Shaun Newman Podcast - #318 - Stephen Barbour

Episode Date: September 21, 2022

Owner of Upstream Data hops on to discuss fiat money, bitcoin, the green agenda, the rise of Larping & inflation.  November 5th SNP Presents: QDM & 2's.   Get your tickets here: https://snp.ticketleap.com/snp-presents-qdm--222-minutes Let me know what you think   Text me 587-217-8500

What's up, guys, it's Kid Carson. This is Alexandra Kitty. This is Danielle Smith. Hey, everybody. This is Paul Brandt. Jeremy McKenzie, Ragingdissident.com. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast.

Folks, happy Wednesday. Hope everybody, you know, is having a good week. This is a reminder. We got November 5th, QDM, and two stand-up tickets are on sale. They're in Lloyd at the Gold Horse Casino. If you're interested, tickets are available. All you're going to do is click on the link in the show. notes. So in the show notes of the podcast, there is a link, or if you want, just text me and I'll

send you the link that works as well. Either way, tickets are on sale, November 5th, QDM and 2s in Lloydminster at the Gold Horse Casino. It's going to be a fun night and certainly looking forward to it. We got a good one on tap for you today. A business owner here from Lloyd Minster, he's been on before, but before we get there, let's get on to the show, or the show, the businesses that are sponsoring today's episode. Guardian plumbing and heating, Blaine and Joy Stefan, 2021, like Mr. Chamber of Commerce business of the year,

a team of over 30 who thrive on solving your problems and offering the best possible solutions with 24-hour emergency service available, because we all know when things are going haywire, you're not waiting to, you know, until after the long weekend or until the morning or or you want it done now. While they got 24-hour emergency service, They also offer developed and manufactured the world's most efficient grain dryer right here in Lloydminster.

I know the farmers are going about as hard as they can go. It's getting closer, but they're still giving her. And to those farmers, once you're done and get your feet up on the table and got some time, maybe take a look at that. Just go to Guardian Plumbing.ca where you can schedule your next appointment at any time. The deer and steer butchery on the Highway 16 and Range Road 25, It's open to all you hunters or, you know, meat enthusiasts. They got custom cutting and wrapping.

They offer the ability to go in and help the process, which is super cool. And they've been lending their spot to, you know, some different information around meat. I'm actively pursuing Sean Baker. Maybe you know who that is. Maybe you don't. Anyways, he's a carnivore diet enthusiast. Anyways, he had a video out. It said meat rots in the colon.

I don't know if you'd heard this when you were younger. I certainly had. John Wayne died with a colon full of meat. The logic in my brain. Anyways, he talks about it. And he said, actually, it gets to digest in the stomach and the small intestine. If anything rots in the colon, it is vegetation. He says, look in your stool, your poop in the toilet.

How many times have you seen a chunk of meat floating around? He goes, you can't say the same thing for corn and other different things. Anyways, there's your little meat trivia. Talking about stool. I never thought that. That would happen on the old podcast. Agland. Wait, one second, I guess I should say,

if you're looking to get into the deer and steer with hunting season, et cetera, and you need an animal butchered, that type of thing. Give me a call, 780870, 8,700. I'm still thinking about stool. Anyways. Eggland, eggland started back in 1957 with a John Deer equipment dealer with a staff of over six,

or with a staff of six. Today, 60 plus years later, three locations, Lloyd-Binsman and St. Paul, and a staff of over 130. They sell in service genre, Brent, Brent, Bob, Cab, Dangleman, and AA trailers. And if you need more info, go to agland.com, to check out their full inventory

or give them a call 780875-4471. Three trees tap and kitchen. They've been, well, Jim's bathroom, Jim Spenrath, geez, Louise, spit it out, Sean, have been doing a little treasure hunt. They got a three-digit code and a little treasure chest. It's been won twice now. But they keep reloading it.

So if you go in, you've got to be 18 to play, and each time you're in, you get to input a three-digit code into the lock on the treasure chest, and they've got a whole bunch of different things. Dixie Smith just won four tickets to the shopper's drug mart fundraiser in support of the interval home and a bunch of other things. And it's been reloaded again with a bottle of Lake Life Caesar Mix, and they keep adding, you know, different gift cards, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So stop in the three trees tap and kitchen today. earn yourself a chance at a little prize or you know just go out for a little thunder alley pilsner geez can't even spit it out today guys it must be it must be Wednesday hump day anyways you get the point um I don't know I'm go I've been goofy all week maybe it's because I'm doing five of these suckers right now I don't know

either way I hope you're holding on like I am I hope you're enjoying the content because it just keeps rolling like guest after guest after guest people always wonder they're like you know how you do it for guest content i don't know at the end of the day they just seems like you open up one door and it opens up to 17 more doors and then you open up one of those and you get the point and you can kind of visualize how this thing is is rolling along i hope you're having fun you got guest suggestions i should point out uh fire them off to the to the text line um i can't guarantee i'll get to the mall but at the same time if you got somebody you think needs to be heard from i'm all for Going back to three trees, make sure you book reservations.

Don't be like this guy. Give me a call, 780, 874, 765. Finally, Gartner Management, their Lloyd Mr. Base Company specializing in all types of rental properties. I see Taneal Sidebottom has moved into the building. And so the building is quickly filling up. It looks like it's going to be quite the fun place here come wintertime. So if you're looking for a spot, give way to call 7808085025, he can get you hooked up. Let's get on to that tail of the tape brought to you by Hancock, Petroleum.

For the past 80 years, they've been an industry leader in bulk fields, lubricants, methanol, and chemicals delivering to your farm commercial or oil field locations for more information. Visit them at Hancock. Petroleum.com. He is the owner and acting president of upstream data, which builds units to convert waste gas from oil wells into energy to mine Bitcoin. I'm talking about Stephen Barber. So buckle up. Here we go.

This is Steve Barber, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. I listened to our last chat And that was 2021 And that feels like 15 years ago We talked a lot about Bitcoin We talked a lot about Which you know, it's funny Because we talked a lot about green

And how you didn't want to identify as green Because he thought it was bullshit And we talked about coal and all these different things And I don't know if you've been paying attention To the podcast lately But I've had on this week Brian Get Patrick Moore

Mark Morano the week coming up when this will be released is John Robson. And all, what they're all talking about is, you know, I think Brian get articulated at the best, which is, you know, if we want to save the planet and we truly believe CO2 is killing the world, the way to do it isn't wind and solar. It isn't this green they're talking about. It's nuclear. It's fossil fuels.

It's anyways. I was chuckling because, you know, 150,000. odd episodes ago, you were on. And that's what, you know, I was kind of, I don't know. It does seem like a long time, especially for you, 150 episodes. It's probably more than that. 150 numbered episodes, but then you got Tuesday mashups, you got archives, you got, it's a long time ago, in my world.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, on the carbon thing, I mean, have you ever thought about what if carbon was actually good for the environment? Yeah, I've heard that argument. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Like, obviously plants and everything don't live off of nothing.

And so... Yeah. I've been on that spiel lately, actually, on my socials. Because you have unprecedented global greening happening. Like, that's from NASA. Okay. Like, who's more credible than NASA? They've shown that since the 1980s, most of the world.

has seen over 50% increase in like I think they call it leaf density like leaf coverage so we're so the planet is actually greening and I mean I'm sure that's part of that is you know we're not logging as much for heat energy and the like as we would have been many years you got to think there's a whole bunch of things going on there right like innovation is getting better we're getting smarter about how to replace force when we do take it down, right? We're doing a whole bunch of different things that are getting better, not worse. Yes, we're in backwards world now where we're reverting back to, I mean, it won't be long before

we're whaling again and using whale oil to heat our homes and light our, lighter kitchens. That's sort of the path we're going back. People seem to forget that, you know, oil and gas actually saved whales. Like it's saved, it ended the whaling. industry when they discovered crude oil back in the 1850s the first oil well was like the Drake well I think in Pennsylvania and after that it unleashed this market that completely disenfranchised the whaling industry and and now you see I mean there's plenty of articles talking about biomass you know we're clear-cutting forests now for biomass dry out green yep because it's renewable so now so now

clearing forests is considered renewable whereas not even that long ago the environmentalists were hugging trees and you know putting their bodies in a line of fire to save them so we're in clown world we're in ultra clown world right now and of course it's all based on it's all based on the fiat money system as we talked about before well it's I guess I should introduce you I got Stephen Barbara in the studio today folks and obviously you read the thing and you know exactly what I'm doing it's it's fun to have you back in I don't know I don't know what the the proper course of action is of getting

somebody to come back in the studio you know like do you wait a month do you wait two years is it is their time frame because people have been asking for you I don't know probably two months after you came on the first time they were climbing for you to come back on and then you're just saying that I'm not I'm not no I wouldn't I wouldn't fill your head with hot air most times. But I went, I went a different way, right? You know, if you look back on the trajectory of the podcast, it's not soon after I have you on. I have on Dr. Andrew Liebenberg, then Roger Hodkinson, and then from there it just, as they say, it goes, right? And then I went on, I basically didn't turn away from COVID and tell the trucker convoy.

I mean, truthfully, like, I didn't talk about anything but that for about 100 episodes. I was like. Yeah, the trucker convoy was after me, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, because you were July 21, I think, July, somewhere in there. And so to have you back on, I was like, the only thing I want to talk about right now is fucking COVID. And I don't know if I want to put anybody in the target hairs of. that especially as business and everything else but I couldn't see any way of talking about anything else so for you know I mean I think the average listener they talk about me

you flipping over your audience I flipped over my audience because I had a hockey audience and kind of local and whatever and I still got tons of local listeners and you've been faithful and you've been awesome but you can imagine Don Cherry and Tim McAuliffe and these are great human beings I'm not knocking these people but then you go to I I mean, Eric Payne, who was a pediatrician from Calgary and Peter McCullough and, you know, Dr. Francis Christian and oh my God. And I just, you know, it's controversy, right? Except that was what we lived through. And so now I've been, it's funny, so you just keep fast and forward.

And now I've been, you know, I'm watching Europe and I'm going, what is going on? Like this is, like, I'm all for, human beings aren't perfect. I think we need to continue to get better every day. You know, like I don't want to live in a trash field wherever. I want a clean place, et cetera. I want to take care of the planet, et cetera. But at some point, you stay alive is a good thing too. Allowing people to thrive is a good thing too.

And I'm learning real fast here. And it's funny. The reason I bring it up is when I listened to you, you were talking about it in July, and I was thinking about different things. I was not thinking about green. and I couldn't understand what you were talking about. Fast forward, and I'm like, oh, I get it. Yeah, I mean, I have an interest.

My interest is obviously, like, with businesses, Bitcoin-related stuff, even personally now because, I mean, I think it's fundamentally a better system of money and what's more important to every man and woman on a planet than money. Makes the world go around. What is the one thing every person has in common? It's money. You want money. So a new system of money for that reason,

just because it's so globally important, it sparks my interest. But that also, you know, being an oil field engineer, you know, I've always been interested in energy systems and Bitcoin being related, as a money being related to energy systems. Like, it's sort of like it becomes an obsession, right? So, I mean, you mentioned like Europe and I think what people are finding now is, that energy security is a lot more important to the happiness of, you know, populations and the comfort of families and the ability to feed yourselves than carbon, like worrying about carbon accounting. And what better example than Europe right now?

Right now. Who's, they've been so caught up with the European Union and who I generally call the other Fiat maximalists. It's the term in my little circle in the Bitcoin sphere we use. But the people that, you know, they've gone psycho. You want to pull that mic in here, Steve? Yep. You can pull the entire arm like the top this way if you want.

Yeah, no, this is good. That's good? Okay. Yeah, I mean, they've gone so crazy with the carbon accounting and basing their decisions on it that we're seeing what's happened. Germany had shut down a lot of their coal plants. They've even shut down most of their nuclear plants. So all the reliable baseload in the name of, you know, virtue signaling for carbon.

And now they're a reliant, Germany and Germany being the biggest economy in Europe, but Europe as a whole, the European Union being completely dependent on Russian natural gas, of course, that has proven to be a really stupid strategy. and any sensible person who pays attention to energy systems would have known that any reasonable engineer or technologists like who works on energy systems in Europe would know that. Doing that would have been, is a terrible idea. But unfortunately, we live in this world where it pays to warp, warping meaning live, live action role playing. It pays to be fake. And so this carbon accounting system is fake.

And, you know, I mean, it's so heavily subsidized. People are, you know, shifting out of certain careers, like fossil fuels, oil and gas, to go into these industries that aren't sustainable economically. There's nothing to do with, like, environmentally, but economically, they're not sustainable. And if it's not sustainable economically, then it cannot be sustainable environmentally either. And, yeah, it's come to a head in Russia. But it's coming I mean Alberta is pretty good. We have a pretty reliable system Even contrast Alberta with Texas very similar values conservative values

Deep reserves of fossil fuels but Texas certainly has grown so exponentially Their energy grids have been stressed and they've overbuilt renewables they put way too much money in West Texas wind Which is you know West Texas, West Texas, you know West Texas This is not, is pretty sparsely populated versus, you know, the rest of Texas, like central eastern Texas. And it's, they've overbuilt the wind there. Well, there's no demand over there. And they have to ship it all the way over across the state.

And it's unreliable energy. So they put way too much money into it. And if they maintain their diesel standby generators a little more and built out more coal. And not that they haven't. they haven't done enough. You know, they wouldn't be coming in these situations where even in Texas, their energy prices spiked immensely last summer. I think they've come down a bit.

But, you know, because Texas experiences huge heat waves, and they did. And their grids were becoming extremely stressed, especially with so much population boom down there. Influx, yeah. Infrastructure boom. And, you know, they didn't plan for properly. And they're very reluctant to admit. that they overbuilt wind.

And the wind is not helping anyone unless it's blowing. And it's not just whether or not the wind, for example, it's blowing. It's the transmission. You have to still have to transmit it. The transmission capacities bottleneck in many areas down there. And I am scared of what we see in Alberta. They've been, especially when Andy P was here, like we were seeing big pushes for solar wind. and silly projects like that when we are literally sitting on an immense amount of gas, right?

Well, you only, I got buddy who lives down South Medicine Hat and you wind farm all over there. And it's ridiculous. Like there's no sense to have wind at all in Alberta. There's not a business case in the world to have it. It doesn't pay out anything close to a natural gas power plant, especially when the gas is sitting there. it's being wasted and the feds are funding and subsidizing abandonment. They're coming in with their money, you know, under the guise of helping the economy. And producers are eating it up.

It's free money. But in the end, they're actually capping wells that some of them are duds. Some of these wells that they cap and are absolutely duds. They have no future. And they need to abandon them and reclaim them. But there's actually quite a few, quite a percentage of them that all they need is a higher commodity price and they're back to being worth tying in again and turning on and maintaining. And the feds have been subsidizing the destruction of reliable power in Alberta, which is a topic

that is very seldom talked about. In fact, it was celebrated when we were in the downturn here in Alberta and the feds started subsidizing these programs. But that's wrong. The market should dictate what gets capped, not the federal government. And unfortunately, a lot of potential valuable assets that might not be valuable today. Actually, a lot of them would be valuable today because we capped a lot of wells that, in the price of oil, you know, it went negative for a while, the futures. And then the price of oil has been low for a while, but now it's ripping. And I've been saying for over a year now that I expected, I would not be surprised if it goes up to $300 Canadian per barrel. And you'd not be the first person, probably the first person on the podcast to say that, but certainly in the circles around this area, not the first person I've heard to say that.

No, people are bullish. And I think they're realizing the more, I've been very bullish, I think, sooner than many people because I'm more in tune, or at least I'm paying attention to the money, like the money. The money is the base of everything, right, in hyperinflation. And I've, in the circles I'm in, like, I sort of, I'm like an arm-chair. economist. Like I like the I like economists. I like I like that viewpoint. I like to learn about different ideas in the macro economy and a lot of people in my circle, you know, we talk about when supply chains are collapsing due to things like COVID like lockdowns, which accelerates what's actually happening, which is underlying the money it's inflating. It starts with high

tech. You see shortages in high tech. And then it cascades down to low-tech. So like you see semiconductor shortages is what we saw really early. Like right now, you cannot find anywhere in the world at a reasonable price, like a 48 port network switch. That used to be a commodity. They're really hard to get now because they're not, the chips that are being made, there's a huge shortage of semiconductors. And so they're going with the most lucrative use cases like military equipment. vehicles, phones, stuff like that, computers, like laptops, the stuff that people just, you know, are paying more money for. But the stuff that you normally was a commodity,

as hard is impossible to find now, like just dumb network switches, which we use for a business. I cannot find them anywhere. And if you find them, they cost five, six times what I was paying for them about a year and a half ago. And so as these supply chains collapse, do the base monetary problems of inflation. It cascades down and eventually reaches the base layer, which is energy. And that is the base layer of energy is fossil fuels, coal, oil, and gas. And we're seeing that commodity, that commodity price delayed,

like it didn't inflate as fast as other goods, like prices didn't go up as fast as these higher tech goods because they're a stack, you know, Think about it like a pyramid. The highest tech is the top of the pyramid. That saw inflation first. Like prices like skyrocket supply shortages. And that cascaded down now to the underlying commodity, which is oil, gas, and coal.

And so when I talked to a lot of our customers, like producers, and I'm talking like, hey, you guys excited for what's happening? Like, in the sense for your core business, right? Like your commodity prices are going through the roof. About a year ago when I was talking about that, so you're excited for, you know, you got, like, oil's going to rip. Like, we got to get prepared. And even then, actually, like, there was definitely a lot more, there was way more bullishness and optimism than I had seen for years.

But people were like, oh, it's going to peak again. We might get 120 oil or, like, 140 oil. Like, maybe that, like, we're on the next cycle of Bull Run, right? The next oil boom. No, it's going to be way more. more than anyone's ever seen because no one's ever had a complete supply chain like cascade collapse like we're seeing now. So I think it's going to go 300 plus because the unit of account is the dollar and that's

hyperinflating. Like look at the look at how much money that Bank of Canada printed. I mean, it's absurd. They're, they're what they did through COVID, right, to bail everything out. Like after they locked everyone down while they bailed, they tried to bail everyone. tried to bail out the system and they had to print a shit ton of money. Well, I mean, look, it isn't just Canada, Steve. The United States was no different.

Oh, yeah. Canada's just worse. Yeah, U.S. is terrible, but Canada is just worse. You think so? Oh, yeah. Yeah, we printed way more money per capita than the U.S. did. We're way worse. Our central bank's balance sheet looks way worse than the U.S.

And the U.S. has a mighty military, right? Everything sort of follows the U.S. dollar still, because it's the base unit of account. But that might not, well, that will not persist. In fact, that's more or less what I think is happening overseas right now is Russia just got off the U.S. standard reserve currency. Well, they were kicked off of it, right? Yeah.

The U.S. confiscated Russian foreign treasuries. And so they effectively, it was an act of war. and Russia can no longer trade on the U.S. system, on the SWIFT and everything. And so China is basically allying with Russia. Russia's gone back to a gold standard. Russia's rubble, their unit of account, has outperformed. You know, all the media says Russia's getting crushed. Russia's crushing it.

Russia's winning in so many ways. Their money is, their money is really, retaining its value now because it's on a gold standard. And if you look at the Russian ruble versus the U.S. dollar, it's gaining strength every month. And China is supporting them on that. Both Russia and China for years now, for over for a couple decades, actually have been stockpiling gold. And they've been, I mean, this has been a long play about getting off the U.S. reserve currency. And because the U.S. derives so much power from having that. like oil and gas contracts settled in U.S. dollars.

In U.S. dollars, yeah. Petro dollar. And that's, and that has ended now for Russia. China has been settling contracts outside the U.S. system. And I don't see that ending. So many, many people I listen to, like people way more knowledgeable than I am about macroeconomics are saying it's already over. And it's like anything. It's like you don't know it's over until you look back.

And they're going to, and they're saying when we look back in a couple decades, they'll find a date, right? They'll say this is when it ended. Like this, this, you know. Yeah, there'll be books written about it. Yeah. Was the big, was the straw that broke the back, the camel's back. But I mean, it seems pretty clear to me.

That's what's happening. And it's important, too, because it affects how everyone might need to behave on you know, as they run their business. Like for me, inventory management is now more important than ever. I'm a manufacturer, so we build buildings, you know, Bitcoin mines, gen sets. A lot of people listening, and if they're around Lloyd, would be involved in manufacturing as well. This is a bit of a manufacturing hub for the greater area. And for decades now, manufacturers have sort of operated on,

on a lean manufacturing basis. So what that sort of just means is like timeliness of supply chain. Like bring in the iron, convert it to your product, sell it. Don't hold inventory, right? Just in time manufacturing. Buy it, build it, sell it. And that worked when supply chains were robust because you get it when you want it, right? But you can't get it when you want it anymore.

And there's unexpected delays. You might, I was talking to a wellhead drive. manufacturer out of Edmonton yesterday. He pre-orders his castings now over a year in advance because it's too volatile on when it can ship. And that's part of why, excuse me, that's what the part of why prices are going up

is because we have to build in this uncertainty into the price. Everyone does. Everyone's doing it. And so these macro things, I'm so keen on trying to understand it I think it really affects how you run your business. So, yeah, and I mean, they're raising interest rates right now, which they're trying to suppress inflation.

And so I don't see any signs of them stopping yet. They seem to keep jacking up interest rates. And for a business owner, I mean, that might eventually suppress commodity price inflation, which is their goal. But as for a business, you know, what a guy might do in his business, for me, it's like, I'm going to hold. a little more dollars right now than I would otherwise like instead of putting it out in inventory or in my case converting it to Bitcoin because I hold Bitcoin in dollars

but as they're as are you know quenching the market with this and with this interest rate hikes it does affect how you you might make business decisions so for me I'm I'm now holding more dollars than I normally would because that's what dollar value goes inflation of the dollar, you know, slows when they do that. And, like, we're seeing steel prices slowly drop, stuff like that, commodity prices. And that's partly because, you know, interest rates are being jacked up. So, you know, what's interesting about having you in?

And I enjoy people who are paying attention to different things. Because all of us are, you know, like, if I were to sit here and say, you know, what does Sean got his, you know, kind of pulse check on? I would say, Alberta politics right now, I'm like, I know the beat of that sucker. Like, I mean, I am just, I'm on it. I would say that, you know, up until the last couple months, listeners would certainly know that all over the COVID topic of, you know, are we going to have lockdowns? Are they going to try and do any of that bullshit again?

If they are, et cetera. You kind of get the point. Are they? I hope not. Please tell me no. I tell you what. I'm a real optimist on this side. I assume that the majority of the population doesn't want that anymore.

I think that's pretty evident in saying that we live in the West, and the West is different than the East by far. But there's this lovely lady running for Premier of Alberta called Daniel Smith, who, if she wins, she's literally ran on, you know, among other things, one of the big ones that sticks out to my crowd is no more lockdowns. Just no more. Like, we're not doing it. We're not going there.

And to me, it only takes one. And even by her talking like that, all the crowd that's running against her in Alberta politics are starting to champion the same thing. That's right. Which means now Saskatchewan gets to champion the same thing because somebody's already done it and seen, oh, a few people support that, eh? And it's like, yeah. Well, what about, you know, they got, clearly they had the COVID lockdowns and

they're going to milk that COVID cow as long as they can. As long as people are willing to comply with their nonsense. and mask up and lock themselves down and obey, they're going to keep doing it. That will eventually run out of steam. I'm hoping to God it's out of steam. Well, the thing is, is there's tentacles still in certain things, right? You still got the Arrived can app.

You still, you know, the United States still won't let the unvaccinated people in. And that's really brutal for us. I can't send any of my half my staff down when I'm trying to service our equipment. But I was going to ask you, what about climate lock? Yeah, so Mark Morano, that's what he brought up, right? His climate lockdowns. Now that they've worked out this seeing how compliant a population will be, what's next, you know, climate lockdown, you know. And I've actually read a couple, you know, different strategies.

What's the word I'm looking for? Kind of like the evolution of it. It'll be a COVID lockdown to a climate lockdown. down to kind of an internet, what do they call that? Digital lockdown. Digital lockdown. Thank you. Yeah.

And all these different things. That is all, I mean, all these crazy conspiracies do seem to be, it seems to be coming to life. Let's, if you just take a step back and you sit here and you watch what's going on, I come back, the reason I'm paying attention to energy right now is you can see what's happening in Europe. I mean, I was saying this to, geez, who the hell was I saying this to? I think I was saying this to Ross Kennedy, who would have been just recently on. It's like, I just started paying, like, I just started interviewing people on energy because I'm like, you know what?

I got brothers and a dad in the oil field, and I got friends and family, home make their living here. And, you know, I got sponsors and cool people such as yourself that all make their living in this kind of industry. And it's really under attack, as is the food. industry, farming, as is... Yeah, farming is definitely under attack. As is firearms. Like, everything that I've grown up around and understand, for the most part, is all under attack.

And it's being demonized is like the worst of humanity. And yet you're like, that makes sense. So now they're on to the nitrogen tax. Right. Have you talked about that before? They're moving, they're adding, they're adding on to the carbon tax with nitrogen tax. So they're

going after fertilizer. That's what was happening. Denmark. Going after, I think they're, and I think they're taxing and limiting allotments of fertilizer to farmers over there. I mean, I think the Netherlands are a huge, huge exporter of agricultural goods. And it seems to me, I don't, I don't pay attention to the politics as much as you do. I'm more, I like to just listen to economists, but it is tied together. But just to hop in for a second, that's why I like having you on, because, oh, I know. Because there's, There's no possible way for me to focus on everything.

It almost becomes overwhelming, right? So have you come in and talk about what you see is really beneficial to me. Carry on. Well, the nitrogen, I think they're trying to tax the very air you breathe. Okay. They started with CO2. And we alluded to the fact that CO2 is actually a net benefit for the environment. I personally have a, I like to think about it in a silly way, but

silly but I think truthful way I think it is really very real is that I mean and I post I posted some of my socials but like you look back at eons ago and like the cretaceous and period and stuff like that carbon dioxide was huge right in the atmosphere habitats were enormous trees were enormous coal was derived from a mass extinction of trees and they have fossil records of carbon in the air atmospheric carbon and showing that there was a huge decline in carbon dioxide for some reason during a certain period. And that's what made coal. So I like to think about how we actually have, like, prosperity in Earth walked up in fossil fuels, and we need to burn them.

We need to burn them for human flourishing, first of all, of course. So we don't have to consume our environment because it's fossil fuels are just the dead environment, right? They're just dead trees, dead animals, dead dinosaurs. So let's consume that because no other life form consumes that other than human beings. So let's consume that and stop consuming habitats. And it just so happens in the consumption of that. We're actually feeding habitats, which I started there with NASA. So, I mean, I think I have a very hopeful future of humanity and its use for fossil fuels,

whereas they're painting the opposite picture because they want to tax you, right? They want to take your money. So they're taxing air, we breathe. They're taxing the most fundamental commodity to human life and human comfort on earth. And now they started with carbon and that worked. And it's sad because even that's why I stopped as a business. I stopped using because when I started upstream data and our biggest use case for oil field, I mean, yeah, you're mining Bitcoin, but most people don't give a shit about Bitcoin.

The reason we sell is because we get them emissions. compliant, right? They're not emitting methane. And so when I started the business, I marketed on carbon reduction. But I've since learned through just following people and research and listening to podcasts and understanding that I no longer think that carbon is bad in any way. I think that the entire thing is a scam. It's a huge fraud. It's actually resulting in the opposite of what it's intended to do, which is to help the environment. It's actually hurting the environment because it's causing these subsidies are forcing people to misallocate money into really stupid projects like wind and solar which end up enslaving uh uiger uh chinese citizens

and people in the congo and make batteries and all that stuff and it's it's it's actually a net negative for the environment i'm convinced of it and i stopped as a company legitimizing carbon accounting even though it would be to my utmost benefit as a company because I feel like there's other ways to market. Like we can say emissions reduction, but using carbon, which is true. I mean,

I like to say energy waste, like energy waste reduction. We're not disposing of energy. We're utilizing it. And that to me is the biggest message I could bring. So I stopped, like I no longer will say like, well,

I try to avoid legitimizing carbon accounting because I think it is, um, I think it is pure evil. to create this accounting system and I think there's a better way to do it. It's one of the things that here I'll pump your tires a little bit

because it's one of the things I admire about you. If I go back to the first time you're on I was saying something along the lines of I don't understand why you just don't go green. You know, like you get the idea. Turn your upstream data symbol to green and just like we're making the planet green and you probably could have been

I could have got, I guarantee you, I could have got insane government funding subsidies if I played the cards the way that most people play. So what I admire about you is what I admire about a lot of people who came through COVID the same way. They could have done things differently. They could have not talked out. They could have carried on with life. They could blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I just see similarities happening all over the place.

And I come back to you on this one. And I go, that had, I couldn't see it at the time. And now I see it. I'm like, oh, yeah, that makes it sense. And you're absolutely right. Like, it's wasted energy. That's what you're just making use of it. But you could have played the cards differently and had the government just, you know, applaud.

No, true. And I could have really leveraged the government programs. And at the start, I sort of tried. I was trying to do that, but I sort of woke up to the reality. And I also realized, like I was saying, there's a better way to market it, in my opinion. But, like, I was also very outspoken during COVID. I'm very much. Steve, outspoken?

No. I'm very much, I try to be a straight shooter, but I think that what's important is, like, you know, if you speak the truth, right, if you speak the truth, like, you got this whole cohort of, like, these crazies who, like, rely on fact checkers, right? And I was like the saying, well, who's fact-checking the fact-checkers? I mean, the truth doesn't need to be fact-checked because the truth doesn't erode over time. Like if you say something that is true, like it's a mathematical proof or an equation or whatever, a fundamental truth, like the sun will rise tomorrow and it'll keep happening. Like, who's your source? Like who's your source? Like, who wrote that?

Like cite that. No, you don't need to. If you speak the truth, time justifies what you say. So it doesn't like people have this really short-term thinking But if you and and it's really tough like there's a lot of people afraid to speak their mind in these socially political You know this whole because there's that social pressure not to say certain things during as a culture We're terrified to speak out about anything

Well because of the cancel culture. Yes And which I could relate back to fiat but so You know I have a theory that if you speak at like Like in the Bitcoin space, I've talked about this a lot. In the Bitcoin space, memes are really powerful and they're important. And there's been memes in the Bitcoin space. Memes being like, you know, like, I know what everyone knows what memes are, but like in the Bitcoin space, like there's certain memes that caught fire and people kept saying,

like Bitcoin always goes up, like stuff like this. Well, it doesn't. And the thing is if you, if you, even though it's fun memes, if you speak memes that are, I call them weak memes, if you. perpetuate weak memes, which effectively are lies. If you, if you build arguments on lies, eventually they fall apart. And so I refuse to support, even if they're fun memes and fun memes to get to jump in and like, you know, get likes for and stuff, I don't jump in on memes if I feel they're fundamentally unsound. And so the carbon thing is fundamentally unsound. Carbon counting is

fundamentally unsound. I will not build my business's argument, like it's use case, it's marketing on an unsound foundation. I'd rather say, you know, Bitcoin mining on oil gas rollers or something, it's it reduces energy waste and it's it's monetizing energy. That's fundamental truth that'll never change. But if you start saying, oh, it's good for the environment because it's reducing carbon emissions. Well, carbon emissions don't fucking matter. And and then one day people are going to realize the truth, carbon emissions are actually good. There's nothing wrong with carbon dioxide. It's good. In fact, I would argue that we need more of them. We need more carbon dioxide in the air. We have very little in the air. It's like 0.04%.

And if you study the greenhouse effect, like we were saying, it boosts plant growth, which is the plant growth is a fundamental layer under mammal growth and some species like speciation. varied species. You need more plants to have more species. Right? So I think all of it's actually good. That's why I will refuse to market myself personally. That's why I think people know me as a straight shooter, even if I'm wrong and stuff, but at least if you think you're speaking the truth, you're trying. I think that's important. And I think a lot of people fundamentally understand that. And those are the types of people who are willing to put their neck out on the line.

like in those really difficult social situations. Because carbon, there's a lot of social pressure now to accept carbon accounting, right? Like I sound like to most people who don't have any context of what I'm saying, never heard me argue it. Or, you know, they might see a LinkedIn post where I'm trolling and I'm talking about how we need to unlock the dinosaurs

and burn as much coal as possible. But I do that for fun on social media. but people, it's like a joke but dead serious. Like that's the truth. But people think I'm crazy because all they've learned is carbon is bad. And this guy's an idiot. He's just a climate denier. It's like not at all.

Like I'm the last, I'm not even close to a climate denier or like climate change denier or whatever. Well, I was saying this to, I think it was Patrick Moore. You know, just because you speak out against doesn't mean you don't want the best for the world. You know, it's just that it's okay to not agree with, you know, an idea. Like, I literally, you know, I just started. Patrick Moore was the starter of the Greenpeace. He was one of the co-founder's Greenpeace. Yeah, right.

Former president, yeah. Yeah. And he's got a, you know, a guy who's seen a lot. Does it mean he's right on everything? No. But at the same time, I'm like, experience is experience. He's got a very interesting perspective. And, I mean, it's no different than Brian Gitt.

Brian gets the guy from California, who I had on, who's got 25 years roughly experience in energy, was a big, what do you say? He was indoctrinated pretty much into wind and solar and tried pushing it for, you know, over a decade. Yeah. And then realized this isn't working. And now speaks, you know, he's an advocate of nuclear.

But talks very much about fossil fuels. And you just, you listen to these guys and you go, huh like there there's a ton there but they still they still don't want to like see our forest disappear or no or animals go extinct or our oceans or rivers or whatever you know our lakes be disgusting that's not what they're talking about they're talking about like listen actually what what what we need is like reliable energy so people can flourish and if people flourish actually that's going to help clean the world because people actually get to worry about those things instead of like how the hell am I putting a roof over my head and who gives

a shit about a plastic bag blowing down the street kind of thing and I'm being a little bit facetious but you kind of get the point I do get the point and one of the saddest things to me is there's so much propaganda around this that it's it has indoctrinated a lot of youth uh who've lost a lot of hope man like there's there's a lot of doom and gloom on the future of humanity and it should be but it should be the exact opposite yeah but we're the precipice of a golden age with like the transformation of money like in my opinion. Okay, well, I'm going to put a pin in that thought because I want to talk about that. But on the doom and gloom, here's what I will say to any young person who has stumbled here

and is listening to this. The doom and gloom has always been there. When I grew up, it was Armageddon with the year 2000. And if you talk to businesses, business owners about what they had to go through, even in Canada, with the year 2000 and having to change out certain systems and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, man, I thought the world was ending in 2000. And as a young person, I would have been 14 at the time. I'm like, I had some pretty fucked up thoughts go through my brain.

Like, geez, like, you know, like, it would have been nice to have played my last year of hockey or, I don't know, at the time I was probably thinking about bedding a girl or things like that. Not, you know, like, geez, I'll never get to do that, yeah, Steve? But, but like, that's what the world does. We live in this like, we feed off of like the end is coming. Armageddon is around the corner. You know, like nuclear war is going to happen anytime, right? And that's what gets pumped into the public. And some of the time you just need to unplug with it and go like out the door,

realize the world is not ending, stand up for what you believe in, protect your family, learn, help your community, become a better you because by doing that, you propagate that onto the people around you and it just keeps spreading and spreading and spreading and then on top of that we need to start talking about it because in my opinion media is super complicit in spreading all this propaganda and it's because of podcast the internet allowing different voices to expand that started to open up even my eyes of like holy shit right and i'm just a simple minion sitting here in lloyd uh you know trying to do my part and and and try and learn, become a better me and help our community be protected against whatever the

next thing is, if it is climate lockdowns, if it is whatever it is. I think we're going to all be a little bit better prepared because of avenues like this. Yeah, I mean, podcasting is immensely valuable. I mean, just having honest conversations. We don't see that anymore on mainstream media, which is so sad. Who is that? I forget his name. There used to be some really great talk shows, right,

where they bring people on an honest combo, it wasn't censored, and people say some crazy shit, right? And that's gone. But it's coming back. It's back on podcast, thank God. It's coming back. But it's going to fall.

For now. It's going to fall in money, isn't it? For now, because they're not going to want to let it stay back, the people that want to control the narratives, right? The people with the money. And... I will agree with that.

Yeah. On the side of media, my thought is, if you go back to the printing press at one point that technology was earth shaking anyone can you know not anyone but you get the idea now you can print off stories

and thoughts and oh my god and then what happens somebody buys them all up controls it and then the printing press becomes complicit newspaper and if you go back and I brought this up a lot right now because I somehow it's like one of those moments I don't even know how I stumbled into it and I'm sure tons of people in history know exactly what it is, but I, the fireside chats with Roosevelt, he went to the radio back in the

30s. And actually, I believe it says earlier in his, before he was president, he did it, um, in the late 20s. He went to the radio, speak directly to the public because he was worried the papers wouldn't actually print what he was saying because they were against them. Think about that. That's like, my, and maybe more modern, Roosevelt was Donald Trump on Twitter. Right. Yeah. So you go, like this isn't new what you're talking about, that they're going to want to try and control podcasts. They always want to try and control because they want to control the message,

what's going on. And right now, this is a disruptive technology. Once upon a time the printing press was, once upon a time, the radio was, certainly once upon a time the TV was. And over time, they control money, motivates, whatever it is, they control the message and whatever. When it comes to right now, this is, be a really hard thing for them to control, isn't it?

Not as hard as you think. No? In my opinion, I mean, is it hard to control? Yes, but there's ways to attack anything. And I think it really comes down to money, right? Cancell culture comes down to money. Like, for example, a lot of the companies that complied to COVID lockdowns and vaccine programs, a lot of these companies, especially the bigger ones.

You saw, I'd say almost every major corporation complied. Major. The smaller the company, the smaller the company was, like closer to a very small business, like your own business here, my business. A much smaller percentage of us wanted to comply with any of that. And the difference, I mean, there's plenty of differences, but the major difference is how those companies are funded. Major corporations are beholden to their major shareholders and their creditors.

Big banks have huge credit lines with these companies, and the shareholders are often major institutions like Black Rock. Black Rock, it's a multi-trillion dollar. basically private hedge fund or investment fund. If you said that name a year ago, I don't think anyone would have nodded their head. And now I would say 85 to 95% of listeners are all nodding their head.

And they've seen... All these entities are, are proxies for central banks. They're not real companies. They were given printed money to steal the goods of society. They don't, they never, they weren't, Like, you know, Larry Fink, for example, he's the head of Black Rock, and he owns a percentage of every company on the stock market, literally.

There's very few companies on the stock market of any size that Black Rock hasn't bought shares in. Of course, if you're public, anyone can buy you up, right? And so BlackRock has their fingers in almost every major institution. And if BlackRock, I mean, BlackRock, a good example, ExxonMobil. ExxonMobil is an oil company. I think it was like a year or two ago, there's like this activist investor group called Engine Number One or something like that. Engine number one, I believe, was called. And they were, they were through, like they were activist investors.

They had a lot of money. They bought into Exxon. They forced their way on the board through their share ownership and through votes to get board seats. and they're pushing ExxonMobil to pivot to wind and solar bullshit. Now, I guess you can call it activist investing, but that makes no sense for an oil company to do that. That engine number one effectively is funded by money printing, more or less, is how they're financed.

All these major institutions are beholden to their creditors and to how the money, they're all boosted by this stuff, like Bombardier here in Canada, What better example of a fake company, a zombie corporation that only exists. They've gone bankrupt a dozen times. They only exist because they're pumped up by printed money. Because at one point they were a real company and they were a good company. And they made some mistakes and they went bankrupt and they were bailed out.

And now they're beholden to their owners. And their owners are people that effectively are, we call them cantillionaires. They're the biggest benefactors of money printing. And so where I was going with this is all these major corporations have these benefactors and these creditors. And they jump in line when the creditors say hop. And why the creditors are all telling them is you're going to obey these lockdown mandates. You're going to make all your employees vaxed, all this stuff. Because I guarantee most like CNRL, for example, a company I respect immensely.

I think it's probably the, especially now I'm on the service side of the industry. I used to be on the production side, like the operator side. Yeah. And I respect them immensely for what they've been able to do. But I don't not believe that the consensus of employees and management at CNRL really wanted to force their employees to get vaccinated. But they did. I had no people that had to get vaccinated to work with CNRL. I wasn't allowed on a senior lease because I was traveling.

I traveled out of country personally. I traveled. I was in Korea when COVID was breaking out because I was on a Bitcoin conference. And I made the mistake of telling my guy at C.NRL, I was on vacation. He's like, oh, yeah, cool, where were you? I was like, oh, I was over in Vietnam. I was like, oh, I was like, and because I was over in the East,

and then I flew through Korea, that's where there was all this COVID scare, right? And they wouldn't let me on a course site for a while because of the quarantine requirements. and all this stuff. And, but anyway, I guess like even CNRL, a company where I guarantee you if anyone listening here is at CNRL, and say the majority of people there are not, not for vaccine mandates, yet they still implemented it.

And part of that is because they're big public company. They're beholden to, they're basically slaves to their creditors. And the creditors told them to hop and they hopped. And whether that was implicitly told or implied or whatever, that's what management did. And that's the problem is there's no, we now live in a society where there's been so much consolidation in asset ownership through corporations that were consolidated through money printing. That there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no real competition anymore like there was say 100 years ago, 200 years ago, where you had immense amounts of small businesses like, you know, earnest and sun. or like, you know, like in, like free enterprise.

It just doesn't exist anymore. It's all franchises. It's all big corporations. And unfortunately, the vast majority of population works for these people. They work for a big employer. And they're all jumping to the tune of, of what the big creditors want. And it's sort of, there's very few people now that own everything, right? We've heard that for years, like the 99% and the 1%.

And that's only gotten worse. And that's why there is a, there's a doom outlook, but there's an optimist outlook, too. Well, geez, I'd like to hear some optimism about Steve. Well, I'm sort of describing the state of things now, right? And it's very doom and gloom if you're paying attention to this stuff and you're seeing what's happening behind the scenes, like I'm painting. It is very doom and gloom, but I'm optimist. I'm an optimist. The biggest thing that's coming that is the scariest thing is the CBDCs.

Do you know what that is? If anyone talk to you about that on the pod? I don't think so. CBDCs, acronym, Central Bank Digital Currencies. Oh, geez. No, now it's like, as soon as you say, yes, okay. In fairness, carry on. And, you know, we can tie that to the whole trucker conversation.

The freezing of bank counts. The surveillance of your money. Yeah. Where are you spending your money? What are you spending it on? Every time I go to the bank and make a wire, I have to explain when I'm wiring. Why? Oh, oh, hi, sir.

You're wiring $10,000. dollars overseas what is this for I'm not your business oh that's not good enough you need to tell me what it's for and I have to tell them what is for and I I do tell them what is for because I don't really want my bank to unbank me a lot a lot of people go yeah but Steve right now I hardly carry any cash I just don't I pretty much I don't either I pretty much deal with a you know invisible all the time. What's the big deal? What's the big deal, Steve? Well, most people don't carry a lot of cash anymore. I mean, it's gone. That's, cash is the most, uh, call it freedom enabling tool we

have. Uh, like I can, me and you can go make a deal here on something. I pay you in cash. You, I walk home with your Marshall amplifier and, uh, no one knows, no one's the wiser, right? Um, it's not for sale. Cash deals are hard to tax. And, but, but, but, Right now, cash, as people think about it today, because we've all, everyone listening has been living on a fiat standard, excuse me, where money is fake, monopoly money. And one reason I'm not that interested in politics is because I don't think there's any way out of, through politics.

I don't think there's anything we can do to keep things from going more communist, more socialist, Nothing. Nothing. Not from a political solution. I think only a technological solution can get us out of it. So that's why I don't pay attention to... I am more interested in local politics than I am federal. Like I don't care at all about federal politics.

I'm a big fan of whoever, like for example. I think for finally we have an actual person who seems real, right? So I'm a supporter of him and I'll end up probably voting for him. But I don't think he'll end up being a solution. I think he'll... I see it as like he'll probably... probably hold off the storm a little longer. Because the problem is our money system is broken.

The money's fake. It's been fake for many years, at least since 1971, when they got off. Gold standard. Completely got off the gold standard and become unreserved money. See, here's a thing, like the government earns money two ways. One is taxation. Your income tax, sales tax, inheritance tax, property tax, the million of tax, tax,

laws that we all comply with, right? But they're not funded by their tax anymore. They're funded by their deficits. So I'm very unhappy with our government right now, and the way it's been for many years, I'm very disenfranchised on, like I basically don't even care to vote ever again, but I will for a few reasons, one, to respect our forefathers who fucking died, you know, like for democracy and stuff.

And I have that in my family, too. So I will continue to vote, but I don't believe it's going to be a long-term solution until the money's fixed. And it basically comes down to this. You know, yourself, you seem to be on the same page of me. We were not happy with lockdowns happening. I think that it should have been every business owner's choice to do, to handle COVID as they wished. I think it should have been every individual person's choice to handle it as they wished. I have no problem with masking up if it's your choice.

If you make me mask up, I have a problem with it. Stuff like that, right? The government, all the government policy costs the government immense amount of money because when they lock down the businesses, the only way that would even potentially fly at all is if they subsidize them, right? Wage, what do they call it, the wage subsidy, SERB, all these other programs. And all those programs, maybe they were best of best intent, but what ended up happening is you always screw somebody.

essentially planned thing like that isn't fair to everyone. And some people get way more than they should have ever got. Other people get way less. Some people get nothing at all and they're bankrupt. And that's what ended up happening. And it destroyed a lot of businesses. But what people need to realize is how do the government finance this?

They didn't finance it through tax. That's how the government is supposed to finance everything. And that's what we all signed up for. We all signed up for tax. I hate tax, but I pay it. I don't like Canadian healthcare system. I think it sucks and that's a controversial thing to say, but I'm okay with it all I'm buying into it. I can move right. I can move to the states or somewhere if I don't care if I don't want to be a participant. I'm okay with that. I'm not okay with is locking everyone down funding it through money printing is what they did and that ended up We're seeing it now and they're blaming Russia, but it's not Russia at all. It's it's our own government that printed money. That's why supply chains are collapsing. That's why, because they crushed all these businesses. That's why prices have ramped up, gasoline's ramping up.

It's all money printing. It's nothing to do with Russia. Russia is just a consequence of all this macro stuff. Yeah. So the thing is like, as long as politicians can make money out of thin air, they'll never be held accountable, truly accountable. And I like to say, you know, if you're holding dollars in your bank account, I mean, we're all pretty much forced to do it, right? Because there's not really any other viable alternative. Like, I like Bitcoin, of course, but most people don't accept Bitcoin's payment. So I can't just live exclusively off Bitcoin. Some people have managed to do it, but it's really difficult.

And it's just doesn't work. And gold. Gold is good money. Silver is good money. But we can't just live off that right now. of the systems aren't working. They've been stripped away. So we're sort of beholden to the dollar.

So what I want to do, what I do personally is hold, normally hold as little dollars as possible. Earlier I said I'm holding more dollars now. That's because they're ramping up interest rates. But as soon as that slows down, I'm going to be converting my dollars back to goods and assets, which would be things like Bitcoin. That's nice to hold because of digital assets.

It's like land, but digital. And for the listener, I mean, who's not into Bitcoin, well, that's, you might want to hold some dollars now as everything is deflating, like through interest rate being jacked up. Like your home values are probably going to go down over time. It might take a while, but eventually something's going to happen. And they're going to, like sales have already slowed, right, with interest rates rising. That's what they're trying to do. They're trying to quench the market. So asset values are dropping.

And I'm sort of, again. going on rambling a bit on a side but i guess the point the point is um the government currently funds itself by money printing and that's wrong no one signed up for that that's not what democracy is supposed to do in fact it undermines democracy uh because it makes nobody accountable for anything because what the government should be accountable to is their budget if they if they raise you know x billions of dollars through taxation of the economy they should only build to spend that money. And they should not be able to get these sell treasuries and take loans and cheat money from the central bank who prints it out of thinner. That institution is fake. It's a fraud and it needs to end.

If central banking doesn't end the madness, the clown world, the upside down world where everything black is white and, you know, boys or girls and all this stuff will never end. It'll get worse and worse and worse. And it's basically just pure communism. is what's happening. And so for me, it's like, yeah, I'm very excited about what I'm seeing in Alberta politics, finally. Like, it seems like there's hope. Well, speaking of Alberta politics, Daniel Smith, she's a frontrunner.

I like her too because I briefly met her. She supports my niche industry, which is big. She sees the value. She's been educated on it. She sees the value of why, like we do, like mining Bitcoin. off waste gas. She understands why she's not one of the ones like, oh, it's it's all about carbon. No, like she's it's, it's value at it's real it generates royalties. It generates jobs, right? Well, have you heard her talk about becoming the Bitcoin hub of the world? Yeah, no. So that's,

I'm a personal supporter of Dan, of her, of Ms. Smith. But like I said, I, I, when it comes to voting day, like she'll probably have my vote, but I don't dwell on it too much. I dwell on just, I have this, well, actually, more the question that I had in the mind, when I hear her talk about that, I'm like, oh, that's cool, like to hear a government, somebody running, and I can't remember, she might have said this before she was actually even running, you know, for the Premier of Alberta. She might have said it before then, because she says things like, you know, I've heard her talk about Starlink, you know, if they're going to censor how we do things here in Alberta, maybe we'll talk to Elon Musk, you know, it's kind of like, I don't know, pie in the sky, but at the same time,

you're kind of like, I don't know, right? Like, is that a great idea? I have no idea. So she brings up the Bitcoin, building hubs in Alberta and becoming the main source of, I don't know. And I don't know. Well, maybe like even if it's more memetic, like if it's the hub of the Bitcoin industry in Canada, that's an amazing thing. Like that will get her a lot of social support on social media. And that's important, like memetic support.

Yeah. And it will, because we've seen that in Texas. Texas has already embraced Bitcoin. The governor, I was down there and he came to her conference and spoke. Abbott? Sorry, not governor. Senator, but Governor Abbott, Governor Abbott is a huge proponent down there, yes. There's that other guy.

Honestly, folks, I can't believe I know a couple of politicians of states. I mean, obviously I know a few, but. Abbott is definitely a huge supporter. There's another senator. It's drawn a blank right now. But they're all really pro into it and a huge amount of money flocked to Texas because of that. And people are seeing that. And I've been saying since that was on the go, I'm like, guys like Alberta has 20 times Texas oil reserves, 20 X.

Okay. Texas is a little baby compared to what Alberta's got for energy. The only reason Alberta doesn't dominate Texas for production and exports is because of the politics, the Canadian. communist politics. If it wasn't for that, we would absolutely be, you know, if we had our own port, right, you know, like things would be very different. But that's just the state of the world today. But I think that's great that she's doing that. I think it's hard to articulate in a little pot, like a short podcast, like how important this, the problem in money is and how important. And maybe Bitcoin fails in some manner for some reason. I don't think it will, but it may,

imagine it does, there needs to be a fix in the money system. And that's the only thing that makes me interested in politics is how do we fix that first? I think, I really, you mentioned something, and I got it written down. I want to make sure we talk about it before we go there with a politics thing. I just, I look at politics and I go, it's just so influential. And saying that, the people influence it. You know what I mean? Like politics takes their marches.

orders from the people, but the people get influenced by media, right? So it's like, it's, it's this weird ecosystem, almost. And I watch what Daniel Smith has done, in particular, whether she wins or not, what she's been saying and getting attacked for from everyone has been influencing the political stage in Canada, even if a little, because the more conservative provinces actually get to go back to being a little more conservative. Why? Because they're realizing. their appetite for it how they ever lost that idea that it wasn't you know what she's saying was so crazy is beyond me other than I go back to the media the media was you know complicit in in the agenda of the federal government which is

pushing us more socialist I would say right more of these and some of it's good some of it is just complete crock of shit and and she's found a way to find a platform to run in this race and if she wins she doesn't win part of what she's done is already pushed it back the other way somewhat. She wins. It's going to be a completely different story. I agree. And I think that when she might talk on a variety of different things,

some will ring with people resonate and other leaders pick up on what's resonating and they start shifting their because that's really what it's all about. They're all, every politician has the same thing in common. They need the vote, right? So whatever resonates with the voters, they'll shift based on that. They'll, you know. I have a, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm so naive to it because I just want, you know, like, if you, if you, if you speak the truth and you don't get voted in, you go, oh, shit, well, I don't, I tried, right? And politics isn't that.

Politics is figuring out what works so you can garner votes from all these different little, you know, cohorts of people. And you go, oh, that's a little more, not nefarious, but that's why. That's why I sympathize with, you know, Like, I was very critical of, like, even Jason Kenney. Like, I was very not happy with what he was doing very early in COVID and completely lost face in the faith in the guy. But that's what politicians do. They have to, they don't know for sure what the, they can't just stand their ground all the time on the pure truth. I mean, I feel like he could have, he could have made a stand sort of like DeSantis dead down in Florida.

I wish, I wish he was more like DeSantis down in Florida. Don't we all? Yeah, I mean, because that's a strong leader, and that's what we want to elect. But it's hard because it's especially fear is quite quite the drug, right? It's the mind virus. Yeah, fear is the mind virus. People were terrible. I saw people in the Bitcoin community who were generally ultra-conservative.

Like it makes your average Alberta rural conservative look like a liberal. most Bitcoin, like ultra-bitcoiners. And I saw some of these guys who had mad respect for lose their minds over COVID, like, because the fear, the fear, like saying things that were insane about like, uh, they went, they went from ultra-conservative to like ultra-liberal. It's not, it's not your choice. You got to save me, like stuff like that. Like that's a liberal view.

I jump on this grenade all the time. I don't need to look at anyone else. In the first three months of COVID. I was working a baker and I was like, maybe I just need, you know, guys, I, I was terrified, like, I was terrified of everyone. Like, I don't need to look at anyone else. I can judge only myself on how I acted. And in the first three months, you know, like we didn't go around family. We stayed away from everybody.

We were generally concerned. And I always say the weird part of me was, I almost kind of was, I knew we were going to have this moment in life where here's the big pivotal whatever. But then, you know, I didn't shut my brain off, at least, you know, I hope. Because where I sit now is I kept talking to people, kept exploring like, exploring like, this doesn't seem right. Like, and the more they started not seem right, the more you talk about it, you're like, we got to, you know, like, I don't know if they'll, they care. But where I was working at the time, we had a meeting in June 2020. I want you to think about this.

April, May, June. Yes, I'm sure March is when it all comes down. by April Sean is freaking out by May Sean's going hmm this doesn't seem

you know by June we have a meeting Western Canada up on the screen and I expect like in my brain I think everyone around the table will expect the same thing

we're going back to work in you know we're all going to be in the offices everything's going back to normal not a big deal and on the screen is won't be going back to work until the vaccine and that's think about that that is in June 2020 and I remember seeing that and being like what the

fuck is going on like what are we doing here now it doesn't mean that people didn't die from COVID it doesn't mean that all these different things it just means that back in June of 2020 companies knew we weren't going back for years into the way it was life as we know it was going to alter. Like, that's a wild thought. I, I, yeah, I, I feel like because I was well interested and tuned into the macro side of things I, I, and you started a Bitcoin company, not a Bitcoin company, but you're in a world that was attacked from the beginning.

So you could, you already defend, well defended against a lot of these things. Like people, I have a hard time understanding that, you know, maybe certain banks don't want to touch you or certain insurance companies that don't want to touch you. Well, I like to say that. don't want to touch you and most you know you go start up I don't know you go start a whatever company maybe in the beginning some banks don't want to touch because you're small and you know like me yeah they wouldn't touch me but but when it's Bitcoin they really don't want to touch you they're like yes literally yesterday for the first time in

five years a bank a big bank who sent a rep to the oil show who had who I bank with came up to me and said, you know what, I think we're ready to do loans with you guys for the first time. After exponential growth in my company, any other company, anything other than Bitcoin, that would have been years ago. But I,

you know, I'm like, maybe, I mean, I found another source now. So like, maybe probably not, right?

Like, thanks, but I need, when I needed you, you weren't there for me, right? I also say, like,

Bitcoiners can't be canceled. like you can't cancel us the same way you cancel someone else in a few ways. The truck like, you know, truck or convoy happened, I guess after my last session with you. And of course, the scariest thing about that for the Bitcoin community was like, wow,

look at what they did to the Canadians and their bank accounts, like the freezing and their bank account. This is a signal of what the future looks like. comply with the narratives or they will take your means to feed your family away from you because cash is going to be cash is going the way of the dodo at least in terms of the fiat money that's why bitcoin is cash and guess who donated to the truckers and no one knew about well you don't you can you can guess but nobody knew right and no one's this person's bank account wasn't frozen.

If that's not a glaring use case for what Bitcoin represents, then I don't know what it is. Because it's, I believe it's the only thing, the only thing in the world right now that has the potential to not be possible to censor. And that's why like for me, is Bitcoin. It's Bitcoin. And that's, and it's built to be uncensurable. That's the entire premise. The entire design architecture is.

designed to avoid censorship circumvent it you censor one node it circumvents to another node it's a network of nodes right and it has this it's in sync through mining you you shut me down and all my mind's down another one sprouts up in my place you will not stop it because it's just compute it's just computing so you shut down my huge operation well now it's more profitable to mine what's left because I'm offline I'm not taking it right so it's the entire premise of Bitcoin is about being unable to be stopped by a central authority. And so because of where we've been going with this surveillance stuff, this censorship,

I mean, that's what Bitcoin represents. It's anti-censorship. And that's why I'm building not only my personal brand, which is built on Bitcoin, all I tweet about is Bitcoin. And then once in a while, like anti-lockdown shit or anti-vaccine stuff. That's just my personal interest. but everything I do is built on a Bitcoin image because I'm so, you know, I'm willing to stake it on that.

And if it fails, it fails, but my business is built on it. And I think like when things like most Canadians cannot, like your average Canadian cannot understand, well, what's the use case for Bitcoin? When my money works, everyone accepts it, no one accepts Bitcoin, blah, blah, blah. Well, you know, the truckers should have been a wake-up call to you. Like, whether you support them or not, it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter. No politician is built to freeze your bank account ever. Ever. Ever. It's that honestly, I believe that everyone who let that go through should be in prison for life. That's how egregious that act is. Like they should, in fact, in an earlier time in human history, they would have been shot

for doing that. But that's not the way it is anymore. But they should be definitely tried and put in prison because that is taking someone's ability away to feed their family. families for political reasons is not what this country's about. So you mentioned you thought we're coming into the golden age of currency. I think you said currency. No, the golden age of humanity.

A golden age of humanity. Yes, absolutely. Why do you think that? Or what do you mean by that? Or maybe both? It's a deep topic, but I can, it really comes down to, you know, the Industrial Revolution engines, fossil fuels, fossil fuels propelled wealth across this world. Like before that, life was nothing like it is today, obviously.

Lifespans, comforts, everything. Engines, power generation, fossil fuels, energy, the Industrial Revolution, you know, ceded in England, the pace of innovation. It just was unbelievable. And it had created a golden age. But at the same time as all this is happening, And then that went, and I should say, that led into the informational revolution, computing.

And that is, like, as important. What it's done for people, what it's doing for us right now. Community came to the entire world. Like, it's unbelievable. The industrial revolution sort of distributed energy to anyone in a way. Like, anyone can have an engine now, a little baby engine, propelling your ass, 100 miles an hour, to get to where you need to be. I mean, before that, there was nothing, you know, horse and constable. carriage. It just was such a step change, right? Exponential step change and that compounded into

every little thing manufacturing, et cetera. Then it goes to information age, computing. We now communicate across the world and to the moon and beyond like we want to. And anyone can do it. So we've had this golden age of technological boom. But yet there's still major wealth and inequality in the world. There's still major poverty in the world. This makes no sense. There's no reason for it to be that. Like, even though there's major poverty,

for sure, everyone has been uplifted. Like the people in the worst spots, like the most impoverished people are still better off now than they were, you know, in the past, just from technological progress. But I'm saying that we're going to see an unprecedented golden age because what we've seen in parallel with this technological revolution is the consolidation of ownership of everything.

In the 18th century, wealth was way better distributed than it was now because they were on a gold standard. Gold was money. They did have Fiat. The Central Bank of England's been on Fiat. Fiat for the people don't really understand what I mean. It really comes down to paper notes, right? And that's fine. Paper notes is actually really good.

It helps make money more accessible. but it has to be backed by something. So it's been backed by gold up until about 50 years ago. And you can measure. There's a website called WTF, what the fuck, happened in 1971. Google it. There's a website. And it shows you graphs of a million different metrics that have gone to shit since 1971.

And that's because in 1971, Fiat became untethered from gold completely. And that's when stuff, that's when small businesses started being eradicated. And not just eradicated in a sense that, you know, they go bankrupt, but they get bought out and everything is consolidating. It's been a mergers and acquisitions culture since 1971. And that's because the money system is corrupted. And what I'm saying is we're on the precipice of a golden age because we are still in the midst of a technological revolution. Like it's still, like technology is still the AI stuff coming out now. Like this stuff is still accelerating, like rockets landing themselves.

Like everything is still getting better and better and better. And normally when the technology improves, like when a farmer goes from his old tech, like a donkey drag in a plow or whatever it was back in the day to a combine, and one man can now firm that many more acreages, acres or whatever. I'm not an ag guy. Well, and just even do the inputs. fertilizers, the amount you can get out of one field compared to, yeah.

And fossil fuels and how it generates fertilizer and potash and everything. All the technology actually drives more wealth to people, everybody. It enriches everybody. And people are more comfortable with longer, more kids, et cetera. But Fiat money has counteracted that.

And in the sense that it's consolidated all this wealth that technology is bringing. And you can pretty much drive it down to physics, like the better technology gets, the more you can extract out of the unit of energy. That's really what it comes down to. Whereas we used to heater homes with whale blubber, and it took all this energy to get it, right? And so the cost of that energy was high. The cost of that energy is now dropped. The cost per kilowatt hours dropped to really low. And that has enriched to every person and made population booms. You know what I'm saying. But Fiat has counteracted

that. It's given the people at the top of the Fiat pyramid, who I call it cantillionaires, something called the cantillan effect. You can Google that, but those people benefit the most, and they end up buying everything. That's why BlackRock owns everything. Bill Gates owns everything. That's why the rich stay rich. It's not through their hard work. It's through the cantillan effect. They just stay rich. And they start buying everything up. That's why there's a huge culture of mergers and acquisitions. I mean, Tamarack Valley,

an excellent company in oil and gas, just bought Delta Stream, another excellent company in oil and gas. In a Bitcoin standard, which I used to contrast the Fiat standard, what would actually happen is these companies would fracture. They'd split up. They wouldn't consolidate and merge.

That's a Fiat. That's a gross effect from Fiat money printing and consolidation. What would happen is they split. companies would split and they'd become more competitive. You'd have mom and pop shops, more mom and pop shops instead of less. And now we have we have consolidating now where there's very few, very, very few, if you look at the number of small mom and pop oil and gas producers now,

there's very few compared to there were even like a few decades ago. Because it's so much harder now for you, me, Joe Blow, to start an oil company. one of the only because we don't have the money. We've been stripped of our savings over time. If we wanted to and everything, it's just relatively cost more. If we, the only way to start an oil company now, unless you're like filthy rich,

you need to go through private equity. So you basically, you're building an oil company for someone else. And that's what most small oil companies are. They're private equity funded. They're good guys, like me and you and the next guy is listening to this in the Lloyd area, knows what they're doing.

They know how to produce oil. They know how to be. creative but but they all anyone who doesn't leverage the fiat system and go with private equity route and stuff they get sort of swamped by the guys that do and they get bought out and taken off the market no longer in competition they they get absorbed into the big beast right who outfinances the next guy and you see it everywhere it's not just I'm relating it to well and gas but you see it to you see franchising I mean years ago there was many many

mechanic shops that would service your vehicle all owner operated not all of them but you know more of them more of them more family businesses dad and son if it's a mechanic shop usually right bakery mom and daughter like whatever there's more of them in the past and then the fiat standard crushed it be crushed it the franchises were enabled because they get cheap money it's just all this can't till and affecting the more money you have the cheaper you can get it. The more money you have, the cheaper you can get it. Like cost of capital goes down. Interest rates go down. All this stuff. And I see the golden age coming because I think

Bitcoin is going to destroy Fiat in a very short order. Certainly within our lifetime, I would hope within 20 years. I think we're seeing it now. I think Russia just went back to a gold standard. I think that's going to force the hand of governments around the the world to join them because they're going to keep out competing everybody unless you go back to a better money system the money's hyperinflating rushes isn't and their purchasing powers going up by the day i think the u.s is eventually going to be forced to go back the gold standard and their empire is effectively fallen um and this is going to be good for individuals across the world is this going to be some growing pains gold though i mean i personally choose bitcoin but i like gold too

i invest in gold i have a little bit of i bought a little tiny bit of Boolean right over the years. I like to buy like one little, you know, gold coin a year, which I think it's cool. And I think it's the future like, because it's sound money. So I'm a Bitcoin bowl, but I'm not really, I'm more of a sound money bowl. Like I want real money. And that's actually how I got into Bitcoin. I got in it to it through my interest in gold. But that's the picture I'm sort of, you know, trying to paint. I think that because now if you, you know, I was saying how technology has enriched everybody, if you take away that consolidating effect of people stealing your savings through money printing. And everyone should know what I'm talking about right now because

if you've gone to the grocery store or filled up your gas tank, that is inflation. That's your savings being stolen from you. Your pensioners who have a fixed income, that income now buys less groceries than they did two years ago. That's theft. That was theft through money inflation. That cannot happen on a gold standard and it cannot happen on a Bitcoin. standard. If you read the history of money, they, you know, they got off the gold standard. There's a lot of politics behind it. It was, it was really an attack on, on the man, like on the, on the small business owner. And that's what happened early in the, at least in America, early in the 19th or 20th century, like in 1913, I believe it was when they first introduced

central banks. But I believe that it's a, and I would even say that, that on my company and my personally, I'm already in a golden age. Okay. Because I'm not, I hold most of my company's treasury in Bitcoin. Now, that hurt me in the last few months because it's volatile and it went down. But on average, that's helped me a lot. One of the reason why my company's growing exponentially is because, and I've said this, I think, on the last time I was here, I was advising listeners, like, you don't have to be like me

and go nuts with Bitcoin. But learn about it. it and maybe take a tiny bit of it and just hold on to it and just see how what happens and see how it all plays out but don't don't be like me i'm a bit of an extremist but it's done amazing things for my company like you wouldn't believe and and in my image now in the space my company's image is so strong in the bitcoin space and bitcoin space is full of money man these guys have so much money it's like a parallel to oil and gas like there's so much money like i can bring money into my company so easy. Like I just have to call some people up who know what I'm doing because they know what I'm about.

I don't lie about shit. You know, I show people what I'm doing all the time. I'm a straight shooter. I'm very transparent and it's helped my company like you wouldn't believe. Like we raised a bit of money recently. It took me like no time. I snapped my fingers and it was on my terms. Most companies can't do that. But that's because the image I've built and the resources I've tapped into from having that image. And the realm you're playing in. Yeah. Yeah. I'm in the two best industries on the planet.

You have fun? I'm having so much fun, man. It's stressful. But listen, sitting on this side of things, being in this room, I can be honest, at times. It's stressful. Yeah. But I've never had this much fun in my life. Yeah.

I'm doing what I love doing. And this is what I want to build. I'm building what I want to build. I love oil and gas so much. And I love even coal. Like I want to somehow get involved in that industry one day because I think it's so fundamentally needed and useful But I love what I'm doing. I love the Bitcoin thing Energy and money. I'm doing both like I'm in on both and anyone could be in on the money thing the Bitcoin thing

And I just feel like you know people well some people are going to be listening to me this guy's crazy like this guy He's a radical like I'm not putting Bitcoin in my treasury look at it go down right like I would have been screwed and yeah at times you would have been screwed I got screwed pretty hard because my treasury, the percent change in my value of my treasury was pretty enormous like from eight months ago to now. Yeah, from from 70, what was the high of it? 70 some thousand. Yeah, to like 22 or whatever it's now. Now it's sitting at 26. So imagine your treasury just like dwindles by two-thirds, right? Yeah. But at the same time, I wrote it on the other side and on average I'm crushing it like way crushing it more than any of my competition is. And, uh,

I've had so many customers now that feel that believe the same way and they accept Bitcoin as payment and I accept Bitcoin as payment we're on a different economy we're not in like I'm on both like I'm straddling both I can play and trade whichever one makes sense like right now I said I was holding more fiat because I think fiat is a good hold right now because of the interest rate thing but like I'm in both and if you're not in both like you know you might you might be you might have chosen the right way but you know in Bitcoin we say like you know you can't really avoid it forever if it keeps doing what it's doing you're going to be forced to do something at some point or else your competition

is going to crush you like I'll just buy you you know what I'm saying like I'll buy your competition or you or I'll compete you because I have bigger treasury so I've always advocated for everyone like take it take it seriously to at least educate yourself because it's worthwhile And I actually want everyone, especially in the Lloyd area, to succeed. And I think Lloyd could be the mecca of Bitcoin in the world. Lloyd itself. Really? Absolutely.

We are, well, it is, well, heavy oil capital of the planet. It's got so much gas associated with it. So it's a great opportunity to turn it into Bitcoin more than most fields. because heavy oil is so hard to transport. It's isolated, and so the gas is isolated. And so for that reason, the vent gas, the waste gas, it comes with our oil, or specific type of oil. And then you got the entrepreneurial spirit in Lloyd.

Like there is no other oil town in Canada. I would agree with that. There is not. And no offense to people that live in Grand Prairie or Cold Lake, Bonneville, down in Swift. You know, pick any oil town. Nobody holds a candle to what comes out of Lloyd. It's wild.

Like, you can just look at the patent database and see what guys here have done. Like, you know, like, I could name, I could name, like, a dozen entrepreneurs in this town who have transformed the industry. And they're, some of them are well known for it. Some of them aren't so much. But it's unbelievable. And that's why I stuck around this town. I thought it was amazing for that reason. And that's oil.

But you also got ag, right? prolific agricultural area, the two foundations of humanity. I, I, I, I, I, when I, the chamber asked me to come to a talk, sorry, not the chamber, the Rotary Club when I was in the Rotary Club for a few years. And I did a talk and that's my talk was how Lloyd is like, I think Lloyd has the, has the potential to be the strongest economy per capita in this country or on, on a planet. But you got the ag, you got the,

oil and gas, you get the innovation, and the perfect boiling pot for Bitcoin. Conservatives, too, who tend to like Bitcoin. It could be like the mecca, and, like, you know, I'm hoping it will. I'm going to try to make it. I'm very pro this area, too. That's why I'm back. It's why, you know, I don't know. I don't know what the future holds, but it's why I don't ever want to, you know, everybody goes, you should take the podcast stuff. Just pick a big city. Just pick one. You get the idea. traffic people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, man, I don't know.

Like, I know lots of people think Lloyd's a bunch of redneck hillbillies and everything else. They are some smart motherfuckers. You'll never find a place where you can just, I just sort of fell onto Lloyd by accident. Like, I was just given the opportunity to go to a few spots in Husky and I chose Lloyd. I had no idea what I was coming into. I just got lucky. And I feel like I struck the gold mine of like opportunity.

Because anyone can make something of themselves in this town, anybody. You just got to want it. Like, that's all it is. You just got to want it. Work hard. Be trustworthy. Show dedication to your employer. You can do anything in this town.

It's wild. And I come from Newfoundland, an amazing, amazing place. It doesn't have the same economy and the opportunities, right? So it's very, it was very, it was very, I could tell. Like, I was like something was different about what I can't. here and I'm very ambitious right like clearly but like so to me I just couldn't believe it I couldn't believe the guy that like you know just drove truck his whole life who became multi-millionaire because he worked his ass off and and his wife like helping him like and they

just I couldn't believe it like I'd never seen that before I never knew that opportunity existed right so I mean that's why I'm personally not like I've grown my business here and I'm planning on continuing to invest in growing in here as big as I can make it because I think I don't see any other place that could be a better spot than this because it's not because you also got the skill set. You got, you know, hardworking farmers. I appreciate you bringing up, Lloyd, because you know, once upon a time when I started this podcast, it was under the premise that Lloyd gets overlooked. We're in between Saskatoon and Emerton. We're on the borders and Saskatchewan doesn't really want us. Alberta doesn't really want us. We're just kind of like, we're

and we're isolated. We're in the middle of nowhere, right? Like, we got horrendous wind. We got awful winners, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, shit on us. And then on top of it, you know, both provinces look at us like we're rednecks and, you know, it's a transient town and nobody blah, blah, blah, blah. And so when I started the podcast, one of the main principles was showcasing what comes out of Lloyd, because Lloyd has talented, bright people with great stories. and if you shine a light on the community itself, they look out for one another, they got, you know,

you go back into the history of the bar colonists, and then you branch out a little further than that, just not Lloyd, because as, you know, as we've said on here multiple times, a long time ago now, Lloyd isn't just Lloyd. Lloyd is Lloyd, and then this huge community around it, you know? And I think at one point we drew a line of about 57 kilometers,

and you get what Lloyd actually is. It's Lloyd, but then it's the farming communities that all surround it, right? And great people live here. And those stories, you know, the podcast is kind of, you know, it is a winding road. And some days I think I'm in control. And some days it's like a bullet train and I'm just holding on for dear life and it just kind of goes where it wants to. But one of the things at the very start was talking about Lloyd, talking about the great people because nobody else was.

And some of the stories, I mean, I love hockey. Obviously, you're sitting in this room. The Eminton Oilers, one of the reasons they were saved was because of a guy from, not Lloyd, but this area, Cal Nichols. He was my white buffalo for a very long time. I finally got to interview him. And he's the guy that helped save the Oilers. One of the great architects of the Oilers is a guy from Wainwright, Glenn Sather, got to have him on the podcast, right? These are stories, and that's just hockey.

Like, I mean, you're absolutely right in the innovation coming through the oil field. But it goes so much further than that into just like all avenues of, you know, the western. world, there's a lot of people that came out of this area that are just brilliant, have great stories, but never get the time of day because, you know, it's Lloyd Minster and it's not, pick your, pick your spot. Yeah, I think Lloyd sort of embodies the Western spirit, like, which I didn't even know what that meant when I grew up in Newfoundland. And I came out here and I didn't, you know, I was never very political, but I certainly wasn't a conservative. I, you know, I just grew up in a liberal environment. But Bitcoin totally transformed me. And the

people around Lloyd did and I just stuck around because my god the just the yeah the pace of innovation and and I mean like there's technology here that it's been exported everywhere like PC pump stuff is all really innovated here there's a lot of thermal stuff that's like ideas and concepts that have come out of people that that work in Lloyd and work around Lloyd Husky snow this C NRL a bunch of other companies so I don't know I think it's the place to and even the community like Lloyd is a history of really good hockey, I do believe. I'm not, I can barely skate, man.

So I'm not one to speak too much about hockey. But I've told my staff, like Dean Faford, he runs my sales team, you know, well, you know, and he's a big community guy in the hockey community. Like, youth, I like, when it comes to, like, our, call it, budget to give back to, we'll call it philanthropy, right? Like, we're still small. we don't have a big budget for it. But like I told my staff, like the stuff I want to focus on is youth sports. Like whatever it might be. Like I like the 4-H stuff that I consider that in my head a bit of a sport.

I don't know a lot about it. Well, it's, it teaches youth quality and discipline and all the things that it does. Hockey, youth hockey. I mean, that's the stuff like we want to sort of contribute towards. I mean, there's a million things a guy could donate to and like, help the community like you know men's shelters and stuff and all kinds of things um like cancer research whatever but like for me i think uh like i'm really bullish on on youth and future you know future generations and i think like they get overlooked and you know earlier we're talking about doomism like there seems

to be a lot of people don't even want to have kids anymore uh not just because the cost the cost is a big problem again i blame fiat but uh the doomism like oh you know i i have friends that like don't want to have kids because of they don't know what they're missing out out yeah I know and they don't and I just have my first 10 and a half months ago it's the best thing that ever happened to me well congratulations I did uh you had is it him her a little Benjamin barber yeah met him uh when you had your company barbecue yeah yeah yeah he would have been there that that was the first time I got my wife up with the baby yeah to meet the staff um so that I mean that's just been amazing so I don't

know. I just want to help do our part to build the community. And that's why we're at the oil show this week. There's a lot of really great volunteers that help build that. And I think that has the potential to become the best oil show like on the planet. If people invest in it, I was disappointed and I'll call them out. Weatherford, you know, PCM, lifting solutions, other companies I'm calling you out for not representing yourselves there. I think that's pretty pathetic. You're in this town. You're in this area. You're hiring people. Put some freaking money into the community into the show. Show off your technology support it. Like I was disappointed not to see a lot of the big majors there. You know, CNRL, CNOVis. You guys should have a booth

there. You should be supporting that stuff. I didn't see a lot of C&RL employees coming through. I saw a few, the ones I wanted to see, didn't see a lot of Cenovis employees coming through, like, guys, like, what are you doing? Like, events like that, you need to support. So I want to, for my company, sort of be at least a little different than this, I call it the Fiat mindset. I want to invest in the community. Well, I tell you what, the next time in the oil shows around, maybe the SMP will have to do a better job of shining a spot. on it because you know you raise a good point with some of the geniuses or you know

innovation that's come out of this area we could probably run a little mini-series on some of the people go in there and bring them on the show and really promote it because that'd be I mean I to me that's that's the easy part of what I do right to have people like yourself come in have a fun chat some of it can be about what's going on some of it can just be about exactly what we're talking about either way to promote something that's going on in my community I mean I I I I hope I do, you know, once upon a time, I hope I did an amazing job. I hope I continue to because, I mean, I just love our community.

I love everything that makes it bump and run. And, you know, one of the cool things that walk around the oil show. And I think I speak for most of the guys that were there and women is like the group of people that are there. It's just like, that hasn't happened in like four flipping years, right? It was cool. It's just bump into everyone again and see some of the, different companies that have come up or people that have switched hands or all the different things. And when it comes to innovation and things like that, geez, I got a bit of a microphone

and I should be helping as well. So I'll take a little bit of, I got to be a little more on my toes for the next time it comes around because we should be doing this a week in advance or two weeks in advance to let people know it's coming instead of. And it was Mayor Gerald Gerard Elbers who reached out. So showed out to Gerald because he wanted to shine a spotlight on it, but we talked so late, I had no time to get it. And a guy like me should be a look at a month out or whatever it is so that I can shine a light on it as well. Well, unfortunately, you know, you got a plan, right? And the mayor and everyone else who volunteered, you get a plan for these things. And I think they, they crushed it. But there

was a while they didn't even think they're going to have the show this year because it's the uncertainty about the COVID rules. But I mean, you know, I'm just, I'm fresh off the old show and I thought it's good to call out these big, you know, these big companies, these big, whether they're a service company, because it's more of a tech show or an operator or whatever. And, you know, I'm talking to oil, but there's also ag shows.

Like, these big companies got to support the communities more, the big ones. And that, like, it's, you know, that's why, at least for our company, I want to be a little different, be more community-driven, community-focused. I don't even live in Lloyd anymore. I live in Calgary.

So I'm, like, driving up every two. weeks all my staff's here but I mean this is the community that that built my career and for me it's like you got to give back it somehow so that we're trying to do that and employment is you know really one of the best ways you can give back to anywhere employment and so we're very proud to employ a lot of people a lot of born and raised and Lloyd so hoping hoping that continues well here before I let you out of here Here's a guy from this area, Crude Master,

Crude Master Transport, Charlotte Teeth and Tracy. They've been a supporter of this podcast since the very beginning. And I'd like to say, and I like to remind people, some days it hasn't been easy because I've certainly brought on my fair share of people that stir the pot, and they've stood by me through thick and thin, and I know there's been a couple of times where that hasn't been exactly easy. They got the final question, and it's his words. he said, if you're going to stand behind something, then stand behind it.

And what's one thing you stand behind, Steve? Oh, I'm on the spot now. I should have warned you. Normally, I warn people, but... I mean, I don't know. You know, stand behind the truth, I guess. Everyone's different. Everyone has their own, you know, goals and subjective values.

maybe stand behind the truth in some manner. I guess I'm on the spot, but I would just say that. I like to just to do that, try to do that. And in business, I find this industry still irks me. Because I have two industries that I'm in the Bitcoin side. The Bitcoin side is a culture of open source, right? That means collaboration, like co-opetition, if you want to call it. Like we compete with each other, but we're not trying to

crush, like stab each other and like gut each other and and all that. I find the oil industry still way old school and that there's a lot of dirty tricks and like, and it's like I'm not, I'm not advocating for like revealing your hand, right? Like, giving all your cards away. Like I don't do that either. I reveal some of my cards, the ones that I'm okay with and all that. But I find there is a contrast. So I mean, I'm trying to stand behind more of a, co-opetition environment where, you know, I look at my competitors as like, it's like sports. Like I want to beat them, but I also, like, I don't see them as an enemy. I see, I believe that on the right, you know, I'll just use the word Bitcoin standard.

We're all actually in it together, like to win. We all help each other. And I think that's the culture we have at our company. And I'd like to see more of that in the oil gas side of the world is more, more, um, more co-optition, collaboration, that kind of thing. Well, I appreciate you coming in here today. It's been, I feel like it's been long overdue, but I mean, geez, it actually hasn't, in the grand scheme of things, it hasn't been that long since we're on. I mean, it was a little over a year, but, I mean, it's great to have you back in the studio and doing this.

And, I mean, with you in Calgary, you know, one of the things I've started, and we'll see. see. I always put this out to the listener because you know, like once upon a time I was doing one episode a week, Steve, and now I'm up to five episodes a week. You know, I got Thursday night roundtable now, the Sean Newman show on the Western Standard.

And I don't know where this goes. I signed on for four. It's kind of like this trial. Let's see how it goes. And so it's to facilitate conversation, open discussion with a group of people about different things. You know, so right now it's focused

on the UCP election because I mean like, geez, I'm like, how can you overlook that less than 100,000 people by estimates are going to decide who the premier is for about eight months? Like it's wild. Yeah. And I mean, I went and bought a UCP membership because why? I'm like, well, my mind is to get my vote in on who I want to lead. And better talk about that. Regardless, the idea is to facilitate debate, discussion so that people can listen to it and

we just need more of that. And so who knows where this all leads, but you being in Calgary and the Western Standard now, for the time being, we'll see where it goes. Maybe we'll have to do this the next time sitting in the Western Standard Studio and see how that feels, you know? Yeah, I do enjoy podcasting. So, you know, I do a lot of it in the Bitcoin community. I like that this is more local and I reach local ears that an audience I wouldn't

normally reach. Yeah. Because in the Bitcoin community, we're just all talking echo chamber, right? Like the stuff I talk about, you would hear from other people like plenty. So it's nice to get out there. And we're proud to sponsor you guys because we like what you're doing. Well, and the thing is you're talking 90% of my audience is Alberta, Saskatchew. Yeah.

I mean, you've got people listening from all over the damn place, but 90% of it is, you know, in these two great provinces where we sit right on the border of, you know. And funny enough, I got a shop on each side. of the city. So I get to, that's one of the best parts of being here. I can, if I'm talking to people from SaaS, I'm a SaaS business. If I talk to people from Alberta, I'm Alberta business. So it's just good. Well, either way, I'll let you get back to your day. Appreciate you coming in here and doing this and giving me some of your time. Yeah, no, anytime.