Shaun Newman Podcast - #681 - Takota Coen

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

Takota Coen is a 2nd generation organic farmer who was born, raised, and continues to help steward Coen Farm an award winning, and thriving 250 acre diversified farm in Central Alberta. We met at the Bitcoin Rodeo in Calgary where we discussed farming and Bitcoin. Let me know what you think. Text me 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast E-transfer here: [e-mail] Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Text Grahame: [phone] – and be sure to let them know you’re an SNP listener.

This is Ken Drysdale. This is Dr. Mark Trozy. Hey, this is Gordon McGill. This is Drew Weatherhead, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. How's everybody doing today? Tuesday! That's right.

This is day number 23, 24, maybe 24, 24 on the road. Days are blurring together here. And before we get to any of that, how will we start here? Silver Gold Bull, my favorite precious metal dealer is offering a full suite of services to help you buy, sell, and store precious metals, and they got something just for you. They've got an ultimate sleep at night insurance policy. That's right.

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Oh, boy, oh boy, oh boy. We're goofy here. I'm sitting in Colorado right now. It's a beautiful state. Rec tech. Rec tech power products for over 20 years. They've been committed to excellence in the power sports industry. They've got a full lineup.

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Give him a call 780842-3433. Caleb Taves, Renegade, Acres, they do the community spotlight. And for the month of July, the community is you wonderful people. The SMP community, I've been getting asked a few different things about the trip. And if you're wanting to fall along with a few different updates, I've been putting out roughly an update every week on Substack. You can go in the show notes. You can sign up for it. It's free.

And right now for the month of July, I've been just putting out free content, kind of updating people on where we're at. Like I say, by Tuesday, will be day 24. Currently, we're sitting in Colorado, Denver, Colorado. And I've got to give a shout out to Bo and Chelsea, college friends of ours. and they put us up. We've got the kids playing, and it's been a fun couple of days, and next we're on to South Dakota, and by Wednesday morning, we land at the final destination, at least before we turn it head the other way, which is a little ways off yet, but we land in Minnesota.

So if you're wanting to follow along with a few different details, substack is where you want to go, and you can find out a little bit more of what's been happening on the road. All right, let's get on to that tale of the tape. He's a permaculture educator, Red Seal Carpenter, second generation organic farmer and co-owner and operator of Cohen Farm. I'm talking about Dakota Cohen. So buckle up.

Here we go. Welcome to Sean Newman podcast. Today I'm joined by Dakota Cohen. I hope I said that right. That's right, man. A, we're sitting, as probably people can hear, because there's a little bit of chatter in the background. But we're live at the Bitcoin Rodeo,

so shout out to Dave Bradley for bringing me here and having me out. Thanks for giving me a bit of time. I listened to you on the first roundtable, and I thought, man, there's some interesting things there when you're talking Bitcoin and farming. And just, I don't know, I thought I'd explore it a little bit further. But it's nice to finally meet you. Yeah, pleasure, man. I've heard a lot of great things about you. And you've actually been on my docket to reach out and get you on my podcast.

So we'll have to... You've got a podcast? Yeah. What's your podcast called? It was called Building Your Primaculture Property, but now it's switching over to building your homestead. Building your homestead. Yeah. And I've got a YouTube channel.

And it's just, yeah, my name. name so folks can check it out there if they want well here we'll start off i thought this was going to be super weird but anyone who comes on the podcast live we uh we give them a one ounce silver coin which is which is really weird to be at a bitcoin conference i'm sorry dave but uh silver gold bowl is one of my major sponsors yeah anyone who does it in person we always uh we you know it's a little different on the road but uh that's beautiful you know it's a silver coin so uh i don't know if you're silver you know you got i'll add it to my vault i've got some silver at home so that's beautiful Thanks, man.

Yeah, you got her. So tell me a little bit of your story. Like, who is Dakota? I got to know this story. You know, I don't know how long we got sitting at a conference. And once again, I apologize to the listener, listening going, man, there's chatter in the background. That's just part of the venue, part of the atmosphere here today. But tell me a little bit about it.

Yeah, so I was born and raised on a mixed organic farm in central Alberta. My parents have been organic since the 1980s. So they were organic before it was cool. and yeah just kind of being a black sheep my whole life I was always interested in alternative things from an early age I recognized just the corrupt ineptitude of government systems like when I was in elementary school I was writing poetry about the you know basically how stupid the government was

I really woke up when I had a tour of the it was a live parliament session when I was in like grade six or seven or something like that and I got to see like a live debate debate when it wasn't all cut up into the nice little talking points that you see on the news, I got to see like a full hour of it and just saw that it was just literally a bunch of kids bickering and there was no point to it whatsoever. And so I've been kind of awake for a long time. And yeah, like I said, our farm, we've been organic for over 30 years now. I was going to say, you know, like trying to get kids into like politics.

But then as an adult, you watch Parliament. And you see it and you're like, they don't even talk to each other. Why would I, like, our leaders aren't modeling good behavior for the public to, you know, kind of like follow suit. It's quite the opposite. I mean, did you, I assume you watched Biden and Trump's debate? I didn't watch it. Oh, man. I can't.

At this point, it's professional wrestling. And I just, I'm so sick of it. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I mean, I'm like, this is something. Like, this is the. free world? This is this is this is where we're at like pretty um pretty wild things and you know like I try and try and wrap my brain around how on earth do you get you know do you not fix politics

but like fixed society of where we're at or even just try and help like guide it through some things that you're like this is this is this is this is wild you know and and you know when you watch our leaders you go well that isn't they ain't going to show us how to do it no no exactly They're followers. They're not leaders. And this is why, you know, governments have polls, right? They're literally probing the masses to say, what are most people think so that I can parrot those ideas so that they'll vote me into positions of power that I can benefit myself.

That's literally politics in a nutshell. And so, yeah, I've just been completely disenchanted from the political side of things. And for a long time, I was, you know, pretty hopeless. about the world and like you said, how to create that change and build a new world. And, yeah, long story short, eventually I came across Bitcoin and I see it as if it's used properly and if there's a few other, if people understand the philosophy behind it, I see it as one of the most profound tools for freedom and creating this ideal society that everyone, I think, and the freedom space is looking for.

And why do you say that? What is it about it that you're like, people, like, because you, forgive me, you're from central Alberta, correct? It's not like you're from, I don't know, some far off land, your backgrounds and farming, correct? I was born and raised. I've never gone to university. I went to trade school.

I'm a carpenter by trade, did that for four or five years, and then came back to the farm in 2012, and I've been doing that since. And because, you know, my parents were able to work themselves at a debt, you know, pretty, pretty early on when I was a kid, we had enough time to basically educate ourselves. I went to, you know, a regular small, you know, farm school or a country school, but there was lots of time for, you know, self-directed learning in our home. And so I've always been asking questions about, you know, history and how we got to where we are. and looking for solutions. And so I see Bitcoin as a potential tool for freedom.

And the reason I say that is the only reason our political system is able to continue as farce this long is because they have the ability to print as much money as they want and give it to themselves and their buddies to perpetuate the whole system. And so if we had a means to defund them, they literally have no power. They're just psychos that are talking on a stage. So do you think you can get enough people to take, like to go into Bitcoin? Like do you think it's kind of like, you know, like if I look, if I look back over the last

hundred and let's say 50 years, probably a little less than that, you go, what's, what's one thing that consumers like just switch to immediately because they're like, this works? And you probably go to the automobile. I would say, you know, you're riding around a horse, you know? maybe you got a pedal bike and you're sitting there and the first one goes by and you're like that was kind of weird it's kind of cool yeah what is that uh you know that was the model t oh okay all right how much that cost i can't afford that all right and you carry on and then the next one and then the next one and the next one and the next one eventually you know everyone has one and infrastructure is built to accommodate it more and more and more to the point where we're at today where you know like uh one of the speakers preston was saying you know like it's it's like air for us or water for a fish you just don't even notice anymore. Vehicles. I was driving in and I'm like, this is wild.

Think of just hopping in a vehicle, being in three lanes of jarded, like wall-to-wall traffic and being comfortable in it. And I'm like, and I'm comfortable in it. Like, this is wild. So when I look at Bitcoin, I go, is it possible to get a majority of people to adopt it? And do you think there's a time coming where you just, not over a cliff, I don't know, the tipping point, I suppose, where all of a sudden everybody's just like, this makes complete sense.

because when I look at Bitcoiners, you all have this like, it's almost like you've learned the truth, if you would. I don't, you know. And it's kind of similar to gold and silver bugs, right? They're like, man, what are you doing? Yeah. You know, and I hear similar things come out of both camps, if you would. And I look at them all and I go, yeah, but they're under the umbrella of freedom.

You know, if you're in the freedom camp, this is just like this is another, you know, another pit stock should probably make. So do you think people will take it or will adopt it in a mass? Absolutely. So if you look at the adoption rate of Bitcoin compared to the adoption rate of the internet, Bitcoin is currently... Yeah, internet might be a better... It's... So, you know, obviously the internet in the early years, no one understood it. It was this thing that was, oh, you can send, like, why would... I guess write a letter, or I can just call someone on the phone. Why would I need to send a picture? Like, no one... Why do I need to send an email? That doesn't make any sense.

But, you know, obviously now, you know, the internet is massive. Well, it's air. It's, yeah, it's the air we breathe in. But the adoption rate of Bitcoin is basically outpacing the adoption curve and going into exponential than the Internet. We're just earlier in the curve yet. So I think absolutely it's only inevitable that Bitcoin will become the air that we breathe. However, the thing that concerns me is that if people don't understand some of the other concepts of freedom and the illegitimcy of government, and the immorality of, you know, taxation and inflation and things like that, Bitcoin will just

become another thing that the governments can use to control us. So it's only part of it. It's a great tool. Just like a, you know, a rifle can be used to, you know, hunt your food. It can also be used to enslave humanity. And I see Bitcoin as no different. And the other thing I wanted to address was your, the comment about the gold and silver bugs, which I think the people who get gold and silver as a hard money currency it's great

but it's only part of the puzzle because the reason we move to a cash society is that our money used to be say on it, you know, redeemable for gold at the Federal Reserve or if you're in America and I don't know what it used to say in Canada but they were certificates. They were certificates of gold that was somewhere in a vault. The thing is you had to trust the banker

and trust that he wouldn't give out more receipts for gold than he had on hand. So because gold was really expensive to carry around with you, it wasn't very divisible. Like if you had an ounce of gold and you needed to buy something that was, you know, a fraction of an ounce, it was hard to break it up. And it was hard to transport long distances. It was hard to validate. Because if you have a gold bar of gold, the only way to make sure that it's gold all the way to make sure that it's gold all the through is to melt the thing down, which takes huge amounts of energy. Most people don't have that. And so in order for gold to become, and silver, to become a currency that people could use, you know, outside of just their friends and family, there had to be some kind of intermediary,

i.e. the banks that stepped in to act as an assurity again for that. And that's where the receipts, it was easier to carry around paper. You could give, you know, break the paper down into smaller notes. And then, of course, then the bankers started to give out more receipts. That caused bank runs. The government intervened and said, now, we're going to regulate this, so this doesn't happen, even though they were the ones that created the bank runs. And here we are today.

So Bitcoin as a technology has all of the good properties of gold, and it has properties that gold doesn't have, i.e., it's very easy to recognize with basically there's dozens of apps online that can verify, anybody else's transaction to make sure that it is actually Bitcoin. You don't need to melt it down. And it also, you can transfer an unlimited amount of wealth anywhere in the world without requiring and having to go through a bank,

which a bank can reverse those transactions at will, which they've done many times in the past. So that's really the innovation that Bitcoin brought to the tables. It allows people to be their own banks and have all the good aspects of gold with none of the bad. And it's,

I hear, like, I'm like, you know, in the stages, folks of where I'm at with Bitcoin, I mean, like, you know, I talked to Vance Crowe a lot, and he's been like hard on me. Like, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta,

you gotta, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta, I just don't move fast. I like, I understand I'm probably missing a giant opportunity, but like, if, if you're truly at the beginning, which I think,

you know, of Bitcoin, you know, being around, you know, what is it, a little less than 15 years, roughly or right in that ballpark, you know, you're really at the beginning, you know, you think of the internet, the early 90s. And we're still early. Right. We're still very early. We're still very early. You know, I'm trying to build a foundation of understanding these different things.

Because like a healthy skepticism of the government, I'm like, well, I'm there. Like, I mean, I literally just did a conference myself on, on like, I don't like, I don't Thank you. And I want to find ways to make sure that we prepare for, I call it the storm ahead. I assume we're right in the middle of a hurricane. Yes. You know, we're trying our best to batten down the hatches and move forward. You brought up, you know, on stage, one of the things that really stuck out to me was the propaganda around farms. And you said it's almost illegal not to be a Fiat farmer.

And I'm probably butchered how I said that, but that's how I wrote it down. I think, you know, I got a ton of agricultural listeners. grow up in an agricultural area, right? Oil and gas as well. When you get talking about farming and Bitcoin, you know, and you're talking, you know, guys are probably riding around the tractor right now, got this on. Talk to me about that. Because I'm like, that really, I'm like, what do you just say? That sounds interesting. Yeah. And so this is where I want to preface this with, you know, I grew up in a farming environment and I have so much respect for, for farmers and the work that goes into it and the risk like it's one of the like it's like it's such a stressful job has i think it's

one of the highest suicide rates of any occupation in the world farming it's really tough um you know in in today's day and age um but the and i i have i have so much respect for farmers however our current agricultural system has been completely co-opted by the state like our all of our major crops, all of our, you know, the industrial animal feeding operations and stuff like that, like they were pushed, they've been pushed for the last 100 years by government subsidies, by coercive regulations to force people to get big or get out. And as a result of that, farmers have been basically shoehorned into a position where, you know, there's only certain crops they can grow or they can't get insurance for it.

unless they use certain products, unless they use, you know, the herbicides and the fertilizers and all these things. Just so I understand, you're saying you can't get insurance if you are going to grow X and not use X or Y, I guess. If you have debt, like if you're debt on your farm, you can't get crop insurance unless you are following certain protocols. And, you know, again, let's- What do you mean by debt?

Like you're $100 grand in debt because you've taken money out to buy land type thing? Yeah. Like if you're taking out a mortgage from AFSC or FCC and you're in debt, and in order to get that debt, you need to have crop insurance to make sure that you can cover your payments. In order to have the crop insurance, you have to follow certain protocols, which is basically using the herbicides and the things which the herbicide companies have petitioned the government to, like it's all in bed together. And now, this does not mean that farmers are bad and that they're poisoning the environment or that cows are. I don't think that at all. No, and I don't either. So I want to preface that with, like, if someone is, you know, what you would see is like a commodity farmer today,

like a lot of them in private, I've had a conversation with them, they hate what they're doing. Like, it's so stressful. The margins are so slim. They're basically kept propped up by these government subsidy, like cheap debts. Farmers get cheaper debt than anyone else in any other business. They're also backed up by, you know, agra-stability and agra-invest, which are government programs that basically if you're, you have a crop failure, in addition to whatever insurance you've got,

you've got these other kind of income stabilizations. There's massive grants that are getting farmers further and further into debt into this industrial agricultural system, which makes it harder to get out of. Like right now there's like millions of dollars of subsidies to build chicken barns, hog barns, industrial dairy operations. And again, there's nothing wrong with having large arms, but the current agriculture system that we're seeing, like, it's not working, in my opinion.

It's, there are environmental consequences that are, like, not, I'm not talking about global warming here. I'm talking about, you know, soil erosion. We're seeing a lot of, you know, diseases in animals and crops that are, I believe, symptoms of this mechanistic, pharmaceutical type farming system that we've been shoehorned into by the government. Now, again, that's going to rub a lot of. lot of farmers who are playing in that game the wrong way. And I just want to say that, like, that is not an attack against them personally. They have been forced into this system. They are, have essentially been enslaved by the system where they have to farm this way. And I don't think a lot of them enjoy it, but they can't get out because they're on this debt treadmill.

And in order to get the debt, you have to play their game. You have to play the game. Like, For example, when my dad bought his original home quarter in 1986, he wanted to buy two quarters. So he went to AFSC and they said, sure, we'll lend you money for two quarters. However, you have to also build a hog barn. And my dad's, well, I don't want to build a hog barn. I want to do this. I said, well, then we'll only give you funding for one quarter. And he said, okay, I won't do that.

I think it was within 10 years, the hog market fell out. everyone who had built a hog barn of that style went bankrupt. You know, next-door neighbors lost everything. They lost a family farm. Because, you know, whenever you go to borrow land, you got to, you know, use current assets that you already own as, you know, collateral against the new debt that you're getting. And so they, they, every, you know, 10 years,

there's a turnover in the market. And, you know, either it's canola or hog or chickens or whatever it is. There's something that's high. All these government finance, agencies are pushing those things. And then, you know, some guy who's, you know, running the stock market changes some figures and the market drops out of that. Everyone loses their shirt.

And the whole thing repeats again. And so, like, this is a very predatory system that has been designed to basically, it's made farmers slaves. So then you say farmers, you need to get into Bitcoin and this is why? That's part of it is, but it's not just farmers. Everybody needs to get into this. Fair. Fair.

Yeah. So, like, if you look at the price of anything in the last four years, it's gone up. In some cases, almost double. Why? Because the government has printed, basically doubled the money, or it's 40 or 50% in the last four to five years. So that means that any money that you had in your bank account, so if you stop thinking about your savings account as a number and you started thinking about it as a percentage, your percentage of your savings account dropped by 50% in the last four years. That's called inflation.

It's a hidden tax outside of income tax and all the other forms of taxation that governments have. And it's done secretly. And the Roman emperors used to do this by coin shaving. Yeah, well, I was going to say the way, I appreciate you putting it in percentages because the way my brain works, I always think of coins. Yes. Right? So they used to do coin shaving and you go, well, why?

did they do that? Well, because they wanted to make more money supply. So they trim up the coin just ever so slightly, then they take said shavings and now they get more coins. The next thing they did was, and I think we all know, well, I shouldn't say we all know this, but the next thing they did was they started to, you know, if it was 100% silver, then it was 80% silver, then it was 60, then it was 10%. And now you get more money supply because you're using less of what money is and we're seeing that play out in the current system under Fiat. And the key pieces is that When the government collects those coins and remins them or dilutes them down or it prints more of them, that reprinted money only goes out to certain people.

And the people that it goes out to are the people who play the government's game. It's their buddies. It's their cronies. Well, we're seeing a huge push in that in the green agenda, right? Exactly. There's a ton of money getting flooded into that market. Where is that money coming from? Exactly.

And so the thing that I love about Bitcoin is that it's an off-ramp. I actually had this insight after the last roundtable that we had if you go back several hundred years when slavery was was legal and it was actually illegal to help a slave escape from their master right like and not only that but it was legal for if one of your slaves escaped in some in some states or counties you could commandeer someone else's boat or horse or basically whatever you needed to go and capture your slave.

And so for me, Bitcoin is the underground railroad. That is, that is, it's, it's allowing people to get out of this system. Right now we're all slaves. 40% of our life energy was stolen from us in the last four years through inflation alone. That's outside of income tax. There's probably another 20 to 50% depending on how much money you make, stolen off top of that. Then there's GST. They just passed the new law in the states.

If you are in Canada where if you're, if you have assets worth more than $250,000, the capital gains is 66.6%. I love how everybody says two thirds and I'm like, interesting number. Let's call the number what it is, okay? It's the devil's number, folks, and that's what it's at. And that just says a lot about the government. We are at a minimum 50% slaves right now in our society. And Bitcoin is basically a money that no one can print. So the way that it's designed, no government can pull the coins back, make more of them, and then give them to their buddies.

What do you, you know, like, one of the hesitations of a lot of people who listen to this podcast, certainly, you know, like, I assume you've done a ton of research on this, right? Sit and I listen to you guys talk here today. And I'm like, okay, there's a, you know, I was saying to you before we started, one of the things I enjoy about coming to somebody else's conference. One, I get to like sit and, you know, nitpick it and go, huh? I like that. And maybe steal a couple of, oh, I don't mind that. Oh, I didn't. The other thing is, is I look at all the speakers.

I'm like, I don't know, a single soul here. I'm going to learn some things. I'm going to get to be around some different people. And the hesitation with a lot of people in Bitcoin, sure, they don't understand it. But that comes with a lot of different things, right? Like, I think of the freedom community here. There was a lot of things they didn't understand about COVID. What did they do?

They researched it. And they know more than half the bloody doctors in this country. Exactly. So when I come to Bitcoin, I go, okay, so what is the hesitations? Yeah. One is the origin story of Bitcoin. Yes. They stare at that and they go, okay, you want a conspiracy theory.

Some guy saves the world and then just disappears. That makes zero sense. How concerned at all are you that this is a giant sci-op that the government is created to get a bunch of freedom people to put their money and assets into, to them one J just flick the switch and she gone. So this is a fantastic question. I think it's one of the most, if not the most important question in the Bitcoin space. I've asked it to several people

and myself on my own podcast most people don't like to to answer it I'll give you my answer which is why didn't they like to answer it first? I don't know doesn't that scream more a conspiracy?

It does and so I don't I don't see it as a conspiracy I see it as a sign of people are they haven't they're scared to go there because for them you know if you understand the problems in the world and you see how bad it could get

and then someone offers you a holy grail Sure. And then there's potentially a hole in the bottom of it that could leak out everything. It's almost like you don't want to look at it because it could shatter your whole paradigm, right? So for me, I actually, I think the place I've gotten to is even if it is a sciop, even if Satoshi Nakamoto, who is the founder who created it disappeared. And there's some circumstantial evidence that he was affiliated with the CIA and there's some other things. However, it's all circumstantial.

It's all rumor. Every other currency in the world, including gold and silver, is being objectively manipulated. Like, provable. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So for all you folks who just own gold and silver, understand that they're suppressing, like, it should be breaking out, like, giant. Yeah. But they don't.

They don't. They keep pushing it down. And so in my mind, every other currency in the world is a scam. Bitcoin may be a scam. However, the principles that it's based upon, and the thought leaders in this space, guys like, so if folks want to do their own research, Michael Saylor, Safedina Moose.

Those are the two guys you need to go research. There's two great books, the Fiat Standard, and the Bitcoin Standard. They're fantastic books. They're on Audible. They're really easy reads. They go through that. Did I mention I have like a 50-hour road trip coming up?

Okay. They're fantastic. I've listened to them several times. Michael Saylor is just, he's just a fantastic. He's been on hundreds of podcasts. He's got, there's just so much information. Those two guys are the two guys that I would spend the most amount of time on, particularly with Safeedina Moose in his books,

the Bitcoin standard, the Fiat standard. They break it down conclusively, in my mind, from the principal's perspective, that Bitcoin is perfect money. Now, could there be a backdoor that someone could turn on at some point that, you know, allows them to print more of it, or, you know, it makes it, you know, traceable potentially. That hasn't happened yet.

For me, the community that has gathered around Bitcoin understands the principles of what money has to be. They get the freedom aspect. I don't care if it's a sci-op because if it is in the future, whenever they engage that back door, everyone in the community will be like, oh, shit, they got us.

Okay, well, let's build another one and let's close that back door. So let's take a look at gold and silver. The purchasing power of gold and silver has basically been the same for 2,000 years. The amount of wine, the amount of beef, the amount of like a fine man suit was basically worth an ounce of gold. I like the fine man's suit. I'm, you know, yes. Yeah.

And so gold is a great store value. Yes, but it has problems, i.e. it's not very portable. It's hard to, it's not very recognizable. It's hard to verify. and that's what insinuated these bankers to get involved. And then I need to trust someone. Bitcoin is actually a relatively simple technology that once you grasp the core principles of it

and you get a few apps on your phone, it's literally as easy as online banking at this point. 10 years ago, it wasn't. But we're at the stage now where I think we're at the sweet spot where we're still early in the game. we haven't yet like it's it's it's accelerating faster than the internet but we're still in the very early stages of that yet the technology is at the point where it's it is it is as easy if not easier and cheaper than any online banking that you're already doing and yes it may be a siop however

everything else is this one there's no objective proof that it is that it is a siop so in my mind I'm gonna I have some money in Bitcoin I also have money in silver I I'm, well, that's where I'm at, like, I look at it and I go, you know, like, is there problems with all different types? It's like, yeah, probably. But look at it, look at it, look at it, I'm like, this is, this is getting, like, absurd. Yeah. You know, when you, when you, when they, your roundtable about talking about Argentina and different

company. Yeah. We just think it can't happen here. Yet, it's literally happening. It's literally happening. And I want to, I want to stress this in Venezuela, the inflation rate. it was 2,000% 2,000% in a year.

In Zimbabwe, I think over 40 years, it was like 4 or 5 billion percent. My brain can't even comprehend that. You can't even comprehend it. You can literally, Google this right now, you can look up trillion-dollar Zimbabwe banknotes.

They have trillion-dollar banknotes because it was that bad. I think Zimbabwe has gone through like a dozen or more government currencies because the rulers in charge, they basically run it for five years, tell everyone loses faith in that, then they say, okay, we're not going to do it. We promise we're not going to print more money again, and they just keep doing that. In Canada, inflation was like, you know, 10 to 20 percent. So in Zimbabwe, it took like decades, or Venezuela, it was decades, Zimbabwe, it was 40 years,

and it's still going. So this inflation game, this invisible theft of our purchasing power, can happen for decades and people won't rise up against it. Now, I see Bitcoin and other things that I do too, but for me, the piece that I, another property of Bitcoin that I like is that it'll be really hard to get gold out of the country

on your person. Sure. Right? You're not doing it. I can carry an unlimited amount of wealth in Bitcoin with my brain, with 12 to 24 words. The portability of it is nothing touches. And no one can know.

So there are, again, I'm not saying don't buy gold. I'm not saying don't buy silver. No, but I think even where I sit, I don't, I'm a big silver and gold. I really like it. I really like having something tangible in my hand. Because in one essence of Armageddon, if it were to ever come to that, you have something physical that you can hand over. Yeah, if you get hit by, let's just go EMP, you get it hit by something that just knocks everything out.

You have something very physical. You know, like when they were joking around about the solar flares, geez, what was it? That was Jamie Sinclair, retired military veteran now from Regina. I was driving up there and they were talking, that was when the big solar flares are going on. And Elon Musk texted tweeting about, everybody's tweeting about it. So I took some silver with me, and I laughed because, you know, when I was younger, I biked across the country. So I was like, well, I can bike back if the vehicles won't work.

And I'll take a little silver with me. and people understand silver and I can give it to them and on I'll go and I'll be fine, you know? And I think when you're looking at the future, we have no idea, right? We have no idea if, you know, Canada as a country or the Canadian dollar lasts another 100 years, 500 years or five years. We have no idea. So you look at it and you start to go deeper into rabbit holes and trying to find, you know, different ways to kind of navigate through. and I just go like to me Bitcoin, the more I stare at it, I go whether it's 1% or 5% of what you own, 0.5% of a percent,

if you just start to put money there and see what it does. Then you might start to understand more of it and what's that going to hurt you? I don't think anyone's, I haven't heard a Bitcoiner yet. I could be wrong. Walk in and you go, put 100% of everything you own into this today. I'm sure there are a few that would say that, But most people are like reasonable.

And they're like, honestly, you know, 1%. Put 1% in there and just see what happens. Yeah, my strategy for myself is I want to have a year's worth of living expenses in as many different kinds of currency as possible. That's an interesting thought. So I've got, you know, grain. I've got livestock. I've got my skill set. I've got, you know, not quite for silver and gold.

And Bitcoin. And that's basically. That's an interesting thought. How did you? How did you come upon that? I don't know. Well, just kind of just thinking about like what would happen if I got sick or hurt myself or... Sure.

It's like, how do I have the most amount of resiliency possible? And that's basically what I arrived at, is that no matter what happens, I'll be covered. However, you know, there are people in the... Like, I would say that it's more... For me, Bitcoin is more than just like a point percentage of... of your allocation, I would say it needs to be more substantial than that based on the principles that I've been talking about. Because even with that silver and gold, right, like say you're traveling across the country and someone has something they want to sell, but all you've got is,

you know, one ounce bars or whatever. Now silver is worth $100 an ounce or whatever. How do you break it down? How do you break it down? With Bitcoin, you can basically make it as small as you want and it's literally as easy as, you know, sending someone in e-trans. It's faster, actually and there's no processing or almost no processing fees for certain like for for for bitcoin itself there is but there's other uh kind of add-ons i look at bitcoin and i go uh i think and maybe i'm wrong this if you're curious your thoughts i go if we go to the best possible scenario where we we always have power like we don't shut down every industry and just all of a sudden one day have rolling blackouts all the time yeah we go the other way where we have access to power

clean energy, fuel, water, everything. Yeah. To me, this makes sense because you're like, well, how small can it be broke down? It can be rolled down ridiculously small for, you know, but now you don't have the, the fungibility of it, right, where it just doesn't get printed more and more and more. If all these things stay true and society keeps going on an upward trajectory, I don't know if that's the right way to look at it, folks, but you go like we have access to power, the internet on and on.

Yeah. It actually starts to make a lot of sense. If we go the other way, I might argue that silver gold is the way. And somebody would argue with me that lead is the way, right? Because you go into this dark world where all of a sudden you can't afford a pot to piss in. And nobody's traveling anywhere. And you have rolling blackouts and you go on and on and on. Well, that means our access to the internet's going down.

And all these different things are happening, doesn't it? It does. And this is where I want to run towards. not away from things. And so this is where I kind of got to that strategy of like, I'm going to have, like I have not a year's worth of supply. I have a lot of salt. Because salt is one of the most valuable things.

You can do everything with salt. You can raise livestock. You can use it as a bait for wild animals. You can preserve vegetables, meat, cheese with it. So where are you buying your salt from? Agricultural supplies. You can buy a 50 pound bag of salt for seven bucks. That's enough salt for your family for a year.

And nobody thinks to that. And no one thinks of that. Yeah. But you try to go mine 50 pounds of salt yourself without technology or energy. It's hard. And so, again, this is something that I use on my operation anyways. So for me to have a warehouse of it. Yeah, what's a big deal?

A couple of extra pallets, whatever. It doesn't go bad. Yeah. So I'm still doing those things. However, like you said, the future that I want to see, Bitcoin will allow civilization to still happen. If we're going back to gold and silver or a barter-based economy. Yeah, we're going back into dark times. It's bad.

It's bad. Like, I mean, there's almost nothing in your life today that doesn't come from international markets. And if we lose the ability to have access to that, which is basically some kind of, right now it's Fiat money, which is controlled by bankers, which allow money to transfer all around the world and everyone gets a percentage. If we lose that, you can't do that with gold and silver without a, without a meteor. You can't. So are you saying Bitcoin is? is the optimist way of looking at the future. It's Bitcoin is hope.

I actually, I'd rather enjoy that thought. You know, I don't know if I ever. Because to me, there's so many dark things going on in the world today. They are, right? That you can get stuck in. I was just having this chat the other day. Like, I look at the world and I try, you know, I've been into the dark, dark recesses of my mind.

Yep. And I'm like, I just, I got young kids. I want to give them a better life. We've got to fight for it. And I want to find different ways. You know, once again, I look at it, and I don't know why I use water folks because we live in the middle of the prairies where, you know, water's pretty, not scarce, but, you know, like open bodies of water are.

And I just see, like, I just see the storm ahead. I just go, okay, which way can we navigate it? What cove can we slide into to watch the storm roll by? And who doesn't love a good storm when you're safe? I mean, the kids love thunder and lightning. But when you're in an open field running from it, I don't think you're enjoying that very much, right? Like I've been, I used to tree plant in my younger days. And I don't know how many tree planters are out there.

You ever tree planted? Do you even know what I'm doing? Oh yeah, on the farm. I haven't done it commercially, but we've planted 30,000 plus trees in the farm. So you've planted as many trees as I have. Well, you get stuck out in the middle of a chunk of land. You know what the protocol is if it starts thundering and lightning? The only time you shut down is when there's thunder and lightning. You know what you do?

You throw your shovel as far away from you as humanly possible and you lay flat on the ground while it's doing it. I tell you, you feel pretty, like, exposed. when that's going on. It's a cool feeling because you have nowhere you can go. You're literally out in the middle of, you know, I was in Northern Ontario. You're in, and it's just raging. And you're just getting downpoured on. But you work through everything else.

It's raining? You work. It's four degrees heat. You work. The bugs are out, you work. Lightning strikes, you throw your shovel, and you pray, you know, you pretty much kiss your ass goodbye, and you lay there in the dirt, and you just wait for it to pass because you got, you got no other choice. So other than that scenario, all of us love a good storm.

when you're safe, when you're inside a building or whatever, a vehicle that provide you some safety. And I look at different things in the economy and I'm like, what's going to provide me safety from what the government and others are doing? And you're, well, I think this entire conference, I'll shout up one more time, Dave Bradley and Bitcoin Rodeo for having me here, is Bitcoin is that. And the faster you dig into it and find some things out, maybe you'll find that too. Absolutely. It's worth your time. At the very least, you will have some, a lot of these guys, like the books I recommended, they go deep into the history of how our current money came about, what money was used in the past.

It's just a fascinating story. Whether or not you agree with the technology of Bitcoin, understand the principles of what money has to be in order for us to have a free civilization. And I think once you understand those principles, you will see that Bitcoin is at, As of this moment, the only currency in the world that has all of the principles that a money would have to be for truly free. It's durable. It's divisible. Durable meaning?

It's not going to break down. So this is why gold doesn't erode. It doesn't rust. It needs to be divisible, meaning that it needs to be broken down into, if you want to sell your house, you can't sell part of your house. Correct. Right? So you can have a million dollars house, but you can't. sell it for half million.

You can't chunk it away here and there. Gold, you can, but it's very expensive to break it into divisible pieces that are, that are recognizable, which is another important people. People need to be able to look at it and say, oh, that's gold, which is why it used to be called sound money. Because one of the simple ways to verify the soundness of gold is to drop it on a table or some flat surface, it'll make a clear ringing sound versus if someone has wrapped lead or some other metal with a gold foil, it won't have that clear ringing sound. That's where, so it needs to

recognize. Sound money. Right. So it needs to be recognizable. It needs to be scarce, meaning that, you know, the paper money that we have today, it's not scarce because the government can just print as much money as it wants, which decreases the purchasing power. If the price of gold or silver goes up, people will be incentivized to mine more of it, which will bring the value back down in supply and demand. That's why gold is, but it's not relatively scarce. It is, the energy involved to get more gold out is difficult. The purchasing power, the goods and services that you can buy

with gold has stayed basically the same for 2,000 years. Regardless of whatever, the Fiat money valuation of it, people in the gold side would say don't go into gold thinking you're going to get rich, go into gold thinking you're going to hold your value or stay the value of your money you have.

However, what happens when we start mining asteroids, which we're at that stage now, like the governments have already passed laws securing property rates in space, and they've an asteroid that's, you know, has more gold than all of the planet Earth on it. What could that do to the purchasing, or what if someone creates a new technology? They are already, they have found a way to synthesize gold. You can, you, you can literally make gold without mining it now in a lab.

It's, but it's, it's not, it's not economically feasible yet. So they have found a way to print gold. We're going into a strange world. But with, with Bitcoin, there will only ever. be 21 million bitcoins ever because that's how it was unless there's a backdoor but if there is who cares we all understand the principles of sound money we learned our lesson great let's build a new system and everyone will transfer over to that well i tell you what i appreciate you doing this knowing where you're at compared to lloyd what we're going to do is we we exchange numbers

folks um i don't want to take you away from the conference or or myself from sitting there heck because there's a lot of different people. I appreciate you giving me some time. And what we're going to do is we're just going to have you come to the studio and Lloyd and we'll have it in some place where it's kind of quiet. Well, not kind of quiet. We'll have it in a studio where we can actually sit and have a conversation and explore this a little further.

I'm glad I got to meet you. And the fact you're sitting on relatively my doorstep is rather funny, I think. It's pretty cool. But I appreciate you doing this. And we'll continue it again at a later date in the future. Looking forward to it, John. Thank you.