00:06:35.680Yeah, I mean, like, at the end of the day, so I'll back it up a couple steps and talk a little bit about why Bitcoin is important.
00:06:44.000Bitcoin is just money, right? A lot of people look at it as an investment, and they compare it to your stocks or your bonds or whatever else.
00:06:50.880And, you know, we're all sort of wired into this situation where we all think we need to be investing.
00:06:55.740Because if you just sit on dollars in your bank account, you're going to be losing purchasing power very quickly as the government prints more.
00:07:02.340So Bitcoin is actually just a different form of money. You don't get a yield from it.
00:07:06.620You don't get any rights for owning it like you do with a share.
00:07:09.560But Bitcoin's better because the government can't print it.
00:07:13.000And it's a very simple thing, but that's what it really comes down to at the end of the day is it's just money that the government can't print.
00:07:20.140When the government prints money, it changes everything.
00:07:45.940Well, there's two big problems that printing money causes, right?
00:07:51.160And so the first one is the obvious one, which is inflation, where if there's a certain number of dollars and you're holding some of them, your dollars represent a certain percentage of the overall economy.
00:08:01.120The overall amount of goods and services that you can buy are your percentage of the dollars.
00:08:07.080And when we enter a scenario where we have, like, in the last five years where the government doubles or triples the supply of money, your dollars become a lot less rare and therefore a lot less valuable, right?
00:08:19.840Now, the second problem, and this is a really important thing for us here in Alberta, is that, you know, if all goes well, the government just wastes that money.
00:08:27.800Like, that's the best case scenario is that they just steal it, right?
00:08:31.700But the worst case scenario is that they're going to use that money that they've printed, that purchasing power that they've now delegated to themselves at the expense of all Canadians, and they're going to use it against us.
00:08:44.060And that's something that they do very regularly in Alberta, you know, of all the money that gets printed, a lot less of it gets spent in Alberta than anywhere else, obviously, by the federal government.
00:08:54.740And that is a profound effect up and down through society, and it changes the incentive systems.
00:09:01.500And so the example that I always like to use, I do this thing a lot when I'm speaking at conferences or podcasts or whatnot called Bitcoin Fixes Everything.
00:09:08.700And when you look at the problems in the world, the stuff that's a really profound issue that we would look at and say, like, that's a systemic problem.
00:09:17.560A lot of those problems at the end of the day come back to the fact that our incentive systems are broken because our money is broken.
00:09:23.160And I've been, and you guys can throw one at me if you want, but I'll give you an example here where you can come up with just about any problem and work through with some logic why the money printing is causing that.
00:09:37.040And a friend of mine's mom asked me this, I was having this conversation.
00:09:41.720She said, okay, well, my dishwasher, my brand new dishwasher doesn't really wash my dishes very well.
00:09:47.540How is this the fault of money printing?
00:09:48.900And it's an interesting one because dishwashers are kind of unique in the sense that they're named for the only thing that they do, right?
00:09:58.420So your incentive as a person who buys a dishwasher is quite clear, right?
00:10:05.260And you might want it faster or quieter or something like that.
00:10:07.580But if it doesn't wash your dishes, it's not doing the thing that you got it for or what you want it for, right?
00:10:11.840And so your purchasing power with the money that you've earned, you should be able to make a choice to buy the dishwasher that best meets your needs.
00:10:21.060But in the scenario that we have now, where not all the purchasing power from the money that you've earned goes to you, a very large percentage of it instead goes to the government who have their own incentives and their own interests.
00:10:32.800And with the case of a dishwasher, what the government wants is a virtue signaling position wherein they want the dishwasher to use less water and less power.
00:10:42.260And it turns out the water is super useful for washing dishes.
00:10:47.100So it's the scenario now where the government spends all this money creating rating agencies, you know, all this nonsense that now gets applied to the supply chain of the dishwasher.
00:11:00.440And now the people who design dishwashers or half of their attention is going to what the government wants in a dishwasher, not what the consumer wants in the dishwasher.
00:11:07.920And you could take this logic and just expand it to virtually everything in the world.
00:11:13.040You know, almost anything that you can spend money on, the government gets a say in at this point.
00:11:17.520How does, I guess, sorry, I'm, well, it's interesting.
00:11:19.980So Donald Trump, this is interesting one, because remember that one of the first things when he got in office, he actually got rid of water saving toilets.
00:11:28.580Remember this whole thing where everyone laughed, right?
00:12:37.320But when the government has to tax people directly, there's a more direct connection between how they get the money and how they spend the money.
00:12:46.100And now that they're in this scenario where they don't even have to raise taxes in order to raise spending, they can just print more money.
00:12:57.520And now there's no longer, you know, if the government was just taxing us for the full amount of what they're spending,
00:13:05.060the reality is that the government is confiscating somewhere in the area of 70% to 90% of all the resources of Canadians and we're allocating them right now.
00:13:13.100Now, if you're getting your paycheck and the government was taking 90% straight off your paycheck,
00:13:19.060I think there's a lot more people who would not be okay with that.
00:13:21.220And so moving to a form of money that removes the government's ability to just print money from thin air,
00:13:29.540ultimately at the end of the day brings back a layer of accountability where if they're going to tax us, they need to justify that.
00:13:36.120David, how do we support a nation if we're just going to use Bitcoin?
00:13:38.940Is there a way that we can kind of, is there a solution somewhere in the middle where we can handle this?
00:15:14.520And so that was what kept silver as a useful form of money for many years.
00:15:17.800But when they invented the idea of an IOU, like paper bills, which started out as a direct IOU for gold to be redeemable for gold, it solved a lot of those problems.
00:15:29.100You can move the paper a lot more easily than you can move the gold.
00:15:31.120And so we've now gotten into this place where they've used the fact that they've not only switched us over to paper currency,
00:15:39.340they've removed that link between the paper currency and the gold.
00:16:20.340The supply of Bitcoin can't respond to the demand.
00:16:22.600So if the price of gold goes to $20,000 an ounce, five years from now, there's going to be a lot more gold mines, a lot more gold produced.
00:16:31.120So in other words, unless somebody's pulling these off of another hard drive and mining it, it doesn't exist.
00:16:38.320And you can't create a demand for it because there's only so much being mined and it's beyond the control of...
00:16:49.860That's the important part is we know exactly how many Bitcoin there are today.
00:16:53.240And we know exactly how many there's going to be six months from now because it's a fixed supply that rolls at a predictable rate.
00:16:59.600And that one thing is the single most important feature of Bitcoin is the fact that the supply is fixed.
00:17:06.200No government in the world can get together and decide to print more.
00:17:10.460They can't send men with guns down to a headquarters somewhere and say, hey, we're going to need you guys to print some more money because there is no headquarters.
00:17:38.700If they understood what Bitcoin is, they would be trying to use all of their resources to ban it.
00:17:46.000Because in the long term, what Bitcoin means, the fact that Bitcoin exists, means that this abusive relationship that most of the countries in the world have with the government, with their governments, will be permanently over.
00:17:58.340It's going to bring us back to a spot.
00:18:01.580And we're probably even better than we've ever been in human history because of the flow of information.
00:18:06.920It's going to bring us to a place where governments become competitive with each other because they become service providers to their citizens.
00:18:15.600And in the world that we live in now, where a huge number of jobs are digital, especially the high value jobs, a lot of people can pick up and move.
00:18:24.480We're just starting to see the little bits of that, where countries are starting to make private tax treaties, tax exemptions for certain, you know, El Salvador, where there's no capital gains on Bitcoin, for example.
00:18:36.420They're starting to make policies designed to pull in the smartest and most useful people in the world.
00:18:44.920And that, I think, that competition, I think, is going to increase.
00:18:48.900And the end result of that inevitably is going to be that that parasitic relationship that most of our governments have with us will become untenable because no one will put up with this shit.
00:18:59.140They'll just move to a country where, you know, they're not stealing 90 percent of the value and wasting it on rainbow sidewalks and bike lanes and whatever else.
00:19:09.080Yeah, I was just reading, you know, that's a very good comment because I was just reading today a lot of these fintech companies that are out there now are actually moving to the U.S.
00:19:16.840because the capital raises are so much faster and the things they can't achieve, immigration, they can't get landed, they can't.
00:19:25.320And actually, this morning, I was over at an office downtown, and it's a group of people that are there kind of waiting, doing their tech research and their tech development, waiting to go to the U.S.
00:19:38.100So in Calgary, there's actually a building full of these people, an incubator full of these people that, you know, when I was having my meeting, I said, well, who are all those people over there, you know, pounding away on their computers?
00:19:49.840And the guy says to me, he says, they're just waiting.
00:19:52.640And I said, well, what are they waiting for?
00:19:58.080Because they can't raise capital here, nor get immigration status to stay in Canada, and they're going to take that, go to the U.S., raise capital, and, you know, there's two kids.
00:20:07.260It's funny, I stepped out, picked up my phone.
00:20:09.640I took a look, and there's an article there of two 20-year-old kids, kids, not kids, but I consider them kids.
00:20:39.280And how can you put it to work for you in other places?
00:20:44.160Yeah, so investing your Bitcoin is tricky in the sense that most investments, things you qualify as investments, like, you know, the equities markets, the bond markets, etc., they're all denominated in dollars.
00:20:57.100So you have to convert it to dollars first.
00:20:59.180It is very easy to convert back and forth between dollars and Bitcoin.
00:21:04.740Yeah, there's, I mean, anywhere in the world at this point, there's fairly deep markets that you can convert Bitcoin into the local currency quite easily.
00:21:11.180It is really the second most widely accepted currency in the world at this point.
00:21:35.320And to the point about the people leaving to the US, like, that's the scenario that we're in right now, where it's not just that they are, they're stealing a huge percentage of the resources, confiscating and reallocating a huge percentage.
00:21:47.480They're actively getting in the way of just about everything.
00:21:50.240And I know a lot of business owners, I'm pretty integrated into the small business community here.
00:21:55.000And there's not a single small business owner anywhere in Canada, where they didn't immediately have to deal with a government roadblock when they started their business.
00:22:05.340And they're lucky if it's like a couple of government roadblocks.
00:22:08.940In many cases, it's a bureaucracy that makes no sense, trying to accomplish something that doesn't need to be accomplished, getting in the way of entrepreneurs and causing, you know, untold economic damage.
00:22:21.660And to your point, there was just a Y Combinator, one of the biggest venture firms in the United States who funded literally every tech company anyone's ever heard of, just changed their policy and removed Canada from their investable jurisdictions.
00:22:36.520And it's because it's just gotten insane here.
00:22:39.120Our government is clogging up the wheels of commerce way too much.
00:22:44.240They're taking too much from us and they're getting in our way way too often.
00:22:48.260And that's a huge part of why you've seen the Alberta separation movement take off here is because it's, like you say, we're in a parasitic relationship.
00:22:58.880We're in a scenario where a lot of Canadians are almost in, and a lot of Albertans are almost in like Stockholm syndrome because they don't realize how bad, you know, the government is making things for us.
00:23:10.200And there's no signs whatsoever that they're going in the other direction, right?
00:23:14.640They're trying to crack down on our freedom of speech.
00:23:16.420They're jettisoning all of our relevant industries.
00:23:22.180You just saw Carney give away whatever was left of the auto industry to the Chinese.
00:23:30.820A major chunk of our mining is going to be scooped up.
00:23:34.400We just sold one of our biggest mining companies to the Chinese for $5 billion.
00:23:38.440Yeah, there's no sign whatsoever that the government is going or has any chance of going in the other direction.
00:23:45.180And, you know, opening up the economy, revitalizing things, and bringing real entrepreneurship back.
00:23:52.680And so it's gotten to a point where, you know, it's just overwhelming math.
00:23:57.620Do you think cryptocurrency is a way for people to take their freedoms back to feel a little more, not off the grid, but a little more in control of their destiny?
00:24:27.660Yeah, and, well, interestingly, Trump actually said in the terms of service of his coin, this is not and can never be worth anything, which at least it's intellectually...
00:24:39.720A lot of these other ones have all of this technical mumbo-jumbo, all these reasons why they're going to be the next Bitcoin or the Bitcoin for the banks or the world computer or something like that.
00:24:50.160And the fact is that nothing has come from any of these things, even though some of them have been running for over a decade.
00:24:55.700No one's built anything useful on them other than gambling platforms.
00:24:59.200And the fact that they've really had this resurgence is because of the state of the world.
00:25:05.900It's because of the fact that the government is taking so much of our resources and squandering them that now...
00:25:11.480And we deal with a lot of scams through the companies that I work with where you get these CRA scams where they call you up and usually they get seniors.
00:25:21.380And those seniors will sometimes then be directed to come and buy Bitcoin.
00:25:25.040And we have a whole process to sort of weed these out and help them not get scammed.
00:25:59.020And we eventually convinced him that he was being scammed.
00:26:01.560And then once we were talking it through at the end, we realized that the reason that this guy has decided to take these kind of risks is because he had something like $600,000 saved up for his retirement.
00:26:12.820And he's like 70, and now he's realizing that's just not enough money because the wealth that he thought he was saving in dollars has been diluted by the money printing.
00:26:23.980And now he doesn't have the wealth that he earned.
00:26:26.120Well, even the housing market, you know, you see boomers now that are unable to get out of their homes.
00:27:26.740You have to put it into something else.
00:27:29.580And that's the position that the government has put us all in.
00:27:32.440And so Bitcoin is kind of a way to opt out of all of that and get your wealth and the product of your time away from the hands of the government.
00:27:42.100And, you know, like you guys asked at the start, like a lot of people have done very well in terms of purchasing power because they've held Bitcoin.
00:27:48.760But the flip side of that, the other way to look at that is that even more people have done very poorly because they held dollars.
00:28:18.900I think we may have already hit the all-time high for Canadian real estate because the reason that the Canadian real estate has gone so high, first of all, there's a massive money laundering problem in Canada.
00:28:29.380And the fact that they instituted money laundering checks for mortgage brokers about a year ago suspiciously coincided with all of the money drying up.
00:28:39.040So there is a lot of money laundering that was driving that, but at the end of the day, what's going on is that homes are taking on one of the properties of money, which is the store of value.
00:28:49.240And they're then acquiring a monetary premium just like gold has, right?
00:28:53.960Like, the usefulness of gold is very limited compared to the value and the price of gold because gold has still maintained a monetary premium because it is scarce and therefore makes it a good place to store value.
00:29:06.240And so once, you know, the market has chosen, which I believe we're in the process of doing, once the market, and I think we'll choose Bitcoin, as I think it is the best form of money that we have now and the best form of money that the world has ever seen, Bitcoin is going to soak up that monetary premium from everything else.
00:29:24.840It's going to take the premium from real estate.
00:29:26.600It's going to take it from collectibles.
00:29:27.940It's going to take it from gold and silver.
00:29:53.460The Ring of Fire in Ontario, huge gold finds.
00:29:56.540So everyone's announcing these huge gold finds now.
00:29:59.000So as gold is skyrocketing, all of a sudden you have all these countries now finding this mining development that's going to produce, you know, tons and tons of gold.
00:30:26.800It's interesting that you point out the gold mining because gold mining is easier to do than ever, easier to detect than ever, easier to get to market unless you're in Canada, faster than it's ever been.
00:30:39.540Well, no, I'm sorry, but we really do gum up the works every chance we can and we lose the market often.
00:30:45.360And that's what's happening now, I think.
00:30:47.160Canada's, that Ring of Fire is being lost to these huge mines around the world.
00:31:27.540Well, we're in a spot now where this price increase with gold has created a big incentive for more people to bring on more mining.
00:31:33.780So there's more exploration, technology is driven down the production costs.
00:31:38.000And so that spread between production and what they can sell it for creates that incentive, which will drive an increase in the supply.
00:31:44.620And that's where Bitcoin is better in the sense that the Bitcoin supply cannot respond to the demand.
00:31:53.100And then on the flip side, it's not doing that in everything else in the economy the way that it should, right?
00:31:59.580Like the supply and demand of virtually everything in our economy is twisted by the fact that the government gets their fingers into the middle in some way, right?
00:32:08.820The supply of housing cannot respond to the demand simply because the requirements for permitting, you know, the entire supply chain and all the bureaucracy involved in everything that's required to make a house is so staggering that it really disincentivizes someone to make a house, right?
00:32:28.480And in the scenario that you're describing where you could put all these houses in Timmins, but you've got to convince people to move there, convincing people to do anything is a losing game.
00:32:37.560The market will determine where people need to go.
00:32:40.820And if the incentives were aligned, people would go where the opportunities were.
00:32:46.540You know, people will say, and I think this in my own mind, I'm too late to get in on Bitcoin.
00:32:58.480Uh, I had, the first time I had that conversation was in 2011 with a guy who had just missed the spike from $1 to $35.
00:33:09.500And I have had that conversation hundreds of times with hundreds of people at every different price.
00:33:15.640And, uh, when people were telling me that it was too high at $3,000, I said, I told them the same story.
00:33:22.140You know, at some point, um, there will be a top to Bitcoin, but my belief is that that top will be when it absorbs all of the money in the world.
00:33:33.480I don't see a reason why we need more than one form of money as a planet.
00:33:39.020And unless we can come up with something better, something that is, uh, easier to use faster, but is also just as hard to create.
00:33:47.260It doesn't have anyone in charge that might be able to unseat Bitcoin.
00:33:50.920But at this point it's, you know, logically, I think it is the best form of money that we have.
00:33:55.940And it has all of the properties that made gold other than the shininess.
00:34:00.020Gold is very shiny, but it had all of the other properties of gold that made it such a good form of money and has solved all the problems that made gold susceptible to the creation of fiat currency.
00:34:11.240So, no, I don't think there's, uh, I don't think it's too late.
00:34:15.520Um, it's, it's unlikely that Bitcoin is going to go up another hundred thousand X, but, uh, the, the, the fundamental reasons that Bitcoin is valuable are just as true now as they were then.
00:34:28.720And we're now, you know, when, when, when Bitcoin was a dollar, there was a lot of unknown.
00:34:35.020There was a big uncertainty, both from a technical standpoint, you know, and a sort of just like market uptick standpoint.
00:34:42.280But I think we've gotten to a point where it, it's, it's too big to fail now.
00:34:47.100If it was going to be hackable at scale, if it was going to break from a technical standpoint, it would have done that by now.
00:34:52.600We've got a trillion dollars there as a sort of bug bounty that if somebody could steal it, they would.
00:34:56.880And so I think it's now gotten into a place where there might not be as many gains in the future in terms of dollar terms, but if you're looking to protect the wealth that you have, it's still the best place to store value, I think.
00:35:11.280And, you know, it is quite volatile still.
00:35:13.280So what I usually say is don't put money into Bitcoin that you need soon.
00:35:16.340But if you have some time to wait three, four or five years, you know, there's never been a time when if you put value into Bitcoin and waited five years, you wouldn't be massively up.
00:35:29.840Yeah, that, that scope of time sounds right to me because there are, there are spikes and dips and those are the exciting moments for Bitcoin.
00:35:37.440But you do see over time, it does just increase.
00:35:42.040And sometimes over the last five years, that's been fairly, fairly dramatic increase overall anyway.
00:35:48.460It has. And you could look at it as just increasing.
00:35:50.820But if you flip the axis on the graph, you could look at it as the dollar just decreasing, which the Bitcoin is the same and the dollar is different.
00:36:01.500So really the what's going on is a change in the value of the dollar.
00:36:06.840And since we measure Bitcoin and everything else in dollars, it looks like Bitcoins are a lot more valuable.
00:36:11.520But really, they're just the same as they've always been.
00:36:51.320I mean, you have to think if our dollar is so easily manipulated and even misspent once it's printed and it's not doing our country any good, at least a portion of standardized protected money makes a lot of sense.
00:37:10.200Yeah, I mean, one of two things is going to happen.
00:37:13.460Either Bitcoin is going to continue to go up when measured in dollar terms or the government is going to become reasonable and start spending less money than it brings in and stop printing money.
00:37:23.900So I think this hat makes your brain bigger.
00:37:39.300You know, there now is a vast amount of content and a lot of a lot of thought going into Bitcoin and what it means.
00:37:49.140There's a book that I would recommend everybody in the world to read called The Bitcoin Standard.
00:37:53.540It's kind of like the Bible of Bitcoin outlines really a lot about the history of money and what money is and why it's important.
00:38:01.340The author has four books that are all amazing, but that's the that's the place to start.
00:38:05.520And before that came out, before there was a lot of discussion about this stuff, the very early days, Bitcoin was kind of marketed as a competitor to like PayPal, like a like a payment.
00:38:17.180And it's a very useful payment network in some ways.
00:38:20.460It's not fast compared to PayPal or fiat payment networks, but it's censorship resistant, which can be super important.
00:38:27.380So there's been some really interesting examples of, you know, dissidents around the world being able to get their their money out of, you know, hostile regimes.
00:38:38.360We live in a hostile regime here and we had financial controls put on our protesters during the trucker convoy.
00:38:45.780And there was a, you know, a Bitcoin donation train that got a lot of value to those truckers that the federal government was not able to freeze in the same way that they were able to freeze people's bank accounts.
00:38:56.980Well, that's a good point. It's any idea what transacted there in the way of donations for Bitcoin and the I don't.
00:39:03.820It was it wasn't a massive amount. It was like tens of thousands of dollars, I think, spread out amongst very many people.
00:39:10.220But I know they had some people on the ground who were basically converting it and handing out cash to to the truckers.
00:39:16.000It's wild that that was one of the ways that they managed to get fed and get in, you know, get support in there.
00:39:20.960And what would you say to people now that really want to make this part of their their savings methodology?
00:39:31.380Is there a process? Is there a formula for how much you should do that you recommend?
00:39:37.860You know, the the common saying is don't put in more money than you can afford to lose, which makes a certain degree of sense.
00:39:46.240I like the don't put in money that you need soon.
00:39:51.760But the flip side of that is I often say don't like only put in money that you can't afford to lose, because if you have dollars, it's like a melting ice cube.
00:40:00.500Right. If you have one hundred thousand dollars in your bank account, wait a year and you're not going to be able to buy as much with it.
00:40:07.780It's pretty straightforward and it's just math at that point.
00:40:10.640So the first step, I would recommend everybody read that book, Bitcoin Standard.
00:40:16.100There's a local guy, a good friend of mine here who has I think he's the largest Bitcoin YouTuber in the world now, actually.
00:43:27.000So you can get tickets to that at BitcoinRodeo.com.
00:43:29.920That's happening at the end of June, June 25th and 26th.
00:43:33.480And we do a lot of content kind of geared at people who don't really know that much about Bitcoin.
00:43:39.960Bitcoin is not a technical conference.
00:43:41.840There's no, like, nerding out about the technical side.
00:43:46.100So it's designed to talk about how Bitcoin actually affects the world, how it affects your life, and how that ties in with personal freedoms.
00:43:54.280Sounds like the right guy is doing this conference.