[00:02:41] Peter McCormack: There’s a lot of luck with it, right? I could have discovered it four years later or eight years later, and I discovered it at the time I did. I YOLO’d in, lost a bit, made a bit, figured it out, and then ended up launching a podcast, which enabled me to then understand how to invest in it. And then eight years later, I’m kind of in this position where the podcast is a platform.

[00:03:03] Peter McCormack: I’ve got some of these good connections, people like yourself. Other people in the industry who are experts and companies and I’ve got a bit of capital myself and I feel very lucky with that. So, yeah, how do you pay it forward? I’ve got, you know. When I first started this podcast, I emailed Jameson Lopp, I’d made two episodes, and he didn’t know who the hell I was, and he said, come out to Raleigh, let’s shoot some guns, and record a podcast, and lots of people do give up their time, they do give up their time to allow me to make the podcast, and bring an income in, and then with the football club, I’m asking everyone to back it, and come and visit us, and watch games, and buy jerseys, and burgers, and beers.

[00:03:39] Peter McCormack: And so if I’m like asking for so much, I want to give something back. And I think Bedford’s the right size town where I can make a difference. And I like living here. I’ve lived here my whole life, Preston, apart from kind of like a year and a half, two years at uni, I’ve lived here my whole life. So I’ve got everything I want in life.

[00:03:56] Peter McCormack: So can I, can I give something back? And that’s what I’m trying to do.

[00:03:59] Preston Pysh: This was the funniest part for me coming to Bedford. So you had prepared all of us and you’re just saying, oh yeah, it’s, and we try not to swear on the show. It’s a crap town, Preston. It’s a crap town. Don’t worry. Like lower your expectations and all this.

[00:04:14] Preston Pysh: And as an American, I show up and I’m staying at this just beautiful hotel. Very nice. So the Swan hotel, very nice hotel. And there’s this gorgeous river right next to it. There’s people out there doing crew right there on the water. There’s these gorgeous paths to go walking, the beautiful flowers, like, I’m just enamored by this town and I’m thinking, what is he talking about?

[00:04:37] Preston Pysh: Now I do realize you got Cambridge and Oxford that are like next door neighbors, like right between, or like Bedford sits in between these two like renowned towns. And I guess, is that why everybody says what they say about Bedford? Because for me as an American, this would be like a top notch town in the U.S. If you came over here and like walked around, it’s crazy.

[00:04:59] Peter McCormack: Well, I mean, look, I kept people to the good bits. That kind of area of the Swan, the River and the Corn Exchange. But I also turned up in the morning of the conference and there’s a guy sleeping in a tent outside the Corn Exchange. First time I’ve ever seen that in the morning of the conference. And then I’m sat in my car outside getting ready and I’m seeing the crackheads go in and out of the toilet outside.

[00:05:18] Peter McCormack: And I, I didn’t even know it was there. And I, you know, I’ve witnessed the dealing, but like most of us watching this managed decline of our economic situation in the West, well, everywhere. Everywhere, everywhere. I see it evidently in where I live. I’ve seen the rise of homelessness. I’m seeing the lack of capital and funds available from the council to spend on park projects, local sports, the local community.

[00:05:43] Peter McCormack: I’m seeing shops closed down regularly. I’m speaking to people who are struggling financially. So I think that’s all in the back of my mind. If anything, the thing about Bedford, it’s not that it’s self a crap town. It’s just a nothing town. You know, people don’t come to the UK and go, I’m going to go to Bedford.

[00:05:59] Peter McCormack: They go to London. They might go to Cambridge or Oxford or Bath or York. They might go to Wales, might go to Manchester or Leeds, or go to a city. Nobody says, I’m going to go to the UK and I’m going to go to Bedford. That’s not a place you go to. And so when I say crap town, I think like that. But now we have people coming to the UK and the reason to come is Bedford which is hilarious.

[00:06:20] Preston Pysh: Yeah. I think it’s amazing. And I think that it speaks to you for people that don’t know you personally. I’ve known you for quite a few years. For people that don’t know you personally, you’re just this extreme, you’re an extreme giver and you’re a person that just cares deeply about others.

[00:06:36] Preston Pysh: And I don’t know, I just see a lot of reflection in what you’re trying to do in the town and very admirable and just very exciting for what you’re trying to do for it. And I don’t know, I just, I think it’s a story about you that is, that is very untold and that people do not see on the surface. They might see you you know, online like poking different things, but, but as a person that knows you personally, I can just say it’s, it’s, it’s really exciting to see what you’re doing, Peter and hats off to you.

[00:07:04] Peter McCormack: Well, you came, I mean, you saw it. You, you, you came to a match day and I didn’t have any time to spend with you. ’cause I’m wandering around and checking on everyone. Everyone’s having a good time. Everyone trying to okay, trying to trying to win a game. Yeah. Which we didn’t. Trying to make sure everything runs okay.

[00:07:18] Peter McCormack: But yeah. Look, I just, I’ve been very lucky. I, I’ve said to the conference when I gave my little short speech. I think Bitcoin represents so many different things to so many different people. It’s hard to describe what it is. You can explain it as money, but the more time you spend in Bitcoin, I think the more time you realize what it is for you.

[00:07:35] Peter McCormack: And for me, I just see it as a, as I said, I see it as a pay it forward technology. If you can survive a, your first tour of duty, your first four years in Bitcoin, and you can get out alive at the end of it, you should be in a position whereby you can help others. And that’s either with time or capital. I don’t have as much time as I was like, but I certainly have capital or access to other people’s capital, which I can use to try and help people where I live in Bedford.

[00:07:58] Peter McCormack: And it’s very easy to move to a big city or to move to a beach somewhere and help an already thriving economy. But yeah, I want to help here. I love it here. I like the people here. Yeah. I just want to do something here, mate.

[00:08:11] Preston Pysh: So we were at the, at the conference that you set up there in Bedford, but you had a massive announcement.

[00:08:17] Preston Pysh: Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the Winklevoss twins invested in Real Bedford, your football team. And they invested 4. 5 million. That’s the number that I think is hitting the headlines. But the number that I’m seeing when, when I see this, I’m saying, hold on a sec. If I know Pete, well, he’s going to put that amount into Bitcoin.

[00:08:38] Preston Pysh: Let’s say we have a 5X or a 7X run, so that’s more like 25 to maybe 50 million in buying power in just 12 to 18 months from now, assuming this bull market does what many of us expect it to do in the coming 12 to 18 months. That number, the 4. 5 is already insane for a club this size, but if you 5 or 7X that.

[00:09:04] Preston Pysh: It gets really insane, like really fast. And the irony for me is the, is the name of the conference over the weekend was Cheat Code. And when I’m watching what’s happening play out, I’m thinking, holy cheat code for what you’re competing. Like you’re, you’re the people that you’re competing with, I don’t think can see what’s maybe about to play out here.

[00:09:25] Preston Pysh: So break it down for us. Is that my assumption? Correct? Of how you’re looking at the treasury and walk us through some of this strategy.

[00:09:33] Peter McCormack: Yeah, absolutely. No, you’ve, you’ve nailed it. Look, you and I know one thing is that the world is repricing in terms of Bitcoin. I don’t want to spend Bitcoin right now. I don’t want to spend the club’s Bitcoin.

[00:09:44] Peter McCormack: I want to spend the pounds that it brings in, similar to how when I was in Lebanon. When people have both the Lebanese pound and they have the US dollar in their pocket and they go and buy coffee, they give the Lebanese pound. They don’t want to spend the dollar because that’s holding value for them.

[00:09:57] Peter McCormack: And that’s, we’re in this world that’s repricing in terms of Bitcoin. And when I first spoke to Cameron Tyler about this, it was just over two years ago. We were at a conference in Texas. I met up with them for a beer and I just said to them, look, I’ve got this idea. I’d like to buy my local football club and get them in the football league.

[00:10:15] Peter McCormack: So I explained to them the league structure and Tyler immediately said, how do you get them in the Premier League? Okay, that’s a different prospect because it gets increasingly expensive every league you go up in. And you have to have infrastructure and you’ll need a stadium. So I mean, look, rough number.

[00:10:33] Peter McCormack: If I picked a number out of the air to take a team from the 10th tier to the Premier League, I think is a 300 million pound project. You might be able to do it for 100, 150. I don’t know. But I mean, at some point you need a stadium that’s going to cost 50 million. If you’re in the championship, you’re going to be spending 30 million on wages every time you want to have a go at it.

[00:10:49] Peter McCormack: It’s an expensive project. Or you can invest a load of Bitcoin, sit it in the treasury. And if Bitcoin does what it says it will do, then maybe you can do it that way. So when we got to the point of raising, because I essentially spent the last two years, I think, proving that I can run a football club and that I can understand how promotions.

[00:11:08] Peter McCormack: Yeah. And I was able to do it sustainably. Then that was, we can come back to that. That’s just using why I always say cheat code. And I said, we need to raise as much as possible and stick it in Bitcoin. Now with four and a half million dollars of Bitcoin, we’re going to sat in the ninth tier of football about to go into the eighth tier of football.

[00:11:24] Peter McCormack: We’re, we’re the most well capitalized club at that level in the country. And if Bitcoin does what I think it will do over the next two years, I think our capital needs will never catch up with the compound annual growth rate of Bitcoin. So essentially our treasury will always be ahead of our capital needs.

[00:11:44] Peter McCormack: Because, you know, we’re not going to get promotion every year, Preston, but take that back. Well, I hope so. Let’s go on the low end. Say, say Bitcoin does a 4X in this cycle and we have 20 and maybe in four years we’re in the National League and I need to spend a couple of million on infrastructure. So that takes me down to 18 million.

[00:12:06] Peter McCormack: And maybe the next year, another couple of minutes, maybe that takes me another 16 million, but Bitcoin does another run. And maybe that 16 becomes 60 million, you know, just a three X at that point, even a two X becomes 40 million, you have 32. And then the next year I might need a couple like the math in my head is, is, is that I think if Bitcoin reprices how I think it will do over the next two decades, we will not spend at the rate that we will grow that treasury based on even a declining compound annual growth rate. So that’s my thesis. Now, alongside that, to make that work over the next two, three years, I want the football club to be sustainable, live within its means, and still get promotions. Now, we’ve done that for the last two years, and we’re an expensive club to run.

[00:12:50] Peter McCormack: Compared to other clubs at this level, we’re a very expensive club to run. I mean, my budget for next year, in step four, is going to be about 600, 000 across the whole club. There will be clubs with budgets probably anywhere ranging from a hundred thousand to maybe four hundred thousand.

[00:13:05] Preston Pysh: What’s driving yours being so high?

[00:13:07] Peter McCormack: We always want to have a competitive playing budget. So I kind of estimate what I think the top budgets will be and make sure we have one there so we can compete. We don’t want to over spend there. And we’re doing that for men’s and ladies football at the same time. So we have high budgets. We also stream all the games.

[00:13:25] Peter McCormack: I mean, that’s a 60, 000 pound a year investment. We have lots of infrastructure requirements. I mean, we spent 40, 000 pounds in the ground this year, just alone on putting in a stand in changing the walkway. There’ll be more requirements to do that every year. Cause every division you got, we have some go to ground grading whereby you have to do certain improvements.

[00:13:46] Peter McCormack: So there’s costs that could be going into that.

[00:13:49] Preston Pysh: Will those costs keep going into the pitch that I saw?

[00:13:53] Peter McCormack: Yes, until we have the new location ready to build on that. But we still have to have that ground ready for each level whilst we’re working on another one. You can’t stop that work. So there’s costs that go into that.

[00:14:05] Peter McCormack: We will have full time staff next year. A lot of clubs entirely rely on volunteers, but we’re trying to build a project for years ahead, so we need to invest in the staff. So we’ll have full time staff working. on the club. We have a large outgoing in terms of stock, which is part of the budget. And, you know, if we don’t sell all the, all the stock that ends up sitting as you know, within our P and L, but it’s still something we have to spend money on.

[00:14:27] Peter McCormack: We have to have the cash flow to do that. We we’ll spend a significant amount on travel next year because we’ll be going further distances and we’ll have to hire buses to take teams to games. So when you, once you start going through it all, it all kind of adds up, but where we probably different from other clubs is we will invest in full time staff.

[00:14:46] Peter McCormack: We will invest in the streaming. We do have this large investment in ladies football that we want to have in the same time. We do support youth football. So we’ve built a model that works. I will, if we hit the crowds, I think we’ll hit next year and merch sales. I think we’ll do, which is conservative. We should be a break even club, and if we can beat that, again, because we did that last year, then great, but we’re not building a club for always for next season, we’re building, it’s almost like the Michael Saylor thing, I’m building a club for the next hundred years, a club that can get up there and compete.

[00:15:17] Peter McCormack: And so then it’s important to be sustainable and that’s a lot of work, but you know, we’re managing it at the moment.

[00:15:23] Preston Pysh: Talk to us about this dance that you had with Tyler and Cameron because it happened for multiple years and then you guys finally got a deal across the table. So talk to us about how that initially unfolded.

[00:15:36] Peter McCormack: Yeah, they’ve been very good to me from the very start. They used to sponsor the podcast a while back. And when I told about the football project, I mean, they got it immediately when I explained it like, Oh, no, I get this. This is just like Bitcoin. It’s a grassroots movement. And when they said about the Premier League, I kind of got it in reverse when I said, well, if you pitch Bitcoin 15 years ago and said what it was trying to achieve, everyone would say you’re an idiot.

[00:16:02] Peter McCormack: You’re not going to launch a decentralized currency that is going to dethrone every fiat currency in the world and become a global reserve currency launched by somebody we don’t know. And we’ll never find out who they are. People think you’re an idiot. And the same with this and we can take a football club from the 10th tier of English football with 40 fans to the Premier League.

[00:16:20] Peter McCormack: Again, nobody’s ever done it and everyone thinks I’m an idiot. But when you when you merge the two together, you realize powered by Bitcoin and hard work is possible. So they got it straight away. And I kind of got why they got it afterwards. And I think what they did, and I haven’t had this confirmed, I think what they did is they, they agreed to sponsor the club to begin with, almost like a test.

[00:16:47] Peter McCormack: Because this isn’t like a traditional investment. When you invest in software, there’s traditional metrics you can look at in terms of customer acquisition, customer acquisition cost, lifetime value. You look at the team, you see how they’re doing. You maybe start with a very small seed investment. This is a very different investment.

[00:17:03] Peter McCormack: This is doesn’t matter how good you are running businesses. Do you know how to win a league? And do you know how to recruit the right manager so you can win promotions? Because most businesses are fairly simple. If you’re good at marketing, you create a good product, you look after your staff, you should create a successful business.

[00:17:20] Peter McCormack: You can do all the business things right with a football club, but if the 11 players go on the pitch on that day, don’t win enough games, you don’t get promoted. So I think, I think if anything that they, they did the sponsorship to help me with the cost of running the club and almost like a test to see if I can go and do this.

[00:17:37] Peter McCormack: And look, first season, we won the league by nine points. This season we’ve won it with a, with a game to go. It could be by, you know, five, six points. Our ladies are top of the, the league. They’re most likely going to win the league a week on Sunday, I think it is. So I think I’ve proved, I know how to get promotions.

[00:17:53] Preston Pysh: You started off Pete, just so people understand the context. Yeah. Did you started off at tier seven or six? When you, when you first bought. The club tier six of non league.

[00:18:02] Peter McCormack: So I’ll explain the pyramid pyramid. You have the professional leagues, which is the premier league championship. Lead one league to, and you have promotion and relegation between the two.

[00:18:12] Peter McCormack: And that’s the professional leagues. And then you have, what’s known as non league. And the first level of non league is called step one. Okay. But it’s the fifth tier. We start in step six, which is the 10th tier. And that’s a, that is a, that is a genuine pyramid where once you get to the national league, there’s only one national league division.

[00:18:31] Peter McCormack: But below that there’s national north and south. And as you below that, there’s four more divisions and so on. So there is a pyramid up to the national league and it’s a straight line up. If you finish top of most leagues, you’ll go up. And then depending on the league, you’ll go up if you’re second, or if you’re second to fifth or third to sixth, you’ll go into a playoff.

[00:18:50] Peter McCormack: It’s very competitive because everyone wants to win their league, or if you, you know, on the lower budget end, you’re trying to survive. And so I think I proved to them a few things. I think I proved that I can win promotions. I think I proved another thing is I can do it whilst building a business, which is sustainable and I could grow the crowds.

[00:19:07] Peter McCormack: So we, our average attendance last season was the highest in our division and the same this season. And so I think I’ve kind of proved I can do it. And so when I went back to him and said, okay, I need investment, I think it was, it was a fairly quick decision. So it really the dance was about how much and when how to value the club, which is a difficult thing to do.

[00:19:30] Peter McCormack: And again, I said to them, look, if the investments too small now, there’s a chance I’m going to come back a later date and ask for more sooner than I’d want to. If we raise this amount right now, and I can leave in the Treasury not spend it for a couple years, I might never need to come back for more money.

[00:19:47] Peter McCormack: And so they understood that they understood the strategy. that they believed in it and wanted to be part of it. So yeah, it happened all fairly quickly. It was really painless. I’ve never raised money before and it was relatively painless.

[00:20:02] Preston Pysh: Well, you had the right partner. You had the right partner that understood what you’re trying to do.

[00:20:06] Peter McCormack: And they understand sports as well, like as Olympic was.

[00:20:10] Preston Pysh: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:20:11] Peter McCormack: They understand sports and they understand the nature of sports. And I think they like the competitive side of this. I think what will happen is down the road, as this is more successful, I think there might be other billionaires and Bitcoin will be like, damn it.

[00:20:24] Peter McCormack: I wish that was me.

[00:20:26] Preston Pysh: I mean, I’m already kind of feeling that way.

[00:20:28] Peter McCormack: Not that I’m the billionaire, but. Well, we will press them one day, I do. So I’ve kept some equity back because I would like to do a fan sale at some point of like small amounts of equity. So yeah, you sell to everyone else who loves the club, who wants to invest in the club and have just a small, a small amount of ownership can do. So that’s something we’ll look to do. So I think you’d have a ton of interest in that, Pete. I really do. Well, we already do. We’ve got a form on our website. That’s had over 600 inquiries.

[00:20:56] Preston Pysh: What, what really? Yeah. Yeah.

[00:20:59] Peter McCormack: And some people want to write big checks. You know, we’re talking tens, hundreds of thousands, and we just don’t have the ability to take that much capital on now because. I didn’t want to dilute too much down. Yeah, of course. You got to have control, Pete. You’ve got to have control. Yeah, I think it’s that.

[00:21:14] Peter McCormack: But there’ll be a time beyond me. And again, it’s another interesting investment, Preston, because I was talking to Tyler on camera about this. I said, this is an investment for you whereby if we do get to the Premier League, you’ll own You know, a significant amount of equity in a highly valuable asset.

[00:21:29] Peter McCormack: Yeah. In the most watched sporting league in the world. Yeah. For me, it will never be about the money. So I’m asking them to depart for money for something where I don’t care about the money. I just care about the journey. Yeah, the journey. Yeah. So if anything, because I don’t need the money. And the success is more important.

[00:21:48] Peter McCormack: I probably will work harder at this. There’ll be a time beyond me where I somehow, I don’t think it’s the part of my inheritance that would go to my children. I think it would somehow go to the town in some kind of trust that the town owns and no individual owns. I’ve got a really strange tangent, but I think it’s connected.

[00:22:07] Preston Pysh: I read, and I don’t know if this is rumor or real, that Universal Studios is trying to set up a theme park in Bedford. Is this true?

[00:22:16] Peter McCormack: This is true. It’s also totally insane. So this is now Pete, this is four minute drive from my house. This is a really big deal in my opinion. Huge. For the club. Yes. Because it’s going to bring such a different level of capital into the town and interest into the town.

[00:22:34] Preston Pysh: And what’s the, is this like, is this happening or is there just talk about this? Like where, what’s going on?

[00:22:42] Peter McCormack: They’ve bought the land.

[00:22:43] Preston Pysh: No way.

[00:22:45] Peter McCormack: Yeah. They bought 500 acres. It’s about a four minute drive from my house. It’s just insane. This is crazy. Yeah.

[00:22:53] Preston Pysh: So Pete, I want to tell you, so I got to tell you a story.

[00:22:55] Preston Pysh: So there’s a, there’s a theme park in in Pennsylvania. It’s called Hershey, like Hershey chocolate, the whole town, the whole town revolves around this, this chocolate factory. A lot of it’s been outsourced out of town, but what’s really interesting. is they’ve set up this massive sports complex in association with the park.

[00:23:15] Preston Pysh: And so you’ll have like state championships and like all these types of events that happen at Hershey park. And I guess I’m looking at what’s happening with universal coming into the town and I’m looking at your situation and how you guys are going to have to grow. And it almost seems like there’s this situation that could be like mutually beneficial to each other if there’s somehow a way that you could preemptively kind of work together or I don’t know.

[00:23:41] Peter McCormack: The universal stadiums?

[00:23:44] Preston Pysh: Yeah. The universal stadiums. So is this something that you’ve just, is this something you’ve thought about? Is this something that you’re entertaining? Is there any way you could have a conversation with them early on from like before they start work? Yeah.

[00:23:58] Peter McCormack: Yes, so the state of the project it was announced I think about a year ago I think everybody better was like what?

[00:24:04] Preston Pysh: What it’s the land about they got the land there.

[00:24:08] Peter McCormack: Yes, so we’re a good location So where they bought the lands really interesting There’s two main motorway spines that go through the country through the left and the right you’ve got them M1 which goes up towards Manchester and then you’ve got the a1 And Bedford’s really interesting in that we’ve got a bypass between the two about, and we’re 40 minutes north of London.

[00:24:27] Peter McCormack: And so we connect with the country very well. So what we have had around here is lots of logistics. Places pop up. We have a huge Amazon warehouse here because we’re perfectly located. On that bypass is where they’ve bought the land. So getting that amount of land near London is very difficult, but a train to Bedford from London is 40 minutes.

[00:24:48] Peter McCormack: So if you fly into London, we’re very easy to get to, but we’re also good to get to from the north of England as well. So we’re, we’re, we’re in a very good location. The talk is that they think it will take up to 10 years to complete the planning and the infrastructure requirements and the build, but think where our football club might be in 10 years time.

[00:25:07] Peter McCormack: You know, we might be a professional team in the professional leagues by then. I mean, that’s certainly my hope. So no, it’s certainly on my mind. Yes, I want to speak to them. I do have connections who can get me to talk to them. I hope it’s something they’d be interested in. I certainly think our investment from Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss gives me the credibility to sit in the room with them and say, I think there is a potential relationship here.

[00:25:31] Peter McCormack: But I also think of it a little bit like the Raiders moving to Vegas. If you support, I don’t know, let’s think of another team. Who’s that team that’s owned by the town? The Green Bay Packers. I expect the Green Bay Packers is the whole town going to watch the Green Bay Packers when they play. That’s pretty much it.

[00:25:50] Peter McCormack: But I think with the Raiders, I think a large number of people going to watch the Raiders play are people who’ve come to Vegas for the weekend. And so I think Rail Bedford has an opportunity of being that kind of team whereby we have the people from the town going, but there’s thousands, tens of thousands of people going to this theme park.

[00:26:07] Peter McCormack: They may also choose to come watch a Rail Bedford game over that weekend. So, no, it’s definitely on my mind. It is an incredible gift for the town of Bedford. It certainly puts us on the map. We have another place called Alton Towers, which is a huge theme park. There’s no reason to go to Alton unless you’re going to Alton Towers, but now we might have two reasons to come to Bedford, which is one, to go to the Universal Studios, or two, to go to Royal Bedford.

[00:26:32] Peter McCormack: There’s another interesting fact. I don’t know if I saw you and showed you, but when you came to our football ground, did you see the large aircraft, airship hangars?

[00:26:40] Preston Pysh: No, I didn’t see that.

[00:26:42] Peter McCormack: They’re about a two minute drive from the football ground. That’s where they shot Batman. Oh wow, really? Yeah, they’re the largest indoor structure in the UK.

[00:26:50] Peter McCormack: They built Gotham City in Bedford. No way! Yeah, there’s so many films that have been shot there.

[00:26:57] Preston Pysh: I think there’s a huge advantage of Bedford being very close to Cambridge and Oxford, which are two literally tourist destinations. You know, I was joking on Twitter the whole time I was in Bedford calling it a resort town and it might turn into a resort town with all this stuff happening.

[00:27:13] Preston Pysh: And Oh my God, Pete, the comments from, it was, it was hilarious. The people from the U S like, Oh wow, that looks so beautiful. The people from the UK. I can’t believe you actually put that in the writing, that this is a resort town. The comments were hilarious.

[00:27:27] Peter McCormack: The funny thing is, you commented in a very British way.

[00:27:30] Peter McCormack: It was always very British. And I was like, I was just looking at that picture going, Preston, you’re not allowed to step on that grass.

[00:27:37] Preston Pysh: The grass picture was hilarious. And then your comment, and then you replied back to me and I was like, Oh, I think I did sort of piss Pete off just a touch by stepping into this meeting.

[00:27:48] Preston Pysh: All right, well.

[00:27:49] Peter McCormack: No, you, you embraced it and it was just, it was such a, it was really surreal and overwhelming to, because we, we do this job, we make these podcasts, we, we go to these events, we, we, we become a community of friends, but to have everyone come to my place, honestly, it was really humbling. So I was overwhelmed by a lot of it.

[00:28:08] Preston Pysh: I’ve been to a lot of conferences, Pete, and I’m not just saying this because you’re a close friend. I had so much fun there. The pubs, just like, everything was in within walking distance. And it was just, everybody was having a blast. You’re not, I don’t know if you’re going to take this recommendation, but the size was actually perfect because you can get to know the people that are there.

[00:28:28] Preston Pysh: I think you had like 500, 550 people at the conference. And for me, it’s, it’s a lot of fun to have like real conversations with people and not feel like you’re getting kind of pulled in, you know, numerous different directions, but. And one other thing, and I heard this from at least five people when I was there, I’m so glad that the panels and like the conference was only one day and we had another day to just go have fun with everybody that was there.

[00:28:56] Preston Pysh: And I, I’m serious. I heard that from so many people that it wasn’t like three days of like listening to panels over and over again. So. As far as this.

[00:29:05] Peter McCormack: So a lot of people said to us things like, you know, I really like the attendees because it’s not cheap to go. I mean, yeah, 50 by 1000 pound of your VIP.

[00:29:13] Peter McCormack: But they said, the cool thing was I would go to a bar and there would be press them push or Jeff booth and I could talk to them and they were real in front of me. Because if you go to bitcoin, So I’ve been you know Miami, previously or natural now. It’s a huge event and it’s hard to get that connection with people I think we’re going to make it slightly bigger, I think we’re going to give it a couple couple hundred more next year and I think they’ll be I think it will sell out I think there are a lot there was a lot of film out there.

[00:29:37] Peter McCormack: But what was interesting is we did it last year as just a light of podcast casually 150 people and took them to the football and then we realized the thing about the conferences. Nobody really wants to go to the second day. They’re all hung over. If you’ve got the opening slot on the second day, you essentially got this ghost shift that no one wants to be at.

[00:29:56] Peter McCormack: And so it’s really difficult to get people interested in the second day. But if the second day is a barbecue and beers and watching a game of football later in the afternoon, Yeah, it’s just so much fun. And I think that’s why people have such a good time because they’re like, this is so different. And I think the conference scene will start becoming more experiential because there’s a couple I’ve been invited to recently, and it’s three days at all.

[00:30:17] Peter McCormack: So I’m like, I don’t want to do this. I like Pacific because at Pacific, they do such a good job of the non conference thing, the outside with the bars and all in the game and the bar. I love that one. And I, you know, I love Bitcoin magazines because it’s so big and everyone goes and I’ll be in Nashville, but the ones which are just two, three days of panels, I’ve got zero interest because personally, I just want it more experiential now.

[00:30:41] Preston Pysh: Yeah. Well, so much of it is just the networking that takes place and just meeting other people, like minded people that have a love for like what the whole movement’s about being able to network with them. And dude, it was so much fun. Oh my God. Was it fun?

[00:30:56] Peter McCormack: Okay, here’s some other cool things. Back of it. So firstly, the vegan restaurant next door, yeah. Vegan coffee shop. She had her busiest Friday ever and she decided to keep all the Bitcoin. She said, you know, I’m going to keep the, I’m going to keep the Bitcoin. I think this is the future. She said, everyone was so nice. It’s the nicest event that’s ever been on.

[00:31:16] Peter McCormack: And I, I, I think I want to keep it. So she’s keeping all the Bitcoin she brought in. There was a local restaurant called Wagamama’s. It’s a chain of Japanese restaurants. They’ve emailed me and they said our restaurant was full of people wearing Real Bedford merchandise on the Saturday night and the atmosphere was great.

[00:31:32] Peter McCormack: So they’ve invited me for dinner on Monday to go and talk to them about it. There was another one, the Pizza Place, that did the pizzas outside. I had to settle my balance with them because we owe them for the VIP food. They’ve asked for us to pay them in Bitcoin. And so, we’ve got this kind of gradual orange pilling of people in the town as well.

[00:31:51] Peter McCormack: La Tereza the restaurant had their busiest night. So, I think a lot of people in the town who maybe were a little skeptical started to realize, Oh no, this is a really good thing for Bedford.

[00:32:01] Preston Pysh: Well, no doubt. And I, I like I paid for this sweatshirt I’m wearing right now with Bitcoin. It was amazing. I want to talk a little bit about the business of a football team specifically, just like how, like your thought process.

[00:32:20] Preston Pysh: And I don’t know if you’re comfortable sharing your thought process on this. I’m assuming you will. Just, I would think it’d be so hard and time consuming to be able to audit all the players, the up and coming players, like who I’m going to add to the roster, whether I’m overpaying. I think that’s the part that would be as a value investor, as a deep value investor, I’m thinking in terms of, can this guy literally kick the ball five times better because of the value that you’d pay than this other guy that I can get.

[00:32:49] Preston Pysh: And like performing this quantitative, qualitative dance. In a way that like, Hey, maybe next year, this guy’s just going to kind of suck for, cause he’s getting older or whatever, like taking so many variables. into account. Clearly you can do it. You’ve, you’ve done it very well for two years in a row. You were number one in running a team right out of the gate.

[00:33:12] Preston Pysh: I find that miraculous. How do you go about that process? It seems like it’d be so difficult to, to look across the whole spectrum of, of players and being able to select. And I don’t know.

[00:33:24] Peter McCormack: I will get a lot of applaud. It’s in the Bitcoin world for doing this. In the football world, most of the, a lot of the plaudits will go to the manager.

[00:33:31] Peter McCormack: And I think, I think it’s a job that both of us do together in that we have a very clear separation of roles and responsibilities. He’s everything on the pitch, which means players, player selection, player acquisition, player performance. I don’t interfere with that at all. The team is his team. And that’s, and I’m okay with that.

[00:33:52] Peter McCormack: I’m everything off the pitch. I’m the brand. I’m the marketing. I’m the business side. I’m the brand. And we talk all the time. We speak every day. I mean, we had a coffee this morning. We, we’re meeting up at five o’clock today. We speak regularly, but I can talk to you in detail about the business side of it.

[00:34:09] Peter McCormack: But in terms of the players and the player acquisition, that’s all the manager. What I can tell you is really interesting is how important they are. So when I actually bought the club, I had them for half a season when under their old name, Bedford FC, and they were just below the playoffs. And I changed the manager straight away.

[00:34:28] Peter McCormack: And the new manager I came in, I gave a really good budget. I said, just get us in the playoffs. They recruited a bunch of players, well paid, very well paid players. We had one player in the team who’s paid more than anyone’s been paid since. But it didn’t work. We didn’t get in the playoffs. We weren’t getting the results.

[00:34:45] Peter McCormack: And I realized this is, this is a lot harder than I think. You can’t just throw money at it. And so at the end of that season, when we became Real Bedford, I knew I had to change the manager. I realized it is the manager that drives this. You can have a great manager and no budget, and you won’t go up. It’d be very hard.

[00:35:01] Peter McCormack: Or you can have a great budget and a terrible manager, and you won’t go up. You need a good budget and a manager who knows how to spend it. So I was told by a couple of people to speak to this guy, Rob Sinclair. He was an ex professional. He played in the professional leagues. He played for Stevenage. He played for Forest Green.

[00:35:16] Peter McCormack: And I was told he’s trying to play expansive, entertaining football and to dominate teams. And he was running a team called Sainsbury, who didn’t have a budget. And I went and looked at their results before he took over and after they took over, and he changed the team around, but he did it without a budget.

[00:35:32] Peter McCormack: And so when I met him, I immediately knew he was the guy for the job. He was so professional, he was ready with a presentation to explain his strategy of how we win the league. And I said to him, tell me what you need, and he told me what he needs in terms of budget and infrastructure, and I gave it to him, and he went and won the league in the first season.

[00:35:50] Peter McCormack: And then I said the same at the end of that season. What do you need to go and win the league? And he told me we’ve just won the league again. I already knew, I already, we did the work early. I said, if we win this league, what do you need? He’s told me. And so I’ve got everything in place for next season.

[00:36:04] Peter McCormack: But in terms of player budgets, player selection, player recruitment, that’s entirely him. I don’t get involved in any of it at all. All I do say, What budget do you need to challenge for the title? He tells me and I go away and I do all the business side of things to make sure he has that budget. It’s a very clear separation.

[00:36:23] Peter McCormack: I don’t criticize it. It was interesting, Preston. So we had a run recently. We had a run of games where we lost to Leatherstock and we had three draws and we went from a position of very clear, eight points clear at the top of the league to being in a position where if MKIrish won their games in hand, they would have been five points clear.

[00:36:42] Peter McCormack: And so what happens at that point, people start coming to me and saying, well, right, why is Rob doing this? Why is he picking that person? They’re being backseat managers. And I said, I don’t know. That’s his decision. I trust him.

[00:36:53] Preston Pysh: I love this. Yeah, I love this. Pete, I always had a saying whenever I was managing large teams.

[00:37:01] Preston Pysh: Give people, when you charge people with responsibility, they’ll take responsibility if you have the right people and then you can’t get in there and start messing with them, right? You cannot mess with them. You hired the guy that you think is the right guy. Let him run with it. He’s going to make mistakes.

[00:37:17] Preston Pysh: You’re paying for those mistakes and he’s going to learn from those mistakes. And if after a certain amount of time, you’ve determined, all right. I let him do his thing and it just didn’t work out. He was, he was the wrong guy, but you gave him a shot to go through the cycles of learning, making mistakes, you know, making good decisions and seeing the rewards of those.

[00:37:40] Preston Pysh: That is the epitome of leadership.

[00:37:43] Peter McCormack: So I said, Rob won the league last year by nine points. We’re still top of the league now. Irish have to win their games and they’ve got a hard run. I’m not going to second, I’m not going to question Rob and guess his decisions. It is down to him. He’s, we’re top of the league.

[00:37:59] Peter McCormack: Why are you questioning this? We can’t win every game and look at the games. Look, when we lost to Leatherstock, you know, Fairplay, they played well. When we drew with Potton, we missed the last minute penalty and we dominated them. When we drew with Bigglesway, they scored a last minute penalty. And so, these football is a game of fine margins, but Rob is such a professional over the space of a season.

[00:38:20] Peter McCormack: We’re going to come out the good side of these fine margins. And we did, we won the league with a game to go. And I think that’s one of the things about becoming a chairman. I think one of the things I learned very quickly, two things, actually, I’ve learned a lot, but two things I learned. I’ve got to come to terms with that.

[00:38:35] Peter McCormack: It’s a weird business in that you can do everything right. And then you can lose a game. And that affects the business. And so I’ve emotionally separated myself and I’ve become very stoic. If we don’t get promoted, fine. We’ll carry on doing our job. We’ll carry on growing the school team. I’m not going to get over emotional about it unless we win, of course, and I’ll look crazy.

[00:38:53] Peter McCormack: But secondly, absolute trust in everybody in their position. Absolute trust. I go, it’s like Emma, Emma was, I mean, Emma, how good is Emma? Emma’s amazing. Emma doesn’t know how good she is. She, she is unbelievable.

[00:39:09] Preston Pysh: And by the way, she loved my fake neck tattoo that I had for the day. She complimented.

[00:39:13] Preston Pysh: She said, I want you to do that for real.

[00:39:17] Peter McCormack: Emma will phone me up and she’s like, I don’t know what to do about this. What do you think I should do? And I’m like, I said it straight away. What do you think you should do? And she’s like, and she’ll tell me, I was like, we’ll do that. She’s like, is that the right answer?

[00:39:28] Peter McCormack: I was like, I don’t know. Go and find out. Or she’ll phone me up and tell me a decision she’s made. And I’ve said, you’ve made the decision. I can’t change it. You don’t even need to tell me this. For our football club to keep growing, it has to be able to run outside of me. I need to focus on growing the brand, focusing on the business, all these other things.

[00:39:45] Peter McCormack: Just get on with it. And, and I’ve learned this with this business more than any other business I’ve run because it is so unique that you just have to put people in a position of authority and trust them and say, get on with it. Yeah, and let them make their own mistakes and football accelerated that because it’s such a weird business.

[00:40:02] Preston Pysh: Yeah. Wow. What would you say he thinks his secret is to hiring? Like what, what’s he doing? Are you, or are you just so hands off, just like getting out of his way?

[00:40:13] Peter McCormack: I think that will change. That’s something that’s changing. I think originally, I think his secret to recruitment is just telling people what his ambitions are and how he’s going to approach training.

[00:40:24] Peter McCormack: Rob demands professionalism from everyone. Even from me, he will call, he’ll pull me up if I’m not being professionalized with something. absolute professionalism and commitment. And so there are players out there who you consider maybe journeymen who are happy to pick up their wage. They’re good players and naturally good players, but they don’t care about going up too much further.

[00:40:44] Peter McCormack: Rob wants to find young, talented players who want to play at higher levels that will listen and develop and work with him, who will train twice a week, train hard, who won’t drink or focus on their fitness. So I think his secret was that is convincing people that under him, he will develop them and they’ll become better players.

[00:41:03] Peter McCormack: I think we’re in this fortunate position now that people want to come to us. People want to play for a team. You want to win leagues.

[00:41:09] Preston Pysh: Do you think is it his humility as well? It seems like he’s a very humble person .

[00:41:14] Peter McCormack: Yeah. But I think mainly it’s, it’s not just people wanting to play for him.

[00:41:18] Peter McCormack: He’s got to find players. that want to play and be professional in the way he is. Yeah. So there are people, there are people he wants to find, but there are people out there who want to find him as well. Yes. Yeah. Because they want to play at high levels of football. We’ve got so many good young, talented players like Josh Cetral on the wing, Ben Stevens, Ben Stevens last year, he played for Kempston Rovers.

[00:41:42] Peter McCormack: I think he scored 12 goals. This season scored 40 in the number 10 position. Under Rob, he will become a better footballer. He will learn more. And so for him being our club is a great thing. And so I think it works both ways, but with such high profile now, people will want to come and play for us. At first, they didn’t take it seriously.

[00:42:04] Peter McCormack: It was just this guy from Bedford, big loud mouth saying, I’m going to take the team to the Premier League. They’ve seen back to back promotions, growing crowds, investment. They know we’re, we’re the real deal now and people will want to play for us, Preston.

[00:42:16] Preston Pysh: I love it. Talk to us about how the business side of this changes.

[00:42:21] Preston Pysh: Let’s say you get up into tier four, three from here. What changes? Cause I, I was hearing from some friends that like, once you get up to a certain level that the amount that you can spend on players is somewhat capped based off of a multiple of your, of your revenue, that’s coming through the club that way you just can’t like, I guess, yeah, buy your way up.

[00:42:42] Preston Pysh: So talk to us about some of that and like what the challenges are and how you plan to navigate something like that.

[00:42:48] Peter McCormack: Yeah, that’s the financial fair play rules, which a number of teams have been docked points at the higher levels for Everton, Nottingham Forest have been docked points, and I think Man City are under investigation because they’ve bent the rules.

[00:43:01] Peter McCormack: It doesn’t affect us at our level, but I don’t think about it anyway, because we’re already sustainable based on our revenue model. This is why I focus so hard on the business. I was chatting to my son about this yesterday, because he was asking. I said, look, there’s a film you need to watch, Glengarry Glen Ross, where we talked about always be selling.

[00:43:16] Peter McCormack: I’m always selling. Everywhere I go, when people ask me about the club, I say, have you been to a game? Are you coming? There’s a game on Tuesday. Come down. I’m recruiting one person at a time around Bedford because people through the door. Every person comes through the door on a match day means 12. 50 for the club.

[00:43:33] Peter McCormack: And so when we get a crowd of 200, that’s two and a half thousand pound, but you have base costs of a match day of paying the referees, putting on the food. So you may only make about a thousand pound profit with that. Whereas on the game you came when we had a thousand people there and we took 18, 000.

[00:43:52] Peter McCormack: And we’ve made, take off our base costs and our cost of sales. We made over 10, 000 that day. Now, if you could do that every day, every game, you got 25 home games, that’s 250, 000 revenue just on a match day. That side of things is why sustainability is so important because even with the investment, you can’t just go and splash it on wages.

[00:44:12] Peter McCormack: You’ll, you’ll, you’ll break the financial fair play rules and you’ll lose points. But there’s, there’s a couple of other things that have become really important to the club in terms of growing. As you go through the leagues, that is really important, but infrastructure is the big one. And there’s two big things on my radar.

[00:44:27] Peter McCormack: One is our ground. So I’ve talked about our ground. We can sweat this asset up until probably three more promotions. Okay. But realistically, if we keep getting those promotions, we need a ground suitable for a league football, which itself will be a 5 to 6 million pound investment, but we have to start that work now.

[00:44:47] Peter McCormack: We have to be ready for when we ready to be able to have that ground ready. But there’s another really big change that’s going to come that’s really important is going from our time to full time. And so in the National League, the one below the four professional leagues where Rexxon, where Rexxon were when Ryan Reynolds bought them, they will be full time.

[00:45:08] Peter McCormack: And then below that National North and South, you’ll have a mix of teams which are full time and hybrid. And so hybrid would be your manager will be full time. And you maybe have a squad of 10 to 12 youngsters, like younger players who are full time, and then maybe some youth team players, you know, teenagers, and then you’ll have a core of first team experienced players who are maybe 25 to 35 years old, who will only train twice a week on, or maybe three times a week in the evenings, because you’ve got to think if you’re 30 years old, you’re a very, very good footballer, You may have a job earning 000 a year, and you’re also bringing maybe 15, 000 a year playing football.

[00:45:49] Peter McCormack: You’re not going to earn that as a professional footballer playing at this level. And so what you tend to do, you tend to find a lot of players, they never reach their full potential. because they’re never going to play in those divisions because they’re not going to risk the finances for their family.

[00:46:04] Peter McCormack: So they tend to stay around this level. I’m always working one season ahead. So Rob always says one game at a time. If I ask him about our cup final on Wednesday, he’ll say, forget that. We’ve got a league game on Saturday. We’ll talk about that afterwards. I’m the same with leagues, I think one year at a time.

[00:46:22] Peter McCormack: So all the work for next season is done in terms of my preparation and we’re ready to go. I’m thinking about the season afterwards. If we get promoted, we’re now up in step three. And so I’m thinking, can we be hybrid that year? Can we, because not many teams do it at that level, but if we are, if Rob is full time and we’ve got full time youth players and we’ve got young players full time, that’s going to give us such an advantage over everyone else.

[00:46:46] Peter McCormack: So how do I fund that? How do I finance? What’s the infrastructure for that? And so there’s all these things of a growing football club that you have to think about to try and get in place. And then to do that, you have to be sustainable. So, okay, if I want to have that full time model, what does it cost me?

[00:47:03] Peter McCormack: Okay, well, it costs me that, then I need to bring in this much revenue on sponsorship, this much money in on merch sales, and this much money on a match day. So, there’s like these competing things of what you want to do, but being able to afford to do it sustainably. It takes up a lot of my time.

[00:47:16] Peter McCormack: Luckily, I have Danny on the podcast, the show, so I can do this because I’d say, Preston, this football club is 80 percent of my time now.

[00:47:23] Preston Pysh: Yeah, yeah, I would imagine so. Not to mention Danny’s incredible, by the way.

[00:47:28] Peter McCormack: Yeah, he’s amazing.

[00:47:29] Preston Pysh: And by the way, Pete, you said you’re always, you’re always closing. I’ll close this one for you.

[00:47:33] Preston Pysh: This merch is amazing. We’ll have a link to the in the show notes for people, if they want to buy a Bedford hat or real Bedford shirt or sweatshirt, sweatshirts. Nice. I like sweatshirts without the hoodie on it. So when I saw this, I had, I had to own it.

[00:47:48] Peter McCormack: We by the way, we usually set about one item a day on the, on the club shop.

[00:47:53] Peter McCormack: We sometimes like in the start of the season, we’ll sell a bit more, but it’s about one item a day since the announcement, we’ve been selling about 10 items a day. That’s amazing. Yeah.

[00:48:03] Peter McCormack: I mean, it’s just supports the sustainability of the club.

[00:48:05] Preston Pysh: There hasn’t been a conference that I’ve gone to that I hadn’t seen at least one person wearing real Bedford gear around, around the conference.

[00:48:13] Peter McCormack: That’s kind of nuts, really, when you think about it, because every conference I go to, I think our merch is the most worn merch now.

[00:48:19] Preston Pysh: I think so, too. I think so, too. It has to be a little surreal, people walking around with Bedford stuff on.

[00:48:26] Peter McCormack: Well, we get, I get photos. So, one guy was in a gym in London, sent me a photo.

[00:48:30] Peter McCormack: There’s a guy working out in one of our shirts, in one of our jerseys. Another guy at the World Cup. And so it’s starting to get spotted around the world, which is the really surreal thing.

[00:48:41] Preston Pysh: So if you, I want to go back to this additional micro equity offering that you had talked about earlier, I would recommend, and I’m curious if you would agree with this, you got to strip the voting rights out of whatever additional equity that you’re going to issue here.

[00:48:54] Peter McCormack: Yes.

[00:48:55] Preston Pysh: And I, I, okay, that’s good. And I think that a person that would, I know personally, if I was going to buy a small portion of equity at Bedford, I wouldn’t want to own any voting rights. I want you to have the voting rights. I don’t want somebody to step in there and start influencing the way you’re doing this.

[00:49:11] Peter McCormack: That’s the same with Cameron and Tyler as well.

[00:49:13] Preston Pysh: Really? Okay.

[00:49:15] Peter McCormack: They’re co owners now. Yeah. They don’t want to be making decisions. They don’t want to have to vote. They trust me. And it’s like, Pete, you get on with this. And yes, look, a football club, it kind of needs to be a dictatorship. It really kind of, and it is at the moment.

[00:49:29] Peter McCormack: I mean, I have. Yeah, but if we do this, do this raise yes, we would strip out voting rights. I think there’s a lot of people who just want to be part of the project. It would be another way to stack more Bitcoin into our treasury. But ultimately, I think the big part of this is if it’s a thousand people, 10, 000 people buying tiny shares.

[00:49:50] Peter McCormack: That’s a 10, 000 person marketing department. Who are bought into the future of the club going around. I mean, did you meet Edgar? The guy from Minneapolis who had the flag. So Edgar, this is the second year he came. He runs a real Bedford supporters club in Minneapolis. Okay. He gets 15 people together in a bar every game and watches the live stream.

[00:50:11] Preston Pysh: That’s hilarious. I’ve seen real Bedford. I think there’s one up in Ohio too. I saw it on Twitter, just like they had their own little Twitter group.

[00:50:24] Preston Pysh: All right. So I was having so much fun when I was there at the game. I come back and I’m still watching a lot of the antics. You guys win the division after I got back to the States. And I’m talking a little smack online with the other team. So for people that aren’t familiar, there’s two teams in Bedford.

[00:50:42] Preston Pysh: Pete, when you bought the team, correct me if I’m wrong, you were two divisions lower than the other team in town, correct?

[00:50:49] Peter McCormack: Well, yeah, well, actually, kind of. Yes, but within six months, we were three below because they got promoted.

[00:50:56] Preston Pysh: Oh, okay. So you were?

[00:50:58] Peter McCormack: Do you know I tried to buy them?

[00:50:59] Preston Pysh: So I didn’t realize this.

[00:51:01] Preston Pysh: So you tried to buy the other team, which was higher. What happened with what happened with the negotiations? Why did that fall through?

[00:51:07] Peter McCormack: And so I went and told them, I made a very good offer, an offer that you don’t get for a club like that way more than they deserve. But because they were going, they were about to get promoted and go three divisions of a higher, I basically offered what I thought the cost was for us to get there.

[00:51:22] Peter McCormack: Yeah, it’s half a million pounds. That’s a lot of money for a club at that level. But I also said to them, look, this is the plan I want to do. I’m working on an investment with some very significant billionaires. I think I can take him to the football league. So we had a long conversation. They ultimately said no, I think for a couple of reasons.

[00:51:40] Peter McCormack: One, they were going into a higher division and I believed he thought he could do it himself. I don’t think he fully understood the proposition, but then I don’t think many people have. I think a lot of people thought it was not a serious offer, but I think the bigger issues were is that I didn’t want to change their name.

[00:51:57] Peter McCormack: They wouldn’t have been Ralph Moffitt. They would have stayed at town, but I did want to change the colors. And ultimately, the current chairman, I didn’t want any involvement from him. It had to be a clean break. You can be a fan, you can come along, but you’d have no involvement. And I think that was difficult for him.

[00:52:12] Peter McCormack: You know, his dad used to be very much involved in the club, very respected, respected man in the town. And look, ultimately it wasn’t right for him, so fine. That’s, that’s not a problem. I think they were very surprised when we announced the buying of The Next Door Neighbors. And rightly, we’re a little bit worried.

[00:52:29] Peter McCormack: I also think they thought I was trolling them calling it Real Bedford, which I wasn’t, because I think they read it as Real Bedford and said they’re not the Real Bedford, but really, it was just more of a joke, because it’s a bit like Real Madrid, but from Bedford, so we’re obviously nothing like them, so I thought that was kind of funny, but.

[00:52:45] Peter McCormack: That’s been a rivalry that’s been bubbling. And this season has been bubbling a lot more because it’s getting close to us being in the same division. We’re confirmed to go up to theirs. They have a chance for promotion in theirs. If they do, then they’ll go up to one above. But if they don’t, we’ll be in the same division.

[00:53:03] Preston Pysh: Crazy. I mean, they’re very, they’re very sensitive. I mean, I, I kind of deserved it. Like I’ll admit if I get blocked by somebody, I’ll admit I deserved. What I was, I mean, I was calling them babies. I was saying that they were watering your field with their tears. I was telling them that they needed to have a box of tissue, I’m sorry, a pallet of tissues delivered to their front door, so I deserve the block, but I find it hilarious, this rivalry.

[00:53:29] Preston Pysh: And I think that it’s only heating up. Do you think they’re going to get promoted this year? The other team?

[00:53:33] Peter McCormack: They should do. Look, if I was betting on it, I would say yes, but winning the league is going to be hard for them now. They could do it, but it’s going to be hard. If not, they go into the playoffs and the playoffs can be a lottery.

[00:53:44] Peter McCormack: It’s one game. You don’t turn up when the other team turns up, you can lose it. And so, look, interestingly, I want them to go up for two reasons. One, if, one main reason. I want to win the league next year. And if we’re in the same division, that will be a distraction. That’s all people think about. We’ll be competing on budgets.

[00:54:06] Peter McCormack: It will be a distraction. It’ll be a psychological distraction. So if they go up, I don’t have to think about that. I can focus and Rob can focus on winning that division. And then maybe we meet in the one above it, but the one above it, the level so much higher. It’ll be a great rivalry, but less of a distraction.

[00:54:24] Peter McCormack: So ultimately I want ’em to go up. If they don’t, I mean it’s going to be Fire. Preston , I recommend you. You fall over that. I might fly over for landscapes. Yeah. It will be a sellout, it will be fire. It’ll be noisy. The whole town will come out. And financially it’ll be great for both clubs because we can host 1500 and we will, and they can host 3000.

[00:54:46] Peter McCormack: And I would not be surprised if you get 3000 there in the town. out for that game. The rivalry is interesting because I think they’ve got a big problem. Everything we’ve been doing, we’ve been working on for two, two and a half years, building a brand, building a match day experience. And I don’t think they realized the threat early on.

[00:55:08] Peter McCormack: And they certainly do now. And so now they’re trying to change things at their place, but their crowds are falling. Their fans and some of their fans are disgruntled. And the way I explained it, I think they’re trying to turn around a tanker and catch up with a speedboat. And so, at some point, we will get ahead of them.

[00:55:26] Peter McCormack: If they don’t get promoted, I think we’re the bigger club at that point. We’ve certainly got the bigger following, we’ve definitely got the better business model, and we’ve certainly got higher revenues. The only thing they may have on us is crowds, but I think that’s changing. Like I say, the trajectory of our crowds is up.

[00:55:41] Peter McCormack: We’ve, our crowd on the game when you were there was bigger than any crowd they’ve had this season. Their average is higher than us, our average is like 250, theirs is like 450, 500. But more people are going to come next year for us because of the Winklevoss announcement, because of what we’re doing.

[00:55:56] Preston Pysh: Are the twins coming over to a game?

[00:55:58] Peter McCormack: I mean, they’re going to have to at some point. They’re going to have to. They’ll have to come to the UK at some point for business, so we’ll just time it.

[00:56:05] Preston Pysh: I mean, at the, at the end of the day, they’re going to be forced to play your game, which there’s no, there’s no better way to define winning than having your opponent be forced to play your game, right?

[00:56:16] Preston Pysh: Well, every football club will have Bitcoin eventually.

[00:56:18] Peter McCormack: And you know, this is another funny thing, Preston, because a lot of people laugh at us and make jokes about us and make jokes, jokes about the Bitcoin thing. So like, I’ll go to a club and they’ll make jokes or we’re not going to accept your Bitcoin.

[00:56:30] Peter McCormack: Or they call us the Bitcoin. They just make all these jokes about us, Sue with Bitcoin. But I’m there thinking, huh? That means you don’t understand it. Yeah. Yeah. That means right in front of you is this thing which can solve so many problems for you and you, you don’t understand it, you don’t take it seriously.

[00:56:45] Peter McCormack: I’m sure if I turn around to you and say, you know, how’s your, how’s your cost of living gun? What’s what’s happened with your groceries? What’s happened with the price of fuel? You feeling the squeezes? If your interest rates come up in your mortgage, you know, if you’ve got less disposable income each month, they’re going to say yes to all of those.

[00:56:59] Peter McCormack: And I’m going to go, okay, well, I sure don’t.

[00:57:01] Preston Pysh: In fact, in fact, my costs have been going down, bro. I don’t know what to tell you.

[00:57:05] Peter McCormack: Yeah. And so they’re making jokes and it’s like this thing here that will help you. So we’ve got this advantage over other football clubs because we’re ahead of them with this.

[00:57:15] Peter McCormack: They’ll all eventually get there, and I hope it’s sooner rather than later, but.

[00:57:19] Preston Pysh: I just can’t imagine, seriously, how we started off the show. I can’t even imagine 12 months to 18 months from now when these other clubs are looking at your treasury. It’s going to be nuts.

[00:57:28] Peter McCormack: It’s going to melt their brains, but it’s like, if you look at what else, we’re kind of the grassroots English football version of El Salvador micro strategy.

[00:57:36] Peter McCormack: Everybody laughed at Bukele. The press were writing articles saying he’s squandering their their treasury. He’s squandering the country’s finances. He’s wasting on this Bitcoin thing. Michael Saylor, you know, there was a time I think his investment was down about a billion and people were laughing at him and mocking at him.

[00:57:55] Peter McCormack: Look where we are now. Michael Saylor was right. Bukele was right. I know I’m right. It’s going to take that cycle when people say, Oh, ask us about the four and a half million dollar investment. I’m like, Oh, do you mean the 20 million investment that I was saying? Yeah, that we haven’t spent any. It’s 20 million now.

[00:58:11] Peter McCormack: And then there’s somebody 40 million. And then other big clubs, big clubs up in the football league who are in debt and struggling are going to look at us and go, oh, damn.

[00:58:20] Preston Pysh: Yeah. Yo, what is that? What is, what is the size of the treasuries? If, if you had to guess on average for the, now the, the one that you’re promoting into you’re now in four, what do those treasuries look like?

[00:58:33] Preston Pysh: Just so people can kind of understand that the Delta.

[00:58:35] Peter McCormack: They probably don’t exist treasuries. Most clubs will limp through to the end of the season. And I know some, some, some clubs will won’t be able to pay the wages and we’ll lose players. It’s football is very much hand to mouth for a lot of clubs.

[00:58:51] Peter McCormack: There are a lot of examples. There’s a club called Farnham, very good club run by a guy called Harry Hugo. They’re similar to us. They’re trying to do something different. He’s investing, but most clubs lose money or break even. A very few clubs actually make, make money. Plymouth are a great example outside of the Premier League and a lot of the top Premier League clubs do.

[00:59:12] Peter McCormack: Most clubs are losing money and limping through to the end of the season. We’re finishing the end of this season. Forget the Winklevoss investment. We’ve still, I think, got four and a half Bitcoin. I mean, that’s, you know, in English pounds, that’s 225, 000 just sat there that we can use at some point, but itself might be 600, 000 next year.

[00:59:31] Peter McCormack: We’ve still got, I think, about 60, 000 in the bank. Yeah, we, we are a comfortable club that’s expensive to run because we’re a good business and we use Bitcoin and I’ve given it all out there. I’ve said to everyone, here it is. Here’s the playbook. If somebody phoned me up from another club and said, listen, I want to do what you’re doing.

[00:59:51] Peter McCormack: I’ll take the phone call. I’ll explain to them. They won’t be able to do exactly what we’re doing. They’re not going to get Gemini as a front of shirt sponsor and Galaxy as a sponsor and Ledger. They’re not going to, those things aren’t going to happen. They’re not going to have Bitcoiners fly from all around the world to their ground.

[01:00:04] Peter McCormack: There are four other Bitcoin clubs now, I’ve spoken to all of them, and they’ve asked for advice, and the truth is, is Whilst they’re Bitcoin clubs, we are the Bitcoin club. And so they can use the benefit of power Bitcoin, but they’re not going to get the community thing that I’ve managed to get. It’s just because I went first.

[01:00:22] Peter McCormack: But if any club says, and I’ll be, I’ll be saying to them, you need to get investment. You need to build a sustainable model. And if you have capital leftover, you need to put in Bitcoin and forget about it. You need to be thinking about 10 years from now, not a year from now, because that’s what I’m thinking about, Preston.

[01:00:37] Peter McCormack: I’m thinking about if we get in the football league. And we need a 50 million stadium, and we want to have a go at the Premier League, and that’s a 30 million wage bill. Well, where do I get that from? Well, hopefully it’s my treasury that sat there for four cycles. Fingers crossed.

[01:00:50] Preston Pysh: My lord is this exciting stuff.

[01:00:53] Preston Pysh: You tell me the dates, I’d book it like that on the spot, and I want to tell you one other thing that for me was just amazing to see. I’m there watching the game, and I look up and you’re in the stands, and who’s right next to you? Your son. I see your dad there at the game.

[01:01:12] Preston Pysh: I’m leaving, I’m catching a bus to head back into town, and a gentleman comes up to me and says, Oh Preston, hi, blah, blah, blah. I’m Pete’s brother. And I have a conversation with your brother and for me, it was just so amazing and just speaks to you, your family, the town, like the whole bit of it. I don’t know.

[01:01:32] Peter McCormack: It was so much more than that. Because it’s real community. So you’ve got Emma, her son, Sebastian’s there. He always helps this mark. He’s a local Bitcoin. He comes to every game and sells the merch for us. Jim behind the bar, Karen behind the bar. They’re all, everyone is so invested in this personally and emotionally.

[01:01:51] Peter McCormack: And people just want to help and be part of it. It’s a family and it was just.

[01:01:56] Preston Pysh: It was really inspirational, just very simple. It was very inspirational to see and to just experience. And I don’t know, man, you’re a close friend of mine and I just can’t thank you enough for bringing me out to Bedford. Cause I had a blast and this was an amazing conversation. So thanks for making time.

[01:02:12] Peter McCormack: Well, I’m grateful for coming on your show. You know, I love your show and just appreciate you coming out. I knew you were having a good time. I could see it. There was a moment, there was a moment at the football. I was from a distance. I saw you with your Bitcoin tattoo in your neck.

[01:02:26] Peter McCormack: And I remember who you were talking to, but you had this big grin. I was like, and then I looked around and everyone was grinning. I was like, people are having a good time. They’re going to come back. So thank you, Preston. I appreciate you. You’re a good friend as well.

[01:02:36] Preston Pysh: I felt bad after the, I got back and I took a shower and the tattoo was gone. It was gone forever.

[01:02:41] Peter McCormack: Have you got no tattoos?

[01:02:42] Preston Pysh: I have no tattoos.

[01:02:43] Peter McCormack: Let’s get you a tattoo next.

[01:02:47] Preston Pysh: Pete, we’ll have the link for the merch, a link to your podcast. Anything else you want to highlight or, or make sure is in the show notes?

[01:02:54] Peter McCormack: No, just the football club. Promote that and just yeah, appreciate you and thank you again and we’ll see you. Well, I’ll see you before then, but I’ll definitely see you in Bedford next April.

[01:03:03] Preston Pysh: Yes, sir. All right. Thanks.

[01:03:06] Preston Pysh: If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for, We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I’d love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it’s something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening and I’ll catch you again next week.

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