Shaun Newman Podcast - #751 - Ben Perrin

Episode Date: November 26, 2024

Ben Perrin stands out as a leading educator in the realm of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Through his YouTube channel, BTC Sessions, he delivers educational content centered around Bitcoin, amassing over 350,000 subscribers and more than 12 million views. Our discussions cover everything related to Bitcoin. Cornerstone Forum ‘25 https://www.showpass.com/cornerstone25/ Clothing Link: ⁠⁠⁠https://snp-8.creator-spring.com/listing/the-mashup-collection⁠⁠ Text Shaun 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast E-transfer here: [e-mail] Silver Gold Bull Links: Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Text Grahame: [phone]

This is Ben Davidson. This is late and great. This is Tanner Nadey. This is Tom Romago. This is Chuck Prodnick. This is Alex Krenner. This is Jim Sinclair. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast.

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Okay? Let's get on to that tale of the tape. He's a prominent figure in the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency education space. He hosts BTC sessions on YouTube, which is known for providing educational content about Bitcoin. He's amassed over 350,000 subscribers and over 12 million views. I'm talking about Ben Perrin. So buckle up. Here we go.

Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. And I'm joined by Ben Perrin. Thank you, sir, for answering the call. Yeah, thanks for having me. We met a little while back, and I'm happy to make it happen now. Yeah, well, we met at the Bitcoin Rodeo. And I had this grand plan of having like eight of you on, and none of it has happened. Like none of it.

I'm like, all right. Well, I guess back to the drawing board, Sean. But here, we finally are making it happen. today, which is cool. For the people who don't know who Ben is, maybe let's just, let's start there. Yeah, yeah. So I have been educating people around Bitcoin best practices for eight years on a YouTube channel called BTC sessions.

So practical step by step tutorials on how to obtain, use, and secure Bitcoin. So I've been doing that for a long time. I speak around the globe at various conferences and, educate people through the Human Rights Foundation as well. So political dissidents in countries with tyrannical governments, I basically teach them how to use money that can't be censored. And then outside of that, I was also involved in 2022 during the Canadian Trucker protest. I was the one that set up the donation page for Bitcoin. And when all of the other avenues of donation did not work, it was the only digital payment mechanism that actually made it to the intended recipients. So that's me

in a nutshell. Can we start before you become BTC, I'm going to say it wrong, BTC sessions, right? Yeah, yeah. I don't know why that sounded foreign coming out of my mouth, but that's how it's going to be this morning. What were you, like before you got into Bitcoin, like who were, like what, lead me up to you reading the founding document of Bitcoin, like were you into that, type of stuff or were you already on your radar or you just read it and you're like this is something yeah um i came to bitcoin much like many other people where you see the number going up and it looks attractive so it's the the initial foray into bitcoin for me was speculation and i came to understand it as something very different than that over time but um i was uh funny enough before bitcoin

I spent a decade teaching little kids how to break dance. So I wasn't a technical person. So the reason I bring that up is because a lot of people think it's too complicated for me. I can't get it. I wasn't really a technical person. I knew how to use a computer. I knew how to do some basic things. And I would look at things like tech crunch or stuff like that,

like online websites because I liked how to have. having, you know, new computers or things like that. But it wasn't like I was coding things is what I'm getting at. And so because I was on those types of websites, everyone's from all, I'd see an article on Bitcoin. And each time I saw one, I thought, oh, that's neat. But I probably missed the boat. But each time they'd add a zero to the end of the price of a Bitcoin, and I'd keep on thinking, I missed the boat.

And so it took me about a year of having that consistently happened to finally say, So you're saying, sorry, to interrupt, so you're saying as people have seen all these zeros start to be attached to a Bitcoin, and they're thinking, oh, I've missed the boat. You're like, wipe that from your brain right now. Yeah, for forever. And Bitcoin has no top because the devaluation of our dollars have no bottom. Yeah. They can always print more money. If the value of a dollar, like I'm using an extreme example, if they, if they,

But if the value of a Canadian dollar goes down 99%, it can still go down another 99% from there. It's all relative, right? Like if you lose 99% of your value and now one Canadian dollar buys a set amount of goods, from that point, it continues to drop from there. And so like when we hear things like, oh, and inflation is dropping, it's not that things are getting cheaper. It's that things are getting more expensive. but less fast than they were the previous year. So like it's,

things are always getting more expensive when priced in these dollars, these currencies that can be printed at will by the powers that be. So you started to see the rise eight years ago. So the price of Bitcoin was not anywhere near what it is today. Because like we were just talking about this before we started. Price of Bitcoin, where we sit today in Canada is somewhere around $140,000 a Bitcoin.

Yeah. Like think about that, folks. It's staggering. It is. I remember when Steve Barber and Upstream Data was an advertiser on the podcast. And back then it was down to 11,000. I think that was, I think 11,000 was American dollars. Yeah. But I remember thinking, oh, man, right? Pierre Poliev had come out saying Bitcoin and then it tanked and all his critics went after him and everything. And I'm like, where is he today going, guys, are we going to pay attention to Bitcoin or not? Yeah, I'm a little surprised he hasn't at least done a little nudge of I told you so because he would be entitled to that.

Is that coming? Like you see Donald Trump go to a Bitcoin conference and say, you know, but I don't know. You Bitcoiners, you probably know exactly what he said verbatim and are like, this is what's interesting about it. Yeah. Yeah. So my take on Trump when it comes to Bitcoin is, I think he found a base to pander to pretty well. Yeah, I, I, I, I, I, I will say. So he's a politician. Yeah, he's a politician, right? Like, my general sense is really just don't put too much trust in any politician in general.

Like, that's just, it's just how it is. Like, they want to get your vote and everything. And he found a base that the Democrats were notable. antagonistic to the entire industry. You know, we saw threats to self-custody. We saw, you know, developers being arrested for creating open source software tools. We saw all kinds of clampdowns on if you're a company that deals with Bitcoin and you're dealing with banking, just kind of this like shadow banning.

and so he saw an opportunity in that, okay, well, there's a large group of people here that are growing, not just in size, but in their influence and purchasing power. And maybe it's a good idea to tap into this base and be favorable to them, which, again, yes, to a degree it's pandering. But it also kind of points out that when you exit a currency that by design steals from you and you enter a currency that by design actually preserves the fruits of your labor over time, then you can have more of a say in how the world around you is shaped. Yeah, money's a real important thing to life, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, it's half of every transaction.

Everything that you do, half of every transaction, is influenced by the money that you use. And it used to be that one could just be really good at a skill and save the fruits of their labor and then eventually retire. And now you have to be really good at something to earn a good enough wage. But then when you earn the currency that you're being remunerated in, you have to then become a professional investor or roll the debt. and gamble in hopes of maybe making it to retirement and not feeling like you're taking a huge

step down and standard of living when you do. Well, I mean, if, you know, COVID taught us, like everything that went on during that time taught us a lot of lessons. Yeah. And one of the main themes I saw of why people went along with it was a paycheck, right? They filtered it down. And if you didn't have a way to provide for your family. And this is no judgment because I felt this pain back then too.

At the time I was working for a company and I was sitting there and, you know, that goes through your mind. And I had somewhat of a raft kind of built at the time in the podcast, but not really, right? Like when I think back to it, I'm like, not really. Man, I spent a lot of sleepless nights back then. Yeah. And, you know, your, your, your well-being, your family's well-being is tied to a job, which is going to dictate to you of things you don't want to do.

And one of the things that I find very, very, beyond very fascinating about Bitcoin is it takes all those troubles away. I think. I mean, I could be wrong on that, Ben. Yeah. I mean, again, it would depend on, you know, your job and your income and who you're beholden to. But over time, yes. So it simplifies a formula to. to being less susceptible to those types of things. Like if you can create value for others, spend less than you earn, and save in a money that nobody else can print for free,

you're going to be doing better and better over time because you're going to have that extra padding. You're going to have that nest egg that, that, you know, if push comes to shove and you're faced with trying to weigh your values versus your daily paycheck or your weekly paycheck, you have the ability to say, okay, if this is really pushing my moral boundaries, then I get to say no, and then sort things out after that because I have that buffer. So in a way, yes.

And then in terms of, I mean, we saw bank account shut down. Well, that was the next thing I was going to bring up, right? You could have all the money in the world, right? I know some very wealthy people who run big businesses who donated to the convoy. And then they started seeing everybody's bank accounts getting frozen. And I tell you, a lot of those people ain't in this country anymore or have made means or ways to make sure that if ever that were to happen, you know, they'll be gone. So like the ripple effect of what freezing bank accounts did, I mean, you just come back to Bitcoin and it gets you away from that. Yeah. Yeah. It's it was it was one of the first global instances where you could easily point to the legacy financial system and say, this is why we need Bitcoin.

Because if you go to the wrong protest, if you're part of the wrong political movement, even in a place that people prior to this thought, that would be an impossible thing that they would never go and shut down people's bank accounts for a peaceful protest. Well, here we are two years after the fact. Inside of three weeks from the beginning of the protest to a light version of martial law. Like how insane is it that we live in a world, that we live in a country where that even happened? And with no due process, nothing, it was just, yeah, we see. your company truck was down there everything shut down credit cards you have no way of transacting and again the coin was the only thing that people could like if you got your bank

account shut down i was i was thinking at the time because i you know it was clear that i had some involvement i wasn't in ottawa i'm in calgary but there's still involvement so i'm at least i was able to think throughout that time and say okay well um what happens if my bank account gets shut down. And in my head, I was going, okay, there's a few things that would be a pain in the butt, but I would still be fine. I'd still be able to transact day today. I'd still be able to live. I'd still be able to go get groceries and gas and all of those things I'd still be able to pay for. I've been, and I guess I should say, I've been living on Bitcoin for four years.

95% of my income is Bitcoin. I pay my bills. I get gas and groceries. We were creating a local market here in Calgary where a bunch of people, you know, direct. I can get beef and I can get eggs and chickens and stuff and pay in Bitcoin for all of it. So I would have been okay.

It would have been a little tricky at first to navigate because there's a few bills that come out of bank accounts and everything, but I would have been fine. You know, before we get, oh man, you got my mind going here in seven different directions because this can be fun this morning, folks, I think. You know, you mentioned right off the hop. I'm going to switch. I'm going to do a bit of 180. You mentioned right off the start going to different countries where they have tyrannical governments and helping them to use money that can't be censored. I think is how you put it.

Yeah. Can you just explain to me a little more? on that? Like, what are you talking about? Because I'm like, all you got to do is go across Canada at this point and you're in one of those places. I mean, a little tongue and cheek, maybe a little hyperbolic, but after everything, me and Ben are talking about this morning. I think most people get it. What countries were you going to? And like, walk me through that a bit. Yeah. So I've been doing some work alongside the Human Rights Foundation for a few years now. And part of the reason I've become an educator for them is because they saw what happened with involvement in the Canadian

drugger protest. And they said, oh, so you've got some experience in dealing with people being cut off financially. And so the types of countries and the types of people that were talking about, places like a lot of like central and South American country. So Nicaragua would be one of them. Venezuela, even if you think. if you go east uh russia um you know like the the girl that i host um quarterly webinars for human rights defenders with is russian she's in exile because she was part of the nevalny foundation who opposed putin and nevelny was basically died in prison earlier this year um but uh she was part of that foundation she was living in russia and uh she was in charge of their financial she

They had bank accounts and everything like that. And one day she goes to check the balance. And they were labeled as a terrorist organization. And the balance was something like negative one trillion rubles. Like they just they did it was just like some cartoonish ridiculous negative number. They just and she called the bank. They're like, oh, we can't talk to you. And it was the financial censorship was to the point where even if they were to go and say they wanted to.

to get some chairs or something for an office or they wanted to purchase, I don't, even like a meal for the team, they wanted some catering or they, whatever it is, businesses would not deal with them because the degree to which financial censorship was taking place was if you received money from that organization, you by proxy were supporting or providing goods or services to a terrorist organization. And so then your bank accounts would be shut down and your homes and businesses would be rated and all of that. And so like the degree to which you can control people with the money is is crazy. And so this, the Navalny Foundation or the Anti-Corruption Foundation began accepting Bitcoin years ago because it, they couldn't censor it. And they can openly

put Bitcoin addresses out there and and receive donations. And it cannot be frozen. Now, there is a little bit of finagling, like once you get the Bitcoin or you get it to where it needs to be, then it's finding mechanisms to purchase the things that you need or to convert to local currency and cash or whatever it is. But it takes away the borders and it takes away the censorship. So, again, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Myanmar, all these different places. It's crazy. Where is this human rights? Yeah, Human Rights Foundation. Human Rights Foundation. Yeah.

So they've got offices in New York. They do a yearly event called the Oslo Freedom Forum in Oslo, Norway. And so they have people come in. Again, just to outline the types of people that are there. Did you ever see the movie Hotel Rwanda? Yes. Yeah, so the guy who ran the hotel was at the Ozzell Freedom Forum speaking. And he also came to a summit that we had in Nashville earlier this year to come speak about the censorship resistance of Bitcoin and how important it is to cause us like his.

Because people don't realize his story like continued on. He was years later abducted and brought back. Can I just say. It is wild to me that what went on in Canada, right? Like, we just have this like, what is the word I'm searching for? It's like apathy of like, we had all these things go on. And then people like, oh, it wasn't that big a deal. Yeah, no.

But to put that in perspective, the dude who is in Hotel Rwanda, Don Freakin' Cheeto. No, you know, it's the act. Yeah, you get the point. If you haven't watched that movie, make sure you got a cold shower. lined up afterwards or a nice funny something because that is about as bad as watching or read in 1984 that movie is not don't go in that one lightly yeah you have him alongside you because of what happened to Canadians with their bank accounts and what that could mean and i realize they're not the same thing but i i am just that is insane to me yeah right that nicaragua was

like holy crap do you see what happened in canada and i'm going nick what are we talking about here Yeah, it's, in talking to a lot of these, these human rights defenders, I often, even I go into it. And I, like you, I go in and I say, okay, like, it's clear that it was a big deal here, but comparatively to the genocides and things like that, that people are, it's nothing. But I don't know if I'm allowed to drop an F-bomb here. Sure. I was talking to one of these people and I said, well, I mean, you know, like it's not, it's, it's not the stuff that's here. And, uh, and referring to Trudeau, she said, no, fuck him. This is how it starts. Don't you ever diminish what happened there? Because every other instance that you're referring to here, it started with steps like that. And you need to push back at those early points to make sure. sure it doesn't descend into what we now have here.

Again, like some of the people that we talk to, You know me Park, who escaped North Korea. She was there. She's big into Bitcoin now. She understands it's freedom money. She knows how important that is. And, you know, she's gone on a lot of podcasts and done the circuit where she's talking about, like, yeah, you got to pay attention to those signs because I fought to escape that.

and I don't want to be somewhere that descends back into it. It's a really, like, think about that. I guess when you think about that, it's like, they're trying to warn. I've had many Eastern European on the show trying to raise the alarm bells. Folks, you keep seeing the signs. We got to knock this off. Things are just kind of like, what are you talking about?

You know, I just went to the hockey game the other day. Nothing's that big deal. And you're like, I don't know how to, you know, you bring different people on to raise the alarm bell. You don't want to scare the crap out of everybody. But at the same time, when enough people are like, listen, make a big deal out of them freezing bank accounts. That is a big deal. I mean, I think the world got that.

I think Canadians got that, right? That unnerved a lot of people. But like, how do you sound the gong of like, folks, time to get moving? Or do you see it on your side, Ben? You know, it's part of it, yeah, is pushing back against it. But the other part is just opting out. And that's where I feel I'm at. Opting out in that I'm just, I'm removing myself from that system as much as possible.

And I think for the people that are listening to this going like, I just don't get Bitcoin. It's, it's, again, as I described, while it would have been a pain in the butt if my, if my bank account got frozen back then, it, I would have been okay. And so like you begin to you begin to basically build yourself almost like a little citadel. It's like you've got a community of people that are outside of the existing system, even though we're still interacting with people day to day and we're building bridges so that people can kind of move between the two existing systems. It's an opposition in a way where you don't need to fight or fire a bullet. You just need to opt out and starve the beast. You are basically cutting off its power. Because with all of these wasteful government programs and the ability for them to fund all of this crap that nobody wants any part of,

that comes from the ability to have unlimited money, right? Like at any point, they can fund anything through deficits or taxes or money printing. And if you just stop using their money, their money begins to be useless. Like if you look at Venezuela, what happened over time is they couldn't even pay the army there because the army was like, what are you giving me? I can't even get anything with this. And so they started to have to bribe them with like rolls of toilet paper and toothpaste and things like that. Because it was the only thing that actually had value, the money was just littering the streets.

And so you can, you can actually, it's a silent revolution by making the old system obsolete. Yeah, I don't know if it's my biggest fear, but certainly a fear of mine is we turn into Venezuela. And I hear part of my brain going out, that'll never happen. But then I just chuckle because I'm like, just look at the prices of everything. Just look at what's going on. Just look at how much money we're, how much debt we're going into and on and on and on this goes. And you go like, if it continues, right, everybody goes up, Pierre Pollyev's going to be in in a year's time and we'll fix all this. It's like, I don't know, folks.

It's you can't. The system inherently itself is bankrupt. Because the way that our money works is effectively we have a central bank. And this is how most currencies on the planet work right now is at the beginning, there is there's no money. It's there's a central bank. And the government or whoever borrows money for. from the central bank at interest. And so what that means is to distill it down to a very simple point,

if there are $0 and somebody borrows $1 from the central bank and there's interest owing on that $1, there's only $1 that exists. So how do you pay back interest? The answer is somebody else somewhere else has to borrow more money and then you have to pay back the dollar plus interest from some of the other borrowed money. So you always need more money being printed in order to pay back the outstanding interest on the old debt.

It's from the very beginning, you're bankrupt. From the moment, that first dollar is lent at interest, there's already not enough money to pay back all the debt. And this has been snowballing for years and years and years ever since we went off a gold standard or a... 19. 19, what is that? 71. 71, yeah. And they were kind of already off of before.

Like things were getting tricky beforehand. That's why France sent like a huge warship to New York to repatriate their gold. But they were, that's how they were paying for Vietnam was we're going to make more monetary units than gold because it was supposed to be $35 to announce a gold. And it was very clear that they were making more dollars than they held gold. and as countries started to catch on and say, I think that they're printing extra. We're going to get our gold back now. That's when Nixon was like,

oh, we're going to, these speculators are ruining the dollar. We're going to temporarily go off the gold standard and pause convertibility. And nothing is more permanent than a temporary government measure. Let's, I don't know, you'll have to come along with my brain this morning. My brain, I'm having fun. Forgive me. You'll maybe know the history better than me. But essentially, you know, is it 1930?

Is it 1933? I think it's somewhere in that range. Basically, the U.S. government says, give us all back the gold. They build the giant vault. They take away the gold from public people, right, from the public, sorry, not public people. And then it's 1971 where they go, we're going off the gold standard.

Now you can use gold as a collectible. It's not money. Roughly, that's the timeline. All I'm pointing out is it's roughly 40, years. Yeah. It takes to go from where gold is money to gold is a collectible. Yeah. It was actually the way they did it too was horrible because they they did the executive order 4102, which was the gold confiscation act. And they said, okay, if you if you're, it was illegal to own gold in the US. So basically and and because gold, this is part of why Bitcoin's important. But

Gold was good money. It was scarce. It was like even with new gold being mined, it typically was under, you could only mine like 2% of the above ground supply in a given year. Like it was kind of difficult to add a lot more to the supply, barring some, you know, huge discovery. So they basically said it's illegal to hold gold. Most people just kept their gold with a bank. and then were issued, you know, promissory notes on the gold. But they could be redeemed up until that point. So it was very easy for the government to go in and say, like, we're confiscating all the gold because most of it was with financial entities. They did say also, though, that you weren't allowed to just own gold, like gold coins and gold bars. They made some concessions for jewelry and things like that.

But other than that, it was like, you got to turn this in. and we're going to pay you back. We're going to basically buy the gold off of you at a rate of around $20 an ounce. Now, the important part is they said, okay, now the currency will be backed by said gold, but you're just not going to be holding the gold yourself. The government will do that. One year later, they revalued the gold at $35 an ounce. So another way to say that is they paid people.

$20 an ounce for their gold. And then they said a year later, actually, we're going to almost double the amount of dollars existing versus the gold. So in another way, they stole half of the value from the people that had the gold in a year. Yes. Yeah. And thank you. Yes.

I don't mean not stop you. I agree with everything you're saying. Where I want to pull you to, okay, is it takes 40 years to do. Not all that. Obviously, some of it happens really quick. Others of it takes a very long time. At some point in the middle, they stop actually, you know, like, you know, was it two years before they decide, like, we're completely off the gold standard, or was it 10 years before? I'm sure somebody is going to text me and be like it was this year. And that's fair. All I'm just pointing out is the general. It took 41 years roughly to go from gold as money to gold as a collectible. We're off the gold standard. Now, since 71 to where we sit. now has been about 50, what am I at? 53 years, folks, am I doing my math correct? Right? To go from gold, sorry, where money is just running rampant to like where I feel like the

collective consciousness, like everybody that's paying attention and then even people who aren't are starting to understand we have a problem with our money. Because I'm just thinking in my own head. Like if you would have asked me five years ago what fungible meant, I would have been like, I have no idea what you're talking about. Are we talking about something that comes in a bag? Like, am I eating these things? What is fungible?

And now I'm like, oh, man, I know way too much. And I'm at times not doing enough of what, not doing enough with what I know. Yeah. And so I sit here and I got, huh, we're into and interesting because Bitcoin's been around now for, what is it been? 15, all going on 16 years. 15, 16 years. And you go, okay. If things happen in cycles, and we're not going to, we're not destined, I don't think to repeat exactly the history, I just look at the next like decade and I go, Ben, where do you see us heading?

Yeah. I think there's going to be, it's interesting. I think there's going to be some initial pushbacks. There's going to be pockets of pushback until there's just full on capitulation. And what I mean is, I firmly believe that in the coming decades, I don't know exactly how long it will take. But I think that Bitcoin is going to be more or less like a world reserve currency, like similar to how there was a monetary metal standard for a large period of time. I think Bitcoin gradually moves into that role. And there's certain reasons why I believe that.

I think gold was fantastic for the time when you had economies, smaller, kind of more localized economies because you could have the physical gold or silver or whatever transacted. And you could, you know, you could verify. There's ways that people can verify it. and, you know, mostly not get screwed around with fake gold and stuff like that. But as we became a global society and you needed to pay over borders and you needed, you know, to be able to move money, you know, at the first abstraction of gold was creating

paper notes, but then now everything's digital. And the digitization of everything also has meant that you can. create many more units through these other abstractions than the base money. Not to mention that we just fully went off the gold standard eventually. And the reason for that is because there's no inherent link between the digitization and the physical. And what Bitcoin was able to accomplish is, and this is the hard part, especially gold bugs coming to Bitcoin, they say, well, it's not tangible.

I can't feel it. the tangibility of gold is actually in a global society with moving money over large distances quickly becomes a detriment. And so Bitcoin for the first time ever was able to create something digital that was also verifiably scarce. And that is the important thing. And furthermore, Bitcoin is the first digital system. I shouldn't say the first, but it's a digital system that is incredibly difficult to change. And when I mean to say change, I mean like change the rules of the system like, oh, there's a cap supply on Bitcoin.

You can't just go and change that. You can't just go and hack Bitcoin and create new Bitcoin. It's near impossible to do that with Bitcoin. And so we have something digitally scarce where the rules are nearly impossible to change. So you know the supply, you know the issuance, you know the rules, and those things are going to remain constant. Much like gold would have been in a physical instance. We know the supply. We know the issuance roughly what we can mine every year.

And we know the rules, like the rules would have been the physics of what gold is and, you know, how it's made up. So you can actually verify what it is. This brings me to you change the money, you change the world. I don't know. Fix the world. I don't know how you guys all say it. It was first Dr. Jack Cruz who reminded me of this. I'm like, oh, yeah, I keep hearing this.

And I'm like, I don't know about that. I'm not saying everything you've said is lovely, right? Bitcoin. It's lovely. I get all the little points and the nuances, probably not all of them, but I get a lot of it. I'm like, you can't fix the human beings. human beings got a huge chunk of us are both as evil as it gets as about as power corrupt as it gets on and on and on and on and on and on and I'm like does money fix that I don't see how it does

money can fix the incentives so right now with broken money a lot of incentives are broken money a lot of incentives are broken that are contributing to a more and more broken society. So I'm not saying that Bitcoin fixes, you know, people, people that are inherently evil. But Bitcoin can fix the idea of perpetually being able to obtain wealth and value through corruption with no effort. in today's society if you want to if you want influence all you need to do is to cozy up closest to the money spigot aka you know central bankers government positions of power government is the first benefit uh the first group to benefit from newly printed money um because they don't experience the inflation. When new money is created and given to that first person downstream of it,

all the prices are currently the same as they were before. And so they get the benefit of spending that money into the economy before the economy adjusts for the amount of money. There's only so many goods and services and things that exist. The money is just kind of whatever amount of money that exists at that current time is just kind of like a measuring stick for that. If there's 10 apples and $10 exist, and that's the entire economy, each apple's going to be $1. But if you inflate the money to $100, there's no more apples. It's the same amount of apples, but each apple is now going to be $10. We see this playing out gradually through the economy, but people value things differently,

so it's a bit more complex. I'm going to relate this back to how you can fix what, a lot of people are feeling right now just day to day from how difficult it is to live. So right now, as I said earlier, you're in a situation where you work all day, you know, you work 40 plus hours a week or more if you got a second job, whatever it is. You're scraping by to make ends meet. We're in a situation where a family with kids cannot possibly, unless you're lucky, cannot possibly afford to feed,

clothe and house your family on a single income. We're now forced into dual family incomes, and they're still scraping by. And further to that, you've got a society of people where, you know, Gen Z is grown up going, oh my God, like I can barely afford life on my own. Why would I ever hope to have children?

Like, I'm not good. I'm just like, I'm not having kids. And we see it in the birth rates dropping off because nobody can afford kids. And so, like, you're getting this situation where because the money is broken and constantly buying less, people are changing their behaviors in and around, even just the very basics of, oh, you can have a single breadwinner and you can have a mom or dad, whatever. you decide to stay at home with the kids and actually like have uh you know one-on-one time with their own kids instead we're shipping them off to daycares and having other people

take care of them so that you can try and make more money which ends up costing an arm and a leg anyways but the point is that you're seeing these these changes even just in in how we raise our kids or if we even have kids and this this nihilism that's inherent through all of society And that's coming from a place of how I said the people at the top are the first ones with exposure to the money. So you're going to get the governments and the government contracts and the big companies and the corporate kind of side of things. They're the first ones to get exposure to that. The last person to get the newly printed money is your nine to five worker, right? Your blue-collar worker.

Well, I was going to say you work 40 hours. and at the end of your 40 hours your money is worth less than what you got paid. You know, like it's it's constantly, especially under the Trudeau government, is just being like the value of it's being devalued every single day. It's just getting worth less and less and less and less. Yeah. And think of the dynamic as a blue collar worker. You have zero recourse on when you get a job,

you go in, you interview, and they say, okay, this is what the hourly wage is. You in your head are basing that hourly wage on what you expect to be able to buy with that amount of money at that current snapshot in time. But a year later, the contract, the employment contract that you signed is already moot because what you can purchase with those hourly wages is already diminished. And so as a blue collar worker, it's on you to then go to. the employer and say, I deserve to not have a better standard of living, but to maintain my

standard of living, please give me a raise so I can continue having the same life that I had. You're spinning your wheels. You're begging to spin your wheels is basically what you're doing. Now, that's because the money's broken and the last person to get hit, like to, to get the new money is the blue-collar worker. And they're the last one to adjust what they're doing. The company, it's a funny thing because you get all this pointing fingers of like, oh, blame the grocers. It's not the grocers. It's the money's broken. But they have the ability to adjust their prices to anticipate the inflation that's happening. The blue-collar worker

is doing the same thing in arguing for a raise. They're, in a way, they're adjusting the price of their hours to account for the new money in this in the system and so I just want to draw a comparison to how that would work in a world with a fixed money supply fixed money supply you have a wage that you then agree to same thing you go in sign an employment contract here's your hourly wage over time with a fixed money supply we're going to have likely some population growth. We're also going to have efficiency in, hey, we get better at building things. We get better at creating stuff. We can do it with less effort, with less resources. We can create more stuff. What that means is your take home pay, you can buy more stuff without raises.

You just, it's just, oh, wow, like we got better at making stuff. That means I can afford more stuff. There's competition in the market. And everything, prices perpetually drop. That's the natural state of things. And there's a really good Canadian author named Jeff Booth. He wrote a book called The Price of Tomorrow. And he kind of before he fully discovered Bitcoin was talking about how the system is broken. And the natural state of things is that prices should perpetually go down.

Right. Like if you go and you go to a vending machine and buy a can of Coke right now, it's $2, $3 sometimes. That's more expensive than it used to be. I remember putting in a looney in getting a can of Coke. Did it become three times more difficult to make a can of Coke? No, it probably became 50 times easier to make a can of Coke. Exactly. And so I think people are misinterpreting the scale of theft that is taking place right now.

Because it's not just the inflation on what stuff used to be. It's that the prices should have been dropping exponentially. You are not only being stolen from in that things are costing you more of your paycheck, you're being stolen from because those things should have been getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Homes, do you think we're worse at putting together a home and making it today? I see homes go up. Like I moved into an area and inside of a year an empty block was filled in all with new homes. Would you say that we're worse at building things in an expedient and an efficient manner?

Absolutely not. But things are skyrocketing in price and it's because the money is broken. Everything should perpetually get cheaper because there's more competition. We're better at making it. And with a fixed supply money, that would be true. but we are being absolutely raked over the colds. Pay me, I don't mean to instill any fear this morning, folks, but I know myself along with a lot of others,

when you think bad things are coming, you start to move. When you think it's all sunshine and rainbows, you just kind of, you know, you're driving along and you just kind of carry down the road and you don't notice the fact that, you know, things have been perpetually getting worse in Canada. So when you look, you look at the next whatever time frame. Like, do you see a time where we're going back to Germany and, you know, a wheelbarrel full of dollar bills don't get you a sack of potatoes type thing?

Or you're like, no, I don't see that bad. But, you know, here's some things that stick out to me. I think it's different this time because we have a parallel system that people can migrate to. It's Yeah, I do think that our government currencies I think we're in for a major overhaul I think they will try to every trick in the book to get people to stick with the currencies we have

So you're going to see incentives to use something called CBDCs or central bank digital currencies Yes. And so think of of how draconian things got here with the traditional banking system and now give infinitely more power to the government and how that is spent. So you're at the wrong protest. All of a sudden, your money can only be used for food at grocery stores within a certain vicinity of your home.

Otherwise, it just doesn't work. Or you went to the wrong thing. So now you can no longer use transit to get where you need to go or you can't travel to certain zones. Or, you know, you, oh, your carbon quota has been met. So you can no longer go buy a steak. You've got to go buy like beyond beef or something like that. Like you, it's, but like that's how granular they can get. I'm not saying necessarily all of that's going to happen.

But it is happening in China. You know, they have absolute totalitarian control with these, these tests of their central bank digital currency, which is rolled out where it's like, if you do the wrong thing, well, okay, this is frozen or you can only spend it on this, or you're not allowed to buy a plane ticket or whatever it is. I think that the way that people get roped into using that system is, again, because they can print money, there's this idea of, oh, maybe we'll use universal basic income. But how are you going to get that?

You're going to have to get into the government system and use that UBI with your central bank digital currency. If you don't have a CBDC account, then you don't get UBI. And so that people kind of get, get, it's like when you get an Apple phone or, or I'm on a Mac right now, but like, you get roped into that ecosystem and everything works with that. And when you try to get outside of it, if you're not used to it, it's just like you have to retool everything. So you get people in the system and then they're like, I just, I need the handouts. Now that I'm used to it, I need the handouts, I can't survive without them, and then you're kind of stuck. I think that's where we're headed. I think, though, and this goes back to earlier where you're like, oh, the price is

insane. Like, is it, you know, a lot of people ask, is it too late? When the money that you're using currently can go down in value forever, it can, they can always make more of it, meaning you have a smaller slice of the pie. And you have, in contrast, a scarce money. And you have, in contrast, a scarce money. that cannot be printed, the value of those two things can always continue to widen. And so when we're seeing $140,000 Bitcoin in Canada here, I mean, there's when somebody said the other day, oh, a million dollar Bitcoin, yeah, absolutely, no question. Like at some point it'll be, but like what combination is that going to be? that going to be the purchasing power of the Bitcoin has gone up partly. Yeah, probably. But the other

half of that is the purchasing power of the Canadian dollar will have gone down so much. And so like, you know, think of if you had told somebody that going to an ANW drive-thru would cost you $17 for a meal. I literally did that yesterday. And I was like, are you see? I mean, okay, I got a triple burger, but still $17 for a drive-thru meal. Like my wife is a nurse. And the other day, a couple months ago, but we went through a drive-thru, and she got a meal for each of us

and then the kids split something. And we realized that her hourly wage could no longer purchase the whole family a McDonald's meal. And she's a nurse. She's been a nurse for 50. 15 years. Like this is why you see people in their cars watching, like making a TikTok crying as a nurse saying, I can't, I don't understand. I thought I had a good job. I thought I could make ends meet and I'm living in my car, something like that. Like this is, this is what's happening to us. So when you say like, where are we headed? I mean, the Canadian dollar and every other fiat currency will go down forever, forever. Like not. like, oh, it's going to be bad for a bit and then it'll be better.

No, it's going to go down forever. And if they try to retool it or say, oh, we've got a new currency, it's not going to be any different. Eventually, it all goes down the same path. Like, government wants to spend money forever. The only way you can stop them from doing that is to separate money from state. And that's what Bitcoin is doing. Bitcoin is neutral. Anybody can use it.

Nobody can print it. And that's how we need money to be. That's why gold people gravitated towards it was scarce and nobody could change the rules of the system. And we need that. As soon as government was able to take the reins on how our money worked, that's how we ended up where we are right now. Yeah, that's a lot to take in, isn't it? Sorry. I get on a rant and I get back.

No, it's, I'm thinking, you know, like I'm playing this out in my head, you know, multiple different things. But, you know, like the early adopters of Bitcoin. He was like, you had to go to this website to jump over to that website to come here and then you got there and then you head and on and on and on. That's the early adopters. And, you know, like where it sits today, I bought not my first Bitcoin, folks. I don't want to make it seem like I have that type of money. I don't.

I bought my first fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction. Yeah. And I'll put it nice and easy. I spent 100 bucks just to get through the process. For $100, ATB shut down my business, a bank account, everything. God. And I was like, I have no problem saying the ATB. I was, I was pissed.

Sitting in the States, it was all excited. It was after the Bitcoin Rodeo and I had to jump through a bunch of different hoops that probably are straight, simple, but I'll speak to the person who's not interested in Bitcoin or is like trying to figure it out. It's not like going into a bank and starting a bank account, although no, no, it isn't, because I'm staring at Bow Valley Credit Union right now, a thing. and it took me like three minutes. I was done and everything was sent.

Okay. Now, in fairness, Bitcoin isn't as hard as it was probably 15 years ago. It took me with the right person, three minutes, and my bank got shut down. I'm like, oh, my God. Like, this is going to be in Spitz and, because, like, people who fits and spurs and fits, fits in, I don't know why I can't. I was going to say Spitz. I'm like, that doesn't make any sense.

And you think of how much it's gone. So as time goes on, you talk about, I guess what I'm trying to point out is, as they can continue devalue the dollar. The other thing that's going to happen is Bitcoin's going to become easier and easier to get access to. And in theory, there's going to be a bank. Actually, I'm going to bring up Bow Valley Credit Union again because Brett Olin and them are coming into town. And I've got a lot of time for Bow Valley Credit Union because I switched over to them to buy Bitcoin. And it took me one minute. And all of a sudden it was just like done.

And I'm like, oh my God. So what? Every institution under the sun is captured and they look at Bitcoin and like, screw this. We're not, we're going. And I go back to your earliest of early comments, which was like,

well, you know, this is how I'm speaking in my ATB voice. Well, there's been some people who've been scammed. How do you know it's Bitcoin? How do you know this? And I'm like,

because I'm not a dumb ass. And I, I guess I'm like, I'm following through on all these things. and I'm putting in a small amount of money to start. And if I get scammed, I'm telling you right now, I'm okay with it. Still wouldn't go through. Still wouldn't go through.

I tried it multiple times. It wouldn't go through. I was like, okay, this is, I'm done with this. I'm done with, I'm not with Bitcoin. I'm done with the ATP when it comes to trying to do this. So I guess the difficulty of getting a Bitcoin and your Bitcoiners out there listening to me are like Sean, there's so many easier ways. Fair enough.

But to the moron who's trying to get into it, the hoops to jump through are still there. And human beings are fun, we're funny creatures. One little hoop, one little stub of your toe. You're like, I'll do it next week. Right? Like you just push these things off. So you think into the future as things get worse and as Bitcoin gets easier to get into, the acceptance of it should go through the roof, I would think, at some point.

Yeah, yeah. And you're right. It's gotten a lot easier. But yeah, you still have those instances where, banks are used to having that amount of power. I had like three. I had to talk to like two different managers sitting in the United States of America. My entire bank account shut down. I'm like this is strange.

Yeah. Like if anything, vote with your feet and you're doing the right thing because Brett and and Boe Valley credit union, they're awesome. And I'm like, what a great, what a great institution to have here in Alberta for us. What a fantastic tool and friendly, friendly group of people to be able to not have to worry about that stuff with Bow Valley. But yeah, I mean, things are getting easier. Like, okay, so I think this is probably where there's a couple things that should be outlined to people to make sure that they're kind of doing things right. Like if you're looking at Bitcoin, you want to make sure. that you actually take custody of the Bitcoin yourself.

Because a lot of people, I'm sure a lot of people listening to this are like, well, it gets hacked all the time and it gets stolen. The people that are losing money in Bitcoin are the people that are buying it and then leaving it with the equivalent of a bank. Right. Like they'll buy it on an exchange and then they'll just leave it there. They'll be like, okay, it's sitting with this. I trust this institution. and history is riddled with examples of why that's a horrible idea. You know, a couple years ago, we saw FTX, one of the biggest exchanges on the planet, blow up.

And hindsight's always 2020. Well, of course, I was going to happen because they were doing all the shady stuff. Yeah, well, at the time, everybody thought it was like the golden example of how much the industry has moved forward and become more mature. No, in the background, they were scurren around and selling Bitcoin that they didn't actually own. and the accounts were just numbers on a screen, and they were buying Bahamas real estate. And it was crazy. In Canada, the largest exchange in the country,

the one that everybody used back in the day, is now a Netflix documentary about the fall of Quadriga CX. That was the largest, like everybody used Quadriga, and it went down. And so what is necessary and what is, completely counterintuitive because we're always told like, oh, no, like, don't, don't take your own money, like put it in a safe financial institution. It's the exact opposite rule here. Because when you have digital money, okay, there's ways to secure it. And, you know, you can always,

I'm happy to help people figure out how to do that. And that's what I've been doing for years. But when you have a bank account, you know, you have numbers on a screen and a ledger that the bank keeps. And so if anything goes wrong, they can just reverse the numbers and they fix up the accounts and pull from somebody else's if it went the wrong way and everything. They can do that. Bitcoin is the equivalent of cash. It's a digitized version of being able to send cash peer to peer. And if you give cash to somebody, the only way to get that cash back is for that person to give you the cash back. And so when you send, there's like, there's finality to the transactions that happen. And so when an exchange gets hacked and all the money goes out,

well, that it's not coming back. There's no reverse button. And so it's counterintuitive in that you think, well, I'm taking personal responsibility. That's scary. You know, am I going to get hacked? The amount of effort to go and try and hack you as an individual is going to be on par with hacking a honeypot of a whole bunch of people's money. So it's actually more secure to hold your own money rather than pool it with others because

that's a bigger target. If you know, if you're sitting, once again, the Bik-Corners who are listening to this are going to get this. Let's assume you're talking to a bunch of people who don't own any. Yeah. Right. Are skeptical of it. And some of the things you said, probably rightfully so. And they're like trying to figure it up.

Yeah. Now, I'm going to point them to your channel, but maybe they're like, well, who would you suggest of like, here's some people that are doing the right things and helping. amateurs or people who, maybe amateur isn't the right word, but people who don't own any, where would you direct them to, to like start to walk through? Because, you know, I always come back on this side, folks, to Vance Crow. Vance Crow has been a guy or even Stephen Barber, for that matter, here on the Canada side, on the American side, Vance Crow, because they've both talked to me about it extensively. And, you know, having the ability to just call one of them up and be like, hey, I have no idea what I'm doing is a very helpful thing, right, to just,

be like, oh, do this and this and this. And if you're looking for a wallet, go here. And if you're wanting to be more secure, this is what you do and on and on and on. Where would you, where would, I assume you're going to want people to come watch what you're doing? Because that's kind of what you're doing. You're walking people through all these different questions and trying to help them sort through the many, many questions of Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, when you, when you're looking at there's, there's the why of Bitcoin and then there's the how of Bitcoin. And so, yeah, we're talking a lot about the why today.

But I'd say that's not even my forte. It's the how. It's the practical. And so, again, I've been doing this for eight years, almost nine years coming up pretty soon. But teaching people, what is a wallet? How do you obtain Bitcoin? How do you secure it? Like all of those, like just baby initial steps.

And so for the people that are skeptical right now, what I'll say is contrary to somebody that's trying to get you into a Ponzi scheme, I'm going to say don't put a whole bunch of money into Bitcoin. Your understanding of Bitcoin or your allocation to Bitcoin should probably reflect your understanding. So if you feel like you don't understand it very much, then you probably shouldn't own a whole bunch. But you should take time to learn. You should be curious and start to figure things out. And so when it comes to really quick for the how or for the why, read the price of tomorrow by Jeff Booth and read the Bitcoin standard by Saifedina Moose.

Great books. That'll get you off to a running start. I probably read the price of tomorrow first because that outlines a lot of the, why is our system broken and what's wrong with it? And then the Bitcoin standard outlines, oh, this is how we fix it. But for the how, I actually, so on, on, I have a website and I put together a learning page that kind of walks you through a number of steps in terms of, okay, where can I go to get Bitcoin? And then what is a wallet and how do I set it up and use it?

And then once I have a little bit more than, you know, you don't want to have just, you know, thousands and thousands of dollars sitting on an app on your phone, kind of like you wouldn't want to walk around with your life savings in your pocket. How do I then secure it so that it's more secure than just having it on my phone? And so you can get special devices that are like a digital vault for your Bitcoin. So I'd say that the three things out the gate that you want to focus on is where am I going to obtain Bitcoin? There's an awesome Alberta-based company called Bitcoin Well. Pretty easy.

You can send an e-transfer and it'll go directly into your own wallet. Unless you're at ATB. Yeah, exactly. Yes. So it may be first-order business for some people. getting an account at Bow Valley Credit Union. I don't know. I think, I think, sorry to interrupt. What we're going to do, folks, we're going to put it down on the show notes.

That way, if you're, you know, I think where you start with your first thought is like, you should never stop learning. You can be skeptical of Bitcoin, but go read Jeff Booth. Go read the Bitcoin standard. I think that even for myself, I'm like, I haven't read Jeff Booth yet. I'm like, I probably should go read Jeff Booth. It's so good. Well, and the fact that you put that as the number one thing, I'm like, oh, man, okay,

and we'll just tack on another thing to the reading list. But the thing about it is, is, you know, I just, the idea behind the Cornerstone Forum. So I do, it's actually coming to Calgary this year. I'm buggy about that after. May 10th, I'm bringing in a whole bunch of people to talk in Calgary. And it goes all over the place last year, or I guess this year in April. Dave Bradley was the Bitcoin man there to talk about some things on the Bitcoin side.

And the thing my brain always toys with is if I had known about COVID in 2019, how would I have done my life different in 2020, 2021, et cetera, right? Because if you go back in this podcast, folks, and for a lot of you, you've been listening for a long time, certainly it took until August roughly of 2021 for me to start talking to different people. And, and, you know, it's graduated into, you know, where I sit now. And I'm like, okay, well, imagine if you were in 2009, 2008, you started talking about Bitcoin. like, how would your life be different right now? Now, that's an easy game to play because you can go back and see, you know, it's like if you had a million dollars to bet on, I don't know, whatever stock, right, Amazon, etc. It's kind of the same mindset. So then I go, okay, well, we can't go back because as far as I know, I don't have a time machine.

So I need to turn around. I need to look to the future. And I look at this and I go, never stop learning. I think that's a great thought for anyone listening to this because it's like, yeah. Unless the Lord and Savior comes back tomorrow, I hopefully got a long, healthy life to live. Full of stupidity by governments. I mean, it's just, if there's going to be one thing that's for sure, that's probably going to be there. So I look at it and I go, how can we navigate them?

And how can we create a community that not only survives, but, you know, I feel like I'm stealing somebody's line here. Not only survives, but thrives. I feel like that's somebody's mantra. And I look at Bitcoin and I'm like, there's something to be there. It needs to be learned about more and understood more. I'm not saying go dump. You pointed out if you're new to it, I wouldn't say go dump 100 grand and do it. Do what your level of understanding, as Ben would say.

I think that's really interesting. And I think to continue learning about things is really important. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You got to stay skeptical. There is a mantra amongst Bitcoiners and that is don't trust, verify. And so, yeah, don't go and just blindly trust anything that I've said here.

Go read up, test, ask questions. If you think that something was wrong, then, then, yeah, like investigate it. You know, like you don't need to suddenly go and, like you said, dump 100 grand into this. And that's not at all what I'm saying. What I am saying is I do genuinely believe that, again, there's no such thing as being late to Bitcoin. Hindsight is always 2020, and it's always difficult comparing yourself to somebody that learned about it earlier than you.

But as the time goes on, like, again, 2021, I saw people coming in that are going, oh, God, I wish I would have gotten into it in 20 years earlier. Yeah, exactly. But those same people that got in around 2021, like during one of the last, like, exciting times the new people coming in now are saying, I wish I would have gotten in in 2021 or whatever. And so like there's always kind of ups and downs with it. But like the general trajectory is the purchasing power of Bitcoin will gradually go up over time. So like don't, don't treat this as I'm going to I'm going to buy some and I'm going to sell it for dollars later. When people ask me

if I'm going to sell my Bitcoin, my answer is for what? Why would I sell? my savings that are actually finite, that are actually scarce for something that can be printed for free. Why would I do that? And so it's a hard hurdle to get over where people have a realization like, I don't want the dollars. That's not the thing that I want. I want what the dollars can buy. And what the dollars can buy will always be less. And so again, it's just start Start basic. If you are going to get some Bitcoin, again, Bitcoin well is great. You can set up like a really simple wallet on a phone and you can do something like,

I like 100 bucks and just have it in a wallet and go, oh, okay, let's test sending it around. Let's see how that works. And then, you know, if down the line you end up having a more meaningful amount, then it's like, okay, it's time to make sure that you have a secure digital vault for it. and it will seem foreign at first, much like online banking was a very foreign concept when it first came out. But who doesn't use online banking now?

That's what I'm trying. I'm probably doing a very poor job with this. That's what I'm trying to like remind not only the listener, but myself of is like you're so, you're in such the early stages of this. Yeah. Right? I mean, if the world comes to an end tomorrow,

none of this matters. Yeah. You know, we get hit by a meteor. you do Ben Davidson's solar flare in the mid-2030s, like that 6,000-year event that, boom, done, we're back to the Stone Angels. You're right. This doesn't matter.

A whole lot of things aren't going to matter then, right? But if none of that happens and you carry on, you go, you're at the very early stages. 15 years in, you can always go, well, I wish I would, I wish I would. But, I mean, just think of yourself in another 15 years or another 25. And I'm speaking more to myself than anyone else, folks. Because obviously on this side of things, I think very highly of silver and gold. I think very highly of having that in my hand and what that represents and historically what that

represents. Lots of people talk about, you know, getting, how do you verify and the fraud that comes with it. I mean, in this chat, we've talked about how some of the things of Bitcoin have been screwed around. And that's my point to, you know, you fix the money, you fix the system or once again, I'm butchering it again, is I just look at, but how do you fix the human beings because they took Bitcoin. They created these, these exchanges. Everybody thought of them as like, oh, this is the greatest. And of course, human beings can be so nefarious, right? And they just go and do silly things that diminish everything. Well, the same is true in gold and silver. Same is true in paper money. The same is true as, you know, any walk of life, human beings, you have to use

discernment. You have to pay attention. You have to learn. You have to continue to read. You have to watch what a person's doing to understand what it can actually do in the future. And so, you know, like, to me, if you look at this, you got to remind yourself, you're in the early, early, early stages of Bitcoin. And once upon a time, Sean would have been like three months. Oh, man, you're 15 years. I wish I would have been in the first three months. But I'm starting to learn more and more. And it was the Dr. Jack Cruz podcast once again, when he starts rattling off all the things over the course of 100 years.

Like, man, the guy's really got to change his mentality on time. Yeah. Yeah. Again, I firmly believe that even like if we trend towards a world where Bitcoin is a ubiquitous global form of money, even the last person to enter the system will still benefit from it from that point forward. Because again, if you're in a system that perpetually devalues your savings and you move to a system that has a limited supply and we continue to be more efficient at things, you're going. to have more purchasing power with your savings over time. And so, like, again, even the last person to adopt Bitcoin will still benefit at that point. Now, obviously, the people that took bigger risks earlier on are going to benefit more. But the difference from this system to the system of old is if you have a lot of Bitcoin, it doesn't guarantee you more Bitcoin.

you don't perpetually get a bigger piece of the pie. And if you want to enjoy that Bitcoin, you actually have to spend it. You actually have to use it. You can't just benefit from a money printer giving you more and more money. Like you can't get additional loans and stuff on top of that. Like the money supply is constrained.

And so, again, a lot of people that have a lot of Bitcoin today that got in early, they would never be able to purchase that amount of Bitcoin right now based on their salary. So like if they want to use it, they've got to use it. If they want to benefit from it, they have to directly use it and spend it out into the economy. And so like you you only get more Bitcoin if you create value for others. And and and I guess I'll put it this way.

There's a couple things. There's a there's the unit bias right now. Everybody's like, I'll never get a whole Bitcoin. That doesn't matter. That doesn't matter. Most people will never get. If you were to take the entire supply of Bitcoin and split it up. up evenly across every person on the planet. Each person would get 0.002, 3, something like that.

That's the amount of Bitcoin that each person would get. But Bitcoin is divisible. And so what you're probably going to start to see a lot is using the smallest unit as the reference. It's one Bitcoin can be divided into 100 million piece. And the smallest pieces of a Bitcoin are called sats. So you can think of it like a dollar to cents. It's a Bitcoin to sats. And the different phenomenon is with the Canadian dollar, as it gets devalued and you can't buy as much with it, what did we do? We got rid of the lowest denomination.

There's no pennies anymore. Why? Because they're useless. You can't buy anything with a penny. While Bitcoin is the opposite. As purchasing power goes up, those tiny, little units are more and more useful. And so now a lot of wallets denominate in sats. And so you might, right now, it's less than, God, it's weird to me because I've seen,

I've seen the numbers changing this, this year. But one, one US dollar will buy you a thousand and 50 sats. But in Canadian dollars, one Canadian dollar is 750 sats. So like that and that number will trend down and down over time. You're going to be able to get less sats for a Canadian dollar over time. So I just think that people need to realize like, don't worry about getting a whole Bitcoin. Just think of how many sats have you saved is a better way of looking at it. And if you if you just start, you know, like I just, it's like anything. You start saving, just take your Canadian dollars. Just take all the nefarious stuff away and you just start putting a bit of money in in savings.

Yeah. Like, you know, over the course of a year, you'd be surprised how much money you got, right? It's just, it's, it's understanding the rest of this equation, right? Because obviously there is, there is a nefarious side to the old Fiat money system, right? It's not exactly on the up and up. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And the last little piece, I'll say, in and around this kind of unit bias and this, am I too late kind of thing.

If earlier we talked about how there's only so many goods and services in the economy and the dollars are just kind of a measuring stick for that. What you have in dollars right now represents a percentage of the total amount of stuff in the Canadian economy. So imagine if your bank account instead of having the amount of dollars, you had had that percentage. It listed, oh, you own or you have the ability to purchase this percent of the Canadian economy. Yes, it would be a decimal, but besides the point, what would have happened over the past few years, especially since COVID, so we printed all the money that we've printed, even in the face of getting, you know, like if you were getting checks like COVID checks and everything like that. You feel nominally richer because you're getting

money for free. And you feel pretty good about that, oh, like the number in my bank account has gone up. But if people were actually watching and their bank account showed a percentage of the economy, that number would be going down. Down. Yeah. And so that's what people don't get. Like, I got more dollars. But your number's going down because they're not. evenly distributing the newly created money, right? Like what percentage is going to government cronies and like special contracts and like all of that, like the buddies that are closest to the money spigot? They're getting the largest percentage.

So what they're actually doing is they're siphoning wealth from everybody else to themselves, even though it looks like they're giving you money. They're actually taking away your ability to purchase something with Bitcoin. if you own Bitcoin, that percentage stays the same. And as we are able to create more stuff with less effort, that percentage staying the same means you're able to get more stuff with the same amount of money. One final question for you,

because obviously you do a show, I do a show. I'm kind of curious. Have you used, I don't know the heck do I ask this, How have you used Bitcoin as a payment form for BTC sessions? Like, is that a simple thing to do? Whoops. Is it a simple thing to do? Because, you know, I think of different people on this side of things have, like,

have done two interesting things, which I found really interesting when it first happened because I'm like, oh, that's, that's kind of cool. One is the simple way, E transfer, right? That wasn't a thing not that long ago, I might add. But, you know, I have the first E transfer ever got from a fan. I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool. That's, you know, a value for value. I'm like, okay, that's pretty cool.

The next one that I found very interesting was I got sent a few silver coins. And I'm like, man, I really like that. You know, like hats off to you audience members. And then the one that Vance Crowes always talked about has been Fountain the app and people paying you in Satoshi and in Bitcoin. And I've tried to get my brain around that. I feel like I'm starting to. But where do you sit and how do you do it? Or if you do it, I assume you do it.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So there's a variety of things, actually. So first off, like when I send out invoices, I use something called ZapR-I-T-E. So what this is is it's a service that will allow you to create invoices or like payment links or whatever it may be. They also have like a point of sale terminal that you could use. But the way that works is, you can link a Bitcoin wallet that you yourself own. So ZapRite never holds money for you at all. It's just a portal for people to be able to pay you. But alongside that, you can also put in e-transfer information,

accept credit cards through like Stripe or what is the square. And they've got a few different options there. But you can present all of those payment methods at the same time. And then they also give you the ability to add a discount. or a premium to certain payment methods. And so, like, you could say, oh, if you want to pay me in Bitcoin, I'll give you a little discount. I like the opposite because I don't like getting paid in dollars.

I don't like dealing with bank accounts. I don't like, I just like when somebody sends me money that I instantly have it. There's no holding period. There's not, I just have the money and I can then use it. So I actually charge a premium if somebody wants to pay me in dollars because it accurately communicates what I want to communicate, which is. is you're paying me in an inferior form of money that I don't want. So I'm going to charge for that.

And so I use ZapRite for my day-to-day invoices. Also, there's a censorship-resistant form of social media called Noster. And with Noster, they have baked in Bitcoin payments. And so I've literally got a little clock device on my desk right here. And as I'm watching this, I made a post this morning. and I have it linked so it's flashing and I'm seeing oh somebody just gave you X amount of sats they put it they tipped your post and so I'm getting sent Bitcoin in real time as we're sitting here talking for a social media post I made this morning and and same thing I have my podcast linked up

and people can pay there's a an app called fountain where per minute people can can set like a oh I'm going to pay 10 sats a minute or whatever 50 sats a minute and every minute that passes, it just drips into your wallet. And you have instant access. There's no third party. There's nothing. It's just you receiving the value. So like there's a whole bunch of different ways.

And even beyond that, and this is the important one, especially for the Albertans listening to this, is it okay if I go into a little bit about the sat market that we have going on? Sure. So, so we've created a local circuit. economy amongst people here in Alberta. We do it in Calgary a couple times a year. But it's a market of people that we're all kind of into Bitcoin, but we all also have jobs and businesses and products and services that we offer. And we've got, there's farmers there and there's, tradesmen, people that do roofing and flooring and all that kind of stuff. There's personal

trainers. There's a whole bunch of different, very useful things. And all. of us get together and we create a market and accept Bitcoin. So people there are all prepped and ready to get paid in Bitcoin or to converse with each other or to transact with each other in Bitcoin as well. So people are earning it in real time just on the spot with phones and paying. And so what I would say is for those that are curious and actually want to see if this is really something real in real time. I would encourage you to come to the market that we have going on next month. Maybe I'll send you the link, Sean, but we've got it going on on Sunday, December 15th. And it is, again, just like an aggregation of great Albertans, all like

local people coming in offering goods and services. And you can use cash. So if you're brand new to Bitcoin and you don't have any, that's totally fine. You can come and pay in cash too. But it's all meant to be like peer-to-peer censorship resistant. And so everybody there accepts Bitcoin. And you can come. You can bring cash, but you can also learn. And then we'll teach you out to get a wallet.

And you can play around while you're there too. Appreciate you coming on and doing this. I'm, I guess where I sit is I'm like, I've got to go reject booth now. You know, like I just like every time I, you know, sitting here folks and doing this five days week you know I sit and I go oh man the the reading list is like I at times I struggle with it at times you find a good book and you just hammer through it and like crap why did I ever stop not stop reading but slow down on reading and when when you come and you sit and you chat ben I'm like hmm there's a few things that I've been pushing off and I the Jeff booth thing

has been mentioned to me multiple times by multiple people I respect and it's like it's high time that a guy probably sat down and and read it. Appreciate you coming on though and doing this. Yeah, thanks for having me. And again, if anybody's looking for me, just search BTC sessions on YouTube. I'll come right up. And if you find that the free tutorials are just not scratching that itch and you need some one-on-one handholding. I also have an Alberta-based company called Bitcoin Mentor, where somebody will sit down with you on a one-to-one call and walk you through wallets and hardware and all that stuff.

So that's just Bitcoin Mentor.io. Cool. Well, I appreciate you doing this and look forward to probably running into you in the future, I assume. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.