your social media is all about Bitcoin. What is it about Bitcoin that has you hooked in? Or is that a long question?

No, no. You know, I was there at the creation of the online gaming industry. And now I'm creating another industry. So it kind of fits with my background. And the industry that I'm creating, though, isn't using cryptocurrencies because Bitcoin has originally designed, which is what I'm involved with, which is the original protocol. It's not a cryptocurrency, it's actually a way of valuing data. And the Metanet, which is a version of Bitcoin that's designed to sit on top of the Internet,

will allow us to do everything that the Internet currently does, but by assigning value and microtransaction value to all data. And this creates amazing opportunities for enterprise solutions for problems that have massive scale and that doesn't exist with any of the cryptocurrency because they don't scale. So what I'm trying to do is educate people on the superpowers of the original Bitcoin protocol and the real world problems it can solve. And that's what gets me motivated right now. So I'm really having a lot of fun with that, but there's just so much misinformation out there that it's really a tough slug because so many people are confused. And the people in these other protocol

camps, for whatever reason, they can't do what we do, but the same thing, time they're treating us like we're a threat when we're not we're we're we don't compete it at any level really because the stuff we do is just so distinct so so you foresee a day though when when that takes over uh the currency of the world it doesn't have to to be successful what it will do is take over the internet and it will allow us the technology could still be valued denominated in fiat fiat currencies could still exist but the underlying technology managing it all and how we all do things on the internet will all have a Bitcoin layer

on top of it called the Metanet. I do believe the Metanet is going to be as ubiquitous in a few years as the Internet is today and in fact it's going to bury the Internet and so or possibly we will still call it the Internet but really it'll be the Metanet. I don't know but it's going to be there between us and the internet and we're going to be using the Metonet like we use the Internet today except with a bunch of superpowers. As a consumer, as a just a person who hops on, are you going to notice, do you think you're going to have like noticeable changes then?

Like, or is it going to just feel exactly like how it feels today? You know, but one of the things that's got to happen is it's got to get a lot more user-friendly and that's going to happen. If you remember the early days of the internet, which I do, because I was, the internet was hard to use too. And then Mosaic came along and all of a sudden it got simpler and then, you know, progress from there. And that's happening very quickly with Metonet applications as well.

But this will open up a whole bunch of new types of things that you can do that can't exist right now. And so when you, you know, 10 years from now, when you're in that world, then you look back, you're going to be like, well, I can't believe you didn't be able to be before. You couldn't do this thing. When you say you couldn't do this thing, what do you mean? Well, what's something that we can't do on the internet? Do not exist in the world today except for on the protocol that I'm working with. You cannot pay one-tenth of a penny to do something on the internet. the internet. There's no payment mechanism that scales to include every transaction in the

universe, like massively scales, almost infinitely scales, that at the same time allows you to do frictionless micropayments. The only technology in the world can do that is the one that I'm involved with. That opens up a whole bunch of different possibilities. You can put a value to every speck of data that ever gets passed around. No more advertisers because your paying advertising model disappears. That's what I'm working on. Oh, that's got to hurt the old brain. So you're saying that whatever data you use on the internet would cost you a fraction of a penny or a fraction of whatever it is.

You can monetize it all. Right now you're paying, you're giving people like Facebook all your data and then they give you something that. make you seem like it's free, but really they're abusing your private data. In the future, you can just use microtransactions to control your own data and still get the same service that you're getting from Facebook without having to give up data unless you're selling it. We can sell it to them and they can give you money for it. And then you can give you money for it.

Or you could decide to keep all your data and just pay using micro payments. You can just pay for what little things you do, pay as you go. And there's only one technology in the world that can do that right now. that's Bitcoin SV, BSD. Interesting. Well, I'll be very interested to see where that goes. That is something new. I've never heard that before. Yeah. Well, yeah, a lot of people are distracted by all this cryptocurrency nonsense that's out there, which is all going to disappear over time.

Here's the question. The next one is I enjoy sitting down with people, obviously. I enjoy sitting down with people that are successful. henceforth you coming on from having ties to this area. Who's one person if you could sit down with tomorrow you'd like to sit down and have a coffee, a beer, a tequila, whatever is your fancy? That's a tough question. I mean, when I was younger, I used to always say Richard Branson was a guy that I'd like to meet, but I assume that fairly soon, given how much business I do in London,

and the way our spheres of industry overlap, that at some point I'm actually going to meet the guy on its own. But I used to have a lot of respect to Richard Branson because of his branding and marketing skills, which I abhorred from actually in my younger years. But I don't really have anybody on that list right now anymore. I kind of met a lot of people that I kind of looked up to over the years. Who's one of the guys you met that you looked up to? Bruce Willis.

I told you he came to my party. That was pretty cool. Bruce Willis. What are you guys I have to say? He's just a calm guy. I've always appreciated his movies, so I thought that was kind of fun. And he lived up to the building. He was actually a pretty cool guy. Some of the celebrities I met were kind of not the same person as you'd expect they'd be in real life. But he was kind of kind of his match his movie character a little bit persona. Oh, sorry. Nope.

Yeah. So magic. Jake Johnson was another guy that was pretty inspiring to meet because it was after he'd been diagnosed with AIDS. And at the time, it was supposed to be a death sentence and how positive he was and stuff. So there's a lot of cool people. Kobe Bryant, it's a pretty cool guy to meet. He looks a lot bigger in real life than he does out in the basketball court with all those giants out there. I can tell you that. Yeah, well, all those guys in the NBA are pretty big now, aren't they?

Certainly are. what's one bo-dog event that you never got to have happen or idea once one thing you're like I wish we could have pulled this off but it never went because I mean you did man I just listen I just watched chale son and talk about uh bow dog fights and I until he talked about I was like oh yeah I remember that yeah uh I honestly don't think that there was any big ticket item I mean we we when we were rolling there when we had ideas we kind of have experimented and dabbled with a lot of stuff. So we kind of, you know, stuff that I thought was going to be fun, we just kind of did it.

So there wasn't really any one thing that I wish I would have done. I mean, we started conferences. I still do conferences now in cryptocurrency or in Bitcoin space, but we started with the Bodod conferences. You know, I did my branded fight stuff. I did my branded poker stuff. I even did a bodok branded like Battle the Bands show series. So yeah, we did a lot of stuff.

Had Snoop Dog as a highlighter for my Poker for the Troops TV special in Hawaii. That was kind of fun. I sometimes forget all the stuff that I've done. Well, you've been a busy man. I thank you for your time of sitting down with me and chatting. All the best in the future. Okay. Cheers. Thanks for having me on.

You bet. Hey, folks. Thanks again for joining us today. If you just stumble on the show and like what you hear, please click subscribe. Remember, every Monday and Wednesday a new guest will be sitting down to share their story. The Sean Newman podcast is available for free on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and wherever else you find your podcast fix. Until next time.

Hey, folks, a few of you are starting to catch on of this. I'm starting to have a little bit of fun. I love all to talk about who's 100. So if you are new to sticking on this long, what we're doing is we're playing a little game here. and in order to participate, here's what you got to do. Head to social media, tag the podcast, and the hashtag who's 100. I'm talking about W-H-O-S-100 and with your guess for 100. So whoever you think I'm about to have on here in a few weeks,

give me the guess who you think it is. It doesn't matter if you're right. Just by putting in a guess, you get entered. For each post, whether it is on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, chat. I'm even accepting if you go to the website and email it to me. If you text me it, I'll toss you in. So who your guest is, hashtag who's 100. And the winner of the draw will get a Sandy Beach round of golf for four and two carts and a $200 gift card to factory sports. And your hint for this Monday is that he has been on in some form or shape.

on a nationally broadcasted, on a national broadcast. I don't know why he said nationally broadcasting. He's been on a national broadcast, whether he's playing, getting interviewed, doing the interview, singing a national anthem, somewhere along the line, he's been on a national broadcast. So I hope your week is fantastic. I look forward to seeing you guys again Wednesday.

Until then. Thank you.