He made $100m betting on the NBA… here’s how

this was the biggest greatest edge in the history of gambling edges i can promise you but i've never uttered this in public to anyone ever before you want nuke it yeah look nuke it i feel like i could rude world to i know i could be what i want to from at all in in like a day's all alright soul less travel so we gotta tell your story because your story is you basically did what me and probably fifty percent of other young guys wanted to do in their life it's like oh what if i could take a few thousand dollars find an edge beat the house in vegas and turn a few thousand dollars into millions of dollars tens of millions dollars and ultimately i believe over hundreds of millions of dollars not by counting cards in blackjack first by you know sports betting and then you get recruited by mark cuban to go work for an nba team at one point you now own your own soccer club so you've had this a really cool life and career you're like a comic book character yeah you're like your man cave came to life you know it like it work so that's dope but you know of course no stories perfect you know there's ups and downs and it's not all not like you planned it out this way but what we like most on this podcast this podcast mostly it business podcast so somebody comes on and they tell us about their company or their investments or whatever and but we what we like most is people who play their own game what i like about you is you play your own game you're pretty independent thinker and so i wanna kind of walk through the story so you know what i'll call chapter one is stumbling into gambling and and and find figuring out how to have that edge can you tell a little bit about that story because i i think i know a little bit it but i know sam you don't know any of that story right like how he how he first got and had made a name for himself doing this no yeah i mean i grew up around gambling my dad was i used the term unsuccessful gambler some people might refer to as degenerate he was he he was someone who gamble a lot unsuccessfully and you know had a lot of it caused a lot of problems in our family not the sugar code goes bad but i grew up around the horse race racetrack and i grew up around watching football nfl football on sunday basically trying to like help my dad make picks what city i up in winnipeg manitoba canada so i was at the boy downs race racetrack from i guess it was every saturday sunday wednesday for most of my teenage years so i would say twelve to sixteen seventeen eighteen and so yeah just kinda was around that's how i kinda and i i i was i always thought it was rather interesting i also saw like firstly i didn't realize when i was younger was just how it would compose near impossible to beat the horses just because of the takeout the vegas is so high like thirty thirty six percent they gotta pay for everything stable the horse approvals you know all of it but i just thought well these people don't know what they're doing like they're you know like they they have no process they don't know what's happening there's they're very emotional like i grew i'm a greek family so you would hear these people like they just were not in control of their emotions in anyway and they would be upset when they win and they be something they lose they would be arguing with each other they'd having them i'm very low key so to me i'm it was very different for me so that's why i got started and then at some point after i after i graduated from high school i went to vegas with my dad he was there and i went there for like a month or so he was there gambling like like there my dad was if it was daylight hours and he had money in his pocket he was gambling again what was what was his occupation he was he can't he was a a first generator he he moved to canada when he was he's got a great i him on the show he's not a great story he moved to canada when he was like twenty years old didn't speak a lick of english became a dishwasher kentucky fried chicken and just worked his ass off and so he moved this way up from dishwasher to restaurant to finally getting involved in real estate somehow by some way owning a commercial he was a he had strip malls all over winnipeg so he's an entrepreneur take time entrepreneur yes and when you go to vegas you're not twenty one right you just graduated from high school so what do you do with your dad you're in a casino you can't really i've park myself in the sports book and hope that nobody else they don't idea in the sports book yeah they're there post to you but they don't like you're just in the sports so you're just sitting there you know you're and i just watched basketball say the first time i really ever watched nba basketball to that extent i was previous i was watching a lot of hockey and canadian football and yeah my dad would give me a little bit of money not a lot and i would watch basketball and i would sit there from four pm pacific to ten pm eleven pm pacific and just watch the games on these giant tvs and then i started to really enjoy the routine of watching the west coast games so i started like kind of pay attention more to the west coast team i was like chris webber worked a year when he played for a golden state and they had a run t i think it was before that and so yeah that's what i think were you were you losing money at first what was going i just start making money i didn't i didn't really win i wasn't losing a lot though like i i i wasn't i had okay opinion by the end but yeah i was losing of course like i was probably flipping coins and paying big so i was like probably fifty fifty roughly but needed you know it was paying i needed to win eleven to ten i eleven out of every ten so it wasn't bad it wasn't like i was getting my ass handed to me or anything but then i realized i really like this and i wanna get good at it and i just thought about what do i what does that entail what do i have to do to get good at it and so i just want to work and just start taping games to start reading a lot of newspaper articles on the internet when you're when you're saying you're learning to get good at it how much of it is a human side where you're like learning human emotions of like the players and leadership and things like that like the story versus statistics yeah back then there was not a lot of good statistics there was just the there's just something called the box score which is just not very it's not very illustrative of the game so it was almost that and a little bit of database work in terms of like just getting aggregates from teams in certain situations i also tried to like really also understand the market more i think but in other words the opening lines with cola i the where i got to be really good when i was in vegas around that time i was seeing the sharp that would line up at the start casino in the morning they had something called the lottery so the lines would be posted in the morning and then every sharp would be able to get make a full limit bet down in the morning and they'd have to do a lottery to see it'll could go first and then they make a bet and then the book would decide to adjust so i started just like looking to like okay who are the actual sharp where are the guys would seem like they're moving money for other people what are they betting so you're treating it like a job you must have been getting there early then what time is that yeah i mean i mean saw a lot of work it's not manual labor i'm not like laying bricks are like riding and top the back but bro ass like fred flint stone breaking rocks but yeah work and so did you go ask them so to learn from them or are you're just watching them from a afar and figuring it out yourself i just wouldn't wanted to see like okay this guy made a bet the lined in move that's interesting then you see him back like the next day and the next day and then and then you see the by the way when wouldn't just be one you'd see like now at four o'clock post time the lines had move even more so it's like okay this this line moved a lot there wasn't an injury that i bet it early so it's just like little things just pat like i think if i have one skill in life aside from being not not really caring what other people who i don't know think about me i think and just being confident that i think it's like maybe like a little bit of pattern recognition i think i'm decent at that i like i i can see patterns and i'm also able to identify like oh was that an actual pattern or was i just fooling myself with randomness there did you have a role model like was there you know as a as like a as like an eighteen or nineteen year old are you thinking to yourself you know there are other people who have gotten super rich doing this i think i can do it or were you like there's some people who make an okay living doing this i think i can do it or you're like i don't think about next year just this is what i'm enjoying today when you're nineteen you don't really think like that i don't like in terms of like oh i wanna make i've always been someone who's always like been very confident that i was going to be successful i would recite things in my head when i was a kid like i'm gonna be millionaire i'm i'm just i would just do that and so at that age i think i was just kind of i wasn't sure how i was gonna make it i just knew i was gonna make it like i went through life with this like a rational confidence i think was there a definition of making it was it like ten million dollars by the time i'm twenty five yeah i think when i was pre planting i i would had like i was listening like tony robbins books and reading them like listening to him at night and reading him in the morning and i think yeah i had like ten things that i wanted and and yeah i think it was ten million before the age of of thirty i think back in that was a lot of money now you can just spin up a meme coin and and you're they could buy that app by noon the back o'clock what was the first profitable pattern you figured out the one that really really kind football first profit my first my my first bit of money was canadian football not like soccer but actual like football three down football there's a lot of things going on then there was they expanded into america at that time and so you had some interest for whatever reason in las vegas the book canadian football games are like offshore markets and so and the canadian teams had to abide by different rules in the american teams so that was part of it you had to have certain amount of canadians on your roster that were starting american teams didn't didn't have that the canadian stadiums were all compliant to canadian football lead rules american stadiums did not so so some of the end zones like they exchange rules are like the enzo are twenty yards deep but in some stadiums in america they didn't have that luxury so they were like squared off at the back and so those gains are lower scoring that was a big part of it and i just got to be really good at knowing a lot about canadian football in which teams were sharp we're doing innovative things so canadian football so can you give us a sense of the the kind of the journey so you start with a rough roughly what bank roll and then how long did it take you to get to your first million and then at one point i think you were betting like a million dollars a day or it maybe even more than that's ten million a day i mean i was betting a lot i mean i think like so it's a long story so i think the most it got to be i was sky cap at winnipeg international airport that's when things really took off me and don't think anyone's ever said that before in their life that they off whoa what is the sky the dudes are i was like the first white sky cap hired at the winnipeg pick i they do sit courts sit curb side and carry people's luggage and check their luggage in in the us they check the but in in canada that's not allowed because the transport can't so you would just carry people's luggage so i like very big boy we don't like being called bag boys yeah so you carrying people's luggage or or or in canada big thing in the winter was snow birds who are fleeing winnipeg to go move the to florida for the winter and they're in wheelchairs and you're just like wheel them through customs and immigration and making sure they're back you're making wallet like what per hour roughly i was making a lot so i started out as was a sky cap in the summertime i was printing money and i was making i started out was a sky cap i realized that the saturday sunday ships were very profitable because we had american fishing travel that were people coming in on these boats and made up to take a charter plane to go fishing somewhere in northern canada and those days you're making four or five hundred dollars and a eight hour shift easy wow and so i basically went to the boss come like i really wanna work the saturday and sunday shift what do gotta do to make it he's like no we gotta spread those around it's not fair and the other dudes weren't making any money they he'd make like eighty dollars so i just started paying them for saturday he start paying on like eighty bucks to work on saturday sunday and then he got the owner got went knew that and he got upset and so then he started working the saturdays on sundays days and figure why he wasn't making money that i was but i was what were you doing you're like complimenting these folks and just getting tipped i was just like you know i this i was doing things like getting them to go with the strip clubs when the four hours that they're getting them cuban cigars because cuban scars are legal and you and know when they land and like making sure they had like cuban cigars and charging them like three times the value for that there's was like little things like yeah just being i was being intense i was a concierge of the winnipeg take a national airport but anyways i ended up taking over the company from him i just undercut his contracts and so there was actually at the way figure actually ashley i making so that's a that's an easy leap right bag boy to taking like it's like i was walking his office offense and you're like hey guy move they were i i was like i was like i went to him and i was like like i've already got north it was northwest airlines now delta i guess but it was northwest i was like hey i've already i got them to agree to the contract everyone wants to work for me you can just i can give you some money and you can just move on or i can just undercut you the money i'm gonna give you i'm gonna say you we can it's a win win and he was like nope don't wanna do that whatever so i ended up doing that ended up undercut him how old are you i was twenty two twenty three time it's actually a crazy story so i was making so much money at winnipeg pay international pros sky cap and gambling that mostly sky cap that at the time eric there was actually like a bunch of there was there was some cocaine i was found in air canada i had like a past wherever was a sky cap and there was like a situation where some drugs were found like big amount of drugs from like and one of the us customs and immigration employees who i would became friends with said like hey you got they think you're like we we know what you're doing here is a sky cap and i know you but you're like suspect number one like just so you know like like you they don't understand why you have us up like a brand new cadillac what not brand new but like you're driving a cadillac like some gangster and you're walking ralph with w of cash like i had lots of cash from the salt tips and so i was like what and he's like yeah like it's they were laughing i thought it was funny they realized of course it had nothing to do with it but you can google this so it's it actually happened there's was like some kind of thing that happened in winnipeg at the time where they found something so what was your what was your income at the age of twenty two twenty three twenty four doing all this like fifty or sixty thousand a summer easily i was i know i was i was living with my my mom and my brought my older brother we were like paying my parents rent for a while after after my dad kinda had like a down slope on the you know the during the nineteen eighty seven whatever the interest rates went up strip all business wasn't so good anymore especially when you're borrowing money to at at at at floating rates to build these strip malls so yeah that was about what i i i had was making at the time so you're been rich since you're twenty three years old oh i don't think so because i've been spending you know like i wasn't exactly saving like money was going i was like going again every night i was spending the money it was come taking trips of as i was doing stuff but yeah i was i had to pay for my school also i to pay my university so i was paying for my university i was supporting my parents so i wasn't rich i just worked hard i'll also i also while was working with ky i also worked as a video store at rogers video i was working forty hours a week at rogers video in the summer sky up in the morning and rogers video which is like a canadian blockbuster in the evening so had to work i think i guess you're more of a hustle than i i thought because you i guess i got know the public perception is you're like kind of just a sharp period it's all it's all mental you sit in the room you have your models and then you made bets and the money comes in i i didn't know at least some of these stories about you kinda hustling as the the sky cap and figuring out how to like run your own operation down there so that's pretty cool when did like i don't know understand if you've heard these stories but i guess a couple of your famous betting stories are i guess you went all in at one point on the lakers to win the championship and like sixty to one off yeah six and a half to learn roughly what how much is all in and what and what eight and the timeline it was like eighty seven thousand canadian give or take and and that was all your money yeah but you could go buy i you know i looked at it like okay it was all my money now it's like october fishing each you know fishing season just ended up winnipeg take international airport i've already paid for my tuition at the university of manitoba to get my useless philosophy degree i'm leaving my brother's basement worst case i lose this bet and i just go back to sky capping and just make half of that or two thirds of that back again so yeah i made the vet wasn't a sharp bet by any stretch like looking back it wasn't sharp but it felt sharp to me at the time you know you're have a your your risk model hasn't developed your amygdala whatever hasn't fully developed to you i age to really understand if you're making good decisions so did he win yeah anyone yeah sam if you heard the billboard quote about risk no what's he say the the comedian and he here's is great line about risk you know being a comedian is like it's risky at many levels right you're probably not gonna be a successful famous millionaire traveling touring comedian but on top of that just stepping on the stages of risk you're gonna get humiliated most of the time when you you're not that funny it he goes they were somebody asked him they were like you know did how was it taking that risk the take taken taken on that risk take a leap of faith and he goes i didn't see it as a risk he was the best thing that ever happened to me was like i'm kinda dumb but you know the the one sparked thing i realized early on was the risk was waking up in a in a king size bed when i'm forty years old turning over to a woman that i don't love anymore that i'm married because we thought it was the right thing to do dread this job i have to go to in six hours and he's like that became the risk in my head was waking up like that and in compare he goes chasing your dream there's no risk at all he goes yeah because there's no there's no risk in chasing your dream because you're doing the thing you wanna do and versus living this life that you don't wanna live just to play and safe that seemed like a bigger risk definitely relate to that i mean i don't know if any of you guys had the pleasure of spending a winter in winnipeg but it's not pleasant so one of the other stories then that's pretty sweet is he i guess at one point like in vegas you can bet on the the full game which is what most people do like me i'm a casual i go in i just bet on the over under maybe on the the the final score and what he realized was like the that you could also bet on the first half only which was like not as common of a bet but the way that vegas is doing is it would take the full score which they're pretty accurate at predicting and then for the halftime times square they were just cut in half divided by two roughly make the first half a little bit higher scoring in general i could tell you guys i haven't told this i tell this story in a way that makes it so the edge still lives on for the people that are still betting but i don't wanna do new guys you guys caught me on okay this is this will maybe go viral i don't know probably fuck up a lot of people's money but i think i think that i people most people are figure it out by now but i've never uttered this in public to anyone ever before true story okay the away team gets to choose which basket it wants to shoot on oriented so you have teams who play back then i would say thirty teams in the nda twenty eight of them twenty seven of them when they're on the road would always want their offense shooting in front of their own bench and they would want their defense shooting in front of their bench in the second half therefore the first half are higher scoring the second half start lower scoring you've got the bench in front of you you can park out instructions this and that three coaches god bless them i wouldn't be here without outcome decided that they wanted to flip it and they wanted to have the defense in front of them in the first half and the second half they want to randomize the game and make the second half higher scoring so you would literally like eddie jordan it was jerry sloan was the king of this he was the first original guy from utah and so this was the biggest greatest edge in the history of gambling edges i can promise you you would have situations where the total would be higher in the first half lower in the second half and the team would literally score on average a hundred and six points in the first half and eighty seven or something like this or remind whatever it was back then in the second half you also have the advantage of foul at the end of games which will also make the score in the second half higher scoring and over overtime which is a nice little bonus too working in your favor so the second half over was like you'd have teams playing doing this forty one times a year and they would go nine overs in the first half thirty whatever thirty two thirty three with some pushes in the second half and you could just print money making this bet and that's what i did and i figured that out very very quickly i actually didn't figure out that quickly to be honest i'm not as bright as i think i'm because it took me a long time to figure out what the fuck was happening i just knew these teams had situations where on the road their games were much lower scoring in the first half than they were when they played at home and i thought while they're they're trying to slow the game down it's this and that but really it's just you're more efficient when your offense is in front of your bench because the other team's defense can't get set and you can barcode on it it seems like a clear pattern right like you only need a season of games to understand that pattern you don't know that teams are doing this not like they say hey the mavericks are shooting in front of their like they're the one team nobody's paying attention to this nobody knows that a team that that that that back end it was you it was a perfect situation because it was three to four teams a year they were all shit teams it was am mi i heyday it was the utah jazz it was a shit team the wash wizards with eddie jordan shit team byron scott new jersey nets shit team and then you had a few teams like the minnesota timber did it some games and not other games which is the dream scenario nowadays it's probably screwing these gambler because when that happens you've so so that was i was it that's i made all my a lot of my money and you could i i i if i had a bank rule of this is not responsible please don't follow this that about but i had banker of like two hundred and fifty k because i was betting on credit you settled at the end of the week i'd have a situation where if i somehow lost all my bets i'd be like two or three million dollars in debt but it didn't matter because i knew my edge was so big that i was betting and i somehow partnered up with some big book big big book maker slash alleged mafia guy in montreal which is another story who was able to get me down for a lot of money and he just basically i gave him the bets i told him i wanted to bet he would go bet them for him he'd collect he'd give me the money i'd win that was out so that's the edge that's the whole edge and i'm not sure this is it say that i have so many questions but it it you know i'm a new thoughts always had like friends who i've told this to are like can you please share out my podcast with me i'm like i feel for the people we're still grinding out a living doing this but you know what it's a new day tariffs are here this is my tariffs to a gambling community i'm i'm a i'm i'm a new fan of yours you know sean was like we gotta talk to this guy so i'm a new fan so i went and read everything i could in the past week can you give some type of can you can you give me a n some type of scale as to your winning like are we talking like hundreds of millions of dollars and winning or whatever you're comfortable with yeah no i mean look i i made between ten million to twelve million dollars year gambling for ten to fifteen years minimum i'm like so we're top nine nine figures in oh that's spent a lot like i didn't just always i was that was like my net win you know i'm not i'm talking about local i won but i lost i mean like i lived the pretty good life like i here my parents i did other things but i profit a lot gambling on basketball for sure like a bad year from me on the n nba i think was like six or seven million averages probably eight and in the early heyday i made more money then i yeah then but i was also i made some mistakes afterwards but yeah what you your personal life are you living a life of twenty eight year old rich guy of like i mean are you spending seven figures a year in personal like no no no no that crazy i other biz i tried like other business things i like you know i helped out some family i bought it like a profitable in in montreal i bought you know some stuff from my i yeah i mean you're not you're not you kind of over play you're you're it doesn't seem like you're being irresponsible no i was just like i just think bike is short and what's the point how money people spend it so but i don't spend it i got on experience i been on experiences like i'm not a flashing guy i don't drive a fancy car i don't wear julie i've never had a watch i've never had any expensive you know i'm pretty basic in my clothing just like a lot of nba players like end up going broke right if nfl players end up going broken they're like later career one of the crazy things about like i grew up idol analyzing phil he had a lot of poker guys basically and once i got into the world of business and investing like okay this was kind of like what real wealth looks like and i realized that a lot of the guys who were really great poker players really great gambler that you thought were really great gambler like i don't think they were as successful like businesses as i thought like you know i i don't don't think they made as much in their peak and i think they lost a lot along the way where they had huge downs somewhere along the way as far as you know are you the most like did you do the best are you the most successful sports better that you know or words are people better than you that that made more than you billy walters is very i mean billy walters had the biggest like my edge was i like scrap for my edge because but billy walters had the first computer program when like they were using giant like this old west house machines to feed the information on those giant cards for computer programming to and they had like a computer program when the vegas odds makers would just sit there and like sit around a taylor i think the line should be seven and half what do you think jack and i don't think it should be around eight a half and then like billy walters computer guys like no it's like four point three is the right a price on this game so they had like the best edge ever he made a lot of money super successful and billy walters he i think i saw a sixty minute special on him is he the he's a he's a southern guy who yeah i i read i read about him alright you know i saw a sixty minute and he was exactly like i thought he was going to be like he seemed like a fast talking in wheel dealing no alone no not a fast talker he opposite built the number one thing billy walters had going for him is he's from the south and if you're a gambler one of the greatest things you can have going for you is people thinking you're not as intelligent i mean and i guess i should have said fast talking i guess i mean like charming charming oh yes yeah no but he'd like why don't i like to bake a bed if i could i mean i like almost game but the thing about billy is like people underestimated how sharp was early on but he's as sharp as they come did you have any you know like in the movies where it's like at some point the casino is like facial recognition they're like don't let this guy bet anymore know tay you're in the back it bruised you up a little bit like did you ever run into problems with winning too much so the way sports betting works you're not really betting in the casino you're betting with like back then when i was at my heyday you were betting with literal like street people so that had like corner book making operations casinos are for losers and people who can't win and if you win they'll just not let you bet anymore and so so you need to find a way to bet on credit through like you need to find someone who's gonna play a game of telephone with you who's gonna take your bets and then maybe bet more later or thinks you're a loser like or or you find a suck like my big business like nobody nobody knew who i was nobody knew i was winning money betting because i was never the guy making the bets i'd always find it was called a beard who would make my bets for me and so i've had numbers of like numerous beards throughout the years who were making my bets for me and they were there you know either they were really successful business people or degenerate gambler or like hollywood people or like for may weather or who's a beard for like half an afternoon for me how did how did that go yeah he just wasn't he wasn't it was too who's too difficult to work with i mean he's got so much money and he's just like impulsive no i could even been hitting the head for like most of his life like you know he's how much how much i just piggy back off your bets right he's a huge banker couldn't he have just piggy piggyback off your bet you're telling him to go he was moving i think floyd was already moving for someone else whether it was billy walters or someone like for sure someone got into floyd and floyd making those bets like nobody posts their bets on instagram for millions and millions of dollars unless there's an angle whether they're sponsored by the casino are there so yeah i think he was moving money for someone but someone entered i i sat next to my miami heat playoff game and he like the my friend who was sitting next to me he got like took the liking to her and so they became friends and so we somehow had a situation where for an afternoon him and the guy his biz his business guy and i were talking and floyd was gonna make the bets but it just didn't work like i told my one to bet one game and they said no we like the other side and i was like that's cool but can you please go bet this one for me and they're like no we don't wanna do that like you we wanna bet the other side and i was like okay well then just we'll just bet against each other you bet that side all bet this side and they're like no but you always win we can't do that and i was just like hey i'm i can't deal with this anymore so that was it is the motivation on all this getting rich or is it getting a rush is it an intellectual challenge what's the like what's what's the motivation not a rush no the rush is like not not a rush guy it's i think it's the intellectual challenge also i i've realized as i've gotten older that i i take a pride and putting myself in really really stressful situations and seeing how well i perform like that's like my probably a weakness of mind is i'll put myself in these really stressful situations without knowing it but i'll do that what's an example of that like being all in bitcoin since two thousand and thirteen like for a hundred and sixty to a hundred and seventy percent of your net worth at various different points in time a hundred and sixty so you borrowed yeah so betting on sports and making money was challenging and in terms of your winning money like i was in canada at the time i was betting all over the world and having to receive money from people all over the world and so my bank accounts were constantly getting closed even in canada i was like i'm a professional gambler this is what i do i pay my taxes as a professional gambler one of the few dummies in canada who actually because in canada tax gambling is it's considered non taxable i was like one of the few people who actually paid tax on their gambling winning in canada because i was considered an expert but i didn't have to but i did that probably stupid on my park but but yeah so just that and then seeing how easy it was to move money with bitcoin and then and then the other part it was later on in life i left canada after i got tired of paying taxes in canada and i moved to monaco and that entire principal is built on minimizing your tax exposure it's it's you know we're you're looking at flats that are like the current places in monaco now that just got built are eighty five ninety million dollars for a three thousand square foot condos it's the most expensive real estate in the world and the only reason it's that expensive is because there's a limited amount of land and everyone lives there because a tax is zero zero tax and so my point is is that that whole that's like a swiss bank account move people are willing but whereas there's a lot of people whether they're whereas bitcoin you can you can you don't have to invest in monica real estate to hedge you can have your money in your pocket you don't have to worry about a bank you can move money intermediate without any intermediate on any permission even the bank accounts i had whether they'd be in monaco or canada they'd always been like why you send this money where is it going why you get it and now it's even worse so that was part of it i like the i like the math behind it it made sense to me as a math guy yeah i and i'm an independent guy to begin with and so i didn't really click for me until later on i heard about it maybe five or six times support it finally clicked that finally clicked because i was betting with someone in china who had owed who had had a really difficult time in paying me money also i was living in vancouver before i moved to and my entire apartment building was owned by chinese expat who are literally laundering their money in canadian real estate none of them lived in my building the entire building was empty except for six people but the entire building was sold at all of vancouver ever been the vancouver canada it's in it's an entire money laundering operation the real estate is all owned by foreign people trying to escape regimes that are the capital flight so bitcoin just made sense okay i'm gonna go buy a of condo in canada and or i'm gonna buy some bitcoin and put it in my wallet to escape some total tell some regimes some capital taking the ten million gross earnings and just going straight to bitcoin no then i was i was trying to get paid by people who owed me money and so this the first person the first time i ever acquired bitcoin i had a a a gentleman in in fellow i i'm at blank poker got me a bunch of accounts in china bet on india basketball or asia let's say don't know where it was exactly but somewhere and he was like it was two thousand thirteen ish and i was like hey like how are you gonna send me money at some point we had like an h an hsbc account in hong kong and he's like i can send you bitcoin and i was like bitcoin really you guys like bitcoin i think the price was around a hundred and eighty dollars at the time he's like yeah everyone in china loves bitcoin and i was just like like everyone in china loves bitcoin maybe i should love bitcoin too like what is why do they love it in china and he's like length why everyone loves it how great it is and so that was it so i i i bought it then it very quickly went to six hundred and a thousand like very after and then and then it slowly went down to about hundred and fifty after i think bit got hacked after that the next summer but that's when i got involved and it clicked for me instantly when i was all the situations moving to monaco for taxes seeing my all of the real estate in canada being super expensive for native canadians especially in vancouver because of especially people from asia buying real estate and just holding it and not doing anything with it and i just like why would you like what michael sailor now has a really good view on it like why would you ever own real estate you're at the mercy of the government who can change the rules and change the taxes or you could just buy a big bitcoin so that was it basically what what when you're dealing with you know i'm not saying that you're shady or you do ever do anything illegal but when gambling as an outs well as an outsider when i hear about gambling i i know i watched the movie casino and i like i know like i think mafia and whatever yeah when you're owed money and i and i read stories how you're you owed money and you talked about it what what's up with the gambling culture do people actually pay their debts i'll just on a handshake agreement yeah yeah yeah i mean i think i had an advantage i mean just to be clear like i lived in canada gambling was legal i paid my taxes i wasn't doing any illegal some of the people who i'm my my my customers are all breaking the law because they're are book makers so i am not the customer i'm the shark they're the sucker i'm winning the money they know they would think they may think they're they're that i'm the customer but really i'm not so so so for me the hard part was like okay revenue canada wants fifty seven percent of my money as my partner but they're putting all my out of business by making so that that was part of it to answer your question is it's hard to get paid yeah people lose money because i'm betting through intermediaries for the most part i think like part of the deal is you have to guarantee the money customers when you're making the bets and people would go out of their way to guarantee may not because they're afraid of me because why would they be i'm not have never ever done anything to get money other than be like annoying but like if you knew that i was always going to win and if you didn't pay me even you were not gonna get my bets anymore you might go out of pocket to make sure your relationship with me was good knowing that eventually you're gonna make the money back if you're smart enough yeah if you're smart enough if you'd realize why would i suffer for all of those else is gonna win we're gonna win it back next year a go out of pocket we'll figure out a solution that's generally what happened with me that's a good threat though you look i'm gonna call you like at least five or six times to get paid no i didn't even i was pretty bad at it to be honest like the the the way to get paid is to be the most annoying person in that person's life so so i had a i had a famous poker player who's was like really good dude but he was for sure to generate and he owed me money and not not the like this guy eric lin and he talk like he keep you know that's what i was referring to yeah yeah and i would just like i would just like he would i i if he wanna tournament i would like it on a plane and just like be there when they paid him i would just like hand out and just like you just got but you also have to be like kind of like understanding that it's kinda needs to live his life and help also have some money but you know he was a guy who who at the time owned a piece of full tilt so they had all this innovate all this imaginary money they they thought they were all gonna be so rich and so he didn't really worry you know you can literally worry about getting paid because he's thought eventually they'd get paid by full tilt poker but then full tilt poker got shut down so all these guys yeah anyways yeah that's what you do just be annoying what what inspired you to buy the soccer team so like we're like how long did you had that idea before you end up doing it i wanted to buy an nda eighteen and then i worked i saw like the sausage was made and i was like had to nda not for me what do you do by that why not i mean for for one the the the franchise valuations are going up and up and up and up it's a very very very difficult business to buy because you're competing with the richest people in the world who want these assets so it's very difficult and then i just found i started finding the sport not that interesting anymore after seeing like how everything was all i didn't i didn't like i think the the bubble for me kind of ended it because it was during that time when the the league came left which is cool because the league was primarily the big became like almost was like a social cause versus a and i thought that's good for society in some ways if you believe that and but for me it just became too much i just wanted i just wanna sport and i just like sport so around that time i didn't wanna to you know didn't wanna i think people i think where the nba may missed things is i think a lot of people wanted to escape during coronavirus into sport i want okay forget about other people i wanted to escape the shitty the the whatever the riots the burn and whatever i want to escape all that into sport and i'm watching the nba and it's and maybe maybe the the answer isn't for maybe the answer is an escape for for people who are i'm not american but maybe for americans who were living through it and they really believe that that whatever that's cool but for i was just like i wanna watch this like i just just wanna i wanna watch a basketball again i wanna have like a message so yeah just became it became too much i think in some ways it became overwhelming and then also your i was working for the mavericks at the same time and they were in the bubble and i'm hearing the stories from them and you have like african american coaches who are like really upset with what's happening as they should be the players are upset it just became like really draining emotionally in a way that made me really kind of sad and i started watching football more because soccer was the first store sport to start up after covid and so i just got really into it and we already building models to begin with before then i thought you know what i wanna this is new it's exciting it's more mathematical in the sense of it's unsolved it's a lot more there's a lot the game tree is bigger it's more nuanced basketball is pretty simple you got a top five player you put him on the court you surround him with other players but he's the guy like helix looks called helios sent and then you profit and then you trade him for anthony davis and one first parent i don't know but that's it you just find a guy like luca or lebron or joke or whatever and off you go but not that difficult you said we you said we're we're we are building models i think sean and i were talking and he was like this guy guy's is like a lone wolf and well wolf and i don't know the truth and i want you to tell me the truth do you i think you don't have a family i think you're you're and i think that like from an outside perspective it doesn't seem like you have this massive company like hard i'm old lone wolf yeah okay this now i am a lone wolf when you put it that way yeah like i've always been very yeah so i bought i have people who work for me i have people explain my you explain that what what's your what's the of your team look like it's so i have had now my organization not kinda the football team which is completely separate like two hundred and fifty people or something worked for me don't know how many it is it's a long maybe less i don't know account academy players but no i just have like i still do my basketball betting i spend zero time on it it's an automated program but when i first started betting on basketball programmatic with a model when i decided that my method works but it only works if my mindset is good if i wanna have a life and have like emotional relationships with females and have a partnership whatever and i'm upset i'm making bad decisions when i'm gambling it's harder to be like a perfect ar of what's right and what's wrong and what's the right information when you're the input so i wanted to automate me basically and so so yeah i i i hired a couple different quan unsuccessfully they weren't great kept trying and then a friend mine a poker player by the name of well he played poker got named brandon adams was teaching at harvard at the time and i was playing poker with him really really smart guy and he said i have this student that i think you need to talk to he's a genius and he'd be perfect and i met him and that was the guy who basically together we built our simulation models that really took me to the next level which was not the little the halftime thing which i would made a lot of money on this was now full game bets on you know sides totals everything and so hip him and i together built and operation was myself this individual and then one person who basically was two people who were bring the bets in and also making the lineup and then me and my the person the the that the we call them the wiz because he doesn't wanna be nobody he wants to know who he is but he's out there what's up and we had a we had a falling out he doesn't run not falling up but he when i went to go work for the m i basically turned over the business to them and he ran it for a while to enjoy it they didn't do that well i ain't left and then when i quit the halves we started back up again and those was so i did the gambling again not for myself but for the people who worked for me to allow them to make continue to make a lot of money because i've had guys who've worked for me now for over twelve or thirteen years with a gap with a gap appeared mavericks and so they run everything and they do everything dude you're basically running it like a like a small little seat fund sean you know what i mean like a hedge fund i'll get rather and make hedge fund like jump minus you know so you know those guys they measure their success on you know irr or you know annual returns and if if they could get twenty percent thirty percent returns what's a good return annual return for you what's a bad annual return for you what where do you land you know i know what multi family can get you i what private equity can get to you into know what venture can got you it's hard to really quantify because i've never able to bet my entire network like i can't take an outside capital and so like we're i i don't look at as working an annual r r arr or or it's more of a return investment on every bet you're making and so every bet we make a bad year for us was four and a half for four to four and a half percent on every bet we're making a good year is like in the eights and nines and now of course you wanna have as many bets as possible and the lowest profit as possible so you're you want your roi to go down a little bit as your bets go up so it's like you're threading the needle but the game has changed so much now that now we've got like two models that are that are going at all times and we use like a a mix two of them and it's but i say it's automated it's completely automated like zero last four or five years since even before i you even when these guys are running it themselves like nobody's auto don't i think the model's is are wrong like it gets teams wrong for sure and we have a guy who says like yeah we're really off on these oklahoma city totals like we we think they should be higher scoring but they're not we be lower score we think they're higher scoring but they're going under and i'm just like cool we're not making any changes like water and has you know now i i like we said this before i don't pay to too much of sports i think it's fucking insane though that like every sport is basically a gambling thing now like it's like gross like it's i think it's weird but not weird it's gross it's messed up i think it's wrong and but does that make you richer then because you have more retail investors yeah this the amount of i don't even look like last night like i probably lost more money on fart coin yesterday my fart coin holding on paper but i would rate to make an entire year betting nba so i don't i i don't care what we make in the nba i just do it because it's meaningful for the people who work for me and they have a massive profit sharing in it so that's why we do it so well let me just recap with that you said if every bet you know low in four or five percent good nine percent ten percent that means you need to bet like a hundred million dollars of total betting volume totally total dollars bet to make ten million is that correct yeah well you don't need a hundred million to do that because you're doing it every day multiple times over work and so yeah so yeah like that's exactly right yeah so couldn't you have just applied your brain to like buying hvac companies as like private equity and gotten better returns right like you know like i always think about this with like if i hear somebody a pro blackjack player i'm like first of all i don't even know if that's act technically a thing i don't know if blackjack is like a game you can get an in anymore but secondly if you're that good and that's smart couldn't you just applied it to an easier game and made more money like don't you think about that for yourself my dad was great dal i probably would won a different path but unfortunately my dad was my dad was agree who spent this time at with the racetrack so this is what i knew need i what else to say but you have done it you have done it right you buying a team that seems like it could be a a great business move and you did crypto yeah the crypto thing is really the part i think that ga is because i don't have an edge in finance these people have bigger they're smarter like maybe could have honed in on one specific category that i knew very well but again like i try to like i i'm a gambler in the sense that i like gambling games but like the number one edge and poker is playing with players who are worse than you that's just it and so i try to apply that also to my businesses i try to stay away from people that are smarter than me where there's plenty of them in terms of that i'm competing against and so yeah i mean i'm i gonna compete with like no i don't think so i mean maybe but at this point my i think i'm good at what i'm doing i like my quality of life well what do you do with your money now do you like your income or your investments do you have do do any boring stuff i mean i mostly do boring stuff index i be super boring i do super boring stuff every dollar and goes directly into bitcoin that's my boring stuff is that so that's still how how you roll then correct yeah wow every dollar i make betting sports goes into bitcoin has forever i just so you made more money off bitcoin than you have sports betting yeah for sure yeah sure i've done very well with bitcoin it's done very well but yeah what's what's your game with bitcoin is it hold forever is it bitcoin becomes global you know reserve currency like what where does it there's no exit with bitcoin right for you i don't know i wish i could do better michael sailor in nature but i don't know this guy like this guy i feel like his end game is crazy as this guy is i feel like he's kind of he's a sa avant like he's kinda figured what is your end game i know if dollars what am i gonna do with dollars like sorry i'm not they're printing more of it like it's not doesn't seem like it works for me i remember like doing being in covid living in malibu covid and the houses that i've rented had gone up in value like triple like rich people stuff was going becoming more and more expensive as more and more money entered the system so what's my game i don't know protect my wealth i guess maintain my sovereignty that's my game like i just to be clear i don't have it in i like bitcoin but it's it's still i'm not like the pure bitcoin guys like the guys who are like have their own seed and they have it memorized in their head like that's not me my money's is in i it's in the bank it's with a third party it's not smart but i like my quality of life i i i don't wanna have i don't wanna be my own bank like be my own bank was cool before people knew what crypto was now being your own bank is not cool like for me just to be clear like i love bitcoin i love the self sovereignty of it that's the ethos but my money is custody with institutions unfortunately do you own anything like do you own any real estate cars and like items or do you live like yeah dude i you this i feel like i lost these guys guy thinks i'm like some kind of like i'm like an alien who just dropped into the world that has nothing well you the butterfly they fun and watches sports all day sean and i actually both rhett homes and i don't i i i actually don't own a lot of stuff i i like women lights sean does too and we don't actually own houses we were you like to them about so recently i no i i was with you guys i i own any real like i bought real statement when i was younger yeah i didn't i didn't before that i was i just thought like the better move is bitcoin than i'm why am gonna buy this house in now when i can rent and buy bitcoin i sold i also sold all of my assets during the two thousand seventeen dump i own property outside of own property in mexico i had some vacation property on some property europe at a plane sold at all actually had some friends try to schedule an intervention for me because they thought i'd lost my mind when i sold everything to buy more bitcoin at thirty three hundred wow you you sold all your shit to buy the dip that's incredible i that's amazing i got gotta ask you different question what are you into now like we asked you a bunch about the past but like what's the future shit you're really like somebody said you're into bio hacking or you're your something interesting about like owning things and and and kidding just what i meant into bio hacking i'm into yeah i don't know like i think like i'm into it's interesting because i'm i'm i'm i'm i'm really into like analog things like records looks oh i'm i'm you know old games old like pin ball machines yeah being begin i mean before you like detox from phone like a phone phone goes away from handling doing this new i forgot it's call but this new thing that's black and white i'm trying to what's into that i think old box is the new one that that just came out palm palm two i think is what it is it's supposed to be getting shipped but that looks really cool we love those things i use the blank all the time and then there's like daylight which is like another like dumb phones space nice i've used daylight yeah yeah i'm into i'm into like to be honest like during covid i i started getting to like western life i just gonna sound crazy but like i want a ranch yeah and send bought a ranch i bought a ranch doing do wanna do wanna be buddies like i would love to i would i bought a yacht before i was like on the mediterranean cruising and now i'm like now i want a ranch i want courses i want simple life that's what i'm entering what are you doing for bio hacking like what what what's your kind of like what's i guess maybe what are you finding valuable or helpful or or you're saying or better thing yeah i'll i do i do a lot of peptide stuff i kinda grew up and like or i i spent a lot of time i should say in like rich guy la circles for a minute playing poker and all these guys were on like t t and h hd h and all this other stuff and they look great but they weren't necessarily optimizing for living longer so h hd is great you feel awesome on it but you're definitely not living longer taking it t t i think can be good for some people it didn't work for me i tried it it made me irritable so i i do other things to raise my testosterone like i take some rhodes whatever in fun art test and i do lot of squats and kettle bell stuff and so i do quite well with that but what am i taking i'm taking peptides for the most part i think the best thing i've ever done i do a lot of asana red light therapy i would say the brian johnson regimen i mean i yeah i i i i admire what he's doing it it i just think like what's i mean he's doing it for science i guess but for me it's yeah not for me i'm not that bad but i do have you know do have to take about twenty supplements a day for sure i inject myself with some peptides when i'm diligent about it but i think the best thing i've ever done with stem cells are are you doing peptides and stem cells for injury recovery or are you doing pep i've thought peptides is like for injury do you use for other stuff a peptide peptides it's like a protein yeah like or an amino acid i guess which is a precursor of protein yeah it's a pre it's a precursor you can find a peptide it's a precursor or whatever you wanna solve for so like some is for injury recovery like dp p one fifty seven that's what i took i took that on my achilles it was great yes but it also by the way that also helps with your gut which then your gut connects to your brain which helps your brain it helps you there's a lot of benefits to it i tick custom more more ex through the doctor i get tested very regularly my blood tested very very regularly but the best thing i've ever done and the thing i could recommend to anyone who can afford it is aside from son five times a day i five was a week excuse me is is stem cells getting actual stem cells that are which is through the umbilical cord do you do that if you have a injury or like i feel great like do you did you were you so you're probably yeah i mean i'd yeah no you look great both you guys look like i'm not sure how but you guys look like you're they're doing great stuff for your health but i think yeah do you do you people do it for injury i did it because i want to feel better and i found this place in panama that i went to stem cell institute and they were kind of the one of the pioneers behind it doctor re reorder and i think that's like i think i think mel gibson dad make may have talked about this on the joe rogan and had already gone there but i think there's like an episode mel gibson talks about dad going there to get stem cells i've seen similar things like it's unbelievable the one where it's like its own sovereign land no i don't know what that is but this is just panama you're at like you state of hilton i last time i don't think it was sovereign oh i know what you're talking about i do know what you're talking about no it's nothing like that aren't they doing they're doing genetic what chris what what's it called were you crystal yeah they're doing that right it's like a peter t thing editing they're doing genome editing yeah yeah i don't i don't want none of that i just want i want building blocks into my body to make me young so if you can give me the stuff that little baby has to grow a fucking actually one these guys doing it's like their own little sovereign area and they're like building like the future y ming super baby or something you know like the network state stuff right where it's basically like oh if we can get like you invest in practice it's like people wanna create create new lands where they can have like you know let's say more can have different rules right for themselves like it's like a land or like anne ran is the president you know like it's it's like labor like libertarian land you gotta watch the documentary it's hilarious because brian goes there i think it goes there for like a full plasma like swap with his son and his dad or something like that i i remember exact procedural treated but he goes and it's like the two scientist who created this institute and they show the guy and the guy's clearly like twenty two so he's so young and but he has this mustache and he has glasses with like a rope as if like bro we can see through the disguise you're twenty two years old and and the the narrator what he's standing on another kid's shoulders with a trench coat on like look like that and he's like you know i think these guys hearts to the right place but you know they're not like twenty year phds if you know what i mean it's like yeah because he's funny it was it was so funny you're gotta watch that part yeah and i actually did watch it and i know what you're talking about now and i remember like i had my finger this is where i need my digital whatever but have my finger on the fast boat or the entire like like is you can't watch it all the way through it's just like what is this is not that interesting but yeah i didn't like talking about now nothing like that this is more for you have a rotator top injury some parents were there with some kids who were that were autistic and they were doing that therapies people to ms there a lot of different stuff that they were doing and i had the most i've done it maybe seven times but the the injuries you have will repair permanent that's permanent the superman feeling you have for three to four months afterwards is fleeting but it feels amazing for that two or three months period and the there's a lot of physiological effects that you know that you got a good batch sometimes you don't get a good batch where it doesn't take but if you had a good batch you'll know it and it's yeah it's great i haven't done it a while but it is amazing do you do any drugs or drink alcohol do you get like fucked up at all or so you're out you're sober yeah i just never i i think the last time ever got i mean i betting on nfl football in canadian football in university and waking up with a hangover and was says again this doesn't work so you've been in like this like vice for this world a world advice but not substances and like you're you're control i'm a control i i like to be in control by myself i like being control my emotions i like to be making good decisions i don't like to be not unable to think rationally so alcohol doesn't do it for me dude this is great thanks for thanks for doing this man where should people follow use twitter still the best place or x yeah i mean follow the football club i'm not looking to promote myself but i i would love for the football club to get more we were doing some great things this year at the full football club and then you guys one right you're won the like we were recently promoted to la two we had an amazing first start of the season and then we had a game we had a a stretch where we played twenty two games in six days and i failed the culture and that i wasn't able to demand that we do things that were proper for rest and health for the players and we ran our players into the ground during during that period because i didn't have you know that was something that the coaches wanted to do and then we suffered some injuries and we've been basically we we we're in the midst of a sixth game losing streak right now which is sad and we're paying for it from what we did in november which was a cultural failure on my part so i are you able to like apply the bio shit that you're learning to your sports psychology not in the medicine part of it but like there's lots of studies on how to optimize health and and what the your your risk of muscle injury goes up twenty five percent if you if if the football player plays more than one game every six days there's plenty of research that can make you come to good decisions but like sleep and recovery i'm team we're gonna do a better job on we're when i bought the team we didn't even have a training facility so we're building a brand new training facility we hope to announce the land that we've acquired soon and yeah we'll do we'll do stuff like that out you you're gonna go from like doing these bets and hanging out with your dad in vegas to owning a team and implementing like what you ever you wanna implement that's pretty wild right that's a good that's a good ending so far or it's at the end but it's a good i did the story predicting fact you thought that i did i was very delusional and when i was younger i was very like i'm a very i'm really i'm really a big fan of that sort of stuff like speaking things not speaking into but just like having the belief and why not why not i mean i don't know the universe is kinda there if you do it like you you can craft your own path just keep trying until you get there dude you're insane you're the man awesome you're the man you thanks for coming on dude you yeah you're welcome them well thank you man that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rude where to know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never kim back