Shaun Newman Podcast - Ep. #163 - Stephen Barbour

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

Owner of Upstream Data, he builds units that converts waste gas from Oil wells into energy to mine Bitcoin. We discuss Bitcoin, fiat currency, the term "Green" (why Steve will not use it) & some of the challenges he faces because his business associates with crypto currency.  Let me know what you think Text me! 587-217-8500

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Happy Monday. Back at her again. Hopefully you had a great long weekend. I'm sitting here Sunday night. I got food coma going on. I want to go to bed. So I'm not going to ramble here for too long. But I hope you had a great long weekend.

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And all I got to do is look around the podcast studio or when, in fact, you find the billboard you'll understand. Gartner management is a Lloydminster-based company, specializing in all types of rental properties to help meet your needs. Whether you're looking for a small office or a 6,000 square foot commercial space, give Wade Gartner a call 7808080-5025. all right. If you're heading into any of these businesses, make sure you let them know you heard about them from the podcast. Now, let's get on to that T-Barr-1 tale of the tape. Originally from Newfoundland, he graduated with a mechanical engineering degree.

He's been in Lloydminster since 2011, and he started up upstream data in 2016, which takes waste gas from oil wells to mine Bitcoin. Yeah, you heard that right. I'm talking about Steve Barber. So buckle up. Here we go. This is Steve Barber.

Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by Mr. Stephen Barber. I hope I didn't torture that name. I was spot on, man. Barber just like the haircutter. Now, you got to give me some background on you. I've been listening to a few of your interviews.

I've followed you on Twitter now for a week, 10 days. Oh, no, that's interesting. But I got talking to a guy out of St. Louis, and we got talking about Bitcoin because I know I'm like the simpleton. I don't fully understand it yet. So I got a guy in from St. Louis. He started talking about it. And I started talking, you know, there's this company in Lloyd, actually, that goes out to oil wells. And he goes, it rattles it off. I'm like, I think I've driven by their shop. So that led me towards you. Wow. And St. Louis? Someone is weird of us down there, eh?

I guess so. Wow, that's cool. That's cool. Anyways, so then, well, of course. Now I'm like, well, you're sitting in my backyard. I got to make a phone call and see if I can get you on. It's too easy, man. You can't pass it up.

That's right. So let's hear a little bit of what you, Steve. I'm curious. Nothing special about me. I mean, my roots in Lloyd start in 2011. So I'm an engineer. I worked in oil for my whole career starting in 2011, so I was lucky enough to get a land a job with Husky,

who basically employs half the town. So just like half the town. Well, no longer. No longer, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And yeah, there's been a lot of changes over there. And a lot of, well, half my friends or most of my friends in this town have worked with Husky or did. So it's now snowvis.

But no, Husky has been really good to me. They brought me over when I graduated from Newfoundland. So I graduated Memorial University in 2011. And Husky brought me out, just like, you know, the oil patch draws a lot of Newfies out this way. Alberta draws a lot of Newfys out this way. Absolutely. Not much going on in Newfoundland at the time, so I couldn't really find much for work. But landed this job or the job.

started with with Husky out here in Lloyd and that was a great really great experience but basically I was working with Husky from 2011 to 2016 uh I quit um in 2016 to start I'm really like I'm really ambitious in a sense that like the you know sticking around in a company like Husky it would have been a fine career I'm sure but you know that I couldn't really see a clear path to like you know, climb the ladder and get ahead and stuff. And then, you know, it's just one of those things. It's hard. It's very political in a big company like that.

So, you know, even if you're working your butt off, you might never get recognized and that kind of thing, right? So for me, I started at Husky. I really loved what I was doing. I started in production, so optimizing oil wells. So just PC pumps, that kind of thing. And actually it was funny because I became obsessed with PC pumps. Like these, I'm sure you're familiar with it, but for the listeners, I guess. They're just rotary pumps that you'll see all around Lloyd, downhole pumps with a rotary top drive.

I really became obsessed with them sort of in a weird way, like started designing them for fun at home, at night, like that kind of thing. Because I thought they were really fascinating. Like I won't get into my fascination with pumps unless you really want me to. but I well what is the fascination with a pump well what fascinated me by it like when I stepped I think it was like my first week at Husky they had these pumps on display and you if you walk over to husky or slash synovis now since they're now synovis you'll see them there that's all right the building still says husky so still says husky so we'll just call it husky for now um but the pumps like to me I saw a lot of this as lame as this sounds like I thought it was just a beautiful

mechanical machine. Like, I'm a mechanical engineer. So when I, it was the first time has ever even seen a pump like that. I didn't, didn't, you know, read about it, like when I'm, you know,

or YouTubeing stuff. And so I just love mechanical stuff. And I never, I'd never heard of it before. And I was introduced to at first out here because it's widely deployed in artificial lift systems. And its simplicity is actually quite beautiful.

It's just like a one moving part. And, you know, I could talk about my love for it all day long. But anyway, I thought it was cool. And I'm really, I'm the kind of person like, I'm really driven to like, I don't know, innovate.

Like I always want to come up with something a little better, like just advanced the technology. So I became obsessed with these pumps. I started realizing, like thinking of different ways that maybe they could be applied down hole and in a bunch of other interesting applications. So I started, Husky was such a good employer because they allowed me to try some of my crazy ideas that I came up with with these pumps.

And so they gave me the budget to go try it. And so I did a bunch of testing these novel concepts with these pumps. And some of them worked out. Some of them didn't. But I learned a lot working on them. And I was working on them a lot at home just for fun because I enjoyed it. And so what ended up happening was after about four or five, I was almost five years into Husse. I had switched from production, which was maintaining like these pumps and wells to facilities,

which is designing like the facility itself and maintaining a facility, like doing maintenance programs. So I learned a lot about upstream oil and gas, especially heavy oil and Lloydminster. And I've always been obsessed with just understanding exactly how things worked and trying to make them better. So what I did was, uh, I was doing quite fine actually at Husky. I really enjoyed the job and mainly the people there were just awesome to work with. but I quit in a weird time to quit.

It was when a lot of people were getting laid off. I quit because I was trying to get Husky to take all the stuff I was doing the innovation, like when I was doing patents and stuff like that just for fun for Husky. It didn't really need to. I wasn't getting paid to do it. And I wanted them to go market my products. Because effectively I was trying to. to do new novel things with these pumps, like new ways to design them and set them up,

which would be, call it a skill set maybe more suited for an actual pump company, like a pump distributor or a pump manufacturer. So Husky wasn't really into, you know, taking any risk and spending any additional capital on like what I wanted to do. Like I was trying to, I was also really a lot younger and naive and trying to get them to like, let me start like a pump division and stuff. and just crazy ideas that this wouldn't really fly for a company like Husky. So what happened was they wouldn't let me actually continue doing some of these projects

because I wanted them to take it to the next level because all they were doing was, you know, effectively we'd patent like what I was coming up with and then they wouldn't go any further. Like they were just sort of defensively holding the patent to the IP within the company. And they wouldn't let me do anything interesting with it. Like just go all I was actually wanting to do. I wanted to, I was trying to convince my bosses to let Husky license the tech that I was doing for Husky to like one of the local shops, like a Kudu or Weatherford, you know, like whoever. And just just as a, for me, like I was trying to also stand out of the company and like find a different path to get ahead. It was that combined like that ambition, like trying to find a way to get ahead and to get noticed along with just my passion for I just.

love, I love mechanical stuff and especially oil field stuff. Like, I've developed a huge passion for oil field equipment. So that, that's sort of, it was the first five years. I was, I did like three or four patents for Husky on different tools. And when I figured out that it wasn't going anywhere for me at Husky at least, I wasn't able to do what I wanted to do with mine, like tools, downhole tools and that kind of thing. I realized I just had to leave because they weren't going to let me go that route. So I just quit and decided, like, because I had, you know, I have a list of, you know, like 50 to 100 tool ideas I want to develop.

And I still have a massive list, but like slowly picking them off, like one by one. And it's sort of like, as I was going through this experience, I was also learning about, well, I was learning in the patent process. I was learning in the patent licensing process. And I figured, well, I'm really good at this stuff. I really love it. Why not try to make a career out of it? So when I left Husky,

I had nothing to do with what I'm doing now. Like I was not interested. Actually, I didn't even know what Bitcoin was. So I was actually starting a career. I was going to have a tool company and just designed minor tool innovations. Like the kind of thing I do during my day after I quit Husky and before I found like my next role

was I'd look up tools that are being sold like by the mass, like really popular products like say like a no turn tool like an API no turn tool like something like that and I'm just looking at that tool researching all the patents that are on that tool basically digging up every scrap of info on why people run this tool and why it's so good and then trying to find a little minor improvements to it that would be patentable and that not just patentable but but the actual distributor let's say if it's weatherford they'd be like oh, that's pretty cool little niche, right? Like, that's a cool little perk to this tool.

Let's integrate it to our own tools. And so my goal was to just do these tiny, like, improvements to tools that were already selling. And then I'd go out, file a patent on it, and then I'd work with the manufacturer just to get a license deal. And that's actually a career path. A lot of, you know, people like inventors or engineers

or anyone interested in that kind of thing can do. And it's actually, quite a nice career path because you end up working for yourself. It's passive income if you can get licenses and deals done. So that's sort of what I wanted to do. And that's what I was doing. I started going through my list of all these ideas I had for years that I wanted to develop. And I did a couple. They were pump related, so with my, which is sort of my main expertise would be in PC pumps, like these rotary pumps. And I landed a gig with lifting solutions in 20s. I think it was actually 2017 when I formally started with them on contract.

So it took me about a year from quitting Husky. It was almost like a year to the day. It was like 12 months almost to the day where I had left that job and found my next job. So my next income. How nervous, I don't know, nervous is the right word, but like you're with Husky. You're an engineer. I mean, now if you had a crystal ball and you get bought up by Sonobus, things are different. But at the time, especially in that economy, 2015, 2016 was not great year.

we are not in great years now. But at the time for you to say, peace, I'm out of here. I'm sure you got a few eyebrow raises. Like, are you sure you want to do this? I'm sure that wasn't, or maybe it was an easy decision. It wasn't an easy decision at all. So my wife, who's my girlfriend at the time, like I ran it by her because I was thinking about it for a good six months before I actually said,

okay, like, you know, here's my notice, right? And the way it worked out if I remember, it was summertime in early 2016. I gave my notice in maybe February. And then a good mentor and boss of mine, Pat Harris. Pat Harris. Yeah. What a beauty. Oh, a great guy.

He sort of turned into a bit of a mentor for me over my last couple years. He really convinced me to, you know, think about it some more. Stick around. We'll see how this can go. Well, shout out to Pat Harris because Pat Harris listens to the podcast. Hey, Pat. How are you doing? No, he made a really great impact on me.

In my last little wild husky, we worked, I worked sort of somewhat under him and these special projects, but he had given me a lot of good advice. And so I remember because my boss, it went up through the chain and Pat was sort of the boss and my boss. And so he was sort of the last guy, you know, to talk to before I finally did it. but I put in the notice and then it didn't um he actually convinced me stay on a bit longer right and I thought it through a bit more I said you know like because we couldn't work anything out on finding a way for me to do what I love doing like in that role I just sort of had to for me like

like I I the way I thought about it a lot and I just thought if I don't do this now um when I'm young before I have a family like before I'm married it's very unlikely I'd be willing to do it when I'm married with a family. So I just quit. The unfortunate part of that, I had no job prospects. I just quit cold turkey because I couldn't do anything I wanted to do while under contract. I had to be, I had to have it terminated. So because we're talking like innovation and IP and stuff.

So anything I wanted to do, I wouldn't be able to do it while under contract. So I had to leave. It sucked because they were laying people off at the time, but just, you know, the way things go and sort of bureaucracy and stuff, they couldn't lay me off because there was no just cause. So if I did get laid off, I would have had a nice severance. Yeah, yeah. So I really, it was, you asked me like, it was as stressful? It was a nerve-wracking? Yes, because I had no income. I gave up this excellent, well, it's, you know, you get severance if you let go. But I also didn't qualify for EI because I quit. So I went, I went from a really,

nice income and benefits to nothing. Now I probably would have thought twice about doing this if my girlfriend Morgan wasn't we weren't serious. Because I knew that she could take care of me. Like if things got bad. She could be your sugar mama. She could be my sugar mama. And she sort of was like I like I remember like the day I quit and I was actually on my own. I had a little buyout where I splurge and you know bought everyone a lot of drinks and stuff at the sticks. but after that I cut off spending completely like I I would not spend a dime on anything because I knew I didn't really have a big savings like it was all like you know got me through school and stuff I didn't really have much so I just I just lived now at the time I was also renting out my most of the rooms in my house so I had a little bit of income to help supplement just you know the cost of living and like to cover the mortgage and stuff but it was a really stressful time especially because when I I started, you know, when I started down the path, okay, trying out these new tool ideas and

getting some IP going on them and trying to market them because I had to convince somebody, I didn't have the money to go build it. I needed to convince someone that this is a good idea. You should invest in me. Like, I'll help you with the idea and that kind of thing. And that was a long process. It took a full year, a full 12 months to finally land on my feet, like, and have a, get a contract, which I think was actually pretty, decent time frame, but I wasted about six months working on a couple other companies who I won't name who were sort of leading me down, like leading me down a path, okay, like we'll do something together, but it just never got over the edge. But luckily, I made, I made really good contacts

while I was at Husky with some local, not producers, local service businesses like Weatherford. And when Weatherford at that time started to transition, not transition, but lifting solutions sort of became sprouted up at that time, which is a competitor to Weatherford. And they're doing PC pumps and all the other associated like rods and associated services. So I made really good contacts at Weatherford and some of these people, really good people like Lonnie Dunn, Ryan Rowan and some other guys were now at lifting. They made a transition and then they were really eager to work with me because they knew my background. They knew how passionate I was for these pumps. Like you'll never meet someone like this. The pump man.

In love with this stuff. So like I think I think it worked well for them just to have me like reping them as well because I was just so passionate about it. But they also like like the ideas I was bringing forward and we're still actually working together on those ideas today. So I started on a contract with them from 2016 until. or 2017 until I ended it in 2019 because my current business got so busy. So that was a long sort of background of where I am today. But I started this business. So my business is called Upstream Data Inc.

I started that on the 1st of January 2017 formally incorporated. So I was sort of thinking about it. Even that during the time, it sort of came to my mind, like this whole Bitcoin thing. In that downtime when I quit Husky and I was finding my, my next job. In that downtime, of course, you know, I'm mostly, you know, sitting at home, like trying to figure out what the hell I'm going to do with my life. Did I make a mistake and stuff like that? And anyway, that's when I learned about Bitcoin. Like, I had heard about it before, like a lot of people might have. But that's when I actually said, okay,

what the hell is this thing? Like, what is this hacker coin? Like, what is Bitcoin? A good question. I still can't explain it. No, Bitcoin is, it's, it's, it's, it's money. It's, uh, I really try to keep it simple and, you know, like I'm not going to get into, let's say the technical back end, but what it is, it's, it's effectively, it's money that no single entity, uh, controls or, um, is responsible for how it's issued and distributed. So, I mean, we contrast Bitcoin with our current system of money, which would be issued and distributed, uh, from the top down, starting with at the top of central banks. So like the Bank of Canada, in conjunction with the board of directors and the Canadian government, sort of figure out, and this is like, you know, I'm not an expert on central banking, but they generally, the gist of it is figure out how much money they're going to print and then who they're going to give it to.

And then it trickles down the chain from the top down that way. Bitcoin is sort of the opposite. It's issued, you could say, it's sort of crucial. you could say it's sort of created like gold is created it's like you go out and see for gold or pan for gold or mine for gold it's the same deal like anyone can go mine bitcoin so it's more of a bottom up money any person can create the money if you invest you know in the mining technology which is what our business does and what our customers do so anyone can anyone can um create the money now you can't you can't just print it it's not like printing you have to work for it

And that's all sort of, that's where it's, that's where I won't get too technical, but it's all controlled on the back end just through algorithms. But what you're actually physically doing is the decision that you're making and that I'm making is I'm going to spend capital on this hardware that's specialized for mining, deploy it, and it's going to mine me coins. So the coins are effectively created. I'm sort of in a sense creating the coins. And then once I have the coins, in that sense, I dictate who they're distributed to on who I spend it with. right so instead of it being like a top down money which is what we're all used to it's a bottom up money um so in that sense it sort of stands and stark contrast to the current monetary system so when you go back to uh 2016 2017 and you're reading this are you going wow this is brilliant

or is your brain going well maybe i could make some maybe i could do some things that could actually make this viable for i mean what you're doing in oil and gas it's pretty Brilliant, I think. Yeah. Well, to me, like, I didn't understand Bitcoin at all. I mean, certainly on the technical level, like, understanding how it functioned on the back end, which I don't need to bore people with. But I didn't understand any of that. Well, that's the problem.

I probably had, I don't know, handful of conversations before. I told him who I was coming in and sit with tonight, right? And everyone's like, yeah, Bitcoin. What the fuck is that? I'm like, you know, I don't actually know how to explain it well. I've done a ton of reading over the last because I'm starting to interview more people about it who are trying to mine it or spend it or use it or everything above. And it's not like, here's a dollar.

And you just go and handle it like that. It's a little more complex than that. And once you get complex, you lose half the people. Yeah, no. So I learned early on when I got onto Bitcoin and I was like, okay, this is a solution to all this waste gas. Like that is what I first realized about it was, okay, this is just a great option to go deploy on a vent gas source, right? Like something like the excess gas vending off a well, off a tank, off whatever, usually off the casing gas. But this is a perfect solution for it because you can have its portable machine, which all you're doing is hooking computers up.

They're crunching numbers like, you know, to keep it simple. and they're connected to the internet, so you don't need pipelines. So some people call it like digital pipelines or digital sales points. Okay. Yeah. But when it comes to actually like having a conversation with people about what is Bitcoin, I did enough over the years. If I actually get into the technical weeds with you, I start glazing over.

But I mean, let's, it's like, it's like if you ask me like, okay, we're just all of a sudden introduced to digital dollars. Like they didn't exist that long ago. I mean, like digital money, you know, was all physical, let's say, I don't know, 50 years ago. Yeah, sure. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, if you were to all of a sudden introduce digital money to people, like digital dollars, if you try to explain the back end of the interact debit system. Yeah, your brain.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone's going to turn off this podcast. Well, I tell you what, if for the people listening, they should go to your website. And you got a couple of links in there, like FAQs. Yeah. And one of them is, explain Bitcoin to me, like I'm a fifth. five-year-old, that was pretty good. That was pretty good because I'm like, yeah, I kind of get it.

I kind of get it. And that's the way you have to because it's like anything, like whenever there's something, whether it's like a new kind of money or like a new product, an oil field, if it's unprecedented, like if no one has like an inkling of, you know, where did this thing come from? Like what's the, it's hard for people to, and certainly people don't like change. So they're skeptical of anything too novel. People are skeptical of this. Well,

I mean. Oil field, oil field is notoriously, uh, resistant to taking risk on weird, obscure changes. Like, I try to introduce all kinds of little things like in my time, uh, working with my team operators and the guys and,

you know, they give me, they gave me crap because it's like, that's a, that's a terrible idea, Steve. And at the time, I might not realize that they're absolutely right.

It is a terrible idea. Because I would come up with terrible ideas all the time. Um, but that's like part of the, process you try to keep thinking a ways to do things a little differently but you know it's just the way it is because especially over the years when you're working in an industry and you have to see all these hairbrain schemes by some idiot engineer or some other individually you're like another one of these like you know run around so so do you worry do you worry so much about what bitcoin is or do you

worry about the technology you can use to help mine the bitcoin well because i mean what you're building is something that mines it. So are you focused on making sure Bitcoin isn't, I don't know, pyramid scheme of hoax or whatever they label it? Or are you not so worried about that so much? You just wanted to build the technology or did you have to prove out Bitcoin first in order to, you know what I mean? Well, to me, when I first encountered it,

I didn't understand it. And I wouldn't build to explain it very well to anybody. And I certainly learned a lot over the years on how to explain it in a way that doesn't lose people. So that's why I always focused on the why of Bitcoin. Why do people like Bitcoin? Not how does it work? Fair.

So why do people like Bitcoin? So my answer to that is I usually don't. I'm not going to suggest why you might like it or why this other guy likes it. I'll tell you why I like it. Why do you like? And then you can make your own decision. I don't like how money is currently issued and distributed. I never did.

I thought, why should some effectively cartel or non-elected, undemocratic process, board of directors at the Central Bank of Canada, in the case of Canada, of the country, why should they decide how everyone's money is created and then who gets it? That to me, even when I was young, I couldn't grasp why this was the best way to do money. It made no sense to me. That's why I was actually getting into gold before I got into Bitcoin. I think gold is actually what led me to Bitcoin, because a lot of the people into gold, As, you know, gold, you know, the gold bugs say sound money.

Like, you want to have some physical gold at home in case, you know, there's a run on the banks and stuff like that. But ever since the banks went off a gold standard in like around 1970, 71, where the money was no longer linked to gold, everything's gone to shit. Like, if you look at the macroeconomic perspective, like how prices have gone, how wages have gone, everything, like all the trends, if you look on a historical data, to have sort of hit this weird spot in 1971 where there's actually a website called or if you Google what the hell what what the hell happened in 1971 or what the what the something happened in 1971 you'll come across this website and it's all about focusing on how everything changed in 1971 but it's not all that's all what I learned later for me it was like I don't like the idea how this money loses value over time

of these dollars. WTF happened in 1971.com. Is that what we're talking about? WTF happened in 1971.com. It's a good, it's a good. It'll give you a quick overview of all these weird changes that have happened to society since then.

And, you know, people in the Bitcoin community because we're all against, because we're pro-Bitcoin, we're very anti what we call fiat money. Yeah, paper money. Paper money, yeah. Unreserved money. Right, right.

Unreserved, that's right. Yeah. Not tied to. I'm not like personally. like I'm totally fine with a monetary system that's properly managed like by the government like the central bank if it was tied to gold or something or maybe tied to Bitcoin. But even if it was tied to gold, I'd be, I think, you know, at least we call that a relatively sound monetary system. Problem with this money we have now. So you ask like why Bitcoin, right?

Problem with this money we have now. No one can predict. No one can predict what the hell they're going to do next. So, you know, COVID was a big excuse for them to print a good deal. gillion dollars and to spend money they didn't have. So COVID was the most recent excuse to do this. Prior to that, you know, the financial crisis in 2008 was another great excuse for them to bail themselves out and print some money. It's just this fundamental problem where in this system of money we're on now, if you make a mistake, if you're a big business, like a big institution,

you make a mistake, you're GM like General Motors. You get bailed up. You just get it doesn't matter. Just make the same mistake again. It doesn't matter. because you get to retain ownership of everything. You don't lose it, right? Like, normally when a company goes bankrupt, like, okay, if you mismanage your pod and your business, you go bankrupt. I was going to say, what happens if Steve mismanages his business?

What happens to you? Do you get bailed? I'm not going to get bailed out. They do nothing to help me. I'll tell you that. Like, the insurance companies treat us differently than every other business. Really?

Yeah, yeah. I'm having a huge problem with that right now. So some listeners, local might, you know, if they're working with some of the oil companies I'm working with, might, you know, be laughing because I'm, we're as a business struggling. I think I've hopefully finally got to figure out this week. But like for the last two months, I've been not able to get commercial general liability insurance and stuff because the underwriters, like the people, you know, the broker, I work with a broker just like anyone else. like, hey guy, can you get me some insurance? I need this for my business. He goes out and markets it to the underwriters

or however that works on the back end in the insurance industry. And everything about our business is above board. We've been like I got chartered account and everything is perfect. Never done any bad business. No reason to have bad credit. Nothing.

Like if you just took away the fact that we're related to Bitcoin, we'd have no problem getting insurance for a good growing business with good revenue. But when you look on our website and you say, so when these guys are going through the approvals and like looking us up and seeing, okay, are we going to insure these guys and doing the background checks on us, they look at our website. And in my website, I'm unapologetically pro-Bitcoin. Like I think Bitcoin is the best thing in our generation, I think is the most generational, important, like technology since the Internet for sure. So I'm really interested in promoting it because I think it's, I think everyone who, Everyone who approaches it and learns about it and touches it will be benefited.

And I say that, like I'll say that to people. If you, everyone I know that has, I usually don't, you know, tell people to buy Bitcoin. I tell them to learn about it. Everyone I know that's learned about Bitcoin and then made their own decision on whether they want to get involved or not. It doesn't matter when it was. They've all benefited from it.

So I think that'll continue. So that's why I'm unapologetic in promoting it. And anyone that, you know, you'll find that people like me, like some people call a guy like me like a Bitcoin maximalist. You'll see that like in the online communities. They call us like toxic maximalists in a sense because when there's another person saying, okay, well, Bitcoin's great, but look at this shit coin like Ethereum. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to swear on this, but that shit coins actually. You sure shit are. So far away.

Earmuffs, Mom. Well, shit coin is not even a swear word actually because it was spoken in common. Congress in the US. So it's it was not. Was it really? Yeah, like I forget who it was. Someone, some senator defined what a shit coin was. So it's part of the, you know, vocabulary now. But so I mean, like there's there's, you know, people are excited about Bitcoin and and they lose sight of what it's truly meant to do, which is to be a better form of money. And they think, okay, well, look at these other coins like, because there's literally thousands of them, thousands and thousands of them now because Bitcoin's only code.

So you can copy paste the code and you have a clone of it. The only thing you can't copy paste is the people that actually care about it, right? So all these people are copy pasting the code and you're making all these shit coins like light coin, Ethereum, like Minero. There's like too many to ever possibly count because they're like literally in the hundreds of thousands now. But there's only a few relevant ones. And like there's other ones like Ethereum.

And I'm not here to abash. like bash the alternative coins, but one problem I have with them is often people are sold. Like, you're a newbie, Sean. Like, you've admitted it. I am a solid newbie and I take no offense to that. Very good. And most of your listeners are as well. Like they're relatively new. Even people that have been sort of following it for a while, still relatively new to the whole scene. And when someone else like maybe talks confidently like I am about, oh, Ethereum is the Bitcoin killer or Ethereum is this and it's better than Bitcoin in this way. Oftentimes, like, they sell it on silly ideas like, oh, Bitcoin's bad for the environment.

It uses too much energy. Therefore, Ethereum is better because it's designed not to use as much energy. Therefore, you should buy Ethereum. People like me, we speak out against that stuff because it's wrong. Like, at least in my perspective, it's wrong. And I think I could back up why idea is certain of these. these ideas that people are marketing, these alternate coins are, is this wrong? And it's because it's wrong, you're going to hurt people.

You're going to cause them to malinvest, right? You're going to, you know, you're going to think Ethereum's great, and you're going to go spend a bunch of money thinking it's going to do this thing that I'll never do. And you might not. Why can't, why can there only be, once again, you've pointed out, I'm newly, I'm curious now. There's hundreds of thousands of these.

Why can't there be Bitcoin and Ethereum and Sean's token and Sean's second token and whatever else and build it off the same network strategy and have a bunch of them come popular with the right people and whatever else. Why can't you have multiple? Why won't that work? You can have multiple. So I certainly don't mean to say that you can't have coexisting coins or like coexisting currencies. I think that's clear that at least in the last, because Bitcoin's been around for about 12 years, the alternate coins, which I playfully call shit coins, have come about like sort of starting in 2014, 2013 is when we really started ramping up.

And then through 2017, that's when I get the hype really ramped up around them. Now they've certainly co-existed for this period of time, right? So to say that they're not going to coexist in the future, well, there's not really any evidence for that. There's no reason why they won't coexist. I don't have a problem with any other coin. And the only problem I ever have when anyone's promoting some other coin

is when they're, if they're promoting it in good, good faith and not so be it but when they attack bitcoin that's where you take a little well when they when they lie when they lie or say ignorant things or uh things that are wrong like saying like bitcoin is bad for the environment they're in it and this coin will be better for this reason i could get into the technical weeds and debunk all that uh when you say bad for the environment you're talking about the energy it takes to mine it yes yes but i could be wrong on this but you're kind of like off the grid on the way you mine Bitcoin, aren't you? Yeah.

Yeah, we are. You should be sold as like a green way to help the oil patch look better. 100%. Because you're basically taking waste product that's going in the atmosphere or burned off. Yeah. And you're turning that into the ability to, well, if you're an oil company, possibly make some money. and save on your emissions. Oh, definitely.

And I mean, part of our sales pitch is the emissions reduction, right? When you're using our technology, so I'll briefly explain it because we didn't really explain it. Yeah, sorry, yeah, yeah. I got you scratching around, yeah. Like what we do at upstream data

is we build what we just call them data centers. They're Bitcoin mines, but it's a data centers, it's an easier word for people to deal with. So we build portable data centers. So basically the way it works is if you have an oil well, like this is the main problem we attack. So you have an oil well, let's say like a chops Canadian Lloydminster area, heavy oil well.

You're producing that well. It comes, you have solution gas and associated gas come up with the oil. Right. It comes out of solution. That gas needs to be dealt with. So usually the producer uses to fuel their engine. They use it to run their burner system. They use it every way they can.

But there's often an excess. And so when you have that excess, what do you do with it? The only options before Bitcoin mining was sell it down a pipeline, but pipelines are expensive. You got to, you know, dig, dig them in and they're permanent sunk capital. It's a lot of money. And so you have to have a lot of gas for a long time to pay it off. So not very many pipelines are going in on these small volumes. So that's why you have all these small vent volumes everywhere because they can't sell the gas to a pipeline and to, let's say, Vermilion County for, you know, the residents and the commercial.

businesses because they can't sell the gas downstream they have no other choice but to either vent it if they're allowed to vent that volume which every producer can vent up to a certain amount or uh you burn it if you can't if you're if it's too much to vent because it's not compliant with regulations you got to burn it so that's where you're where you hear people talking about flares and combustors right but as a so on our end from upstream data's end of course we do market it from the emissions reduction perspective. But I'm really careful not to go market ourselves as a green energy company because I think that's very scamy. I really do not like the green labeling that all of these startups and all these other and the big companies and the banks and every main. Trying to align themselves with it.

Well, they're pandering to this, pardon my French, just bullshit on, they're saying they're green and net zero and, you know, net negative carbon. And it's a bunch of garbage. Like it's baloney. Like it doesn't matter what you do in life. You're going to be a net emitter of you're going to be a net consumer of resources. You're a human being. Every animal is actually the same except human beings do it out of much. We leverage, yeah, we leverage technology to propel ourselves and vehicles and stuff and all this stuff.

So we're all net consumers. And the entire concept that there's clean tech out there is just bogus. It's like, it's just a lie. So like I'm really. against like on a personal level. I obviously don't like when I'm in a sales pitch right. I'm not talking about this stuff, but like on a personal level,

I really find it distasteful to talk about over we're green this like as and I've said it online. I've said it like in our like presentations and stuff like our tech or anyone mining Bitcoin in general on on this vent gas especially the vent gas because the gas is vented and not burned it It's actually has a higher global warming potential. Like the methane, like the greenhouse gas of natural gas, is, uh, warms the atmosphere a lot higher.

So it's worse, right, to just let it go free without burning it. And that's a fact. Like it's much cleaner to burn it than just let it release. But, uh, you know, I don't, I don't, even though our technology for, it reduces emissions more than any other technology on the planet for the dollar spent, when you apply it to a vent source. I don't go around saying we're a green energy company because the whole concept is just gross to me

because the whole oil and gas industry has been demonized for years and not just oil and gas like coal, any fossil fuels. It's been demonized for years about being, you know, like we're the bad guys. Like we're just producing what people consume and it's the consumers that are actually the bad guys, right?

Like it's the consumption, that's the bad. And so like, you know, when you have these alternative... Sorry, I guess, I guess I just find that really interesting because if you were to adopt the words they use, you'd be green. And that'd be an easy thing to just walk into any boardroom and go, listen, guys, you're admitting all this stuff. Everybody wants you to be green.

We can help you get there. And although true, as bullshit and everything, I admire the passion. I really do. It's just to me, I look at it and I go, yeah, and everybody thinks what they think. but what you're doing is exactly what all the other companies are trying to sell them. You know, like our tech is good enough and it does like it sells itself. Like it takes people everybody like even our best customer now, I won't name companies, but it's a publicly traded oil company.

Okay. Everyone around here knows who they are. They're a best customer. The first time I deployed a unit with them is my first one I built. Okay, I built it with all the savings I have left. Can I ask what the first unit looked like? It's an ugly ass sea can So right now we own a fabrication facility

We took over what was formerly called Fisher Building Systems Yes, the old bingo hall Absolutely, an old roller skating rink I hear That is also correct Yeah, that was before my time I came in 2011 I think that was just before But Fisher I mean great

Small business in town That had been building excellent Like small shacks and stuff for oil fields So they're perfect fit for what we do because we're building the scale of building that it's perfect for us, right? This is a natural fit for me when I started out to start working there. And it became Calrock temporarily. Calrock bought it out.

And then I took it over from Calrock because we were just doing all the business. It just made sense. But yeah, no, on the green subject, like it's, it's, what I see people make mistakes. I see people make mistakes all the time, like people that are on my, like on our side, like most people around Lloyd, right? we're on the same side when it comes to talking rationally about, you know, what it is we do in oil and gas and what, you know, other industries are doing and what truly is like what is green and what isn't, but what is sustainable and what isn't. I think we're on the same page

there, but I don't like pandering to the green crowd because they use like, like, for example, right, if you're going to contrast, well, let's say you're going to, let's say coal. Okay, coal, even oil and gas guys sometimes don't stick up for coal, although I'm a huge coal fan, and I advocate for coal all the time because it's so incredibly useful. Like, coal is such an amazing resource, right? Like, it does so much that people don't think about. Before you skip by, it's an amazing resource that people don't think about. What are some of the things that coal does that people don't think about?

Well, it's, you can't have steel without coal. Like, coking coal is part of the carbon that you have in plain carbon steel and all the steel products and many metallurgical products come from coal, right? From the coal raw resource. Sorry, Steve, we don't need coal. We don't need steel anymore. Yeah, we don't need steel. We don't need concrete. We don't need concrete.

We don't need asphalt for the roads and all this stuff, right? So there's all these useful byproducts. And so the point I'm trying to get at is that you get this crowd of people, like these people that pander to the clean tech and to the green tech. And they say, look at this, like this dirty coal. Look at all the emissions, right? Look at all the negative externalities is what they say. They call it negative externalities, which is what they're saying is like, look at all these emissions that no one's paying for. We need you to pay for that. We need a carbon tax. You got to pay for that negative externality, right? And they're comparing coal, like the levelized cost of energy. They'll compare

that with, they'll normalize it with the levelized cost. They'll compare coal with solar. And they'll say, look at solar. Solar is no emissions, right? No emissions. clean. Costs of panels is coming down. So now the levelized cost of the projects is competitive with coal, et cetera, et cetera. And then when you slap on the negative externalities of coal, the evil emissions, now, you know, solar is, you know, it's the way to go, right? And that's the narrative today. But they don't like, when you look at the literature, like, where there, where there, where these, like these, there's one famous and now like, it's a company called Lazard. They do, it's like an institution that compares,

these energy tech. They're only comparing electrical generation and they're not, they're not accounting for all the useful byproducts of coal. Even in coal where you're actually converting it to electricity in a coal-fired power plant, you still have useful byproducts, two of which, for example, bottom ash, which is not as useful as the other one is fly ash, which comes, bottom ash comes out of the bottom of the boiler systems that, you know, create the steam. And it's sort of crap that can be used.

is used in like building roads and stuff. It's just it's just like a filler. Like they throw it in stuff, but it's useful. And because of that reason you're not using like when you're using this filler or this other stuff, you're not having to harvest some other resource like gravel or dirt. So you're displacing some other resource from having to get consumed by using this byproduct. Right. So it's a useful byproduct.

So coal that has bottom ash, it has fly ash, like just two examples. Fly ash is used in, um, um, concrete and I think in in some in some places like in in in, uh, uh, you can make like a synthetic gypsum like that goes in like, uh, drywall and stuff like that. You can do, you can do like it's using a lot of things, but it's using like concretes and cements. So, you know, when you, when you compare something like just arbitrarily, coal versus solar, they both produce electricity. One does it a lot better. Coal does it when you need it. So they, they, you know, they, they use their, they use some pretty gaping garbage assumptions, I think, to, you know, say, justify why, you know, the levelized cost of solar is actually comparable.

But then they're not even accounting for all the other useful stuff that you get out of it. And they're not accounting for the fact that you can't actually manufacture. It's not possible to manufacture a solar panel without coal. You can't do it. So they don't account for all that. So the whole problem right now is I'm sort of like just ranting, but like the whole problem is, is that in this whole green discussion, we're not talking about what actually matters.

Like what we learned in school, which is utility, right? If you remember an economics class, how useful is this thing, right? We use this unit of utility, which is sort of subjective in a sense, but like how useful is this product? Well, it does all this, it provides all this value and you sort of try to quantify it that way.

We're not even doing that anymore with looking at different energy technologies. We're saying, we're not saying the utility of coal. You know, Texas went through that, brutal storm storm yeah and guess what doesn't work in that situation certainly renewables like what they call renewables wind and solar specifically it's not it's not reliable it's unreliable energy so I mean these things aren't properly accounted for and these like by these institutions who are effectively the people

that label what's clean and what's not and then the rest of us like the government just says okay we're citing we're citing Lazard's levelized analysis. This is how we're going to spend our taxpayer dollars. We're going to invest like the Alberta government for God's sake is investing in solar plants, like especially when the NDP was in power, it was really pushing solar. And it's like, guys, you have sitting gas wells that aren't tied in anymore that have been sitting there rotting away for years. You could just tie that in. You could all these flare stacks, all these vent sources that are being wasted. So you have gas that's actually literally just going up and smoke. You could power the.

grid off that stuff and you could do it at a much cheaper price like if you have to subsidize it you'll do a lot more using that stuff like subsidizing pipelines for example and getting it to the local markets so is it so is it I hear you talk and I I hear wisdom in what you say Steve and I I know you're saying you're doing a long rant and whatever else I just look at it and I go to me there's a couple things probably a little bit of poor leadership right the wrong people in the right place and then just like I don't know

lack of like communication and like you know like teaching people these things right there's like this huge gap now on how energy is created how food's created for for sake how farming's done and the end user and I cite this all

the time and I'll bring it up again in Canada 81.4% of people live in cities and as the cities continue to expand and we distance ourselves from where the work is done and how it's done and how it translates into the people that are living there and how it makes their lives better, I just feel like, so then the issue is the industries need to be funding themselves to help

educate the people so they can understand. So when they hear the jargon come down, they're like, actually, no, like, I read something over there that says completely opposite. And that seems to make a hell of a lot more sense than what you're talking about, doesn't it? Like, because I feel like we're spinning tires, not me and you per se, like just in general, everybody who's in the know and knows like, you know, I come from a farming background. I got lots of friends that are farmers. Well, my parents, my dad and my oldest brother do cattle. And then there's grain farmers.

And then there's the oil workers. And then there's all this. And it's like, I feel like we all get it. But there's a huge majority of the population that doesn't. doesn't and green sounds nice and emitting nothing sounds nice but I mean geez you're doing it that's the crazy thing and you're doing it in a way that sounds freaking a cool uh right like it's very in tune with where the world is at and it's making you know these oil wells and making them more profitable they're making them more profitable which uh in a sense is the most important

thing, which some people might sound weird, you know, like, oh, he's all about profit, but it's also about efficiency. Like, it makes them more efficient. So, like, if you can produce, uh, like, let's say it chops well, like common oil well around here. And all of a sudden, you've never been able to monetize the gas and you've been blown it into the atmosphere. And it's just been bad like, like all like bad for the environment, bad for, you know, it might even be bad for just local health, like having that amount of gas. Who knows? Like, I don't know. But it's not good thing. I think everyone can agree with that. And then when you, when a new technology comes along like Bitcoin and people start, because I'm not the only one doing this, like I was probably

one of the first ones that's really focused on building a business around it. But I know tons of guys around here now doing it and building their own little, uh, yeah, retrofitting shacks and stuff. And look, all these guys are making their producing facility more efficient, um, cleaner, even though I think that word was just dumb, but it's more efficient, it's more useful, they're making more money. The government's getting more royalties, more oil is being produced, everyone benefits than even the environment. Like, it's like complete win. But generally, you know, Bitcoin mining gets a lot of flack in general. And people often have been citing like us, like our company, where we're deploying Bitcoin mines to reduce emissions. So they're saying, because if you,

if you Google like Bitcoin mining, bad for environment, right? If you go Google that, you'll see all these garbage publications like the New York Times and the rest of the rags like talk about, you know, what people are used to respect and anyone who knows what's going on now and knows they're just junk science, rags. But these things are, you know, talking about, oh yeah, Bitcoin mining is bad for the environment. We need to ban it, you know, we need to put regulations on this stuff. These guys are consuming, like the Bitcoin mining industry as a whole, like globally. They're like, they'll, they'll cite things like, oh, they're consuming as much energy as, like, Pakistan, right?

They'll come out or Ireland, right? They'll take some random country. They'll say, this country is known for this much energy consumption. And now Bitcoin miners have grown this big. Look at, like, this is horrible. Like, the earth is doomed. All the doom, all the nihilists and doomsday guys come out. But if they picked any industry, couldn't they do that?

You could. Yeah. You could just pick, hey, Sean Newman's podcast. Look at how much energy he's using. I don't know. I'm being a smart ass. Got this amount of listeners. They're all wasting this much time.

That's right. They're all wasting this much energy. See, the thing about Bitcoin mining is it's so transparent on how it all works. That's the nature of the Bitcoin network is extremely transparent. It means anyone can look up almost any information aside from like you can't look up identities and stuff. But you can see it all. It's all transparent on what they call the blockchain, right?

So it's just code. that you can you can literally audit yourself just like a central bank or a bank audits their own ledger we all have our own ledger in Bitcoin so we can all audit each other's ledger because it's all the same so it's like two or three banking branches you know making sure they're in sync with each other and their ledgers are are aligned right so the thing with Bitcoin mining is so transparent that these people who I don't know if they're just fools or they're they're just ignorant or they're just malicious like they're just

trying to denounce Bitcoin, but, you know, they, it's so easy to tell, you can actually calculate and I actually have a spreadsheet that I send out to our clients to help them figure out, you know, revenue and all this, you know, understand how Bitcoin mining pays, right, how much money it makes. You can actually see in the data that I have in the spreadsheet exactly how much energy, like literally within a very close approximation to the actual amount of like kilowatt hours being burned every day in the whole world. world. You can see it very fine, finally, because it's all so transparent. Whereas on a system, like in any other system, because a lot of people will say, okay, these guys are saying Bitcoin

mining's bad for the environment because it uses this much energy. A retort to that, like a Bitcoiner might say, well, look at the banks. The banks employ like a billion people, or how many people the banks employ now, and all the infrastructure around the banks. And therefore, you can try to guess what the energy consumption is, but it's not transparent, right? You have to make all the these assumptions. But with Bitcoin, it's really easy just to literally pull the data at any time. Oh, it's 18 gigawatts today. Like that's, that's what it is. Like, and it's a fact and you can't dispute it. So it's easy to pull those numbers, compare them to something else and say, oh, look how bad this is. And then just ignore the fact that most miners, like myself and our company, are using energy

that no one else wants. Like we're not adding energy to the global consumption. We're actually just using what's generally already there being wasted. Like we use wasted gas. Other companies like in Manitoba, for example, use wasted water. Like the hydro dams in Manitoba, they got a bunch of hydro. Well, if the grid's not demanding all of it,

what happens to the water? It doesn't go through the turbine. It gets bypassed. It just goes down the bypass line. You know, like just basically gets dumped downstream. So it's basically just potential energy not being used. This happens frequently in China. like China has is known for its massive hydro projects like the Yangzi river in China was experiencing like unprecedented flooding last year.

So Bitcoin miners were all really interested in this because it's a hot spot for mining over there because they have so much hydro energy. And what happens is they have this wet season. And the way I guess the geography is over there like the topography, there's this monster basin and all the all the water. basically all funnels into the Yang Zee River, and there's a lot of hydro along that river. And so all these dams, like when there's excess water, well, there's way too much for people to use, so it just shoots down the river.

So that's what Bitcoin miners are going after. The stuff that no one else can use. So that's, you know, I'm sort of getting really into it on the Bitcoin energy consumption, but we're an example of using waste, and there's pretty much every miner out there is using low value energy because you can't stay in business unless you're using a low value of energy. I find it very interesting how passionate you get about Bitcoin.

Oh, you haven't seen anything. Well, that might be true. I'm trying to not get too radical. Well, it's fine by me. I just, to me, I don't get too fired up in both the Canadian dollar, so to speak. Or, you know, if you want to get me fired up, I don't know, let's talk oilers or something along those lines. You'll get me fired up. But to watch you talk about Bitcoin and how you defend it is just, it's very intriguing

because it's a network that minds or does the mathematical equation to slowly figure out, what's the guy's name, Satoshi Nakamoto, who nobody in the hell knows, which gives it that intrigue even more. But to watch you to defend it, so. I think it's going to do an amazing thing for humanity. And in the sense that I think that the money system we're using now has deprived families, communities, people in general from so much wealth that they should have. Like, I mean, we're seeing it right now. It's like I see it as a manufacturer.

Okay. I bring it in steel. I'm bringing in lumber. I'm bringing in raw materials. My prices are going through the roof. Availability in product is getting tighter. Like there's a huge chip shortage. So in the general sense, the inflation of goods and services, like the price inflation and the cost of living is going up.

And I'm a firm believer. That's because of our, we have a really stupid system of money that we need to fix. And that's and that doesn't mean we have to fix it with Bitcoin. As much as I think Bitcoin is the answer, I think Bitcoin will drive society towards a better system of money. Bitcoin is just an option. Right. You don't have to use it. But I think it's because it's competing directly with those people that control the money system, like Fiat money and central banking, it's going to force them to do better.

And that would be good for everybody. So whether or not you care about Bitcoin, whether or not you want to get involved with Bitcoin, it's not that important. It's competing with the money system as it is. And I think there's going to be a huge net benefit for everyone when we get back to a sounder system of money. There's less of this unpredictable because really the root cause like the root problem with this money system that we're all using now is no one can predict what the banks are going to do. Like they keep jacking in like if you look at the interest rate charts, right? They balance like how much money they're printing and issuing and the interest rate.

It's all sort of tied together how they're trying to manipulate the economy and you know they say, you know, they're trying to do what's good. But really they don't know what the hell they're doing and they're just sort of winging it. So, like, they started, if you remember, like a few years ago, they started jacking interest rates up like little by little, but pretty quickly. Like it was almost every few months, like every three months, every quarter, every couple quarters, they're jacking up another couple points. And the interest rate went from, I don't know what prime was. It was low like 2% or something. And they jacked it up to like three and a half or wherever it went. But that quickly, like, you know, no one, no one can really predict what they're going to do next with the interest rate.

So like think about yourself, like if you're thinking about buying a home, you're like, hmm, I want to buy a home here in Lloyd. I want to, you know, I want to maybe a fixed mortgage or a variable. Like, what's interest rates going to do, right? Like you have no idea because they just pull it out of their ass and, you know, they were raising it. So a lot of people might have locked into a fix thinking, okay, I better, I better lock this down because interest rates are going up. All of a sudden, they pull the rug out and now interest rates are back to where they were and they're on the trend down again. And so like if you got locked in at a fixed in the last couple of years at a high fixed rate, you're worse off than someone who wouldn't want to might have went variable or something.

So it's all like all this stuff like without getting into the weeds. Like it's just the way things are being handled and like the way our institutions. So the basically the central bank system, the government, the way they're, uh, call it making the decisions and guiding society is just, it's creating. uncertainty and that uncertainty is hurting people.

So a system like Bitcoin is contrasted that because I already described how it was that bottom up kind of production of money, but it's also a money, the reason that makes Bitcoin different from anything else, including all the shit coins that we've touched on, is that it's the only one that you can count on being 100% predictable. Like no one's going to, there's no going to be some influential, charismatic developer person. Like, like, for example, I'll just contrast it with Ethereum, which is another, is in the number two alt coin, Ethereum. Well, it's got this guy named Battalic Buterion.

He's actually Canadian. I think he's a good guy. I think he's well-intended. But he's so influential in that ecosystem in the Ethereum ecosystem, he can pull rugs out left, right? He's like the central bank of Ethereum, right? Bitcoin's the only system,

the only coin, and the only cryptocurrency, and the only kind of money, it very closely resembles gold. Because gold, there's no magical, like, alchemists saying, okay, I can manufacture gold from lead. You gotta work. You gotta go find her. You gotta work for it.

And that's the parallel. You have to work for Bitcoin. There's no way to get Bitcoin without working for it unless you like stole it off a guy. But in the sense that's working for it too, right? But you have to work for Bitcoin. You can't print it. So that's the. How about when Elon Musk drops 1.5 billion, you wake up to that news?

That was a good day for the Bitcoiners like myself because you know, as time goes on, Bitcoin is becoming more credible. More people like yourself are saying, you know what? Like, let me think again about this. I wrote it off before. But I don't really understand. I can't explain it. So let me do a bit more research, right?

And then when you finally get to that point where you're actually like talking to people like me and understanding why do you like it, Steve. And I explain to you why I like it. And maybe some of what I'm telling you is ringing true with you. You might be like, I'm not too into, like, I think our money's okay. Like, Steve's a bit off his rocker on like what he thinks with central banking and stuff. But I do like this aspect of it, like maybe the fact that I can produce it, right? Let me be clear.

I don't think you're off your rocker about the central bank. I'm in a book club. We read the creature from Jekyll Island, which talks all about that. And that'll hurt your brain enough. So I get what you're saying. I think it's crazy that myself, I remember. I remember hearing about probably yourself and the other individuals around the area that started, you know, buying C cans and sticking computers. And I remember hearing that idea.

I'll be like, that's kind of crazy. And I finally read, because your website had it, the white paper, the original white paper, by once again, I'm going to torture his name, but Nakamoto, who nobody knows who the hell he is. But I finally read it today, which I find funny. So he starts writing this paper in what, 2008, 2009, and we're in 2021. That is crazy that maybe one of the most influential ideas of our time, as you put, takes even a guy like myself who I'm not, I live under a rock. But I still want to learn new things and have heard about Bitcoin for five years. It's still taking me.

Like, what is that? Like 12 years to finally be like, yeah, maybe I should give it the time of day. That's pretty crazy. When you talk about if you took debit credit system, sorry, the Interact system back, the Interact system back like 60 years and told people about it, you're right. Their heads probably would have popped off and went like that that can never work. Bitcoin, we're seeing it ramp up here. Like all of them, like we're just everything, like these NFTs now.

And all the, like, it's just like it's what? Like what is going on? Like my brain's starting to try and figure it out, which means that a lot of people, are trying to start and figure it out and you were just early on the curb I was looking at the numbers in 2016 Bitcoin was worth four and thirty four dollars and today which is what five years later roughly 58,000 this morning like think about that it's mind-boggling and a couple years before 2016 it was like in the dollars right like it yeah I mean unfortunately like people um one thing I

I find is common. I'm going to hold you there for one second. You said a couple of years before. Try this on just so people have an idea if they don't realize this. In 2010, it was worth $0.0.11, 30, the next year, $5.27, then the next year, $1330. Then they had a huge jump to $7.70. In 2015, it dropped to $3.13, sorry. Then the year I mentioned $4.34.

And after that, it has gone up and up and up and up and up. Yeah, it's extremely volatile, which is one reason why people say, oh, it's not going to last too volatile. It can't be money. Money is not volatile. Money is stable, right? They're used to the dollar. I mean, the dollar really had like hundreds and you could almost argue thousands of years to become stable. It didn't always exist as the dollar, like the dollar, like the dollar, like the note, you know, which used to.

to be redeemable for gold. It was always based on gold, right? Yeah. For a long time or other precious metals like silver or whatever. So it's all had a long history. Like, I mean, okay, like if I drop, if I drop into a lease today and I meet a new operator, right? And he asked me, what the hell is that thing? You're, you're, you're, I'm sure that's happened a couple times.

Yeah, all the time. And I, uh, and sometimes it sparks a conversation. It depends how interested they are, right? If they're interested, I'll get into it with them like I am with you. But oftentimes they're not that interested. But I mean, if I'm explaining, like, if you go tell someone who's not that, he doesn't care a lot about this money system, right? And you say, hey, this gold is worth something.

They'll agree with you, not because they own gold or they personally value it, but they, it has a precedent. Like, they've heard about it their whole life. Like, they've heard about gold. Gold is in jewelry. Gold is in coins. Gold used to be treasure, right? Like all of these memes throughout a person's life, whether or not you've ever touched gold or care about gold, you know there's so much precedent for it.

So you don't have to have a guy like me convincing you gold is interesting for you to know. It's already interesting, right? There's a precedent there. Bitcoin is so new that there is no history. Like the internet, Bitcoin is native to the internet, right? The internet hasn't existed for that long. So the internet itself is novel. And now that there's a money native to the internet, like, there's no precedent for it.

So there's not like your grandpa, like, you know, used to save a few gold coins and, you know, the family's wondering what he did with them or something. Like, where did he bury it or something? Like there's no history for Bitcoin. So it's almost like any new technology when it's absolutely unprecedented, when it's not really building off of anything, it's hard for people to grasp. It's hard for them to say, oh, Bitcoin, that's interesting. Like, they're more inclined to say, look what the news is saying. The news, look at these guys, they're all hacking people. And people are getting their computers locked up and ransomware and all the other crazy shit.

And they'll only pedophiles use it or only drug dealers use it. And these, you know, these arseholes on the news will say these kind of things. And not, you know, they're really just trying to draw a reaction anyway. they don't know what they're talking about most of the time they're just trying to get clicks and listen i've talked to like 10 people today and some of them i believe are very smart and the common theme was i don't know what the fuck it is so chances are the news people have no fucking idea what it is no and it's uh it's it's it's hard to relate to it because it's just it's different but like that's when you um when you start to i guess like you've obviously been doing a bit of

research and you're wondering why people are interested in it. I'm explaining to you why I am. And there's many, many people now online that have written about why they're interested in it. So you can, there's many different views on it that might be attractive to you that you finally say, you know what, that makes sense because it fixes this problem that I don't like. Okay. Well, here's a question for you, but that I've been turning on that I haven't been able to figure out what really bothers me rate in this instant with Fiat money with just like the dollar. It just seems like every month that goes by they just print more, right? I'll give you an example.

My wife is an American and So they just have bailout after bailout coming where family just gets money put in their account Canadiens have the same Oh yeah big time yeah right But you're like okay right I get the gold thing because it's like Well you can't just grow a mine and start well I mean you could but I mean you you got to work for it right? Right like yeah, it's not like there's just gold spewing out of a volcano, so to speak, just going everywhere and everybody's

running around and collect that. But with money, you just turn on the printer and now you got more money and away you go. Yeah. What happens with Bitcoin when you hit the, what is it, 21 million? That's all, there's only 21 million coins, right? Yeah. So what happens once you hit 21 million? And I'm, from what I understand, and this is where your knowledge is going to help me immensely is as you go along, it gets harder and harder to mine these coins. So in theory, it's going to take longer. You're at like 18. You had a great other link on your website where it shows the act of like everything on Bitcoin. How many total supply? Yeah, which you're at, I don't know, 80 some some some have been mined. It was like 18 million and some have been mined. So at 21. So you're

slowly closing in or quickly closing in, whichever you want. What happens when 21 million has been mine? Now it's all there. That's a very common question. What happens is nothing. Like it just continues on. Mining, so mining, when you're mining a Bitcoin like we do, like our business and our customers, when you're part of a group, what's called a pool,

or if you're doing it individually, like if you have enough power dedicated, you can do it individually. But when you're mining, you are rewarded for your work for what we call proof of work. So that's sort of what the number crunching is all about. you're just proving to this system that you're doing work.

When you've done that work, you're rewarded by the Bitcoin network for doing it because you're doing a service to the network. And it rewards you in two things. Well, it rewards you in coins. So you get Bitcoins. But the coins come from two places. One place is the new coins. It's called the Coinbase or the new.

Some people just call it the subsidy. So every new Bitcoin block, a block of transactions at our mind. And this is where I don't want to get. Two for off track. But yeah, all the, every time, like, a new block is found and new bitcoins are minted, the miners will get the, the successful miner who mine that block will get the newly minted coins or what we call subsidy. But they also get the fees.

So think about it this way. Like, if I send you Bitcoin right now, like I'm from my phone to your phone, for that transaction to settle, like to actually confirm, I have to pay a fee in Bitcoin. So if I send you, let's say one Bitcoin, right, it's a lot of money. But if I send you one Bitcoin and I have to, to pay, you know, 0.1 Bitcoin, um, uh, in fees, let's say, um, the reason I have to pay that is so that a miner like, well, myself or someone else mining will actually take your transaction that you're trying to, I'm trying to send you and settle it. You know, basically

the minor is putting it into the system is basically what they're doing. Um, but the fee, I have to pay a fee to get someone to do that. If you don't pay a fee, no one will do it for you. So, because you're competing with everyone else. So to, to, to get confirmed quickly, to make a transaction and have it actually settle quickly, you need to pay a fee. So as I talk, I'm thinking, so let me see if I can make sense of this. After you're done mining the $21 million, you've got $21 million, they're done. The mining actually doesn't stop. Your procedure does not stop because now that the $21 million has been mined,

and it's still going on right now, obviously, as transactions happen, those systems recognize said transaction, which allows it to process and the people that process it will actually earn back parts of Bitcoin. Yeah, the fee that you're willing to pay to transact in Bitcoin. Just like if you, you know, if you use Visa,

like, which isn't money, Visa is just a payment system. But even on Visa, which is a system using dollars, you still have to pay a fee. Like if you're, I think, I think like a merchant has to, you know, Visa might charge them like 2% or 1% or something of the transaction. right so yeah everybody everybody

knows about credit card fees right yeah and you as the credit card holder you have to pay the interest right that's right hold your balance yeah but even the merchant who accepts the payment has to pay yeah yeah yeah so pretty much all payment systems even even in a sense gold like if I gave you

if I gave you gold right now like a coin I'm sort of paying a fee in the sense that you know like I'm paying I've paid for the value of that gold coin in the sense that it was minted by somebody and they added that service fee to the cost of the coin at some point in time. But Bitcoin's the same way.

You want to move the money around. You've got to pay to do it. Like there's nothing free in Bitcoin. You have to pay to play. So when I was saying that like, okay, you're asking about, okay, there's $21 million. What happens when it's all mined, right? That'll happen in about 100 years from now, like or 120 years from now. Like in the, there's a schedule, like a set schedule.

And that's why I said earlier, there's no uncertainty in Bitcoin because it's set in stone effectively. 120 years to mine the last? I believe it's the year 20, around approximately the year 2140 is when there will be no new bitcoins issued. That's when the system would have transitioned from a pure, like miners were mining all the revenue like a miner is mining is mostly new coins right now. Like every time you mine a block, which happens every 10 minutes, you'll get 6.25 new bitcoins. That's how much new bitcoins is issued every block. But then, because there's also fees, the more people that use it, the higher the fee level rises. So the more useful Bitcoin is the society, where people are willing to pay fees.

So over time, people can't see what I'm doing. But on one hand, the bulk of the revenue is in subsidy or new coins, but it transitions to all fees over time. So Bitcoin never ends. That's what the point is. There's only one point of a cap, like a supply cap at $21 million. And that's just to actually distribute the coins initially. So the person that thought of, okay, this is a better way of doing money. One thing he had to figure out was how many total coins would there be?

Because he wanted to have a cap supply. He wanted to have a money that no one's printing. Like that, see, if you think about it this way, like if you own one Bitcoin right now, if you're smart enough to go out and get some coin and you own some coin right now, the total amount of coins you have, let's say, one just for easy numbers. You'll have one out of 21 million total coins. And there's nothing anyone can ever do to dilute your ownership. Like there's nothing anyone can do. If you think about in, let's say there was only $21 million in the world, right? And you own a, you own a dollar.

So you own the same percentage of the world supply of money at this moment in time. Well, tomorrow, the bank, the central bank is going to print some more money and dilute your share. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So that's the point of the cap supply is that you cannot be arbitrate. trarily diluted by some jerk off politician that is riding high because he thinks he's popular or whatever the case may be like in whatever reality, you know, that we may be talking about. But that's the contrast. This is another contrast like Bitcoin, when you own it, nobody can dilute your ownership. And that's what makes it better than even gold in many senses because gold, there's always new gold being mined.

And think about it this way too. Okay, like many, many years ago, right? I don't know how they mined gold like back in the Aztec days, right? They probably literally like shovels and by hand. Nowadays, you have these, if you watch, I love watching those shows, like those reality shows, like those guys up in the Yukon, right? Like they're stripping the land and they're getting like trace amounts of gold through their seed process or however that works, like that big water slide and stuff.

Now that's a technological improvement. Now, if you have, let's say, okay, if you, somehow could apply that technology instantly back in time in the Aztec days, you would put everyone else out of business who's mining the old way, and you would be inflating the monetary supply at a rapid pace, just you and your machine. Well, just take oil. Just do oil. Yeah.

You take the technology of today, stick it 150 years ago or whatever, and, I mean, the world wouldn't be able to keep up with how much stuff you could give them, right? No. I get what you're throwing down. So it's really just about not being diluted. So think about it. If you have one Bitcoin right now, all it's getting, I mean, I don't know, there's probably things that can happen because, I mean, I think of, you know, I mentioned Elon Musk,

but I should mention India, right, and talks that they may ban it or however they figure they can do that. But, I mean, there's going to be people that don't want this to go there. You've already kind of have mentioned that. Things have been maybe a little bit tough because you're a guy who deals with the mining of Bitcoin. But overall, the fact that it's finite, like, you're not getting another $21 million after this. And the fact that it's $2140, that kind of hurts my brain a little bit, actually a lot. Like, it should, it should only appreciate, like, it should just keep growing.

Like, it should never stop. So there's a meme in Bitcoin. There's a lot of memes, like number go up. number go up forever. I'm in that camp that the Bitcoin price is going up forever. Like it'll never stop. And that sounds like how the hell can you think? Well, you've got to think long term though.

That's crazy. Yeah, I'm talking long term. I'm not saying that you're going to go buy Bitcoin today and get rich tomorrow. Although a lot of people have. It seems that way, but it's really not a get rich quick scheme. It's a get rich slow scheme. You got to be patient. You have to, you know, anyone listening, I would say,

say if you are going to get into it, learn it first, and then when you're ready and to get into it and like buy it from an exchange or whatever you're doing, don't buy, don't, don't, don't blow your budget on day one. Like dollar, just this is just generally, I think, good investment wise. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just sort of buy in slowly and, uh, and really spend the time to understand how to avoid getting, uh, fished, right? Because people can try to like lock your computer up, make you, like lose your coins or like,

you know, hack you. I got sim swapped, right? So do you know what that is? I have no idea. So, you know, one thing I'll advise anyone listening here is like if you are into Bitcoin, don't advertise it. Like there's no good reason to advertise it. The reason I advertise why I'm into Bitcoin is because I'm a salesman.

I'm literally selling my business. I'm selling my company, selling my product, right? So I'm promoting Bitcoin. What it does, though, is it makes you a target for every hacker on the planet. Okay. So if Sean here, if you go out and start saying, I'm a big Bitcoin. dude I'm accepting Bitcoin because the best you're gonna probably have at some point some you know jerks try to hack your computer system try to fish you send you emails that you

shouldn't open the attachments right like get into your stuff and and try to find out how to steal your Bitcoin what happened to me was I was it's funny because I used to you know I'm from Newfoundland right like so I like I came over to Lloyd just after graduating big into big and a big binge drinking and things were things were good life was good things are great things were great in the patch okay like there's parties all the time it was impossible not to go out and have some fun really into that oh when I when I quit Husky and things slowed down with the with the downturn and then I got started my going on my own business and I maybe started maturing I really slowed down on the drinking stuff what was funny was I went out probably the only time I went out and

decided to have a bunch of drinks like it was the only time in like the previous 12 months This was about a year and a half ago over the summer. I went out to, I think it was a husky or some vendor event just to have some fun golfing. And I got sim swapped at the most inconvenient time because I was pretty plastered. Like I was carding and drinking, golfing and loving life. And a sim swap is a, it's called a social, it's a form of social hack. It's where someone, they might have figured it out somehow or they might just guess because Canada only has a couple phone companies.

What happened was like I was with company X, I might as well not name it. And some dickhead, I don't know where they were in the world. They're probably at the phone company. It told me they thought they might have been in like Montreal. They knew enough about me from what I promote online. They knew I was into Bitcoin.

So they're trying to find ways to steal like, I don't know, hack me, right? Like somehow profit, maybe take my Bitcoin if I'm, if I'm dumb and I leave it in an insecure online. you know, on my email or something because you could literally leave it on your email if you wanted. And so what they did was a sim swap is what it's called is they impersonate, they call your phone company.

They say, I'm, in this case, I'm Steve Barber. They knew enough about me generally. They might have known maybe where I live, like I live, they maybe looked up where I lived or, and also remember that everything that anything you've ever submitted online about yourself is out there in a dark web because all these friends. tricking companies have been hacked now, right? Like all these companies you're sending your like social insurance stuff to like in the States and And you forget that I do a podcast twice a week and talk about myself nonstop. Yeah, yeah, and you've spilled the beans on everything

So like someone will just research about you. They know that you're the target. They want to see if they can hack you and steal some stuff. So they end up what happens is they trick the phone company into porting over your phone number to their phone like to their like SIM card. And this happened to me. I was on the golf course. All of a sudden, my phone, no connection, right? So I was just checking my phone. No connection. I was like, that's weird. Like, I'm in, I'm at, I was at Rolling Greens.

So it was like, well, Rolling Greens doesn't have bad reception. So it's a little weird. Reset my phone, right? I was also pretty drunk. Reset my phone because I'm a, you know, I'm a working man. So I got to check my emails and make sure I'm on, because it was a work day. So I'm making sure I'm on top of things, like as best I can while I'm having fun. Anyway, couldn't get my phone going.

And what happened was someone, SimSwat me. So they stole my phone number. So now they own my phone number. Everyone texting me is actually texting their phone because the phone company who generally has extremely poor security and they don't, like I did actually have a pin code, but they somehow got around that or didn't require it for a port. And I had to phone the company later when I got this all fixed

like later that night and the next day. I had to request additional security in my account. So that kind of thing couldn't happen again. Like they'd need to be there in person to port my number. But they did this all remotely. So anyway, I was just, what they ended up doing was they didn't do a lot of damage to me because I'm already paranoid about this stuff because I'm into this space and I know that I'm sort of like a target for hackers.

And I had the right security systems on my back end. So once they get your number, if you, you know, a lot of people have their email. Like if you forget your password, what does it do, text you? So that's what happens. They go to, once they get your phone number, they try to log into your accounts. say forget my password text me and then it text them the secret right to re-access your accounts and then they get all your accounts they get your emails and through their email then they can go through all your once they get your main email account they can get everything right because

everything you've ever signed up through email right so that's the kind of that's the kind of that's why you know I say there's no need to really be too out there advertising it but it's you making me feel I had to I had to God, what was I doing? I was talking to Shaw or something about cable. And they asked me like 17 effing questions. And I remember being like, man, it's me. Just like you've already asked me everything.

But hearing that story, I'm going to take it easy on them next time. Well, it's really. Obviously, there is some smart people out there with very bad intentions. Well, the best hackers in the world are interested in Bitcoin, right? So they have the best resources. They have all the weak stuff on the dark web. pay they pay for illegally like all the leak personal information right it's usually a big hacker right they'll they'll hack like a company they'll get all the customer information and they'll sell it on the

dark market like to other hackers like for bitcoin or for whatever and so they have access to this info and then they try to use this info like you're they might know your email then and that's how they try to coordinate these hacks um so it is a it's sort of like you know if you're into bitcoin If you're in a gold, right? Like if you're a person that loves gold, you've been hoarding gold your whole life because you think like me, you think it's better money or whatever.

And you have it, I don't know, like you probably wouldn't announce to the world online that you're a big gold bug and you hoard all this gold at home. Like you're just inviting like risk, right? You wouldn't do that. So that's the same mentality a person should just generally have when it comes to Bitcoin

because it's, there's no one no one's going to bail you out in bitcoin like that's the opposite of you know again contrast with the current system there's no one to help you if you screw up you're just out of luck and that's that's again you know why i say things like oh just you should you should learn spend some time just learning the basics and you know if you know people in your friend's circle that's already done that you can you know get them to help you um you know like i help a lot of my friends not make mistakes and just like don't get get distracted by these like potential risk factors, right?

Like one, one, if he's listening, there's a good friend of mine, play ball with him. I won't name him, but like he's one of a couple friends like back in the last bull run when everyone was getting interested in Bitcoin in like 2017 when it was spiking, right? Like that was when even even though Bitcoin's higher price now, there's a lot more people interested back then it seemed. It was really in the news. And so I had a lot of friends like, you know, asked me for advice and you know the one number one thing I tell everybody is once you buy Bitcoin, take possession of it. Don't leave it.

Like if you're back then, people were using this. It's sort of infamous now is a Canadian exchange called Quadriga. There's an amazing write-up on this. Like it's a fast, it's really an amazing, interesting story. What happened with Quadriga is Vancouver-based online exchange. And if you search up Quadriga, the guy's name is Gerald Cotton. How do you spell that? If you don't mind.

Quadriga is spelled Q-U-A-D, as in quad, Riga, R-I-G-A, Quadriga. And the owner was Gerald Cotton, and there's an amazing write-up in the Vanity Fair. So if you search up Gerald Cotton and Vanity Fair, they wrote an incredible article sort of going through what happened. And effectively, this Canadian exchange, what is suspected is the owner, Gerald Cotton, stole all the money, mismanaged the company, but also stole a bunch of customer money, gambled a lot of it away.

Excuse me. And then vanished. And apparently he's dead, but the idea, if you read that right up, like the theory in my circles, like we're, I know a lot of people that knew him.

The theory is that he faked his death and he's like living in India with a different face or something like with stolen all the money. But the point of this sort of, side like this sort of tangent was when you when you get Bitcoin you got to take responsibility for it yourself and you shouldn't trust someone else to hold it for you so everyone that was getting into it that held that bought Bitcoin through Quadriga the online exchange it's sort of like

buying stocks through like Quest trade right you buy stocks through Quest trade like any online brokerage and well you own the stock but it's held on this custodial service like an exchange like like Questrade they're saying you're their customer they're holding the stock in your name. Same thing with an online exchange. You buy Bitcoin. If you don't pull your Bitcoin off the exchange into your own possession, well,

Quadriga actually owns it and says that they'll pay you, right? Like when you want it. But if they all of a sudden go bankrupt or they get hacked or the guy fakes his death and steals all the money, you're out of luck. And so I had some friends, a couple local that lost a bit of money from buying through that exchange and they didn't take it off

because that's the number one thing. you in Bitcoin they say like not your keys not your coins like you don't have the keys of your coins then you don't own the coins and that's true um I want to come before I let you get out of here I want to come back to upstream data because that's the reason I brought you in like I mean in the beginning and this has been a fascinating chat like I'm probably going to have to go back and relisten to it because there's some things that um I think of the brain as a as a computer and I'm a few decades back, so to speak, and the brain's bogged down in a couple,

and it just needs to churn on some things. But a couple things with your data centers out on site. Can it go on any... Well, so for like people listening in the area, or hell, Canada, wherever, where you got all these units? Canada, United States? All over North America right now, in a oil field. Okay.

Yeah, oil field. So if you're in oil field and listening to this, what are the requirements for gas? Because you're using waste gas to power these things. Yeah. What are the requirements for it to be eligible to be on a site with a little bit of excess gas? Like, you can be technical as hell as you want because you're talking to Lloyd Minster here. So a lot of the guys are going to know, they probably already know all about you. Yeah.

Just. Yeah, the loiter is, honestly, I think it's going to become. Like I think Alberta and Saskatchewan are going to become, an oil field in general is going to become a mecca for Bitcoin mining. It's going to be dominated by oilfield. I thought that from day one, and that's sort of why I'm positioned my company to focus on oil field. And it comes down to the fact that there's all this waste gas.

But Lloyd is an amazing area in that sense because climate's perfect for it. It's cool or northern climate. It's dry. So humidity can be a challenge. And there's gas everywhere and wasted gas. So Lloyd, Lloyd itself is like the hub of the mecca in Canada because the most vent gas is actually around the Lloyd area. And so that's why I think like at least for my business, I think it's a good idea to grow it through in Lloyd, right? But as for your question, like what does a guy look for?

Generally in Bitcoin mining, if you're wanting to mine Bitcoin, you're looking for cheap energy. That's in a general sense. So if you're even just the guy at home, you're generally not going to build a mine Bitcoin profit will be at home, not really anywhere around here or in most places. Like maybe in places with hydro, you might build a dude at a decent rate at home or build a little facility in Manitoba, that kind of thing.

I know people doing that. Oil field specifically, when it comes to gas and what you're looking for, really, like for anyone that knows anything about oil production, if the gas is good enough quality to just generate power, you're good. So things that might throw a wrench into, like if you have a well, they're like, oh, yeah, my, my dad owns a piece of land with an old well on there. I'm going to strap a Bitcoin mine in secret, right?

And I'm like, mine some coins. I know people doing that. And I think it's great because if there's, if there's any, you know, any stranded gas that no one's benefiting from, you might as well. But so, you know, you wouldn't sour gas like H2S. Like that's going to eat the crap out of your engine. It's going to corrode it. It's going to eat away. The oil will become acidic.

So your engine will just crater real quick. So H2S generally is not a good idea because you'll have to spend money like prepping it. Yeah. So that's like for us, if a guy is like, oh, I get an H2S site, I'm like, okay, well, do you have any sweet sites? That might be a better application rather than have to go down that path of what to do with that gas. So sour gas is something you generally want to avoid Unless it's just slightly sour in which case you might be fine Volume like some volumes might be just too low

Like if it's just a Well right now a challenge that we're still trying to tackle is like taking the vent gas off the top of a tank So you see all these black tanks sitting around and there's gas coming off it It's usually really low volume. It's very low pressure it's atmospheric basically and it's hard to Really capture that and get it There are systems like VRU systems and the like that you can deal with it. But it's still, it can be intermittent based on how you're producing and so it can be

challenging. So the intermittency as well, like if you had a well, some of these wells are spitting gas and then they're basically the fluid levels bouncing around. So they'll spit a bunch of gas out and then they'll load up with fluid and you know you're pumping away but like it'll be sort of barking gas out. And if it's if it's really volatile, it can be a bit of a challenge. It just means you have to sort of change the way you're producing the well a little bit. Like don't maybe pump it, pump it that way that you're doing. Maybe slow it down and maybe a little more even keel with the way you're producing. But then there's other things like in certain jurisdictions if you're in Texas, like we've shipped a few down to the Texas area. Like if you're in West Texas

and the Permian, you have hotter gas. So like liquids rich gas, heavier hydrocarbons. So it's not just methane. It's like hexanes and pentanes. And, octane so the so this these hydrocarbon chains burn very hot and so you can't just run that through any old engine you have to maybe knock knock out the heavier liquids and and just make sure that the heating value like how hot the gas is how how hot it is when it literally combusts right like it's not going to damage your engine and that kind of thing the other thing I wanted to ask is I read an article I think it was on your website about people running into mineral expiring and this can help prevent that yeah we had so Repsall is a they're big

down in Provost job area big company really I'm I really like the people I met over there forward-thinking and stuff but they had they heard about us right and they I've been marketing our stuff for a while saying look it's really portable no sunk cost you can just drop it anywhere that there's gas and start monetizing it so some of these guys, like if you're a producer and you have a mineral lease that under certain conditions can expire, like if it's not productive for a certain period of time, you might lose the right to it. It might go back, like back to the crown, that kind of thing. Like if you have a property that you don't produce for a certain period of time, it'll go back to the ground.

So that was sort of the situation here. I think what happened was based on the pooling agreement, which I actually don't know the details of because I wasn't privy to it. But based on the pooling agreement, when COVID hit and the oil price crashed, Reps all had to shut in a bunch of properties. And if they didn't produce one, if they didn't get it back online, they would have lost the minerals. So they took a bunch of our units, put them on site. That got rid of their gas problem because all their downstream gas, because it was normally sold downstream into a compressor. Yeah. And that was all shut in because the infrastructure was shut in downstream.

So they weren't able to produce the oil. well unless they dealt with the gas, so they dealt with the gas using us, like in a compliant way. And we can do it quickly because like if you need a flare combustor, you might need permitting. There's a bunch of bureaucracy to jump through right off doesn't need any of that. You just drop it in, done. Well, no, I guess there are two of the things I wanted to make sure that just for your company's sake, I find it really intriguing what you're doing. And you're sitting in oil country, right?

Like, I mean, I'm sure you've hit up. every last oil person on the sun, but you just never know who's listening and who stumbles across this, especially in this area and have a couple things that they could be like, oh, that might work here, right? Like, oh, I read that it's going to run out, you know, they're going to have $21 million.

Well, actually, no, by the sounds of this thing, it ain't going anywhere. And if that's the case, you plop one of these units down, you solve a bunch of problems and you can make some money doing it. Oh, yeah, and I mean, like, do you have me on here is great because exactly that. I'm able to reach another audience that might not get this information, and they might not get it for a while, right?

Like they might figure it out eventually. But, I mean, for me, like, my job is evolving from, like, you know, I'm finally getting more staff to help me with all the nitty-gritty stuff. And I'm becoming now more of an educator because the way I look at it, like, the more people understand the system, the more they're willing to buy into it. Like, I spent a lot of time educating producers over the years. and even to the day almost every day,

like I'm giving information, more information to people, me and my sales team. So, I mean, the education aspect is hugely important because I just think the sooner we get, especially in Canada, because we've been, our oil industry has just been beaten down by the false rhetoric of the green horse garbage, right? So like we're being like, almost,

discriminated against in certain ways and can't get pipelines in like I we equipped a gas well recently like a good friend that I know him for years had this great well we needed a spot to have some backup fuel we equipped as well with Bitcoin mine and you can see me talk about it in the video because I have a video there on YouTube just explaining the well and like I'm saying like it's great to export I say we're exporting energy like we're bypassing the bureaucracy you know know, slammed down on us by these idiot politicians that won't let us, you know, sell our energy. And Bitcoin is awesome because there's nothing they can do about it.

Like it's we're selling it. We're selling this gas effectively to the Bitcoin network because we're mining it, but they're paying us to mine it. The network's paying us to mine it. So they're paying us to consume these resources to do that. So in a sense, like Bitcoin is a form of exploitation to the global market. And that's something Canada needs desperately. for gas like uh obviously lNG stuff that's on the go but just you can do it now directly through mining bitcoin and if only we could do that with crude oil and seller well you technically can

you can you can you can mine bitcoin if you ever find the crude oil and like you know run engines and stuff but that's a bit of a challenge a bit of a different challenge but um but yeah unfortunately a crude is still sort of stranded but the gas isn't so i really just try to you know any any guys if you're operating, if you're operating wells, you just have friends. Like it's, it's, again, step one is just coming to terms with the tech and being like, okay, this isn't a fad.

Because that's the first thing you've got to get past. Is it a fad? Like, is it just going to be like tits up in like two years, right? And you bought the top and now you're wrecked, like as we call it. Right? So that's where the education aspect comes in. And, and, you know, you mentioned Elon Musk earlier, right?

So a lot of people look up him and his company and they it's very credible what he's done and what he's doing and what he's doing so like when a guy like him lends his credibility towards it that's what people need to see you know like like some schmuck like me in a boardroom trying to convince an oil exec that it's a good idea is not going to weigh as much as like when they see even banks now take it seriously so when they start to see that kind of thing when they start to see the institution recognize that that's huge yeah well i appreciate you coming in i want to get to the crude master final five five questions and then I'll let you out of here I've been

grilling you for almost two hours okay um just five questions here um the first is always if you could sit down put you in my position who would you take across me you can have anyone oh you can have anyone um who do I admire I'm like I'm so deep into the Bitcoin space like it would be a Bitcoin guy you know what a good guy he's actually a good friend mine. He's a big bitcoiner, but he's an interesting fella. If you were to have him on, you could obviously talk about Bitcoin. He would, he would blow people's minds on what he has to say about it. But he also has some really interesting things to say about just macroeconomic. He's an economist. So macroeconomics in general. His name is Safe Dean Amuse. So he's a good friend of

mine. So a well-known guy in Bitcoin, but he would come on something like this, absolutely. He's he's a, you know, down-to-earth guy and loves talking to real people like yourself. Well, we're going to line that up after this is done because anytime anyone's, that's the guy they'd interview and you're saying he'd do it. It's like, I'm not going to, let's get that done because that'd be cool. I think that'd be anytime anyone has their choice and they have the access to them, that's pretty cool. Because most of somebody's, you know, you know how many times Jesus has been said, who would you interview? Well, Jesus has been an interesting conversation.

It's like, well, yeah, that is true. That is true. That is true. Don't think he's coming on next week. Just saying. I said safe because he's got some really polarizing ideas on all kinds of things. Like he's a huge, huge carnivore guy. And he's really, yeah, he'll trigger a lot of people and make for a lot of interesting conversation.

Trigger. If you could, if tomorrow. You could have a call come from anywhere on the planet to set up one of your units. Where would you want to go and set one up? Some local farmer who wants to do it behind the scenes. Like I like when, I mean, okay, I can say like ExxonMobil, right? Like the CEO of ExxonMobil. I think it's just inevitable that they will call somebody, whether it's us or someone else, and do it.

And that would be exciting, of course. But when it comes to deploying our products, I love seeing, I could, you know, some local guys that are farmers that are doing it, usually partnered with friends they know in oil. But like I would love to see like guys that stranded gas wells on their land just do it under the table without. Because I just think I can't get into it now, maybe on another time,

but I just think like there's a big problem with how the government is incentivizing oil and gas production. I think it's creating a lot of these orphaned wells. and stranded wells through how they're doing. Well, I tell you what, we'll get into that next time. Yeah. That sounds like... Next time we'll have to talk about why Lloyd Minster,

forget Alberta seceding from this country. Lloyd Minster needs to secede from this country and why we're in a good position to do that. Bold statement, cotton. It could happen. It could happen. Anything can happen. You just got to get the people together to do it.

What's the biggest misunderstanding in what you do? What do people misunderstand when they hear you mine Bitcoin? I would say the biggest misunderstanding it. Maybe is just not taking the time to understand it. Like it's, I would like to see more people. And every company we go talk to is full of people that are sort of like yourself, like getting more interested in learning about it. Or like myself, like that have been learning about.

for a while I think it's great and they're trying to get their company to do it. But generally the businesses, like I mentioned that one company locally who's a public company who's our best customer. I've been trying to get them to like be proud of what they're doing and announce it like publicly. But they don't want to do that? They want to keep it secret. So because I think they're, it's still a little edgy. Like the whole Bitcoin thing is a little edgy.

So they don't want to be the guys like leading it, right? They don't want to be the first ones out of the gate being like, yeah, reminding Bitcoin to do all these good stuff for our facilities. So it'd be great if people understood, like these oil companies understood how I think they would be greatly benefited by being proud of what they're doing with it and advocating that this is a great tech for oil field and for emissions reduction. And for Canadian energy in general, I'd really like to see some of our customers start advocating it because they don't so how high does bitcoin go um it goes up forever so it's just a question of when when when then well i i think i i said in the local paper when they did a little

interview on us recently um i think i told them like 300 grand uh i was i think i was saying i was talking US terms so 300 US $300,000 US dollars by like 2025 at the pace that's going now that could actually happen it could brush that pretty quick because usually when Bitcoin goes on pumps like it is it goes like 1020x really fast and I don't know I don't know when will be when we'll like I'd say in 10 to 10 to 15 years will be well over a million so anybody like that anyone that's interested in protecting their own wealth against inflation and against the evil of the central banks. It's not a bad idea just to take a little.

Like you don't, people often too, they're like, oh, I need to buy a full coin. It's like, no, you don't. You just get 500 bucks that you're willing to blow. Just get 500 bucks worth, you know, tuck it away, forget about it. Don't look at it again for five years. Like you'll be happy, you listen to me. Final one.

Who in the hell is Satoshi, Satoshi, Satoshi, I'm going to butcher this name to the end, Nakamoto. Any ideas? Best theory? Is he an alien? Did he beamed down? No, he's, uh, there's, I think, like, there, there is a narrow group of individuals who it could be. Um, they call him the cipher punks.

Like, there was a period of time in the early 90s when the, see, this is the thing that people don't really understand. It's not like some guy, this Satoshi guy, right? Which is a pseudonym, like a pseudonym, like a pseudonym, like a, fake name. Yeah, fake name. It wasn't, it wasn't, it's not like he just came out of nowhere with it. Like, there was a group of people working on this like, like, like, like feverishly, like, you know, passionately, right? Like, like, like the kind of guys that are like me with pumps, like reading about them at night and like YouTubeing and doing whatever I can, like on my own time. Doing that

about how do we get native internet money? So once the internet was invented and encryption started going, they wanted, okay, how do we solve money on the internet? So that was actually in, in the works since the 80s, like for quite a long time, like native money to computers. So it was actually a long buildup. So because of that, you can sort of say, okay, it's like within this circle of the industry is one of these people. There's some good articles. Like there's a one recently in this, if you Google Len, I think his name was Len Sassiman, S-A-M-A-M-N. It's a really interesting article about why he might have been. Satoshi Nakamoto and I found it very convincing.

At the end of the day, I don't think it matters very much. The text speaks for itself, but... It does add to the lure of the story, doesn't it? I hope that it's, I'm sort of hoping that it's never really proven because I do think it adds a lot to it. Well, can you imagine it's 2140? That's a lot of years from now, 119 years. We definitely will not be around.

And all of a sudden... Never say never. True, true. But let's assume the law is still apply, which means in 2140, me and you aren't there. Yeah. There's some young kids going around, they're talking about Bitcoin,

and they're like, have you heard the story about its founder? And then the lure just comes in. Now extrapolate that by a thousand years, and what do they talk about, right? Like, the fact that guy, nobody knows who he is, and it's like possibly the most influential thing

to ever happen in our lifetimes, It could have been like how, I don't know, who knows the story of Jesus snowballs over the years, right? Like it becomes this epic, epic thing. Yeah, I hope it remains anonymous or remains unknown because it does add a lot of sexiness to it, the fact that he wasn't, he isn't known. So I hope it stays that way. And it's sort of there's a cult around Bitcoin.

Like my mom thinks I'm in a cult, right? my mom thinks I'm uh you know on the on the extreme side but still sane I think she I think she would agree I'm still saying but um it does it does sort of attract sort of this cult like religious like fervor like while you're defending it yeah right like and I'm probably sort of like on that side of it like I I think it it justifies like the the fervor and the interest at garners so well I appreciate you coming in and uh sitting and talking about it. It's been highly entertaining.

I enjoy learning new things, and Bitcoin, let me tell you, is something I'm feverishly trying to, like, understand, so I can understand what's going on in the world because I hear about it all the time. You see the Elon Musk, you see India, you're like, what the hell is going on? And you've given me something to ponder now

and think about for a bit, and I'm sure I'll get you back on here again, and we can talk about Lloyd seceding from Canada. That'll be an interesting chat. But thanks again. I appreciate it, Steve. No problem. Thanks for having me.

It was a pleasure. Hey, folks, thanks for joining us today. If you just stumbled on the show, please click subscribe. Then scroll to the bottom and rate and leave a review. I promise it helps. Remember, every Monday and Wednesday, we will have a new guest sitting down to share their story. The Sean Newman podcast is available for free on Apple, Spotify, YouTube,

and wherever else you get your... podcast fix until next time hey caners hope uh hope you enjoyed that one that one uh well there's a lot in there wasn't there um he's a smart smart guy doing some pretty cool stuff so it'll be interesting to see uh what steve does here over the next little bit but uh thoroughly enjoyed sitting down with them i hope you you got as much out of it as i did um now i got to give a shout out today to kenny thompson out of oxford nova scotia he said hey sean just listened to the Michael Stonthauhnhaus episode, which was this past Wednesday. He said he loved it.

Stumbled upon your... Can't even spit out, guys. I mean, this is what turkey and ham and everything else I've been eating on Easter Sunday is done. Anyways, shout out to my... Shout out to Kenny Dobbs and spit it out here, Sean. Stumbled upon you with the first QDM podcast and have listened ever since. Keep it up, man. So shout out to you, Kenny.

listen in from the other side of Canada, so that's pretty cool. Now it is Monday. We're all a little sluggish, I'm sure, after the long weekend. And if you're the champ, chances are feet are up on the desk. Let's get those feet up or feet down. Jeez, Sean's going to bed, folks, all right? We're going to catch you Wednesday. Chapper, come bring me a coffee. All right, peace out. We'll see you Wednesday.