True Patriot Love

00:00:00.000 Hi, thanks for joining us. Here we are in Calgary. Yes, we are following, let's see,

00:00:09.480 separation, the Conservative Convention. Maybe you'll get us in tomorrow. And a lot of other

00:00:16.560 issues. But one of the things that we're finding with the guests that we're talking to here in

00:00:20.520 Alberta is the topic of freedom. Everywhere, which is great. And, you know, it's nice to

00:00:26.840 be in a province where freedom is talked about freely. And yeah, so I'm happy to be here and

00:00:35.260 I've enjoyed meeting everyone so far. Yeah, it's kind of cool, isn't it? I mean,

00:00:38.880 that perspective that we have even from a, and if you recommend it, if you go back in time,

00:00:44.480 we've talked about freedom from the perspective of what you can and can't say. And but today,

00:00:49.900 what we're going to do is talk a little bit about a financial freedom, something that the government

00:00:55.320 may not love, but they're trying to get themselves involved in. And joining us to do that is the

00:01:00.400 Bitcoin King, David Bradley. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. I love your

00:01:06.300 head. Yeah. Thank you. History on the hat. Give us a little detail. So I just got this hat for

00:01:11.600 Christmas. So I needed to wear it for a few reasons. One is that it's obviously an amazing

00:01:15.880 hat. Yeah. Oh, yeah. The other is that I think there's an important point in there about Canada

00:01:22.580 and freedom, wherein fur creates a really interesting metaphor. So, you know, we're a nation

00:01:28.960 that was founded on fur trapping. Yeah. Literally, it was the single biggest industry for probably a

00:01:35.620 hundred years at the founding of this country. Yeah. And our oldest institution, much older than

00:01:41.160 Canada itself, the Hudson Bay Company, also founded on fur trapping, sold fur until about three years

00:01:48.460 ago, at which point they cut the fur, you know, sort of towed the line from the woke mob. And we saw

00:01:57.580 where that got them. They're now bankrupt. And that is a metaphor for what's been happening to our

00:02:02.160 entire country, because all of the things that have made Canada great have now been sort of

00:02:07.840 jettisoned in favor of the woke agenda. Well, you know, it's interesting that you say that because

00:02:12.460 you hearken to an era, really, that is our only heritage. And it's recent. You know, it's not all

00:02:20.360 that long ago that we were trading furs and trying to create a nation out of it. Yet here you are in

00:02:26.700 a position in life where your focus has been so far to the future that it's really kind of a difficult

00:02:35.940 landscape to to be a part of in the Bitcoin world. You're the guy you have been in Bitcoin for the

00:02:42.120 longest time of anybody I know in Canada, and have made the most of it. So here you are, it's a bit of a

00:02:48.500 dichotomy, right? You've got the old world sensibility of let's be proud Canadians, but you're doing it with

00:02:54.320 a currency that is not necessarily that of our nation. Yeah, I mean, it's it's a new thing. But the broad

00:03:01.480 phenomenon where, you know, different kinds of money have emerged, and different kinds of money

00:03:07.980 evolved through market forces to be accepted by a country or by a group. And that's something that

00:03:13.740 we've seen throughout all of human history. And for most of human history, it's been gold and silver

00:03:17.760 that naturally became the best forms of money. There was an interesting detail actually related to

00:03:24.360 the fur trade where the Hudson Bay Company actually tried to issue their own money at one point, they

00:03:29.380 they're they're issuing a coin called a beaver nickel. Oh, and the phrase don't take any wooden

00:03:37.900 nickels comes from? It might be. I don't know what they were made from. It might have might have been

00:03:41.140 wooden, but the it was very relevantly, it was not gold or silver. And so what they were trying to do

00:03:47.600 at the time, the Hudson Bay was the only place you could buy anything to, right? It was literally the

00:03:52.540 only store in Canada. And so, you know, their idea was that they wanted to to issue this currency,

00:03:57.980 that they could then pay fur trappers for the fur with, and then the fur trappers could turn around

00:04:02.560 and buy stuff in the store. Right. And, you know, the market forces acted very quickly,

00:04:07.240 because the fur trappers were like, absolutely not, we want the silver. Exactly. And it just never,

00:04:11.580 never took off. And that's like a microcosm of the global version of that that's happening right now,

00:04:18.640 where, you know, we're going through a period of flux where the market is choosing the best form of

00:04:24.500 money again. What is it that, so let's, by the way, if you, if the hat becomes hot at any point,

00:04:31.780 David, I don't think I'll make it. Feel free to, I don't want you fainting on the show.

00:04:36.280 Feel free to, to, to remove it if you want. And Paul or I will wear it. But let's talk a little

00:04:42.540 bit about Bitcoin, because Paul, I don't know how familiar you are with it. But I mean, from a media

00:04:46.700 perspective, I've followed it. I've bought a little bit of it, lost the wallet, forgot how to even

00:04:51.460 access the money. But you're an early adopter. How did you get into this in the first place?

00:04:55.680 Yeah, yeah, I was, I got into it in about 2010, when I was, I was looking up video cards for gaming,

00:05:02.220 and found that you could back then mine Bitcoin with a fancy video card for your computer. And just

00:05:08.800 kind of got into it that way. I was mining it and, you know, buying more video cards. And then

00:05:13.460 eventually, 2013, we made it a real business. And I opened a store, which I think was the first

00:05:19.720 physical Bitcoin store in the world, here in Calgary, selling Bitcoin, Bitcoin mining equipment.

00:05:25.620 And, you know, I've been working full time in the Bitcoin industry since, since then in 2013.

00:05:30.680 And so you, you got old Bitcoin, do you?

00:05:34.440 I mean, I'm seriously considering buying some someday.

00:05:39.000 Really?

00:05:41.480 So, you claim that maybe you don't have any in a wallet anywhere.

00:05:45.040 Is that an issue? People knowing how much Bitcoin you have? The government alleging how much Bitcoin you have?

00:05:51.900 So, you definitely don't want everyone in the world knowing how much Bitcoin you have any more than you want

00:05:56.560 everyone in the world knowing how many dollars you have, right? Like, you don't want to be, like,

00:05:59.980 if I came on a podcast, and they're like, how much money is in your bank account? I'm not going to tell anyone that, right?

00:06:04.360 Okay, take that off the list.

00:06:05.460 It's a matter of financial privacy, I guess, that's pretty normal. But, yeah, I mean, I've gotten a lot of opportunities out of Bitcoin,

00:06:14.540 and I've made some money on it. From my perspective, the much more valuable thing than the, you know,

00:06:21.020 the price appreciation or the appreciation and purchasing power that I've gotten from Bitcoin

00:06:24.860 is the sort of knowledge that has come with it.

00:06:28.900 And how that's shaped my life, and how it's shaped my worldview has been really a lot more profound than just a financial impact, I think.

00:06:35.360 Sure.

00:06:35.680 Yeah, 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.

00:06:44.000 Bitcoin 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.

00:06:50.880 And, you know, we're all sort of wired into this situation where we all think we need to be investing.

00:06:55.740 Because 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.

00:07:02.340 So Bitcoin is actually just a different form of money. You don't get a yield from it.

00:07:06.620 You don't get any rights for owning it like you do with a share.

00:07:09.560 But Bitcoin's better because the government can't print it.

00:07:13.000 And 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.

00:07:20.140 When the government prints money, it changes everything.

00:07:24.020 It changes inflation, GDP.

00:07:28.240 It positions us with banks around the world in a different way.

00:07:32.540 And in this sense, there you go.

00:07:35.380 You're free.

00:07:36.940 And in this sense, it does less harm to a nation than printing money, obviously.

00:07:44.040 Yeah, exactly.

00:07:44.720 But how can it replace it?

00:07:45.940 Well, there's two big problems that printing money causes, right?

00:07:51.160 And 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.

00:08:01.120 The overall amount of goods and services that you can buy are your percentage of the dollars.

00:08:07.080 And 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?

00:08:18.300 So your purchasing power goes down.

00:08:19.840 Now, 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.

00:08:27.800 Like, that's the best case scenario is that they just steal it, right?

00:08:30.900 Which they do.

00:08:31.700 But 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.

00:08:44.060 And 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.

00:08:54.740 And that is a profound effect up and down through society, and it changes the incentive systems.

00:09:01.500 And 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.

00:09:08.700 And 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.

00:09:16.360 We have to change that.

00:09:17.560 A 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.

00:09:23.160 And 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.

00:09:37.040 And a friend of mine's mom asked me this, I was having this conversation.

00:09:41.720 She said, okay, well, my dishwasher, my brand new dishwasher doesn't really wash my dishes very well.

00:09:47.540 How is this the fault of money printing?

00:09:48.900 And 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?

00:09:58.420 So your incentive as a person who buys a dishwasher is quite clear, right?

00:10:03.200 You want to wash your dishes.

00:10:04.200 I got to wash those dishes.

00:10:05.260 And you might want it faster or quieter or something like that.

00:10:07.580 But 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?

00:10:11.840 And 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.

00:10:21.060 But 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.

00:10:32.800 And 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.

00:10:42.260 And it turns out the water is super useful for washing dishes.

00:10:46.120 It is indeed.

00:10:47.100 So 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.

00:11:00.440 And 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.

00:11:07.920 And you could take this logic and just expand it to virtually everything in the world.

00:11:13.040 You know, almost anything that you can spend money on, the government gets a say in at this point.

00:11:17.520 How does, I guess, sorry, I'm, well, it's interesting.

00:11:19.980 So 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.

00:11:28.580 Remember this whole thing where everyone laughed, right?

00:11:31.720 Yeah.

00:11:31.980 And that's the exact same argument that he used, right?

00:11:34.780 It was an example of how he was going to do away with government interference in the free market, right?

00:11:42.260 Especially with virtue signaling, where the net result is nothing.

00:11:46.900 Yeah.

00:11:47.540 So I got, so energy now, let's talk about that for a minute.

00:11:50.400 Is that, you know, we're in Alberta.

00:11:52.020 So apply the same example to, you know, whatever you want.

00:11:55.860 Yeah.

00:11:56.080 I mean, that one's crystal clear, right?

00:11:58.060 Because energy, oil, and gas is the single most useful thing in the whole world.

00:12:01.840 And we're very lucky to have more of it here than really anywhere else in the world.

00:12:06.760 And we're not developing it.

00:12:08.920 We're not making any money off of our oil and gas.

00:12:11.260 We have more oil and gas than Norway.

00:12:13.260 Norway is sitting on a $1.7 trillion sovereign wealth fund.

00:12:17.360 And meanwhile, we do not have a $1.7 trillion sovereign wealth fund.

00:12:21.280 And that's because of this very issue.

00:12:22.840 Because the government has gotten in the way and blocked the development of our oil industry.

00:12:29.380 And, you know, the government can still do those things.

00:12:32.000 They can still get in the way of industry.

00:12:33.460 They can still get in the way of dishwashers.

00:12:35.660 They can still cause problems.

00:12:37.320 But 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.

00:12:46.100 And 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.

00:12:53.420 Don't print, yeah.

00:12:55.280 That's caused a greater disconnect.

00:12:57.520 And now there's no longer, you know, if the government was just taxing us for the full amount of what they're spending,

00:13:05.060 the 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.

00:13:13.100 Now, if you're getting your paycheck and the government was taking 90% straight off your paycheck,

00:13:19.060 I think there's a lot more people who would not be okay with that.

00:13:21.220 And so moving to a form of money that removes the government's ability to just print money from thin air,

00:13:29.540 ultimately 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.

00:13:36.120 David, how do we support a nation if we're just going to use Bitcoin?

00:13:38.940 Is there a way that we can kind of, is there a solution somewhere in the middle where we can handle this?

00:13:47.760 The important word in there is we.

00:13:50.520 Because who do you mean when you say we?

00:13:52.720 Well, I guess us as a nation.

00:13:55.440 How can a government exist only, I guess, I don't think you're saying only use Bitcoin.

00:14:02.120 Maybe you are.

00:14:03.220 At the end of the day, I do think we will eventually get to a spot where we only use Bitcoin.

00:14:07.420 It's a pretty common scenario that's happened throughout history that led us to the gold standard,

00:14:13.780 that led us to using gold and silver as our money, and that is that good money replaces bad money naturally through the market.

00:14:21.680 And what makes good money is literally only one thing, is the most important thing about it,

00:14:26.640 is money that is hard to produce, money that you cannot make for free.

00:14:30.600 And that's what made gold so useful for so long.

00:14:33.840 You have to go pull it out of the ground, invest in it, mine it.

00:14:36.440 Yeah, exactly.

00:14:37.540 And so gold has been the best form of money for most of human history.

00:14:41.540 And the collectivists, the globalists, the communists who created fiat currency, the Federal Reserve,

00:14:51.640 basically leaned into some of the weaknesses that gold has as money.

00:14:56.280 So gold is very good in the sense that it's very hard to create, but it's quite heavy.

00:15:00.560 It's very hard to use for daily commerce, especially as the value of it started to go up.

00:15:05.980 Right.

00:15:06.460 Hard to verify, hard to divide, hard to settle, hard to move, and expensive to do all of those things.

00:15:12.280 Even just to make change.

00:15:13.600 Yeah, exactly.

00:15:14.520 And so that was what kept silver as a useful form of money for many years.

00:15:17.800 But 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.

00:15:29.100 You can move the paper a lot more easily than you can move the gold.

00:15:31.120 And 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,

00:15:39.340 they've removed that link between the paper currency and the gold.

00:15:42.700 It's no longer an IOU.

00:15:44.020 It hasn't been since 1971.

00:15:46.540 And that currency is really only a currency because the government says so.

00:15:51.880 And now everything's digital.

00:15:54.140 The settlement of these made-up units is very fast.

00:15:57.600 And now Bitcoin has come along.

00:15:59.180 It solves a lot of the problems that gold had originally.

00:16:02.480 It's just as efficient as the global financial system running on these digital bank accounts of fake dollars that they've made up.

00:16:12.560 But it also has the hard money properties of gold.

00:16:15.180 It's even harder to make than gold.

00:16:17.240 And relevantly, it can't respond.

00:16:20.340 The supply of Bitcoin can't respond to the demand.

00:16:22.600 So 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.

00:16:31.120 So in other words, unless somebody's pulling these off of another hard drive and mining it, it doesn't exist.

00:16:38.320 And you can't create a demand for it because there's only so much being mined and it's beyond the control of...

00:16:43.740 Yeah, so the demand creates itself.

00:16:45.300 The demand is based on how many people want it, right?

00:16:48.120 Right.

00:16:48.620 The supply is fixed.

00:16:49.860 That's the important part is we know exactly how many Bitcoin there are today.

00:16:53.240 And 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.

00:16:59.600 And that one thing is the single most important feature of Bitcoin is the fact that the supply is fixed.

00:17:06.200 No government in the world can get together and decide to print more.

00:17:10.460 They 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.

00:17:17.040 There's no one in charge.

00:17:17.980 Right.

00:17:18.400 And that's the most important part.

00:17:21.380 I'm just guessing, Paul, that our government's probably not going to love the notion of making this change.

00:17:26.660 But maybe I'm wrong about that.

00:17:30.520 Are we starting to see daylight at the end of this tunnel on Bitcoin?

00:17:36.140 So they're not going to love it.

00:17:38.700 If they understood what Bitcoin is, they would be trying to use all of their resources to ban it.

00:17:46.000 Because 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.

00:17:58.340 It's going to bring us back to a spot.

00:18:01.580 And we're probably even better than we've ever been in human history because of the flow of information.

00:18:06.920 It's going to bring us to a place where governments become competitive with each other because they become service providers to their citizens.

00:18:15.600 And 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.

00:18:24.480 We'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.

00:18:36.420 They're starting to make policies designed to pull in the smartest and most useful people in the world.

00:18:44.920 And that, I think, that competition, I think, is going to increase. 0.99

00:18:48.900 And 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. 0.97

00:18:59.140 They'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. 0.94

00:19:09.080 Yeah, 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.

00:19:16.840 because the capital raises are so much faster and the things they can't achieve, immigration, they can't get landed, they can't.

00:19:25.320 And 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.

00:19:38.100 So 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?

00:19:49.840 And the guy says to me, he says, they're just waiting.

00:19:52.640 And I said, well, what are they waiting for?

00:19:54.200 To leave.

00:19:55.320 I'm like, well, why are they waiting to leave?

00:19:57.060 Why are we letting that happen?

00:19:58.080 Because 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.

00:20:07.260 It's funny, I stepped out, picked up my phone.

00:20:09.640 I took a look, and there's an article there of two 20-year-old kids, kids, not kids, but I consider them kids.

00:20:15.280 Young adults.

00:20:16.020 Young adults who actually were in that position, went to the U.S., and in one day raised $4 million for their fintech company.

00:20:22.760 Yeah, I mean, we don't do a very good job of that.

00:20:26.580 You know, it's one of the things that kind of raises another point.

00:20:30.780 First of all, is it easy to invest Bitcoin?

00:20:35.020 Is it easy to monetize your Bitcoin?

00:20:39.280 And how can you put it to work for you in other places?

00:20:44.160 Yeah, 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.

00:20:57.100 So you have to convert it to dollars first.

00:20:59.180 It is very easy to convert back and forth between dollars and Bitcoin.

00:21:03.080 There's always a market for it?

00:21:04.740 Yeah, 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.

00:21:11.180 It is really the second most widely accepted currency in the world at this point.

00:21:17.240 So what happens when you do that?

00:21:18.880 Is there a tax implication at the moment that you do that?

00:21:21.440 Yeah, it depends on the country.

00:21:23.260 Here in Canada, there is a tax implication.

00:21:25.340 Every time you buy and sell, there's a capital gain.

00:21:27.840 So if you're, if you were buying a coffee with a Bitcoin, it would be cumbersome.

00:21:32.400 Right.

00:21:32.860 Because our laws make it cumbersome.

00:21:35.320 And 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.

00:21:47.480 They're actively getting in the way of just about everything.

00:21:49.440 Right.

00:21:49.840 Right.

00:21:50.240 And I know a lot of business owners, I'm pretty integrated into the small business community here.

00:21:55.000 And 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.

00:22:05.340 And they're lucky if it's like a couple of government roadblocks.

00:22:08.940 In 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.

00:22:21.660 And 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.

00:22:36.520 And it's because it's just gotten insane here.

00:22:39.120 Our government is clogging up the wheels of commerce way too much.

00:22:44.240 They're taking too much from us and they're getting in our way way too often.

00:22:48.260 And 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.

00:22:58.880 We'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.

00:23:10.200 And there's no signs whatsoever that they're going in the other direction, right?

00:23:14.640 They're trying to crack down on our freedom of speech.

00:23:16.420 They're jettisoning all of our relevant industries.

00:23:22.180 You just saw Carney give away whatever was left of the auto industry to the Chinese.

00:23:28.580 And there's really no...

00:23:30.820 A major chunk of our mining is going to be scooped up.

00:23:34.400 We just sold one of our biggest mining companies to the Chinese for $5 billion. 0.96

00:23:38.440 Yeah, there's no sign whatsoever that the government is going or has any chance of going in the other direction.

00:23:45.180 And, you know, opening up the economy, revitalizing things, and bringing real entrepreneurship back.

00:23:52.680 And so it's gotten to a point where, you know, it's just overwhelming math.

00:23:57.620 Do 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?

00:24:07.740 Yeah, absolutely.

00:24:09.900 I would make an important distinction between Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.

00:24:14.200 Okay, hit me with that.

00:24:15.540 So we only need one form of money.

00:24:18.720 Every other sort of cryptocurrency out there is somewhere between a bad idea and a scam.

00:24:25.060 It kind of feels that way.

00:24:26.460 I mean, Trump had one.

00:24:27.660 Yeah, 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...

00:24:38.140 That's pretty honest.

00:24:38.620 Yeah, at least it's honest, right?

00:24:39.720 A 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.

00:24:50.160 And the fact is that nothing has come from any of these things, even though some of them have been running for over a decade.

00:24:55.700 No one's built anything useful on them other than gambling platforms.

00:24:59.200 And the fact that they've really had this resurgence is because of the state of the world.

00:25:05.900 It's because of the fact that the government is taking so much of our resources and squandering them that now...

00:25:11.480 And 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.

00:25:21.380 And those seniors will sometimes then be directed to come and buy Bitcoin.

00:25:25.040 And we have a whole process to sort of weed these out and help them not get scammed.

00:25:31.440 And a lot of the time...

00:25:32.440 That's a big deal.

00:25:33.840 To say to my dad, oh, you're in trouble, but we're only taking Bitcoin.

00:25:38.720 Yeah.

00:25:39.880 He doesn't know what Bitcoin is.

00:25:41.500 He doesn't understand why he's getting that.

00:25:42.900 That's a really horrible scam.

00:25:44.500 Yeah.

00:25:44.940 So they have the CRA scams.

00:25:47.280 The one that we see a lot of are investment scams.

00:25:49.640 And the reason that we see these investment scams...

00:25:52.300 We had one a couple of years ago where I caught the guy.

00:25:56.400 He was being scammed.

00:25:57.800 He didn't know he was being scammed.

00:25:59.020 And we eventually convinced him that he was being scammed.

00:26:01.560 And 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.

00:26:12.820 And 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.

00:26:23.980 And now he doesn't have the wealth that he earned.

00:26:26.120 Well, even the housing market, you know, you see boomers now that are unable to get out of their homes. 0.53

00:26:30.560 And that was their retirement plan.

00:26:33.360 And the housing market is falling across Canada.

00:26:36.200 Easier to pull people into these scams.

00:26:39.060 And the housing market is an interesting example of the devolution of our money because houses are not meant to store value.

00:26:47.660 Houses are for living.

00:26:49.480 Right.

00:26:49.940 They shouldn't be your investment.

00:26:51.540 Because they are much like gold, they're hard to make.

00:26:55.960 Right.

00:26:56.440 And so because houses have been hard to make and they're scarce, people started using them as a way to store value.

00:27:03.020 And you see that throughout the economy now.

00:27:05.300 It's why collectibles are going through the roof.

00:27:07.140 It's why Pokemon cards are at an all-time high and all these other things.

00:27:10.940 People are trying anything to offset wealth that they need.

00:27:15.740 The fact is that you can no longer just save.

00:27:19.240 Right.

00:27:19.460 You've got to do something with your value at this point.

00:27:22.440 You have to take a risk.

00:27:24.160 You have to put it in the stock market.

00:27:25.360 You have to put it into real estate.

00:27:26.740 You have to put it into something else.

00:27:29.580 And that's the position that the government has put us all in.

00:27:32.440 And 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.

00:27:42.100 And, 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.

00:27:48.760 But 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.

00:27:54.240 Oh, yeah.

00:27:56.020 Especially now, right?

00:27:57.060 You know, we were talking about baby boomers.

00:27:59.400 You know, they grew up in a generation where appreciation of real estate, especially the residential, just went up, up, and up.

00:28:06.400 It's my view, and we've done this on many shows.

00:28:08.580 That's not coming back.

00:28:09.660 Like, that's something that they're not going to see.

00:28:11.580 This generation will not see an appreciation at all in their homes, right?

00:28:18.300 Not at all.

00:28:18.900 I 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.

00:28:29.380 And the fact that they instituted money laundering checks for mortgage brokers about a year ago suspiciously coincided with all of the money drying up.

00:28:38.300 Incredible, right?

00:28:39.040 So 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.

00:28:49.240 And they're then acquiring a monetary premium just like gold has, right?

00:28:53.960 Like, 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.

00:29:06.240 And 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.

00:29:24.840 It's going to take the premium from real estate.

00:29:26.600 It's going to take it from collectibles.

00:29:27.940 It's going to take it from gold and silver.

00:29:30.500 And drive demand on it.

00:29:32.000 And I think, Dave, you know, it's interesting you talk about gold because I was having this debate a few shows ago.

00:29:38.360 And it's my belief, I don't know, we did a mining show and the announcement on the number of gold finds.

00:29:44.520 Are you noticing that around the world?

00:29:46.600 I haven't really been following it.

00:29:47.940 So China, Australia, and all these countries now are announcing these huge gold finds.

00:29:52.560 Canada, right?

00:29:53.460 The Ring of Fire in Ontario, huge gold finds.

00:29:56.540 So everyone's announcing these huge gold finds now.

00:29:59.000 So 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.

00:30:09.740 Yeah.

00:30:09.880 So eventually, again, just like that housing market, we're going to see that rise and then the supply is going to come on.

00:30:16.440 It's a ride, right?

00:30:17.540 You can see it.

00:30:18.340 And then where that ride gets off and who gets it to market, what they get to market at, all those things are going to determine it.

00:30:24.520 And that will level out.

00:30:26.800 It'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.

00:30:39.540 Well, no, I'm sorry, but we really do gum up the works every chance we can and we lose the market often.

00:30:45.360 And that's what's happening now, I think.

00:30:47.160 Canada's, that Ring of Fire is being lost to these huge mines around the world. 0.94

00:30:51.260 We're not even prepared.

00:30:52.520 So we talk about it, but quite frankly, we've talked about it quite a bit.

00:30:56.500 You know, we struggle with building a road, right?

00:30:59.560 You go to China, quite frankly, in one year, they build a whole city.

00:31:03.240 One weekend.

00:31:03.880 Movie theaters.

00:31:04.320 They're ready to mine. 0.78

00:31:05.160 Movie theaters and they're off and running and building and we're struggling and move a million people into that area to work.

00:31:12.220 It's not so, we could build roads and we could build homes up in Timmins or, you know, wherever.

00:31:17.320 Could we get the manpower?

00:31:19.340 Quite frankly, try to convince 100,000 Canadians to go up there and live.

00:31:25.440 I think you're going to struggle, right?

00:31:26.700 Yeah.

00:31:26.960 Yeah.

00:31:27.540 Well, 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.

00:31:33.780 So there's more exploration, technology is driven down the production costs.

00:31:38.000 And so that spread between production and what they can sell it for creates that incentive, which will drive an increase in the supply.

00:31:44.620 And that's where Bitcoin is better in the sense that the Bitcoin supply cannot respond to the demand.

00:31:53.100 And then on the flip side, it's not doing that in everything else in the economy the way that it should, right?

00:31:59.580 Like 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?

00:32:08.820 The 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?

00:32:28.480 And 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.

00:32:37.560 The market will determine where people need to go.

00:32:40.820 And if the incentives were aligned, people would go where the opportunities were.

00:32:46.540 You know, people will say, and I think this in my own mind, I'm too late to get in on Bitcoin.

00:32:52.080 I'm too late to get in on this.

00:32:54.000 All the money's been made.

00:32:55.300 What do you say to us people?

00:32:58.480 Uh, 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.

00:33:09.500 And I have had that conversation hundreds of times with hundreds of people at every different price.

00:33:15.640 And, uh, when people were telling me that it was too high at $3,000, I said, I told them the same story.

00:33:22.140 You 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.

00:33:32.580 Right.

00:33:33.480 I don't see a reason why we need more than one form of money as a planet.

00:33:39.020 And unless we can come up with something better, something that is, uh, easier to use faster, but is also just as hard to create.

00:33:47.260 It doesn't have anyone in charge that might be able to unseat Bitcoin.

00:33:50.920 But at this point it's, you know, logically, I think it is the best form of money that we have.

00:33:55.940 And it has all of the properties that made gold other than the shininess.

00:34:00.020 Gold 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.

00:34:11.240 So, no, I don't think there's, uh, I don't think it's too late.

00:34:15.520 Um, 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.

00:34:28.720 And we're now, you know, when, when, when Bitcoin was a dollar, there was a lot of unknown.

00:34:35.020 There was a big uncertainty, both from a technical standpoint, you know, and a sort of just like market uptick standpoint.

00:34:42.280 But I think we've gotten to a point where it, it's, it's too big to fail now.

00:34:46.040 It's come too far.

00:34:47.100 If 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.

00:34:52.600 We've got a trillion dollars there as a sort of bug bounty that if somebody could steal it, they would.

00:34:56.880 And 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.

00:35:11.280 And, you know, it is quite volatile still.

00:35:13.280 So what I usually say is don't put money into Bitcoin that you need soon.

00:35:16.340 But 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.

00:35:29.840 Yeah, 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.

00:35:37.440 But you do see over time, it does just increase.

00:35:42.040 And sometimes over the last five years, that's been fairly, fairly dramatic increase overall anyway.

00:35:48.460 It has. And you could look at it as just increasing.

00:35:50.820 But 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.

00:36:01.500 So really the what's going on is a change in the value of the dollar.

00:36:06.840 And since we measure Bitcoin and everything else in dollars, it looks like Bitcoins are a lot more valuable.

00:36:11.520 But really, they're just the same as they've always been.

00:36:14.660 It's a cool perspective.

00:36:15.640 Yeah, it is a close perspective.

00:36:17.220 Yeah, it's one of those things where you think, OK, we really were paying attention to the wrong side of this Bitcoin, actually.

00:36:24.100 It's the other side that's really kind of devastating.

00:36:26.300 Yeah.

00:36:26.960 This has been fascinating.

00:36:28.380 I got to tell you, just the Bitcoin side of it is certain.

00:36:32.060 And by the way, it's very nice.

00:36:33.460 He's offered to give each of us one Bitcoin.

00:36:35.440 That's been seriously entertaining and informative.

00:36:40.720 But I do think that the root cause of using cash is a great discussion that I've really appreciated having with you.

00:36:49.020 It's food for thought, man.

00:36:51.320 I 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.

00:37:10.200 Yeah, I mean, one of two things is going to happen.

00:37:13.460 Either 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.

00:37:23.900 So I think this hat makes your brain bigger.

00:37:26.780 Give me that for a second.

00:37:27.700 Well, I was going to ask you that.

00:37:30.040 Can I, you know, your perspective on Bitcoin from 2010 to now, has it changed a lot or were you seeing it that way?

00:37:38.040 Oh, no, not at all.

00:37:39.300 You know, there now is a vast amount of content and a lot of a lot of thought going into Bitcoin and what it means.

00:37:49.140 There's a book that I would recommend everybody in the world to read called The Bitcoin Standard.

00:37:53.540 It'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.

00:38:01.340 The author has four books that are all amazing, but that's the that's the place to start.

00:38:05.520 And 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.

00:38:16.300 Kind of was. Yeah.

00:38:17.180 And it's a very useful payment network in some ways.

00:38:20.460 It's not fast compared to PayPal or fiat payment networks, but it's censorship resistant, which can be super important.

00:38:27.380 So 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.

00:38:38.360 We live in a hostile regime here and we had financial controls put on our protesters during the trucker convoy.

00:38:45.780 And 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.

00:38:56.980 Well, that's a good point. It's any idea what transacted there in the way of donations for Bitcoin and the I don't.

00:39:03.820 It was it wasn't a massive amount. It was like tens of thousands of dollars, I think, spread out amongst very many people.

00:39:10.220 But I know they had some people on the ground who were basically converting it and handing out cash to to the truckers.

00:39:16.000 It's wild that that was one of the ways that they managed to get fed and get in, you know, get support in there.

00:39:20.960 And what would you say to people now that really want to make this part of their their savings methodology?

00:39:31.380 Is there a process? Is there a formula for how much you should do that you recommend?

00:39:37.860 You 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.

00:39:46.240 I like the don't put in money that you need soon.

00:39:49.840 I like that advice. That was cool.

00:39:51.760 But 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.

00:40:00.500 Right. 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.

00:40:07.780 It's pretty straightforward and it's just math at that point.

00:40:10.640 So the first step, I would recommend everybody read that book, Bitcoin Standard.

00:40:16.100 There'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.

00:40:22.540 Oh, wow.

00:40:23.180 Called BTC Sessions. And he does a lot of tutorials.

00:40:27.320 He's a very non-technical guy, so he's very good at, you know, helping people set things up and the average the average person.

00:40:34.760 Yeah. And it comes with a little bit of an extra layer of responsibility.

00:40:40.380 You know, we're all sort of programmed to just put our money in the bank and just trust them.

00:40:45.240 Whereas when you're setting up Bitcoin, you know, the saying is always be your own bank.

00:40:48.660 It does require a little bit of your time and your brainpower.

00:40:51.900 It probably takes about an hour to figure out how to set it up.

00:40:54.180 And like you're saying, you can lose it.

00:40:56.240 So you don't want to lose it.

00:40:57.500 Like it's very similar to if you have a bar of gold and you lose it on the train, then your gold is gone.

00:41:02.940 Yeah, I'm not going to lie to you.

00:41:04.600 I'm sure that I have two or three wallets I've set up.

00:41:07.220 I have no idea what I did with them.

00:41:09.100 So it does require a little bit of diligence.

00:41:12.000 And you can set up a storage system that is actually much safer in a lot of ways than a bank account.

00:41:19.560 Because the government can't take it.

00:41:21.740 The bank can't take it.

00:41:23.080 And, you know, it's like a safer version of gold under your mattress kind of thing.

00:41:29.320 I'm more interested now in Bitcoin than I would be.

00:41:31.260 Yeah, I am too, actually, you know, and it's funny.

00:41:33.460 So I had a, I think I told you this.

00:41:35.140 When I was starting in 2011, came back to Canada, started up a new company.

00:41:40.640 And my lawyer at the time, he finished our transaction.

00:41:46.340 He said, I'm done.

00:41:47.540 I'm retiring.

00:41:48.880 I'm going to go into the Bitcoin market.

00:41:51.040 And he went in.

00:41:52.160 And the other day, you know, I was looking him up.

00:41:54.500 I was trying to do something and he was in Italy.

00:41:56.800 You know, I called him.

00:41:57.960 I said, what are you doing in Italy?

00:41:59.060 He says, well, I'm kind of semi-retired.

00:42:01.180 And so I was kind of Googling him when I was trying to find it.

00:42:04.200 He had a net worth of about $6.2 billion.

00:42:07.220 In Bitcoin.

00:42:08.000 In Bitcoin.

00:42:08.720 Yeah.

00:42:09.040 And I was like, okay.

00:42:10.300 What was his name?

00:42:10.860 I think I know who you're talking about.

00:42:15.160 He's a great guy.

00:42:15.880 But, you know, he's kind of gone and he's living there now.

00:42:19.160 And he's living a very modest.

00:42:20.280 The funny thing is when I talk to him, he's a very modest guy.

00:42:22.760 Good family man.

00:42:24.900 And he's living a modest life in Italy part-time.

00:42:28.620 I guess because, quite frankly, it's probably more acceptable and a better place to actually live.

00:42:34.960 Yeah, I would say.

00:42:35.800 At this point.

00:42:36.540 But, yeah.

00:42:36.940 Yeah, I would take my Bitcoin to Italy any day of the week.

00:42:40.120 But, yeah, it does seem like, well, first of all, thanks for kind of straightening it out of my head a little bit.

00:42:45.620 It makes a big difference for somebody to actually take you through the process of what it is.

00:42:51.740 Give you the confidence that it's a better system.

00:42:54.560 And then get you interested from that point.

00:42:56.720 So I appreciate that.

00:42:57.860 Yeah.

00:42:58.420 Thank you.

00:42:58.840 I appreciate it, too.

00:42:59.760 Now, listen, do you want to plug anything before you get out of here?

00:43:02.120 Knowledge like yours should be shared.

00:43:03.780 Yeah.

00:43:04.100 So I have a couple companies that I'm involved in.

00:43:07.740 Bull Bitcoin that was mentioned earlier, I think.

00:43:10.700 Great brand.

00:43:11.680 Bitcoin Well, both places that you can buy Bitcoin.

00:43:14.340 And the other thing that I got to plug is I put on a Bitcoin conference.

00:43:17.880 Oh, cool.

00:43:18.260 Every year in Calgary here.

00:43:19.520 It's the Bitcoin Rodeo.

00:43:22.060 So you can get.

00:43:22.860 I've heard of the Bitcoin Rodeo.

00:43:24.060 Good.

00:43:24.540 Yeah, well done.

00:43:25.240 Okay.

00:43:26.300 Another good brand.

00:43:27.000 So you can get tickets to that at BitcoinRodeo.com.

00:43:29.920 That's happening at the end of June, June 25th and 26th.

00:43:33.480 And we do a lot of content kind of geared at people who don't really know that much about Bitcoin.

00:43:39.960 Bitcoin is not a technical conference.

00:43:41.840 There's no, like, nerding out about the technical side.

00:43:46.100 So 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.

00:43:54.280 Sounds like the right guy is doing this conference.

00:43:56.480 Thanks, Dave.

00:43:56.840 I really appreciate this.

00:43:57.860 Thanks for having me.

00:43:58.920 And thank you for joining us.

00:44:00.560 Don't forget, more conversations like this, a couple of them a day on average.

00:44:05.360 Go ahead and subscribe wherever you're watching this.

00:44:07.640 Hit the notification button.

00:44:09.220 But more than anything, go to tplmedia.ca.

00:44:11.980 And remember, you're the fuel in the tank that keeps us going.

00:44:14.940 So don't hesitate to subscribe.

00:44:16.640 Thanks so much.

00:44:17.320 Thanks, Paul.

00:44:17.880 Thanks, Dave.

00:44:18.440 Thanks.

00:44:18.720 Thanks.

Bitcoin vs Money Printing - Rules To Live By

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