Shaun Newman Podcast - #377 - SNP Presents Rural Urban Divide

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

Vance Crowe, Quick Dick McDick & Steve Barbour discussed the Rural Urban Divide live at the Gold Horse Casino in Lloydminster January 22nd, 2023. Here is the full night. Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500

I know. Everybody's going to panic at the back and be like, I'm still standing in line. Need to get my dessert. Need to get my drink. But it's 7.20. Hey, John, we got a little bit of music still playing up here. Thank you. I want to try and move us along because we've got lots to get to.

It's a Sunday night. I know for myself, kids got school tomorrow. There's a whole bunch of things going on. So I don't want to keep us here until midnight. although I love seeing people smiling and having a good time. So I hate to interrupt, but I do want to move us along, and I'll be the butt end of a couple jokes, I'm sure, by the guy in the cowboy hat. But either way.

First, I want to do, I want to bring up the staff from a Gold Horse that have given us this excellent meal tonight, or if they're just going to stand in the back, they can wave their arm and give them a round of applause. And then you got Nicole and Jen in the corner as well. They're the group that make sure all of us, Yahoo's get through this thing and get fed and water. and everything else.

Now, while people are slowly working their way through the end of it, I think I've been to every table, I think, I hope. That means everybody has one person at least with the link on their phone. And essentially, as we get going here, you're going to have three speakers. Vance Crow laid down the challenge that he thinks he's going to have more disagreeable things to say to all of you. and then my challenge to you is simple. Every time you hear something you disagree with, tell the person or open the link and put it in a question

so that we can discuss it. Because I figure where there's disagreement, maybe there's some gold nuggets in there and can lead us in an interesting discussion for the second half. Because the second half, hopefully, will be led by you participating in the roundtable. Now, I was going to let off with Trudeau saying prayer, and I chuckled about that,

and I think there was a couple eyebrow raises. And then we started live streaming at a quarter to seven, and I felt like Premier Kenny being about an hour late to his addresses. There's a couple Alberta government folk in here tonight, so maybe I've been rubbing too much shoulders with him. Who knows? Either way, we found a way to get her started here. And so tonight is about the rural urban divide.

I can tell you a whole bunch of lovely stats and everything else. It's been a problem that's been around, or maybe just something to stare at for a long time. I love telling the story about the dirty 30s in Saskatoon. I read a book where in the dirty 30s and food was in short supply, they gave them all garden plots. Wouldn't that be something today? You go from 90-some percent, even in the United States,

back at the beginning of the 1800s living in rural, to the 1900s at 60 percent. And by now we kind of get where we're at. We're 81% of Canada lives in what you consider urban settings. And so that's where the discussion starts. We're going to see what comes out of these three individuals and see what you guys want to hear and what you disagree with and we'll see where it goes. But it's a very real thing. It's bled into a lot of different things, not just politics and different legislation and everything else, but a lot of just disagreements had by people

living in different places. So our first speaker is Vance Crow. He is from St. Louis, Missouri, a communication consultant that has worked for corporations and international organizations around the world. He's spoken before to more than 150,000 people, answering questions about some of the most sophisticated and controversial technologies in the modern age. He helps organizations realize why the general public doesn't agree with their perspective and offers new ways to communicate effectively, resolve disagreements, and build rapport with critics and stakeholders. Finally, he hosts the influential Vance Crow podcast and has become a good friend of mine through a a lot of different conversations. So give it up for Vance Crow.

12 minutes. So I don't know if you can tell from my accent, but I am from St. Louis, Missouri. And when I was telling my friends that I was coming up here, I was just like, oh, I'm going up to Saskatchewan and Alberta. And they're like, but really where exactly are you going? And so I said, Lloydminster, and I actually hadn't looked it up. One of my friends pulls out his phone and goes and looks it up, and he goes, oh, my God, Vance, that's like in Game of Thrones when they go north of the wall. And so I guess that makes everybody here wildlings, and I think that's pretty accurate, considering I got to go to my first U-7 hockey game, and that was a shocking experience.

I had never seen anything like that. But the reason I'm here is because I've had a voice in my head that has been saying, like, pay attention to what's going on in Canada. And it is such a strong voice that it has prompted me to actually pretty much abandon all of the other podcasts I would. was listening to and pay deep attention to it. I spend many hours just like you listening to Sean on his podcast, listening to Tews, because what has gone on in your country is really bizarre. And it's something very important to look at because it's not going to change. The storm is coming. And so what I thought I would do is start off by talking about my background. Like how did I get into agriculture? Because it's not a natural fit that I would be here. I'm not a Canadian. I'm not

farmer, I don't work in the oil field, so what do I have to say to people from another country, the wildlings, about, you know, the cultural problem that you're facing. Well, the way I got into this was that I ended up getting an opportunity to interview with Monsano. And they were hiring for the director of millennial engagement. And for anybody in here that doesn't know who Monsano is, they were an ag company that was considered one of the most evil in the world. And I was one of the people that definitely thought that they were evil. And so I decided to take the opportunity to interview for the job because I thought, well, you know, hey, who doesn't want to see inside of North Korea? So I go in and I do this job interview and it is a really intense situation because they

are trying to find somebody that can go out and talk to the general public that believes GMOs and pesticides and modern ag is evil. And so whoever they're going to hire for this, they do seven hours of interviews. And I don't know if any of you have ever interviewed for a job that you don't want, but that is about as much fun as you can have. Because they would ask me questions like, what's your preferred management style? And I would say, I like to get into work at 7 a.m., why are you causing farmers in India to commit suicide? You know, why are you poisoning the Gulf of Mexico? Why are you forcing GMOs on farmers? And this was my perspective. This is where I came from, but I was intensely asking them these questions. So we get all the way done with seven hours of

interviews. And the woman that had arranged this comes back into the room and she sits at the table across from me. And she goes, okay, we've now done all the interview questions. Do you have any questions for me? I said, yeah, I got a question for you. You're going to have somebody go out and represent your company to people that believe that you are actually evil. How are you going to train somebody to do this job? And she said something that changed my life. She said, you know, whoever we hire for this job, we're going to train them specific to what they know and what they're good at. And since you've been so curious, I think the way that we would train you is we would line up a list of 50 people from throughout the company, geneticists, chemists, farmers, breeders, attorneys, and have you sit down and talk with each one of those people for an hour.

And after you're done with that list of 50 people, then you'll sit down with me and we'll talk and we'll figure out what you do and don't know. and then I'll write another list of 50 people, and you'll go talk with them. And right at that moment, a light bulb goes off in my head, and I'm like, oh, my gosh, this is the opportunity of a lifetime, because these people don't realize that I can run around here and ask questions and find out really what's going on here. And I'm going to discover one of two things. I'm either going to discover that they are as evil as everybody thinks that they are, in which case I'm going to go write the greatest tell-all book of all time, or I'm going to discover that you have just uncovered maybe the most important communications problem at that point

in the history of modern civilization, which is we're growing food more bountifully than we ever have before, and yet people are afraid and angry about how their food is being grown. And so this thrust me into a world where I started to think about very deeply, how do you understand, how is it that people know what they know? Why is it that people believe this? And then if you want to change culture, is it that you have to do in order to be able to change the way people think about it? Not a one or two people, but a massive amount of people, which as I think about it is actually the problem that you are facing right now. If you are to change the inevitability, the direction that everything is heading in, you are literally going to have to change culture. So the step one that I think everybody has to do

is to make sure that you are defining the problem properly. You know, when I think about the rural urban divide, I think about the fact that when you define what is urban, it's 100 people per square mile. I don't have any idea what that is in kilometers, but if you think about it, Lloydminster is way beyond that. Lloydminster is actually defined as an urban environment. But nobody here thinks, oh, it's Lloydminster and the way the people here are thinking that it's dominating our culture. So really, you need to think maybe a little bit more deeply about what is actually going on. Is it rural versus urban? Or is it something else? And I would propose that it's actually two different camps of people, people living in the world of Adams and people living in the world of ideas.

People living in the world of Adams are the people that have to go build and dig and trench and make things happen in the real world in order to make money. But people mostly living in the city, now because of the digital age and the way that we've transformed our society, there are a whole bunch of people, millions, hundreds of millions of people, that now don't actually work in the world of Adams, they work in the world of ideas. And in the world of ideas, what is possible, how quickly things can change, what matters most is very different than the world of atoms. And so when people get engaged in the world of ideas, they do it not always by choice.

many people moved off of farms because there was no more farmland. There was no way to be profitable on farms. And other people moved there because they saw the opportunity in cities. And as much as people living far away from cities might not like them, you know, it might not be the most comfortable place. It's important to understand what happens in a city that's so beneficial to the individual. And it turns out if you go research cities, if you double the population of a city,

all these things start increasing by force. 15%. It's called the 15% rule. So if you go from 1,000 people to 2,000 people, then all the sudden the median salary goes up by 15%. You go from 100,000 to 200,000 same thing. But it isn't just salaries that go up. Also things like number of patents filed go up. Number of crime goes up. Also things like fast people walk goes up. This is so true that you can go to any city in the entire world, you can track how fast the average person is walking 100 meters, and you can determine within 10,000 people how dense that city is, based just on how fast they walk. Now, this is important to understand because it's actually representing that people living in the world of ideas among

really highly dense populations are actually seeing and experiencing the world at a different time rate than you are. And this time rate is actually all around them. right? It's in how long their day is because you have lights on at night. It's in the fact that they don't ever actually have to experience the weather because they can wake up in the morning, go to their car in a heated garage, drive to work, get out, only work in that building, or maybe just stay inside all day. So their experience of how fast time is moving and how much time there is and what does it take to build things is completely different than the people in this room. Now this is important to understand because if you're going to change culture, you must

deeply understand your adversaries. And it's one thing to say, well, I understand them. Look how dumb they are. Look how crazy they are. But the truth of the matter, if you want to change people, you have to understand them really deeply. And one of the things that I think might help is to understand that many people that are living in cities, the changes that have happened to them, they didn't have any control over. You know, putting people on top of each other, so many, you know, with giant skyscrapers, or pushing people together in houses, means that they can't be the sort of alpha male that was needed to be able to tame the wilderness that was out here

or to be able to feed cattle out here, right? If you put a bunch of giant alpha males and the women that love them in cities, you have all kinds of problems, which results in the fact that the people are actually physically different. Now, this is something that can be a little controversial, and when Sean said he was going to live stream, I was like, oh man, this could get me in trouble.

But there's a truism about when you domesticate animals. You know, if you go to domesticate wolves or foxes in order to get their peltz, you start selecting for the nicest foxes. You do that for just three generations, and all of a sudden the fox's ears no longer point straight, their fur becomes a much different texture, it's completely worthless. Because if those foxes become too tame, too docile, the physical nature of their bodies change. And this is actually happening with people living in the cities

because they don't need all of this testosterone, all of this stuff that makes them rugged individuals, and that is actually making them different from you. Not bad, not wrong, different. And so what I would say is, when you look at this challenge of interacting with people that are so different from you, you really only have three options.

You have loyalty, voice and exit. Loyalty is you can look at the problems in your country or in your province or in your city and you can say, I'm just going to go along to get along. Hey, this is going to work out. It eventually go away on its own. If you're a listener of the Sean Newman podcast, loyalty is not the option for you. This is not why you're here. But the other two options, voice and exit, are worth exploring because both have pros and they have cons and it's really important that you understand them. So voice is the idea that you can actually put forward your disagreement, your different way of looking at things. A perfect example of voice is twos or quick, right?

They're sitting there trying to be persuasive. They're writing things in a different way. They're trying to persuade and change people based on what they say. Now, the problem with voice is if you keep voicing your opinions and nothing changes, well, then you're actually really just loyal. But the other problem with voice is if you rile people up too much, you get them going too much, and you rile people up, then eventually they can turn into a mob. And a mob is the most dangerous and uncontrollable force on Earth. I believe the most dangerous thing that humans can get involved in is a mob, and we've seen that.

And we see how close voicing your opinion being different can go from being a very positive thing to quickly morphing into a mob really quickly. Now finally, the third option, exit. Now, exit can look very different, right? If you're wealthy enough or you have the opportunity, you can just pick up, sell your house, move to another place. Now, I don't have any idea where you would go, but this is one of your options.

The other option with exit is to get everyone that you know around you to decide, hey, we're going to leave, we're going to break away. Now, as a visitor to your country, I have no polarity. I have no advice for you on this whatsoever, only to say that on the other side of the exit door is blood. And it is a very serious thing to decide that you are going to leave. Because if you decide to leave and the other people don't want you to, real conflict will happen.

And when I talk about that voice that has been pounding in my head for months, in particular, ever since I knew I was coming to do this with Sean, I feel deeply compelled to say, I know you must do something. I know that you can't continue on this track, but you must look very closely at the cost of each of these options and consider that really the only thing that will keep you from joining a mob is the fact that every single person in this room has a little voice inside of you. You have a little voice that's going to tell you,

no, this is getting too excited. to slow down. No, there's a wise way to handle this. No, I'm not going to join that thing, or I'm going to be a voice of reason to slow things down. I don't know what you should do to tame the conflict between rural and urban, but the thing that will keep you from becoming the most dangerous force on earth is the little voice inside of each one of your minds. And so I am so glad to have come here. I am excited to be on the platform, on the stage with you guys, but just know that in the future, every person that came here is here for a reason. Every single one of you is important in whatever the next stages you do. And I think that that is an incredibly powerful thing, and I'm so glad

every one of you came out tonight. Thank you. Well, if you don't know who Vance is, you certainly got a feel for him now. The next up is Stephen Barber. He's a mechanical engineer, and he's the owner and operator of upstream data, which is a company focused on monetizing strandage energy through Bitcoin mining. There's also an advocate for wait for more carbon emissions. So give it up for Mr. Steve Barber. Thank you, Sean. Well, if this was a charisma sandwich, I'd be the dull guy in between these two speakers. So thanks for having me. I'm very proud to be building a business here in Lloydminster upstream data for about 40-ish strong and hopefully bigger into the future as we, I plan to continuing to invest in this community. I think I got one

staff member here. Is that just the one, Brett? Say hi to Brett over there. So I guess my take on this topic, this rural urban divide, I was thinking a lot about it on the way up here from Calgary. I was living in Lloyd for many years, but I since moved to Calgary to be closer to my wife's family to take care of her newborn. And I was thinking, about more or less how it's I see it as as a there's a natural aspect to this division it's like a division of labor and so it's sort of I'll reiterate what Vance was saying that you know you have a need I mean rural communities sort of sprout up around the need to produce from the environment oil and gas around here agriculture mining that's where you generally see rural communities

It's around the resource base. And so this is a natural need. And then you also have the cities, the urban areas, which are very different. They're the consumers of the natural goods that we produce. So rural communities are general net producers, and the surpluses go to the cities who consume. And the manufacturers in the cities, and like Vance was saying, a lot of the idea creation congregates in cities for a variety of reasons mostly related to efficiency. It's just more people in the area.

He said more patents are generated. Logistics, shipping, all these things that cities bring to the table. That's why they exist. So my first point is an observation that there is a natural division of labor. It's not this like, it's not necessarily a struggle. It should be mutual. Just like in any division of labor is mutual. I mean, I was trying to think of how to relate that on our microscale.

And within the family even, we have a division. labor. Me and my wife have a divisional labor. Part of our marriage contract unofficially was she would do all the laundry. I do all the yard work. And it's a mutual relationship, right? Like, we're not at each other's throats because we've decided to have a difference in duties in the household. So if you look at the urban and rural areas, really it's a mutual relationship. but I think that there is a what I was thinking and conceptualizing as a unnatural divide amongst rural and urban communities in today's age. So there's a natural division of labor which is an efficient thing, it's a mutual thing,

and then there's the unnatural division between these communities and what is that about? Just some examples of what I would consider unnatural. is the policies that are being, you know, force-fed into society today are very destructive for one side of this relationship. For example, carbon tax. Carbon tax is discriminatory against rural communities because rural communities need to use fuel. Farmers need fuel.

The mining communities, oil and gas communities need to use fuel. These carbon taxes hurt the rural communities a lot more than they do city folk. Because city folk, I mean, I live in California. I'm in this deep suburbs, so I can't really ride my bicycle everywhere, but if you're in the midst of the city, you can, and you're not consuming fuel. You're not paying as much tax on this stuff. So you have this unnatural divide generated by politics that is dividing the communities and polarizing things. So I was trying to figure out a way to sort of simplify and relate this to people. So I was thinking about like the story of the like the golden goose. And I don't know if I got this right because I was Googling on the way up here. make sure I remembered the story, right? Because I think there's a few versions, ones like the brother's grim, and that's sort of like this weird, nasty version of it.

But I think the traditional story that golden goose is, you know, a farmer either comes across or him and his wife see a golden goose in the market, they buy it. And they, this golden goose, of course, it lays golden eggs. And that's awesome.

I don't think he knew that at the time. It's just the golden feathered goose, and it starts laying golden eggs. And the story goes on, and eventually the goose stops laying its daily egg, and the farmer gets upset, and he's getting greedy. So he, you know, for whatever reason, maybe the goose isn't happy. It stops laying eggs, and he kills it. He slaughters it for some reason, thinking that I think the story goes,

he thinks he can get the eggs inside it. It's just not laying them or there's gold inside the goose, but sure enough, there's not. And the moral of that story, the traditional story, is don't kill the golden goose. Like that's, we've all heard that saying. And it's a story about greed. Don't get too greedy. Well, I want to try to tie this all back by saying you should kill the golden goose

if it comes into your life and this is why. I think the unnatural phenomenon that's happening in the world today is basically a golden goose that exists. It's the government's central bank. They have a golden goose. And it's creating this division. And one way to think about it, maybe you conceptualize, you know, there's a lot of farmers in the room.

Who is a farmer here? Like show our hands, family tied to farming, a lot of people. You know, in a natural, because I started talking on a natural setting in a natural market. In a natural setting, you know, there's a, think about your own farm and your own community around it. It's synergistic. It's mutual. Everyone's generally making, you know, over time, there's a balance. Everyone's making about the same kind of return on investment. You know, some people raise cattle,

some people plow fields, but overall, there's like a harmony. And there's a beautiful community there. There's a lot of many generational farmers in the room, I'm sure, with family land. And what would happen to, if you just think of a figurative farming community that's been around for generations and it's all synergistic and mutual. And all of a sudden, there's a golden goose shows up and in your yard. I mean, what would you do? And I think about it, like, I know what I would probably do as a normal human being. First, I wouldn't tell anyone. I would capture that thing. I wouldn't tell anyone. I'd be like, this is pretty cool. I don't want to tell anyone, because, you know, people get greedy and they might come take it, and the greed would

take over. And I'd go do the golden, the egg thing, and I would make a lot of money. The problem, the problem with this, though, that I think the traditional story doesn't touch on is that as you're making all this money secretly selling your gold eggs, you know, you're going to upgrade your firm, you're going to make your firm more productive. Like we said, it's been a generational thing. You're very proud of it. Your name's attached to it. You're going to start out competing your neighbors with a golden goose. And this golden goose is basically a subsidy. You have this free money subsidy coming into your life and it is driving you to be more productive which is great for you but it's actually quite bad for your neighbors because the kind of thing it does from an economic

standpoint is your neighbors you start to take the the higher hands because you can afford them right where before you're sort of sharing the work you know no one's at any huge competitive advantage all of a sudden you have a huge competitive advantage and you start taking you know all the best people to hire on your firm, you have all the best equipment, you become the most productive. Your neighbors, your community becomes impoverished because the best hands are going to work for you. You're paying them the most. There's no longer this balance of opportunity amongst you and amongst your community. And so what happens is your community deteriorates. All the best people go to you. You become the most productive and you start buying up your adjacent firms. And that would be, in my head,

a natural occurrence if you have this infinite supply of money, this infinite gold, this golden goose. And so, I mean, if my wife was here, she couldn't make it up, but she would laugh and roll her eyes because I can always find a way to turn every problem back to the same cause, which is money printing. And so that's what I wanted to sort of iterate on is this, there is one entity out there with a golden goose, it's government. And they print infinite money. And the unnatural aspect of this urban rural divide is that most of the subsidies, the golden eggs that the government lays, goes to urban initiatives. A lot of it is like in our own industry, you know, I look at all these clean tech companies. You know, it's great on paper. They're trying to clean up the environment, whatever.

But, you know, they're taking labor away from the market. It's driving up the costs of everything. else. And the people, the natural, I just call it natural businesses in the market who serve a customer and serve a need have to fight and win against subsidized businesses. And a lot of these end up in cities. And it draws, and here's the thing that really matters, it draws people to the cities. Vance said that I didn't know the stat. It's very interesting that, I think you said back in the day, Canada or somewhere was 90% rural, 10% urban. And it's shifted where it's now, What'd you say, 80% cities in Canada, 80% urban. Well, this is urban voters managing rural lives artificially

because there shouldn't be the people in those places in the first place. They should be in rural areas. The point I'm trying to make is this unnatural phenomenon where government subsidies, through their golden goose, is drawing people into places they shouldn't be. And one example, like, I'll sort of end off with this, you know, I don't know if you can tell it from my accent, but I'm a Newfee.

I don't know if you knew that. Most people don't, unless I start drinking a lot. But so I came from Newfoundland and like when I moved the wood and was given an opportunity to work in oil field with Husky, I was probably a liberal back then. I probably would have identified one. I have since, you know, growing a business here and being surrounded in a rural environment,

have shifted, you know, in probably your view, improve my views. and I'm now more conservative. But I think the point is, like, one thing I've observed from that is really I'm a product of my environment. Like, my parents were, as many people in Newfoundland, unfortunately, are subsidized by government jobs. There's a lot of government services in Newfoundland. And one problem that has is it brings, and it's sort of weird to say it, but I see it as a problem. It keeps people there that the actual natural economy there can't sustain.

So it can only sustain it with outside subsidies. And I think that's a problem for the province because there's not a lot of opportunity because it's almost like an oversupply of people for limited opportunities. And they should be elsewhere in the economy. And so that's just one example I see of this whole subsidy phenomenon, skewing markets. It basically misallocates capital and creates this division, unnatural division, in the communities, which, you know, in our, I think in a lot of your views, and you see it, like if you look in American politics, too, it's pretty much everywhere. You have other people

and other places influencing your lives with their votes when really why, it doesn't really make sense. There's too many people in, say, urban areas influencing rural area policy. And yeah, I sort of, I guess my message was, I think it has to do with, with, with, these perpetual subsidies, which are sourced for money printing. So my message is if you see a golden goose in your community, you should kill it. Give him around applause again, folks. Steve Barber. I always like when the quiet, somewhat awkward guy makes fun of himself to just like send it off, right?

Like he got the contrast. It's awesome. And Steve, I think he did excellent. The last speaker for tonight is probably from Tuffman. Saskatchewan. It's funny, me and him were just talking. I feel like we didn't, we were like literally on the stage together, not that long ago, which isn't that far back. It's November. And so he's proudly from Tuffnell. He went from Snapchat handle to YouTube star with 11 million views and over 100,000 subscribers. And I was joking that I think my dad's a bigger fan than I am,

right? Like, he's got this weird way of being a hit with the young generation and with the older generation. So please give it up for a quick Dick McDick. Oh boy. This is the first time I've been on stage without a beer in my hand. Cussing and swearing for quite some time. Thanks everybody for coming out here tonight. This is really weird, you know, because I thought the whole goal when we were doing this was some kind of a competition. Wasn't in advance, Steve, whoever disagreed with most of the things that we said was going to be the winner? Well, they put me last. So that makes it pretty easy. And, hell, I've killed a lot of geese, but we usually eat them afterwards kind of thing, and they were just shit, and they didn't

have any gold in them or anything. And Vance made some pretty good points, but I think the biggest reason that I wanted to be up here and chat with you folks tonight is because I'd love to say some things that you disagree with. Because first of all, I'm going to win this fucking competition. And second of all, it's hopefully going to lead to some kind of a point. So let me start off with five statements. The only way that we will get out of the current climate crisis that we're in is by putting a levy charge on carbon. Justin Trudeau is not the only the most masculine guy I've ever seen in my entire life.

He's also the best leader of Canada has ever had. There's no business case whatsoever for liquid natural gas marketed globally from Canada to the rest of the world. I trust that the government is responsibly managing my tax dollars and spending them accordingly. How are we doing so far guys? Agriculture affects oceans. Chemicals hurt habitats and species. They also decrease oxygen levels. I said five statements that I said to you folks. Four of them I made up. One of them was on a school billboard in Outlook Saskatchewan. Do you know which one it was? Number five, how did it make you feel when I said it? The same as the rest of them? It actually made me feel a lot worse. When I saw that billboard,

the Sun West School Division, an outlook, I felt rage. like we typically do when we go on to social media like I hadn't felt in a long time because I felt that I had been abandoned by a rural community. So I want to do a little more show of hand stuff in here because you all matter to me when I talk to you. So like get involved with me here by show of hands. How many people here in this room tonight from Lloydminster believe that they are a part of rural Alberta or Saskatchewan? How many believe they are a part of urban, Saskatchewan, or Alberta? Okay, how many people live within the city of Lloydminster? Did you go to the grocery store tonight on your way home? Sorry, last night, tonight we were eating here.

And Sean, thank you for taking salmon off the menu. We'd be farmers to go the grocery store the last couple of nights, phone up your spouse, be there to rip down and pick up some avocados and we'll have some avocado and toast, maybe a little bit of beef or something. Would that happen? Does that still make you feel like you're a part of rural Saskatchewan or Alberta? Does it?

What about anybody that lives on a farm? Who lives directly on a farm? Same show of hands. Anybody bring their kids into town to a daycare? Anyone? Anybody who lives in town of the Lloyd Minister that showed their hands that said they were a part of urban? Saskatchewan or Alberta bring their kids into town to daycare? taking daycare to go to work?

Anybody? Do we just have cowards or nobody does it? There's no daycares in Lloydminster. Town is an anomaly. The point I'm trying to make here is when do we draw the line? When do we draw the line between when we feel like we're rural or whether we're urban?

I live in the middle of but fuck nowhere in Saskatchewan. 17 miles to get into the town of Fulme Lake, Saskatchewan and there's a lot of times where I consider myself more of an urban person than I do a rural person because that's where I go for groceries. Still a major center where I depend on a lot of the things that I get. Could I make it somewhere else without going there?

Of course I could. I can live off of what we've got on the farm. But isn't it easier to go into town? I think it is. It's way easier. Ripping of the grocery store and I can buy an avocado, 95% of which were growing in Mexico and flown here to us, instead of trying to grow one in a greenhouse.

It's what I'm trying to get at with this sign that I saw at Outlook. I've always looked at the world through a lens of Outlook, Saskatchewan, Fom Lake, Saskatchewan. Hillmont, Alberta. These are rural towns, but is a rural town a thing? Sorry, that's what I meant to say, yeah. How many people from Hill one want to kill me now? I said it to piss Sean off anyways. We're talking about here.

It's a big problem for me when I see something in what we call rural. rural towns happening like what we saw at this school. I think it's a big part of the problem of what we have in the rural urban divide is I guess I didn't expect what I got here, but a lot of people that I talked to, especially in my area of Foam Lake, take their kids even in off the farm to go to daycare throughout the course of the day so that they can go to their jobs. I've got a couple of family members that live in the city of Calgary, which I think is in Alberta. I think I'm allowed to say that here now. They run around with their kids going to daycare. and from daycare we start sending our kids to school. And when you see a sign like what you've seen outside of the outlook school, no matter what anybody tries to cover up to say there was a loss in the translation of the message of what we were teaching the kids at school that led to this billboard, can you tell me what the fuck the message was off the start?

Was it in German, French, that the kids couldn't translate it over to what we were really trying to say about agriculture? I think one of the bigger problems, I mean, Steve made a great question. great point that a lot of divides that we have are caused by maybe government policy and subsidies and these are places that we fall into where different communities are voting for policies that affect us in rural Saskatchewan. Where are we sending our children be educated and what kind of education are they getting? Split in Saskatchewan last time I checked is 70% to 30% female to male teachers in the province of Saskatchewan. Where do our teachers come from when

they come to our towns. Most of the time they come from a city, even if they came from somewhere in rural, Saskatchewan, rural Alberta, whatever your province might be, they've spent four years in a city. Do you know how long it takes to become detached from a rural community? It's actually less than six weeks. Most studies that I've looked at are anywhere between three to five weeks, because all of a sudden, everything is at your fingertips. And what these gentlemen exemplified very greatly as far as I'm concerned is that when something's at your fingertips, all of a sudden you lose respect for it. You lose respect for where it came from.

I have family members who I grew up to next on the farm, shitting outside, processing cattle, butchering, learning what a steak was, learning the two different parts of the a T-bone. And I've lost that part of that family member of mine. They haven't been in the city for that long. I grew up together with them. I lost it. I left the farm, and I went and worked oil and gas in northern Alberta for 19 years. And I'm telling you right now, folks, I was not a rural guy anymore. Yeah, I grew up on. Grew up on a farm, new horses, new cattle, knew everything. I knew what was going on, but it was really easy for me to just drive down to the grocery store and not really give a shit to where anything was coming from. And all of a sudden I turned into this guy

named Quick Dick, who started posting stuff on the internet, and it became important to me where things were coming from. Who knows my character on social media is Quick Dick McDick. Yeah? Swear's lots, cusses lots. Do you find a lot of the shit that he does funny? Yeah? Why? Yeah, guy in a cowboy hat saying, fuck true. fuck the carbon tax. You bunch of fucking lefties and your green policies and your fucking EVs, go fuck yourselves! What does that fix?

Nothing. Fixes absolutely nothing. What I do might be a great way for people to watch the internet and have some kind of an outlet of where they can laugh, laughter, as far as I'm concerned, is the best medicine. But it doesn't fix anything. It doesn't fix the problems that we have. And the most important thing that I wanted to talk to you folks about tonight when I came here is that I've had a revelation throughout the course of this social media character that I've created. Now, I'm not going to change what he does, because to be perfectly honest, I like swearing on the internet.

My mom doesn't. Pisses her off most of the time, actually. But the most important thing that I've found that you'll ever do between social media, whether it be Twitter, whether it be Instagram, whether it be Facebook, whether it be anything, it's to get outside of the people that make you comfortable like me. I'm standing here asking you to watch less of me. Go find people that you disagree with that are in a city, that have a different opinion than you, and try and find somewhere in where they come from

or what they do of what would make them have the opinion that they have. Maybe they've had to administer an eloxone kit to an overdose. Anybody in here ever had to do that? couple one two not very many hey if we were downtown Toronto right now I bet you we would have just got a little bit different of a show of hands now is it dangerous that five and a half million voters in Canada are the ones that keep the liberal government in power I think it is but I think the more dangerous thing that we do is try and slag everybody and one-up them on social media it helps nothing I have my opinion, and I'm allowed to have it because of the experiences that I've had, but whatever you do, try and get yourself into somebody else's shoes and experience life how they have

before you start slagging them, calling them names, and trying to want up them on social media. Because all we're ever going to do to each other if we keep doing that is just keep pushing this divide farther and farther away from each other. That's all I got for you tonight, folks. right on big fella there's always one prima donna and his name is vance crow oh there he is sneaking in

it's funny i don't know is dave schneider hiding in the crowd anywhere did he make it tonight maybe he didn't he gave me this he gave me this to wear and then i left it on the chair the entire time and i'm like well i should probably at least wear it up one one second my wife knows i i overheat very easily so either way

this is the second port on what we do, okay? This is my fun part. I was saying to Vance and Q last night, it kind of reminds me, you know, now that I start to like build these and kind of mess around with them in my mind and then put them out for you folks to enjoy or criticize or, you know, everything else in between. It kind of reminds me of a TEDx talk. I think a lot of people in the room would know the TEDx talks, followed by my favorite portion is the roundtable. It's led by you, and I just try and steer the ship wherever you want it to go. But before we get there, I want to do what we did last time with Q because I already know there's somebody from Manitoba in the audience.

So I want everybody to stand up. So wherever you are at, stand up. I'm always curious about where you're from. So if you're from Lloydminster, the city of Lloydminster, you can sit down. If you're from 50 kilometers away, sit down. If you're from 100 kilometers away, you can sit down. 200, 250. I've got a slip tank in my truck if you guys need it when you leave. It's farm fuel. And I have to preface this. This is what I pointed out last time. I don't mean if you were born in Newfoundland and live in Lloyd Minster.

Just point that out. I'm looking at Steve. This happened last time too. 300. $400.500. Okay, we got a couple. You can kind of see $500. Shit, I've got some spare tires if you guys need them to get back too.

We got one left? No, we got a couple. 5.50. 5.50 in the corner, where are you from? See, I told you, didn't that? In the back corner, we got two, or are you guys the same married couple? Married couple?

Okay, how far away are you from? Southern Manitoba. It's Doug. Hey, good to see again. How far? How many K? How far did you come? How many?

About a thousand. There you go. Hey. Thanks for coming, you guys. I don't know what I'm more. shocked about that you openly admit you're from Manitoba or that Vance knows who you are. I don't know. Manitoba and I. It's right there.

So I love doing it because I get to share this experience with podcast guests, right? All these guys have been on the podcast. And this is a brainchild as I let off of doing all these different episodes. So it's something that I've like, in my head, I'm like, oh, yeah, this will work. This will work. And then we sat here in November and had people from Abbotsford and Dawson Creek, right? And now we got them coming from Manitoba. And I'm like, something we're doing is working, something on the podcast with these men and others, right?

It isn't, you know, I was just joking. The women have been kicking ass lately on the podcast. There's been lots of interesting ladies come on. But regardless, something's attracting you all. So I appreciate whether you drove 5K across Lloyd Minster or came, you know, 1,000 kilometers. Either way, to come out on a Sunday night when you certainly could have been at home, I don't know, watching the new Last of Us episode, I think is the big thing, right? Because it's made in Calgary anyways.

But to come here and sit and listen to a group of guys talk, it's just really cool. So if I could give you all a round of applause, I would. So either way, I appreciate all of you coming out and doing this. That being said, folks, the next roughly hour, it's 824, I'll try and have you out of here by 9.30, unless everybody keeps telling us to go, is exactly what you've done. And so the first question is the urban population controls the votes. Rural vote is insignificant now. Thoughts.

Yeah, Q. Do we just jump in or what? I don't know how it works. Do we rock paper, scissors? Well, and maybe you should lay the ground rules. It's no different than when we're sitting around the table last night. You know, we're sitting there having Q stops by the house and Vance is at the house. And we sit there and just have a friendly old conversation.

This is no different. you feel called to speak speak you want to sit and let somebody else do the talk and i'm good with it it's a bigger part of the problem that i have and and that's we can't get to a point where we think that our votes don't matter you know and i think that's a that's a big part of what we saw in our last mid-pandemic election that was called here so we have 27 and a half million eligible voters that unfortunately i put this in my comedy show because it's just shit that you can't write you know we have 27 and a half million eligible voters in the country candidate and 62 percent showed up to vote. That's a lot of people that just think that their vote doesn't matter or don't want to go

to go vote or maybe they're too, you know, upset to go vote. I think one of the most important things that we'll ever do, you know, as people who live in a democracy, is to go cast your vote. As far as I'm concerned, when I go vote, I might not have a selection on the ballot whatsoever that I want to choose, but I need to go and try and make the choice of who's going to represent me the best in my local riding that gives me the permission as far as I'm concerned is to criticize the government that's in power. But at the same time, the person that I did vote for if they get elected, that gives me the right to criticize them. It's their job to represent us. And you need to let them know that they're not doing a good job of it. And I think the most

important thing that we will ever do in a democracy is to go cast a ballot. It's what a lot of people fought words to get us to do. Yeah, I'll... Is this on? Is this on? Yeah. He'll turn you up right. Yeah. I'll just add that, like, I sort of identify as that that person that doesn't

care to vote, like that's the feeling I have. Just because it just seems like to me that over time things just trend away from rationality to just absolute absurdity in the economy and in politics.

but I, you know, I always joked my in-laws, especially my father-in-law, Brock, Blakely. Some of you guys might know him. He actually worked in Lloyd for many years. He's a hardcore UCP guy. You know, he's threatening to disown me if I don't go vote and the like. But I always joke around that I won't do it. Because of that, like, I do, I sort of feel like a lot of, I'm sure a lot of Canadians, even my age sort of feel in my mid-30s.

it just seems like no matter what happens, it just gets worse. But I mean, I've always said to my family, like, I'll do my duty because I respect my ancestors who went to war over this stuff. And not to do that would just be, I consider it would be a little disrespectful. But I definitely feel the way that you're saying that I think a lot of Canadians feel. It doesn't seem like there's a sensible path forward in a lot of cases. I think one of the great hijackings that happened through the media is that it is, at least in the United States, we have this federalist system. So really, we vote on everything all the way down to county supervisor, mayor, these kinds of things.

I think it's similar for you. But the great media trick that they did is it is really expensive to cover local elections. So they tell you the only one that matters is the national one. And as far as the Golden Goose goes, that's true. Those are the only ones that get to print the money. But in my community, the person that locked me down was not the president of the United States. It was the county supervisor that came in or the county executive. And frankly, like, I hadn't voted.

I was like, this is a stupid election. What do I care about this? And then all of a sudden they declare essentially martial law. And like, now they can lock me in my house. And that was a great civics lesson on why local elections really matter. And so to me, like, I am disillusioned by the national elections. And I think the media is perfectly happy to tell you that is the one that matters, but the one that matters to me is the one that's closest to me.

Very good point. The American system, one thing I like about it is that the states seem to have more independence and more ability to conduct their own business, which I think a lot of us here wish we had here in Alberta with left-leaning liberals out of Ontario and Quebec, say, keeping our gas in the ground, keeping our oil on the ground like they have for many years. bottlenecking or pipelines. But that's the kind of thing that's disillusioned me, like, feeling like there's been no way to get out of this because, like, Alberta is like the biggest powerhouse in North America. I mean, all my Texan friends that I've met through this industry,

I mean, this Bitcoin mining thing, they all think they're hot shit. They just think they're the best. And, you know, when you look at just numbers, like we have 20 times the oil reserves they do. like it's we're bigger and badder and more powerful in every way but there's a stark difference between their economy and ours uh you know i was especially a couple years ago i was down there and their oil oil gas was booming and ours was you know crawling along and it's sad to see and it's sad to see that you know a federal government can uh do this to us which which yeah it's part of that disillusion it's like we let ourselves be the diet coke you know what i mean like we're just happy being lowering calories with less sugar and we're just happy being lowering calories with less sugar and

just hang out here, you know what I mean? But that is a little bit of the problem, right? And in advance, it's a good point. I mean, like, local elections are very important and trying to, you know, work within your city councilors, your RM counselors, however it might work, is it's very important. You see it come through the federal government in areas right now

where if we look at the, like, it's a bit of switching gears, but if you look at the reduction in fertilizer emissions, like we have a, you know, a policy that's being spread, across Canada based on 40 temperate zones. Well, I live in the RM of 276 throughout which there's 40 temperate zones in that RM, you know. So like that's an issue where you have one broad stroke of a brush that's trying to paint a place like Canada. That's where it's important. I always try and see, you know, like in a federal election, pick the MP that's going to represent your community the best and a lot more now than before that you follow it closer and look into it. And I know there might be

different people with different political parties in here. But, you know, I hold my nose and vote most of the time. And that should be something that we have to do. I think it's a part that's really broken in our electoral system. Federally, that's the way it is. And provincially, I'm lucky that I have a good MLA. But at times, I don't agree with the party that the MLA represents. And so I don't say that I hold my nose and vote, but sometimes it's your fucking stinks. Don't you wonder that I think, you know, I go back to March. I was almost a year ago to this day, and Shane Gadsden was one of the first four that came into the S&P presents, along with Daniel Smith. We know where she's went, and we had a lawyer Andrema Murray, and of course we had Dr. Eric Payne, and they sat up here.

And one of the things that I took out of the night is more people need to get involved. I firmly agree, you have to vote. Like, I mean, you have to vote. But to act like you can just vote and then see in four years, I'm not really. not so sure. You got to hold everybody accountable. I mean, otherwise, they just get to go and do whatever they want. And we learned that. We learned a lot of different ways. I mean, media right now isn't doing what it's supposed to be. I can speak all day long about that. But acting like you can just place a ballot and walk away, I'm not sure that's a recipe for success in the future,

no matter what issue we talk about. I'm kind of like a known character on social media, but from time to time, have no problem calling out. Yeah, obviously, I, like, I, I run shade at Justin Trudeau quite a bit. I somewhat enjoy doing it. And, but like, that being said, there's times where a Premier Scott Moe will do some stuff that I completely disagree with, or maybe you see a tweet from him or something will come out, and I will just go out, but just, like, just to show you how hypersensitive we are as a society going forward from an election, a guy like me named Quick Dick McDick will quote tweet the Premier and be in like, uh, the sad thing is I had to check if this is. a satire account who tweeted this, right? And immediately, my comment section is filled full of

conservatives that are calling me an extreme leftist. What the fuck did you just call me? An extreme leftist. My name's quick dick. But it's just, it's just so hypersensitive all the time, you know? I think social media has got a lot to do with the reason of why people won't go vote or will just vote within a tribe kind of thing. And I think that's a, it's, it's not why this is so important. To have people get together to talk. We get stuck in the old, everybody knows it. Everybody's got it stuck through their hip right now. You get stuck in the air and you think that's real life.

I mean, this is real life. Seeing everybody's smiling faces and I got a lot of things to say about the last couple of years, everybody's heard it for, you know, 300 podcasts now. But, I mean, to see you guys all here on a Sunday night, being engaged, being involved in what we're talking about is a step in the right direction, I think. Yeah, let's applause that. There was somebody out there too.

You know, came up to me. I forget who it is. I apologize. I've shaken hands with too many people, which has been a good thing. They said, you know, it's really cool. And I was trying to do a better job of looking to, you know, actually, like, visualize what the first one was. But the demographic here of age, you know,

I don't know how many political things anyone in this audience has been to. But I certainly had my share as I interviewed, you know, all the different UC candidates and whatever else. And the average age, I don't know. And this isn't to date anyone in the audience. But it was like, I don't know. 60 plus. Like I felt like a young guy. And one of the things I pointed out was how young the audience was tonight, like that there's an actual. So maybe that's a good sign as well moving forward. The next thing that was asked was how do you change the mindset of the urban population to understand the fundamentals and traditions that built this province? I have a sort of niche Twitter following. It's more Bitcoin related tweeting and the like. I've been pushing around this concept.

I call it learned coal. There's a, like when the oil and gas industry was depressed and, you know, the tech industry was booming. I'd see it all the time, like, you know, because I'm sort of affiliated with the tech industry, with this Bitcoin thing, these computers and software and the like and coding. And the saying they'd always have is learn to code, like learn to code, learn to program, learn to program, you know, your jobs are obsolete, you know. It's not going to be any plumbing anymore. You better learn to code.

And these people, like, you know, we all have our own delusions. But their delusions where, you know, the tech industry, which again, you know, me again, money printing. But all this money printing subs, like sort of boosted certain industries over others. Prop them up. The tech industry was one of them. I mean, you can look at that Tesla stock skyrocket. That was printed money getting allocated to things, like high-tech things. and Amazon, all these tech companies skyrocketed.

And as our industry, like, I'm a hardcore pro-oil and gas guy. And as our industry was struggling through like 2014 to just recently, you know, I heard that all the time. Like, yeah, you lost your job. You know, the coal miners, yeah, you lost your job. Better learn to coal. Or you better learn to code. So I just flipped that on them recently as I mock them for losing their, you know, not in a bad

way. But, you know, as they're losing their tech jobs and the tech retraction is happening. while the blue collar like the like you know the industry workers and the rural you know commodity business is doing relatively quite well i mean the oil gas industries only you know the energy industries have been a great industry these last couple years as things come back to reality so i've been trying to trying to uh i never forgave them for saying that kind of stuff like learn to code learn to code because i'm like you guys are so delusional so you better learn to coal is what i say so Pigeybacking off that, just real quick, a show of hands. How many people in this room have used chat.com? How many people in this room? So, you know, you're thinking about how to... Nerd alert.

Nerd alert. I saw there were a few good hands, right? So if you haven't used it, write this down. Chat.com. Because that came out, and it is a technology that you can type into it, and it will type back to you as though it is a human being. and you cannot tell the difference between it being an automated thing and a person being there. And the reason I bring this up is the thing that Steve's talking about there about learn to coal,

this is real. And the city has not actually had to face what is going to happen when automation comes for them. The rapid rise of urbanization in Canada, which actually Canada was the fastest urbanizing country in the world. Eventually the U.S. caught up. Japan just caught up. but Canada skyrocketed first. Well, the reason was because farms got so efficient and they needed so much less labor,

people had to go somewhere to do something. Well, what they did was they got into the world of ideas, only now there is artificial intelligence that can write law briefs, that can write recipes, that can write blogs, that can write marketing copy better than hundreds or thousands of people all working on it at the same time. And this AI is not going to get just stop.

it's going to get better and better and better. And so there's going to be a sea change that we don't even know, we don't have a name for it. What do people do? Do they leave urban environments if they don't have jobs? What do they do? I have no idea. But I can tell you that there's, I have a good friend and he says there's,

one good way to make sure people listen to you is that you help them make money. And if there's any way that you in your world can help people in the urban environments when they're in this time of need because the moment is coming, that the writing is on the wall. And I think that's a really important consideration because there's going to be people that are going to be moving out of those cities and finding a way to show them enough respect

and help them find a way to reintegrate is going to be important. And I'm pretty sure this idea sounds crazy right now, but I'm certain it is coming. Chat, C-H-A-T-O-O-A-I-A-A-as-an-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-LOLGGLEG. Go check that site out. It'll blow your mind. Or chat, GPT, just search for it, yeah.

It'll code for you, too. That's right. So that learned a call is not a joke. That is real. Can it, like, tell me that it loves me and... Yeah. How far does this get? Maybe my search is over. It'll write you love letters. If you need your wife's forgiveness,

need to write something nice, it will do all of that. I, like, on my tweeting where I'm just, you know, shit posting all day, you know, I can't draw. I'm not an artist. but this AI stuff is serious. Like when I was doing the learn to coal memes, I wanted a drawing of Greta Duneberg eating a bowl of coal. And I just put this into the AI.

I spit out a picture of her eating a bowl of coal. And I made a little poem about eating bowls of coal. Like it was just a joke. But it's unreal what I can do. And that that learned, you know, the whole learning a coal thing, the thing that you cannot, I mean, you can obviously automate and apply tools to do your jobs better. That's what, you know, the farming, oil and gas, you name it, every industry is done.

But this is now all coming, like you just said, for the ideas industry or the digital world, where a lot of these really high-paying jobs, like over the last number of years, I've got buddies in Waterloo working for Amazon that I went to the school with. Man, they make good money, and I've asked him if he's learning about coal. You should read about it, buddy, because there's going to be a shift in the market. and I think we're already seeing it. But it's really true. And, you know, like, when you look back towards the industrial revolution and how it, you know, changed,

I would say it was one of the pivotal moments of change in rural society. It seems like we've come into a shortfall in the agriculture industry now because help, cost-effective help is very difficult thing to find, right? And that's, I think we've seen a larger embrace of the technology industry and agriculture, but at the same time when there's been a lot of people from rural that have, you know, populated to urban, areas. And now you see this start to come down in cities where maybe a lot of, you know, coding jobs or software jobs maybe aren't going to exist anymore. It's staggering if anyone's ever just taken a moment to go to, you know, the middle of a city. I use Calgary just because

it's a good example. There's people out there don't know how to plunge fucking toilet. And like these are people that get paid an obscene amount of money to code and to do all these different jobs when this comes down to basic trades. Like, where does your shit go when you flush the toilet? But this is this divide that we got, whether you want to call it urban rural or what it is, but I mean, we just get so lost and out of touch with reality of the technology and the ease that's been brought into our life,

which is I guess what I kind of tried to say in my talk a little bit is, we're all kind of guilty by association of it. Even like my canola seed, I learned a lesson of where our canola seed comes. from when I was at a beekeepers event this year. And it's just shit that shows up that you take for granted. And we just don't know where it comes from. So you think they want it?

Like what's coming? And I hope I'm not being too cryptic in that. We assume through social media and everything else that they just hate agriculture. They hate guns. They hate, you know, I can probably list off a few others. You get the point. but you guys just told me that there is a thing that thinks faster than I can and can apologize to my wife and we might that's right better than I can so what's to say they

aren't already doing that and fooling us all and do you think the the urban population then is sitting there just going about their day and they're worried about you know getting molly to the day home and getting on to work and whatever else and and you know trying to bring them into the conversation of like this is what's coming or maybe they think exactly like we do but the AI chat bots and everything else are telling us different. I think there is a book written by a guy named David Graber called Bullshit Jobs and it's a PDF and it's actually pretty fun to read. Seems like he wrote it on my farm.

So Bullshit Jobs is actually this guy pointing out that office work, has already been automated. And he's like, look, you used to need hundreds of accountants, but now you have Excel, and one person can do the work of what hundreds of accountants could do. And you used to have to send letters in order to be able to communicate with people that are in different spots. Now you can do it over email.

You can do things much faster. And you say, what used to take 40 hours now takes people like five hours or seven hours. And the rest of the time, they are participating in a political game, which is really about being managed and being a part of this larger corporation. He has a very sophisticated argument

that corporations need to keep hiring more people in order that the government lets them keep doing their work. So if you want to get in on the golden goose, you have to have plenty of employees, and it's kind of this give and take. And the thing that makes me, like, when I read that, the thing that I worried about, because I realized it in corporate America that I saw,

is that meaning comes from work. And it comes from, like, being tired when you're done. or succeeding at fixing something or moving something further down the path. And so when I see the people talking about, you know, being afraid of guns and being afraid of wanting this climate change stuff, like a lot of them don't have meaning in their work in the way that people in the world of Adams do. And I don't, I mean, I think we see this playing out in terms of people having, you know, massive amounts of anxiety medications, male suicide.

these things are occurring, not because they're bad people or because they've made a bunch of bad decisions, it's because they don't have meaning in their work. And that causes people, like Mel said something last night, it's going to stick in my mind forever. You see somebody be really, really angry, that's actually covering over for them being really sad or really afraid. And I think that is much of what you see there. I'm not absolving them of their responsibilities for the way they lured over you with their voting, but I think it's important to recognize. this whole work from home mantra has turned into a really big thing you know there there's been a lot of jobs in the world that are work from home jobs kind of thing that you can do online in the internet and

and whatnot has brought this all to us but i've seen it and a few personal friends of mine and now i've heard different conversations of people having it being like well now it's time to go back to work to the office and they say well why do i have to go back to work to the office i do all my work at the office remotely anyways and uh i've got a dog and i like to cook and i really like going to work in my pajama pants in the morning. To me, that's the most terrifying thing that I'll ever hear in my life because it feels to me like we're programming a society to be okay with just hiding from the world and being inside.

And you can be convinced very quickly that there's climate change if you don't go outside and experience the climate. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. You can be convinced that agriculture is killing the world if you don't go drive by a canola field and stop and walk through it. Don't do that, put boots on first. It's a biosecurity risk or whatever.

But when we stop experiencing things that we need to experience as humans, what other end is there than depression? Well, let's not forget we're all social creatures. And for two years, you know, I'm really, really, really, really, I can put as many reallys on the end of that happy. I lived in this community. Was it perfect? No.

Do we have lots of like, what? is going on, yes, but I bet you it was worse in Calgary. I guarantee it was worse in Emmington. And, you know, we chuckle about it. Maybe we just glazed past, maybe we go to Eminton, and I'm going to pick on Emmington a little bit, I was just there. And you walk into a couple places, and you're like, what are they ain't doing? This is like a year and a half. This is strange. They're still living in it. Some of them haven't left it. And when I see that, my heart goes out to them because they're still trapped in this dark world that does not exist. It is a false lie that has been told to them.

And they're still living in it. And that is a dark world. We all experience that. And somewhere we have to find a way to understand that they still care about their family, still want the lights on and whatever. It serves. There's some education in there. But they're like, the social part of this got taken away.

There's some people in here that never wore a mask. Never stopped seeing family. And the complete opposite can be said about people who lived in the densest of populations. I mean, just got to go back to Kate King on the podcast. She was a paramedic. It still is, I think. And she went to Quebec, and they were hiding out visiting friends because if they got caught, they're like, oh, you can hear the cops down the way pulling people out of the house

because they're not supposed to be there. We all remember the snitch lines and different things like that. I don't know. The social aspect of it to me, I can't imagine for people living in the cities. You know, you just said something, this is kind of a non-sequitur, but how will you make sure your children that were maybe too young to experience this? What will be your never forget? Because like the people in this room are going to remember, but it was a surprise to me what happened in my country. I'm sure it was a surprise to you. But how do you make sure if you guys are, I don't think you're past it. I think you're still going to get it. But how do you pass this idea along that the government will break up people getting together?

Like, it's something shocking to people. Vince, I don't have children. Yeah. That's one way to handle that, yeah. You know, you know what? That's a great question. And I think one thing that we really need to do is humans is to make sure that we never forget our past and that we learn from it. You know, I don't think we can always just be okay.

Nobody's ever going to be okay with anything that happened at any point in time, even if you go back to, you know, world conflicts. But the important thing is that we learn something from it and we prepare ourselves better possibly for the next time that it winds up happening. And I think that's a big problem that we have right now, even when we just went through this last flu season here and we've got a huge influx again, once again in our universal health care system that we have here in Canada. And we have everybody hitting the panic alarms that kids are in hallways and they can't get care. that should be something that really concerns us as a society. We went through almost three years of shit, and we have fixed, fuck all.

If anybody else was in charge of this as a private corporation, you would be fired. Three people underneath you would be fired, and somebody else would come back in and be like, can we please do this right? You have an obscene amount of money to be able to do this, and you have fucked it up. But here we are hanging out,

and the status quo is fine? Not to mention we all, well, all of us have worked in the battlefields or events. And if we had the negligence that went on the last couple of years, somebody being jailed, too. And that shouldn't go past being said that, like, there's been a lot of harm caused in the last chunk. I don't know if it goes so far as to thrown people in jail, but I just feel like we are at a point where there's just zero accountability whatsoever. I don't just think that goes into government. I think it goes into a lot of different places.

Go back to even my simple little example of a teacher that was behind putting a billboard up that was obviously a targeted indoctrination of a group of kids saying agriculture is bad. And there was basically no repercussions whatsoever. It was like, oh, the message was lost in translation and we'll do better next time. We now apologize with the federal government for ethics breach

and we just go on like nothing ever happened. Accountability is one of the most important things that you'll ever have in your life. I worship the ground that my parents walked on for kicking my ass as a kid because you got held accountable for being a dipshit, which taught you not to be a dipshit anymore. We're missing that in society.

I agree. I think it comes down to accountability, and I think generationally, like when a lot of you folks were younger, like years ago, there was a lot more accountability within society. It's a lot more accountability at the political level. And, you know, it's funny, it's funny because I actually started my business trying to figure out, I remember I was downloading and researching, and no offense to Husky, Husky made my life in my profession.

But I was there in my cubicle and my hamster wheel every day. And even within 2011 to about 2015, or 2016, when I left, I could see my responsibilities dwindle. Like they eventually, you know, like instead of me being able to choose myself, like what downhole pump to run and when to send the rig and do the economics, they started politely up proceduralizing that and not allowed, allowing me to make that decision. And that was what I was hired to do. And I really thought it was funky because the engineers I replaced talked about that very thing. They used to send an email to send the service rig, and that was all it was. There I was, spending all day writing a justification report on why I'm doing what I'm doing. And then a few years later, I couldn't even do that without approval. It made me think, I'm like, what the hell? Like, why is it that this company is trending towards what I learned was, why is it becoming more bureaucratic? Why is there more procedures and less accountability, less responsibility for me?

Like what? Like I'm only getting better at my job. I'm making less mistakes. Like, but yet I'm getting less ability to do my job. And that's, that actually was what led me to leave the company because that the whole bureaucracy thing got me on to this. I became a gold bug thinking that the money system was fucked up. And then that led me to Bitcoin and that led me to like starting our business. And that's, and ever since I started the business, like one of the, like, one of the, the things I think about all the time and I'm really hyper focused on like trying to figure out is how do I prevent my business from becoming that bureaucracy because that's what you generally see in a lot of businesses they trend towards bureaucracy over time so on the topic of like the government the government

is the biggest bureaucracy there is is the it's the most least accountable organization because of course they have that golden goose and you know during the lockdown period I went through a lot of conflicts to my parents. You know, like I said, I was from Newfoundland. They're liberal-minded. I'm formally liberal-minded since reformed, conservative. And we fought

a lot on the topic of the lockdowns. And I realized during that time, too, that in the past, if we we've had pandemics in the past, you know, apparently Spanish flu, whatever. But there's a main difference between then and now. Then the government didn't

have the ability to send you serb checks, like to send you subsidy checks. Again, my talk was about subsidies and how you should shoot them. They're bad, they're evil. They, like, they, they misconstrue reality. And I believe, I personally believe that, you know, there is a difference between even when my parents were my age and now, and today, that if we had the same pandemic roll through, and no matter what you think about the pandemic, it could be anything, it could be the black death, the government should not have the ability to fund a lockdown through your theft of your savings, through money printing and the like. And in the past, they couldn't do that. Thank you. I do think it's the most important topic at hand on the global stage is this is how your money

is created and issued through a society. But to me, it's like, even in my parents' day, when we were still off the gold standard, like that was 1971-ish that happened. We fully went off the gold standard. You wouldn't build to do what they did. You wouldn't build a lock every business down and then send you a check and say, well, don't worry about it. You know, like your business will come back. Like, that's not how it works. Nothing is returned the same as it was, at least for very few businesses, the exact same way it was before the lockdowns. And I looked at it at the time. I'm like, this is the wrong way to approach this. And unfortunately, I just looked at it like in a different time, not even that long ago,

this wouldn't have been acceptable just for the pure fact that there was a time where politicians actually had to hold a budget. It didn't have to deficit. They weren't allowed to deficit spend because they would be held accountable. And that's the main difference from then and now is there are no budgets anymore. Like politicians can just spend whatever they want. It doesn't really matter. I mean, they just, their central bank money printer just lends them more money.

and there's no accountability. And that, to me, is the root cause systemically of all non-accountability in society. And it leeches into even companies, because companies derive their money. A lot of companies, unfortunately, derive their money from subsidies as well. Like, when you start talking about accountability, you're really talking about justice. And justice is one of those things that drives people to being in a mob. Because you look around at the world and you say, this was not fair. and I know what should have been done

and so you start getting around people that vibrate with you in this way and there's a time when justice can be served and you can seek out accountability but you can go too far and the reason I am so afraid of mobs is I when living in Kenya saw what happened when people were afraid

and they thought two guys from a neighboring community you know you guys said you hate the people from the you were telling me two is that in Saskatchewan you always hate the neighboring town and all the people in it. Well, these people got afraid that they were being attacked and robbed. And so they went over to the next town, and they found two people that they thought maybe weren't good. They pulled them out of their houses. They put tires over them.

They poured kerosene on them, and they lit them on fire and let them die in the streets. And this was a crowd of people. I woke up in the morning to hundreds of people outside cheering and being excited. And they were doing it because they were afraid, and they needed to find some way to hold people accountable towards this idea of job. And where I come off on this is, and I've thought about this for years, because that image is indelibly burned in my mind, the thing that I think any time when you start looking around for who should be accountable, who's responsible for this, is the moment you should say, what can I do to hold myself

accountable? And I think to like Steve's point about inflating, if you don't know about Bitcoin, you should 100% understand that this is maybe the only way out of the Golden Goose situation. And two, if you really love the Sean Newman podcast, you should be relentlessly asking him, how are you going to make yourself uncensurable? Because eventually they are going to censor him. It is going to happen. He's going to be impossible to get him on any channel that you know of right now. And so there's not a clear answer for how do you become uncensurable.

but the way that you keep yourself from being focused on what should we do to those guys is to think about what can I do and what I can do is make sure that no matter what happens I can know what's going on in Canada because Sean Newman podcast didn't get censored somehow we got down a rabbit hole and I I'd written it down a night how didn't you get censored so far Sean I don't know how that's possible yeah how the fuck am I still on YouTube and you're not I don't know oh man you asked how you are going to teach your kids. And one of the things that I admire about QuickDick,

QuickDick's taken a lot of arrows. But you have. You certainly have, right? And COVID is not an easy topic for a lot of people when you go to the other side, when you talk to the other side. Me and QuickDIC, sorry, have had lots of different conversations

because we fell on different sides of the argument. And one of the things I admired about QDM is he went on Ryan Jesperson, and when he did it, I was like, like, what are you doing? I get annoyed me. I don't know if any of any Jesperson fans in here, and I apologize, Ryan, if you're watching a live stream. But I don't love what he does, okay?

It doesn't mean I dislike the person. It just means the show isn't for me. And then you went on Max Fawcett, and I apologize for shooting it out if I'm live because it hasn't come out yet. But we wait. And what I admire about that is a bit of courage to go hear what you don't probably want to hear. So when you come back to kids,

one of the things I've been trying to do more, and I do this poorly, and my wife knows I do this poorly, is I go and I interact with different people. I don't do it every time in the podcast because it is hard, but I go to uncomfortable situations, which is usually somebody who thinks I'm an asshole, or I have the wrong views, or whatever it be. And what social media I feel like is trying to do is put us in these camps, and in advance of saying a mob is the worst thing because we, you know, it's almost like, like bloodlust is what I kind of hear out of you, is because we're all in the same frequency, and we all think we got the right answer,

and away we go and the door we go. It's like, well, that's what it's building on both sides. Both sides think the other side's an absolute idiot. And what I admire about QDM in particular is he goes and searches it out. Doesn't mean he does it right. I'm not sitting here going to sit and talk about everything you've said, but I do admire that. I try really hard because I think one of the things to try and teach your kids

is to go into uncomfortable situations that you, don't know how it's going to end. You don't know the conversation that's coming. You don't know if you're right. Like, I'm learning as we go. And that's a very hard skill, and nobody wants to do that. I don't want to do that. I don't want to go into a conversation where I don't have the answers.

Or I come off and I was saying to the boys last night, like there's certain conversations I have on the podcast where I just feel like a, like, I don't, I'm weak. Like, they just have arguments that I disagree with, but I don't know how to articulate it. And so one of the things I really want to pass to my kids is like, in our world, very few people pick up a weapon and go to war. Some places in the world, that's commonplace.

And I'm not making light of war. But in our world, you win by having difficult conversations. And when I hear about different institutions, because I worked in a big company, one of the things I noticed, and I, you know, one of the things I did poorly was articulated why I disagreed with, an idea. So then there was consensus that the idea was great. So you get like five stages down and nobody's disagreed because nobody spoke up. And we have to find our voices. We have to find ways to

articulate that doesn't come off making you feel like you're throwing arrows at the other side every time. Because I have to believe there are other people on the other side that not only think like us, they understand somewhere deep inside them that they don't know why it's off, but they can't articulate it, just like I can. And that takes effort. That's a muscle. There's a whole bunch of brain stuff that somebody smarter me. Probably Vance has talked to him knows all about that. And that goes across all people, whether you're sitting in the farm, in the city, in a different country. To me, that's my thoughts. We should never find ourselves in a point in our lives where we're comfortable with our opinion and that we can't be challenged on it. I think,

and there's a difference between opinion and belief, because an opinion is something that you've formulated on maybe an event, right? But a belief is something that's true to your core. And I like my opinion to try and be closer to a belief of what it is of mine, because a belief means that I believe it. I believe it for specific reasons. And if I have somebody challenged a belief of mine, I have a very specific set of reasons why I believe it to be true.

but a dangerous place that will put ourselves in the world is if we never allow that to be challenged. And you need to be true to yourself that just because you want to be in a tribe or you want to be in this crew, it needs to be okay that when you have somebody that challenges that core set of values that is formulated as belief that's within yourself, you need for it to be okay for somebody else to come at you with something that you can look at objectively and say, actually, I never thought of that. You don't have to just shut yourself off and say, no, I believe this and this is my crew and this is what I'm going to do. You need to be able to look at another person.

You need to be able to say, shit, I never thought of that. And if there's one thing, that's probably the most important thing that will help us circ navigate things like social media and tribalism, is to be okay with that. But you need to be okay with yourself and that you're strong enough to say, hey, you know what? Maybe I wasn't right on that. maybe I need to experience where you came from or you are bringing some to me that I've never had brought to my attention before.

And any of these other people that I have actually reached out to or they've reached out to me and I'd be like, yeah, I'll come and do this. I want my beliefs challenged. And I'm okay and I'm comfortable enough with myself going in front of a crowd and just having them challenged. And I don't give a shit because if I was wrong, that's okay. I'm just going to go farming tomorrow if nobody wants to watch Quick Dick anymore. You know what I mean? So, but it's, to me, it's more important to just make sure that, that you explore all the avenues of what leads you to your belief and or opinion before you just cement it and say, I'm not moving from this ever again, right? I want to, I want to say something about parents. So, um, I think one of the things that happened with Jordan Peterson and the reason that he got so popular, so fast, is that young people had been exposed to all these ideas that they knew weren't right, but like they didn't have a way to argue again.

them, but somebody was actually doing it and giving them this, like, push. And I don't think he had to push very hard for people to be like, wait, I'll go ahead and take this red pill. Maybe I'll take this whole bottle of red pills, right, and see all the nonsense that was out there. And I actually think that, like, at first you're like, ah, that's so good. But I feel the temptation to indoctrinate my daughter into seeing the world the way that I do. And getting her to be like, oh, yeah, those people, we don't like them because of X, Y, and Z. But I know that I can push those ideas into her and they are as paper thin as the ideas

that we're getting pushed into the college kid. And so this is me more than anything saying out loud to myself. The most dangerous thing you can do is push those ideas into your children without them having the structural understanding of why you think those things in the nuance because otherwise they're going to go to college and they're going to feel like they got red-pilled too

and they're going to reject the things that my daughter will reject the things that I taught her and be like, Dad was just a crazy person. And so this is something that I think is really important is to avoid the temptation of indoctrinating your own children. I don't know. It's a great point. It's a great point. And that's one of the biggest reasons why I talked about that billboard in my chat. I mean, I always remember going to school as a kid.

and I don't ever remember talking about anything political. I don't remember any of it. I just remember our teachers teaching us to research, to look into the facts, to see what's gone on, form an opinion, defend your opinion, respect somebody else that doesn't have the same opinion as you. And I feel like that's something that's just slowly been changing,

and I think it's been changing very quickly along the tangent with the rise of social media. So what do you do, folks, when one of the ones that just came in, and I just saw it, and it kind of fits in, well, I think, is what happens when the narrative is challenged, right? Opposition comes into the current narrative. What we're talking about, you can go to school, but you can go to a list of different topics. There's always a combative narrative. What do you do when they don't, you know, you're talking about Sean Nugentz,

why I'm not on YouTube and things like that? I mean, it's pretty simple formula in the social. media world, you know, there's an algorithm. I mean, Twitter's been releasing their Twitter files on a whole bunch of stuff, right? And they're not the only one. So what do you do when the control, you know, and we sit in a country that, I mean, the legacy media, the corporate media, whatever you want to call it, controls how we look at certain issues. Now, certainly different things like this and other shows and independent media are starting to come up, but we have other things trying to clamp down and make sure they never see the daylight. So is it just continue to share? Is it, or,

Or do you have any other thoughts on how you, you know, how do you get around them trying to control it so much? Do this. Get in front of people. Get in front of a person and get them out from behind the screen behind which they live. I've shared quite a few experiences with you even on podcasts of me just running across a person that I completely disagree with.

And both of us realize very quickly within seconds of being in person of each other, that we did not disagree with each other as much as social media would have led us on to believe that we did. And the faster you can get out from behind a screen and get in front of a person, the better it's going to be for everybody involved. I've had that experience a lot where you battle people on social media on Twitter. Usually me, it's some kind of Bitcoin thing, and then you meet them at a conference and you're like best buddies. And there really is a human element that gets lost online. You know, you just reminded me of like, you know, my parents, other people, I always say, like, look at all the fake news these days.

Look at all the fake news. And my perspective on it, like, as someone who loves this tool, I only really use Twitter. I don't use the other socials. It's been really good for business. It's really been amazing for my own education. Like, this whole industry I'm in is very new. No one really understands it very well. And we're all learning it as we go together.

It's been an awesome learning tool for that. And along the way, you know, my personal opinion now is that, you know, you see more realness. And despite all the problems social media can cause, you see more realness, more truth come out on social content, like you and I posting what's happening, whether that's like pictures of your dog or your opinions. But these are real things by real people and they're much less manipulated content, even though the algorithms can certainly censor what you see. see. But I mean, I've come to think that, you know, when I have a conversation with my parents say, like, oh, all the media today, like all this social media is manipulated. You're getting manipulated. Like my mom and dad think I'm like in a cult, right? Like at one point they did. Because my mom read about, I was going through this thing where I loved, I was only eat meat,

would only eat meat. I wouldn't touch, wouldn't drink beer, meat and water. I did the carnivore thing. And it turns out my mom discovered that all these bitcoinsers were in this carnivore cult. And I was like, what is this thing? And all my friends online that I haven't really met yet, but all the people I respect are talking about this meat thing. I want to try that. Like, that sounds interesting. Some logic behind what they're saying.

I tried it out. But, you know, my parents thought I was in a cult. You know, they think that that the social media, like, creates these cults of thinking, that it creates these, there's all this fake news and everyone's getting brainwashed. But I looked at it like, I'm like, mom and dad, like, you know, you've been used to, you know, the boob tube, the television your whole life, and there's been a force-fed narrative to you on every topic under the sun for,

I mean, for your whole existence, more or less. And, I mean, if anything, social media is the less, even though there's a lot of problems with censorship right now and people getting the platformed and the like, it has, I think it's just revealed to people, he's in my head, that the news was fake all along. It wasn't, it wasn't like this new thing. It was fake the whole time. and that social media is actually showing all these grains of truth here and there that make you question a lot of the common narratives.

But it's being misconstrued as being the, you know, all the conspiracies are these people on socials and the like. But I sort of look at it completely different. It's actually most of the truth that comes out in these social content platforms. Did everybody catch the fact that he called it the boob tube? The boob tube. I love it. Haven't heard that in years. Is that an American?

thing too? So I'm like trying to find some way to make this happen and so I'm just going to interject and do it like I come from the Bitcoin world and I don't often tell people about this because it only makes you a target like Steve said. I really think Steve should take a couple of moments to give a pitch for Bitcoin and the reason I think that is we are actually on stage with like Bitcoin greatness. Like if you go all over the world, Steve Barber is one of the most well-known names for being respected for his knowledge, for the fact that he didn't just stay there and have ideas in the idea world. He got to the world of Adams. And like, he is actually creating a technology that if

the West ever wanted to be free of the Golden Goose, this is the way you would do it. So I would say Steve should be put on the spot to have to give like a two-minute, what is Bitcoin? Because it's a real thing. This is what happens when a podcast host comes on with a podcast host. I was hoping to avoid shilling Bitcoin. I've learned not to make it a thing at any kind of event like this because it does like, you know. Also, you just told an engineer to explain something in two minutes. Yeah, and I'm not a salesman.

I'm an engineer. As we're joking about, I'm not a great salesman. But, I mean, the case for Bitcoin, there are examples, an example. I'd give is, you know, even recently, you know, I don't care what side of the whole trucker, you know, thing you guys were on. I was on the pro trucker side because personally, truckers and shippers and logistics and sea captains and everything that moves the goods that we produce around, they are the lifeblood of society. They are literally the arteries. They're the heart and the arteries of society. And I respect that because I can't do business without these

people. So, you know, you might remember after that, that whole convoy, there's a lot of censorship of banking, right? And I think this was the first real example. I used it. I did a little talk of the OTS committee, the O'Field Technical Society here in town, and sort of brought this up there, too, because it was the first time I felt like I actually had a real example for, like, my local audience to really, at least maybe, grasp why Bitcoin is cool. That example was, you know, when people were donating to the trucker's cause, a lot of people at a bank account shut down by Mr. Trudeau and his lackeys. And that's not good. I mean, it's your bank account. It's your means to put food on the table. So no matter what, you know, it could be any topic, in my opinion,

that should never be allowed is any politician shut down a person's bank account. And I was already in support the truckers and, you know, I was able to donate to them privately without ever, anyone knowing ever did through Bitcoin. So to me, like, just the tool that it is that allows you, like, because it's hard for Canadians to recognize what it can do for society. It's easier for if you're in, well, we're starting to see it actually with inflation. We're all feeling inflation right now. Like our wages aren't going as far. We're all feeling that. If you're, if you're, if you're stuck in a variable rate mortgage like this poor sucker right here you're seeing i saw my i just saw the bill like our uh our mortgage went up 4% year over year uh i had a great 1.8 or something it's up to

5.8 it's like oh my god i wasn't budgeting for that you know and and bitcoin the whole the whole point of the technologies it just can't arbitrarily be created and so you know that was you know when i did my little spiel earlier and talked about the golden goose and subsidies that's really my motivation for, that's why I got down this path of Bitcoin in the first place that led me to starting our business here in town. I think I was also luckily located in the center of

natural gas waste in Canada. It just sort of clicked. So that was just a luck. But I was already down the path of, man, I love gold. Like gold gold to solution because I was saying, I was studying this bureaucracy thing and I'm like it's all caused by the money system. It's all caused by the money system. I got into gold, got into that. But

you know, like for us, at least Canadians, like I think that was first tangible example of why Bitcoin really matters because, you know, I just revealed that I donated to the truck or so I'm probably going to get my bank account frozen now. I probably shouldn't have done that because I've never really explicitly said that I did before this, but I, but I did. Guess what, Steve, your mortgage doesn't matter anymore. Yeah. Your house is our house now. But it felt good. It felt really good at the time because I felt like, and I've used Bitcoin in similar ways before, I won't talk about publicly, but I felt good. It felt good that I could do this where the normal system, like the GoFundMe stuff, got shut down,

any other means you wanted to at least help this cause. And it could be any cause, right? Any cause whatsoever. So that, to me, is like the best example that, you know, a fellow Canadian might identify with. And if you, again, if you don't, you know, if you don't like that particular cause, just think of any cause.

Like anyone being able to shut down your funds, like your hard work, the fruits of your labor should be concerned. and that to me is enough of a case for why Bitcoin is interesting technology. It's 921. I'm trying my best to see how the crowd's doing. Do you want five, ten more minutes, or is it by, you know, everybody's holding their pee and they're trying to, they're like, oh, man, this is good. But, you know, I totally understand. Getting started late, this is normally when I would call it a day. It's been an interesting goal putting this together and having all wonderful people show up. So if people buy it, you know, we can go for a few more minutes,

or we can, well, let's, let's talk for a few more minutes. Sound like my ex-girlfriend. I say this, I know there's some people in the audience would love for us to talk till midnight. And certainly this room is open until midnight and you can hang out and these guys will be around, most likely. But why don't we talk for a few more minutes around 9.30, that's about 10 and it's, I'll call it a night, because I know there are some people that are just gracious with their time, and this is where the time cop in me always comes. I'd rather leave you wanting more than have you go dragging on way too long. So it was a question that came in late here, said with the loss of trust in societal institutions,

how does trust in these institutions become the norm again? How do you gain trust back in institutions? Speechless, interesting. Stop lying to us, as the gentleman said, yeah. I think that's step one. How do you gain trust in anybody, really? I think they answer, you know, when you lose trust in someone, what steps will they take for you to gain it back? I think the first step is, depending on the exact subject matter,

admitting wrongdoing, that wouldn't be a bad start. Maybe there's some, I personally would, you know, I was very disappointed in our conservative leadership in Alberta that they would go as far as supporting the lockdowns of unnecessary businesses, unnecessary workers. I mean, that is not a conservative view. I don't care what your definition of conservatism is or you know right leaning or whatever um what the businesses decide and i would appreciate uh i mean even from a gentleman like mr kenny or former premier i don't know maybe he did i don't pay to have much attention to politics but i know i would appreciate some apologies for locking down businesses and that kind of thing and so i think

there's uh there's a there's places that might have done it right like uh um allowed businesses families, people to decide on their own how to react to a threat. And that really in my mind is how it starts is maybe an apology on whatever, you know, whatever one topic. We could pick in many things like, you know, Justin Trudeau, I'd appreciate apology and Christia, Christia Freeland that you lock down people's bank accounts. Can you start there, please? And that would be the first step towards forgiveness and not thinking dark thoughts at night. I'm not a guy that you can really get my trust back from once you've crossed that line. And that makes it really hard for me to navigate. I guess, you know, my public opinion, my YouTube channel,

whatever you want to call it kind of thing. I believe trust is sacred, you know. That being said, I can't say I've ever married a government before in my life. You know what I mean? Like, it's, I guess it's a different thing. And I just, I want accountability is my biggest problem. I think the biggest way that we ever see trust in a lot of our institution coming back to the public that have been wronged by said institution is just accountability. And I just feel like it's just the one thing that we lack right now. We seem to live in this strange world where, geez, you can go to Ottawa and protest your government and you're arrested.

Your social media accounts are frozen. Your bank accounts are frozen. You're paraded around in front of your country and shackles. No chance of bail. But if you're a child sex offender or a violent criminal that's been convicted of gun crimes, you're back out on the street in 12 fucking hours. How fuck does that make any sense? How do you get trust from something that that is your institution?

And until we see it, and until we see the leader of our country being convicted or charged twice of being in breach of ethics violations and a continuing path of it with zero accountability, without accountability, you'll never get trust back ever. It's just you have to be held accountable to some way, shape, or form that's of measure to the people you serve. I'm a guest in your country, so I'm not going to tell you about how to trust your government again. But there is a really interesting YouTube video that if I think it would probably be worthwhile to listen to if we've gone all this way. And the video is called Rules for Rulers. and it basically describes how does power work.

And it was written a book by the similar name, but I actually think the YouTube video is better. And the video is put out by a guy named CGP Gray. And in the video, it describes, if you're put in charge and you're like the king, right, you don't actually have enough guns and swords that you can personally go out and make people do what you want them to do. You have to give what you have your treasure

to different groups of people, the military, police, all these different groups. And how is it that the whole patronage system works? And I think when I watch this video, it stripped away some of my naivety about democracy. And not that democracy is not the system I want. It's a shit system, but it's better than all the other really shitty systems. And so, but watching this video help me understand how does power work. Because once you have an understanding of how power works, then you can start to say, okay,

even if they apologize to me, they're not actually going to be sorry. They don't care, right? Like, they had that power. They used it. And so what is it that I will do? What will I change personally is something that the only way you can know what to change is if you understand how power works. And I think it's really important to understand that even if you get the apologies and the accountability that you want, one, they won't care. And two, the next one will do it too. And so this is like that cold, hard, maybe like a cynical view that I have about the world, but I don't think there is accountability going forward. How are we going to end this on an upbeat note, Sean?

That's your challenge. Maybe give us two more minutes, Sean. You're going to send these people home happy, not to press. Thanks for that, Vance. I'm going to go drink at the fucking roulette table now. Well, there's lots of gambling to be had, so we'll all leave happy. I mean, the positive note is every single person had a thousand other things you could have done tonight.

You had people you could have called, you had emails you could have written, shows you could have watched, but you didn't. You listened to the voice in your head that said, I don't know, this guy, Sean Newman, he does some pretty cool stuff. Maybe I'll show up and do that. And you encountered all these people. And the craziest thing is, you are in a room of people, unlike any other room of people that you get into at any other point in your life. So the rest of the night, you can walk up to any other person and they understand you better than almost. everyone else in the world. And so to me, breaking so everybody can help chill out and drink some more beers and talk, this is like the golden part that you guys all paid for by listening to

hours and hours of Sean, by showing up on a Sunday night. And I think it is don't leave feeling cynical, leave feeling empowered and tell Sean become censor-proof because we want to listen to you for many years. Thank goodness you didn't say golden goose because what I've learned tonight is to shoot the prick but maybe maybe it's just the start of a beautiful adventure you know like I mean it just it feels you know you can get cynical and dark and everything else but I mean once upon a time a brother and I biked across this country and I remember day one and I remember day two and I remember day three when I was ready to like just pack it up

we're never getting across this damn planet and country and like I'm done and he had to talk me off the ledge and he just said, you know, every day, just get on the bike and just start turn the pedal and we'll move a little further and you'll move a little further. And you took this giant map of Canada and you trimmed it down to Newfoundland and all of a sudden you're across it. And then all of a sudden it's PI and all of a sudden it just goes, you know, it's not going to be solved in one night. This isn't going to solve it tonight. But it could be the start. Certainly could be the start. And Vance is right. You've got these wonderful people around here. The room's yours. Have a little fun, interact with some people, see where a conversation leads to. Either way,

I appreciate you all giving me a Sunday night, because when I sat around roughly Christmas, Vance is coming to Canada, and I told, I, like, I love nothing more than to have Vance on the stage. And I'm like, okay, that's like 18 days away or whatever it was. And then I text Quick Dick right away, Because without quick dick, I don't know who Vance is. That's how this worked. And wouldn't you know what? He was supposed to be in Vermillion last night? And he goes, the only day that will work is a Sunday.

I'm like, a Sunday? A Sunday? I call the casino, because obviously I've been doing work here. They go, well, you can't have the Saturday. I'm like, no, not the Saturday. The Sunday. You sure the Sunday? We don't even do things on the Sunday. Sunday. Sunday.

Text, Steve, I thought for sure Steve would say no. I don't know why. I just had this gut feeling like it was a pit in my stomach. This isn't going to work. Yeah, I'll come. Okay, wow. This is interesting. three. And then for the next 15 days, all I did, people talked about on the podcast, they could

hear it in me. I was so nervous. Like, how are we ever going to put people in seats on a Sunday night to listen to these three guys talk, the rural urban divide? Oh, man. And yet here it is. It's happened. It's maybe the beginning. If not, more will come, for sure. Because you're just like me. You're the start of something beautiful because we're all concerned about something. That's what it's brought us all in. So I appreciate you all giving me time. With that being said, it is 9.30. And I want to make sure that if you want to talk, you want to get home, whatever it is, that we give you time for that. So please give a round of applause for these three guys, for being up here, speaking what's on their mind and doing this lovely thing that we get to have a little fun doing.

Yeah, thank you so much for coming out. And for anyone who tuned in a live stream, thanks for hanging out. And this has been a ton of fun.