Shaun Newman Podcast - #675 - Francis Pouliot

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

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And if you want to see maybe the odd highlight or odd thought, substack is where I'm going to share some of that. And so, you know, hop down on the show notes, click on substack, come subscribe, throw your email in there. That way you're notified every time we're doing something. Okay. Let's get on to that tale of the tape. He's the CEO of Bull Bitcoin. I'm talking about Francis Puliott. So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by Francis Pooleyot. So, sir, thanks for making some time from the other side of the world by the looks of it. Yeah, thanks for having me. Now, where Francis are you at today? Like where are you actually

sitting. I'm in the south of France vacationing and enjoying the good life of a bitconer. The good life of a bitcoinser. Wait, let's start somewhere closer to the start then, right? Right now, you're south of France, which I assume is lovely. And, you know, you're the CEO of bold Bitcoin. You probably got a whole other list of accolades you can give me. But start us up. So, like, where are you originally from and where does the journey begin for Francis to where he ends up in the south of France? Yeah, well, I'm a French-Canadian, born and raised in Montreal, and the journey to Bitcoin for me started out with Austrian economics, free market, libertarian ideology. So right out of college, I started to work for a free market research institute as a policy analyst. and kind of an economist. So my job was to explain free market principles to the general public.

I was, you know, a shadow writer for politicians and for conservative politicians and for researchers. And through this experience as a free market policy expert, I started to get to get I had a very strong dislike for just generally how the government runs things. I'm a big pro-capitalist person, and that journey ultimately led me to sound money and trying to understand where the money is coming from, because I was looking at, you know, analyzing Quebec specifically and Canada more broadly, trying to understand how come, regardless of the political party, we kind of like always end up in the same situation. How can you reform this system where you have all of these incentives that are fighting against any reform of the system?

You have a very wide array of people that seem to be mooching off of the people living off of government welfare, government subsidies. Regulation is a ratchet. There's always more regulation. And the system obviously doesn't work. It doesn't produce optimal results at all. So how come we are stuck in this status, collectivist, society and mindset? and what is the root cause of, you know, this kind of soft socialism that we have in Quebec and Canada. And as I was trying to study the root causes of our economic system,

I started to get into the whole gold scene, you know, back in those days, and we're talking about 2012, you know, Ron Paul was running for office in the States. And I was kind of like part of the Raulpaul generation watching his YouTube speeches. And he talks about ending the Fed. Okay, so what is the Fed that's starting about the Federal Reserve? of how does money get created? And then immediately I realized, oh my God, like the money system is a gigantic scam.

You know, they're printing money out of thin air. They're devaluing the savings of everyone. And those institutions that are creating the money supply are extremely opaque, extremely obscure and unaccountable. And there's got to be an alternative to this system. And you know, I started asking questions, like if they can print money out of thin air, like why do they even bother with taxation?

And what's restricting the government from printing the money. When the government prints the money, who gets the money in the first place? You know, where does the money go? So fell into the gold bug rabbit hole. And very, very quickly, I started to hang out in libertarian meetups and circles in Quebec. And I met these early Bitcoin entrepreneurs, these early Bitcoin advocates. This was in 2013. And they were very interested in the stuff that I was writing about, that I was involved with, like free markets, economics and so on and so forth. And they were telling me, man, you've got to research Bitcoin.

You've got to publish some stuff on Bitcoin in the news. You have to talk about Bitcoin because my background was explaining free market economics to the public. And they saw what I was doing and say, you have to do the same kind of work, but explaining Bitcoin to the general public. And very, very soon after getting into Bitcoin, I realized, okay, so we're not going to be able to change our political. and economic systems from the inside.

We're kind of like too far gone in the collectivists, socialists, era. We have to create another economic system like from scratch. That's a parallel system. And instead of trying to change the system from within, which is what traditional politicians do, you know, I was very involved in like the conservative politics

and trying to change the system from the inside. And I just thought it was going nowhere. So here's this new idea. Instead of changing the system from the inside, let's create a new system, a fully free market, sound money-based economic system that values production, that values energy, that values time, that stimulates entrepreneurship, that stimulates savings. Let's create this other system.

And instead of changing the system that we have, let's get people to migrate to this new economic system, which is Bitcoin. So I got into Bitcoin really for the political and economic aspect of it. I was not a geek. I was not one of those early Bitcoin programmers. that were just interested in the technology. I was interested in Bitcoin because I saw it as an actual revolution. It's not reforming the system.

It's a revolution because we are putting forth a fully different and alternative economic system. So I started to work for this organization based out of Montreal, which was called the Bitcoin Embassy. So the Bitcoin Embassy was a collection of entrepreneurs and educators and programmers that had created this physical space in Montreal, like a physical hub, where all of the Bickorners from Quebec would come and we would share office bait and discuss ideas. And you have to remember that at the time, Bitcoin was not something that you could talk about openly in public. It was associated with drugs and black markets and dark nets and terrorism and all sorts of nasty

things. So we needed a space where all of the Bitcoin, you know, entrepreneurs and thought leaders could gather. And so we created this Bitcoin embassy space in downtown Montreal. And I became kind of like the head of public relations for that group where I would be the one who would be talking to the journalists, talking to politicians and bankers and other people in technology trying to explain Bitcoin. And, you know, one thing led to another.

And then I realized that there was a big gap in the market for people using Bitcoin on a day-to-day basis. So investing in Bitcoin was like not that hard, but spending and using Bitcoin on a day-to-day basis was pretty difficult. And there was a little startup out of Montreal called Bills, which allowed Canadians to pay any bill they want with Bitcoin. So like your internet, your credit card, your electricity bill. And so I took over this startup called Bills because I wanted to scale it. I wanted it to become like a ubiquitous product. in Canada where any Canadian could spend their Bitcoin. Because at the time, a lot of people would ask me, okay, Bitcoin's all great, but what can I do with my Bitcoin?

Okay, well, you know, there's a startup that I'm involved with that you can pay your bills with Bitcoin. And then I also ended up creating this non-custodial Bitcoin-only exchange called Bold Bitcoin. And again, because I've always been a Bitcoin believer, but I didn't believe in any of the other coins that are out there from this. I never got interested in like Ethereum or stuff like that. I saw them as distractions because the goal for me of cryptocurrency generally was to replace the U.S. dollar, replace all fiat currencies worldwide with one universal standard of value, unit of account, and means of exchange, and that would be Bitcoin. So I was not interested in all the other cryptocurrencies.

I thought originally, and I still think today, that they were all scams. And I saw that there was a big gap in the market. for a Bitcoin-only exchange. It just didn't exist. Everybody that was getting into an exchange platform to buy Bitcoin would be bombarded by advertisements for all sorts of crypto coins. And the feeling that people got when they got into these apps, these companies is like, this is a casino, this is gambling.

This is like the stock market, but like on steroids. So I wanted to create a company whose only objective is to get Bitcoin in the hands of people. And another thing that also really got me interested in Bitcoin, other than the economic policy aspect of having sound money, so money that the government cannot print, was also the sovereign individual aspect of Bitcoin where when you own Bitcoin, at a fundamental level, it's a physical thing. You don't have money in an account somewhere that's digital. You actually physically own cryptographic private keys, which allow you to move the Bitcoin. So the ownership of Bitcoin is very similar to the ownership of gold. It's a very instrument. So Bitcoin cannot be seized without your cooperation.

Bitcoin payments cannot be censored. I also got very, very interested in WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. He just got released from jail today. Thank God. But I got really interested in WikiLeaks and the role of alternative media and exposing governments. And what I realize is that governments can't really censor speech on the internet. It's very hard. They can try on social media. We've seen that recently, but ultimately, anybody with a web server can host a website. But what they can do is censor payments. So WikiLeaks

got their bank accounts and PayPal accounts shut down by the government in 2013. And the only option for WikiLeaks to get received donations from the public to support their journalistic endeavors was through Bitcoin. And that's where it really clicked for me. It's like, oh my God, like Bitcoin is a type of payment that governments cannot censor. So it's our last bastion of freedom. If we want to exchange value with each other, even if the people receiving the value are politically uncomfortable people like Julian Assange, Bitcoin is still there. And the promise of Bitcoin is that, is that people hold it in their own custody. And a lot of these exchanges, these Bitcoin companies,

when they sell you Bitcoin, they keep the Bitcoin. You know, they don't send them to you. See, these are called custodial exchanges. And when you own Bitcoin on an exchange, you don't actually own Bitcoin. You own an IOU. You own a promise. It's kind of like if you're buying gold,

then one of the main reasons what you would buy gold is because you can literally stash it in your backyard. And then someone can't just go to the gold company and freeze your gold accounts because you have it in your physical possession. So that's been my angle in Bitcoin is promoting the Bitcoin-only narrative or the Bitcoin-only concept, which is forget about all the crypto coins, forget about Ethereum, forget about NFTs and like all of these shenanigans, and focus on the core value of this technology, which is to create a universal sound money alternative to the dollar system.

and also a more modern, I would say, and more secure and resistant version of gold. Gold has great properties, but it's very, very hard to transact gold. If you take gold, if you want to move to another country, try bringing your wealth with you in a backpack and crossing the border. There's a very, very high chance that it will be seized. Try sending gold to WikiLeaks as a donation. It's just not going to work. You have to use the mail and it's going to get intercepted. So Bitcoin is this alternative both to the fiat world and to gold as a means of payment.

And that's what I'm all about. I'm not into trading. I'm not into decentralizing finance or anything. I'm really into decentralizing the money, the units of money, and making payments censorship-resistant and impossible to stop. You said something that I want to go back to. You said, you know, you're looking at, you're living in Quebec. You're looking at the political system. You mentioned being involved in the conservative side of things.

You're trying to explain different things. And, you know, you're looking at the problem, like so many of us, I assume, going, like, how on earth do we ever change things? Like, this seems really complicated. This is a large problem. you get involved in politics. Everybody says the same thing. Once you get involved with the machine, there's very few, if any,

they can fight the level of corruption and basically having to compromise parts of who you are in order to get things done. And you said Bitcoin is an actual revolution. So it's apart from the system. Can you just explain that thought further to me? Yeah.

So a lot of the problems that we have in society today are caused by misaligned incentives. So in terms of why is the government able or willing to subsidize losing businesses, unproductive sectors of society, welfare, war, how is it possible that we're always overspending on public works? It's because we have an infinite money pit. It's because bad decisions are not punished. In the marketplace, you know, if you make a bad decision as an entrepreneur,

then you will lose your capital. You will lose profits. You will get punished by the market. But when it's the government that's making those large decisions on behalf of us, because when the government runs the economy, what's happening is they're making decisions

based off for the benefit of everybody. They don't get punished with their bad decisions because they have a mechanism to bail themselves out. So I believe that the capacity of government to just create money out of thin air and to subsidize their bad decisions and never get punished for their bad decisions is what creates a systematic, a system where bad decisions happen all the time. So if you look at, you know, if you look at the Americans, for example, the Americans have been, have created this military superpower, this massive, massive, endless war machine that's all over the world, that's costing, causing, causing great. great, great harms to the American people, and how are they able to pull that off?

And it's not taxation. It's because they control the money printer, and they are able to literally create money out of thin air and put that in spending. So if you propose an alternative system where the governments cannot create money out of thin air anymore, their entire scheme completely collapses. Like, my goal is to defund the government, right? You can't beat the government. And revolutions today, let's face it, like, nobody is going to, it's not conceivable in our culture, in our society, to take up arms and storm the capital and change power. Like, that's just not something that's conceivable.

It was conceivable hundreds of years ago. Revolutions happened all the time. But today, it's just, it's just not something that's feasible. you know, not in the Western world. So if you want to change the system and have a revolution, it needs to be a peaceful revolution. And the way to have a peaceful revolution is through a war of attrition, where I think that as Bitcoin grows and takes, Bitcoin is going to take capital away from the government and into the private sector. And, you know, if many, many Canadians and many, many people start to move their wealth away from fiat currency and into Bitcoin, then the government can't fund itself. by devaluing the money because, you know, when the government is printing money,

it's expecting the citizens to hold this money and to accept the devaluation. It's like, you know, that's the kind of like the logic is we can devalue the money and we can continue doing so because people are still going to still going to hold our money, even though it loses value. But if people stop holding the money, if we opt out of the monetary system of fiat and into Bitcoin, then gradually governments lose this ability to print money and without massive inflation. And the more people are into Bitcoin, as the government prints more money, inflation will skyrocket.

So Bitcoin is not going to stop money printing. If anything, Bitcoin is going to accelerate money printing to some degree. But the people who are holding the Bitcoin are going to be protected from this government-created inflation. So it puts pressure on the governments to stop printing money. Like the more people hold Bitcoin, the more pressure there is on governments to stop printing money. Ultimately, I think we're too far gone for government to stop printing money. I think the next steps are the acceleration of the money printing process. We've seen this all over the world. Argentina, Venezuela are two very powerful and potent examples. I think Canada is very, very close to what Argentina was,

15 years ago. And we're on a verge where the government has been screwing with the economy so much and subsidizing their bad decisions like Trudeau did, you know, two years ago, printing more money in a couple of years than, you know, the last 50 years combined. And I see Bitcoin as like a life raft, you know, the Canadian economy, the fiat economies, I call it, it's a sinking ship. It's a really, really big ship that's impossible to turn. You know, you've got, it's just so hard to turn this ship. And it's just so hard to turn this ship. It's also going in a bad direction and it's also sinking at the same time. So you can't turn it, you can't save it.

It's gone and Bitcoin is a life raft. And when I talk to people, I say this is a way to protect yourself, to protect your family from the devaluation of your wealth. And this is just to protect your wealth. And also from an investment thesis, it's also a generational wealth opportunity because you are right now, Bitcoin has been around for 15 years. So we're at a very interesting stage in the life of Bitcoin where if it was going to fail because of some bug or some hack or something like that, we would have already found out. Like, Bitcoin has been attacked time and time again for 15 years.

And the system has been running with 100% uptime for the last 15 years. So at this point in history, you're like, Bitcoin is safe. Like, Bitcoin's not going to get hacked. It's not going to collapse. It's not going to break. It's a very robust, resilient and decentralized system. and we have 15 years of track records to prove that. But also, we're at a point where Bitcoin's market is so tiny,

so very, very few people are in Bitcoin. And my personal thesis is that as the Fiat system continues to degrade, people will gradually start looking for alternatives, and that alternative is Bitcoin. And of course, since Bitcoin is scarce, you can't create any more, which is the fundamental value of Bitcoin, nobody governments or banks can create more bitcoins. That's the fundamental, fundamental thesis and like value proposition of this of this currency.

It's, you can prove that nobody can create more of it and you can prevent people from creating more of it. I believe there will be a gradual flow of capital away from the fiat system into Bitcoin, from real estate into Bitcoin, from equities into Bitcoin. So, you know, if you want to participate in this revolution, there are ideological reasons to do it. that Bitcoin removes one of the main levers of power of the state, which is the ability to print money out thinner and devalued citizens. It prevents another lever of power of the state, which is to censor payments to prevent people from accessing the economy.

And there's a more selfish motive to Bitcoin, which is, damn, like, this is a scarce asset, and people are going to want more of it in the future. So even if I don't believe in it ideologically, I might as well get some in case it catches on. and participate in this upside. So, yeah, the revolution for me is that if Bitcoin succeeds, it means that fiat currencies have failed. And if fiat currencies have failed, the state loses the power that it has to control the economy

and to control the population, which, as we've seen, particularly with COVID and now also with the climate change agenda, they have some pretty nasty plans in store for us. and Bitcoin is a way to remove some of the power they have over us and give it back to us to citizens. Yeah, anytime you can add things in to help, you know, as you pointed out, life raft against, you know,

the financial issues that are coming down the pipe or already in the pipe towards us. I appreciate that thought. I'm curious, you're a guy who's been all over the world, right? You're in South of France and you've been traveling, You've been, you know, you left Canada in the middle of COVID. I'd love to hear a bit more about that. But before I get there, I've been wrestling with this idea, Francis,

and I don't know if you can even offer any insights to it, but forgive me, I'm going to throw it at you and see what you say anyways. And that is, you know, you look at Washington, D.C., you look at the state within a state. Would there be a way in your mind to have a state within a state, let's say here in Alberta or in Quebec? where you operate under a different set of rules while being in your given province

or if you're in the United States, et cetera, because you know, you got Washington, but you also got London. They talk about the mile by mile. You got different spots across the world that are similar to that. You know,

in your travels, have you thought anything about that? Like, maybe we could just put down our own mile by a mile. And Bitcoin could be a part of that. And now you're free from so much of the, the insanity of the current governments. And because like one breath, I'm like, huh, man, more people need to use Bitcoin.

Okay. But more people need to wake up about what went on in COVID. And we seem to be struggling with that. And I can't get my mind around some of those hurdles. So it's like, okay, so what could we do in the meantime? Well, for some reason, they seem to be able to create their little spots within the country and operate their own way. Could we do that?

Have you thought or could you, yeah, I don't know. Maybe you've never thought about that. I have thought about this quite a lot, and Bitcoin is very much related to this idea. There's an underlying thesis that's not necessarily related to Bitcoin, but a lot of people in Bitcoin subscribe or understand this thesis, which is a sovereign individual thesis, which is that governments have been a centralizing force for the last 60 years. And as time goes by, we're also seeing that not only are governments a centralizing force, but international groups of governments are also a centralizing force away from the government. So is a country today able to make its decisions? Well, no, as we've seen with COVID, all of the orders came from the World Economic Forum,

the World Health Organization, the UN. So the world is becoming more and more centralized. And the more centralization you have, the more points of failure you have in a system, and the worst decisions you make. Because if you remove the centers of decision-making away from the end user, from the person, you start to have systematically bad decisions. And, you know, I think in more specific concrete terms, I believe in the decentralization of power. Bitcoin is a tool for that, where there are also mechanisms. I am a strong believer in the separation of Alberta and also in the separation of Quebec. Interestingly enough, I think if Alberta separates first, Quebec will follow soon after,

because the money pipeline from Alberta is ultimately, yeah, it dries out. So, you know, why are Quebecers, most Quebecers, a good part of Quebecers are true. patriotic Quebecers that, you know, they consider themselves to be Quebecer, but they see it as a good deal to be part of Canada. It's a purely economic decision. Like, why would we leave Canada when we have all this money coming to us and we can subsidize our bullshit, you know? So if Alberta leaves, Quebec is going to leave soon after. And in my ideal vision of the world, we would go back to a system of micro-states, many states, you know, even within Alberta, maybe you'll have southern Alberta, maybe you'll have northern. Alberta, same thing with Quebec. Maybe you have multiple states. And the smaller the state, the more incentive the people running the state have to have to make

the decision. There's actually a really great book by an author called Nassim Taleb, which is called the Black Swan. And there's another book called Anti-Fragile. And these were books that really shaped my understanding. And there's just this example where, you know, in Switzerland, a lot of the governance happens at a municipal level, at a very local level. And if you're a politician and you make bad decisions, you still want to be able to go to the bar

and not get booed and shunned by your community. So if you are personally very close to your community, you're not, because, you know, Justin Trudeau is not going to suffer at all from his bad decisions because he's never going to be hanging out at the same places that we are. Once he leaves office, he's going to be in Davos and he's going to be in some other places

and we're never going to see his face again, you know? And I think Bitcoin is a huge part of that because if Bitcoin makes a centralized government very, very inefficient, it incentivizes very small governments that don't have the power to print their own money. And I don't think that all of these small states, like I don't think Alberta should have its own currency. You know, I don't think Quebec should have its own currency at all. I think they should have their own borders. I think they should have their own criminal laws. I think they should have their own school systems and regulations.

But if they start, you know, if the Alberta government separated and started to create the Alberta dollar, then the same thing would happen. The Alberta government would start printing money and we would end up in the same place. I think these states should adopt Bitcoin. And, you know, we're seeing that today. There's already states that are adopting Bitcoin. You know, El Salvador has adopted Bitcoin. And I honestly think that there's going to be a few more to follow.

So all of these micro nations and microstates on a Bitcoin standard would be a very, very powerful combination. Well, yeah, Alberta, you know, you go Alberta separates, then Quebec separates. That makes sense. You're singing to people's ears out here in Alberta who always say, why are we giving so much money? And then you argue, well, why if you're Quebec, wouldn't you take it? Right. Like, you're going to, why not? It's, to me, I sit there and I go like separation.

you think about the powers that be that do not want any of that. They don't want Alberta to go. They certainly don't want Quebec to go. If they, you know, then it breaks up what they have, their racket going on. And so you go,

like, is it possible? Or is it possible to, I go back to this mile by mile, uh, thought process, uh, you know,

out of a conversation with Faisal, um, a few, Francis won't know who that is. The listener will, this mile by mile in London. And then you just, you,

you know, there's a spot in Russia. There's a spot in the United States. There's a spot in Europe. And you start to go, hmm, I wonder if a guy couldn't, if there's laws for them to do it. Why isn't there law, probably laws and rules that we could do it. And then you could create your own mini state or what have you. I don't know what you call it.

And you could start to wrestle some of that power even from the provinces. Because if Alberta separates, you could have the same problem happen. Alberta because it gets so big. And what you're talking about is that eventually you want to have it where it's decentralized and multiple states within the state, it's like, well, how the heck does that happen? To me, I don't know how we get there with a large group of people. Bitcoin is maybe showing a little bit of a roadmap because you said right at the start, you know, when you were first meeting, you were meeting, you know, kind of behind closed doors

because the way it was being slandered was that it was, you know, drug dealer. and so forth. So you've seen the progression to where it is now common talk to speak openly, to own it, to, you know, like that must have been quite the journey to have witnessed, to have been hiding,

to now being able to talk about it openly. Yeah, that journey has been absolutely insane. And, you know, I actually always thought that it would go down this way. I was very, very confident that Bitcoin would take over because the incentives in Bitcoin are,

are just perfectly aligned, right? And on a long enough timeline, if people's incentives are aligned, things are going to go a certain direction. And Bitcoin is not just a currency and a technology. There's also a huge community around Bitcoin. And it's kind of weird because it becomes part of your personality, almost. There's this whole, you know, like subculture. And it's not just like internet memes.

It's much deeper than that. One of the reasons for that is once you get into Bitcoin, there's some of the same. there's something that changes in your mindset, you become a very, very, you become a very long-term thinker. And that's because, you know, why, a good example, why don't we build cathedrals anymore or monuments that last for 200 years? Why is everything, everything looks so cheap? And why do we have a society where immediate gratification is seen as okay and delayed gratification is seen as something of the past. It's because fundamentally, if your savings get devalued over time, you want to spend them now. You don't want to save up for the future, right? If your money

loses value over time, your incentive I to spend it now. So becoming a Bitcoiner kind of changes your mindset. And there's this culture in Bitcoin revolving around the concept of a citadel. And a Citadel is basically a small private mini-state where Bitcorners live, and Bitcoiners can trade freely, that's kind of like physically separate from the rest of the political jurisdiction. So Bitcoin itself separates money from the state, but you still have to live in a physical space. Your money exists in a digital decentralized realm, but your body and your person, we have to live in a physical geographic location. So this concept of the Citadel is really, really common in Bitcoin. A lot of Bitcoiners are actually always talking about this, like,

we should buy a gigantic, you know, 2,000 acre piece of land and set our all sales there. And that actually said, I don't, have you read Atlas Shrugged by any chance? I'm like 10 hours away from the end of it. So it has been a juggernaut of a book. Yeah, yeah, it's heavy. I'm just rereading it now for the second time. I read it when I was 18 and that also changed my mindset a lot. But the concept of the Citadel is basically Galtz Gulch, right?

I don't want to, you know, throw any spoilers out there. But the concept is that productive members of society are tired of being mooched on. We're tired of being looted, but we still want to live within a community. We don't want to live by ourselves. You know, being a sovereign individual doesn't mean being a redneck in the woods with a shotgun and, like, being away from society. It just means living in consensual voluntary economic relationships with people that share your values and that you can rely on. And if you can't moot or luch your neighbor because they're using Bitcoin and they can secure their wealth and they can be seized away that removes. And another thing that you said also, if Alberta was to have their own currency, there's another great book called the Bitcoin Standard.

And a very, very compelling case made in that book is that if humans have the capacity to print money, they will. It is just human nature. You cannot put the money printer in the hands of someone and expect that they will be, that they will resist the urge to print money. Whatever happens on the long enough timeline, people will print money. So if you talk to a bit corner and you tell them like, do you know what is a citadel? Almost all of them will tell you yes. And the Citadel is essentially a micro-state of individuals who are voluntarily agreeing to share and pool resources together. You know, I'm kind of like an anarcho-capitalist.

So I'm a very hardcore capitalist that believes in the minimal states possible. But there are still, there's still a really good case to be made for people coming together and pooling resources on a voluntary basis, for example, for security. you know, what do you care the most about for you and your family? You want to live in a place where there's security. And if you have 100 families that are pooling their wealth together in order to hire security guards to build gates, to build, you know, defense kind of systems. Like, it makes sense to have a kind of condo fee. You know, we're not talking about taxation. We're talking about like a condo fee.

When you talk about infrastructure and electricity grids, for example, or irrigation or. or sewers, these are expenses that you can't build a sewer system for your own home. That just doesn't make sense. Very, very hard to build an electric grid for yourself. Like, sure, you can have your off-grid setup, but, you know, it's not very reliable. So there's still a case to be made for having some form of consensual, voluntary, you know, government. But I see that as being way closer to like a homeowners association or maybe like even more like a condo association than being a government.

and if that entity, that community local government, doesn't have the means to print money and doesn't get big enough so that it can act as a racket, then they're not going to be able to centralize, right? They're not going to have the means to become a centralizing force and start to oppress their citizens. And another thing that's really important is competition. Right?

So the more competition between these communities exist, the better they're going to be. Because, you know, if you can't leave one community and go to another one, Like today, it's really hard to opt out of a government, of a country, and go to another country because they're all the same. And I'm telling you this, like, you know, it's pretty bad in Canada, but the EU is just the same. The U.S. is just the same. Most of Latin America is just the same. There are very few havens of individual liberty in the world.

If you move to Argentina, you move to Mexico, you move to Costa Rica. Like, I moved to Costa Rica and I experienced living there. I mean, sure, like, life is a lot more in joy. than living in Canada, but it's still very, very similar. So there's not a lot of competition, but if you have like 10,000 micro-states across the planet, the ability for people to choose one versus the other and move freely between one another is what is going to incentivize these states to bring the best value to their customers. And like, that's also something that I truly believe.

We should be customers of our governments. We should be paying them for a service, and we should be getting to be getting to be. and we should be getting a service in return. And if you're paying for service and you don't get the service you deserve, you don't vote. You just go to another service provider and you vote with your money. So people should be able to vote with their money instead of voting with their votes. And for me, democracy is possibly, I'm not a Democrat.

I don't believe in the nation's sitting democracy that we have today. It's the biggest sham of all. Democracy is, you know, two wolves and a sheep deciding who's for dinner. the majority is always going to want to seize. If the majority has the means to seize the wealth of the minority, they always will. And even if you have a government that, for example, in Canada, we're probably going to have a conservative government. They are ideologically more inclined to this kind of speech that I'm having. But still, our tax rate is not going to go down from 45% to like 1%.

It's going to be the same. and the government is always going to end up doing what the majority wants. And what the majority wants is to take away the stuff of the minority time and time and time again. So the minority needs to have means to prevent that theft of their funds. I think Bitcoin is part of that. And they need to have the capacity to choose and to go to another service provider, to another government, to another entity. So the more states, the more microstates exist, the better. Before I will not let you out of here, we still have plenty of time if we need.

But, you know, one of the things you alluded to there was, you know, you've, you were a Canadian, or are a Canadian, but you lived in Quebec and in the middle of COVID. You've left Costa Rica, other places. Walk us through the journey. You're not, you're not alone in that. There's been lots and lots of Canadians say, no more, I'm out of here. and that came in the darkest hours of COVID or of the, you know, of all the lockdowns and everything.

In Quebec was a special sort of case. I assume that had a lot to do with it. But Francis, walk us through it. Yeah. So when you get into Bitcoin and you become a Bitcoiner, and I'm not talking about just like investing in Bitcoin, but like investing time and researching into it, you really start to realize that there's a gigantic scam going on,

which is the monetary system. So that really opens up your eyes where, because dollars, fiat money is a day-to-day thing that we all use. And our entire economic system is a sham. It's a Ponzi scheme. So you become very distrustful of government. So a lot of Bitcoiners, either they come into Bitcoin from the libertarian side and then they're already distrustful of government or they come into Bitcoin from the tech side and then they become distrustful of government. but there's this widely accepted culture in Bitcoin of being extremely suspicious of the government's intentions.

So I don't think a single Bitcoiner in the world that really believes in Bitcoin would tell you that the government has our best interests at heart. So that's kind of like the premise of me. You know, already coming into COVID, I was already suspicious of government. And I really hadn't taken that much time to look at health. You know, I wasn't anti-vaxxer before COVID.

I didn't really think much about vaccines at all. And I wasn't, you know, I am now, but I wasn't really concerned about, you know, fluoride in the water supply. And I wasn't concerned about, you know, microplastics and all this. I wasn't really thinking about health that much. Ironically, COVID, the COVID lockdowns got me very, very much interested in health. And as soon as the COVID thing hit, there's one thing that was immediately obvious on Twitter is that many, many bitconers immediately. we looked at the COVID thing and we're like, this is a scam. This is a sham. And I was an economics researcher before by trade. So I'm starting to look at statistics. I'm starting to look at death

rates. I'm starting to look at the data. And I'm starting to see all sorts of weird stuff. Like the way that COVID deaths are being the whole comorbidities scam, right, where you would die of cancer and you had COVID and you were counted as a COVID death. And I'm starting to look at these statistics. And, you know, the death rate just doesn't. add up. You know, you're just looking at the anecdotal evidence from hospitals and, and I'm also looking at the past hospitalization rates. I'm looking at the flu three years ago. I'm like, this is the flu. Like, this is literally, like it's like a bad, like we're going through like a bad flu season. So obviously I was like calling bullshit on Twitter and it was really interesting

because I was very, I became very, very vocal right away that COVID was a scam and I got tons of flack. I mean, I got also in my personal life, luckily, a lot of of my BitConnor friends and my family, which are also into Bitcoin, were very receptive to the things that I was saying about COVID because I was coming at it from the data, from the data, and I was just like, I have a bunch of tweets like the data just doesn't add up. And as a libertarian, I see very, very suspiciously the suspension of freedoms for emergencies. You know, one of the things that got me the most interested in politics was the Patriot Act and 9-11, you know, later on Ron Paul and WikiLeaks, but you know, you have, and because also they're doing the same thing with Bitcoin, you know, the way that you attack Bitcoin is to say, oh, it's to fund terrorism and Bitcoin is the dark web and Bitcoin is a child pornography or something. So you have this like emergency and then this like public threat and then you curtail the freedoms of the individual. And I did not handle the lockdown well at all. You know, I, I value.

very, very much my personal freedom. And I always kind of thought like, okay, you know, on a long enough timeline, the state is going to self-destruct and Bitcoin will be the answer. So I don't really care. You know, I don't care about politics. But when politics means that I personally

can't go to the gym anymore, like you've fucked with my day-to-day life, like on a serious level. This is no longer an intellectual, philosophical battle. You're fucking with my daily life. And like, I'm a, you know, highly functioning entrepreneur. I need to go to the gym. I have my routine and you're

fucking with everything about my daily life like this will absolutely not stand. So I decided to leave. I left Quebec and my first destination was also Alberta. So I had already started to gradually move all of my business away from Quebec to Alberta for a very simple reason. In Alberta, every time I went to Calgary and I had business partners in Calgary and people working for me in Calgary, I felt very welcome. And my entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial spirit and I was meeting with, you know, oil guys and banking guys and, you know, private equity guys and and and everybody was receptive and interested to my entrepreneurialism. Whereas in Quebec, my entrepreneur, my entrepreneurism was, you know, in Quebec, if you're not, if you're not in cahoots with the government as a startup, as a tech startup, you're expected to be part of this kind of like weird, I don't know, government, uh, kumbaya kind of like community or like, what's the social good of your startup, you know, doing. are you into environmentalism or something? It's kind of weird.

I didn't feel welcome at all by Quebec institutions. So already I had a philosophical affinity to Alberta. And even though I'm a Quebecer at heart, my family has been in Quebec for 400 years. Like we're one of the top top the first 50 families in Quebec. So I'm, I deeply, deeply identify with the French-Canadian culture. I don't even consider myself to be a Quebecer. I consider myself to be a French-Canadian

because Quebec is an artificial political jurisdiction. You know, I'm part of a French Canadian nation, which includes, you know, the east of Ontario and, you know, New Brunswick and all that. So I love the place, but the culture, man, it's become so collectivist and so socialist. I just, it disgusted me. It really did. So COVID happens. That's the nail in the head.

And the thing that was interesting is all of my Albertan friends were reacting to COVID very, it very differently than my Quebec friends. And I was told by, you know, I think you've had Dave Bradley on the show. Dave Bradley is a very, very good friend of mine. There's a world famous artist in Calgary called Maidex, also a good friend of mine that's in Bitcoin. And both of them told me like, man, get the hell out of Quebec, like come over here because I'm going to go crazy. You know, I'm here in Quebec and I'm losing my damn mine over here.

So I go to Alberta and it wasn't so bad in the beginning, but Calgary ended up being. you know, it wasn't a haven of freedom, you know. So luckily I had like a month of something without the mask, but after a month of me living in Calgary, the mask mandates came in. And the mask for me was one of the most, was very hard. Like the mask was very hard because I saw it as an attempt at dehumanization. Right. And I love to see people's face.

I love to communicate with people and being forced to put on a mask and hide my face like in shame of like my own body, I took that very, very badly, like philosophically. And I decided to not wear the mask anymore. So it's very funny. Actually, I became viral on the internet for this concept that I came up with. Is actually I actually went to Banff. This is a funny story.

I went to Banff and I go to this fancy hotel. And I roll up in my car and they're like, sir, you need to wear your mask. And I'm like, no, I have a medical exemption. And I didn't have one, you know, obviously. But they told me, oh, that's okay. We're going to give you this blue bracelet so that the whole staff of the hotel understands that you have a medical exemption, and then they won't bother you. So that's great.

So they give me this wristband. So, you know, as I'm walking into the hotel in Banff, you know, the staff comes up to me and they're like, hey, you have to wear a mask. I'm like, no, no, no, I have the bracelet. I have the bracelet. I have the bracelet. I'm exempt. I'm exempt. And I felt like a king.

You know, it was awesome. And then after three days, I leave the hotel. And I'm like, wait a minute. What if I just keep wearing the bracelets? and telling people that I'm exempt and I have this bracelet. So I started the experiment of going to every single store

and telling people, hey, I have the bracelet, I'm exempt. And then what was really interesting is about 90% of people just let me in because they were just drones repeating that they were just getting orders from the government and orders coming in and left and right and like it's six feet, now it's three feet, now it's the mask, but you can have the mask inside

or not inside, you can pull it up and down. So people were just receiving orders And I just confidently told people, hey, it's okay, and exempt. I have the bracelet. And I could get into any store with my magical mask exemption bracelet. I thought it was hilarious. But eventually, it became too much. And I decided to leave Canada for Costa Rica.

And the reason was that in the countryside of Costa Rica, there were these pockets of people that were living there, like living off the grid. And there was these, like, little towns that I saw from social media were like pockets of freedom. And I told myself, you know, I can't, I can't focus on my business in this situation where I'm constantly in a battle with a cashier to buy a bottle of water. And I always feel awful when I leave the house. I'm just in a bad mood. And it's hard to run a successful company and be productive member of society if you're always in a bad mood. And if you're always pissed off at the government. I have other shit to think about, you know.

I'm running a business. We have 30 employees. We have hundreds of millions of dollars of volume. You know, it's a whole, there's cybersecurity issues. There's banking shit going on. I mean, my head is full of stuff. When I go to bed at night, I'm thinking about my business, like constantly. I can't give my mind share to these idiots.

I have to leave. And I am not the only one. I'll tell you. So I moved to Costa Rica, and it's been fantastic. The pandemic in Costa Rica was phenomenal. I had a great time. I felt so bad for my friends. You know, my New Year party was insane.

It was great. It was little police enforcement. And a lot of people that thought like me also flew to Costa Rica. Why Costa Rica? I don't know. It just has this this culture of off the grid, a lot of homesteading. You know, I had a baby in Costa Rica and we had a homebirth. Like homebirth thing is a thing. You know, Farmer. Thank you very much.

You know, you just said something that I think, hey, congratulations on being a father. That is by far one of the best life choices I ever, I don't know, stumbled my way into, you know. You just don't understand until you're there. But you just said something that I think is beautiful. And I'm going to try and regurgitate it to you. And then you can pick it apart because I probably won't get it right. But you just said, you know, I go home at night and I worry about the government. And, you know, at some point you just got to go, I got a business to worry about.

and I got too much, you know, you only got so much space in your head to worry about things. And it should not be constantly focused on how the government's trying to screw you. And that's a profound thought because you think here in Canada, sitting here, I'm laughing at that because, you know, I'm like, you know, I'm an entrepreneur doing a show, trying to worry about things, constantly worried. The government is going to shut me down with all these different bills they got going on, how they're going to get me on and on and on and on it goes. And I'm like, huh, I wonder how much time I think about the government screwing me over or putting a bag over my head and just like I'm gone compared to actually trying to make this experience better for not only myself but the audience. That is about as clear a thought as anyone said on the show here in the last little bit, sir. And you know what? Whenever I think about quitting my business, whenever I think about giving up, it's never because I'm not satisfying my customers.

and it's never because I'm tired of doing what I'm doing. I'm just tired of dealing with governments and banks, man. And it's as a Bitcoin exchange, our business is to turn bank transfers into Bitcoin and to turn Bitcoin into bank transfers. We're a very highly regulated business and we have to deal with banks. And I've got to tell you, it's really, really, really soul crushing. So, you know, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, not the only entrepreneur in all sorts of sectors where everything is going well,

but I got to come home, and I got to think about this government strategy, about this tax strategy, about this accounting strategy, about all sorts of things that I should not be thinking about. And when it came to my daily life of when and where I can go to the gym, it's too much. I'm like, you know,

a man is able to take a huge beating repetitively because, you know, it's the rules of the game. And, you know, I got it. I got to create value. I want to build wealth for my family and I want to provide. And I want to build also. You know, you have the urge to build.

And then at some point, it just becomes too much. You just got to, you just got to leave. And then that was actually a great decision to, to extract myself from the situation. And then what's sad? It's like,

so now the pandemic is over. The lockdowns are over, you know, and don't get me started about the mandatory vaccination. You know, if putting the mask on my face was invasion of my privacy, the mandatory vaccination. got me really, really riled up.

And what's even more than funny is like, I had never had any qualms with vaccinations in general until it was forced on me. And when it was forced on me, I was like, wait a fucking minute. Why? Like, there's something wrong here. And I start to study and to research a lot about vaccinations and about,

and, you know, one thing that became very obvious to me, by the way, is that I was living in a small town in Costa Rica that's full of expatriates, many, many of whom are Canadian. And you would be shocked at seeing how many Canadians live in Costa Rica, in Mexico, in El Salvador, in Argentina. It's nuts. And the official government figures, I think, do not reflect at all the reality, because most Canadians that leave the country, they just don't tell the government that they've left. They just leave. And by the way, at Bo Becoin, we have a lot of clients who come to us And they were like, I'm selling my business, selling my house. I want everything turned into Bitcoin and I'm fucking off to Paraguay or I'm going to Panama, you know?

So these little towns are full of Canadians and none of us are wearing a mask. None of us are vaccinated. We are hanging out and no one is dying of COVID. And we are all healthy because we're going outside. We're going in the sun and we're eating well. And that's really where I realized like this whole thing is a complete sham because if that was true, we would all be dead by now. Right. So you wrote up Atlas Shrugged, you know, and I've been reading it.

I've been reading that book going like, man, this is, this is like, yeah, this is another book written 60, 70 years ago that's pointing out exactly where we're at. And I chuckle about a couple things. One, Alberta, you know, you're talking about COVID and everything. Let's talk about a couple things just government wise to show people, remind people, I shouldn't say show people, remind people where we're at. In Alberta, we have a red tape reduction. minister like i'm like how we just start by cutting that position and a whole bunch of other things

just get back to building things and doing things right two my home rm of britannia just so this is the farming community now if you're planning this is planning an event on private property within the r of britannia this summer that will require a special occasion permit so if you're having a wedding or a family reunion you need a special occasion permit. I would like to see them come on to one of those farmers lands and say you can't have a wedding on your property. We are getting to insane levels now. That's slavery. That's that's slavery. And the thing about slavery is that, you know, for me, slavery is not gradual. It's black and white. Are you free to do what you want with your body and your property or not? You know, and like when you're at a point where you need,

and it's so crazy, you need to have a permit to plant a tree on your own yard. You need to have a permit to cut a tree on your own yard. You need to have a permit to put a tent on your own property. And at the end of the day, 50% of your wealth is gone in taxes. And then when you die, your kids also have to pay tax on your inheritance. And like when you make a profit, despite all of that, it's tax. Your employee paid tax. You pay sell tax. And the end of the day, like, you are working for the government 70 days at 70% of the year. You know, there's a really awesome metric that's by the, I think the Fraser Institute, which is Tax Freedom Day. And I think tax freedom day, and I think tax freedom day this year it was like in mid-July which is that from the first of January to like half of

July you are working for someone else and you don't have a choice but to give them the money right so what is that that's slavery you know that's that's full-blown slavery and like you know I think I think society and when you think about like taxes and you know who will build the roads I will build the roads people in Costa Rica in the third world what happens, do you think, when a little bridge collapses? Do you think people wait for the government? People that live there, we get together, we build a damn road, we build a damn bridge. This happens all the time.

You know, who will build the infrastructure? We will build the infrastructure. We don't need government, you know? And if you look at, you know, before the Second World War, my God, look at photos of of Paris, look at photos of Montreal, look at video clips of Montreal in like 1915 or like 1910. People are not living in caves, like dying on the street of, of, you know, all sorts of disease. It's not anarchy. It's not chaos. People are, and, you know, and you had private organizations like the church, you know, and like philanthropists, that would take care of the sick

and poor, because people are fundamentally deep down. We're fundamentally good, you know, we're fundamentally good. And when you take the responsibility of being good away from the people and put it in the hands of the government, guess what happens to them? Well, they become bad, right? Because we're fundamentally good, but as soon as we're born to say, no, you don't have to be good. I'll be good for you by taking your money away. Then, of course, it doesn't incentivize people to be good and generous and caring to their neighbors because, you know, the government's going to take care of all that. And when you look at photos, you know, of Chicago in like 1990, you're like, in 1890, in 1890, you're like, this is not real. Like, this, this cannot possibly be real. How,

how is it that we seem, other than technologies and health and internet and, you know, high-tech technologies, we seem to have regressed, at least in terms of architecture, in terms of style, in terms of like culture, in terms of general happiness, we seem to have regress as a society. And what was it at the peak of the end of the 19th century? Well, it was the gold standard, you know, the era, the top era of the gold standard that's like the 1960s to like the the early 19th century before they created the central bank of Canada in 1950, before they created the Federal Reserve in I think 1925. Like the early 20th century is when all the central banks started to print money.

And that has degraded. And I would highly recommend your listeners and yourself to look at this website called WTF happened in 1971. WTF happened, what the fuck happened in 1971. And what happened in 1971, the kicker, is that Nixon took the United States off of the gold standard. So after the Second World War, the deal was that the world deal was that, okay, well, you know, all of you guys are broke because it went to war. We, the United States, are not broke. So instead of backing your currencies with gold, why don't you back your currencies with U.S. dollars,

And we will back the U.S. dollar with gold, where the U.S. government was acting essentially as the reserve bank for the entire planet, which was using U.S.D. But U.S.D was fine because it was backed by gold. And then in 1971, after also becoming broke, the U.S. government said, actually, you can't convert your U.S.D. to gold. So Nixon stopped the gold dollar convertibility. And that was the era where the United States basically, and, you know, Canada by proxy because, you know, it's one political entity, went bankrupt. So we declared bankruptcy and then we decided, hey, from now on, US dollars are no longer backed in by gold. We can just print them. And then the money printing started to massively increase in 1971. And that website shows you all the things that happened in 1971. And it goes through like divorce rates. And it goes through like the nutritional content of, of, of, food. It goes to the ability of kids

to pass a math exam. There's all of these things that all seem to have a very direct correlation with this event in 1971. And I think there's like 400 charts on this website and you scroll through this thing and you're like, if I was a scientist

and I was looking at phenomenon and I saw a correlation between all those things, I would assume, you know, correlation does not cause, does not imply causation, right? But, however, if you see all of these unrelated things start at the same date, and there is a plausible economic explanation, which is the one that I gave really starting at the show, where once you start to print money, people start to think short term because their savings get

devalued, and it creates a centralization of power at the government level, takes power, decision-making away from the individual, and starts to reward badly performing entrepreneurs because they have the endless subsidy of fiat money, and the market is no longer deciding who's a winner, who's a loser. It's the government because the government creates the money and distributes it to the people. Then you see that, okay, there is definitely a causation. So the shift away from sound money,

because the US dollar was kind of sound money-ish, you know, it was fractionally reserved, but it was definitely backed by gold. So you couldn't print. And it was a good system that worked for a while. but like the pure gold standard of like the late 19th century, early 20th century, you're like, unbelievable, unbelievable. And you know, you look at even in Alberta, my friend, which is this world famous artist from Calgary called Madex, and you have this joke where we look at like the pavement in the streets of Calgary

and the younger, the more recent, the asphalt and because like in Calgary you can see the dates of the on the sidewalks. I don't know why, but you can see like all the, and like all the recent sidewalks are just complete garbage. You know, all of these buildings are just falling apart and they're like 20 years old. Like how, man, I'm in Europe right now. You have Roman roads that are still fully functional roads. You know, you have Roman bridges where you still have cars that are driving on those bridges. You have 19, 17th century, you know, buildings that are full modern, offers buildings that are still standing and you know you compare that to what we've built under the fiat

era since since we started to print the money everything's cheap everything's garbage everything is the same so that's like coming back to the start of our conversation like that's how i see a revolution it's it's not just a it's not just a tech or it's it's also a cultural revolution of building things that last and you know another very interesting thing also when you have a child you start to think about your legacy. You start to think about what am I going to give them. And, you know, why would I work my ass off as a laborer if by the time I'm 80 and I'm 30, by the time I'm 80, that $1 that I have now is going to be worth the equivalent of 10 cents. So why would I save up to give that to my kids if they're going to, I'll just spend everything before I die.

It's the logical conclusion. So this whole concept of saving wealth to pass on to your kids and me as a Bitcoiner, I see it very differently. I'm like, wait a minute. Do I really want to buy this car with this one Bitcoin? Knowing that my child will be able to buy 3,000 acres of land with the same Bitcoin after I die. I will delay the gratification of buying useless shit because my kids are going going to when I pass away or when I'm old and I'm starting to, you know, seed their projects,

they're going to be able to do so much more with that money than I am today. So I'm incentivized to save it. And now as a Bitcoin, I'm even thinking, wait, I'm not even talking about my kids. I'm talking about my grandkids and my great-grandchildren. If a Bitcoin went from $1 in 2012 to like, I don't know, 300 bucks in 2013 to like a thousand bucks to like 10,000 bucks to like when it went to today, 100,000 bucks, it is not irrational to think that Bitcoin, one Bitcoin is going to be worth millions of dollars. I know this sounds insane, but trust me, when I first got into Bitcoin and I first heard about it, I didn't buy it at the time, unfortunately, but when I first heard about it, it was like

20 bucks. The thought of Bitcoin going to 10,000 bucks was just insane. Like nobody really seriously argued that Bitcoin was going to be worth 10,000 bucks. from $10,000 to $100,000 bucks, Bitcoin, $10 million per Bitcoin, is that really insane?

It's only 100 times more from now, right? From 100K to a million is 10 times more. It's already done multiple times, 100 times more. So I'm thinking, on a very long term, I'm not thinking this is going to happen

within a few years. I'm thinking like multiple decades. So why would I spend and waste my money now when I can create generational wealth from my entire descendant, with by by holding Bitcoin.

And that's where, you know, I'm like, okay, you know, this is the mentality of the people that were building cathedrals. Because if you build a cathedral, you'll never finish the cathedral. It takes a cathedral takes 100 years to build. So it's like at least three generations. So like, okay, we can start as a culture to think about these very long-term projects. Why? Because the wealth we have today is still going to be worth something in the future.

So instead of spending it on stupid shit now, I think, let's, let's, you know, if you think about like ranching, you know, in like very large infrastructure projects. And you can say, okay, it's worth it to start projects that will take multiple generations because the capital that's required for this projects to run and you need constant capital is going to be available for future generations. And that's like a huge shift. And one thing, an anecdote, I'll tell you, is that Bitcoiners are having babies.

There is a Bitcoin or Baby Boom. I do not have data to back this fact other than the fact that I am friends with hundreds of Bitcoin, I'm a very frequent speaker at Bitcoin conferences. Pretty much, I don't have friends that are outside of Bitcoin at this point. I'm fully, fully into the Bitcoin community. Everybody wants to have kids in Bitcoin. Because we have a very positive and optimistic outlook. And people that are not into Bitcoin, not just Bitcoin, but they're not into the freedom movement.

A lot of people are pessimistic about the future, whereas we are very, very optimistic. So you ask a random person that's in Bitcoin, you have kids. like no but I want some or yes I have kids or yes I have more I want more and why why do you want to have kids? Well, what am I going to do with the bitcoins when I die? Some you know it's like a lot of people in Bitcoin, but but you've already said it. You got a positive outlook on the future and you think you know there's a lot of people who don't want to have kids and they, why is that? Well, they don't know how they'll afford it one or two, they look at the future and they go I don't see the you know like I don't know if that's a good idea. and that's a very dark view of the future.

And what you're saying rings to my ears, you know, anytime there's anything with a healthy outlook on the future, like kids are a part of that. We don't have kids, we don't have a future, right? Yeah, 100%. Take the wealth out of it and just go,

if there's no kids being born, the old human population dies off pretty darn quick. So having a positive outlook on where the world is heading, even if rough days are ahead of us, I got a lot of time for that thought, that sentiment. Yeah. Last thing I want to talk about, I want to talk about the truckers. I want to get back to COVID a little bit because one thing that happened is during the, during COVID, I think a lot of us had dark thoughts.

It was very dark times, very pessimistic, very worried about the future. And I think a lot of people were very frustrated at the government. And, you know, we're thinking like, there's no way out of this, right? Because I can't, I have, you know, there's not going to be a revolution against the government. This is just not going to happen. So we're just stuck in this forever. And Bitcoin came out as a positive thing that people can grasp onto. Even though things look very dark and it looks like we are losing our freedom and it looks

like we're getting robbed, there is something that we could, as Bitcoiners, that's the thing I really like to do is talk to those people and be like, it's not hopeless. Actually, we've been working on something for the past 10 years. It's called Bitcoin. and what don't I tell you about Bitcoin? And you can see that we can see a path out of this mess. That is a peaceful path. It's a voluntary path.

There is no darkness involved with Bitcoin. It's very, very positive. And that message resonated with a lot of people, you know, because when the Emergencies Act, the trucker protest was a very positive and optimistic time during COVID. Finally, we're coming together as a community, as a group of people. like our rights will not be violated, we will go to Ottawa, and then boom, you know, we're crushed with the Emergencies Act, banks get frozen, you know, the truckers, it was a very dark time, but then I think we were, the Bitcoin community was able to take a lot of that momentum and be like, listen, there's a

positive path. And I, you cannot imagine how many people found Bitcoin through this trucker protest, this COVID, you know, anti-hysteria, anti-terony movement came into Bitcoin. And that's what I want to offer people. I want to offer people hope. I want to offer people a constructive thing. And people that are also, a lot of people, they tell me, like, I want to quit my day job. I want to work for you. I get job people that spontaneously ask for a job, you know, all the time.

And it's because we just build shit. you know, we're builders, you know, like Bitcoin is not, so people have this erroneous view of Bitcoin that were just a bunch of Wall Street, you know, nitwits that are just like gambling people's money and it's all paper shit. No, no, no, it's like, it's software infrastructure, hardware infrastructure, there's mining, there's energy involved, and there's, it's open source, and it's a community of people. When I ask someone in Bitcoin that I meet at a conference, I never ask them, like, where are you from? Or, you know, What's your background?

I asked them, what have you built? Okay, you're like, what's software? What company are you building? What new system are you devising? Like, what paper are you writing? Like, what are you contributing to this thing? And it's a community where production is valued. And, you know, at a fundamental level,

the Bitcoin mining system is that the proof of work from converting electricity into mathematical, outputs, it's called proof of work, you can only create Bitcoin by proving that your computer has done a certain amount of work. That is a cultural concept in Bitcoin. Like, you are, you are only worth what you are, what you can prove you did, you know, like, I don't care about your ideas. I don't care about, like, what are you building? So for anybody that's an entrepreneur that wants, you know, it's very atlas shrugging. You know what I mean?

it's like it's there is a huge overlap and uh you know final thoughts on people who are reading um atlas shrug right now or will after this bitcoin is reared and metal that's what bitcoin is yeah good old reared and metal i tell you i don't know how many times now i sit and i listen to what's going on and i just go atlas shrug you know like who is john gulp it's it's like no atlas shrug like this that entire book it's been uh boeing Boeing planes are breaking down and you know that's the last one of it. That's just a symptom. Yeah. Well, I mean, you can just see it just, I just, I've been talking way too much about it lately, not way too much. People should read it. I just, I had, you know, you look back to the world wars, specifically, but different times,

all the books written in that time frame. And I keep having this thought and I don't know what to do with it. But essentially, when the world goes to places that are so insane and you're seeing the insanity but the general public doesn't want to listen you write a story because they'll read said story and that's where you get Atlas Shrugged

that's where you get 1984 that's where you get Aldous Huxley is a brave new world why because they won't believe you they don't want to listen so they tune you out so then you write a book that becomes this story that resonates across time

because it's literally talking about the insanity of the world and that was you know i like alice shrug just it just surprised me written in 57 yeah like so it was already starting or it had already begun way back then and she could see it and so she wrote a story about and you know yeah people read stories people listen to the story yeah and you know the uh when i was in uh in in in college uh as a as a high school you know late late late teens um like everybody in my generation, I was, I was susceptible to lefty ideas. You know, I want to change the world. The UN was great. You know, socialism was fantastic. You know, if you're not socialist in your, in your teens,

you know, you're doing something wrong. But then my dad is actually a huge libertarian, a huge conservative figure in Quebec. My grandfather was also a conservative figure in a libertarian. And he never ever tried to convince me. And my dad's a huge capitalist entrepreneur. He never tried, we never had a debate. He just gave me Atlas Shrugged when I was 17. And he was like, read this. And I read Atlas Shrugged.

And as I'm reading the book, I'm just realizing, oh, my God, I am the bad guy in this book. The hero is the virtuous. And it's because there was nobody talked about the virtue of selfishness, the virtue of production. Everybody was talking about the virtue of redistribution, right? And that's also

my message to a lot of people in Bitcoin. It's like Bitcoin is a moral stand. Like, when I first got really, really into Bitcoin in 2015, I got into Bitcoin in 2013, but then as time goes went by, I like fully became really convinced.

What I realized, I am not investing in this asset. I am boycotting fiat. I am taking a stand where like I don't want this dirty money. I will not touch it anymore. And it's kind of like the same thing. I struck with the gold and the paper money. I was like, me holding this money is an immoral act because I am allowing myself to be devalued. I am allowing the government to take away this money from me to fund immoral acts like wars and like, you know, whatever it is that the governments are doing. So by opting into.

Bitcoin, and out of Fiat, I'm taking a moral stance, you know? And that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's really my, my, my, my pitch. It's like, you can be selfish and think about it just from an investment perspective, but I'm thinking about it as like, I'm saving my soul over here. I will, I will not be complicit in, in this, in this Fiat game, I'm opting out. You can't use me. You cannot, you can not, you, you cannot, you can't devalue me to fund your, your, your, your, your bullshit. Like, I'm not going to be your pawn anymore. I, I, I, I, I, I tell you what, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I tell you know, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I to this ring every day because I never know what I'm going to get. And Francis, I had no idea who you were before this. I'm very thankful you gave me some time today to take this conversation on. And I look forward to the next time you're in Alberta and hopefully getting to run into you shake your hand and maybe follow up with a different conversation because you've given me lots to think about today.

But either way, thanks for hopping on and doing this.