Shaun Newman Podcast - #882 - Brad Mills

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

Brad Mills is a Canadian entrepreneur, Bitcoin advocate, and host of the Magic Internet Money podcast. Involved in Bitcoin since 2011, he has been a miner, investor, and startup angel, managing a multimillion-dollar Bitcoin investment portfolio. He is also a producer of the documentary This Machine Greens, which promotes Bitcoin’s environmental benefits.To watch the Full Cornerstone Forum: https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcastGet your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500Silver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] Grahame: [phone]Bow Valley Credit UnionWebsite: www.BowValleycu.comEmail: [e-mail] Use the code “SNP” on all ordersProphet River Links:Website: store.prophetriver.com/Email: [e-mail]

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before you watch today or as you're watching that, you know, if you're on Spotify, Apple, YouTube Rumble X, make sure to subscribe, make sure to leave a review, make sure to hit the retweet button, make sure to just share it if you're enjoying it. And it's the month here while I'm off on holidays. So there's no Tuesday episodes for the month of July. And Fridays, we have a guest co-host with twos and then Thursdays or throwback Thursdays. So you can shoot me a text. This will be the month where if you don't hear back for me for some time, it's just because I'm spending time with the wife and kids and look forward to being back fully here in August. Either way, let's get on to that tail of the tape. Today's guest is a Canadian entrepreneur, Bitcoin

advocate and host of the Magic Internet Money podcast. I'm talking about Brad Mills, so buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by Brad Mills. Brad, thanks for hopping on. Thank you very much. and I guess I should give a shout out to Dave Bradley for hooking this up. Now, it's your first time on the show. And I have been having a bit of a stretch here with Bitcoins. So this has been interesting to me. But it's your first time on the show.

So I treat it very much. I'm not a Marvel guy. We don't need to get into that. But I liked the movies, how they gave origin stories with a guy on his first time. I liked to, you know, for me and the audience, let's just hear. bit about Brad before we get into anything? Well, since it's Marvel movies, I mean, I grew up in Cape Breton. I was actually born in Calgary.

My parents were Cape Bretners out West looking for work because in the 90s, the 80s. I was born in the 80s. Economic depression in Cape Breton, 20, 30, 40 percent unemployment rate. And I grew up, we had these industries that would come and then leave. And the steel plant was one of the industries. that had just recently left Nova Scotia in Cape Breton and kind of decimated the local economy, but they left behind the tarponds.

And I grew up near the tarponds. So all kinds of weird sludge and stuff would be coming up in people's yards. So I must have been playing around one day in some sludge and it taught me about sound money and planted the seed so that later on in life I would become a bit-corner. So I guess that's my,

Marvel inspired origin story. Do you ever talk to your parents about that time, like when the industry was leaving? Like any, like, do they, have you ever gone down memory lane and heard about that time? I have, yeah. I talked to my parents, my grandparents, about what it was like to live up in Cape Breton in the early days.

And just recently, actually, I was home last summer and I was talking to my grandfather. I was curious, like, how did he build his house? What was it like? And it was like dirt roads, you know, horse and carriage. Still people were using horse and carriage. Some people, some of the older folks. But he told me that he needed a $400 loan to get the materials to build the house.

And that he had, I think it was like $500. He had secured from another bank to get the property. And then the bank wouldn't give him any more money. And he was working a full-time job at the time. but they thought he was too risky. So he went across the street to the other bank, and they gave him the loan. And then that was TD Bank that he ended up switching all of his banking over.

And he ended up building the land and the first structure of the house and everything to be able for him and his wife to live in there, his new bride, it was something like $800. And I just thought, like, that's kind of a strange way of living that we've lost this. that connection to what the value of things is. And I just remember, like, I've recently watched it's a wonderful life. I've had to watch it before.

So we watched it with my wife this holiday season. I'm like, man, that actually reminded me of my grandfather's story of how he built his first house and the deals, the struggles he had to deal with the bank. And people are stressing out about the financial markets and the depression and stuff like that, the downturns and they just go to the bank and they try to get out there $20. And it's like their life savings is $20. And that's wild to think about in one lifetime, one generation like that, how much things have inflated and the utility value of a house used to be what it would cost plus a little

premium for labor. And then now I just recently renovated my mother's house. in Cape Breton and I had a guy, I hired a guy to do some nice cabinetry. And the cost of the labor was 60% of the cost of the cabinets. And this is the same sort of deal. It's just a young guy who's a skilled worker that I felt like I wanted to give them some work. I didn't want to just buy some cheap stuff from, from IKEA or something like that.

I wanted to hire somebody local and employ somebody. man, it was like five times the cost of buying it from home hardware, somewhere like that. And 60, 70% of the cost was labor. So things have completely gone distorted in terms of value and the costs and what things are worth. And it's not even as bad in Cape Breton. For the labor side of things, it's really bad. But, you know, house prices in Cape Breton, when I tell people the costs of homes and stuff, they're just shocked in the rest of Canada.

like my grandparents house that I was just talking about. They, because of Bitcoin and because of being a investor in Bitcoin, I was able to pay off my grandparents' mortgage because 20 years ago they took a mortgage when my grandfather retired. He was a milkman. So he retired. He wasn't very good with money. And he ended up having to pay off some debts to the dairy.

And he took a mortgage on his house to pay off the debts and sort of. end his entrepreneurship career, like not owing anything to anybody. And it was kind of a tragic sort of resolution of that story because usually the, the path for dairymen was like, you build up, you work your whole life, you get a book. And then you sell it back to the dairy for a profit. But when things shifted in the economy and inflation started going crazy and they started doing quantitative easing, it just kind of messed up the whole equation for everything. You know, technology is deflationary.

So obviously a guy driving around, delivering milk to people is not as efficient as people going on Amazon or whatever, just ordering it online and getting it delivered by Uber or something like that. So he ended up getting kind of screwed. He worked his whole life and he wasn't very good with money, but he didn't really get himself into heavy debt. But he tried and he tried and he tried and he ended up having to take debt on his house in order to end his working career just in the black. And so it was a $20,000 mortgage that he got on his house. And they were paying the minimum payment. for 20 years.

And when I, I, I kind of got a little bit more financially smart myself. And I started eventually like realizing one of my goals was I wanted to do was pay, pay off their mortgage. And I had thought like, I want to get my mom a house. I want to get my dad a house. These are some of the things, some of the goals I had set for myself to kind of like helped my Cape Breton family who didn't really have a lot of experience with money and things like that.

And I was pretty pissed off when I, when I took a look at my grandfather's situation after the 20 years. his principal was still $20,000. So they were just paying interest only for 20 years, not realizing that they were actually not getting ahead. They were just paying off the interest. So he paid a total of like $19,000 over the 20 years on the mortgage, and it was still $20,000 principal.

So I went in with them and I took my grandfather to the bank. I'm like, I'm going to pay this off. Let's pay off this mortgage. And the girl at the bank, because I was kind of pissed off doing it. I'm like, I'm going to use Bitcoin and pay off. this mortgage. And the teller at the bank was just like shocked. She started crying. She didn't real, she was like, nobody's ever done that before in here. Like that's so special. And I kind of like disarmed me a little bit because I was a little bit mad because I had noticed that it wasn't actually

a mortgage. It was a line of credit. And it was a higher interest line of credit. So I, you know, I spoke to the branch manager and they're like, yeah, there's nothing we can do. Like we can't go back and fix this. When he took it, it wasn't actually a mortgage. It was a line of credit that had a higher interest rate. So, I mean, it just made me realize that the entire system is built to just extract meat profit from you, like you're just meat to the banks. Like, you're just being farmed for interest and late fees and overdraft fees. And they don't have that personal relationship. The banks don't have the personal relationship that they used to. Like the bank teller's back when my grandfather first took his $600 loan from the, from the teller because he's like,

oh yeah, I know that you're good, you're good for it. But nowadays, it's just they're just, you know, working. They're not connected to the customer. They're not connected to actually what's going on behind the scenes. They're not even connected to the money. And they're just there being customer service. And, you know, they put you in shitty investments. They put you in shitty loans. It just really sucks because soon as you're old enough to take a loan, you start getting preyed on by credit card companies and banks to get into debt. And then when you're old enough when you're, you know, you're taking advantage of by banks as well. So it just feels like the entire life cycle of somebody is to just be taken advantage of by the financial system.

So anyways, to wrap all that up, my grandfather's mortgage was 20. I paid it off and they were pretty, pretty psyched about that. But we got the home assessment in recently. And I think it's like $80,000 is like the cost of my grandparents, three bedroom home in Cape Breton with like a half, it's a three quarters of an acre of land. So you compare that to like a place here in Ontario or probably where you are or even in BC. I mean, you'd be paying like $700,000, $800,000, $900,000 for that. Now, if we were to try to sell that on the open market or whatever, I bet you could probably

get $150 or $200, but even still, you know, Cape Breton, it's a unique place, that's for sure. And it was kind of definitely a unique experience growing up in Cape Breton around people that didn't really have a lot of money and they weren't really trying to seek to get more money. Yeah, that's it. Is that just the Cape Breton mindset to not seek, you know? Because out here in Alberta, like, I'm just surrounded by entrepreneurs and people

building things and working a ton and pushing as hard as they can and, you know, just, I don't know, building things, honestly. and trying to innovate and, you know, surrounded by farmers and oil patch and, you know, like Steve Barber with upstream data, like they're here in Lloyd, like, you know, and I've got a tour of their facility and what they're doing. And like it just goes and the list just goes on and on and on of people that are trying to, I don't know, like get way ahead, to be honest. Honestly, I've been thinking about that a lot for the 20th.

years or so that I've been away from Cape Breton because I have all my family still there. Actually, most of my family still there. My sister moved here. She followed me here and she brought her kids here because she wanted to make more money and try to, you know, have a better life. And so I go back every year. I go back a couple times a year. We stay there for a couple months.

But we ended up buying a little home by the ocean in the small fishing village of like 70 people in, in Gaberous. and you know I initially I felt like it was something to do with just there's no ambition but the more I thought about it the more I realized the more I learned about historical cycles and psychology and things like that and money and inflation and what it does to people I think it I think what it is is like Cape Bretners are naturally like ambitious and hardworking people but the problem is over generations, these cycles of you just being kind of defeated in the financial sense, you just kind of change your perspective.

Instead of trying to achieve more financially, you go and then you start learning how to play an instrument, or you go and you write a play, or you go and you create a little tiny entrepreneurial venture selling coffee or something like that. And so there's a lot of, there's a, the entrepreneurial spirit, it is alive in Cape Breton. It's just almost like, because when you go back, when you go to Cape Breton,

everybody, almost, you know, everybody knows how to play an instrument. And that's unique to Cape Breton, where here, when I'm in Ontario, it's very rare to find somebody

who's playing an instrument. It's almost like you've got to be like, it's the opposite. It's like in Cape Breton, if you find somebody who's financially successful and, you know, middle class or even wealthy,

they're the unique person. Whereas here, if you find somebody who's really good at playing guitar, It's like, oh my God, you're a special. You're a rock star. But back home, everybody's writing and everybody's, you know, kind of doing something creative. So it's just like your time gets spent doing different things.

And I think that's because of growing up in the 80s and 90s with an economic depression. You know what? The more I learned about the Depression that, you know, the Great Depression, the more I realize how similar that was for me growing up in the 80s and 90s in Cape Breton, how the things that people would do were similar. Like I remember I was watching Cinderella Man and they made this kind of like emotional sort of moment where he has to take the milk jug and like pour water in it and like give the kids the milk. We used to do that every week. Like when the milk would run out, you just put powdered milk in the bag and you fill it up with water and then you got a new bag of milk. So it's like when the milk bag got like this low, you just fill it back up with water and you got more cereal.

Right. So that was just something that we just did. And it was like it wasn't it was just money was something. something we just didn't have. And that was a unique thing. We just didn't have money and it didn't make anybody upset. We weren't pissed off about it. It was just, I don't have money. So I'm just going to enjoy my life however I can. And a lot of people end up doing side gigs selling drugs or stealing stuff or whatever it is. They end up having some kind of hustle, growing weed, whatever it is. So for sure, there's an entrepreneurial spirit alive and well in Cape Breton,

but the amount of people that have gone on social assistance and identify as having a disability, it's like 33% of people in Cape Breton identify as disabled. They feel like they are disabled and they need some support. It's higher than the national average. I just learned that this year during the election. And the amount of people that are on EI and because of the seasonal work, the super hardworking fishermen that can't work in the winter, it's like, what are they going to do? Well, it's just, unfortunately, these behaviors get,

installed into people and then the kids see that and then it just sort of rolls over and then people leave and they go to Alberta and they go elsewhere go to Ontario to find work and what you're left with is an aging population out east where there's not really a ton of opportunities and everybody's just begging for handouts and used to being given EI and kind of treated like they're unable to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and it has really affected the the political climate and the kind of the perspective of people that stay in Cape Breton. That's why it shifts so hard to the left there. And it's so strange because people are so nice and kind and creative and artistic,

but they're just so illiterate when it comes to finances and politics, in my opinion. I mean, I'm sure a lot of people politically believe that they're right when they're trying to call for socialism and distribution of wealth. by printing money, but I just think it's just financial literacy is just a problem. It creates this culture of dependence and looking for handouts and thinking that it's unfair for people like us that are working hard and then succeed. That's unfair. So unfortunately, that's something that's been spreading all over the world. But I grew up with it in Cape Breton and I'm noticing

it more and more in Ontario and everywhere else I travel. The kind of things I would see when I was growing up, the way that people would behave, the activities of people on the street and stuff. It just feels strangely familiar now here in Ontario, which is really wild. When did you first stumble on Bitcoin? Are you into gold and silver and all that stuff, I assume? So, well, if I can judge no one on financial literacy, because it took me until Oh man, folks, when was that? 2021, 2021?

Like it was in the middle, you know, like we all have our moments where, where, you know, like, you just get injected with something and you're like, okay, the world. And that's probably a poor choice of words for the, the years of 2020 to 2022. But like, I just, you know, I had my eyes open. And certainly on this podcast, I just started talking about it. And naturally when you start to question things in the world. old, you're led to a bunch of different realms. One is politics because you think that's going to solve things. The harder you look at that, you're like, what the heck is going on here? And naturally,

that bled into financial systems, financial markets. And so I would say, yeah, yeah, for sure, I'm a precious metals guy. And that has led into a lot of Bitcoin conversations, right? Like, I see a lot of similarities between the two amps, although I think you guys are like, like neighbors or maybe even great friends. And at times, uh, it's funny to watch real staunch gold people versus real staunch bitcoins.

Um, I'd see a lot of similarities. I'm sure there's differences like huge differences. But like overall, the mindset is staring at the financial system and realizing it is deeply flawed. And so regardless, that's, that's my side of things.

It's, the way I think about is like the bit corners and the gold bugs. It's like, Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons. They both pretty much go door to door knocking, trying to sell you something, but just one of them doesn't celebrate birthdays. That's pretty much

I'm sure they're, yeah. Okay. That's a great example. We're both evangelizing, we're both going door to door evangelizing the word. But one of us doesn't buy Christmas gifts. I'm curious.

And now I can just hear text line oh man that's great um sorry yes so i guess yes i i'm certainly a precious metals um i'm certainly um but i've been having more and more bitcoins when i do bitcoiners on when i do my conference i always have a bitcoiner and a gold bug or somebody who's a precious metals always there we've done it two years in a row where they sit on the same panel because i think there's just a lot to be learned from both camps mm-hmm so you got into gold like in 2020 after the pandemic's response? Yeah, roughly in that timeframe.

What were you doing before in terms of like financial stuff? Were you just investing or you were just working? A little bit of stocks and then working and paying off debt. I was trying to get out of debt as fast as humanly possible. I'd watched, I guess my parents, right? Farmers get stuck in debt and just watched how hard that was on them. So I wanted nothing to do with debt. I didn't want to take on this huge financial burden.

I just saw over and over again when you worked your butt off where it all went. And, you know, but if I go back even 10 years when I was coming out of college and my first paycheck and watching the money go, I just was like, oh, well, I guess this is what it is. And I didn't really think like the government's taking too much. I just thought, well, you know, like, I am a terrible. Maybe I'm a great test case, but at times I think I'm a terrible test case because I had a lot of things wrong. I like a lot and I'm about as dumb as it comes and I've just been slowly learning but back then I just took what the government left me and used it to pay off my debts so that I didn't have to worry about every car payment you know my wife had student loans we bought a house like all the things

and you just let's just keep paying it off so we don't have to worry about this and then as I started you know like I was I wrote it down I think my parents bought their house in the night built a house in the 19, late 1980s for 130,000. I think that's the number. Wow. And now in Lloyd, which should raise eyebrows, right, to build a similar house is probably seven to eight hundred thousand. I would say a minimum. And like, and I'm just like, that's, that's insane, you know, like, that is insane. And that's just where we're at with, with how much a house cost to build. Like, it's, it's quite wild. I'm building a podcast studio right now. And it is insane how much money it takes to do like a, what is it, a 14 by 24 room. Like, think about it. That's what it is. There's nothing

crazy about it. And yet I watched the money going on and it's like, this is, this is a bit insane how much it costs to build things right now. Yeah, we're doing the same thing here in our house right now. My wife's redoing the, we just, we moved. So I had stayed in the same home for 15, almost 15 years. So actually, you asked me how I heard when I heard about Bitcoin. So I was, I was an entrepreneur. And I had, so I had left Cape Breton when I was. And by the way, I can make the Mormon joke because I grew up Mormon. And my brother was Jehovah's Witness. Isn't that funny? Oh, wait. Really? Yeah. Seriously. Yeah. Yeah. Whoa, whoa, before we go any further, how does that happen? Well, he was,

He was my stepbrother and my parents were divorced. And so my mom brought us into the Mormon religion. And then my dad's girlfriend or, you know, fiance or whatever, was Jehovah's Witness. Was brought into the Jehovah's Witness Church. So on the one side, I was going to, you know, going to Mormon church. And, you know, every second weekend and every, you know, they had split custody. So half the time I was like being exposed to Mormon stuff.

And then the other half the time, I was kind of learning about Jehovah's Witnesses. and what they believe in stuff, but it's so funny because they weren't really practicing. So I would really, we were like, my brother, my older stepbrother was like a hustler. He was like, you know,

growing weed and selling drugs and hash and stuff like that, like the trailer park boys type of stuff. So I was like going to church, learning about how it's evil to drink coffee and say the word shit, like you're going to go to hell if you do that, while then getting woken up in the middle of the night by some guys,

like, hey, is your brother around? I need to buy something. hash and I'm like he's in the other room uh buddy so it's just quite you know listening to teupac and wu tang clan and like all the all the great gangster rap music of the of the the 2000s yeah 90s and 2000 yeah it was actually the 90s because the 2000s i was in college but anyway so it's quite a fun uh unique upbringing i had in cape breton but went to college so i left i was like they were like you're i have so many questions i have so many questions

questions right now and yet I will I'm no you're not at all this is that's okay sorry I'm going to pull you back to Bitcoin but I'm just like you you start talking my brain starts firing and um carry on how go ahead if you got any follow-ups there well I'm like okay so you're sitting there a young kid you think about that you know normally with church in particular you go to one and that's all you're exposed to you get exposed to two different ones from two different Because my grandmother and my dad were regular Christians. They would go to church, like regular church. Like Catholic or are we talking just like...

Protestant maybe? Protestant maybe, okay. I can't remember Anglican, is that a thing? I can't remember exactly. Yeah. It was some kind of like... Where did you square that away? Where have you squared away faith since you've gotten past?

You know what? I'll tell you what it was. At 19 or 18, I don't, I don't know, don't know. Do you know much about the Mormon religion? I'd be lying if I sat here and said, I know. I'll give you, sure. I'll give you the punchline, right? So in the Mormon religion, they are the only religion that baptizes other people for when the, what Mormons believe is that when you die, you go into like this, you know, ghost waiting room to either wait for the rapture to happen where Jesus comes, the second coming, all that stuff. And then, and then, and then,

everybody figures out like they sort where you go. So until the second coming, everybody's just like waiting around. And Mormons go and baptize all the people up in the ghost waiting room. So on behalf of all the dead people, they're going and baptizing. That's what all the temples are. Like all the Mormon temples, they're like baptizing all the dead people from history to let them choose whether or not they want to accept it.

It's like a voluntary thing. It's not like a coerced vaccine, like a forced vaccine, like a forced vaccine. Like you got to get this baptism or you're not going to heaven. It's like, we're going to baptize on behalf of you and then it's going to like email that up

to the ghost waiting room and then you can choose to accept it or not. So you're saying cousin Bob is dead. How do you baptize cousin Bob who's dead? You just say it. You go to the temple and you put on this like holy suit and it's like got all these like blessings and stuff

on the water and somebody with the proper level priesthood because you got to be like, you know, prestige level priesthood to baptize for dead people. So you get, you get like the top guy who's like top tier maxed out the Mormon game. And he can baptize on behalf of dead people. So you stand there as a proxy on behalf of like 10 people that they've done some genealogical research on. They know there's these 10 people died and they weren't baptized Mormon. So you're going to be baptized as a proxy on behalf of them. So like that's just like a factory, a funnel of like just.

just pilgrimages and people going to the Mormon temples to get baptized on behalf of other people. And they just constantly do it. It's like a... So you could be baptized like 50 times for people in your lineage? Oh, hundreds of times, yeah. How many times have you been baptized then by the Mormon church? 11. 11. 11. 11. Once on behalf of myself. Okay. And then the other 10 on behalf of people in your line?

No, it was just people in history. It wasn't even people related to me. because Sean, we're all God's children. So anyway, that's not even the point. That's the kind of, here's the thing, though. What the Mormons believe is that there's three levels of heaven and then outer darkness, which is hell. So there's the celestial, the celestial, heavens.

And the top heaven is like where God and Jesus and the archangels and, you know, like the real O.Gs, the real, and, you know, And you can make it up there, but you've got to be like the perfect human being in terms of all the values and, you know, live devotely and all the stuff. You can make it up there. It's extremely hard. Like, that's the target that the real religious people are shooting to go up to the top tier of heaven. Then there's like the second tier of heaven, which is where most good Mormons are going to go, like great Mormons. If you're a Mormon and you're great and maybe you were somebody in history who was great like Mother Teresa, but you weren't Mormon, you can go up there if you accept the baptism when you're in the waiting room.

So once you die and you're up in the waiting room, you realize, oh shit, the Mormons were right. Dang it. I lived my whole life as a Catholic. They weren't the right one. I should have, but they don't want to, you know, it's like kind of a socialist thing. Like they don't want to discriminate against you because you were a different religion. So they give you the, the option to make the right choice after you're dead. So Mother Teresa is probably going to say, oh, duh, yeah, okay, I'm Mormon now. And then she gets to go to the second tier of heaven, right? So I don't think there's a scarcity cap. It's not like Bitcoin. I think like at the top level, I think it's a, there's a scarcity cap. It's, there's only a certain amount of, you know, ghost coins or whatever that can make it up into the top tier of heaven with God and Jesus.

But then the second tier is pretty, pretty wide open. It's just criteria base. It's like an OP, like a checklist, like, you know, did you pray a lot? Yes. Did you get back? Did you accept your ghost baptism? Whatever. Blah, blah, blah. There's like a lot of criteria there. I can't remember them all now. But then there's the third tier of heaven, which is where every good person can go. So as long as you're a good person, even I think if you commit crimes and then you just like repent for it and you say, oh shit, you know, I'm sorry. I did that. I'm going to live better from now on and you're serious about it. You would go to the good heaven. So there's, and they say that that is like earth. That's just like living like on earth. There will be some, some suffering and every once in a while,

some despair and whatnot, but you're going to live like an earthlike existence for eternity. So, and then there's the outer darkness, which is the Mormon hell, which is like, you know, bad people go there, right? So people who drink root beer and Coca-Cola, they go to hell. No, I'm just kidding. But you're not allowed to drink root beer and Coca-Cola if you want to go to the top tiers of heaven. But you can be in the regular earth heaven if you drink dark. pop. So I was like 19 years old ready to either make a choice like I want to either do earth like activities like normal human things or go on a mission. Because at 19 as a Mormon male, you go on a mission. Because I was going through all the priesthood stuff. I got all the baptisms. I got all the like check

boxes and stuff done on my list of like seminary steps to go become a missionary. But then I was like, I like Jim Carrey movies. Like I like laughing and having fun. I want to try. I want to. sense that sweet, bubbly taste of root beer. I enjoy that. I want to say the S word. I don't want to live like a normal. I'd like to have premarital sex. You know,

that was a big one for a young guy. Like, I wonder what that would be like kissing somebody. You know what I mean? Like, that's the choice. I was like, go for two years with a bunch of dudes

and have to live this devout, boring kind of holy life. Or go to college in Toronto and just have fun and watch funny movies. and become an entrepreneur and kind of like learn how to do comedy and do stand-up comedy and things like that, like enjoy life. So the game theory choice that the church gave me was terrible. They basically told me that you can stop going to church and give up on being a Mormon and still go to heaven.

And I was like, if that's the way it works, I'm definitely choosing that option. Like if life can be awesome and that can be what heaven is like and I don't have to go to church and live this like missionary lifestyle I'm 100% doing that. So I chose that option hardcore and I haven't been back since because if they're right, I'm just going to take the ghost baptism and then live the pretty good heaven existence. And if they're wrong, I had a good life. So that's where I landed on it. And since then haven't given much thought then. Well, not really. No. I'm enjoying life. Interesting.

Well, it's funny. I just had Adam O'Brien in Bitcoin well. And he had his, you know, like he had his own journey back to faith. Anyways, I just find it interesting that you were brought up Mormon, Jehovah Witness, and let's regular Christian. I don't, that's kind of your words. And I completely understand what you mean by it. It's just, you know, going to church and. And my wife is like when I came to Ontario, I met my wife in 2004 at college. And her whole family is like hardcore Catholic.

So I've had over the last like 20 years a lot of exposure to the Catholic church. And I go to church with them. My daughter's baptized Catholic. She goes to a Catholic school. Um, you know, so I've, you know, I got married in a Catholic church, all that stuff. So I've been of a lot of exposure, probably like the same amount of time, like half my life has been a lot of exposure to the Catholic religion as well. So do you just chalk it up to? Well, I don't know. What do you chalk that up to? Um, I'm also really interested in like Buddhism and, and, uh, sort of spiritual teachings of

and Buddhist type religions. And I've met a lot of Muslim friends in Bitcoin. There's a lot of Muslims in Bitcoin. So, you know, Bitcoin is halal, I believe. And shit coins are haram. So I've learned that. And, you know, there's a lot of interesting stuff about, I've learned about the Jewish religion and the Muslim religion and stuff like that.

So I just kind of like learned a lot about through meeting a lot of people and being in Bitcoin. and people come at it from different perspectives, but I don't really judge anybody for whatever they believe. And I'm just still figuring it out. You know what I mean? Like, I don't know the answers. I'm just, I'm just hedging my bets. I'm hedging my bets here. I'm trying to be as good of a person as I possibly can.

And, you know, one of the things that they did teach me in the Mormon religion, which I still hold true to this day, is charitable, to be charitable and to help others. Those are two and to be family focused. Those are two very, very important pillars of the Mormon religion. Every Sunday we had to do a family meeting. And then every Monday we had to do another meeting with the family. They have workbooks that you follow and everybody gets to like participate. And so super, super heavy focus on family and tradition. And then in terms of like charitable, you have to tithe 10% in the Mormon religion.

it's like mandatory. So it's like another tax. There's like not only you have to pay income tax off your check, but you got to tie it as well. So there's tithing. And then just generally we're always volunteering to go into the old folks' homes, helping people out, volunteering in the community, going to food banks, things like that.

That's what Mormons do pretty well. And I was pretty shocked actually when I came here to Ontario. I was like, I'm not a Mormon anymore. I don't really go to church. But I want to carry that tradition forward. So I wanted to volunteer for a local church to continue doing some of those things. Like maybe on the weekends, I'll go help the old folks or something or do a food bank. But I'd call the churches up here in Ontario and they'd be like, nah, we don't do that.

I'm like, oh, seriously? Like I was like, I'm here to just volunteer to help out with whatever drives you're doing. Ah, we don't do that. We got enough help. Like, what? Okay, that's kind of strange. And it's because in the Mormon religion, nobody gets paid. The missionaries don't get paid.

The president of the church doesn't get paid. It's not a job. It's like everybody's volunteering. So there's some expenses. The church is run. But all the money goes up to the main church. And the main church builds the temples so that you can baptize all of the history of all the dead people in humanity. And they've got a huge investment fund that I've recently learned about.

And I think they may have bought some Bitcoin a few years back. But yeah, it's been a question. quite a interesting experience of trying to think about it from that perspective with all these different religions I'm surrounded this. This is about as random questions get. What year were you born? You mentioned going to college in 2004. It's just my own brain.

You're in 82. I'm in 86. Not that anyone's keeping track, but I was just wondering where. Yeah. Yeah, I went in 2002 is when I went to college in two years. years. College. Yeah.

You, you had a, um, a post on, on X about, uh, the Citadel mind and body challenge. You were talking about your,

your wife and, um, I found that, well, married man on this side and, uh, very, you know,

focused on, on having a strong relationship with my wife. I found that very interesting. I was wondering if you'd share a little bit about that. Sure, man. Like, um,

well, my wife and I met in college and, and, you know, she was like, you know, the hot girl that I didn't think I had any chance with. So I was too shy to talk to her and, you know, didn't talk to her for the first year. And then the second year, I was just like, well, maybe I'll offer some cinnabone and see if she wants it. So I went down in a synabund. Cineabon, yeah.

So I bought a, I took my, you know, I used to make hacky sacks in college to pay my way through college. I would make hacky sacks and sell them. So I had a little bit of extra money because I was always saving and I was always entrepreneurial in some way. So it was like sewing up hacky sacks while watching Star Trek and Smallville and stuff like that or playing NHL, you know, on the Xbox with the boys. And so I had some money. So I went and took some of my hacky sack money. I went and bought a box of Cinebun and I took it to school. I was like, hey, you want some Cinebun?

She's like, yeah. So she came back to my place. We had some Cineabon. That was our first kind of date, you know, got to know each other. a little bit. And since then she was hooked. Cinebun, man. It's for all the young guys out there, listen, it's like, box of Cineabon, that's the move. So I was like bigger beard than this. I would wear jogging pants all the time. I was actually doing sketch comedy. We were in a comedy school. So she was a comedian as well, an aspiring comedian. We're both kind of doing stand-up comedy and

sketch comedy and things like that in Toronto. And I was at the time filming a sketch series where I was homeless street magician. So I would go up to people in the street and do like dumb card tricks and really coin tricks and really the point of it was I was just trying to steal their their loonies and run away. And so I was doing the sketch bit. And so I looked like a homeless guy. But some so so I know and I was super poor, right? So I know she wasn't in it for the looks or the money. So I knew there's something else that she was interested in. So because because I don't think my it wasn't obviously the way I was dressing did not signal that I had any wealth and and I couldn't afford a razor. So, you know, we, we fall in love and then she follows me back to Cape Breton. We graduate from

school. And it's so hilarious because she's got that Ontario mindset of like hustle and strive and work. And all of my family and my friends has got this Cape Breton laid back mindset of like, oh, it's so hard to work here. There's no jobs available. She's got three jobs in the first week. She gets Cape Breton. I swear to God, she's working at pizza delayed, she's working at the restaurant, she's working at a clothing store, the mall. I'm like, what the hell? Like, how did you get three jobs? Like, everybody around me is saying you can't get any work around here. So I think it really is all about your perspective and the like the assumptions that you make going into something really does paint your reality because all my friends are just like, I can't find works.

They're on EI. Like, can't find work. And my wife literally is like assistant manager at a clothing store We're going from like no experience to assistant manager at clothing store in like two weeks in Cape Breton. So it was funny back then. There was really not much diversity in Cape Breton. It was just like a bunch of white folks. And, you know, she's Portuguese. So the amount of times back in like 2004 that she would get like, you're so exotic looking. What nationality are you?

She's just like, I'm just Portuguese. What the heck? Like, are you Latin? Are you from Mexico? People would be saying all this crazy stuff. But now it's quite different in Cape Breton. There's a lot of Indians. There's a lot of Chinese, a lot of Africans.

So there's tons of immigration has come in. A lot of Japanese people there, too. Some great exotic food restaurants now. So she goes in and she fits in. Nobody says anything to her anymore. But back in those days, so, you know, we end up getting married in 2000. eight, nine, something like that, there wasn't really much opportunity in Cape Breton.

So we did move back to, to Ontario and sort of live with her parents. And that's where I started my entrepreneurial journey. And at this point, you know, I've got this kind of experience that we've built up in my life experience of being really weird, which I forgot to mention I was also a childhood magician when I was eight or nine years old. my mom started getting me to do childhood magic shows for other other children's birthday parties. I did that for like eight or nine years. So I was a childhood Mormon magician making money, you know, doing magic for people and clown shows. So anyways, entrepreneurial spirit, right?

So I'm just making your mind here go like what other questions should we have here? So the month, I'll try to wrap this up so it's not too long for those. Citadel question you asked me, which has nothing to do with any of this backstory. So we, you know, we grow up together. Um, we get, we get married. I was trying to make a movie because we went to comedy school and she wants to be an actress. I want to be a film director and a writer. So I wrote a screenplay and I didn't have any money to make the movie. And nobody in Cape Breton would give me the money because I don't have any experience and there's no money really available for that. So I went on the, on the, on the,

internet, literally, when we moved back to her parents' basement and I started wanting to like, you know, we're saving money, we didn't have to pay rent. We had lots of Portuguese food. I googled like, how do you make money online? Like that was how my plan was, Google how to make money online, figure out how to make money online and then make my movie. So that was like 2006. And of course, one of the first things that came up was like pyramid schemes and Ponzi schemes and work from home survey. You can imagine the amount of stuff. that comes up and I was naive from being a Mormon I believed everything like I was like oh everybody wants to be in heaven so everybody's operating as a true honest person and paying their

tithing and opening the door for the old lady no like I was scammed like crazy for like two years straight I was trying to sell these gas pills to the taxi company that apparently would make your cars more efficient I was trying to do surveys or apparently the local you know there's a lot ways to make thousands of dollars doing surveys from home sending the money to get the survey packages. I was getting scammed left and right. And along this journey of a school of hard knocks of business school on Google Business School, I started getting involved in this network marketing company where they taught me, they told me, okay, they gave me like a list of books to read. And one of the books was, as a man thinketh, and then one of them

was how to win friends and influence people. And one of them was rich dad, poor dad. And it was all these mind development, self-development books that taught you about goal setting and having a vision and focusing and sales and learning about other people and the psychology of the way the world works and business and stuff. And it didn't really have anything to do with my need to want to make a movie, but I was just really drawn in by all these stories from history from like how to win friends and influence people of all these like magnates from the 1800s and the early 1900s. when they were building up their empires, it just really struck a chord with me. And so I started seeking out more of these books that were self-development style books

that would teach me about money. And so, you know, Richest Man in Babylon and all of these like classic timeless books, reminiscences of a stock operator, I just started like devouring these in audio format while I was working different random jobs, delivering furniture for easy home, or working at a gas station, or making trailers. in a factory with my father-in-law, I'd just be listening to these audiobooks and just going on on Torrance and downloading these audiobooks and listening to them on my MP3 player for all day long, just listening to these books. And I learned through these books about the history of money

and how gold used to be money. And so before I even had my first success as an entrepreneur, I started learning about the reality of gold versus Fiat money. And so eventually, through trying to do these businesses online, I succeeded. I ended up finding one that worked. And I started making crazy money for me at the time. What worked? What was the business that worked? It was a, I was really a technology guy too.

So I was always like building computers and like working on software stuff, you know, like script kiddy stuff. I wasn't like a smart, super smart engineer. but I would like make my website for my comedy videos in notepad. Like I would learn how to write HTML code from scratch and I would just open a notepad file and start building websites writing the code in notepad like by Googling and figuring out how to use it. Right. So I wanted to know how things worked.

I would when I was a kid, I always take toys apart and see what the springs did and always ruined my shit. My parents wouldn't be happy with that. But I was always experimenting and trying new things and learning how to do things. never really that great at it. That's the one thing, though. It was never really that great at anything, but I was just like voraciously curious about how things worked.

And then I'd always move on to the next thing and then try to figure out how that works. So same thing with websites. So when I figured out there was this trend coming with social media. So in 2008, Facebook opened up the API for anybody to make apps. And because I had a little bit of like, you know, enough to make me dangerous knowledge about how coding worked and I was just curious about new technology. I jumped into that. And I was like, I want to learn as much as I possibly can about the Facebook API and

making apps. And there was tons of other people like that on the Facebook development forums learning about how this is going to work. Because I saw these eyeballs that were using Facebook back in 2008. And what are eyeballs good for? Well, they're good for showing ads. So my idea was like, I'm going to make an app and then I'll put ads on the app. And then all the people will see it and I'll make some money from the ads.

And it worked and I made an app and it was the it was a rip-off of the Tim Horton's roll up the rim to win game. And it was just for Canadians on Facebook, which is a really small market back in 2008. It was tiny like how many Canadians do you think were on Facebook in 2008? Like probably maybe a couple million, maybe. But that didn't stop me. I made this app and it turns out everybody that was on Canadian and Canadian, that on Facebook really liked the app and they started using it. And we started making tons of money from ads from Canadian ads that were being shown.

And I think we're like probably one of the only developers making Canada focused games on Facebook in 2008 and 2009 and 10. And then a few people saw what we were doing. They came in, started doing it and built up huge businesses, sold them for hundreds of millions of dollars to the big companies when they came in. But me, you know, I just wanted to make $50,000 for my movie. So I did and it ended up working out and I ended up making like $100,000 a month at the top. And it was a small little bootstrapped operation, me and two partners. I was the idea guy. I had one professional coder guy and one business guy who was taking care of the books and the filings and all that.

And I was just doing all the ideas and building the community and creating the revenue streams and stuff like that. So I went from like failing, failing, failing, failing, failing, probably 50 times. times getting scammed, trying to figure out how to make money online, learning all the time about money and about business and about mindset. And I never got this, you know, I watched the movie The Secret that came out. I started doing vision boards and all that. And I started planning for this life that I wanted to attract to me and magnetically bring to me.

And I was just laser focus on trying to make this happen. And it worked. In the end, like I ended up making a successful business and I didn't give up and I persevered. And then that was, I just remember that like validated that, hey, I can do this. So at that point, we, we kind of tried to grow that business up. And I mean, that's another episode for learning about all the things I learned about trying to scale up a team and growing up the 20 employees and all the lessons learned there. But the this all relates to Bitcoin and to the Citadel stuff because in 2009, I ended up making the movie. My wife and I and a group of,

you know, 20 or so people from my sister's film school class. We all went in the woods in Cape Breton. We chopped up a bunch of teenagers. And we made a movie called the Legend of the Psychotic Forest Ranger. And it's like a cheesy 80s horror throwback movie that we made in 2008. And that, but then at that time, I had kind of transitioned into being more interested in entrepreneurship. And I was like making money where all of my film friends were just struggling. All my comedian friends were just struggling. They couldn't make any money. There was no money in it.

And it's so hard. And I'm like, I should focus on this thing that's like making my dreams come true here. And that has the potential to get me to this vision board where I got my RV and my nice house and my family and, you know, all this things, all these things that I wanted. Like, I should focus on making money and then come back to the film. stuff if I really want to keep doing it, the comedy stuff and the film. So that was my experience after, after deciding like, okay, I did the movie. That was fun. Obviously, it was a flop financially, just like most of my friends and everybody else that

tries to make movies. They flop at it. But pause there for a second. Even though it was a flop, how cool was it or maybe that isn't the word, to finally do what you'd wanted to do? Right, the flop or not, to be able to have said, it was awesome, right, to fund a project that you'd had sitting there for, I think, a decade roughly. No, it was only a few years at that point. It was only four years? There was about three or four years since I had written the screenplay to when I actually ended up making the money.

I have to assume that's super rare. Looking, looking back, it is. And I didn't realize that. the time how much went right, even though it was hard, like how right place, right time for all my, my sister had just graduated top of her class at film school. And she had all these like hustler minded, like hungry friends who were also really smart and really talented who just wanted to have like a calling card and just wanted to get the experience of making a movie. I just happened to have had this script that I wrote and that I raised the money. And my sister and all her friends were willing to come to Cape Breton for free basically for two months and be a part of it and be a part of it and then

you know so everything did come together and I actually convinced one of my friends to quit his job to like be a big associate producer and you know like I had a lot of pull like a lot of things were going right there and it was well it's called it's forgive me it's it's the culmination of sitting and doing all the odd jobs and trying to you know figure out how on earth you could pull this all together you pulled it together Like I mean, flop or not, I mean, I can sit here and say, I've never made a movie. I've certainly never written a screenplay. And, you know, it's never even dawned on me.

Well, and I, you know, I probably never do that anyways. But regardless, I understand pulling together an idea, sketching it out and being like, holy crap, this is going to be a ton of work. This is going to do this. This is going to do that. You know, there's very, I'm not saying there's no one because there's lots of people that, that put together an idea and see it. through, but that's a rare quality.

Things going right or wrong, you make things go right. You know, you make the timing work. And I think that's a really, it's probably a very pinnacle time in your life of, like, hey, I pulled this off. Why can't I go do this next thing? Even though you're realizing, like, building a movie, you know, it isn't Mission Impossible. It isn't going to bring me in hundreds of millions of dollars.

There's, there's a, you know, For every Blair Witch project that was a very budget movie to go to the moon and back, you know, most of them spend millions of dollars and then some to get the hundreds of millions of dollars back, right? Oh, totally. But the experience of what you just told me, there's very few people that would have the wherewithal to go through with that. I feel like, maybe I'm wrong on that. No, definitely. And I knew that going in that like the Hollywood success, indie success.

you know, diamond in the rough story, it's like one in a thousand for every one of those primers or something, like you said, Blair Witch, primers and other ones, like they made it for $10,000 and ended up getting bought by a studio and they made a couple million on it. Like, there's thousands of movies that people make that just go nowhere. So I knew that that was likely a scenario that was going to happen to me, but I was just like, I love this. I want to do this. This is exciting.

And it was more like an artistic endeavor, not so much a financial endeavor for me, even though I did want to at least make the money back. It was more like, this is what I'm passionate about. This is what makes me happy. I think this is fun. I like making people laugh. And everybody's excited to be around making a movie. So it was the energy that I did end up bringing with me later. in life on other entrepreneurial things that that that like kind of like magnetic leadership thing to

attract people to your ideas and to really try to make make the situation so that everybody benefits if the thing benefits team building things like that and I did learn a lot of lessons about like because they were in all in a film school and they had just gone through university they they really understood the process of making films and because I was trying to to use a playbook from this guy, Dove Simmons, who wrote this book from Real to Deal. And that's where I got the idea. I read this book in like one weekend because it's like a 300 page book, but I was like, this is it. Like if I want to make a movie, this is literally the blueprint. He's telling me every step I need to do from coming up with the idea to selling it to a distributor.

So I read the whole thing. He's like, this is what you do if you have a $50,000 budget. This is what you do of X, you know, all these different budgets. And then he tells you what you do. and what you need. So I was like, okay, I want to follow this process. And then all the people that were my sister was working with, they were all like, yeah, this is how what we were taught in school to do. So they're like, yeah, we can do this process. It was a little differently. But and then when we did it, man, we got so much done. And we really like, like when you make indie movies, grill a film, usually it's like people don't know what they're doing. They're figuring it out. They're kind of like sneaking around trying to film stuff. They're not paying anybody. They don't have the right equipment.

I did it like right. I had like an equipment truck with generators. I got permits. I had contracts with everybody on deferral agreements. Everybody knew what they were going to get if it succeeded. We had a catering staff. We had lodging. I had travel taken care of.

I did it like a real professional movie. And the amount of efficiency that we were able to achieve making that movie in the 20 days was what I really tried to aspire in the rest of my life in my business and in my life after that. And I'm still trying to get back to that level of efficiency. And that's part of what the whole Citadel Mind and Body thing is about. Because like making a movie is a lot like a military type operation. Like I'm pretty sure that the film structure is inspired by military structure. Because you got to be like extremely efficient.

Get a lot done. Everybody has to know who they report to. Everybody can't have an ego. You got to just do your job. And then the whole machine works. And so that like I, when I came back from the month of making the movie, I was like, man, how do I recreate this in my life? Because I loved this where I had a big team of people and everybody was doing their job and everybody was getting their work done. And it was like, we just crack.

We just banged out a whole entire film in like 20 some days. And like, how do I do that some more? So that experience showed me what's possible, even though it wasn't like this big huge success or anything. but we ended up doing it. And I'm still taking those lessons with me even now when I'm trying to do the Citadel Mind and Body stuff and I'm scaling up my operations in Bitcoin. I'm kind of taking new direction from new lessons,

from a new coach that I started working with Dan Martel. He's a Canadian from New Brunswick, who built a big SaaS company, one of the most successful SaaS coaching companies in the world. And then he pivoted last year. He wrote this book called Buy Back Your Time. And it's all about that stuff. It's all about like how do you, how do you like create a life that you're proud of and that you enjoy and that you have great relationship with your kids?

You have time for whatever you want to do in life, your passions. You focus on your happiness and lifting those around you up while also operating a killer business and making the money and building the team. up in order to make the money and support the life that you want, which is what most entrepreneurs end up doing wrong is they, they just kind of, they're in the weeds everywhere, and they're doing everything, making all the decisions. And then you can't scale that because you end up just burning yourself out. So I ended up, you know, fast forward, like, what would that be almost 14 years or something, 15, whatever that was, 2008 to now.

I've tried. That's 17 years. Oh, 17. Oh, geez. Yeah. Look at that. Almost 20 years. Holy. Yeah.

Wow. So, wait, is that? Really? 2008? Yeah. Holy. It's a lot. At times on this show, I can be taught math, but I think I'm doing my math right here.

It's 17 years. Jeez. So. You sit there and you go, like, where did the time I've been to so I found Bitcoin shortly after that film experience in 2011 is when I found Bitcoin. And it was when I was making that movie to the point where we actually released it, premiered it at a film festival and all this stuff. It was post-production.

It takes a couple of years, if you're not 100% focused on it, to finish the movie. So it took us a couple of years to finish the movie after we filmed it. And in that time, my business had started to decline. and, you know, it wasn't dead or anything, but it was just it peaked and it was declining. And I was, it was the financial collapse, you know, the great financial crisis was happening. The bailouts are happening. And my business was doing well because in times of crisis and depression, like people seek entertainment.

So this was entertainment. So people were online. They were like trying to distract themselves with games or whatever. So I was doing good. But I, you know, my wife and I just had gotten pregnant. I had got fit for the first time in my life because I'd made the movie. And my wife and I played the characters at the beginning of the movie. You know, the cheesy cookie cutter characters that always get killed at the beginning to set up the killer.

Like we played those characters. And I was like editing it and looking at myself. I'm like, I am too fast. Like I need to lose some weight. Like this is not good. So I started doing P90X. and I'd never gone to the gym or anything like that before. I didn't really much fitness stuff.

But so I went to the, I went doing P90X, which was Tony Horton's at home workout program in the, in 2009, 2010. It was super popular. And I lost like 40 pounds of fat. I learned how to do a pull-up. I was like super proud of myself for getting fit.

And then my wife and I got pregnant. We built our first home together. And I bought myself a Ford Edge with, you know, so as I was succeeding, in this entrepreneurial stuff. We went from driving shitty Cape Breton cars that would break down and make crazy noises while you're driving down the highway.

They're like, I'm going to have a Ford Edge, you know? Like, I don't have to worry about changing the belts and the tires and stressing about the safety. It's not going to pass the safety. That was like, I don't want that in my life anymore. So we built the house, you know, so I didn't really have too much money left over after I started doing all this stuff.

But I was like, I had some money left. And I was thinking like, okay, what would Robert Kiyosaki or Peter Schiff or these people that I was like hearing about from following Ron Paul's campaign and learning about him talk about gold or watching Peter Schiff talk to the Occupy Wall Street people about the history of Fiat money and how the Fiat money is the problem. Like what would these guys do? Obviously they're not going to be in stocks because stocks are getting bailed out. It's unfair. It's a bit of a Ponzi scheme. They'd be in gold. Like they would say, you know, Fiat money declines over time. Gold has been historic. historical money. So I was like, I got to just take the rest of whatever's left over and buy some gold. So after doing like the lifestyle upgrade stuff with my entrepreneurial, uh, spoils, I put the rest in gold. And it wasn't much. I just started buying physical gold from, you know, whenever I'd have extra money because I was scaling, I was trying to scale my company up. So I had a lot more expenses. So, you know, a few thousand dollars here or there, I'd buy some extra gold, whatever it was.

I'd go to the bank. They thought it was kind of crazy. I was the only. I was the only, person that was going into the local branch and ordering bars of gold, like ounces of gold. Because probably everybody, like most people listening to this, probably don't even realize you can do that. You can actually just go into the bank branch and get gold and they'll get it for you. Now you can get it at Costco, at least in the U.S. But back then, 2000, whatever, it was unusual for someone to be doing that. So I was buying gold.

It was like 600 bucks an ounce or something like that at the time. And, you know, I just started diversifying into gold. And in 2011, we had kind of like one of our apps got sold for, you know, a little bit of money. It wasn't a lot of money, but it was a little bit. And then my partner and I were like, hey, we should, we should order a large order of silver. Because this was at the time when silver was going crazy. There was like this huge run up in silver. It went from like five to $10 an ounce or something like that all the way to like $50.

or maybe it was 20 to 50, but I remember the peak was 50. And I was like, yeah, I guess everybody's saying silver's going to like $1,000 an ounce. I better get a bunch of silver. So I started researching online, like how do you get silver in Canada? And there was this guy that I would follow for advice on coins to buy and how to identify junk silver at pawn shops and stuff like that. And he, so I watched one of his videos that he had on how to get silver into Canada with, without paying tax on it. Because if you don't put the right code on the import code on the box,

you're gonna pay like GSD or something or you don't have to do that. So in this video, he's like, and if you're buying gold and silver, you should look at this new thing called Bitcoin. It's like digital gold. It's scarce cap supply like gold, but it uses cryptography.

It's distributed all over the world. It's like PayPal, but it's backed by this energy coin that you can plug into your computer. you know, the wall you can mine with your computer and turn your energy into Bitcoins. I was like, this is something I got to check out with all the crazy shit that I had been through in my life with the experiences I had of running a game company with virtual currency or, you know, I had people were like a building in the community where people were paying me hundreds of thousands of dollars for virtual coins that didn't do anything outside of the game.

I already knew that people could value virtual things and being a gamer in the early days, of like, you know, World of Warcraft and things like that. I was paying for virtual currencies and virtual golds. So I was like, yeah, I get this. And I was actually using this thing called Egold in 2006 and 7 when I was getting scammed because you couldn't use credit cards because the credit card companies would charge back. You'd charge back and then the scam companies wouldn't get their money. So they made you use this other thing called Egold.

And Egold was like the predecessor to Bitcoin. It was like this company that put gold in a vault and then they gave you issued grams of gold, like digital grams of gold. And so I was using that to get scammed basically. I was buying with cash, was buying virtual e-gold and then sending it to these companies. And then eventually like they blow up and then, you know, there's no chargebacks. But the FBI came in and raided e-gold and shut the whole thing down because they don't like when the government competes against the money. right so because they were competing against the dollar online they stopped the company they shut the company down and so that taught me that the centralization factor is a problem when there's a centralized

entity in the middle keeping the record keeping the database the government's going to stop it so i had gone through all this stuff like being an entrepreneur reading these books learning about gold from all these uh you know mindset books and setting goals and stuff like that to them when i found out about bitcoin in 2011 and had been like listening to Ron Paul talk about all these things that don't steal. The government hates competition. They print the money so they can go to endless wars. Like the debt ceiling is a joke.

They're just going to keep raising the debt ceiling. All of this stuff came together with like, okay, this thing is decentralized. There's nobody that can stop it. It's a revolution in money. It's the evolution of money on the age of the internet, just like everything else I had seen with education and entertainment and news and videos, you know, all of this stuff is being disrupted by the internet. It makes sense that there's an internet protocol for money as well. And so I went pretty pretty hardcore into trying to mine

Bitcoin in 2011 while I was trying to also kind of manage my business and, you know, had the, my daughter was one years old at the time, had my new, my new family and all these other responsibilities. And my film was premiering at the same time. So, I was like all these things coming together. So I did, you know, if I'm looking back, the one thing, even though I got in early, the price of Bitcoin was $5 and I first heard about it from trying to import the gold and the silver to when I actually got the miner set up and got some money to buy some Bitcoin to the exchange, it was $10.

And I thought, I'm late. I missed it. It's already up to X. Like this is, this sucks. Well, over that summer, it went up to $30. So I don't have any experience managing money or learning about risk or trend following or counterparty risk or any of this stuff. I was just an entrepreneur who was trying to make money. I had goal set and I was trying to make it work.

But I didn't know about managing money and investing. So what was the common trope that you hear when you make money on something? you probably know if you if you make a two or three x on something like what does everybody say to you i don't know like well done but usually what they'll say is take out your principal and just let the house you know play with the house is money you know what i mean oh you're up good for you take your money out that's going to blow up you should at least take your principal out right yeah and then you're just playing with the house's money and like that's what that's what everybody said to me and i'm taking i'm like So I sold half my Bitcoin at $30 thinking I'm a genius.

Like now I'm just playing with the house's money. But, you know, later on, that would become one of the biggest lessons I ever learned in life. That there's a main, there's a real difference between speculating and investing. And the things that you hear as tropes in the investing world, likely you're going to hear it from poor people. And you don't want to take the advice of poor people when you're trying to become wealthy. Because poor people just hear things that they've been told. And everybody just stays in this sort of like cycle of sloshing around, these dumb ideas.

Like take out your principal and let the house is money ride. That's a gambling mentality. That's not an investing mentality. Like the actual smartest people that are managing money, they don't just diversify into all this stuff. Like everybody hears about that to diversify. You got to diversify. That's another trope. Like the people that make the most amount of money actually concentrate.

They concentrate either in their own business or in a specific trade or idea. And they stay focused. They sit still and they don't have this diversification mentality where once they make money from something, they have to take it out and go put it into something else and try again and try again. It's so hard to get a winning idea that once you really understand a winning idea, you just got to concentrate and focus and sit on your hands and learn. And so that couldn't be, you know, the biggest advice that I could like learn from my own mistakes that I've had through my career is, you know, they say a, they say a wise man

learns from the mistakes of others, a fool learns from his own mistakes. So for anybody listening, like, you know, I've got like wisdom through foolishness. So you should be wise and take my advice because I've learned a lot of what not to do. But the main thing there is you just got to study. Learn a lot, study money, study Bitcoin specifically. And put in the hours. And once you understand, like really what's happening in the world, you'll get the right move. The conviction will come to you and just avoid the opinions of others that aren't

doing the work like you. And it's funny, Sean, you said like earlier that, you know, what you were doing when you, before 2020 was actually the historically right thing to do before they broke everything. Like working hard, growing up your family, paying off your debts, that's the right thing to do. Like that should be the way that it works. But because everything's perverted and the money is like a broken measuring stick that just keeps changing and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger your share of that becomes less and why is less and less so everybody is you know with these things that were

passed down from our parents and grandparents of like pay off your debts and all this stuff that's not the world we live in anymore and everybody's starting to realize that but yeah i'm just you know it's a lot of people are in this boat where they got a lot of unlearning and reprogramming to do about the world that we actually live in and focusing and learning on trying to understand the world that we do live in and what is the best way for you to protect yourself against this continuing because it's likely going to keep continuing until they blow it all up and so they're not doing the wrong things like that like they are doing what historically if we lived in a sane world would be the right thing to do it's like work hard pay off your debts

you know grow your family like that's what you should you shouldn't have to be coming in investor. You should be able to have a happy life, be a good person, and then get to like, you know, the third tier of heaven with a little bit of money left. But now people are being like, people that would normally probably have been good people are turning to crime and turning to go into gray things. Their morals are being eroded because the inflation is just out of control and they're being put in a vice between paying for food for their kids or going outside and trying to steal something from someone's garage because we got no crime laws here that prevent people from doing that. So you see young people kind of like a lot more crime happening. And it's a shame

because it's all related to the money and the way that they've perverted the money supply and flip the equation around what you should be doing with your life. The more you work, the less you keep, it seems. So it's, it sucks. I've kept you well past the hour. I apologize. I assume you have to get out of here, yes? Yeah, I do have a meeting. Well, I, I, you know, like, I'm learning, you know, every guest is a little different. Some, I give them a thought process and they, some go for 10 minutes and some go for like 30 seconds. And I'm learning with you that I'm like, I got like 700 questions from what you just said.

And I can keep this going. And maybe what I'll just do is we'll just schedule a different time and carve out a little bit. because I actually want to pick your brain on what you'd put on X about on your relationship with your wife. Because I found that really interesting as a married man. But then you just talked a whole bunch on money and how you got to Bitcoin, which I also find very fascinating. I'm like, I could sit here for four hours and keep throwing them at you because I'm enjoying this. I just want to be conscious of time, knowing you have a busy schedule. I appreciate you coming on.

And we'll just continue this at a different time, Brad, when we have a little bit more time to dive in more on the Bitcoin and on marriage and probably 15 other things that will certainly come up that you're going to say that. I'm like, oh, God, well, I should ask about that. Either way, I appreciate you hopping on this morning. And hopefully it isn't the last time. Yeah, thanks for having me on. I'll see in Calgary as well, I imagine coming up here next week.

And yeah, it is related because there's the striving for achieving in your life. You know, there's a point where, which we can talk about next time, where I realized that I was focusing too much on the money and the risk management and the investing side of things. And I was too engaged in the conversation around that and focusing on the negative side of like debating people and following the news so closely and you know we can get into all that and I had realized after a few years of just my my own internal mind shifting from being that positive person that could attract all these people to come and work for me on a movie and and think

positively. I always think about the positive things that I was I was not living the life that I actually wanted for myself when I was younger and I made that vision board and um you know my wife and I found some old stuff where I wrote out some checks and the vision boards and all that stuff and I you know we had recorded a video for ourselves to watch in the future when we got married and like we watched that video and I was kind of shocked at like how I achieved everything that I said to myself that I wanted to do what what life was going to look like in 15 years all these things wanted to do. I had achieved it all and even more. And I was like, wow, that that's wild. I hear myself speak about what I want to do in the future, but I wasn't happy. And I was happy in some

ways, but I wasn't happier than I was when I was younger. And I'm like, but the point of this is to become wealthy and to become fulfilled and to be happier, then I got to rebalance and I got to refocus on the things that matter just as much or more than making sure we have enough money to survive and to enjoy our lives. But so that's, you know, we can talk a little bit more about that on the next show. It's all related. Well, to finish the thought, though, you know, because on this side, people joke about the vision board and they're like, what a corny thing, except I've done it.

And I don't think, I just got to speak at, um, my hometown's graduation. I got to be the keynote speaker, got to come in. And one of the things I told, one of the things I told them is I'm like, you should, you should really take some time and just sit down and go,

where do I want to be in five years? Where do I want to be in 10 years? And write it down because there's something very, very important about writing things down and fleshing out the ideas. Because when I looked at the podcast in 2019, I was like, if I could be full time at five years, I think I would,

be over the moon and it happened in three and you know like to see that written down and then to look at them be like i accomplish that holy crap right it's it's crazy when you focus in on where you want to go and then just start moving toward it and yeah for a lot of people and i'm talking as much to myself as the audience we just don't write those things down we have a general idea but when you put out a vision board or you write things down or maybe even better do both it's pretty crazy where you can go in a short amount of time and i used to think of a year as like a long time and now i'm like you know we just go back 17 years you're like 17 years yeah i think about i've been podcasting now for six years we're going on the seventh year and this will be the third year full time

now this will be the fourth year full time who am i kidding right and i'm like where does that go how did i get here no because there's a time when i went to you're going to went full-time podcasting folks. I didn't have a vehicle. I was riding around a pedal bike in rainstorms trying to get people to sponsor the podcast. And I think about that and I'm like, that's a pretty wild thing to remember. But there it was. I took the leap.

I was married to a one, still married to a wonderful woman who has supported me. And, and, you know, but at the same time, you got to, you got to show them that the idea isn't just one of your other crazy schemes of like how I'm going to make a million dollars. No, this is going to work. And I'm going to see it through to make. at work. And, you know, I'm still, this isn't the top of the mountain. I want, I want something bigger and better. But I also put alongside that, I don't want to lose my wife and kids to it. I don't want, I don't, because that is what makes life happy. Going home to a house that is just like

full of life and everybody's, I'm just happy to be there. I'm happy to be around my kids and my wife and everything else is really, really important. And that's got to be a part of your vision board as well because if you lose that you can have all the money in the world and it can't buy back what is truly important in life yeah agreed well we'll continue this at a different time because like i say i got like 50 notes now and i'm like we're not going to get to any of this today we'll just do it at a different time brad i appreciate you coming on and giving me a little extra time and i look forward to hearing more about this honestly i do i feel like uh there's a lot left on the and I'd love to discuss it at a future day.

Awesome, man. Thanks again for the chat.