Shaun Newman Podcast - #584 - David Oransky

Episode Date: February 14, 2024

He is a certified public accountant and lead advisor at Laminar Wealth who advises his clients on owning Bitcoin. Let me know what you think. Text me 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcastE-transfer here: [e-mail] Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Phone [phone] – general sales line, ask for Grahame and be sure to let us know you’re an SNP listener.

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We're going to try and work out of there. So if you're ever missing us, you can't access us. That's the probably where we'll be quarterbacking it from. Right now, though, you can find us on, of course, Spotify, Apple, Twitter, Rumble, and Facebook is still allowing it. I'm as shocked as everybody at that point, or at that. All right, let's get on to that tail of the tape, shall we? He's a certified public accountant and lead advisor at LAMI.

and our wealth. I'm talking about David Oranski. So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by David Oranski. So first off, sir, thanks for hopping on. Yeah, happy to be here, Sean. Thanks for the invite. To the audience member, depending, I guess, because I'm sure Vance will tune into this. But the reason I know anything about David is, has come through Vance Crow's podcast. And Vance Crow's invite, you know, that he sends me once a year to come out to Missouri and then I get to interact with a whole host of characters, one being such as yourself. And, you know, for the audience, they're going, okay, so, David, who the heck are you? Let's start there, shall we? Yeah, I don't know how far back you want to go,

but yeah, I live in St. Louis. I didn't grow up here. I grew up in Maine, you know, playing in the woods and on the ocean, moved to California for college, met a St. Louis girl, and ultimately ended up in in St. Louis. So it's what I now call home, but, you know, I'm not one of the natives here. Yeah. And then professionally, I'm a financial advisor, started as a CPA and then moved into the wealth management side. And for the last over 10 years now, I've had my own practice, working with, you know, individuals and families. If we stick on Maine for just a quick sec, I've never been through Maine. I've been on the north side of it going through the East coast to Canada.

What, sitting now living in St. Louis, will you miss about Maine? The ocean. For sure. That's really my only, my only complaint about St. Louis is there's no ocean. But part of the deal when we, you know, decided to move to St. Louis, I said, yeah, sure, I'll move to St. Louis. As long as we can spend, you know, a good chunk of the summer in Maine where it's, I've never been any place better than Maine in the summer.

So we usually spend about the month of July, give or take, in Maine. And to me, I get my fix there. And I don't care where I am the rest of the year. Yeah, that's, you know, I come from the land of prairie, you know, like the ocean is such an anomaly to my brain. And, you know, and I get like, I've been on the ocean a handful of times maybe now. And you get like 100 meters offshore and you're like, I don't know if I like this. You know, I firmly like having two feet on the. ground. Are you, are you different? You like being out in the ocean playing around? I find it being

one of the most calming places to be. On the ocean. Yeah, for sure. That's what I miss. I mean, even if it's just going out for, you know, a few hours, going out to an island, you know, cruising around, having lunch, or, you know, I at one point spent four months at sea, not without seeing land. I think the longest I've ever gone without seeing land is about two weeks. And that was too long for me. I'll give you that. You know, after about five days or so of not seeing land. What took you out to see for two weeks? I've gotten to do all sorts of cool things. My parents were very, uh, wanted me to explore the world and kind of fostered those curiosities. And so in one with that year, the junior year of high school, I did like a semester at sea thing,

but it was aboard a 130 foot classic tall ship where, you know, you are sailing the boat. There's three watches. You're getting up at midnight, standing watch for four hours. By the end of it, it's the students sailing the boat all by themselves. And you know, you're sleeping in a little bunk about two feet wide and six feet long with all your gear for four months. And, yeah, I mean, there were times where it sucked. But looking back, it's all fun memories. You know, I interviewed a lady, Tanya Abbey, way back when. Do you know that name?

Nothing about. So her story is, at one point in time, she was the youngest woman to ever sail, the ocean blue, sail the world. And now, in fairness, I think they didn't give her the title because of a technicality because she had to be solo the entire time. And I think she gave somebody a ride between two of the islands and so they never gave it to her. But anyways, in reading her book, she had never been sailing before except the summer

before she left. And her family weren't sailors or nothing. And her dad drug her out, threw in this boat, kicked her out to see and said, I'll see, or whatever. And I remember thinking, why would you ever do that? Like, you know, like, poor girls going to die out there, right? And yet when I hear you talk about being two weeks and, and like, and the co-a, you know, going out and manning this, I'm like, we don't have, do we have any out west, do we have something like that? We probably do. And I'm, I'm not thinking about it. But that seems not extreme. I think it sounds super cool. I don't know that I'd say it's typical

of growing up in Maine. I mean, it's not uncommon for people to go beyond the water if you're on coastal Maine, but I know many other people that did it, but because I did, my older brother did it before me. That's kind of what paved the way. And then my younger sister did it too. So all three of us spent four months on that boat and still one of the most divine, you know, periods of my life. Yeah. Well, I mean, the old ocean. I mean, you know, I got to interview a lady Judy Reeves who survived the perfect storm, the Halloween gale back in 92. I don't know. Like I read stories And I'm like, I bet you it's one of the most beautiful places to be on the planet and one of the most terrifying. And I can't get myself out of the terrified state, you know, even when I think about it.

Yeah. I don't think I thought about that stuff as a kid. But, you know, certainly now that I'm an adult and have my own kids, things do scare me that never used to. So if I wasn't already used to that, it probably would scare me. All right. Well, I'll keep you off the, we'll keep it away from the ocean talk. I just, you know, anytime somebody comes on that, you know, lives in a different, because I'm, you know, The East Coast, you know, lots of people go to the East Coast, but out here in the West,

we're probably more apt to be the Rocky Mountains into, you know, the West Coast and down that way than the opposite side. So always fascinated. Even if you get to the West Coast, that looks very different than like coastal Maine. Like coastal Maine has islands just scattered everywhere. So you can, when you leave mainland, you're not like just a drift in the open ocean. You're, you know, going to all these little islands and, you know, that's fun. You know, that's what's really unique about the main coastline in particular. Do people own the islands or is it like government? Some of them are privately owned. Yeah, no, some of them are privately owned. A lot of the ones, even that are privately owned,

though they allow people on there as long as they're respectful. Some of them will say you can go on the beach, just don't come up into there, especially if they have a home there or something. No, the mentality in Maine tends to be very open and like a, like, you know, like, you. As long as you treat it with respect, people are very usually open to letting you come on their land. I think there's even some laws there that allow, because people want to be able to cross through for snowmobiling and stuff, that you're somewhat protected. You know, there's various laws, I think, to protect you because everyone's always paranoid about liability. And so I think they've actually done something to kind of make that reduce that so that they want to foster that atmosphere where people can go out and be in the wilderness, even if it's privately owned. You know, it's one of the things now that I'm a dad, like, I really want my kids to explore the world, kind of like you're saying about your parents.

Yep. Because like you get to see and hear different, well, areas, what they're, what they're known for, what, you know, what they got to deal with, you know, the weather on and on it goes. And the culture, right? Like how people interact with one another. If you never leave your little bubble, you really don't understand. And I mean, the world is monstrous. It's huge. And like you think we're far away, but we're not that far away from Maine.

Like, you know, you could easily get on a plane and be over there and, you know, and go explore. But how many of us do that? You know, I'm getting sidetracked here before we even get started. But, you know, like one of the things we do with our family now in the summers, with my wife being from Minnesota, as we've started taking different routes and taking a little bit of road trip. And that's been a lot of fun. And I, you know, normally you're like, we just got to get there as fast as we can so we can get out of the car. and whatever else.

And when you kind of embrace it a little bit, then you get to go exploring and you always amazed what the different states have to offer. But so many of them, you know, like, what the heck am I going to Maine for? What's the big attraction in Maine? I mean, for me, there's within Maine, you have the people like me that love the coast. You know, I grew up on the coast and I like being on the water and the boats and all that. But I know other people that, you know, I kind of grew up more inland Maine in the woods and in the mountains. And that's what they think of when they think of Maine.

And so it's lots of outdoors, but there's, you've got both there. I think the attraction, my favorite place in Maine is like Acadia National Park. So that's where we spend most of our time when we go in July. And we're going hiking and swimming and exploring the beach for, you know, finding crabs and seashells. And I mean, the kids are just in like nature's paradise there. And for me, that's what I did growing up too. We'd go up there and stay in a little cabin.

And so it's very nostalgic for me. and to see my kids do it. And my wife is from St. Louis and didn't grow up doing that type of stuff. Like she's now seeing the magic through our kids eyes as they're exploring. Have you convinced her yet? Maybe. Maybe. I think she's, yeah.

She's on board for the summers. I mean, the summers there are spectacular. So if you're going to go, go like July, August, September. The weather's beautiful. Scenery is amazing. But yeah, like our two daughters this summer were down on the beach and they found like, you know, a muscle shell and they were like, are there pearls in? here. And before we could even like talk, they're like picking up rocks and like bashing it and like

digging through the guts of this muscle to see if there's any pearls. And then we kind of had to stop them because they weren't finding pearls. And right, I'm not going to destroy too many of these living creatures. But, you know, to see them just be curious and I love it. Yeah, well, having kids out in the wilderness in general is a lot of fun. Yeah, I mean, that's super cool. Somewhere along the way we have to get out to the East Coast. We'll see if we can't The Newman clan can't make that happen. I'll let me know. Maybe we can overlap.

Yeah, well, normally on this side, you know, Minnesota is where her parents and siblings live. And now we got young niece and nephew. So to get back there is important, right? But that doesn't mean you got to race back straight as an arrow to take the long route. Like this summer, we're going to. That'd be a little far out of the way to go to Maine on your way. That's true. But this year we're doing Idaho.

So we're, instead of going directly towards it, you know, I was looking on Google Maps of like the route we're taking. We're taking a big old circle to get there. So now I didn't bring you on to talk about this. And now I'm going to try and get on track here, Sean. But you know, one of the things that, you know, Vance had had you on and you were talking about Bitcoin and, and, you know, I know, I know, I was saying to before we started, I'm almost a zero when it comes to on level of knowledge when it comes to Bitcoin. And, you know, I talk to enough people, though, that I'm starting to see a trend that, sure, there's tons of people that have gold and silver. There's a ton of people in my area that have lead, you know, for different reasons.

And, oh, I see what you're saying. And then there's people that have Bitcoin. And there is some overlap. And I'm like, well, we owe it to ourselves to explore this. And you're a guy who's advising on anywhere between 5 to 10% of your portfolio. And I'm like, okay, walk me through this, David. Let's talk about it a little bit. Yeah. I mean, I'm not surprised that you're noticing that overlap between, you know, people that like gold and those other things.

Because a lot of that thing comes down to kind of this idea of like self-sovereignty, of owning something that is no one else's liability and that you don't need permission to use and that really can't be censored. So when we think of like money in the U.S. dollars, like we think of that as money as though it's just an asset, but the reality is it's actually a liability of a bank or of, you know, or of the government itself that somebody else has to perform for that actually to have value. And nobody thinks about that because it's just the dollars, the world's reserve currency and it's always good. But there's been many reserve

currencies in the world. And I don't, I'm not predicting the end of the dollar anytime soon. But the thing that I don't like is that, you know, seeing, I mean, you're very familiar with like the trucker convoy and bank accounts being frozen for having the wrong, you know, beliefs supporting the wrong people. And the idea that your money, your assets can be just frozen because you, you know, offend somebody, offended the wrong person is a concern for a lot of people. And so the beauty of Bitcoin is that it is an asset like gold that no one's own. So like when you think of gold as money, if you hold that gold coin, you don't, you're not, you don't have an an IOU from anybody. You own the actual asset. It's nobody else's liability. If you go deposit

that gold coin into a bank and they give you a receipt and says, hey, this is worth one gold coin. You don't actually have the gold. You have an IOU. Someone else has a liability to you, and they have to give you that gold coin back to you to have it. And so the beautiful thing about Bitcoin is you can hold effectively an unlimited amount, you know, value of Bitcoin in your head or with a list of 12 words that's basically the key or the password to unlock those or on a little device. There's lots of ways to do it and it's portable. So you have this incredibly portable wealth that can be transmitted digitally anywhere in the world with final settlement as though you handed someone that gold coin halfway across the world. Like there is no other technology that can do that.

And Bitcoin was designed to be very similar to gold in many ways. So gold has lots of good monetary properties, namely it's scarcity. And that's why over thousands of years it won out as being the gold standard. It became, that was global money. The issue was that as we got telecommunications and international trade, we started doing business with people, but the gold couldn't move as fast as the business. Once you could send a telegram to somebody, you can start transiting business, but to actually pay in gold, you know, that takes, you know, weeks, months to get that gold there. And then you have to worry about people stealing it or a shipwreck. And so people instead would say, why don't we just keep all the gold in banks? And then we'll just trade.

the IOUs on that goal, then maybe we don't even even have to trade the piece of paper. We can just communicate over the telegram. All right, move this much money from David's account to Sean's account. And the bank just keeps that ledger. And that system works fine as long as everybody you're trusting in between is good on that. And the problem is throughout history, people that we entrusted with our money weren't trustworthy. You know, they issue more IOUs than the actual gold they have in the vault. They simply confiscate the gold and say, yeah, I know you gave it to me, but

the rules have changed. It's our gold now. You know, just use this piece of paper, but it's no longer redeemable for gold. And so gold was a very good money in many ways, but it could not keep up with the 21st century. And so that's how it kind of got surpassed by fiat currencies like the dollar and other just paper currencies that aren't backed by anything. So now Bitcoin comes along and says, a lot of we design something that has the monetary properties of gold, namely its scarcity, so it holds value. It can't be printed and easily diluted. but that doesn't have the same Achilles heel that gold had, namely that it's physical,

it's so physical that it's hard to transmit, you know, it's hard to send places. And so Bitcoin is kind of the combination of it moves faster than fiat currencies, but it's as scarce and actually now scarcer arguably than gold. Okay. Not coherent enough for you. No, no. No, there's a lot there. I guess I'm going to go with gold for a second.

Okay. I guess I never thought of it like that. You know, I brought it up before. I think it's 19, is in 1933. I want to say when, when they outlaw gold in the United States of America, it gets outlawed for 41 years. Yep. Do they do, in your mind, and I'm totally just piecing things together here,

so if this is wrong thought by all means, are they doing that because they can see that things are starting to speed up and gold no longer serves the purpose? Or are they doing that so that they can move away from gold and get to something that they can print as much as they want? Yeah. So yeah, this gets back to the history of it. So prior to 1913, we didn't really have a central bank in the United States. There had technically been two central banks prior. But when the United States was founded, there was a lot of debate about whether there should be a central bank like the Bank of England. And ultimately, the feeling of the country at that point was no. Like we don't want to give that power to anybody. We don't want to give the government power to dilute our money or. any of that. And so those charters never got renewed. They never really had the same power. The first real central bank we had came in 1913. And that's the Fed that we had today, the Federal Reserve. Prior, what led to that, though, was basically there was an earthquake in California,

in San Francisco, 1907. And most of that was insured by a, you know, Lloyds of London or one of the big, you know, British insurance agencies. And so tons of capital to pay off those insurance claims was flowing from the UK to America. And that was not good for the pound. And so in order to kind of attract that capital back to England, they raised interest rates, which then caused, you know, a panic in the U.S. The whole banking system started to collapse and the reality, because I don't know how familiar you are with like how banking works, but there's not actually enough money in the bank for every, you know, if you were to add up everyone's checking account balances, like they don't have that money in the vault. Like,

When you go deposit money in the bank, they're actually then lending that money out to somebody else. And if everybody came back to the bank and said, I want to withdraw my money, but it's not there. Yeah, it's a hard concept to wrap your head around how they got that through. But as I believe I understand it, for every dollar that goes in, they can lend said dollar up to like a crazy amount of times. I don't know. So in the U.S. at least, there used to be generally like a 20% reserve requirement where they had to keep about 20% of the deposits in actual, you know, hard currency. I believe as of now, that was suspended a while ago. I think it's still zero.

So technically, they don't have to keep any. I mean, they do. But that's not really the limiting factor at this point. Anyway, but the whole thing with the UK was. So then the U.S. went into this basically, you know, financial crisis. And, you know, J.P. Morgan and the bankers kind of came and said, hey, well, we'll, you know, bail you out. But we kind of need this, you know, to make sure this never happens again. we need to have this central bank that, you know, we kind of are in charge of, but it's quasi

government, quasi private. And, you know, then you get World War I, like starting like the year after. And they start using, you know, the central bank, you know, the government starts issuing debt and, you know, the central banks kind of buy some of that debt to help fund the war. And then you start getting all the easy monetary policies that leads to the roaring 20s and then the Great Depression. And, you know, then today people say, thank goodness, like we have had a central bank to bail us out of the Great Depression eventually. And if you talk to like, you know, Austrian economist, they'll say, yeah, that central bank may have helped get you out of the depression, arguably, but it's also the thing that caused it.

Like all the, so like, you know, is that really what you want? Um, and so the reason they made gold illegal in 1930, I think it was 33, I think it was 33. I think it was 33 because I can I, there's so many days. You're within a year. It's, I'm close. I'm close. It was 41 years of, of, because you stare at it. that it would have been 33 yeah right you're like how does that make sense anyway so what they

the the way the federal reserve charter was is they needed to have the central bank needed to hold so much gold relative to the amount of dollars that were out there and so as more dollars were being created they needed to get more gold into the system and so they were trying to get people to deposit gold that people didn't want to deposit gold because they were worried that the whole financial system was falling apart so if anything people were exchanging their dollars for gold and so they basically had to say no no no no you've Nobody can own gold. We have to have all the gold in the bank where we keep it safe and where we can then issue these dollar IOUs on it. And so they basically confiscated all the gold. And that was easy to do because everybody kept gold at banks.

Why would you want to carry around gold or carry in your house? You could just carry this paper slip knowing that you could always go redeem it, right? That's what they promised you. You could always go redeem it for gold until suddenly the window closes and now you can't redeem you just have these pieces of paper. And then fast forward, you know, when we had, you know, World War II and various monetary systems. And then from 1933 to 1971, although U.S. citizens couldn't own gold, foreign countries still could keep their gold in America and theirs was still redeemable. And this was especially important during World War II because a lot of the European countries didn't want to keep gold on site for fear that, you know, if they get invaded, it may, they may lose it. So it was safer to keep it, the U.S., and the U.S. was effectively funding, you know, the war in many ways. And then at the end of that, we said, hey, now that we're kind of in charge here, why don't you just all keep the gold in the U.S.? We'll peg our dollar to gold, and anytime you want, you can redeem your dollars for gold.

Well, then you kind of get through the 60s and, you know, in the 70s and, you know, countries around the world start realizing, I don't think the U.S. has enough gold that if we all ask for our gold back, they'd be there. And the story is effectively that France sent over a battleship to pick up their gold. And while they were en route, you know, Nixon closed the gold ones and said, yeah, no longer are we deemed. No, we're not giving out any more gold that's closed. And so then we had this inflation area of this inflationary era of the 70s. And in order to like get that back under control, we then had to figure out how do we create

demand for dollars? Well, let's tie it to oil. So, you know, we went to Saudi Arabia and said, tell you what, you price all your oil in dollars, which. creates demand for dollars because you need dollars to go buy oil. And in exchange, we'll provide security. We'll provide, you know, our military to keep peace in this area, keep all the shipping channels open. And so that was how they kind of kept demand for the dollar, even though it was no longer redeemable for gold. So it's, it's, it wasn't like the free market chose that they no

longer wanted to have scarce money. It was kind of they got rug pulled. And there was no other option. And the thing that the dollar had going for it was this. very interconnected banking system. So if you wanted to do business, the way to do that with the least amount of friction was and still is with dollars. And so people will always choose the easiest way to do business to grow wealth and gold's too slow. So people use dollars, but nobody wants to save in dollars, which is why at least in America, you get your paycheck and you immediately go either spend it or you invest it in an index fund of the SMP 500 and that becomes your savings account.

Because we all know that all fiat currencies, even the dollar is a melting ice cube. Like it's losing they hope that it loses 2% of its value a year. In some years, it loses more. So when you look at right now, right? Thank you for the history lesson, by the way. When you look at right now, right, where we sit, where the U.S. sits right now, with countries like trying to run away from the dollar, you know, different global powers buying out or bringing in all the gold, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

What do you, what are you telling your client? Like, what are you telling your clients? You're trying to make sense of this. I assume, you know, you're having people with their money going, okay, David, what are we going to do? Yeah. So, I mean, based on everything I said and obviously my feelings around Bitcoin, you'd probably assume that I'm in the camp that the dollar is about to vaporize and go away. I actually don't think that's possible. It's of course, it's of course possible.

I don't think it's likely, at least in the short term. because as of right now, the entire financial plumbing of the entire world is built on the dollar system. Although people don't want to be on the dollar, they don't have a next best option. And my personal view is that the dollar will probably stick around for a while. I do worry about other currencies in other nations because they're kind of almost built on top of the dollar system. And in a lot of other countries, people would prefer to save in dollars rather than their own local currency because it inflates less slowly than their local currency. And so there will be a lot of demand for dollars for a while, but I think it's a pretty terrible savings vehicle, which is unfortunate because it forces anybody who actually wants to save their

wealth to invest and take on all sorts of unnecessary risk. I mean, if you think about how the world would work, if we didn't constantly expand our money supply, as we develop technology and start innovating, like it gets cheaper and cheaper and easier and easier to make most things. Like almost all things should get cheaper in this world. You know, think of like how much cheaper it is to get around now that there's like Uber and you can fly, you can drive. There's all these things. On your iPhone, you have a calculator, you have email, you have internet access, like those things in the past either didn't even exist or you had to have

multiple devices to do it. Now it's all just an app on there. Like so things should be getting cheaper yet every year they get more expensive. Why? Well, because although we say inflation is only 2%, we're actually expanding the money supply at about 7% a year, which implicitly means that if we weren't printing money, things might be getting cheaper by a few percent per year. In other words, our money actually sitting in the bank buys more and more as every year goes on. Instead, they dilute our money so that it's still, we're running on a treadmill despite all of this innovation. So saving the dollar is terrible, and it forces people into other things.

It forces people into stocks. It forces people into real estate or gold or something that is more scarce and can't be as easily created as via currency. Okay. Bring me to Bitcoin that because I think I read in your white paper. You sent me a white paper. I sure wrote down. You said something along the lines, you know, you got countries like China are trying to like literally trying to banish this. Get rid of this.

And you got places like El Salvador that are like bringing on in. We like what's going on here. and we're going to make this, you know, the backstop of our economy and everything else. So you got this, you got these wild swings, you know, you got one day, Pierre Pollyev here in Canada, the leader of the official, leader of the official opposition saying, you know, this is amazing. And then it just tanks and people are all over them, you know, and it's, it's this wild, wild world.

I kind of like the wild world, though. So tell me about it. And why you look at this and go, like, this might be something people should be paying attention to. Yeah. So why pay attention to it? The same reason that you might be interested in gold as a store of value. So something that, you know, so the criticism of something like gold is, all right, Sean, you buy an ounce of gold and you put it in your safe and you open it up 10 years and it's still just one ounce of gold. Like it didn't do anything. Whereas if I go invest it, you know, in bonds or stocks, I earn interest in dividends. Like it's growing. But at the end of the day, all we care about is not what the interest rate is or the rate of return. It's like, how much does this allow me to buy in the future? Like, what's its purchasing power? And gold for thousands of years has done a really good job of maintaining its purchasing power. So although it doesn't necessarily, you know, grow your wealth in the real sense, if you, you know, your gold will buy you approximately 10 years from now,

probably similar to what it bought you, buys you now. And so it's a good start value. The problem is Even gold is very volatile if you look at gold's price relative to the dollar because everything is denominated in, you know, dollar or whatever your local currency is. And so, yep, but it's a better store of value. You just got to look over a longer time period. So Bitcoin is similar to that. It's very scarce. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin. Right now, there's 19 something million.

And the rate at which new Bitcoin is coming online, you know, being mined is somewhere around 1.5%. So actually very similar to gold, I think. maybe it's diluting slightly slower than gold. Because with gold, they're constantly mining and pulling more gold out of the ground. But at a slower rate than most things. And so the idea, for the same reason, you might want to store some of your wealth than gold, you would consider Bitcoin. But Bitcoin has some special powers that I alluded to earlier.

You can send it electronically and you can store it digitally. So you don't have to have a huge vault at your house or trust a custodian to hold it. You can hold it all kind of in the so-called blockchain. It's anywhere and everywhere. It lives on the internet effectively and you possess the keys to move it. And I think what's becoming, you know, so that's one reason that people were initially interested in is just the scarcity. I think what I'm noticing of why new people start becoming interested in Bitcoin, in some

places it's due to inflation. And a lot of it, it's because of Bitcoin's permissionless and censorship resistant qualities. And so its various events have been happening in the world over the last, you know, number of years that wake people up. And it's different events for different people. For some people, it was the trucker convoy saying, oh my goodness, I could be unbanked for having the wrong political views or having the wrong state, you know, health, you know. They can't, they can't freeze your Bitcoin. They can't, depends. They can't freeze your Bitcoin if you have itself custody. Now, if you hold your Bitcoin at some other institution, they could freeze it. There's, and it's not anonymous.

This is another important thing about Bitcoin. Like, it's, although it's permission, permissionless and censorship resistant, if they can tie your identity to one of those Bitcoin addresses, then they can kind of follow where that payment goes through. So it's not good for someone that's doing something that they're trying to hide, but it's very hard to stop. You know, it's not this, it's not a stealth plane. It's like, you know, the giant tank that just will drive through anything and everyone can be shooting at and you can't stop it. And it fits in your pocket. It's your pocket. It's your pocket. You fit in your head. So like other examples, you know, imagine, you know, this came up for some people when the war in Ukraine started.

Like imagine if you had to overnight kind of pick up and leave. You can't take your house with you. You aren't going to really be able to take, you know, may not be able to go to the bank and go all your money out. You can take gold with you, but how much of that is going to get taken from you when you're trying to cross the border, you know, they're not going to let you carry hundreds of thousand dollars with a gold over. You might get a little bit over.

But Bitcoin, you could memorize 12 words and take an unlimited amount of money anywhere with you and no one can prove that you have it or prove that you don't have it. And then when you arrive in your, you know, new jurisdiction where things are safer and calmer, you can, you know, use it. What's the, I don't know, maybe, maybe it's just understanding it, right? It's a new tech. But you go, when you put it in those in that way, right? I think, I think most of us get that like, you know, what's happened with the Canada, freezing bank accounts was insane. Yeah. You can't put a big enough word there about how crazy that was. And so then you go, okay, we got to get across the border. How are we going to do that?

So you go, well, let's say you had a million dollars. Well, a million dollars in cash would be a little rough. A million dollars in gold would be a little heavy. And a million dollars in Bitcoin, you know, actually, you know, wouldn't weigh you down one bit. So what is the, the, I don't know. is not the drawback, the hold up. Like, why isn't, why isn't more? Or maybe tons of people are. I just look at myself. I'm like, why am I so hesitant when I, you know, I've, it's out of consensus. It is not something that's, you know, when people are trying to understand Bitcoin,

they either go to their, you know, finance person or their tech person, someone they trust in either those fields. And, you know, in order to really understand Bitcoin, you have to understand kind of economics and kind of maybe what's going on in the world and how governments work and also the technology so even people that understand the economics of it you know think of like you know someone who's maybe classically a gold bug like they should understand the monetary history and why you'd want a scarce asset but many of them can't get on board with bitcoin because it's just it's this imaginary thing like gold i can pick up and hold in my hand this bitcoin thing how do i how do i know i'm not being cheated like i know i'm not being cheated with

the gold i was like well do you like did you melt it down yourself and i say it and all that No, probably not. You're still trusting somewhat. Whereas if you can understand enough about Bitcoin's technology, you can, you'll first understand that its rules are very, would be very hard to break. Like, it's, it's, it's scarcity truly isn't, you know, enforced at 21 million. Is it possible that that could change? Yeah, but it would require basically everybody who owns Bitcoin to decide they want to voluntarily dilute their wealth. It's not going to happen. Why? Explain that to me. When you say like, you can't, you got, you got to, 21 million. And I've read the white paper. I've had several different conversations on this. So I get the general theme, right? Like overall, it's going to take what, 100 and some odd years to finally mine. Yeah, we're still 100 years or so away from the end. But the reality is 99% of the Bitcoin is going to already have been mined by like sometime in the 2030s. So like most of it's already most of it's out there. And there's just a tiny little trail. You know, if you remember from math, those asymptotes where it's this curve that like approaches a number, but never quite.

reaches it. It actually technically never gets quite to 21 million, but pretty darn close. But your question was not around that. Your question was, what was your question here, Sean? I don't know. Every time you start talking about Bitcoin, I'm like, I just laugh at myself. I'm like, I don't know why it's so hard to get my brain around, right? Because you go like, well, you know, go back to your gold bug thing, right? What do I like about gold and silver? You can touch you, you, you can feel it, you can see it. Then you go, but you trust to somebody because how do you know it's silver? How do you know it's gold? It's like, it's a good point. Like, how do you know?

And so with Bitcoin, you can audit it yourself. Like, anyone can download the blockchain. Anyone can look at the address. Anyone can see the total supply. When did you get, when did you get into Bitcoin? Okay. How long? Have you always been Bitcoin?

No. No, no. I first heard of Bitcoin in 2011. Like, I think it was like April. I'm sure. Sometimes, or I had a friend that I took. Over a decade ago, though. Yeah.

But I had a friend that took economics with who sent me article on it. I was like, wow, that's a cool idea. It's like, you know, this perfect form of libertarian money. Like, too bad, it's never going to work. This thing's never going to gain traction. But like, that'd be kind of cool if it did. And I just didn't think about it for years. Like I wasn't like, you know, I wasn't on the fence about whether I should buy some. I was just like, yeah, too complicated or not ever going to happen. And then in 20, you know, I'd hear about it every now and then. But then in 2017, that was kind of the time when Bitcoin launched into the public consciousness where, you know, retail, you know, non just hardcore libertarians and cipherpunks

are buying it. But like, you know, I had people coming up to me all the time. Whether there was clients or friends saying, hey, have you heard about this Bitcoin thing? I just bought some and it like doubled my money in a short period time. I'm like, I've heard of it. I kind of know what it is. Like I'd probably stay away from it though. Like it, you know, things that go, you know, go up that steeply usually come right back down. And, you know, at the end of 20, 2017, it peaked and crashed in 20, you know, meant from I think it was like $17,000, you know, back below 10. And I felt pretty smart that I had, you know, told a lot of people to, you know, don't chase all this dumb money into Bitcoin, stay away from it, keep your eye on the ball,

just invest, you know, in a traditional portfolio and keep saving and working. And then, you know, and in, you know, 2018, 2019, I had a couple clients that just would not sell their Bitcoin. I could not give them to diversify it, that had just lost more than half of its value. I lost like 80% of its value. And they were like talking about buying more. I was like, what are you doing? Like what how are we not on the same page? Like we agree on so many other things of how the world works and how and like I'm obviously like we're not on the same page on this. And like every time I have an objection, you know, you kind of discount it or have some say something back that doesn't make any sense to me. And so I finally in 20, late 2019,

I was like, I'm going to learn this thing so that I can talk people out of it. and speak their language and show them where they're wrong and the mistakes they're making. And so I started reading a couple books and, you know, I kind of got through and I was like, huh, well, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about it that way. Oh, I got that wrong. And then I kind of started exploring it and was like, you know, maybe, you know, it still seems crazy, but maybe it would make sense just to have a little bit the same way that somebody, even if they're not a gold investor, they might want to own a few gold coins for that like, you know, Armageddon situation. Maybe they can just use it to bribe the, you know,

the border guard to, you know, move somewhere else if, you know, the apocalypse comes. I don't know. Maybe it makes sense just to have a little bit as a lifeboat. And so I did that, and I kind of put it away and moved on. And then, you know, shortly after I bought it, which would have been early 2020 then, we had COVID and the markets tanked, you know, Bitcoin went from about $10,000 per Bitcoin, which is about the price that I bought at down to like 5,000 and I was like, whoop, literally two weeks after I bought it. I hadn't bought that much. I bought just a tiny, tiny bit. It lost half of its value. Like, I guess that was the stupidest thing I ever did. But I had said I wanted to buy, you know, X amount. And so I just bought it,

even though it had gone down in price and then put it away and didn't think of it. And then as we kind of moved through 2020 and then into 2021 and they start sending out stimulus checks and all this and was like, this is crazy. Like, this is the world Bitcoin was built for. Like, them just printing money hand over fist. Like, I'm going to start paying attention here. And then we had, you know, then things like the trucker convoy or the war with Ukraine, and we froze Russia's assets. It's like, oh, my goodness, all these things I learned about how Bitcoin could hypothetically matter, you know, when someone's trying to censor transactions or freeze money or stop stuff or just expanding the money supply of why you'd want Bitcoin.

These things that I imagine as possibilities are all happening quicker than I ever could have imagined. Like, I think I maybe want to own more of this. And then 2021, like, you know, the price went way up and I was ecstatic that this tiny bit of money I put in and turned into a lot. And I was like, well, there's no way I'm buying more. Like it's already gone up like, you know, close to 10x. Like, oh, well, like great percentage returns, but it hasn't, isn't going to change my life. I didn't buy that much. And then, you know, started coming back down. At that point, I had been following it closely. I'd been researching it going through the history and learning about money and started teaching other people about it. And so then in 2022 is really

when I said, and this was when Bitcoin was already coming down. I said, I need to at least educate my clients about this. Like, I'm not going to say they need to buy it. Like, they should understand it, though, because I think over their lifetime, there's a real chance that the world doesn't look the way they're used to and that Bitcoin could be a really important part of it. And so I spent basically two years educating my clients. Some of them bought into it, bought little bits. And then over time, it's been building up. And now I'd say 75% of my clients have some exposure to Bitcoin, some very small, some pretty significant. And now going into 2024, I think we're going to have the vast majority, if not all of our clients, at least owning some Bitcoin.

That's what most of them do. I only have a few that are still on the fence. It just makes them nervous. You know, I said this to you this year. Because I got to see your first presentation on it, right? And I remember thinking, hmm. Because, I mean, you go to a, you know, David and I meet once a year. And you kind of like people watch and interact all at the same time.

Yep. And when it comes to you, me and you, I would say, agree on an awful lot. And all through COVID, I would say a lot of the things you've done said, et cetera. I'm like, yep, yep, yep, Bitcoin, interesting. And I sit and I watch and I'm like, why? What am I missing? And it really bothers me, right? Because I sit there.

I'm sitting there and I'm listening to you. And I'm like, I feel like I've not missed an opportunity because there's nothing but time, right? Like, I mean, just get in and, and, and do it. And yet I'm trying to understand it. And my brain, for whatever reason, has like this little bit of a hiccup, you know, it's like, I don't know. And yet I admire and the way you tell me, I'm like, this is really interesting. Yeah. Because you've gotten through COVID, you've done almost not every single thing I've probably done, but you've, you've had similar choices all down the line.

You've noticed the same things. And the one difference we probably have is Bitcoin. And I'm like, funny you say that because that was kind of the story I told a few minutes ago of some other people that I like, we agree on a lot of stuff. Why is why are we polar opposite on Bitcoin? Like one of us is wrong. Right.

I kind of want to find out who. And I might be, I might be wrong. I might be wrong about Bitcoin. Like I can hear Vance already yelling at the radio going, you're not wrong. Yeah. You're not wrong. And I, I wouldn't recommend anyone betting the farm on it. because even if we're ultimately right of where that Bitcoin is going to be extremely valuable and maybe

I don't know if it's going to be the reserve currency of the world. I think the dollar is going to be for a long time, but I think it's increasingly going to be a reserve asset, kind of akin to digital gold and maybe even beyond that. But I don't know what time period that happens over. And because of that, I just want to buy it now. Like I hopefully will have a long life and I don't need access to it in a while and I just want to buy it now why I feel like it's relatively cheap for what its future potential is. But even if I'm right, the timing could be wrong. But I could be wrong. Maybe governments all come together and figure out a way to effectively ban it.

And I don't think that's possible. So far, Bitcoin's proven to be pretty anti-fragile. You know, it's kind of, you know, every time they try to do something, it comes out stronger. But I don't know, might be worth having a little bit, I think, or at least looking into that. How many years has Bitcoin been around now? Is it 15? About 15. Yeah.

So it is in the grand scheme of things, it is an infant. Yeah. It is. But think of the current system that we all think, take for granted and think of as simple. You know, I know. Are you saying since we left the gold reserve? It's been 50 years or just over 50 years. It's been less in a lifetime.

1971 since we completely dealing from gold, 1974 from when Americans could own gold again. That's only about three times longer than Bitcoin. Before that, gold was money. Like, we think it's been the dollar for all this time. It was, but the dollar was redeemable for gold. Well, it's wild to me how much faith we have in a system that we just don't understand, right? The more you dig into the system. It is confusing.

The dollar system, way more complicated. I have spent way more time to understand how the dollar system works than I have Bitcoin. And I have a much better sense about Bitcoin works in the dollar system. Well, if you're sitting here staring, okay, let's assume, let's just assume. Now, I don't deal with people's finances, folks. by any stretch. Let's just assume I'm a couple years behind, David. You said you've read some things. You went, huh, huh, okay. Where would you point me to then? Or would you say skip everything I did and just listen to me? No. So there's no way that I can, you know, deliver everything that I've absorbed. And, you know,

part of the reason I have such confidence conviction is I have spent, I don't even know, easily thousands of hours looking at this. And I don't expect most people to do that. Part of it has been, I am very interested in it. But the other thing is for me to recommend this to my clients, I have to be way more confident than I am just for me to. You know, it's okay for me to speculate. I can't speculate with other people's money. And so, you know, although I, most of my clients have, you know, up to say 5% exposure to Bitcoin, like, I'm okay if they go higher, but they need to do that on completely on their own. Like, I'm more, I'm more willing to take risk with my own money than I am with clients. In fact, we don't, we don't just go buy Bitcoin for clients. They have to either do it

themselves or explicitly, you know, have us. Now that there's ETFs, we can do it for them, but they still have to give those explicit instructions. We don't want any misunderstandings of that. So I would learn about it. And like, I can't give any specific financial advice. And I would never recommend just go buy it. Like, you should learn about it and then evaluate whether it's right for you. But I have noticed anybody that learns about it, it's pretty much a one-way street. You know, it's a there's a, there's a check valve there. I don't know hardly anybody that learns about Bitcoin and then comes back and says, yeah, that's not for me. Like I should never have done that. If anything, people just go more and more in that direction. The one exception of that that I've seen is people that don't do their

research and just what we call like ape in. They just go buy a ton of Bitcoin because they get FOMO without really understanding what they bought. And then, you know, market volatility happens. and Bitcoin can lose 80% of its value in a very short period time. And even though it's always recovered after that, like, it's a wild roller coaster ride. And people will capitulate, they freak out and they sell their Bitcoin. And they're so scarred from that experience that they walk away. Those are the only people that I've heard of that, you know, really change their tune on Bitcoin. It's not that they didn't understand the philosophy.

It's that they, it was too uncomfortable. So where would I point you? I mean, the book that did the most for me in terms of helping, you know, a few things click was the bit, the Bitcoin standard by Safeedina Moose. It's a really good book. If you're, you know, libertarian-minded, you will probably like it. The author that wrote it is a very hardcore Austrian economist, you know, very libertarian. But Bitcoin is not just for libertarians. And if you are, you know, don't really identify more with the libertarian side, the book might offend you, or at least offend your values. And so for there, you might want to look, I think you should still

learn about it, but you might want to go to something. you're going to be able to actually see clearly and not be thrown off by, you know, what you might see as politicizing it, even though I tend to think of as libertarianism as apolitical, but that's a debate if you're on for some people. So another really good book that's, I think, far less maybe passion in it would be broken money by Lynn Alden. Now, it's a thick book. So you have to really want to be ready to study it.

But if you really want a thorough understanding, if you were just going to read one book and So do you want to get, I think that's the book I would go to. If you want an easy read that's like, just give me the high points and get me a little excited so I can see the opportunities, there's a book called The Bullish Case for Bitcoin by Vijay Boyapati. It's a pretty quick read. He originally actually wrote it as an essay. You can find the essay online for free. That's the kind of the executive summary of it.

And then he turned it into a book. It's a really easy read. And it will give you a, you know, overview of the history of money, why gold came to be how Bitcoin built on gold and kind of what its future is. And I think for many people, that's a great book. to start with because it's enough to kind of hook you and make you interested. But if you really want to learn it, I think, broken money or the Bitcoin standard. Well, I can't speak for the United States. Although, in fairness, you guys got some weird stuff going on with Trump and Biden and on and on it goes. We got our own set of weird going on up here. But everybody's, you know, I assume that's

listening to this, is sitting there going like, okay, all right, we can't act like 2020 will never happen again because obviously that's happened you can see what some of the world elites are saying you can see that you know like impending world war three and blah blah blah I don't want to i don't want to bring everybody down yeah i just mean that everybody that's sitting here and has been along for the ride is going okay all right all right what can i do over the course of 2024 to give me a level of piece so that I can proceed into the years to come to know that I'm not completely screwed and basically whatever the government decides, if they decide to, you know, CBDC overnight and, you know, and on and on that goes. If it's, if it's something else you can't foresee,

if it's other, it's like, what can we do? And when you talk about Bitcoin, I could be wrong on this by all means, right? Because I, I like silver and gold too, but I think you can like them both. I think you can have a little bit of each. Right. I own both. And I guess I just go, I'm looking for people and things that can bring people a little bit of peace in their life. Right. Yeah.

So you got to own a little bit of Bitcoin. Is that mean you're going to be a millionaire tomorrow? No. But what we're trying to do is stave off getting swept along with the current after the wave hits and drags us all out to see. And, you know, and we're all like, what the heck is going on? Yeah. And if you're looking, if you're viewing it as merely like a lifeboat, which is how I initially viewed it, like you don't, you only need a little bit, right? You're not trying to get rich. You're trying to have optionality in the same way that gold coins could be, you know, fallback money. Like think of Bitcoin as the digital version of gold, like the types of circumstances that you might think like I'm buying gold as an insurance policy. You know, I think Bitcoin can serve a similar function, but it's transmitted differently. You know, you, it's a different type of media of exchange. I think the thing that took me a little while to realize, though, is that particularly with Bitcoin, I think way more so than gold, is it it won't just do well in an apocalyptic scenario. I kind of view gold as the fallback money.

Like if we didn't have Bitcoin and we end up in a global financial crisis and all, everything kind of gets reset, like I could see people and central banks wanting to go back to, you know, peg something to gold just to like give it some credibility and start over. But there's all sorts of issues with gold that it can't be used directly as money. It's going to end up staying involved and we're going to trade paper on top of it. Bitcoin can function a civil role as gold in terms of being a base money that's scarce. But also it's so digital that I think the future that if the future just continues on as the present where we just keep printing money but things aren't falling apart, I think Bitcoin will become more and more and more valuable. I think gold will hold its own. I think gold will maintain its purchasing power, but gold's already a relatively mature market.

Most of the people that want to own gold and probably will want to own gold, I think already own it. And so it maintains your purchasing power, but it's not going to probably take you the moon. The places where it becomes extremely valuable is where everything else becomes worthless. And gold's like the last thing standing. Bitcoin, I think, can become incredibly valuable even if the world doesn't fall apart. And I view it as kind of this aspirational future of abundance, as AI and all these things, add deflationary pressure the market, make things get cheaper and cheaper. We can't have prices getting cheaper. And this is, I think, what people don't realize about our monetary system. Because

everything's built on credit, if prices start going down, that means as a business or as a, you know, person who has debt, you aren't going to be able to pay your debt because your debt is denominated in dollars. And if suddenly things are going down, including your wages, you're not going to pay off your debt. And your debt is someone else's assets. So the whole system comes down, which is why central bankers are so scared of the word deflation. And they would much rather have inflation. That's why they want steady two, three percent inflation. The thing that they worry about is a depression scenario. And so they're incentivized to overcorrect to the upside, overcorrect to inflation rather than deflation. And in that world, they have in the world where they're printing money, you have,

you know, this fixed asset, Bitcoin and gold and this ever expanding asset of dollars and, you know, other fiat currencies, you don't even need new demand for the price to. to go up. You're just not getting diluted. But now in a world where you have Bitcoin, where more people don't really know what it is yet, but when those things happen, they'll pay more and more attention to say, huh, I want some of that. You know, I saw some people on Bitcoin and they're doing fine. They're not feeling these pressures of life's getting harder. If anything, life's getting easier for them. I think I want to buy some of that. So there's a huge untapped demand for Bitcoin that means you have, there's really two return components when you buy Bitcoin. There's the

what you might call the economic return, you know, that it doesn't get to diluted. And to that, I'd say it's very similar to gold. But it also has this component of untapped demand where if many new people come into the market and demand Bitcoin, because they didn't really understand it. Right now, maybe less than 1% of people own Bitcoin and even fewer of those understand it. And now suddenly everybody wants a 1% allocation. That's going to cause the price of Bitcoin to go up way higher. How much? I have no idea. I don't really see that upside potential with gold that's there with Bitcoin. And so that's where Bitcoin gets me excited. is it plays a role of gold, but it comes with a free lottery ticket.

Could I, could I? I don't know if this is right. So you just tell me if I got this wrong. When you look at gold, the high side of gold is if the world goes in the shitter. That's kind of how I think. The high side of Bitcoin, at least what you're kind of laying out is everybody wants Bitcoin. And then the high side goes to the moon and back. Which means it's not like.

you're hoping the world goes to crap. You're actually like, we have this amazing vehicle sitting over here. I look at it like a little bit of a life raft right now because I probably don't fully understand the entire vehicle and its ability to navigate the world today. It might be able to think, you know, Bitcoin's had over periods of, say, more than four years, Bitcoin's had amazing returns. And that attracts a lot of people to it. If Bitcoin continues on its march to become the money of the world. When it gets there, it's going to be boring. Eventually, Bitcoin's expected return should be about similar to like what you would expect gold to be now. And the way I think of gold's upside isn't that it's producing new things. It's that it doesn't

get devalued. So it basically maintains its purchase of power. It doesn't get inflated away the way the dollar does. So it allows you to store your wealth overlying periods of time. And eventually, that's what Bitcoin would become. It would become just this savings. Like money that you put in and it stays stable and it allows you to buy the same. more and more of the future, but it's not making you like drastically wealthy. The opportunity to get, you know, get rich off Bitcoin is only because right now it's like a venture like investment. You're buying in at the early stages before the rest of the world has really understood what it is.

I mean, besides the fact, it's, it's just crazy to think that what is it at right now, like $40,000 some thousand dollars you. Yeah, market cap is about a trillion dollars, which is already huge. And so, you know, gold's market cap, though, is somewhere around, I want to say, like, 12 trillion. So if it became as valuable as gold, you know, that's like 10x from here. But the thing where I see is like, although I often think of it as digital gold, if it gets to that stage, I don't think it's going to stop. Because the things that are keeping gold contained are the fact that it's hard to use directly as money. You know, people hold gold and they sell it to get dollars and then goes.

And would you agree bureaucracy comes in? Don't you think gold would be higher by now, except the powers it be probably don't want that? Oh, they don't want it. And yet then I wonder, why do all these central banks still own gold then? Like, if gold's not money, why do they want to own it? Yes, there is certainly a narrative that's been pushed for decades, ever since the U.S. went on the gold standard, that gold is not money. And, you know, it's just this, you know, it's just this yellow rock that sits there.

Yeah. And there's certainly allegations that there's all sorts of manipulation within the gold markets. I don't know enough about that to really have a commentary on that. Like, would it shock me? No. But I, you know, the mechanics of it, I couldn't lay out exactly how that would work. Um, but if people, there are scenarios where gold could become really valuable again. The thing, the scenarios that I think where that could happen though, I personally think that

people would first go to Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin's going to get more. take a lot of the wind out of gold sale if that happens. I still own gold. I think gold's a good diversify. The way I think of it in a portfolio is within this like parallel sleeve, you know, normally you've got stocks and bonds, you know, stocks being your growth asset. That's what creates wealth over time and bonds being kind of that boring, stable asset.

Within, then I've got this sleeve of like outside money, money that's hard to manipulate, money that's kind of outside the traditional financial system. And there I've got gold and Bitcoin. Gold being the tried and true been around thousands of years, I think will always be worth something. I think will always for the most part maintain its purchasing power. So it's a really stable, safe, long-term investment in my mind. Bitcoin is kind of that up-and-comer growth asset more akin to stock. So it's got a lot more upside potential.

It's also got a lot more volatility along the way. And there's no guarantee that it ends up getting accepted. I think it will, but there's no guarantee of that. And so I like having both of them. Um, most Bitcoiners don't really like gold. They think it's all then antiquated. And like, if I had to choose one, I would choose Bitcoin, but I'm bullish enough on Bitcoin's future prospects that I don't need to own everything in Bitcoin.

I only need to have a small amount because if it goes where I think it could go, a small amount's going to go a long way. What? Not what this is, I guess in my head, it's, it's my final thought right now before I let you out of here. I'm not a big fan of. government. Obviously sitting in my country and watching everything that's gone on, you can understand why. I really, to me, one of the appeals of Bitcoin is I've watched as they've

tried as hard as they can to get their dirty little fingers all over it. I don't know how much you can talk to it, but I just look at it and I go, how hard is it going to be for one government you know, to control the world supply of Bitcoin. What a weird statement to make. I think it would be very hard. Are there scenarios where they could do a lot? Yeah, if all of the countries, at least the, you know, meaningful countries in the world, came together and said, we are outlawing the ownership of Bitcoin, outlawing the ability

to mine it, you know, we're going to cut off power to anyone that's trying to mine it. and we're going to like they could put a lot of downward pressure on bitcoin and yet i still don't think they would kill it and when they can't kill it you know it's the you know you cut off one head and two more grow and this is what's happened every other time that you know you know china tried to ban it and the you know the price and the hash rate which is the amount of mining power ultimately just went way up like it hasn't worked yet and i think even if you were to try to get this you know, oligarchy of governments coming together to coordinate this, you end up with the game theory, the prisoner's dilemma basically, where every individual country is incentivized to cheat and

say, well, we're going to make it legal, but maybe we'll mine it. Maybe we'll buy it and add it on our balance sheet. Or you get countries like, and I'm not sure El Salvador is meaningful enough, but maybe you get one big country. Maybe it's, maybe it's Argentina, which is a much bigger country than El Salvador that says, hey, we're not outlying Bitcoin. And suddenly now you have this jurisdictional arbitrage where you have people who own Bitcoin and want that world saying, I'm emigrating to Argentina. And suddenly now you have that ecosystem survives there. And, you know, it continues. If they can't kill it, I think ultimately it rises stronger. But that's where my time horizon is undefined. Like, you know, I think anyone that's putting a bunch of money into

Bitcoin because they want to get rich quick and retire in three years, it's like, could that happen? Yeah, it could. But I think the right way to do it is to be patient and say, I'm buying this more because I want to see a better world for my kids and grandkids. And part of that is how do I want the world to look like and what can we do in our daily life to do that? But part of it is also like, how do you want to store your wealth and what's the time for that?

I don't plan on spending any of my Bitcoin anytime soon. I can wait decades if I need to. And I don't think they're going to kill it. So for me, it's a very long-term investment. and it'll probably be a very wild roller coaster along the way. Wild thought because of the world we live in. There's this new religion. It's green.

You know, they look at power consumption and everything else. And you know, one of the things that, and I say this and then I laugh at myself, but, you know, one of the things that they hammer on is the power consumption it takes to mine.

Yeah, and I'm so glad you brought this up. And I'm like, I actually, you can talk to that all you want. I look at it. it and I go, if they're talking about it, they've lumped you in with like the rest of the world. You know, we just, we're here in Alberta, David.

I don't know if you knew this. We're like a giant powerhouse for fossil fuels and energy and everything. And we almost had brownouts. Actually, it's a lie. We had brownouts because, uh, who was it? When it was cold? When it was minus 50. And you're like, what is going on?

So you can just imagine the temperature over the next. I, uh, I think, you know, and maybe I'm a moral. on my time frame on this. But, you know, as we get closer and closer to 2030, I assume the ratchets are going to tighten up on power consumption, not loosen off. They're going to be trying to do a whole bunch. So you got, you know, what do we got? Six years.

Maybe it's longer, maybe shorter. Who knows what happens in that time frame. I don't have a crystal ball. Just that you can see what's playing out. Is there any worry that they ratchet down and say no more? Because when you say the world governments get together, well, they kind of are getting together. And they are kind of saying we're going green.

And we are kind of attacking fossil fuels. And I can imagine they're not going to love people storing their money in Bitcoin. Nope, probably not. Yeah, I think. And to me, it's the political and social risks that are the most, I think, still present in Bitcoin. Like, those are the things that concern me. Not that they'll kill it, but that they could hamper it a lot. And the narrative that seems to be the most effective is the energy consumption.

Because for a lot of people, they hear Bitcoin uses a lot of. of energy, energy usage bad, Bitcoin bad. And I think most of them just don't understand it. Because you know, you'll start to hear these crazy statistics. We're just such simple creatures, you know, it's like, oh, energy uses up. That's bad. It's unfortunate because it doesn't even take that long of looking into it to realize that what the headlines say about Bitcoin mining are just patently false. But even I would argue that even if it were as bad as they claim it is, the ability to have like self sovereign, neutral assets, like it's probably, I think the benefits of Bitcoin would still be worth it, even if I shared their concerns

and that what they were saying was accurate. But it's not accurate. So they'll say, oh, you know, Bitcoin uses more energy than, you know, all these countries. Yep, you know what it's on par to? It's on par with like people plugging in Christmas lights. It uses about as much electricity as Christmas lights. It uses about as much as your clothes dryer. Like that is a lot of energy. but it's minuscule on the grand scheme of things. And you have to, you know, if we're worried about the, you know, the carbon impact, we have to look at where is the energy coming from that's used for Bitcoin mining. Bitcoin mining is incredibly competitive.

Margins can be very thin. So in order to be profitable to do Bitcoin mining, you have to find the cheapest energy around. Where is the cheapest energy? It's energy that's otherwise being wasted or it's strained energy. So you have on, you know, for example, I don't know intimately about Alberta, so maybe this little land, maybe it won't. But like, typically when you're drilling for oil, you often also get natural gas. And sometimes it's economically viable to capture that natural gas and, you know, bring it to market either in a pipeline or, you know, or trucks. Or you could do this thing like Steve Barber's done and take waste of gas and he's been on the show. I mean, his his his, his, his, um, outfit is literally in my hometown, right? Like, this is, then you already understand it. Sounds like your listeners probably do, but I'm going to finish it. One of the lovely things about the oil field worker is they're really smart at not having waste. If you get out of their way and let them do things, they'll create millions of products that people want.

They'll find ways to use the waste gas or the wasted products to create something useful. And that's where Bitcoin comes in in the oil field. The energy sector, once they fully figured out, will be Bitcoin's biggest ally. And this is because, so now take that example with the natural gas. And let's say they're stranded wells or it's just not effect economically viable to bring it to market. you bring one of Steve Barber's generators on, you know, capture the natural gas, use that to run the generator. You're converting methane into CO2. And you can argue the CO2 is still bad, but methane is 80 times worse.

So it's actually reducing the net carbon footprint by burning it and turning it into Bitcoin. And rather than having to, you know, encourage people to use this energy or to flare it to make it better, you are using profit incentives. You're saying, hey, why don't you help the environment? Oh, and make money. So now we don't have to come in with a stick and tell you to do it. You can do it on your own and you'll make money and you're incentivized to do it. That is great. So I think, and in fact, there was a, was it Exxon or one of the big energy companies,

I don't know what the status of the program is now, but they did a pilot program for a while with Bitcoin mining. And the objective of it wasn't to make Bitcoin. They didn't care about Bitcoin. They were doing it to improve their ESG scores because they reduced their methane emissions. Like I was going to say if you start talking too much common sense then for sure the government's not going to do it for sure people aren't going to do it. I probably shouldn't come on your podcast. I'm on a list now.

Well, I just mean like anytime you're like, oh yeah. And you could, you know, you could make money and people would be saying and it's going to do all these great things. I'm like, yeah, that's where you're going to lose people. Somewhere along here, they're going to be like, nope, nope, we got to shut everything down. We got to, you know, we got to have windmills and solar panels. the middle of winter on base load and on and on it goes and you know I'm being a jackass but no but the issue you brought in alberta like texas is doing this the bitcoin miners in texas helped stabilize the grid the issues that they used to have in texas where when they'd get the cold weather they'd have brownouts and

stuff those have gotten way better because of bitcoin mining because they have this huge base load that the bitcoin miners require and then they sell that energy back to the grid when it's needed for other purposes and so it's made it profitable to overbuild your energy sources to have the grid and then when you have that excess demand, the miners get to shut down and that electricity goes out to users. It's actually like it's a grid stabilizer. And so I think most people just don't understand it. And they think too simply of like, oh, energy usage, energy is bad, Bitcoin mining bad. If they actually dug in, they'd realize it. But undoubtedly, there are some people that understand it and don't like Bitcoin because it takes power away from centralized authorities and gives it more to people. And they're using this as the narrative to scare people away.

And it's somewhat effective, but I think eventually I hope and think the truth gets out and people start to realize it. And I think ultimately people are going to adopt it not because they realize it's good for the environment, but because it's good to maintain their own wealth and flexibility and optionality. And at the end of the day, an economy is made up of individuals making their own decisions and doing the things that they think are best. And I think over time, it'll become more and more apparent to people that Bitcoin is a net positive. And that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy then because as new people come into Bitcoin, the demand for Bitcoin increases, the price goes up. It causes more people to pay attention.

And to me, the end game is highly likely Bitcoin that goes up over time. But I don't make any precise predictions on timing or what that value is. I just think it goes up over time. And I want to own some of it. And I think others should learn about it and consider it. Yeah, I just come back to where I'm sitting. I'm sitting roughly where you were, I don't know, three, four years ago, where I'm just sitting there and I'm saying I'm missing something.

You know, enough people that I admire and talk about different things about how to protect your wealth, how to steer, you know, yeah, I talk about it all the time. You know, I just imagine the future is this giant storm on the ocean of all places. Why I think of it that way, I have no idea. And I'm in a boat and I go, I literally have no choice. I have to steer into this thing. But it'd be nice if I had a few things on board to help, you know, survive. And when it comes to Bitcoin, I'm.

I didn't used to give it much thought, you know, like, yeah, yeah. I used to think it was a joke and talk people out of it. And then I had to. And now you've gone the complete opposite way. Hmm. What an interesting thought. Thank you. Thanks for hopping on.

I don't, you know, I don't know if I helped anyone. I don't know, you know, I just, I got so many questions. I don't mean you didn't help anyone. I'm going to have to go back and listen for sure. It's been an interesting, it's been an interesting hour, you know, like, yeah. There's just a lot there. And I know, Vance, wherever he's,

sitting is like licking his chops, right? Every time he gets somebody talking about Bitcoin. I think of the time he was in Lloyd and he was on stage with Steve Barber and Quick Dick McDick. And he had this whole speech about it. I mean, how dense can one man be, I'm talking about me folks, when you have all these people around you being like, you should do this, you should do this, you should do this. And I just don't listen something. I don't think it's crazy though. The heuristics that I think probably keep you away from Bitcoin is it sounds like a get rich quick scheme. I can't hold it. It's this imaginary thing. Like, you know, it's all these fringe people that are into it. Like we've developed these rules of thumb and heuristics to stay away from things because we

don't have time to analyze every possible thing we hear about. And I think that's why for, you know, almost 10 years, I dismissed it. Not because I had done the work and came to the conclusion that it was bad or a waste of time, but because it's like, it's not worth my time. It doesn't sound like something. I put it in this bucket with all these other things. And the last few years, though, have taught me that a lot of things that I used to think were crazy and fringe turned out to actually have a lot of the same going on. Well, you're selling me with the fringe thing because they call me, you know, up here, we're part of the fringe minority. That's coming right from the head leader, right? Now when people say, have you heard about this conspiracy theory, I'm like,

no, enlighten me because I might have to go research that. There might be something to do it. Yeah, well, isn't that right? You start pulling on a thread and all of a sudden you're like, oh, man, oh, I shouldn't have done that. You're right? Or maybe I should do that a little more, you know? Either way, David, appreciate you, you hopping on and doing this. And, well, I feel like there's going to be a conversation or two had in the future as I dig a little deeper into this. Because it's one of the goals of 2024 is to dig into some things when it comes to, you know, just currency, money, fiat, gold, silver finances, all those things wrapped in a nice little bow if that's even possible. And try and shed some light for myself and hopefully the audience as well. Well, it was an honor. Thanks for having me on, Sean.