The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Is Bitcoin a bet you want to make?

Episode Date: March 2, 2021

The pandemic has staggered the entertainment business worldwide -- is it starting to find ways to make a comeback? We check in with Stratford, Broadway and Beijing. And Bitcoin, the market numbers are raising interest, excitement and concern.  We try to answer the questions with a guest who has the cred to deal with them.

and hello there peter mansbridge here with the latest episode of the bridge where today just moments from now we're going to talk about stage and bitcoin seriously Ah yeah, what a combination, eh? Stage and Bitcoin. That's our discussion points today on the bridge. Hi there, I'm Peter Mansbridge. Most of you know that I live in Stratford, Ontario. That's where the bridge comes out of every day. Occasionally it comes out of Toronto,

where I have a studio in our little condo in Toronto. But for the most part, certainly for the last year, the bridge has come from right here in Stratford, Ontario. Now, Stratford's a small town, city actually, about 33,000 people. But like most towns and cities across the country big and small the last year has been a devastating one there's been lots of suffering because of the way the pandemic has hit the economy now stratford's known for any number of different things and justifiably so, but perhaps the most best-known reason that Stratford exists in the minds of many people is the theatre, the Stratford Festival, the Stratford Shakespearean Festival

to many people still, even though it does many other things, including some really great musicals. But for the last year, because of the pandemic, like so many events, sporting events, theater, stage screen, it's been shut down. So there's been nothing happening. And last year was going to be a big deal for Stratford

because it was the opening of the new Tom Patterson Theatre. It's beautiful. It stands on the edge of the Avon River here in the middle of Stratford. And people are anxious to see when it'll finally open. So yesterday was a big day because there was a big announcement. Everybody has assumed that what would happen in Stratford is what we were seeing happening in other places, like in downtown Toronto, the theater district, not going to open this summer.

At the earliest, perhaps this fall, one assumed that the same thing would happen here in Stratford. But no, yesterday they announced that they're going to take a run at something different. They're going to take a run at opening the theater in a special way in late June. Now, I'm not going to go into all the particulars, but it will harken back to the year the festival opened, 1953, when the opening play was Richard III, Shakespeare's Richard III, and performing in the role, Sir Alec Guinness.

And so that is part of the folklore of Stratford. Sir Alec Guinness, Richard III, opening night, Stratford Festival. And it was in a tent. They didn't have time to build a building. They had to raise money over a couple of years before they got a building. They did it in a tent. So this year, the plan is they're going to have a tent. They're in fact going to have two tents,

one outside and alongside the new Tom Patterson Theatre, and one as part of the traditional main stage, the Stratford Festival. Now, there'll be all kinds of rules and protocols put in place for these theater performances in a tent. I think the flaps are going to be up, so there's a good sense of breeze going through. The numbers will be severely restricted,

not only in the audience, but on the stage. I don't think there'll ever be more than six or eight actors involved in any one particular play. The plays will be reduced in time. I mean, many of them are like two and a half hours long in the traditional set. I think the outside limit's going to be somewhere around 90 minutes. But they're trying, and they've gone to a lot of trouble,

to come up with ideas and ways to safely do something. And so that's the plan for this year. And as we look at numbers, having dropped considerably in the last month in terms of hospitalizations and cases and deaths but they seem to have kind of leveled off a little bit recently which has some people worried about the impact of the variants but that's a separate story this story is about an attempt to move back to some degree of the way things used to be. And obviously, everybody is hoping that this is going to work

and that it's not going to get sidetracked by a resurgence of the virus, which is entirely possible. But the hope is that it won't. And the hope is that it will begin to spur the economy in this town as other towns try to find similar ways to bounce back in some fashion. Because this town's been hit hard. Obviously, everyone who works at the theater, all the actors, restaurants, hotels, bed and breakfast,

all the service industries that are trying to thrive in a town that's so dependent, especially in the summer months, on tourism that's attracted by the Stratford Festival. But this is just a small example of what's going on right across the country. So much as you've heard me harp on this before, so much of the country's economy, one in ten jobs, is based on tourism, directly or indirectly. So a lot of places are going through the same kind of struggle that Stratford is,

and it's especially so in, you know, the entertainment industry, which has been devastated in the last year. You know, when you think theater, you know, you think, well, Toronto to a degree, but mainly you think London, you think Broadway. You know, before the pandemic, Broadway attracted 67 million tourists a year. That's just for Broadway shows. 67 million tourists a year.

And part of that also for Yankees games and madison square garden concerts together they generated 70 billion dollars of economic activity so new york's going through a reopening of sorts they're taking steps to reopen movie theaters amusement parks sports arenas and other venues at limited capacity. But job growth and tourism remain stunted. Jobs in arts, entertainment, and recreation in New York City fell by 66% last year. Largest decline among the city's economic sectors,

erasing a decade of gains in which New York's most vibrant industries kind of took off. I found all these stats in Bloomberg. We did a kind of feature, mini feature, on the situation in New York's entertainment sector. So while North America's struggling and beginning, you know, like a spring flower, it's starting to sprout. But, you know, a bad storm could set all of that back.

And that's one of the fears. And you heard it again yesterday from the Centers for Disease Control saying we've got to be careful, very careful about reopening. Because the variants are there, and they are having an impact. So that's the North American situation.

In China, where all this started, Wuhan, they're gangbusters, especially in the movie industry. Feature on ABC News talks about how China's returned big time feature on ABC News, talks about how China's returned big time to movie theaters. Now, what's big time?

They're running at half capacity, which sounds like, well, that's no big deal if they're running at 50%. That's full capacity right now because the protocols say every second seat can be filled, not every seat. So if they're running at half, you know, halfway,

then they're doing pretty good. They're smashing China's box office records with domestic productions far outpacing their Hollywood competitors. There are all kinds of protocols in the theaters in China. Mask wearing is mandatory. Moviegoers must register with a cell phone app so they can be traced in the event of an outbreak. And as I said, only every other seat is allowed to be occupied, making it hard to obtain tickets for the most popular films.

Last year, China sold an estimated $2.7 billion in tickets compared to $2.3 billion in the U.S. This is 2019, before the pandemic. Last year, the Americans saw an 80% drop in ticket sales. Numbers are staggering, eh? So, there you go. Kind of a snapshot into the entertainment business, you know, that's part of, just like everything else, it's been affected by the pandemic. But here in Stratford, there's signs of hope.

As I said, it's like spring, which, with any luck, we'll be looking at within the next month. As Stratford begins what is going to be a long, drawn-out process to try and get back to some sense of normal. It won't be this year for sure, but the beginnings of it could be, with that whole tent situation drawing back memories of Sir Alec Guinness. You know I guess his. Sadly his most famous role. Will always be Obi-Wan Kenobi.

From Star Wars. I say sadly. Only because he did such brilliant acting. And so many other things. And he had a distinguished war record. He was in, I think it was the Royal Navy for a couple of years during the Second World War. He was involved in the invasion of Sicily, 43.

And like so many British actors, and some American and Canadian actors and sports figures had distinguished records during the Second World War. Okay, I've told you a couple times in the last few days that we wanted to touch base on the Bitcoin story. And I've been trying to figure out a way of doing that.

You know, Bitcoin's been around since kind of late 08, 09. Kind of came in somewhere near the end of the, you know, the banking crisis of 08. And it the, you know, the banking crisis of 08. And it's, you know, I don't know about you, but I've tried to understand Bitcoin for a long time

and blockchain and cryptocurrency, and I have a hard time with it. And I have trouble focusing and concentrating when the conversation starts but listen for an investment that started off literally as in the pennies you could buy bitcoin back when it started for certainly under a dollar. Sometimes considerably less than that. And now you see it trading, you know, one day it's at $40,000 US, next day it's at $60,000 US,

and then it drops back down to 40 or 45, and it's sort of bouncing around, and you're going, whoa, that's high stakes poker, man. Very high stakes. So what I wanted to do today was because we keep hearing about it and some of us may get tempted, maybe we should find out,

maybe we should do a kind of snapshot into Bitcoin. This is not the in-depth study. But it is a sense of where somebody who really understands that world, the financial world, what, in this case, he thinks. And the he is Tony Comper, Anthony Comper, former president, CEO of what was then the Bank of Montreal, it's now BMO. And he was in that top position from the late 90s to the late 2000s, the hundreds.

Like, I think it was 2007 or so when he left, stepped down from that position. So he's in a kind of a, he's in retirement like I'm in retirement. He's doing all kinds of things, including writing a book. Personal account. It's been on the book charts for the last few months. And it isolates 25 different areas where he had to show leadership. And leadership is such a great question.

And a great area to study. What makes great leaders? Well, Tony Comfort talks in his book about 25 particular areas where his leadership was put on the line over certain issues so i thought okay this is the guy i want to talk to and uh so i sent him an email and he responded right away. Sure, he'd love to. So let's talk Bitcoin with Tony Comper. Well, Tony, as you know, the biggest danger in discussing cryptocurrencies or Bitcoin is you can lose people in the weeds in an awful hurry.

So let's try not to do that if that's even possible but why don't we start with a sense of where you come at on this are you a sort of i i are you kind of gun shy about cryptocurrency or are you a proponent of cryptocurrency uh well you've just described peter the uh the bimodal distribution if you will. On the one end of that scale, there's people who swear by it and love it and they're invested up to their eyeballs and things of that nature. At the other end, there's all those who can't stand it and hate it and think it's the worst thing in the history of the world. I think the sound approach is to take a median path down the middle of this. It's an asset class.

Right off the bat, bat though when you say that I mean the term asset generally speaks to something of value and here there's no real hard value behind it the value accrues only to will somebody be willing to pay you for what you want to sell your Bitcoin things for and if

they're not there if nobody's there then you got a problem so it's been around a long time now people think it's kind of like when you look at the press today they all think it's oh just the hot new thing but it's been around since about 2009 so it's been around for about 12 years and i was getting getting ready for a talk i was looking at kind of so what's the rate of progress of some of these things because amazon has been around longer it's been around 26 years but at 12 years my impression is I don't really know the hard numbers but I would think it would be well well more well established and

broader in terms of utilization than you would expect for that kind of a new venture which has been around for 12 years and so I think that speaks to the fact that it's complicated and it's trying to figure out exactly what you have and how to use it and things of that nature is more complicated than your average investor would want to do. And I think a lot of the investors are kind of, let me characterize them. I don't want to be demeaning, but let me characterize them as experimental investors.

They're doing it because it's kind of the hot new thing and has lots of attractiveness and things of that nature. But it's, it's, it's kind of the hot new thing and has lots of attractiveness and things of that nature. But it's kind of the thing that it always was sold on. There's no regulation. There's nothing behind it. We're all on our own. We don't need regulators, things of that nature. And so that kind of freedom concept was the big selling pitch. But that's also a bit of a negative because particularly canadians are very cherry of kind of wanting to put real assets into something that they don't really know about and

there's nothing behind it and and it's had it's a huge volatility up and down over the years over those 12 years i mean it was a big time and i think it was like 2018 or so it got pretty high and then 2017 before that it kind of plunged and so there's a lot of skepticism and justifiable skepticism about so what's behind it and if all of a sudden my money goes away or i can't trade it or there's a big dip is there somebody like who do i go and call like what's the telephone number for the service but there's well there ain't one you know good luck on that now that's this that's the sales pitch but but it's also the downside. So it's fraught with a lot of that. But the interesting thing is the underlying software behind it is what people should be concentrating

on because the blockchain software is actually very sophisticated. I think when they get the bugs out and they get it to perform decently, I think it'll have a wide utility. And several of the larger banks have already adopted that on an experimental basis. And they're playing with it. But that's a very interesting concept. When Bitcoin started, it was based on that blockchain technology under the software underlying it, which is a good thing. But the Bitcoin itself has got all the problems of something that has less certainty than if you got cash in the bank and you got the central deposit corporation and somebody to go to if your money goes missing but who do you

call if you can't find your transaction or it's missing or something else of that nature so that's kind of a little bit of a not an entirely negative picture but not entirely positive one either like i would never suggest so i always when i get a lot of questions from friends who say well what do you think about bitcoin tony should i I say, well, if you have some of your, I said, considered a highly speculative asset, that's going to have ups and downs. And if you've got a certain amount of your investment money or your savings account that just segregate into, yeah, this is my play money, then I would use that and experiment with it if you wish and get the feel of it. But don't put any of your real savings that you experiment with it if you wish and get the feel of it but don't

put any of your real savings that you need into it would be my recommendation to people that ask me now you know when you um look back at the beginning of bitcoin 2009 now that comes at the tail end of or not quite the tail end of the financial crisis. And part of it was born out of the reason, because of the financial crisis, people were looking for other ways to invest and to bank their money, so to speak. So the fact that it's still around all these years later, I mean, it's only 12 years, but it's 12 years, must signal at least something that they were doing right. Oh, yeah. Well, there's nothing wrong with the concept, I think. But the only thing I would find fault with is that I think it has to find a way to get

itself into a home where people can have more confidence that it's going to be there for them in times of trouble or if something goes wrong with it or they get screwed up and like, who do you pick up the phone and talk to? I mean, if you, if you got, if you have a problem with your Visa account or your MasterCard account, well, you go running to your bank or you call them up on their line and you talk to a service rep.

Sometimes you have to be on hold for a long time, but nevertheless, you do that. Well, there isn't that equivalent. And so it's kind of, I think stuck in the kind of experimental mode. And then you get a big phenomenon like Elon Musk buying $1.2 billion worth of his Tesla assets into it. So big slur to the press and things of that nature. But it's still, I would consider it even after 12 years, experimental. And so even though it's

been around for 12 years, it hasn't been a huge uptake. And it's a bad comparison to Amazon. But after 12 years, Amazon was like gangbusters kind of a thing. And the financial collapse, Peter, was kind of limited to a very narrow segment of the financial thing that had

a knockover effect. But the good news is look at who walked through it and survived and did well by everybody and kept everybody whole it was the canadian banks and the american banks so the banking system was the thing that kept us out of a really really tough situation for a long period of time um but are we past the point where you know the the common criticism of cryptocurrency bitcoin especially in those early days was days was it's a con game. It's going to go to zero.

It's part of the criminal world. Are we past that? I don't know. The honest answer is you don't really know because it's very hard to predict because there's nothing backing it up and so and that's always the knock on it well i don't subscribe to the knock on it necessarily i mean you know i mean there's no system in the world that's absent people who try to use it for their own intentions malicious or otherwise so like it would be silly of me to say oh yeah it's bad and everything else is lily white. Well, that's not the case. And because somebody will always take advantage of everything. So I'm not there, but, but I saying in general,

people want when they're dealing with your money, they want confidence. Apart from the young guys that the swashbucklers are kind of out there and preparing to go gunslinging. And as I said to people, if you've got some money that you segregate into like something you want to experiment with, get used to it and things of that nature, do that. But don't plunk your hard-earned savings that you're going to need someplace else because you might have volatility. And it has demonstrated volatility. Now, it's progressing

like everything else. And I think it will probably stabilize and become an asset class unto itself. But I don't think it's going to be very, very widely adopted. I don't think it's going to be very, very widely adopted. I don't think it's going to replace existing currencies, the dollar that we know of and everything else of that nature, until it gets into some form of a regulated environment to give people security. One of the ways that you exhibited your leadership at BMO and got a lot of credit for was the way you handled

the dot-com crisis. Now, there are some who compare this to the dot-com era. Is that a fair comparison? There's a lot of similarities. What are the similarities there? Well, the similarities are, as I said, I refer to it as a special asset class. I'm talking about cryptocurrency. I'm talking about Bitcoin. Special asset class. But when you say asset, you tend to think of something of value. And Bitcoin, its only value is intangible. That's the similarity between the dot-com bubble. Because the dot-com bubble was companies, as the internet started to grow, and they had a lot of companies based on the internet, with a lot of promise

but not much substance behind it there was no value behind the stocks or the companies or things of that nature so when the investment bankers would roll in my office and say oh we got this hot new thing here and everything else and um and and the concept that they would use to justify the valuations was something called anticipated revenues. Well, the last time I tried to take anticipated revenues in and use it as a deposit on a mortgage for a house, you get a lot of smiles on your face, maybe, or a punch in the mouth, depending on who you think. So I would say I was gentle. I wasn't exactly very gentle with the investment

bankers who kind of proposed these things, but that was the, that was the thing. So there was no value. It was all about hope and it was all about hope and expectation. Well, hope and expectation is great, except if you want to buy a car. And then you need something a little more than hope and expectation, you know, like, well, I'm going to do great in the future. And yeah, fine. Well, in the meantime, like show me some cash. So it has those kinds of characteristics and that there's no, the only value is in the exchange between two parties,

two willing parties. And if there's only one willing party and there's no other party, then there's no value there. And so it's, it's unlike other things that do have value behind them, whether it be jewelry or real estate or bank assets that are backed by deposit insurance or something else of that nature. That's the similarity. And all those concepts were wonderful, by the way. And some of them have remained and some of them have developed customer bases and things of that nature. But betting just on the hope of it's going to be great.

Some of them were great. most of them weren't and most of them as i say there were great ideas based on hope and expectation but not much else so at the end of the day tony how many bitcoin have you got been tempted no peter at my stage of life the last thing i've and i i was saying now this is a bit of a laugh so don't take this as a comment from a banker but i said to a friend of mine it was he was kind of getting into bitcoin and i said look if you got if you have really money that you want to get rid of really quickly i had it to me, I can do a pretty good job. I shouldn't have been demeaning. The concept is great.

And as I said, the underlying software, the blockchain software is a terrific idea, which will become a permanent part of the financial trading system if I can characterize it that way. And initially, it took a lot of hits in terms of concept. Of course it did, yeah. And it still hasn't stabilized. By the way, when you get into the mining of Bitcoin. Of course it did. So, and it still hasn't stabilized by the way, when you get into the mining of Bitcoin, won't get into the weeds, promise it,

but it consumes huge amounts of computer resources and electricity. You wouldn't believe the size of the data rooms that they have to kind of process these transactions. So a lot of stabilization and streamlining has to go into even that. So cryptocurrency and Bitcoin are the same as anything else for the consumer in the sense that the main word should be buyer beware? Buyer beware. Caveat emptor. Just be cautious. That's it.

And like you would with any other very risky asset. Tony, it's been good to talk to you. Really appreciate your time. Enjoyed it. And like you would with any other very risky asset. Tony, it's been good to talk to you. Really appreciate your time. Enjoyed it. Thank you very much, Peter. Tony Compert, the author, personal account, the book's out there now. Former president, CEO, chief operating officer of the Bank of Montreal, as it used to be known in the 90s. And now, of course, it's BMO. Now, you might have heard Tony mention during that, he talked about Elon Musk

and the fact that Musk, Tesla guy, put more than a billion dollars into Bitcoin or was going to a week ago. And so the financial journalist went to Bill Gates to ask, well, what does this say? What do you think this means? If Musk is willing to risk all of that money of his. And I love Gates' answer.

Gates is an interesting guy. guy someday i'll talk about him because i've interviewed him a few times both in seattle and in true i guess it was ottawa but anyway here's what gates answered on elon musk elon has tons of money and he's very sophisticated so i don't worry that his bitcoin will sort of randomly go up or down, Gates told Bloomberg in an interview. I do think people get bought into these manias when they have too much money to spare. My general thought would be that if you have less money than Elon,

you should probably watch out. Advice from Bill Gates. I guess it's more on Elon Musk than it is on Bitcoin, but nevertheless, it is a little on both. Still to come, over 39 billion meals have been missed since schools shut down. This is an angle that we haven't talked about often on the pandemic story, and we're only going to talk about it briefly here. But I think it's one that we should all be very much aware of.

And it comes from UNICEF. Kids have been missing more than classroom instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. With schools closed, many are also missing out on their main source of nutrition, the school meal. A new report makes the case for prioritizing schools for reopening and restoring these critical services. It goes on to say some 370 million children worldwide have missed an average of 40% of their in-school meals since COVID-19 restrictions prompted the closures, according to COVID-19 Missing More Than a Classroom, a report from UNICEF's Office of Research. is jeopardizing the futures of millions of the world's poorest children, said one official. We must support governments to safely reopen schools and start feeding these children again.

Close to a quarter of the 1.6 billion students affected by school closures have missed out on school meals. Over 39 billion meals missed in total. Those are staggering numbers, right? And those are numbers that we should all be very much aware of and add to this whole discussion about schools. Here's how they close off this report. School meals are not only vital in ensuring children's nutrition, growth, and development. They also provide a strong incentive for children, especially girls and those from the poorest and most marginalized communities,

to return to school once restrictions are lifted. The longer children are out of the classroom, the greater the risk that they will drop out altogether. At least 24 million school children are already projected to drop out of school due to the pandemic. Reversing decades of global progress on school enrollment, keeping girls in school helps combat child marriage and other forms of exploitation. Saw those numbers, I couldn't believe it. I had to read it a couple of times. But it's just yet another fact added to the base of facts on this debate about school and schooling and in-school learning. And part of in-school learning includes meals for millions of kids in different parts of

the world. So I add that to your base of knowledge on this story. Looking ahead to tomorrow, Wednesday, of course, Smoke Mirrors and the Truth with Bruce Anderson joins us from Ottawa. We're also going to be joined by someone who has basically turned the electric vehicle story into a hobby and knows, has been writing to me for the last year

with different ideas and thoughts about this whole issue of moving from carbon-based vehicles to electric vehicles. And so he's going to be our guest tomorrow. As we talk on the part two of this two-part series, remember last week we talked about are we approaching the end of oil? And here it's, are we approaching a whole new world that we couldn't even have dreamt of? Now, I know there's a lot of electric vehicles out there already, but there are about to be many, many, many more.

And that's what we're going to talk about tomorrow. On smoke, mirrors, and the truth. Because there's a lot of smoke and mirrors out on that story. We're going to try and nail it down to the truth. Okay? Thursday is the normal potpourri day. Friday is the weekend special. Don't be shy.

Send in your thoughts, questions, comments on anything to themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. And also on Thursday, 5 o'clock Eastern, Good Talk with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce and myself. We debuted last week on SiriusXM. It is an exclusive to SiriusXM. It is going to be up as a podcast,

as part of their podcast offerings. You will have to subscribe, but they've got some great deals on right now. If you move in, first of all, you can listen to Good Talk for free right now by accessing it through their website, SiriusXM.ca. But I think one of the last offers I saw

is you can get the podcast grouping, streaming for a dollar a month. Okay, so this is an exclusive just for SiriusXM. So it will be as a podcast, but it'll be a part of the podcast offering a whole series of different podcasts that will be available through Sirius. The Bridge, of course, this program will be always available as it has been for the last more than a year. So you'll always

be able to access it, no problem. And listen to it on Sirius XM at 12 noon Eastern. Monday to Friday. Repeated most days at 5 o'clock. And good Talk will

be repeated on SiriusXM Sundays at noon. Got all that? You wrote it all down? Anyway, we're having fun. We're looking forward to this week's show on Good Talk as well. Okay, I'm Peter Mansbridge. This

has been the bridge for this Tuesday, the 2nd of March. I still can't believe we're saying that. We're into March. It is going to be spring. Another month, six weeks. We're going to feel like spring has sprung. Right?

Okay. That's the bridge for this day. Once again, I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours. Thank you.