In the beginning, God created the heavens, the earth, light, sky, land, vegetation, and boys from Canada playing hockey 🏒.
I was one of those boys.
From about age 12 straight through to 22, I did what every respectable Canadian 🇨🇦 kid does: I weaponized hustle. I cut lawns in the summer, raked leaves in the fall, shovelled driveways in the winter, and delivered newspapers after school. If there was $5 on the table, I found a way to make it $10 and turn it into gas money, skate sharpening money, or poutine money in the high school cafeteria.
In between, I played competitive hockey in elementary school and high school — which, in Canada, is less of a hobby and more of a personality type. Hockey taught me a few things I still believe today:
Dealing with pressure – You learn how to stay calm when it actually matters. It taught me discipline and follow through. Resilience – You will eventually lose. You will mess up. You learn how to come back instead of collapse. Finally, it taught me you can smell completely normal and then 60 minutes later smell like a dead seal in a gym bag.Around that same time, I started working in the entertainment and corporate events world. My glamorous job? Blowing up balloons for bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, and big corporate parties. I’m not joking. I once made $5,000 in a single weekend filling a ballroom with balloons. I handed most of that money to my dad to invest in a custodial investing account. He bought Berkshire Hathaway Class B shares. Good call, Dad.
Then I met a stock promoter who promised me “the next big thing,” and I made my first private placement. My dad told me, “Ask for the prospectus.” I did not ask for the prospectus. I never saw the money — or that guy — again. So technically, I paid tuition for a very fast finance course called Due Diligence Matters.
High school years? I delivered Domino’s pizza. I also destroyed my parents’ car in the process. I would show up to dates after a Friday night shift smelling like a three-way collision between Polo cologne, pepperoni steam, and hockey glove sweat. Shockingly, I did not get married in high school.
Then things got interesting.
I went to Texas A&M for firefighter training. After I came back to Canada, the hiring process for the fire service took time, so I did what I’ve basically always done in my life: stack skills and solve problems.
First, I strapped on a gun and drove an armored truck. My job was to pick up gold bars flown in from Russia and quietly deliver them to the big banks in downtown Toronto. (Yes, real gold. Yes, it’s heavy. Yes, it makes you walk differently.)
On nights and weekends I picked up work at nightclubs. One club owner took a shot on me and said, “Think you can run a valet?” So I built a valet company. I hired guys from my hockey team and a few friends, built a 15-man roster, and we were parking 300 cars a night at some of the biggest clubs in the city.At 23, I got hired as a professional firefighter. That part of the story is still going. I’ve spent my adult life showing up fast when things go wrong, running into places normal people are running out of, and making decisions under pressure when panic is the default setting for everyone else.
But I didn’t stop there.
On my days off from firefighting, I went to night school. For five years. Eventually the college program coordinator pulled me aside and said, “You want to teach the rookies?” So I started teaching Firefighting 101.
Then I used those certifications to expand again. I became a risk control specialist. I spent my “days off” traveling across the country inspecting hospitals, schools, and commercial sites for major insurance brokers. My job was basically: walk into a multi-million-dollar operation, find the risks that could burn it down (sometimes literally), explain it to them in plain English, and suggest how to fix them before they became million-dollar problems.
And that brings us here.Trying to build Digital Assets - Digital Real Estate ....... One asset at a time.

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