WBD709 Audio Transcription

Orange Pilling Through Sport with Steven Nelkovski & Patrick O'Sullivan

Release date: Thursday 14th September

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Steven Nelkovski & Patrick O'Sullivan. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

Steven Nelkovski is the CEO of Perth Heat and Patrick O’Sullivan is the Chief Bitcoin Officer. In this interview, we discuss sports teams adopting a Bitcoin standard, why it’s important to meet people where they are at and how Bitcoin changes the economics of sport.

“The beautiful thing about Bitcoin is, if it works with baseball, it works with anything…if you think about value for value, the model, it changes everything.”

— Patrick O'Sullivan

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Welcome, brother.

Steven Nelkovski: Good to be on.

Peter McCormack: Who's your friend?

Steven Nelkovski: This is the Chief Bitcoin Officer of the Perth Heat.

Peter McCormack: Are you actually the Chief Bitcoin Officer?

Patrick O'Sullivan: That's it, that's the title, Chief Bitcoin Officer.  That's all I do.

Peter McCormack: That's why I'm trying to get Ben Arc to do for us.  Do you know Ben Arc?

Steven Nelkovski: Yes.

Peter McCormack: He doesn't even like football, but he comes along, he gets the whole thing.

Steven Nelkovski: Great role to have.  Emerging role.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  You saw that job ad for that Bulgarian team? 

Steven Nelkovski: Yeah!

Peter McCormack: That was amazing.  We've got a call with them, Joe Hall's trying to get me to talk to them.  But there's two upcoming Bitcoin football teams, young whippersnappers. 

Steven Nelkovski: The league is expanding quickly.  We've had a couple of recent enquiries from teams in Europe wanting to speak about what we've done with the baseball team.  But as we've said so many times on Twitter and in comments, that the Bitcoin Sports League is a lot closer than what most people think.  There's a lot of interest.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, you beat us to it.  I think you beat us to it.

Steven Nelkovski: A couple of weeks between us, I think.

Peter McCormack: Was it that close?

Steven Nelkovski: There was a nose between I think the two announcements.  We were early November; I think you were late November, early December, something like that.

Peter McCormack: We're talking 2021, aren't we?  Yeah, 2021, because I think I announced it --

Steven Nelkovski: November 2021?  Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I think I announced December 2021, and we took over the team in April 2022.

Steven Nelkovski: Yes, that's right.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and then 2022, yeah.  Yeah, you just beat us!

Steven Nelkovski: Just.  So many things have changed since then as well, in so many ways.  What we thought we'd be doing in two years has just dramatically changed so quickly.  It's awesome.

Peter McCormack: There's loads we can get into, and we're going to, but let's just do a bit of background stuff just for people listening so we can build the picture of what we're doing.  Introduce yourself, what you do yourself.  I know we know you're the Bitcoin Officer, and then just tell people about Perth Heat, who they are, and then we'll build from there. 

Steven Nelkovski: Yeah, so my name's Steven and I'm the Chief Executive of the Perth Heat, who are Australia's most successful baseball team.  We've won 15 national titles, we've had 34 players who have played Major League Baseball.  We've got an exceptional relationship with the Tampa Bay Rays who send us out six to eight players each Australian summer, and these are top-end draft picks.  So, one of the players they sent us last season, Junior Caminero, is on the verge of playing in the big leagues right now.  So, they send us the best of the best in terms of their young talent and we build a squad and we play a season in the Australian summer.  We've got a history of winning, we've got a history of producing great players, and we're also the Bitcoin baseball team and it's been an incredible ride.

Peter McCormack: How big is baseball in Australia?

Steven Nelkovski: It's big.  Look, obviously we've got the big sports in terms of Aussie rules, you've got rugby, you've got strong national teams with the Australian cricket team, you've got the Socceroos, you've got the Matildas.  So, it's not a tier one sport but in terms of the quality of the competition, if you look at the fact that Perth Heat have had 34 players who have played for the Heat and then gone on to play Major League Baseball, there's no other team or competition that could produce that sort of statistic.  So, if you looked at one of the football teams, like the Perth Glory, they haven't had 34 players that have played in the Premier League.  So, the competition is extremely tough and we'd be one of the best winter leagues in the world, especially with our association with Major League Baseball.

Peter McCormack: So, they send players out to you to get game time, and they also scout players that you have got of your own?

Steven Nelkovski: There's a bit of scouting, there's international scouts in every city, but the idea of sending them out to us is, they will see how the players will react in a foreign environment, a different style of baseball, different time of year, how do these players go in an environment over Christmas, New Year.  Some of them are coming back from injury, some of them have had interrupted seasons, so that's a good chance for some of them to also build game time.  But it's a programme now with Tampa, then in the last five years, we've had five players already play Major League Baseball.  Jacob Lopez was the last just a couple of weeks ago, and as I said, Junior Caminero is knocking the house down, he's 27 home runs this year.  He's just a phenomenal generational athlete. 

Peter McCormack: And what kind of crowds do you get? 

Steven Nelkovski: Yeah, they vary across the weekend.  We play a series, so we'll play Friday night, we'll play two games on a Saturday. 

Peter McCormack: Two? 

Steven Nelkovski: Two games on a Saturday, and then we'll play another one on a Sunday.  So, there's four games in the space of 72 hours.  And the crowd's roughly between 5,000 to 7,000 over the weekend. 

Peter McCormack: Okay, wow!  So, two in a day, what kind of demands does that put on the players? 

Steven Nelkovski: Well it's different.  So baseball, if you're a pitcher, the demands are extreme.  Every time you throw the ball it is logged, it is monitored, it is counted.  If you're an outfield player or an infielder, one of the batters, then that's what you're built for, you're built to play every game.

Peter McCormack: So, all the pressure is on the pitcher?

Steven Nelkovski: Pitchers, yeah.  Good pitching will win you championships.  You need a really strong pitching line-up to bring in the different times of the game, and that's the part of your line-up which you really have to monitor so carefully, because you could start a series with a pitcher and if he doesn't perform well, when you bring him out of the game, when you introduce someone else and then if they don't perform well, how quickly do you run through your rotation knowing that you've got four games to get through?  So, there's a lot of analytics that we look at, we monitor, and as we said, that pitch count is very, very closely watched.

Peter McCormack: I've been to a few baseball games.  I've been to see the A's, I've been to see the Dodgers a few times.  I've been to see, probably your team?

Patrick O'Sullivan: Yes. 

Danny Knowles: You went to see the Yankees.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I went to the Yankees.  It was too hot, wasn't it? 

Danny Knowles: Yeah, it was so hot. 

Peter McCormack: So hot, my knees were burning. 

Steven Nelkovski: There's not many roofs on the stadiums yet, so you're sitting out in the sun baking. 

Peter McCormack: But there's heat and then it was too hot, our legs were in shorts, our legs were burning, so we just went and stood at the back and drunk beer.  Didn't the Yankees get absolutely --

Danny Knowles: Yeah, they got demolished. 

Peter McCormack: I think they were 10 down within like two innings. 

Steven Nelkovski: Yeah, but it's a crazy game.  You can be 10 down and you can still win.  My wife has now accepted that no matter how far in front we are in a game, she won't relax until that last out.  You can be 6-0 up, 8-0 up, and you can still lose a game just like that.  It's very, very different in football.  In football if you're 3-0 up, it's effectively game over, yeah?  But in baseball, a 3-run lead, a 4-run lead, it can change with just one pitch.  If a batter walks and then suddenly things just change.  It's taken a while to understand and to even get comfortable with it.  When I first started in the role five years ago, baseball traditionalists would say, "Well, that's baseball".  It's like, "No, it's not, it's bad game management".  But yeah, it's baseball.  It happens in the big leagues, it happens in Australia, and sometimes it happens with Perth.

Peter McCormack: And so your wife, is that because she's got into the baseball, or she's planning for what your mood's going to be like?

Steven Nelkovski: Bit of both!  She has to be into it, but I'm not a good loser at all.  Yeah, I'm not probably the best person to speak to if we lose a game for a good 24 hours.  After we lost the championship series, that 24 hours was probably four months. 

Peter McCormack: Mate, honestly, I know exactly how you feel.  We lost three games last season in the league.  We lost one Cup game, and then we got thrown out of a Cup because we played an ineligible player, should have been suspended, administrative error.  Every single one of those, I was not good for 24 hours.  I spent the next 24 hours saying, "What did I do wrong to contribute to that?"  Even though it's the team and the manager, it's like, "What could I have done more?"

Steven Nelkovski: "Could we have prepared the team better?  Did we not provide the right resources or did we not get the balance of the roster correct?"  There are so many things that go through your mind, but yeah, I'm certainly not a good loser.

Peter McCormack: Were you a Perth Heat fan before?

Steven Nelkovski: With a surname like Nelkovski, you grew up with a round ball in my household.  I was a football fan from an early age.  This is a true story.  Before I took the role with the Heat, I had not watched a baseball game from start to finish, I had not watched the full nine innings.  I'd watched parts of a game but I hadn't watched a whole game and that first year in charge was challenging, because you'd be with corporate partners and I didn't know all the rules, and something would happen during a game and they'd ask, "Why did that happen?" and I'd scratch my head and say, "I'd have to find out for you". 

But I'm obsessed with it now.  My wife, she loves watching players steal bases, just running from base to base or trying to steal them.  And then I look at my family, Greek heritage, and they're all into it and enjoy coming to ballpark.  And most people I introduce do enjoy it, because again, it's a different sport in terms of just the pace of the game.  You can relax a little bit more and sit back and enjoy the menu of the hot dogs or the Cracker Jack and see some home runs in the background.

Peter McCormack: Well, you've got to understand the sport.  It's a bit like cricket, right?  Most Americans, almost every American does not understand cricket.  We try and explain Test cricket, there's five days, two innings each, it could rain and end in a draw, nobody understands it.  But when you understand the game, you understand what brilliant cricket Test cricket is.  Like my son, he watched the Ashes with me and the first two Tests I was explaining how this works, why they might declare, what the follow-on is, which never got used, try and explain the strategy of it all.  And then once he understood, he got into it, and I was mentioning I was going to watch baseball. 

I said to you before we started recording, I was dating that girl in LA, so we were going to watch the Dodgers.  It was a playoff season and I must have gone to maybe five games.  I went to the game, I don't know if you know the one, where Justin Turner hit a walk-off home run in the playoffs.  I think it was against, it might have been the Cubs, but by the way, that itself was an unreal moment.

Steven Nelkovski: The guy finished there.

Peter McCormack: Unbelievable.  But I had a guy who was sat with me each game explaining it to me.  And so one of the things I'd never known about is the whole pitcher strategy.  My assumption, from the little I'd watched here or there, it was just one guy all game.  And like if somebody came on and was injured, I didn't realize you're strategically placing different pitches in the game, especially towards the end of like the seventh, eighth, ninth innings.  I didn't know any of that.  And so then once you understood that, you understood the strategy.

Steven Nelkovski: Yeah, and there's huge strategy, yeah?  Whether you're bringing in a left-handed pitcher to pitch to a right-handed batter, left-handed batter or someone that can face up to a curve ball better than a slider, etc, yeah?  Explaining the game to someone in baseball is a lot easier if you're in the ballpark.  If you're watching it off the screen, it's a bit harder to pick up.  If you sit in the ballpark and you've got someone that can explain the rules, you will understand it a lot quicker than watching it at home.  But the strategy behind pitching is nuts.  The movie, Moneyball, and the strategy behind the analytics is spot on, that there's so much you can gain out of the numbers.  And that's a big part of our relationship, even with Tampa, is the Tampa front office and what they have in terms of identifying talent and how they use it, is something that is a great benefit to an organisation like the Perth Heat as well.

Peter McCormack: There's a whole money ball thing that's started coming to football as well.  I know specifically teams like Brentford and Brighton have used it, but they're using it in a different way.  They're trying to identify talent which they sell on.  I mean Brighton, can you look up their sales of players?  I mean Brighton --

Steven Nelkovski: They had a profit of £130 million was it this summer? 

Peter McCormack: I mean historically, they weren't ever a Premier League team.  It's only in the last, what, five, six years did they become Premier League.  They're now established.  But the volume of players they sell and the rates they sell their players for; have they got recent sales? 

Danny Knowles: Yeah, let me pull it up.  It was the same with Southampton they kind of have that strategy as well. 

Peter McCormack: So, here we go, okay.  Caicedo, €116 million; Mac Allister, he went to Liverpool, €42 million; Sánchez, €23 million.  But there's more in the previous -- I mean, is that just this season? 

Danny Knowles: Yeah, that's this season. 

Peter McCormack: Did you have last season as well? 

Danny Knowles: I don't think it's on here. 

Peter McCormack: What was up the top when you scrolled to the top? 

Danny Knowles: That was people who have come in. 

Peter McCormack: Right, okay.  But this is their whole strategy.  I mean, they're now talking about this guy who just got a hat-trick the other day.  Ferguson got the hat-trick against Newcastle the other day.  People are starting to talk about him, and they've managed to have this rotation of players, even though they're selling their best players, they've got these new ones coming through and they've got like an identity, which means it's a profitable business.

Luton were the same.  So, Luton Town managed to get back in the Premier League from going into non-league, which itself is incredible, but they had a whole strategy of bringing players through and it's part of their revenue model.  Does that perform part of your actual revenue model, to develop players?

Steven Nelkovski: For Perth Heat, it's a little bit different, because if we have players that we continue to develop, they'll get drafted.  The draft system works a little bit differently to football, where the club doesn't take the profit, the actual transfer fee goes direct to the player.

Peter McCormack: Oh, wow!

Steven Nelkovski: Yeah.  It was one of the first questions our board of management asked when they took the licence over, "ow can we develop players and on-sell them?" but it doesn't work like that in baseball unfortunately.  So, yeah, we've got a great farm system of producing young Aussie talent that go and pick up minor league contracts, but there's no return there to the club, unfortunately.

Peter McCormack: Were you a baseball fan before you joined?

Patrick O'Sullivan: I mean, I played when I was a kid, but not much of a fan, no.  It was strictly because of the opportunity that came up that I joined.

Peter McCormack: And when did you join?

Patrick O'Sullivan: When? 

Peter McCormack: Yeah. 

Patrick O'Sullivan: Same time, so about a year before when the talks happened about, "Well, maybe this is something that we might be able to do", and then what the details looked like for making it a possibility for our team to embrace Bitcoin as much as the team has, and then suddenly realising that it's going to be significantly more work than what it first appeared to be, because I didn't really have a role there to begin with.  I didn't have a job, I wasn't working there at all.  But then sort of trying to orange peel the board after Steve got it, and to show them what we could do with it, it was very much, "This is the idea, this is what we think we can do with it".  And their attitude was, "Okay, go out and prove it", and show them exactly what we could do to kick things off. 

Then from there, it was just small win after small win, and then realising, well, if we're going to actually do it and announce things in November about just how far down the rabbit hole we were going to go, that we couldn't just -- Bitcoin is not at the point now where you can just launch and say, "Okay, everything worked perfectly".  I mean, you know.  It's so hit and miss with things that will work and things that won't work and about integration with systems that are already in place, especially when you're talking about a business of this size.  You know, it's not your MicroStrategy, we don't have teams and teams of lawyers or people that can look after all of the various elements.  And to go all in on Bitcoin means really restructuring how you do everything. 

Eventually that came back to me as my sort of ability to transition and see what will work, what's going to work now, what will work in 90 days from now and what it's going to look like in 180 days from now; all of that has changed and just somewhat to stay on top of that and to help integrate it into the systems that Steve is already looking after.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so I'm going to be interested to compare and contrast what you've done to what we've done, because we're tiny.  Our crowds are tiny.  If you want to play with Bitcoin on a match day, we're talking a handful of transactions.  You've got up to 7,000 people there, so that's an entirely different beast.  Sorry, Steve, what were you doing before you joined Perth Heat?

Steven Nelkovski: My background is media marketing, so I used to be a sports reporter on one of the commercial networks here in Australia with Channel 7.  I was there for 14 years.  I was a broadcaster, I used to commentate football games.  But after being a reporter for the best part of 15 years and seeing how sports organisations run, that's where the real appetite for running a sports organisation came in and wanting to win championships.  So, I went and worked for our local football team, which is the Perth Glory, who play in the A-League.  I was in the media marketing role there for a few years. 

Peter McCormack: Is that where Robbie Fowler played? 

Steven Nelkovski: He did, the great man. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, God. 

Steven Nelkovski: God, yeah.  He used to come over to mum's house every week for dinner. 

Peter McCormack: Shut up.  Are you serious? 

Steven Nelkovski: A gentleman, one of the most beautiful men.  Yeah, we're always on the text to each other. 

Peter McCormack: You're friends with Robbie Fowler? 

Steven Nelkovski: Yeah! 

Peter McCormack: I want an interview with him.  He's one of my childhood heroes.

Steven Nelkovski: Oh wow, yeah.  You know what, he's just a lad, he's just brilliant.  He came and played for the organisation, and yeah, it was Monday night's dinner at mum's house.  He loved the Greek food, so we kept to a winning formula. 

Peter McCormack: That's unbelievable.  Do you know the song the Liverpool fans sing about him? 

Steven Nelkovski: About, "We all live in a Robbie Fowler house"? 

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Do you know about this?

Danny Knowles: I don't, no.

Peter McCormack: So, Robbie Fowler is one of the footballers who was very smart with his money.  He just bought properties all over Liverpool constantly.  And so he's got this huge property portfolio in Liverpool.  And so the Liverpool fans sing, "We all live in a Robbie Fowler house". 

Steven Nelkovski: Yeah, he's God.  He's God, yeah, and he's just an awesome guy.  Good fun to hang out with, and yeah, made so much time for the people of Perth.  Yeah, we had a great year together.  And he's also very cheeky as well.  There was a time where we weren't performing too well and we'd lost, I think, five games on the trot.  And it was a time that Wayne Rooney was having a whole heap of issues with Manchester United and we were about to do this live TV cross for Channel 7. 

We knew the chairman wasn't too happy at the time, so I said, "We've just got to try and deflect here".  And Robbie had been in the UK for a week and the presenter said, "So, Robbie, what was the trip to the UK all about?"  And he said, "It was to chat to Wayne".  And my phone, the media marketing guy, just blew up.  Fleet Street just went mad with this.  It was just an off-the-cuff joke that we're trying to sign Wayne Rooney.  And it was just everywhere, within hours, and we had to put out a press release, and it was great because it deflected off the five losses that we'd had, but it was just a bit of a piss take! 

Peter McCormack: What was his scoring record like at Perth? 

Steven Nelkovski: Look, it wasn't as good as what it was at Liverpool.  It would have been nicer to score a few more goals, but the team struggled a little bit that year and I think he ended up maybe with a dozen goals from memory, somewhere around there.  But it was a good year.  Again, I remember him taking out a little urn when England won the Ashes, out before a game, and he put it up on his head and there were photos of it.  He's just a great prankster in a lot of ways.  He's an awesome person to have in your change room and, yeah, I'm really happy to call him a friend.

Peter McCormack: So, I went down the Robbie Fowler rabbit hole with my son the other week.  Did you watch the Liverpool-Newcastle game the other week? 

Steven Nelkovski: No, I missed it. 

Peter McCormack: Right, so I said to my son that there were two games when I was a kid where Liverpool played Newcastle.  They were 4-3 consecutive years.  The first one was a back and forth.  I think Liverpool went 1-0 up, then Newcastle went 2-1 up, then Liverpool got it back to 2-2, then they went 3-2 up, then 3-3.  Liverpool won 4-3, Stan Collymore in the 90th minute.  It was an unreal game.  And then a year later, Liverpool went 3-0 up, Newcastle got it back to 3-3, and then in the last minute Robbie Fowler scores a header, this flying header to go 4-3.  And so I then had to explain Robbie Fowler to my son, why everyone said he was God, and we went down this kind of rabbit hole of Robbie Fowler goals.  I was always really sad though because when he left Liverpool, I'm trying to remember, was it Leeds and Man City he went to?

Steven Nelkovski: He played both, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I just couldn't accept him not in a Liverpool shirt.

Steven Nelkovski: Not in a Liverpool shirt, yeah.

Peter McCormack: It didn't make sense to me.

Steven Nelkovski: No, iconic to that club and, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Absolute legend.  Sorry, that was a bit of a tangent.  Okay, so going from Commentator to Chief Exec, that's quite a jump.  Did you have to kind of prove yourself, that you were capable; did you have to pitch yourself for it?

Steven Nelkovski: Oh, look, I did the four years of Perth Glory, the media marketing role.  I then stepped outside of sport for the first time in my career and just did some sales, what they called Home and Land Packages here in Australia, selling some land and a house with it, and quickly went into a management role there with one of the companies.  And then the opportunity came with the Heat, and I was given the chance to run my first club, which was good because at the time I'd just started as President of a football club as well, so the management position was quite similar.  And I've run both roles now for the last five years, which has been brilliant.

Peter McCormack: What is the mandate for the Chief Exec?  How does it compare to, say, a Chairman in a football team? 

Steven Nelkovski: Every club's structure can be a little bit different.  Chairman for us is one of the shareholders, majority shareholder of our club, so he's who I report to.  I've got the day-to-day running of the organisation and I report to our Chairman.

Peter McCormack: What are the main things that you target?  Are you responsible for the team and ensuring they've got the resources they need? 

Steven Nelkovski: Everything, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Everything? 

Steven Nelkovski: Everything, yeah.  I run the organisation. 

Peter McCormack: So, it's basically probably almost identical to my role. 

Steven Nelkovski: Correct, yeah, absolutely.

Peter McCormack: Bigger numbers!

Steven Nelkovski: Yeah, bigger numbers, but I don't think it really matters, and there's probably a good contrast with a football club, whether you've got 10 members, 100 members, 1,000 members, a million members, the communication is still the same.  You still treat your members the same way, regardless of how many zeros are involved.  It's the same if you do a social media post, whether your club's only got 50 members or 50,000, you're still putting out information.  So, in some ways, don't get scared by the numbers.  It's, treat the position with respect and your members and partners, etc.  Again, corporate partners, regardless of what the partnership value is, they're a corporate partner.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Do you know what the weirdest part of the of the role is?  I think you'll fully empathise with this because we just already touched on it, but I've run multiple businesses, and I've got three at the moment, and my other two businesses, my bar and my podcast, I know the things we need to do to be the best, to win.  Like, I know with my bar, I've got a good deliver a great service, have the right products, good doorman, good bar staff, good marketing, it'll be the busiest bar in town.  I know with the podcast, we know the guests we've got, the topics, how we package it, and we know we can have a successful show. 

I can do everything right with the football team, I can have the best marketing, I can have the best budget, I can have the best operations, I can do everything perfectly, but our success comes down to 90 minutes, of which 10% is luck, 10% I put down to the referee, the referee has cost us a game this season already, video evidence provable, and then the other 80% comes down to the management team just coming together.  And so you can do everything right, but it all comes down to that.  And so, on a business level, you can be operationally perfect all year, and then like you had last year, you lost in the final --

Steven Nelkovski: We missed the championship by a matter of inches.

Peter McCormack: By inches? 

Steven Nelkovski: Yeah. 

Peter McCormack: But you probably did everything perfect, but you cannot control that bit.

Steven Nelkovski: No, you can't, and there's so many factors that go into it.  And again, does the biggest budget always win?

Peter McCormack: No.

Steven Nelkovski: No, look at the Yankees this season, look at the New York Mets, look at the investment in their teams and you compare it to the Tampa Bay Rays, who have a fraction of that investment in their team, and they're well in front of both of those organisations.  It's a balancing act and then you've got to take the emotion out of it as well. 

Peter McCormack: Good luck with that! 

Steven Nelkovski: Which is difficult, yeah.  When you get to a certain position in the season, do you continue to invest in topping up your team, or how do you make those mid-season transfers, and are you emotionally attached to a player, or when do you retire them, etc?  There's a lot of components that go into it and culture is a big thing throughout your organisation, making sure you get the balance of the squad correct and that you've got a team that performs.  But then, if you've got different characters, knowing how to manage that character as well, and being able to manage the different egos in a clubhouse or change room over the course of a year.

Peter McCormack: Are you an optimist or a pessimist?  And let me contextualise this for you.  I'm an optimist on the long term for our football team.  I'm sure it'll be successful, but in the short term, I am a pessimist.  So, even with two games to go last season, where we were on, with three games to go we were on to win it by 9 points; in my head I was like, "Right, in that game, if this happens " so, we had a game against Chenecks, "if we lose the game to Chenecks, and then if our players are flat and we're playing Ampthill, our rivals, they come and beat us, we go to the last game knowing we have to win to win the league".  Whereas everyone's already saying, "You've won the league, it's over, you're 9 points ahead with three to go".  In my head, I'd run the numbers and I was fearful of that disaster scenario.  Do you know what I mean by that?

Steven Nelkovski: I do, no, I'm probably the opposite, I'm the optimist.  And I think I need to be in my role, so much if I'm not, then it can filter through the organisation pretty quickly.  So, you need to lead and be positive.  But also, I believe, especially in that scenario, you control what you can control, don't look at the other fixtures.  If we keep winning, then no one can stop us.  But I think you also know when you're in that championship window or position if it's going to come off.  I think I've been around the teams long enough to know if it's going to end in success or just miss out. 

Peter McCormack: That just missing out, I mean I'm dreading this.  You know what, because there will come a year that we'll get in the playoffs.  It's only the top team that goes up and the next four's the playoffs, and I know it's going to come, and I cannot imagine, I cannot get my head around the idea of losing a playoff final.  I think it will take me a long time to recover.  I think I will go into a very short, miserable couple of weeks.

Steven Nelkovski: It's awful.  The power of winning championships is as good a feeling as you'll get.  We speak about obviously great moments in your life with your children and special family occasions.  Winning championships in sport is something else and that's, for so many reasons, why we're in the role that we are.  I've been Chief Exec for four full seasons and we've lost three championship series with the Heat, and they don't get easier and you try to pinpoint why.  I think it's just a compounding of percentages across a couple of different things, which we need to improve on.  But no, to lose a playoff or a championship game is a difficult pill to swallow. 

Sometimes it's harder for the administration or for the fan because you didn't play the game.  The player was out there and they know they put their full effort into that fixture.  But when you're on the outside and you can't influence that 90 minutes or those nine innings, it's really, really tough.

Peter McCormack: Sorry, we will get to the Bitcoin stuff!  What are you like during a game, especially when it's a tight game? 

Steven Nelkovski: I'm into it.  Like, when we qualified for the playoffs last year, I sprinted across the ballpark to jump into our dugout to hug our captain.  There's some beautiful images.  I'm really passionate about the team.  I have a great love for it and it's important to win.  So, I feel the losses and I celebrate the victories as well.  It's important. 

Peter McCormack: I get huge anxiety in some games.  Say if we're winning by one goal, the last five, ten minutes, I'm a mess.  Sometimes, I have to go for a walk, just walk away from the game.  And I don't think, if we had a playoff final and we went to penalties, I'm pretty sure I couldn't watch it.  I'd have to just...  It got to a point last season, there were games where I was like, I was talking to my son, I was saying, "If this carries on, I'm just not going to come to a match day".  Just let me know at the end of the game, did we win".  It's a bit like, what's his name, Billy from the Oakland A's. 

Steven Nelkovski: Billy Beane?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, he didn't used to watch the games, did he?

Steven Nelkovski: No, yeah.  He didn't watch them, he didn't want to see them.  I can watch them, no issue, I just want to be left alone.  So, I don't want people asking me questions.  I don't want, you know, "Just leave me alone, yeah".

Peter McCormack: Do you have it that people come and stand next to you and they just want to all game, talk to you? 

Steven Nelkovski: No, no, I just can't have it. 

Peter McCormack: But they've tried it?

Steven Nelkovski: Yeah, I move away.  For the Heat, I'll pretty much watch the game by myself.  If I'm not, I'll walk around and chat to people at different stages.  And then, as President of the Olympic Kingsway Soccer Club, I will stand on the far side by myself.  I don't want to listen to any Mourinhos talking to me or giving me tactics or anything like that; just by myself.  Generally, in a baseball game, I don't even know what position I'd be in, I'd be like this watching.

Peter McCormack: I feel really bad, because people come a long way to come watch us play sometimes, and they want to stand next to me and ask me stuff all day and I'm like, "Leave me alone".

Steven Nelkovski: No disrespect, but the result means so much, yeah.  And personally, I need to watch by myself, I don't like the chatter during a game.  Post-game, if we win, yes; if we lose, I'll take a while to warm up, but I enjoy the comfort of myself, the silence around me.

Peter McCormack: I bet I could talk to you about this for fucking hours.  We probably will through the rest of the day, but we should get into the Bitcoin stuff.  Okay, so you joined five years ago, were you a bitcoiner already?

Steven Nelkovski: Not when I started the team, no.  It started coming, for me, I started looking into it 2018, little bits and pieces, 2019.  And then, as a Chief Executive, you're always thinking, "How do I stay ahead of the curve?"  Yeah.  And, yeah, in a lot of ways I think my Bitcoin knowledge compared to a lot of people like yourself, or Patrick, is minuscule, yeah?  But I just cannot see a future in business without it.  And for me, it was if we didn't start our position or our movement into Bitcoin, then you're just not executing what you need to do as a C-level executive.  When I look to the future, what we're doing now is we're placing ourselves for 2040.  We're not looking at what we're doing in 2024.  This is it.  You've got to imagine what's the world going to be like in 15 years, and are you trying to tell me Bitcoin won't be a huge part of that?  I just don't think that's possible at all, in every facet of the business.  And, yeah, I got started talking to Patrick, and he was an incredible listener.

Peter McCormack: You were already at the company?

Patrick O'Sullivan: No, I was just a bitcoiner. 

Peter McCormack: Okay, so how did you connect? 

Steven Nelkovski: Well, it's a good question, and you'd be surprised how few people ask this, Pete.  He's my brother-in-law.

Peter McCormack: Shut up!

Steven Nelkovski: No, I'm deadly serious. 

Peter McCormack: I didn't know that. 

Steven Nelkovski: No, and there are very few people know or have asked. 

Peter McCormack: So, you were kind of friends already then?

Steven Nelkovski: Well, my brother-in-law, but I had no idea he was a bitcoiner.

Patrick O'Sullivan: That's exactly it.  Contentious!

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Steven Nelkovski: But this is where --

Patrick O'Sullivan: We're not friends, we're brothers-in-law.

Steven Nelkovski: We're brothers-in-law, yeah, and this is where Patrick had already started his Bitcoin journey and I had no idea.  And then I start my own journey, and it was my inquisitive nature, I chat to Patrick about a lot of things, started chatting to him, and he still gave me really no indication of what his position was.  And as we got talking, the conversations started to evolve and he became an incredible soundboard for me to continue to forward my journey and how I could integrate this into the into the organisation.  And then, it took off from there really. 

Peter McCormack: What were you doing at the time Patrick?

Patrick O'Sullivan: So, I'm a cinematographer by trade.  So, I worked just in commercial cinematography.  But in the meantime, I've been in Bitcoin for a number of years, and it's just something, as you know, it grabs you and it's a topic that I've been interested in since really sort of 2016, is when I got in, and then 2018 things started to come together, and then it just --

Peter McCormack: Were you already living in Australia?

Patrick O'Sullivan: Already living in Australia, yeah, so I've been here for over ten years now.  And so, I started down that path and then as you do, I just got further and further along into not only the technology side, but also the idea of what Bitcoin actually is, apart from money, and seeing where that could be integrated into my own personal life, and then what that would look like for other entities, seeing where it would go, the philosophy behind it, all of those things, just continually learning about it.  It's something that just pulls you in, and then obviously, I'm always looking to advance it in conversation or in passing with people, and Steve showed an interest. 

Then it was really like, sometimes you go through waves, sometimes you'll take pride in your ability to orange people, other times you'll just want to leave, you don't want to do it at all, you just want people to find their own way.  And I was in a stage where it was fun to try and meet people where they were and explain what the benefits of Bitcoin were.  And to Steve's credit, he was someone who got it very quickly about how it could make him more efficient as an individual.  And then he put it together, "Well, if it works for me, why aren't we seeing it anywhere else?" and through those conversations, realising the opportunity that is available to businesses, especially to first movers in the space, is you can't really replicate the opportunity that is now in the future. 

This is a once-in-a-lifetime, once-in-a-species grab at seeing just where efficiency can be gained, which is the ultimate goal of it all.  That's why Bitcoin exists in the first place.  And the opportunity to be at the front of that, I mean, it's nice because we don't have to reinvent the wheel, right?  You can almost look back to the internet and say, "Okay, well, what were some of the things that were happening at the early onset of the internet?" to see what we should do as a company or what I should do as an individual.  The internet, you didn't have to have the world's greatest idea in 1995, you just had to get involved.  And eventually, the people that are involved, I mean the meme in Bitcoin, which is true to a certain extent, is that you fall down the rabbit hole.  But what people forget is that someone had to dig the rabbit hole, right?  You get to fall down.  Other people have to dig. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, love that!

Patrick O'Sullivan: And so, the idea behind the Heat is we fell all the way down the rabbit hole, but then you hit the bottom where it's like, "Okay, well now what can this tool do?"  If you think of Bitcoin not just as money, but as a tool, which it is, well then how can we integrate that tool?  Because the reason you use any tool is to make you more efficient, right?  You wouldn't use your hands if you can use a shovel.  It makes you more efficient at digging a hole.  If someone offered you a bulldozer, you would use that instead of the shovel.  So, it's like the tool that is Bitcoin. 

Again, it's not rocket science.  You just plug it into anything, it makes you more efficient because it's incredibly good at removing middlemen.  So, middlemen just suck up resources, but they're unnecessary, because there's technological limitations at the time the system is constructed, and you need a middleman to be able to delineate the resources properly.  But when you don't need that middleman any more, those resources, which we can just think of it just an energy, that energy can then be allocated differently.  And that's exactly what you're trying to do every time you use a tool. 

So, to Steve's credit, he said, "Okay, well, it makes me as an individual more efficient".  A corporation or a business like his is just a series, a group of individuals, who are all pointing at the same goal.  So, how can I make it make us more efficient at achieving this goal?  And the answer is, which is beautiful, is that we don't know.  Like, we don't know what we don't know because no one's ever plugged it into a corporation, no one's ever plugged it into a company.  And we're small enough to be able to be very light on our feet and be able to move. 

So basically, I mean the ecosystem has embraced us so much because we've decided, well, let's just put our hands up and say, we have, say, 10,000 people on a weekend.  We have an entire organisation who understands that this will make us more efficient.  Let's just see how we can become more efficient.  Let's plug it in everywhere we can, because we have enough people on staff that understand that it's not going to work out of the box.  I'm sure you know; you deal with it on an individual level, it works pretty good.  That rabbit hole has been dug.  People have done really good things.  There's still places, obviously, where it needs to improve, but that's always happening.  There's companies in place to do that. 

At the small business level, it has been explored less, I would say.  So, our job is to put our hands up, anyone that has a solution, come to the test bed where we can try these things.  And we'll have the open mind that what we see is working now isn't going to work the same in 30 days, it's not going to work the same in 90 days and it's not going to work the same in a year.  And we're flexible enough to be able to say, "We understand the benefits in the long run.  So, let's go all in and we'll see what those benefits end up being", which has led to, you know, how many times have we shifted in where positive things come to the organisation through Bitcoin?  It's been multiple times.

Steven Nelkovski: Multiple times, yeah, and that's what's so exciting, is that even as we enter a new season in a few months and our plans of how we want to integrate, adopt, innovate, they could be changed by Christmas, because as Patrick said, as you continue to dig you go, "Well, here's another opportunity, or here's something else that we didn't know that we would encounter, or here's another opportunity that we've got the chance to test the technology in a different way".  And that's what's so exciting about the position as well, is that it is continually evolving.  And for us to be at the forefront of being able to pioneer this, or to integrate with other global Bitcoin companies and say, "Reach out to us, let's try it, let's do this", is exciting.  It's an opportunity we'll never have again, and yeah, we're so thankful in a lot of ways that we get to be the guinea pigs in some ways.

Peter McCormack: Well, Patrick, what really stood out to me was when you said, "First mover".  With the Bedford football team, I originally tried to do in 2017, and I just didn't have the money or a plan.  It was before I even had a podcast.  I was just a guy who got into Bitcoin, had made a little bit of money, I thought I'll buy a football team, and there was no plan, and so it didn't happen.  Then four years later, I had the podcast, and I rethink the plan.  I was like, "Oh, no, there's a way I can do this now because there's a Bitcoin community".  But once I realised, I was like, "I've got to be first".  You can't be the second Bitcoin football team.  You want the second, you want the third, you want them all to exist.  I absolutely want every football team -- and look, if Liverpool became the Bitcoin football team and everyone considers them the main one, fine.  I'm cool, I'm happy with that, because it's great for Bitcoin.  But they're not going to, and I knew we had to be first.  And that first-mover advantage is huge, because I think of Bitcoin as a cheat code. 

I don't know how much this will resonate with you, but there is everything you add to the business in terms of efficiency.  But the network effects of Bitcoin mean you now have people who buy Perth Heat merchandise, who support Perth Heat, who probably don't like baseball, never even heard of Perth Heat, never been to Perth.  You've now tapped into that community because you're the Bitcoin team.  We've got exactly the same on the football team.  It's an absolute cheat code for us that allows us to accelerate what my goals are for that team. 

Steven Nelkovski: Yes, absolutely.  We look at merchandise sales in the first three weeks when we launched, and the global sales we had in three weeks eclipsed what we previously had in three years!  And that was just, as you said, by plugging into the Bitcoin community.  Now, no matter what city I go to in Australia, there are Perth Heat fans, or bitcoiners that never knew Australian baseball existed three years ago.  We've got fans globally.

Peter McCormack: I do. 

Steven Nelkovski: Yeah.  It's been phenomenal how the brand has quickly exploded globally through launching our Bitcoin position a couple of years ago.  And then we got, again, the engagement with fans and players and how that works and how we can showcase players in different ways has been great for the organisation.

Peter McCormack: What were the challenges of selling this in?  Once you kind of had the plan, you're like, "Okay, we think we're going to become the Bitcoin baseball team", what were the challenges of getting this to the board?

Steven Nelkovski: They've got great trust in me, and yeah, forever thankful, but I guess the levels and the layers of management at Perth Heat would be very different to, say, Liverpool or the West Coast Eagles here in Australia in the AFL.  So, we continually had discussions with it.  They wanted to understand how it would work and even the significant shift in change to making sure that still our core business principles were being met and those KPIs were being achieved was important.  And then it was, "Let's just test it and see how we go".  And then, probably where the biggest difficulty happened was when we launched, it was during COVID, and the Australian Baseball League season was cancelled in the end because we couldn't get out of Perth, we couldn't fly anywhere. 

Suddenly, there was this global attention on the team as the Bitcoin baseball team and we were going to integrate it into Game Day, etc and we weren't playing any games.  Just the balance of the team wasn't quite right and it did upset a few people, and I can understand why.  It was all of a sudden, it was Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin and there was no Perth Heat, there was no baseball, but that was because we weren't playing any games.  So there were, I shouldn't say some rough days through there, but there were some challenges which people just couldn't piece it all together.  Whereas when we look at the last 12 months and what we've just been through being able to activate and integrate, suddenly there's an understanding, "Okay, this is how it works".  And if I come to the baseball stadium and I want to use fiat, I can still do it, yeah? 

But okay, wow, now I've got the opportunity to send sats to players live in game and I can engage with them.  Wow, this is pretty cool.  Okay, this is what they talk about, the innovation, the technology, and how it all comes together.  And that narrative has completely changed.  And the fact that now fans from the outside can see the use and understand it, has made a significant difference in terms of the narrative and the adoption.

Peter McCormack: Do you get shit from other teams where they think it's a gimmick?

Steven Nelkovski: Initially yes.  And again, it was like almost people thought we were in for a cheap publicity stunt.   And the longer, I guess, we've been the Bitcoin baseball team, the less we've seen of it, because now they understand, "Okay, no, this isn't some sort of publicity stunt.  This is how they're adopting, this is how they're integrating, this is how they're innovating".  I remember a couple of weeks after we launched, there was a basketball team in Australia that suddenly put out a release and they're going to take, "Crypto payments at the arena".  And we looked at this, there was about a six-paragraph release, and I went on their website and tried to follow how they'll take these payments and I'm thinking, "Well, what shitcoins are they going to be taking and how is that going to work?  It's just not possible.  What, is somebody going to go up to the kiosk and they're going to say, 'I'd like to pay in Litecoin' or someone's going to come and say, 'I'm going to pay in Solana' or, 'I'm going to pay with the dog coin' or whatever it is?  It's just impossible".  And funnily enough, I haven't seen anything of that release again.

Peter McCormack: There's a shitcoin football team in the UK, Crawley Town, and they've had a disaster. 

Steven Nelkovski: It just doesn't work. 

Peter McCormack: It's the ethos of what they're doing.  The core of what we're doing, similar to you, if you don't give a shit about Bitcoin, you can come along, watch a game of football, buy a beer and a burger, and completely ignore it and not even care.  But once a month, if you want to come a couple of hours early, you can come to a Bitcoin meetup, you can get Bitcoin, you can buy your tickets and burger and beer with Bitcoin, and it's completely up to you which one you want.  But they went down this journey of selling NFTs to fans, which are obviously worth jack shit now; they didn't understand football.  The team was lucky not to get relegated out of the Football League.  I think they've survived by a couple of points.

Steven Nelkovski: Well, yeah, we had it all thrown at us, "When are you going to start selling NFTs?"  "We're not". 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, "We're not".

Steven Nelkovski: "Oh, why not?"  "Because we're not going down that path".  In terms of the other Australian teams, this season we'll have some other teams engaged and activated with our Sats4stats and Stealing Sats programme.  So, we've been able to advance it from just the Perth Heat into other teams in the Australian Baseball League.  And that is a significant step forward that we can go from one team now, to also have several teams engaged, because the other teams are sitting back and watching and saying, "Okay, well, this is a great way to further enhance engagement in-game with other fans", and it's worked for us. 

So, yeah, we're really proud that we've had that in; understanding from the Australian Baseball League to give us the green light to run the programmes and initiatives that we've had, and then we can extend it because that's the way forward.  The more teams that we can get activated, the quicker we can have mass adoption across leagues and countries and different events.

Peter McCormack: But that's the great thing about Bitcoin, right, is that you've got this competitive advantage that you're the Bitcoin baseball team.  It's a huge advantage, first mover and everything.  You're so open that you're going to help other teams adopt and understand it, and we'd be the same.  If any other clubs -- well, I've spoken to one team recently, the team in Austria; I'm going to speak to another team, the Bulgarian team.  We'll help you.

Steven Nelkovski: Love to help as many teams, yeah.  In some ways, I just want to roll it out globally to as many teams and as many leagues as possible now with the findings and the learnings that we've got, because we've got the data now and we can sit down, be it with whoever it is, executives from sports leagues or teams, and say, "Okay, well, Sats4stats. what was the take-up in terms of increasing player payments throughout a game?  What was the engagement?  Was it only during the broadcast?  Did you have to have a QR code on the TV screen, or could it just work through Twitter?"  We can give all that detail and explain just how it worked, "This is how the technology was initially, but this is where we advanced it to and this is where we think it will be in 24 months' time or 10 years' time". 

So many people say, "Why would I want to enhance player payments?  They're all wealthy".  It's like, "No, they're not".  Watch the Olympics and how some of those athletes have busted their ass for decades to get to a final and then they suddenly win gold and you hear the story.  Would you love to support them with some sats and say thanks for representing the country, thanks for being such a legend?  Absolutely.  And we've seen that, even as the Matildas went through the FIFA Women's World Cup, how many people would love to have boosted their performance as they beat France in penalties, etc, and given some sats to the goalkeeper or whoever it may be.  So, yeah, as many teams as we can support is awesome.

Peter McCormack: Has it shifted the core identity of the team?  And again, I'll contextualise it, in that I do programme notes for every home game as the Chairman.  And sometimes, I'm writing about inflation and I'm writing about poor government policy, or I'm writing about surveillance.  I'm writing about things that bitcoiners care about and saying, "As a club, we care about these things".  I talk about, "We care about hard-working people managing to retain as much of their money as they earn from that their time spent at work.  That's what we care about", and I think it's a very unusual thing to have in a programme, because usually the Chairman, you'll open it up and he will be talking about the football and the infrastructure and plans, and we're talking about the things that we talk about in the podcast.  It's part of our identity now that that's what we stand for.  We actually stand for something.

Steven Nelkovski: Yeah, we certainly don't have that tone in any of our addresses, so to speak.  Certainly, when I'm interviewed, etc, there's a lot of questions from it.  But if we look at the legacy media, and it has always been positive, there's a real interest in a lot of ways in the position we've taken and how it works.  And probably, surprisingly, more positive than negative.  People are just engaged with what does it mean, how does it all come together.  And once you start explaining it to them, there's a real thirst to know more.

Peter McCormack: And so Patrick, with the integration at, say, the club -- you refer to it as a club?

Steven Nelkovski: Club, yeah, absolutely.

Peter McCormack: What have you done and what have been the challenges throughout the business?  Because again, contextualising it, we know our business, we allow people to buy things online or at the site using Bitcoin, want them to be able to pay for anything if they want.  We also, as a business, we have a Bitcoin treasury and we retain a certain amount of our earnings in Bitcoin.  And then it's also part of our marketing.  They're probably the three main things we do.  What are the primary things you use Bitcoin for and what are the challenges then?

Patrick O'Sullivan: Yeah, I would say we use Bitcoin for every possible way that you can use Bitcoin.  It's almost, I jokingly refer to it inside the organisation as, "We've got the Perth Heat", but it's almost as a sidechain become sort of the Bitcoin Institute of Technology.  Because every single idea, every single way that we can plug it in, treasury, payment of players at the ballpark, the programmes like value for value that we're doing, Sats4stats, which is essentially, if you're not familiar with the programme, you can watch the game, and as you watch the game, you can send sats to players as the game unfolds.

Peter McCormack: We desperately want to do that.  Okay, talk to me about that, because I desperately want to do that.  I know when a player scores, I mean, strikers are going to have an advantage here.  When a player scores, we flash up a QR code, because we stream the games.  People are going to want to send them sats.  How have you done that?

Patrick O'Sullivan: Yes, the answer is, it's sort of Jimmy rigged together.  That's the point where once you're on the inside, like if you're looking on Bitcoin Twitter, it looks as though everyone were extremely late.  Like there's all these companies that have all these solutions and it just all seamlessly plays in the background.  The reality is it's not.  It's like it takes so much to build up that system.  It's all based on Lightning, LNURL, so you can do LNURL pay or withdrawal.  So, as it happened inside of the game last year, which is completely different, this goes back to how the things that happened last year will not be the same things that happened this year.  It's like we are continuing to evolve because you're in there digging that hole. 

So, last year we ran it where there were QR codes on the actual screen as we were broadcasting the stream and then on television.  And then what would happen is you could at any time, if there was a batter up, because baseball is a little bit different than football, because you have one batter at a time and you have one pitcher at a time from our team.  So, you could just have their individual player QR codes in the corner. 

Peter McCormack: Okay. 

Patrick O'Sullivan: So, you could scan the QR code, you could send them an amount of sats and you could also send them a message, which was interesting because if you remember, it was not the greatest time for Bitcoin last year; we didn't have the greatest year.  Whereas going into the previous year, the COVID year, there was a lot of interest, and so interest from the players, interest from the fans, interest from everyone to say, "Okay, this is going somewhere, this is going to be big".  Last year, not quite as much.  So, what it did mean though, is it opened the door to be able to give every player sats.  As they played the game, they would start to see the sats coming in.  And as they start to see the sats coming in, you start to see the friendly banter in the locker room of like, "So, what --"

Peter McCormack: "I got more than you, motherfucker"!

Patrick O'Sullivan: Plus the messages, plus they start to see that, "Okay, this is actually a meaningful difference to the money that we're able to earn".  This is something, I think, like the first week that we ran it, you're looking at a sizable increase in the percentage of wages that these guys are making just from Bitcoin, just from people around the world being able to send sats, not only as the game is streamed, but then we would upload the highlights to Twitter, and then you would upload the QR codes to Twitter as well, or you could just do it off a URL link.  And the team at IBEX were phenomenal in supporting.  Every single week there was a problem or an issue that they would be on top of.  So, you're constantly running through iterations of, okay, the first week we only had the QR code, and the next week we had the URL links that you could use to tap on the highlights.  And you just see it increase over time, and you see the responses, and just slowly but surely built. 

What that meant was, all of a sudden, there's players talking about it, fans are interested because it's a way to interact with the players, and it just sets off this snowball of, "Well, let me learn more about what this is and why it's important and what it actually is".  So, we're sitting in the locker rooms showing the team, basically, then how to use their Lightning wallets and the sats that go along with it, and what that means and what they can do with it.  And the eyes start to come on, because now they're invested, right?  As soon as you put a little toe in the water, you think, "Wow, this is --" and it's all happening in real time.  You can get back to the dugout and you can see the sats that are coming to you.  It's a whole new world, I mean, it goes far beyond baseball, right? 

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Patrick O'Sullivan: But the beautiful thing about Bitcoin is, if it works with baseball, it works with anything!  That's the lightbulb moment, and it takes some people a while to see that, but it really does.  If you think about value for value, the model, it changes everything.

Peter McCormack: Well listen, like I say, we want to introduce it for the football, we haven't got there yet.  I've got a game in mind that I want to test it for in October, and so far with the players, there's not a lot of interest with Bitcoin.  I've had a couple come to the meetups, I've had a couple come to me and ask me questions, where can they buy, is it a good time to do it?  Generally they don't.  And I think what's going to happen is we're going to want to set this up, set them up each with a wallet, set up the QR codes, and I think they'll be like, "Yeah, whatever", they'll dismiss it.  And then the game is going to end, and I know probably someone like Joey Evans is going to score a hat trick, and he's going to come back, and there's like $100 of Bitcoin, $200 of Bitcoin.  Again, a meaningful difference.  I think he's going to go, "Huh".  And this is almost the live sporting version of, "Come for the gains, stay for the revolution".

Patrick O'Sullivan: Yes.

Steven Nelkovski: Absolutely, and the great thing about obviously the microtransactions is, you don't need people heavily invested to boost the players or to reward them, yeah?  And suddenly they're going in and there's $10 or $15 or $20, and it's maybe total $10 or $20, whatever it may be, depending on the week or the player or whoever it may be, but they're seeing the engagement and the amount of times and then they're understanding, "Okay, right".  This is probably the shittiest version of this, yeah, because in a lot of ways, this is an experiment.  It's not being done anywhere else, "Guys, you're pioneering this, just understand.  Even look at the time zones that we're working in and the audience, and you are now receiving additional payments".  We continue to invest.  Where does this go in 12 months' time and where will it be in 5 years' time from there? 

It was just very cool to see.  Then even for us to see and understand that, what we thought we needed at the start of the season, in terms of having it on the broadcast, wasn't necessarily where we needed it to be at the end of the season, because the programme worked just as well if we didn't have the broadcast and we're running it through social media channels as well. 

Peter McCormack: I was going to say, tweet it out, tweet the highlights.

Steven Nelkovski: Yeah, tweeting was fine as well, even if it was just shitty QR codes in the most basic form and that's what's important is, don't be afraid to try.  And I think the Bitcoin community is rewarding in the sense they understand, yeah?  If you are pushing boundaries, they'll understand that there could be some friction points, but there's a great appreciation for you trying.  And as we've said a couple of times, "Should we do it, shouldn't we do it?"  Well, if not us, then who? 

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Steven Nelkovski: Don't be afraid to put your foot where others aren't.  And if we can continue to pioneer and provide feedback to the companies we're working with to improve the technology, so then in five years' time, it's ready for Liverpool, it's ready for the Yankees, then we've certainly done our job.

Peter McCormack: Well, we're ready to stand on your shoulders on this, so thank you.  Are you working with Jose at IBEX?

Patrick O'Sullivan: Yes.

Peter McCormack: I fucking love Jose.

Steven Nelkovski: No, they're a beautiful team.  They're one of the first partners that came on board with the project.  They're like-minded people, as you know.  They want to continue to push the technology, and it's been brilliant.

Peter McCormack: Do you know where I first met Jose? 

Steven Nelkovski: Where?

Peter McCormack: Guatemala.

Steven Nelkovski: Oh really? 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, in the IBEX office in Guatemala.  And they were this tiny, little, local exchange in Guatemala, and their company has just exploded over this last couple of years.  It's so impressive. 

Steven Nelkovski: Yeah, they've been brilliant.  As I said, I met Carliño --

Peter McCormack: Carliño!

Steven Nelkovski: -- at Bitcoin Day in Sacramento.  And that's how the partnership developed from there.

Peter McCormack: I was in El Salvador in El Zonte at Garten Hotel having a beer.  Who was I with?  I want to say Jack Mallers.  I want to say I was with Jack Mallers, but I'm not sure, but I was there anyway, and there's this guy and his mate and I don't think it was Jose, and he was just looking at us.  I was like, "Who's this guy?"  He comes over and he's like, "Hi, I'm Carliño, I'm from Guatemala.  Do you want to come to Guatemala?" and I was like, "Yeah, fuck it!"  And so two days later, I get a taxi to the border with Guatemala and El Salvador.  At the border they meet -- it's so funny, I even remember it.  So, I had my cases and you have to walk over the border, but there's like a no-man's land.  So, I'm walking with these two cases thinking, "Hold on, what am I doing here?  I don't know Guatemala, I don't know if it's safe, I don't know who I'm meeting.  Am I going to get kidnapped?"  Anyway, I get across and he's there and he gets me in his car and he drives me down to the IBEX office.  But Carliño! 

Steven Nelkovski: They're gorgeous, yeah.  

Peter McCormack: Yeah, he's so decent.  Do you know who came on that trip? 

Danny Knowles: No. 

Peter McCormack: Brandy. 

Danny Knowles: Oh, okay. 

Peter McCormack: Hi, Brandy, if you're listening.  My friend Brandy.  She was due to come out and I was like, "Well, I'm going to Guatemala now, meet me there".  So, we went to his house, went to Bitcoin Lake.  You've been to Bitcoin Lake? 

Steven Nelkovski: I haven't been, no. 

Peter McCormack: Beautiful.  I mean this lake, Lake Atitlán, it's struggling from pollution because it's a lake in the middle of the valley and everyone just pours all their shit and rubbish in there, and so it's dying and they need to restore this lake.  But there's this whole Bitcoin community there, Bitcoin Lake, it's fucking great.

Steven Nelkovski: Yeah, and the communities and the people that we come across here are all that welcoming, aren't they?  No matter where we've been, the way we've been embraced, the way we've been welcomed by the Bitcoin family has been unreal.

Peter McCormack: So, what about the historic fans of Perth Heat, how much have they taken to Bitcoin? 

Steven Nelkovski: A bit of everything I think, rolling through a season and then to have the understanding that they're comfortable and they can still come to ballpark and they can throw themselves into the project or they can stand aside.  But there's a real intrigue, because you hear a lot of shit at the coffee machine at work as to what Bitcoin is, how does it work, etc.  Then suddenly coming into an environment and you can learn very casually about it, I think there's a sense that, "Okay, I'd like to learn more".  You sometimes see someone making a payment at the bar and you can see them looking over the shoulder of the person and trying to see what's going on, how does it all come together. 

I remember trying to teach, or saying to some of our contractors that, "We're going to teach you how to take Bitcoin payments today", and the fear on their face, it's like, "Gates are opening in ten minutes, we don't have enough time to do this".  It's like, "It's going to take a minute", "What?"  And then by the end of the night, they're almost doing cartwheels as they're walking out, and they're telling people, "We took Bitcoin payments, because it is that simple".  And all that bullshit that they'd heard during the work or at the Christmas lunch had just gone out the window.

Peter McCormack: It's mad.  And it's such a pleasure seeing someone just click when they just suddenly get it.  It's a weird thing, because I've been reticent to go around my town of Bedford and try and get companies to accept Bitcoin, because I almost feel a nervousness about, if it goes wrong for a company, or they don't get many customers, or just seen as this Bitcoin shill guy trying to pump his bags.  So, I've been reticent to do that, but within the club, we've been helping people. 

Steven Nelkovski: Yeah, I think you've got to allow people the time to make their own decision, "Come in, this is the opportunity you have to learn.  If you'd like to become involved, you can.  If you don't, then take your time".  You've got you've got to make sure you've got that balance between not forcing it down someone's throat, but also providing the education if they'd like it.

Peter McCormack: Can you talk to any kind of longer-term plans?  Have you got any cool things you're working on, or is that like trade secret?

Patrick O'Sullivan: No, this is the cool thing.  Well, the best part about Bitcoin is we can share the cool things and people will find solutions to the things that we've stumped on and they will be able to build on top of what we've built.  So, probably the greatest insight that we have made is last year, coming off of Sats4stats, which is value for value, the interaction peer-to-peer between the fan and the producer of the content, which is sports, is that we hit upon an idea that I don't think I've heard in Bitcoin touched on, and it is essentially, we have discovered almost like an energy oasis that has never been able to be accessed before, unless you use the tool, Bitcoin. 

Okay, so it might seem we might have to do a little bit of bro physics to get there, but I think by the end of this, I think you'll be able to see that Bitcoin has the potential to change advertising forever.  And it hasn't really been touched on because there is the value-for-value model which eliminates advertisers altogether.  But we think, just by -- we can sort of analyse it from the sports point of view, right?  The Perth Heat, how do we generate revenue?  The majority of the revenue comes from advertising, from sponsors, from the content.  So, you make the content and then you sell the content.  So, the content is sports.  And you would imagine, well, if sports exist for a reason, they probably don't exist to be content, right?  Originally, they served some purpose for the greater good, like the extended order of mankind has sports for a reason. 

The question is, what is it; what value do they actually provide?  Number one, you have to get clear on what is value, like value is utility.  There's some sort of usefulness to sports, and it's probably not just attracting attention.  There's probably something else underneath there.  The problem is, the technical limitations that are in place when a system is constructed, well, that dictates the incentives, that dictates what the product ends up looking like.  You can almost think of the product as like a gas inside the container that is incentives, and those outsides are set by the technological limitations. 

So, if you go back 100 years and say, okay, you've got professional sports coming up, we're creating a product.  We want to bring fans into the stadium, we're offering entertainment, or you can think of the original value they would have served as something like a low time preference embodied.  You go there for almost a borrow from Jason Lowery.  It's like outside sports, you have abstract power and within the lines of these fields, we all agree that this is going to be real power.  We're going to display what low time preference looks like, what teamwork, cooperation, hard work, dedication, we can all go see it, because it's really hard in your day-to-day life to see low time preference.  So, for a society, if you were to go and look at a display of low time preference, that would actually be beneficial.  That would create more order, that would be better for everyone.  So, you're optimising for that as a sports team. 

Then technology comes along and goes, you know what?  We can take this and we can broadcast it to significantly more people.  And those people, their attention, we can monetise.  So, what is attention?  Attention is just focused energy.  So, basically, you're selling a big, giant pool of energy.  But because of the technological limitations in place, you have to sell that in bulk, and the team doesn't get to sell it at all.  You sell it to the distributors, and the distributors, the middlemen, sell the energy.  Okay, so that's the model for a long, long time.  The problem with that is that anytime you sell anything in bulk, you've got severe mispricing, you've got severe inefficiencies in the system, but there was simply no way to do it any other; it's not possible to have another distribution alley or laneway for accessing that particular kind of energy. 

It also affects the end product.  It's like the energy that is going into making the product starts to shift, because now what are we optimising for?  Now we're optimising for how many eyeballs can we possibly get, because we're going to sell that attention, we're going to sell their energy of the people watching the television, and we're going to do it through advertisers.  So, the advertisers, they pay the content distribution people, but you start to lose.  Like, okay, if I'm watching a game, maybe I don't want to sell my energy, maybe I would rather do without an ad.  Maybe someone who is more successful than me, their time is worth more than my time.  So, you start to get mispricing in how that energy is operating.  But there's, again, there's technological limitations, you can't do anything about it. 

Enter Bitcoin, where you can do something about it.  Now, what happens is, say you're watching a game and you don't want to have advertisements, right?  You can simply send sats to the content distribution, you can send sats to them, but advertisers, if you want to consume ads, advertisers can send sats to you.  So, you're cutting out the middleman of saying, "Well, we need to pull up all of this energy because there's no other way to get rid of it", because in the fiat system, you don't have microtransactions.  You have to build up enough energy and then the clearance time to pay for that energy, that you have to sell it in bulk.  But now with microtransactions, you don't have to do that.  So, what you can do is you can sell, well, every individual gets the opportunity to price their own energy, their own attention that they are giving to advertisers, that they are giving to companies.

Peter McCormack: It's a marketplace for attention.

Patrick O'Sullivan: It's a marketplace for attention.  And it's the first time ever that you will be able to set and dictate your own price.  And you can think of it like this.  Like, just for simple numbers here, for the podcast, right, you have advertisers, you have a number of listeners.  Let's say you've got, again, just for numbers sake, let's say you've got 100,000 people that'll listen to this.  And let's say you're going to do 5 minutes of ads on this show, so you've got 500,000 minutes of energy that you are taking up of the 100,000 people.  That's how much energy you are taking up. 

Let's say that's, what is that? That's 8,000 hours, that's 1,000 days, that's, if we do 250 work days a year, you're looking at four years of energy output that you are controlling with every single episode.  So, I don't know if you've seen the UPS news about how much UPS drivers are making or are set to make soon.

Peter McCormack: $170,000.  But that's not exactly true.  That's certain drivers right at the end of their career.

Patrick O'Sullivan: Yes, but let's take $170,000 for example.  So, what is that?  That's close to $700,000 of energy that the society sees fit.  That's how much that time is worth or that energy is worth, because it's better to use energy.  Let's say podcasting is a little bit different because you don't have to be focused on it.  So, if you use half that, that's $300,000.  Now my guess is, I don't know, but I'm going to guess that you are not getting that amount of money per episode.

Peter McCormack: How much?

Patrick O'Sullivan: $300,000.

Peter McCormack: Not an episode, no!

Patrick O'Sullivan: No, exactly.

Peter McCormack: If we were, I could solve my stadium problem!

Patrick O'Sullivan: Yes.  So, you, as the producer, you're the one producing the value.  What is the value?  Obviously, people listen to the show, there is value.  What you're doing is you're interrupting that value to then sell their energy.  You're deciding, "Hey, you're sticking around listening to this thing.  Why don't we input this?"  Now, that's not bad, right?  Because advertisers, if you have a product, that product in a capitalistic society, that actually provides a benefit, right?  That makes you more efficient if you purchase it, to the people that listen.  Except the people that are listening, maybe they don't want that product, maybe they don't have a need for that product, but because we're selling in bulk, they have to listen to that. 

There's probably, if I think about it, okay, so that's five minutes out of the day in an hour-long episode, let's say you do five minutes.  At the UPS rate, what is that?  That's $8.  I would, if I was going to listen to the podcast, I would rather give you $1, right?  And if there's 100,000 people that are listening and everybody gives you $1, that's $100,000.  So, you're making out pretty good, but that's the value-for-value model.

Peter McCormack: It's a bit like what these guys at Iris are doing with working with the Texas Grid.

Danny Knowles: Curtailment, yeah. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, curtailment, in that essentially, they've created a marketplace.  They're buying the energy in advance from the grid, and then at peak times, they're selling it back.  It's kind of that two-way relationship.  Advertising is broadcast now, but what you're basically saying is, you can pay not to be advertised to, so it can go both ways.  Our only issue with that is that they can pay that dollar, or literally just press the skip button.  And most people will just press the skip button.

Patrick O'Sullivan: Yes, they will press the skip button.  But if there was!

Peter McCormack: Fuckers!

Patrick O'Sullivan: Yes.  But imagine there was a platform that would allow you, rather than just hitting the skip button, imagine they could hit the skip button, but they could also make money. 

Peter McCormack: Like Fountain. 

Patrick O'Sullivan: Like Fountain, exactly; exactly what Fountain is doing.  Except the interesting bit is when you think about it, it starts to get quite mind-blowing, because if you have somebody like the UPS driver, so that person is out $8, if they give you $1, they're up to $7.  Now, if you consider someone like Michael Saylor is listening to the podcast.

Peter McCormack: It's funny you said that, because my next comment is going to be, "You sound like Michael Saylor at the moment"!

Patrick O'Sullivan: Yes, absolutely.  Well, essentially when you boil it down, Bitcoin is, if it's anything, it shows you that the world is a series of Russian dolls, right?  And you get all the way down to the very bottom of it, and what are we doing?  What is the whole point of any product?  Product is just information, information is the physical embodiment of order.  And it's a constant fight between entropy and order; that's what we're doing.  So, every time anything can make you more efficient, that's more on the side of good.  And it's good because lower entropy equals access to more energy reserves.  Energy reserves are good because why?  Because you can plan out further into the future because you're safe.  And all humans understand this if you think about, would you rather have, I don't know, a field full of strawberry plants that you can have at your disposal, or would you rather have a basket of strawberries next to you?  It's like, well, less energy, more order over here because it's already, all the work's already done, all the energy's already input.  So, you want more energy. 

If you think about somebody like Michael Saylor, his five minutes is worth a lot more than $8.  He is giving up so much listening to those ads.  It's not good for Michael, but it's also not good for the extended order.  It's not good for all of humanity to have Michael Saylor listening to those ads.  He is doing such a disservice.  And the beautiful thing about Bitcoin is, if it's bad for Michael Saylor to be listening to that, it's bad for everyone that holds Bitcoin.  He could be doing other stuff, making Bitcoin more valuable, as in, he could be out there farming, transforming energy from inaccessible to accessible, because he's just overflowing with energy, whereas some people are not.  So, he has that ability.  We should be encouraging him to, "Hey, you shouldn't be listening to this".  The podcast, obviously you should listen to the podcast.  But he shouldn't be listening to ads.  He should be doing other stuff, it's more value to him. 

Now, that brings you to, well, there is the value-for-value model, like Fountain.  But the problem with the value-for-value model is, advertisers do provide a benefit.  So the question is, I see the value-for-value model taking off in the future, but it's a complete rewiring of the system. 

Peter McCormack: It's a marketplace. 

Patrick O'Sullivan: Yes.  It's very hard to be able to have that shift versus what it is now.  In the meantime though, even if that does work, what will the solution be if you have a great product, and you want to get it out there; what's the solution in the value-for-value world?  You have to incentivise people to want to listen to your content or to want to hear about your product.  And the way that you do that is you pay them. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah. 

Patrick O'Sullivan: I will pay you to listen to my ad.  And guess what?  If you interact with my ad, I'm going to pay you more.  And if you buy my product, I'm going to pay you even more, because I don't have to pay the content distribution, I don't have to pay the pool, the energy, the people that are pooling the energy anymore, because now we can go peer-to-peer, because Bitcoin removes the middleman from that process.  So, advertisers now, which is the great thing that we're launching, and Danny could probably bring up the thing.

Peter McCormack: All right.

Patrick O'Sullivan: So, this season, what you're going to be able to do is you're going to be able to watch the game, and as you watch the game, if you scroll down to the video clip, this is just a standard video clip; as you watch, you get to the end of this, and you'll see that our advertisers are going to give you sats for watching the game.  You'll be able to claim them with your Lightning wallet.  And then, of course, this is almost like what we talked about with the players.  It builds integration as to how do we get sats into people's hands, and then how do we get those back to the players?  Well, boom, you just got your 100 sats.  And that comes from Bitrefill, is the sponsor.  You can claim it with a wallet, or if you're with Mash, who is behind this technology, who we've partnered with to develop this kind of stuff. 

Right now, like you can imagine, and we say it all the time in the organisation, this is this idea of accessing this information because this amount of energy, it was previously locked.  You couldn't access it with fiat.  It's stuck there.  So, we've just hit an oil reserve underneath the ground of potential energy that we've unlocked.  And it's good for the extended order if we do unlock it.  Hopefully by the time the season rolls around, rather than having the friction of hitting a button, it'll just be streamed to you, much like Fountain is just streamed to you as you watch these things.

Peter McCormack: But it's like a Perth Heat circular economy, in that the advertisers pay you, you pay the viewer, the viewer then might send it to the player. 

Patrick O'Sullivan: That's exactly right. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I love that.

Patrick O'Sullivan: Yes, and that's where you get the involvement of the fans to begin just to learn, because we saw such success last year.  And the reason this stuff comes up is because, again, we're in the trenches thinking of, who are the people that come up with the solutions?  It's the people that are working with the tools and finding the limitations, and finding out, like, okay, there is right now in the current system, this is an amazing build that we're just working through now, but you can claim these sats right now.  I mean, if you click on the link, you can claim them.  The problem is, again, there's friction.  So it's like, how do we remove the friction?  We just need to generate more information.  We need to generate more iterations of this process, and pretty soon, it'll just be streaming to you, and then you'll be streaming stats back as you watch.  And if you want to watch the ads, you can make a lot of money just watching the ads.  If you don't want to watch the ads, if you're Michael Saylor, you just stream sats to us.  So, it's just an energy connection that says, either this is worth your time or it's not.

Peter McCormack: I'm going to steal all your ideas!

Patrick O'Sullivan: Which you should.

Peter McCormack: Every single one of them.

Patrick O'Sullivan: And why is that good?

Peter McCormack: I know, it's great.  It's like a rising tide lifting all ships.

Patrick O'Sullivan: Well, yes, but it's also good as a Bitcoin holder.  The more valuable you are, the more valuable I am. 

Peter McCormack: Yes, true. 

Patrick O'Sullivan: Because you're able to go out and transform energy from inaccessible to accessible.  And what are you going to do with that energy?  You're going to plug it right back into the Bitcoin Network, which rises all the energy inside of the network, which is why we're sharing this information.  In the fiat world, why would we tell you this? 

Peter McCormack: No, I get it.  It's like what I said earlier.

Steven Nelkovski: This is the shittiest version that will ever be.  And there's so much friction in this.  But this is us coming to you.  If you think about it in the flying days, this is the Wright brothers.  We're in a wooden plane and it's just taken off.  But the thing is, if it works in theory and we can prove it works at this scale, we can essentially go to the moon, right?  And we just made Bitcoin that much more valuable.  We were able to access a giant oil refinery, energy reserve, underneath the ground that you didn't know existed.  And no one has been able to tap into this because of the restrictions of the fiat system: there's no microtransactions; there has to be someone in the middle; there has to be the clearance time.  All of these things cannot work. 

You can imagine in the future, you won't pay, there'll be no upfront money, there'll be no subscriptions.  It will be flowing sats back and forth as you interact with the product.  And it just so happens that content creators, what do they do?  They can now focus on the actual content, they don't have to worry about attention.  They can just focus on the content, and making that content better is what ultimately makes the extended order better, because there's some value there.

Peter McCormack: I love it.  So, it's from Wright Brothers to SpaceX.

Patrick O'Sullivan: In a day!

Peter McCormack: In a day!

Patrick O'Sullivan: That's it.  Yeah, so this is like the kind of thing where, did we know that this was going to be the path that we would take this technology?  Not at all.  But it's just getting in there and seeing where are the holes, because we did something very similar in a much more dumbed-down version last year with Stealing Sats; we were giving away sats.  And the amount of interest, the amount of leads that that generated, and people saying, "This is a great thing because I want to interact with that company more.  I want to interact with Bitrefill more", or any of our other sponsors.  And all the sponsors at the team have sort of accumulated the best of the best in Australia.  They all recognise this, "I want to be a part of this", because it's only going up from here.  It's only going to get better than it is right now.

Peter McCormack: Can I tell you something I want to do at the football club?  It's going to take a lot of engineering, and we probably can't afford to do it.  So, one of the big issues we have basically between December and February is frozen pitches.

Steven Nelkovski: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Cold snap overnight and it drops below freezing.  The pitch is frozen, doesn't thaw out in time, game's off.  And we probably had four or five games last year, and especially in January, we had a period where it was just game after game.  It's demoralising because you want to play.  It's demoralising.  It also puts a new pressure on the team because those games have to get played. 

Steven Nelkovski: Catching games is difficult. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  And so, all the big teams have undersoil heating, and all undersoil heating is, is a bunch of tubes pumping hot water through or warm water to thaw the ground above it.  So, I'm like, do you know what I want to do is, I want to build undersoil heat in our ground powered by the excess heat from Bitcoin miners.  I'm going to imagine the engineering to do it is going to be too expensive, but I'm going to look into it, because wouldn't that be --

Steven Nelkovski: Any preliminary cost that you think it would be? 

Peter McCormack: I have zero idea.  So, in my simple mind, I'd be thinking, "If I was going to build this, I need to get some tubes under the pitch and I need to get hot water there, I've got to circulate it, heat it and put it under".  And I visited this guy when I was making a film out in Texas; he does it for his pool, he heats his pool with Bitcoin miners.  He's got like five ASICs and it takes whatever period of time to warm it up.  So, I don't know what the cost of the engineering is, but I don't know.  The one chance I think I have is to find a mining company who would sponsor doing it for the PR.  They'll be like, "We'll pay for it because the PR of this is so unique and so amazing that it's worth it".  That's my hope and that will come alongside the plans to build a new ground because at some point in the next five years, we need a new ground. 

But isn't it amazing these kind of new innovations that come out of Bitcoin.  They're like, "We can build ASICs plugged into solar panels that for essentially free, kind of free, can thaw the pitch out for a match day.  I mean it's fucking insane when you think about it!

Patrick O'Sullivan: Yes.

Peter McCormack: Satoshi had no idea his idea would lead to machines thawing football pitches out.

Steven Nelkovski: No, and probably even back in 2017 when you said you had the first idea of this, that wasn't on the roadmap either.  It probably wasn't there in 2021 when you launched either.

Peter McCormack: No.

Steven Nelkovski: But as you continue to dig, as Patrick said, you come to a junction, you go, "Well, this is another place we can take it, and this is how we can use the technology, and this is how we can improve the world as well".

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Well, this Bitcoin and sports thing is super-interesting.  It's been a challenge for us in that we have a podcast which is basically about macro and Bitcoin, right?  That's essentially what it's about.  A bit of governance, a bit of culture, but it's basically macroeconomics and Bitcoin.  And our audience, there's a large percentage of them who are nerds and techies and there historically isn't a strong correlation between nerds and techies and sports.  You just know for a reason.  Perhaps it's because they didn't play sports at school or they weren't into it or team sports just seems a bit stupid.  So, when we first announced the football team, there wasn't this natural fit.  It wasn't like a great concentric circle.  There was a slight overlap and I think we've lost some of our audience from it.  For me going on about it talking about it, I think people have gone, "Fuck this shit, I don't want to listen to football".  There'll be ones listening to this show now going, "Fuck this, I don't care".

What I've tried to get across to them is like, you don't have to like baseball or football to understand this is about the Bitcoin Network expanding.  You're another node, we're another node, we are experimenting with technology, we are experimenting perhaps with ASICs, we're doing all these things because we know that essentially, Bitcoin can not be part of everything, but be part of a lot. 

Patrick O'Sullivan: Yes.

Steven Nelkovski: It's like Patrick said, it's almost, forget the Bitcoin baseball team now.  We are effectively the Bitcoin Institute of Technology. 

Peter McCormack: There you go.  It's like an innovation hub.

Steven Nelkovski: Yeah, correct.  And our focus is, if you look at big oil and gas companies and they've got -- we're 2040 now, we're not 2024, we're the Bitcoin Institute of Technology and this is the 2040 plan that we're working towards.

Peter McCormack: Well, so we have this meetup once a month that can range from 40 people to 100 people.  And I've been to meetups in New York and San Fran that have a similar size.  But my goal is to build a new training centre, that's my goal now.  I need four pitches where the boys can train, girls, everyone can train, and I want to build a football academy, but I also want to put a Bitcoin accelerator in there.  I want bitcoiners in the UK who are building technology, building companies, to come to a place where they have access to consultants, other bitcoiners, our platform, and so we can build out Bitcoin from there. 

So, I've been trying to get across to people, like you said, meet people where they're at.  With sports, we can meet people where they're at, we can try all this new stuff.  But it's trying to communicate to them, "Stop thinking of sports".

Patrick O'Sullivan: Yes.

Steven Nelkovski: Sport is really just the vehicle.  We're a company, and we've got the opportunity to use the technology throughout the company, to test the technology, to push the technology in so many different ways, and that's where people need to see it take; push the sport aside. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, push the sport aside. 

Steven Nelkovski: It's as simple as that.  Advertising, this really is not about sport, this can be done across anything now.  And that's where, again, you start the project and you're thinking baseball, but this is just commercial now in terms of the business and where does it continue to evolve across all industries, not just sports leagues and the Bitcoin Football League, or anything like that.

Peter McCormack: We would never have met if it wasn't for this.  You would never have reached out to me, and so we would never have met.  And so, we're kind of like sports colleagues and friends now and we should be probably selling your merch at our ground, we should be doing things together, we probably will do things together.  That network effect is super strong.  And we know that we have a basketball team and there will be a Premier League.  But it's all going to come, and we've essentially lit the touch paper under sports.  And I think this is honestly huge. 

I think the next part of Bitcoin is trying to elevate out of bitcoiners talking to bitcoiners about Bitcoin, arguing about drivechains and ordinals and that stuff.  Fine, do all that stuff, you guys should, but if we want Bitcoin to expand to everyone because we know the societal benefits and the individual benefits, and if we have to go and take this to everyone and we have to meet them where they're at, it's no different from Jason Maier writing his book, A Progressive's Case for Bitcoin; it's no different from you guys launching as a baseball team; it's no different from El Zonte as a town adopting it.  All these things are taking Bitcoin to where people are at.  And anyone listening, by the way, I say this, and they're like, "What can I do with Bitcoin?"  I've said it before, it's the cheat code. 

I've had a radiologist, a plumber, somebody else, ever since we, who was cheat code; who did we do cheat code with? 

Danny Knowles: Grant and Marty. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, since we said that, they've written to me and said, "How do I use the Bitcoin cheat code?"  I was like, "Well, you're the plumber; you're now the Bitcoin plumber.  Advertise yourself and anyone who's a bitcoiner is going to come to you first, (1) because you accept Bitcoin, (2) because they know kind of what you stand for.  There's almost an implicit trust with the quality, and you're going to just get more business.  Use the cheat code".

Steven Nelkovski: Yes.

Peter McCormack: Take the fucking cheat code!

Patrick O'Sullivan: I mean, it is one thing to say it once you're in it, you sort of see inside of the system that is Bitcoin and all the people that are building it out, you see that it's still so early.  So, from the outside, if you're just looking on Twitter and you see all the companies, you see all those things, you're like, "Man, there's so much happening in the space and I don't know where I can fit in".  But really, it's just about plugging it into whatever you do because it makes you more efficient".  Anything that you can think of, you plug it in.  And how do you discover anything?  You have to tinker with the tools, you have to see what does and what doesn't work. 

That is what I think to the overall, like what we can be, what service we can provide, like the Heat, the Bitcoin baseball team, back to Bitcoin that has been so good to us, is that we can tinker and see where the problems are, because we're not going to solve it.  We can find the problem, but we're not the developers.  We have the know-how how to operate Bitcoin, we don't have the knowledge about Bitcoin.  Like, I don't know, if I'm on a deserted island, Bitcoin's gone, I'm not rebuilding it, but I know how to interact with it.  And I know things about baseball, I know things about advertising, I can plug it into that area and I can report back and say, "Hey, we're onto something here [or] we're not onto something here", and everyone can do that. 

There is so much opportunity because it changes so much, like the classic, "It fixes this", it really has the potential to be so impactful outside of just something that you can hold and it will never go down in value and all those things.  There are enormous opportunities once you get inside the ecosystem and see like, "Okay, we're still super-early".

Peter McCormack: The challenge is picking what to work on.  It's so exciting that you're like, I mean I don't know about you, I've got like 100 things on my to-do list.  I'm adding more things to it quicker than I can tick things off.

Steven Nelkovski: Because we continue to find other opportunities and ways to explore, to integrate, to adopt, to innovate and that's what's brilliant.  It changes continually, and in some ways the projects get bigger and more exciting.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Are you going to win the championship this year?

Steven Nelkovski: We'll give it our best, yeah.  It's going to be a tough league this season.  We're in it to win it, yeah.  Bitcoin always wins, so it's important we win the championship.

Peter McCormack: When do we get you over to a football game? 

Steven Nelkovski: We'll be close, yeah.  It'd be awesome to come out this season, so we'll see how the calendar works post-February and look maybe towards the back end of the season when you're making that championship charge. 

Peter McCormack: 12 April, are you free? 

Steven Nelkovski: 12 April, how does that position against you? 

Peter McCormack: So, last year for our last home game of the season, you know our event here? 

Steven Nelkovski: Yeah. 

Peter McCormack: We did one in Bedford, 150 people.  We've been hinting on here.  We're expanding that this year, this season.  So, 12 April, we're doing a full one-day conference. 

Steven Nelkovski: Oh, wow! 

Peter McCormack: We've got some big keynotes, which I'll tell you about afterwards.  It's called Cheat Code.  If you come and you can come, we'll obviously have you on stage, because we'll do a whole thing on sports.  And then, there's a conference one day, party, piss up at night, the next day is our last home game of the season, fingers crossed we're challenging for the title. 

Steven Nelkovski: Absolutely.

Peter McCormack: And so, it's a two-day thing, if you can come, we would love you to, we'd host you, we'd have you part of all of it. 

Steven Nelkovski: Awesome, okay.  Let's put it in the diary and let's work towards it. 

Peter McCormack: If you can do it, that'd be amazing.

Steven Nelkovski: That'd be phenomenal.  Sounds good.  Just probably to touch on the way, we've been able to bring all the Australian Bitcoin companies on board this season, which is phenomenal for us.  We'll be working with Monochrome, a Big Asset Fund, Wallet of Satoshi, Amber App, also Iris are part of our programme this season.  It's great that we can get effectively an Australian front.  There's some really great bitcoiners here in the country, and the fact that we'll be able to showcase what the Australian Bitcoin companies can do is really exciting, integrate more teams, work with Mash to continue to develop the technology there, and how we can change the advertising space.  Yeah, it's another season which has so many different parts to what we can do, and we're really excited to integrate with more fans and show the adoption and innovation.

Patrick O'Sullivan: It's not going to be the same in 30 days as you're talking to us right now.  It's going to happen so fast, and it's only going to get better.  So, I would say we're just going in the right direction.

Peter McCormack: Well listen, I wish you the best and I fully appreciate you have been brilliant at reaching out and talking to me and supporting what we're doing.  I love what you're doing, I do want to come.  Next time I come to Australia, we will go to Perth.  Have you ever been to Perth? 

Danny Knowles: No, never been. 

Peter McCormack: Danny's got no excuse.

Steven Nelkovski: Perfect.  You can just see the ceremonial first pitch, you'll have the ball in your hand.

Peter McCormack: What date is the first?

Steven Nelkovski: The first game in Perth will be 24 November.

Peter McCormack: Oh, November.  What day of the week is 24 November?

Steven Nelkovski: Friday night.

Danny Knowles: Go there and then go to Africa.

Peter McCormack: Is that a Saturday?

Steven Nelkovski: It'll be a Friday, or you can do the Saturday; Saturday will be the 25th.  So, we're away in the first round, back home there. 

Peter McCormack: And I can throw the first pitch? 

Steven Nelkovski: Ceremonial first pitch, Pete McCormack! 

Peter McCormack: That's just so much pressure though, isn't it?!

Steven Nelkovski: There's been a few that haven't quite reached the other plate, and then there's someone like George Bush who, after 9/11, the Yankee Stadium, threw one of probably the best pitches of all time. 

Peter McCormack: So, the truth is I have a terrible throw.  Have you ever seen me throw? 

Danny Knowles: No.  That's embarrassing for you, isn't it?

Peter McCormack: It's really bad, I'll show you!

Steven Nelkovski: We may need to book in some sessions!  It's actually tricky because the mound, like, it's not high, but once you stand on it for the first time, if you haven't practised and then you're suddenly looking down, you think, "Oh shit, this is a little bit different to what I thought it would be".  It's not just suddenly throwing a bit of paper into the bin or something like that, and you can understand why people throw it into the dirt.

Patrick O'Sullivan: No pressure! 

Peter McCormack: My daughter plays cricket at school and there's cricket nets behind our house and she's got really into it, she's like, "Dad, can we go up there?" I was like, "Yeah, sure, let's go play".  So, we went out and I went up and bowled first ball and honestly, I must have been five yards wide of the sticks, and she's like, "I'll have a go".  So anyway, she runs up, she's only 13, I was like, "I'm going to absolutely fucking smash this".  Boom, she literally bowled me out with the first ball! 

Steven Nelkovski: Yeah, they've got a great way of humbling us, our children, don't they? 

Peter McCormack: Massive way of humbling us.

Steven Nelkovski: With the first pitch, probably the best tip is, don't try and throw the leather off it.

Peter McCormack: No, dude, I just want to reach the mound.  I just want to get to the other end.  Listen, look, I would love to come, it might be too much.  But if not, we'll find a game. 

Steven Nelkovski: We'll find a date, yeah.  And we'll look forward to a trip to Bedford in April. 

Peter McCormack: Well, listen, all the best.  Anything you need, gives a shout.  I will pimp Perth Heat, that's my baseball team.  I know Real Bedford isn't your football team!

Steven Nelkovski: Real Bedford are my football team.  We'll have the jersey on and that'll be it.  AC Milan will now be a close second.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, man, well listen, all the best for the season.  Wouldn't it be amazing at the end of the year if we've won the title, you've won the -- 

Steven Nelkovski: It'd be phenomenal, wouldn't it? 

Peter McCormack: And everyone will see.

Steven Nelkovski: Well, almost a little thing we could probably do straight off is, goals of the week, hits of the week, start mashing some of those highlights together as the Bitcoin plays of the week, and things like that.

Peter McCormack: There we go.

Steven Nelkovski: Let's start with that, yeah.  And then...

Peter McCormack: Go from there.  All right, well listen, all the best.  Great to meet you, Patrick.  And Steve, it's been great to get to know you.  Good luck here.

Patrick O'Sullivan: Awesome, yeah.

Steven Nelkovski: Thank you, thanks.