You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Canada's Captured Government & the Fight for Alberta - Dave Bradley | Ep. 150

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

Dave Bradley is a Bitcoin OG and entrepreneur based in Calgary, Alberta. He co-founded Bull Bitcoin, and helped take Bitcoin Well public. He’s an outspoken advocate for Alberta independence, arguing that the breakup of the Canadian confederation and Bitcoin are two expressions of the same underlying shift toward sovereignty and jurisdictional competition. In this conversation, Dave lays out the case for Alberta seceding from Canada and Bitcoin's role in opting out of failing systems.→ Please like, comment, share & subscribe, to help me beat the suppressing algo's. Thank you!– SPONSORS –→ Download the free report on second citizenships & setting up a plan B in another country with Expat Money: https://expatmoney.com/efrat→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin with Ledn, get 0.25% off your first loan: https://ledn.io/Efrat    → Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it): https://affil.trezor.io/SHUn→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines: https://AbundantMines.com/Efrat - Claim your free month of hosting via this link– AFFILIATES –→ Join me in these upcoming events & use code EFRAT for discounted tickets: https://www.efrat.blog/p/upcoming-events→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox Spike protein, with the code YCXKQDK2 via this link: https://store.augmentednac.com/?via=efrat (Note, this is not medical advice, please consult your MD)→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - code EFRAT for 10% off: https://efenigson.gumroad.com/l/desmet_efrat– LINKS –Dave on X: https://x.com/BitcoinBrains Dave’s website: https://www.bitcoinbrains.com/ Efrat’s X: https://twitter.com/efenigsonEfrat’s Channels: https://linktr.ee/efenigsonWatch on all platforms: https://linktr.ee/yourethevoiceSupport Efrat’s work: ⁠https://bit.ly/zap_efrat– CHAPTERS – 00:00 - Coming Up…01:30 - Introduction: Dave Bradley05:31 - Alberta Independence from Canada09:27 - Ad Break: Expat Money & Ledn11:56 - The Path to Separation: Referendums & the Native Band Court Case14:30 - Foreign Interference: Incentives & Captured Government18:19 - Referendum Timeline: Three Votes This Fall22:46 - Negotiating an Exit: Peaceful Separation vs. Plan B26:10 - Political Ambitions? Shifting Canadian Consciousness28:29 - MAID: Canada's Euthanasia Crisis30:47 - The Space Program Scandal & Mark Carney Allegation35:54 - The Strongest & Best Looking Bitcoin Entrepreneur in Canada38:27 - In The Belly of the Beast: Playing the Regulatory Game39:05 - Ad Break: Trezor & Abundant Mines44:11 - AI, Data Curation & New Bitcoin Projects46:13 - The Sovereign Individual Thesis, Logic of Violence & Bitcoin53:59 - What Gives Dave Hope

I'm going to make an allegation that Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, is blatantly and specifically stealing funds from the Canadian taxpayers, and if that's not true, he should sue me. I don't know where that money's going, but I have a guess. We have elements of the Chinese intelligence and Pakistani intelligence agencies in our government as sitting MPs. It's a completely captured country that really is on its last days. Do you have a plan to go into politics?

We've been saddled under this anti-business, anti-human, anti-freedom liberal government that is one of the worst and most absurd communist regimes in the world. If I took some time to list all of the absurdities going on in Canada, it would be absolutely shocking. The Calgary, which is the spiritual freedom centre of Canada, and hopefully soon to be the centre of a free and independent Republic of Alberta. You reckon that that's going to happen? I think so, yeah. Are they not the same people or forces that want you to stay because of the wealth that they enjoy?

If those truckers had brought their guns, it would have been a very different story. They'll do everything that they can to try to remove our agency and not allow us to leave. But frankly, we're not asking. My position at this point is that it's our place and they can't f***ing have it. Hello, welcome to another episode of You're the Voice from Ireland. I'm here with Dave Bradley. Hey, Dave. Hello. How are you going?

Yeah, thanks for joining. How are you? I'm good. Enjoying the Irish Guinness. Now you're better, I guess, now that you have a Guinness in your hand. I mean, this is like half the reason I came, honestly. I came to Ireland like 20 years ago and haven't been back. and I've been thinking about the Guinness because it's worse everywhere else. Should I tell people it's only four o'clock?

What time did you start? Well, the bar here only opens at 1230. I was trying to get one for my noon panel, but they didn't have any. So here we are. So you compromise at four o'clock. Okay, I heard your panel. It was pretty good.

I mean, it sounds like a very boring topic, the regulation stuff, But I appreciate the fact that you push back on the same regulators that are kind of regulating your industry and your companies right now. So that was very refreshing. But let's start, for those who don't know you, with a bit of a background story just to get people a taste who you are. I am widely known as the strongest and best looking Bitcoin entrepreneur in Canada. We're going to get to the reason for that in a sec. Yeah, go on.

I have been in Bitcoin. I got into Bitcoin in 2010. and have been working full-time in the space since 2013 when I founded what I think was the world's first physical store selling Bitcoin. And then have kind of been through a lot of different phases in my career in Bitcoin. I co-founded Bull Bitcoin in 2018 and later founded a different company making software for Bitcoin ATMs that then kind of got me pulled into Bitcoin Well, which is another Canadian Bitcoin company that runs ATMs and an online service. and I helped take that public on the Canadian Stock Exchange in 2021. And then I left there

in the executive role, but I'm still on the board there. And since then have been mostly got my fingers into a whole bunch of stuff, I guess. But a lot of my focus now is going into my events and media stuff. So we have some podcasts we produce. We produce a conference called the Bitcoin Rodeo. And which podcasts? So I have a little mini one that I haven't done in a little while called the Bitcoin hour. That's just me ranting. We have one that we produce for women named Heather keys. That's fantastic called unhypnotized. That'll be launching the third season of that in the fall. And then we have one called driving Bitcoin that, uh, is essentially we're wiring up our friends, fancy cars and driving around like top gear and talking Bitcoin

and cars. So it has to be in Canada. It doesn't, but it has to be, you know, if we're going to travel, we need a good reason to travel. So we've got to bring all the cameras and everything. So we're doing the first few we've only shot the pilot on that so far but we'll we'll be pursuing that a little bit more and we'll see where we end up filming we got to see who wants to lend us nice cars and who wants to be on the show beautiful yeah i just came back from porto and the owner of the i forget what it's called the french fries factory in porto which is a nice joint for for food he's a bit corner and he's got a nice orange vintage car outside the joint which is really cool and with like bitcoin logos on it and it's it's orange of course i think you should go to

porto and do it there like with him if he and he'll let you like he's super he's super porto is just so beautiful and all those bridges and beautiful yeah that would be the river it's just really beautiful yeah we've got very beautiful nature in canada we don't have nearly as nice of buildings to drive around so it would be great to do some outside of north america for sure but we'll see where it goes so i'm working on all that stuff and then we're i've got a big collaboration coming up that we're working on i don't know how many details i should give you yet with uh luke and canute where we're going to be doing some really cool stuff down the path of the media company essentially so nice and what before 2010 i was kind of like a serial entrepreneur

i was born in canada i was born in canada yeah i was born in the small town of veggerville home to the world's largest egg, and moved at about five years old to Calgary, which is the spiritual freedom center of Canada, and hopefully soon to be the center of a free and independent Republic of Alberta. You reckon that that's going to happen? I think so, yeah. I think, interestingly, the sovereign individual that most of us have read, you know, it predicts the fall of the large scale nation state. And one of the details that it throws in there is that Canada may be the first one to fall. And it actually specifically mentions Alberta, which was a crazy prediction for 1996. Because we had Quebec separatists, we had no Alberta separatists in

1996. But they predicted that the cultural and economic disparity in our country will lead to the breakup of Canada. And really, like there's no country in the world that has fewer people per space and so the the vast geographic disparity between between us and the people who spend our money is it really creates this divide that i think is really going to cause the inevitable breakup of canada beginning with alberta leaving and that i think in turn will leave to quebec leaving and probably the maritimes leaving because right now those countries or sorry those provinces are essentially being paid to stay in confederation with money that the federal government confiscates from alberta and so what do you mean paid to stay so we have this system in alberta called uh

transfer payments or equalization wherein you know of all the taxes collected the federal government collects these taxes on behalf of the provinces and then redistributes them to the provinces and so we have they call them have provinces and have not provinces is a state yeah okay yeah it's a state basically okay and the have provinces which is always alberta sometimes there's like one more have province have to pay extra into the confederation and that money goes to the have not provinces so we send somewhere in the air it's like the imf system just on a on a local scale yeah it's just a uh it's just a redistribution of resources it's it's a form of communism yeah communism and uh we are on the the raw end of that and we send somewhere in the area

of 20 to 30 billion dollars a year to eastern canada and we meanwhile are not properly represented in the government of canada we have fewer seats per alberton than any other province and really our interests are not represented we've been saddled under this anti-business anti-human anti-freedom liberal government that is one of the worst and most absurd communist regimes in the world, like the realistic freedom that you have in Canada is actually lower than many places in the world that people will be shocked to learn, uh, are more free than Canada. And, uh, you know, our, our interests are second class. We've, we, we, we're, we're a very wealthy province because of the fact that we have so much oil, you know, it's the single most useful thing in the world.

And we have more of it than anyone. And we're not allowed to build it. We're not allowed to develop it we are handicapped by a mix of climate cultists and foreign special interests that keep our oil industry from really developing you know i was on a panel the other day i didn't know who it was but it was a former i think deputy finance minister of norway who was on there and one of the first things i said on the panel was that all politicians are criminals and he didn't like that but um he was talking about the tremendous wealth of norway and they have something like a three trillion sovereign wealth fund and alberta our province or state has more oil than norway and we can get it out faster and cheaper and so we do not have a 3.5 trillion dollar sovereign wealth

fund because the money has been stifled at the source through anti-business practices and stolen from us once we've earned it tired of feeling like your freedom and future are fading away do you live in a country with growing inflation crazy housing prices weird culture and a chaotic economy? You're not alone. And my friend Mikael Thorpe and his team at Expat Money can help. Mikael is the world's leading expat consultant on a mission to free you from broken systems. He's been an expat for 25 years, lived in nine different countries and has helped hundreds of people with second residencies and passports, offshore banking, international investing and many other essential tools. If you're serious about protecting your wealth and your family,

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Ledin also publishes proof-of-reserves reports every six months with full transparency. So if your capital is in Bitcoin, but your expenses are not, you still have options. Ledin lets you unlock liquidity without selling your Bitcoin. Learn more at ledin.io slash efrat and get a quarter percent off your first loan. That's ledin.io slash efrat. Okay, so the arguments you make to me are convincing. the question I have is how do you make it happen that you separate who needs to approve it who are you asking for permission and are they not the same people or forces that want you to stay because

of the wealth that they enjoy yeah absolutely so it's a complicated question I have had a lot of people from eastern Canada tell me that we're not allowed to separate yeah that's exactly where I'm getting to it's like so they they will who are we dealing with here so they will play every dirty trick in the book to keep us from a due process to democratically decide on separation but the one thing that we have in Canada is that we have a history of a democratic process to decide on separation because there have been two referendums in Quebec on separation both of which narrowly missed winning and a big part of the reason that Quebec voted to stay is because they're paid to stay and you know their incentives just line up like why would they leave the country why would

you leave all of this free money whereas our incentives line up in the opposite direction and really there's kind of two questions circling back to your question there's like how does it get decided and how do we how does the campaign go how do we get people to to vote to leave and so the first step is getting them to vote to leave and it's pulling at about internally inside the state yeah okay so it's pulling an internal referendum yeah it's pulling at about 40 percent right now what ended up happening is we had a law in the books that required us to get 176 000 signatures to force a referendum and the group running this got somewhere in the area of 300 000 signatures so well above the necessary requirements and very

quickly a first nations native band from northern alberta of 30 people who happens to have a treasury of something to the effect of 300 million dollars file the court case in nova scotia which is like for geographically that'd be like you know we're in ireland it'd be like filing a court case in turkey and you know it's this judge across the world from us ruled that these 30 people have the right to veto our 300 000 people the the natives the the aboriginals of of canada who they have filed against yeah and separating or against even letting you against letting us vote so and i'm assuming they are also incentivized yeah i mean i don't know where they got 350 million dollars but i do know can you can you track the origin yeah and so there there are like direct

funding links to american special interest groups and one one thing that i mentioned earlier is that we have these foreign special interest groups meddling in our economy. And part of the reason for that is the transportation of oil, right? We can produce a lot of oil, but we're not the market for it. We need to get it to Oklahoma or the coast. And so all the big refineries in Oklahoma, we could also get it to the coasts and sell it to Europe or Asia. In order to do that, we can do one of two things. We can either build a pipeline, put it in the pipeline, or we can put in trucks and trains. And the pipeline is vastly cheaper, vastly safer, and much more efficient but uh just so happens that the majority owner of the trains who send

the oil down to oklahoma is berkshire hathaway and they then fund these special interest groups to essentially pay the first nations to use their outsized leverage as the sort of like in favor wrong to people of the day to stifle this kind of you know this kind of economic activity and so we end up having to put an awful lot of oil on trains and paying warren buffett to do that rather than just shipping it in a safer more efficient way because of the forces of uh you know outside money coming in and that's kind of the story of canada right now and anywhere you look there's a foreign interference scandal of some kind where somebody's being paid to do something. We have, we have elements of the Chinese intelligence and Pakistani intelligence

agencies in our government as sitting MPs. Like it's, it's a completely captured country that really is on its last days. And there are a lot of people still living in the delusion because, you know, we were like, we were like most countries raised to be very patriotic. We were raised to believe that we were a lot like Americans, but somehow better because we are nicer and more polite but the reality is has borne out that we are we are not a business friendly country we are not a a place where the rule of law abides and as a result Canada has been been falling you know and we're we're getting to the point where circling back to the question of will people actually vote for it we're getting to the point where there's actually so much pain

affecting so many people because of these egregiously terrible top-down decisions made by the politburo central planners and those foreign interests that it is hurting so many people and that's the kind of thing that wakes people up is when you have to go to the food bank because there's no money because there's no jobs because the government shut down the oil projects that starts to have a real impact and i think we're just getting to that point where you know the government of canada has done enough things that are sort of like cartoonishly evil super villain nonsense every time they do something and they do it every week like i have i do a podcast a weekly podcast on canadian politics and every single week there is a

cartoonishly evil feat of negligence evil grift theft them stepping on the necks of regular people and and just generally being evil psychopaths every time they do it they wake a few more people up and that's what we have going for us that was the silver lining of covid is it woke up probably a quarter of the population and you know the the government of canada is really just completely absurd to the point where they are incapable of staying away from looking like mr burns essentially yeah absolutely okay what is the realistic timeline or you know where is it going are we going in that direction of separating alberta so the interesting thing what they ended up doing which is kind of dumb but it's moving in the right direction is they called a referendum

on three things in the fall now in october they're voting on whether alberta should control its own immigration which is not a not a uh controversial thing because quebec already does and they basically say that they will only allow the culturally aligned quebec speakers into the french speakers into the province and we should have the only the same right so that's not a controversial thing that will win massively i think we're going to get 80 90 of the vote on that b is we'll be voting on whether we should renegotiate these transfer payments which is kind of like a political fluff move because we had one of these in the past and we already voted overwhelmingly to renegotiate the transfer payments and the federal government said no

so um there's no attempt to really bring us back into the fold of confederation there's there there are fake attempts they've announced a pipeline that they will never build in exchange for a carbon tax so they're they're not they're not fooling anybody honestly and uh anyway the third thing is we're voting on we're not having a referendum on independence we're voting on whether we should have a referendum on independence so it's a referendum on the referendum and the The silver lining to that is that I think more people will vote for the referendum on a referendum because we'll vote yes, because there are a lot of people who are still emotionally attached to the concept of Canada. Like we used to have a really good hockey team. Like there's.

I don't get the need or the point in doing a referendum on a referendum. Like, isn't this the point that you have a system of referendums means that you can do it on anything? why why do you say um isn't it a recursive kind of question it was a it is absolutely it's it's politics 101 it's just like stupid shit for no reason why are people even voting for that i mean so it's going to get a much lower turnout than if it was a real referendum but the hope like the optimistic view that i've seen from some of the people running the campaign is that this will provide a bridge to the real referendum well while giving it time to move those numbers from where it was polling at 40 to 60 or wherever we need to be i think personally the polls lie so you know i'm

i'm going to be in some kind of an echo chamber but i live in downtown calgary which is like the oil capital of canada and i like the people that i talked to were not at 40 were at 90 but that is like I say a bit of an echo chamber but I think I feel the energy changing you know and there's I've talked to enough people especially young people who are really seeing the like that the system is not set up for them to succeed right if you're coming out of university or coming into the workforce or 22 like you're screwed like there's no jobs there's nothing there's no entry-level jobs that you can get there's no path for growth you can't even get a bad job you can't even go get a like a fast food job because all those jobs are taken by temporary foreign workers

subs who are subsidized by the government and uh this generation of people have been left behind and there's you know there's a lot of people in the sort of like 25 to 40 ish age group that have been suckered by the the compassionate face of collectivism and are misguided in their belief that the best way to help everyone is for the state to confiscate resources and redistribute them but these younger people they're not fooled by this stuff at all because the system's just not working for them and that's the fastest way to get to somebody's brain is just through their their wallet and i think is is just going to keep moving in that direction and so i do think like it is absurd to have a referendum on a referendum but at least we'll get another

referendum so there's a path through these two stupid referendums just because we vote to leave also doesn't mean that they will stop with their attempts to thwart us they'll sue us they'll do everything that they can to try to remove our agency and not allow us to leave but frankly we're not asking and that's the point yeah it's like and the you know the the state is held together by violence obviously right it is an organization predicated on the the concentrated use of violence monopoly and power i'm not really worried about the violence from the government of canada because like i said there's such an absurd organization that they're not really capable of doing much of anything we had a really great example a few years ago in the trucker protest

of the fact that, you know, we are, I would say, the men of reason who value the rule of law very significantly and value the fact that we live in a high trust society. And there was a line somewhere in the sand that was crossed. And these people who control the world have been throughout history, mostly very good, barring sort of like the French Revolution and the defenestration of Prague. They have been very good at avoiding crossing that line, right? There's a line where it was able to unite enough people who showed up in a very polite way to say, we're not doing this anymore. And that line and the way that those people showed up kind of points to the existence

of the other line, where if those truckers had brought their guns, it would have been a very different story. And, you know, the government of Canada would have changed. And so I'm not particularly worried about the government of Canada perpetrating violence on us to keep us in the country. I think we'll be able to negotiate our way out of the country ultimately. And the fact that we have all the money in the country gives us a pretty good negotiating foot to stand on. Because option A, what I would prefer is to negotiate our way out of Canada in a peaceful and civil way and remain friends and trading partners with Canada. And

you know the the the fact is right now we're paying for most of it and so if we cut off all of our payments right now it would be a catastrophic financial hole that the east could not really climb out of right they'd they'd have to massively cut their spending we're paying something like 40 of the budget of quebec and that's just not sustainable so if we cut that off on day one they're screwed and so the deal that i i hope and think um rational people will arise on will arrive to is that you know we'll leave the confederation we'll cut down those payments right away but we'll give them something like five or six years to wean them off of the the free money and in exchange we need pipelines in both directions and that's the that's the rational

decision that would be best for everyone that is what the leaders of the east would decide to take that deal if they were rationally acting in the interests of the remaining people of canada yeah so um option b which assumes that uh the liberal leadership under mark carney have no interest in protecting the interests of canadians and are instead on a path of looting where they're trying to get as much out of canada and funneled into their ukrainian sub-companies and offshore bank accounts and probably ethereum wallets you know if that's what they're actually doing then our option b is we negotiate with the united states instead and i think we could probably get a very good deal that includes pipelines south a protection treaty and a free trade treaty

without giving up any sovereignty that would be frankly catastrophic for the rest of canada but would leave us in a great spot so that's kind of where i see it playing out that's where i i think it's going to go and i don't know there's a lot of game theory in here but we'll see how it plays out do you have a plan to go into politics absolutely not no if i go into politics it's going to be with rope and but you're very passionate about this yeah how do you how are you going to transmute your energy into this battle i'm probably going to go to a bunch of bitcoin conferences and then rant to strangers about it mostly do you think that that's effective i like it i know you do i know you do so i know you find great pleasure i'm a passionate evangelist locally

and it is really refreshing now because I've been talking about this really pretty aggressively since 2019 when Justin Trudeau was re-elected when I started talking about that even to people that are pretty ideologically aligned in like oil people in downtown Calgary the the answer that I would get when I talked about Alberta independence was something to the effect of that'll be nice but that'll that would be nice but it'll never happen and now I think pretty much everybody sees it as a possibility as a real possibility and more and more people are starting to think we are going to win and that's really just the the shifting of the the consciousness yeah among among people and way more people are open to it right like I said before COVID woke up a lot of people to the fact

that this group of people in the federal government are not our friends they're not our allies and they do not want the best for us. I wish more people would have understood that about their governments because it's relevant for most countries. I had on the show a couple months ago Carla Treadway. You know her? And we had a great conversation, and she was very much affirming some of the stuff you're saying now

about the younger generation and how they are seeing that they really have no hope in Canada. and we were also bringing up made the it's crazy what the fuck yeah it's it's one of the many like if if i took some time to list all of the absurdities going on in canada it would be absolutely shocking because there's so many little things that all add up like that's what i mean when i say every week there's something completely evil and the government of canada yeah hold on for people don't know made as a medical assistance in dying it's like the euthanasia right and it's very popular in canada and it's just growing every year it is offered in a racist way

because most of the people offered made are white it is offered in a it's it's an anti-human policy it's it's offered as even for people who are disabled or just mentally ill and yeah so they're offering they're offering assisted suicide services for mental illness they're offering assisted suicide services for drug addiction for non-terminal lifelong diseases they're offering assisted suicide services and they're actually offering assisted suicide services now to people with completely treatable conditions who are who are expected not to be treatable in time because the health care system is so poorly administered that our wait times in our vaunted free health care system

often stretch to years for immediately necessary treatments. Every time I hear that, I'm like, this is lowest peak fiat. The lowest point for fiat culture. And meanwhile, we've got this bloated health care system that has something like 15 times as many administrators as it did 20 years ago without adding any significant frontline staff we haven't really built any hospitals we haven't really hired more doctors we're kind of running on on fumes in our health care system partly because of the disastrous consequences of central planning and the fact that the government basically can't do

anything properly ever but also because the scope of the looting that has been going on from our political class has gotten so out of hand that there's just frankly not enough money to go into the health care system because they need to steal it and something that i like to do on podcasts is to invite i'm going to make an allegation that mark carney the prime minister of canada is blatantly and specifically stealing funds from the canadian taxpayers and if that's not true he should sue me and i have yet to be sued yeah so we had a really fun one a couple weeks ago where Canada decided we needed our own space program because it's humiliating to have to ask Elon Musk to launch satellites the problem is we have no space program of any kind we have no rockets we

have no we have an astronaut but only one we have functionally no space program program at all so they decided to start this space program where does this one astronaut train He goes to NASA. In the United States, yeah, obviously. What does he do with himself? Just like one astronaut. Just bouncing around. Green room.

Yeah, exactly. He's on the Hollywood set. And so their first move was, even though we have no technology to mount a space program, we have no rockets, we have no rocket scientists, we have not even the beginning of anything related to a space program, they decided to immediately lease a launch pad. and the launch pad, I believe it was $600 million.

I can't remember the exact number. Hundreds of millions of dollars, this launch pad. The launch pad is a concrete pad in a field in Nova Scotia, and this concrete pad in Nova Scotia is leased to the federal government for hundreds of millions of dollars from a Ukrainian company who themselves lease it from the owners of the concrete pad in the field in Nova Scotia, the province of Nova Scotia. for $12,000 and so there's a there's a little bit of gap in there and I don't know where that

money's going but I have a guess yeah it's being stolen it's like they're and they're these are just like they've gotten so bold because there's been no consequences to the the rest of their actions and so they're now in this period where I don't even know if the Liberal Government of Canada is ever planning for another election. Smart party forever. Yeah. It doesn't seem like they would act this way if they did, but they're either arrogantly out of touch with how insane their larceny is,

or they're, you know, they're just going to crack down hard enough in the next few years where they actually have power that by removing free speech and, you know, removing any fundraising mechanism for their opponents, removing the ability for independent media to operate all of these things. Maybe they're just planning to stay in power that way,

but it wouldn't really surprise me at all to learn that they would use some kind of draconian measures like an emergency. You know, it'll be an emergency of some kind. Yeah. You know, emergencies are a great reason to suspend an election. For sure. We've got that in multiple countries in the world right now where they're at war and there's no election that should have been already happened, right?

And so I could see them using that playbook here. Absolutely. and I don't know how it'll go but it's not going to be popular in Alberta and it'll be yet another of those draconian cartoon supervillain moves that just converts a few more people so that's where my long-term optimism rests is that the government of Canada will continue to be insane and evil and they will continue to wake more people up and eventually enough people will have had enough and we're out and when we're when we're out we will be one of the richest countries in the world And my hope is that we will see kind of a reverse brain drain where all of the immigrants that are currently living in Alberta that came for the free money provided by the government of Canada will leave and all of the socialists who are angry about us no longer being Canadian will leave and all of the most useful, interesting and creative people from all over Canada will come to Alberta.

And I think we have this unique opportunity because, you know, there's these places around the world that are kind of like little bastions of freedom that are starting to pop up in El Salvador and Costa Rica and Paraguay and whatnot. And we could be the first really free place that is also a first world country. And that's, you know, I don't have any interest in living in the jungle. right that's what i wanted to ask you so we know a lot of bitcoiners that and especially from canada that have left in recent years because they know they see and they have seen it coming and i wouldn't blame them i think they're you know it's very fair to try and take care of themselves and their families going elsewhere and building do you have you ever had those thoughts or are you the kind of guy that's like i'm staying in fighting yeah i have pretty strong roots

in the province all of my friends and family are in the province um it's the only place i've ever lived and my position at this point is that it's our place and they can't fucking have it and like there's not like there's nothing that would make me leave but i'm not planning to leave at this point and i do see the path through the darkness i love it fair enough and speaking of calling the government to sue you for something you said let's segue to the other thing that you are calling the government to sue you on can you tell the little story about why you are the strongest and what is it the strongest and most the strongest and best looking bitcoin entrepreneur in canada yes please so yeah we when i first opened my my first bitcoin business was a bitcoin

store called Bitcoin Brains, which is now my handle. In 2013, we had a physical shop selling Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining equipment. There weren't even Bitcoin t-shirts back then, which is crazy. So that's pretty much- Now there are more Bitcoin t-shirts than people. Yeah. So that's all we sold back then. And we called ourselves the fastest and safest way to buy Bitcoin in Canada. And then when we went to found Bull Bitcoin, which we did by merging that company in with francis francis's company out of quebec go watch my episode with francis as well it was awesome yeah i imagine um so we were looking up the slogan and saw that like five or six different companies had copied my slogan and were calling themselves the fastest

and safest place to buy bitcoin in canada and we're like well that's kind of cheesy but whatever let's just move on let's pick a new slogan we picked canada's most trusted bitcoin company which a year after that there were at least two companies copying it and i was like well this is kind of ridiculous and i just made kind of a kind of a joke that we should say that we're the strongest and best looking bitcoin company in canada and we didn't do it but then a couple years later there was all these scandals coming down because we had a bunch of shady bitcoin exchanges that were inflating their trading numbers and doing all kinds of immoral stuff and uh one of them had been saying we're the biggest bitcoin exchange in canada

when they in fact weren't i don't know if that matters but the government thought that it did and they issued a communication that from the ontario securities commission if you're an executive at a bitcoin exchange or a bitcoin exchange you're not allowed to make superlative marketing claims and this unless they are provably true and i was like let's go so i've since been claiming the superlative of the strongest and best looking bitcoin entrepreneur in canada and uh they have yet to sue me which i take as a tacit endorsement of my claims i think that's fair enough so it's official because the government says so there you go yeah i'm not i'm sometimes a state we have an expert signing off on it fantastic i love it okay during the panel

you just had which was about regulating bitcoin companies you were talking about how you see your mission or your role right now as kind of going into the belly of the beast can you expand on that concept why yeah i mean it's it's a very arduous process to legally sell and by the way i challenged at the time francis with being such a based guy and you know we're cypherpunks and we're completely like you know fuck the system and all that and yet you have a regulated company that you have to kyc your customers and you're playing their game so how does that conflict work he had a really good answer but yeah i'd love to hear yours you're the voice is brought to you by Trezor, the original Bitcoin hardware wallet company pioneering the development of self-custody

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see how it works, and mine some of your first Bitcoin for free with a special offer for my audience. Learn more on AbundantMinds.com. I see it as empowering people in a way that is consistent with the message and the motive of Bitcoin, the end result is going to be that more people get Bitcoin, more people have access to Bitcoin, and that's a positive. But beyond that, there is a very significant case for the rigorous application of the law in so much as the government will always try to overreach the law, right? So they've passed certain laws that require certain kinds of data collection and reporting and whatnot. And you kind of have to follow those. Like if somebody is going to buy a large amount of Bitcoin for cash, you have to

make a report there's all these conditions under which you do have to deal with the government but the government also likes to vastly expand their powers without asking or without mandate and so you get things like the canada revenue agency who are our tax agency just asking for customer lists and if you have a bunch of statists running your bitcoin companies they will just give over those customer lists and so companies like bull bitcoin even though they follow the regulations they ask for the list without being like compelled to do it absolutely and so just because they can yeah there is a process by which if a company or if the canada revenue agency needs to get data from one of these companies they can get a court order to do that there's a due process to do that

obviously the the due process and the court system is not the most free and rational system anyway but at least it's something you know what i mean whereas just having a bureaucrat ask is not itself a mandate and that distinction is really important and so a company like bull bitcoin that will hold the regulators to their own regulations let alone hold them to account where their regulations run in conflict with other federal regulations so one of the major rubs there one of the big issues is that that request that i described which is a real thing that has happened to many bitcoin exchanges in canada and most of them have just passed over the info when that happens that's a violation of privacy laws so they're they're actually breaking the law in doing that and it

requires the rigor to follow the regulations and the conviction to hold them to the same regulations and in that sense you know that's what i mean by saying going into the belly of the beast is like i'm going to go into these assholes world and play the fiat game so that we can provide these bitcoin services to people and that's kind of the the view that i have i'm obviously like pretty sick of dealing with all these layers of regulation we're you know we've got three regulators at least that we have to deal with and they're they conflict and nothing is rational and nothing works the way that it's supposed to and it's just all a like a standard government program that you know generally has the exact opposite impact of the intended uh outcome but you know we we

have the ability to get through it and so we can sell bitcoin to canadians in a way that is safer for them than buying it from a custodial exchange or another exchange that is going to give their data to the government with no process so what do you focus most of your time and energy today is it the conferences or um i'm like super down the rabbit hole on the ai stuff right now building a lot of things some bitcoin related some not on the ai i've streamlined a lot of my actual work to such a point where i can spend a lot of hours on the ai now and uh you know talking to the people just about everybody here at this conference is obsessed with it too and it's really cool to see what people are coming up with and the world is going to be completely different in

like six months in terms of just the products that we have access to so i'm working on some bitcoin stuff can you share some things or even some things that you are seeing that are very cool or exciting so we're working on a project with luke and canoe among other things we'll be ingesting a whole bunch of data and this is what i've concluded is you know everybody kind of went down the rabbit hole on ai at the same point and started trying to replace their brains and you very quickly find that if you're trying to replace your brain you get bad results right you're you get hallucinations just all kinds of nonsense and so it's not good at replacing humans at all it's not good at the creative element it's not good at at real discernment

at a high level but what it's very good at is organizing and curating and so we've got a project especially amongst large sets of data yeah exactly it makes the curation of of data within data sets that would have like six months ago would have been impossible to curate can now be curated very easily and so we're working on a project that will be curating a large amount of bitcoin data and sort of representing it in a curated way and uh you know we'll we'll have to talk to you about that because the the data some of the data that we're looking to ingest is podcasts so there's a lot of data out there and you know the the rabbit hole of bitcoin is kind of unlimited and so we're we're hoping to be able to provide some kind of structure to people who want to

explore the rabbit hole and what does all of the information that we've all flooded our brains with look like with some structure. Beautiful. I love it. Very, very cool. All right. So when you were referring to the book and to the model of how we're going to see countries becoming borderless and more global and what are the things that that you are seeing that's that are happening today in the world that are proving you that the thesis was correct and that we are going that direction and what is positive in your eyes yeah in that thesis the the sovereign individual thesis which is a book that everybody should read if they

haven't maybe the most important book in the world i think it rests on a change in the logic of violence and the existence of the nation state has been one of a logic of violence and really the moment that human capital existed the moment we had crops that someone could steal people started to pool resources into a collective to be able to execute a magnitude of violence that was enough to keep them safe so one point it was three guys with sticks and then eventually it was knights and ships and tanks and for most of human history the group that could put the most resources into a concentrated effort to exert a magnitude of violence was the safest group the biggest army most most ability to inflect violence on your neighbors that all changed with the

invention of the nuke because the magnitude kind of hit its cap and it got to a point where a country with three nukes was about as safe as a country with a thousand and at that point the logic around violence started to shift from the magnitude of violence to the efficiency of violence and the single greatest invention in that direction has been the ak-47 and that's why this is why the u.s has lost every war that's been in since world war ii is because it's no longer as important to be able to exert that massive magnitude of violence and when a rice farmer with a gun that cost the same thing as a chicken can take down the United States military, you have a profound shift in what it means to be violent, and to be a violent aggressor. And so in the long term,

what we're seeing is the cost of offense is basically staying the same, but the cost of defense is going down. And we're seeing that in places like the Ukraine, they're up against a much technologically in money and manpower, larger force, but they've been able to with efficient, the efficient use of violence uh maintain some level of their sovereignty and i think ultimately the world is going to continue to move in that direction as we move into more autonomous drones and autonomous defense systems and stuff like that i see the the cost of defense becoming very small compared to the cost of offense which at that point creates a disincentive to attack anyone and as that happens that necessary concentration of resources to affect

this large army to keep your country safe becomes less and less necessary and then you start to look at a country like canada like canada does not exist because we concentrate our resources to keep ourselves safe we don't even we're kind of just safe because we're like away from the middle east like we're not even really safe uh we're safe because we're near the united states we don't really have anything to keep ourselves safe even within the country they don't really keep us safe So that logic no longer exists. And the logic that's holding Canada together and most other major nation states is kind of this like collective service provider. But the problem is that they're very, very bad at that. And they don't provide good services for the value that they extract from us. And that value is not, there's no consent. And so ultimately, what we're seeing is that countries around the world are starting to realize, hey, it's very useful to get the most useful people in the world to come here. When we get the smartest, hardest working people to move to our country, we all prosper. And so what we're starting to see that the book predicted is this competition amongst jurisdictions for the best people. And that's what you see with El Salvador and their Bitcoin move, right? Like that's the most transparent and obvious one that's happened. But it already exists in some other places in the world, like Switzerland, where you can sign a private tax treaty and the government will leave you alone for 60,000 US francs.

This kind of thing, I think for 60,000 Swiss francs, Swiss francs. Yeah. So you're, what I think is that we're going to see more and more small breakaway regions that leave because the logic that created the national entity no longer stands. Alberta can protect itself just as well as Canada can probably a lot better, honestly. And, uh, at that point, we're going to have a lot more competition amongst jurisdictions for people. and we're also moving into an area where in a lot of ways a lot of the most useful people in the world can work anywhere and so i think we're going to be in competition with el salvador i think we're going to be a bitcoin hotspot i think a lot of bitcoiners will move to an independent alberta and it's actually already so wait take a step back how do you see bitcoin injected into that thesis of the sovereign individual right so interestingly the sovereign individual does predict bitcoin right it predicted it didn't obviously say the word bitcoin but it basically predicted that the use of encryption and the internet would allow for the creation of money

without the state and that's the innovation of bitcoin is there's just money the state can't print and or stop or or stop and that in and of itself empowers the sovereign individual thesis in a couple ways one is through that arbitrage right we were no longer stuck in not only the physical jurisdiction but in the form of money that's dictated by our uh unconsented two masters and so we have the option to opt out of their system we have the option to stop letting them tax us through inflation and we have the option to move our money anywhere in the world in a way that they can't stop us so all of that feeds into the ability for people to move anywhere in the world that they want to and the flip side of that is that i think alberta is naturally aligned with

the values that bitcoiners are aligned with and you know we've we've actually seen several bitcoin companies move from around canada to alberta just because of the fact that we might separate interesting which companies um notable one that i i know is the guys at coin cards they sell gift cards for bitcoin uh great people who were living in vancouver just outside of vancouver and running a successful business there and they literally just moved to just outside of calgary maybe six months ago because they were getting sick of the socialism, collectivism in the coastal city. And just like the United States, our coastal cities are woke and they got sick of it. And rational people will make that choice again and again. And we've got other businesses that have

moved there for all of our cheap power. We've got lots of mining opportunities for Bitcoin. and we have in the in the morass of regulatory banking nonsense in canada we have a little bit better regulatory structures when it comes to banking and trust companies that have led to some all all of the custodians the regulated bitcoin custodians in canada are based in alberta now because we have the trust structure to support it and uh yeah lots of lots of mining companies moving there so it's it's already happening and if we actually were a free country with low taxes rationalism and free markets it would inevitably attract the kind of people who believe in those things which obviously aligns really well with bitcoiners i think it's quite clear the answer

to the question i'm going to ask you but i'll ask anyway what gives you hope i'm a pretty positive person generally i think i i'm always looking at the i'm always hopeful i guess but yeah i mean what we've described is where my hope sits i have hope and maybe foolish hope in the political process i love that you're at least at least like based enough to admit that maybe yeah there there is a chance that that it is impossible through the political process to achieve independence in alberta but i do believe that we are kind of unique in the world in our position one because we're part of such a weak and stupid country two because we have such a really distinct flavor of of the love for liberty in alberta which is runs really deep into our people and our our industries

and the last is is bitcoin gives me hope for all of this because it like that's the backup plan right if we can't fix this through politics i can always opt out of this or anything else with bitcoin love it love it all right where should people follow you i am uh bitcoin brains on everything bitcoin brains on twitter although i don't tweet that much anymore you can uh you can see my personal website bitcoinbrains.com which is very important has a lot of important information on there and uh what about noster you know i'm on there but like i haven't used it in a long time because uh i started right when it started and i got like a thousand followers and then one day they were just all gone and i was like this is ridiculous i'll come try this again later sometime

it's working very well these days yeah very like relatively speaking it's working relatively well and i'm gonna dip my toes back into it with all this data stuff that we're doing because we're going to do a nostril native component to that but i'm uh i'm finding myself less interested in broadcasting my thoughts to the crowd than i used to be so we'll we'll see i don't really need to sure tweet i get it but people can find you on x if if they want to reach out i occasionally will uh will tweet something i tweeted a picture of myself in the crowd here the other day but yeah i mean i i can be found on any of those sources bitcoinbrains.com do you actively invest in more projects these days or are you looking for any i'm like i'm not investing in anything other than

bitcoin at this point i've invested way too much into my own projects over the years and things that I would have made more money just not doing anything and staying in Bitcoin. So I'm very conservative with making any investments as a replacement for Bitcoin, but I invest my time into a lot of different projects and I'm always interested to hear what people are doing and collaborate wherever I can.

So if anybody's doing cool stuff, then happy to hear about it and see if it fits into any of the web of stuff I've got going. Awesome. Dave, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. That has been fantastic.

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